ScientificBrands, New City, NY (2026)

10/05/2023

According to an analysis published on Thursday, the rate of firearm fatalities among children under 18 increased by 87 percent from 2011 through 2021 in the United States. The death rate attributable to car accidents fell by almost half, leaving firearm injuries the top cause of accidental death in children.

The finding underscores additional data showing that firearm injuries are now the leading cause of death among Americans under 20.

Some 2,590 children and teenagers under the age of 18 died of firearm injuries in 2021, up from 1,311 in 2011, according to the study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics. In other industrialized countries, guns are not even among the top three causes of death for children.

Firearm injuries are a leading cause of death among young children and teenagers in the United States.

10/02/2023

The pursuit of finding and publishing the truth has grown more arduous than ever before. Social platforms – where false narratives and conspiracy theories are still widely published ¬– have scaled back anti-disinformation resources over the past year. Not coincidentally, public trust in our institutions and experts, as regards pandemic health, climate, and other issues, has also waned in recent years.

As I shared recently in a ScientificBrands Blog, “The so-called 'trust gap' in science has become an existential crisis for our country and the world.” Science is never perfect – but at its best it represents our society’s search for truth. The same holds true of the most socially responsible news and media outlets.

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The number of fact-checking operations at news organizations and elsewhere has stagnated, and perhaps even fallen, after a booming expansion in response to a rise in unsubstantiated claims about elections and the pandemic. The social networking companies that once trumpeted efforts to combat misinformation are showing signs of waning interest. And those who write about falsehoods around the world are facing worsening harassment and personal threats.

The momentum behind organizations that aim to combat online falsehoods has started to taper off.

09/18/2023

A recent United Nations report delivered the bad news that the world was way off track in meeting it pledges under the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Polls have registered a deepening malaise. The specter of burning in nuclear fires started by the war in Ukraine has moved to the back burner.

In an era of ever-increasing anxiety, now is the summer — and autumn — of our disquiet, and eco-anxiety, a catchall term to describe all-encompassing environmental concerns, is having its moment.

While it is not clinically recognized as a pathology, or included in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, experts say the feeling of gloom and doom prompted by all of the inescapable images of planetary gloom and doom is becoming more widespread.

“Climate change is moving faster than psychiatry for sure and also psychology,” said Dr. Paolo Cianconi, a member of the ecology psychiatry and mental health division of the World Psychiatry Association, who is publishing a book with colleagues on the topic this month. He said that the term eco-anxiety had existed for more than a decade, but that it was “circulating very much” these days, and that the condition would only increase in the future.

After a summer of intense heat, raging fires and catastrophic floods, a term for pervading dread about climate change and other environmental crises is having its moment.

09/14/2023

Poverty increased sharply last year in the United States, particularly among children, as living costs rose and federal programs that provided aid to families during the pandemic were allowed to expire.

The poverty rate rose to 12.4 percent in 2022 from 7.8 percent in 2021, the largest one-year jump on record, the Census Bureau said Tuesday. Poverty among children more than doubled, to 12.4 percent, from a record low of 5.2 percent the year before. Those figures are according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which factors in the impact of government assistance and geographical differences in the cost of living.

The increases followed two years of historically large declines in poverty, driven primarily by safety net programs that were created or expanded during the pandemic. Those included a series of direct payments to households in 2020 and 2021, enhanced unemployment and nutrition benefits, increased rental assistance and an expanded child tax credit, which briefly provided a guaranteed income to families with children.

The increase in poverty reversed two years of large declines. Median income, adjusted for inflation, fell 2.3 percent to $74,580.

09/11/2023

Many major philanthropic groups have increasingly focused their attention in recent years on helping struggling local newsrooms. Now they are joining forces.

On Thursday, more than 20 nonprofit organizations announced plans to invest a total of $500 million over the next five years in local media organizations, one of the biggest efforts yet to address the crisis in local news.

The initiative, called Press Forward, is spearheaded by the MacArthur Foundation and supported by organizations including the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Press Forward will use the $500 million to fund grants for existing local for-profit and nonprofit newsrooms, help build shared tools, provide resources to diverse outlets and those in historically underserved areas, and invest in nonpartisan public policy development that advances access to news and information.

The effort, spearheaded by the MacArthur Foundation, will give grants to support newsrooms and start-ups as concern grows over the rapid disappearance of local news outlets.

08/29/2023

Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole.

The New York Times conducted a months-long examination of groundwater depletion, interviewing more than 100 experts, traveling the country and creating a comprehensive database using millions of readings from monitoring sites. The investigation reveals how America’s life-giving resource is being exhausted in much of the country, and in many cases it won’t come back. Huge industrial farms and sprawling cities are draining aquifers that could take centuries or millenniums to replenish themselves if they recover at all.

Unchecked overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide, a data investigation by the New York Times revealed, threatening millions of people and America’s status as a food superpower.

08/28/2023

The pandemic led to repeated closures at tens of thousands of schools across the nation. The shutdowns sent educational achievement tumbling, disrupted the lives of millions of American families, and set off a wave of anger, particularly among conservatives, that has not subsided.

But scientists who study viral transmission see another lesson in the pandemic school closures: Had the indoor air been cleaner and safer, they may have been avoidable. The coronavirus is an airborne threat, and the incidence of Covid was about 40 percent lower in schools that improved air quality, one study found.

The average American school building is about 50 years old. According to a 2020 analysis by the Government Accountability Office, about 41 percent of school districts needed to update or replace the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems in at least half of their schools, about 36,000 buildings in all.

Scientists and educators are searching for ways to improve air quality in the nation’s often dilapidated school buildings.

08/24/2023

Binge drinking among adults aged 35 to 50 occurred at record prevalence in 2022, according to research funded by the National Institutes of Health. A new study found that nearly 30 percent of people in this age group reported binge drinking in 2022, continuing a consistent upward trend in the behavior. In 2012, 23 percent of such adults reported binge drinking.

Use of ma*****na in this group also reached historic levels, with 28 percent reporting the behavior, up from 13 percent in 2012. In 2022, 4 percent of adults in this group reported using a hallucinogen, double the figure in 2021.

The survey also looked at behavior among adults 19 to 30 years old. For this group, use of ma*****na in 2022 was significantly greater, at 44 percent, up from 28 percent in 2012. But their self-reported binge drinking had fallen to 30.5 percent, down from 35.2 percent a decade earlier.

More than one-quarter of people aged 30 to 50 binge drink, according to research funded by the National Institutes of Health

08/22/2023

In the early 2010s reports emerged of a nightmarish drug appearing in Russia and eastern Europe. Krokodil, a cheap substitute for he**in that was concocted in kitchen laboratories, left users with scaly skin and rotting wounds.

Now a similarly damaging drug, a fentanyl mix known as tranq dope, has arrived in America. Deaths associated with it have almost quadrupled since 2019, rising as a share of fentanyl-related deaths from 3% in January that year to 11% in June 2022. Last month the White House announced a plan to stop its spread. How worrying is tranq dope?

Tranq dope combines fentanyl, a synthetic opioid drug, with xylazine or “tranq”, a strong non-opioid tranquiliser used to sedate horses, deer and other large animals. It was first detected by drug authorities in the early 2000s in Puerto Rico and, in the years since, circulated there and in limited areas within the American north-east, such as Philadelphia. But the drug has now been detected in nearly every state in the country and, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (dea), is probably being mixed by local dealers.

It comes with grim side-effects and there is no antidote

08/17/2023

Scientists have trained a computer to analyze the brain activity of someone listening to music and, based only on those neuronal patterns, recreate the song.

The research, published on Tuesday, produced a recognizable, if muffled version of Pink Floyd’s 1979 song, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1).”

Before this, researchers had figured out how to use brain activity to reconstruct music with similar features to the song someone was listening to. Now, “you can actually listen to the brain and restore the music that person heard,” said Gerwin Schalk, a neuroscientist who directs a research lab in Shanghai and collected data for this study.

The audio sounds like it’s being played underwater. Still, it’s a first step toward creating more expressive devices to assist people who can’t speak.

08/16/2023

Antarctic sea ice is at a record low, fires in Canada are reshaping terrain and polluting the air, and record ocean temperatures are threatening coral. There's even new research published in July that suggests crucial Atlantic Ocean currents could collapse sooner than expected, which could trigger rapid weather and climate changes.

But the news isn’t all bad: There’s some good news in the Amazon. And scientists continue to say that if humanity takes climate threats seriously and quickly moves to end carbon emissions, the scenarios below become less likely or at least less extreme.

Here are five tipping points scientists say could start to teeter sooner rather than later.

Climate change effects usually become clear over decades and centuries, but some alarming changes are looming, scientists fear.

08/14/2023

Across the country, a profound shift is taking place that is nearly invisible to most Americans. The nation that burned coal, oil and gas for more than a century to become the richest economy on the planet, as well as historically the most polluting, is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.

A similar energy transition is already well underway in Europe and elsewhere. But the United States is catching up, and globally, change is happening at a pace that is surprising even the experts who track it closely.

Wind and solar power are breaking records, and renewables are now expected to overtake coal by 2025 as the world’s largest source of electricity. Automakers have made electric vehicles central to their business strategies and are openly talking about an expiration date on the internal combustion engine. Heating, cooling, cooking and some manufacturing are going electric.

The cost of generating electricity from the sun and wind is falling fast and in many areas is now cheaper than gas, oil or coal. Private investment is flooding into companies that are jockeying for advantage in emerging green industries.

“We look at energy data on a daily basis, and it’s astonishing what’s happening,” said Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency. “Clean energy is moving faster than many people think, and it’s become turbocharged lately.”

More than $1.7 trillion worldwide is expected to be invested in technologies such as wind, solar power, electric vehicles and batteries globally this year, according to the I.E.A., compared with just over $1 trillion in fossil fuels. That is by far the most ever spent on clean energy in a year.

Those investments are driving explosive growth. China, which already leads the world in the sheer amount of electricity produced by wind and solar power, is expected to double its capacity by 2025, five years ahead of schedule. In Britain, roughly one-third of electricity is generated by wind, solar and hydropower. And in the United States, 23 percent of electricity is expected to come from renewable sources this year, up 10 percentage points from a decade ago.

The United States is pivoting away from fossil fuels and toward wind, solar and other renewable energy, even in areas dominated by the oil and gas industries.

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