Southern right whales have lifespans that reach well past 100 years, and 10% may live past 130 years, according to our new research published in the journal Science Advances. Some of these whales may live to 150. This lifespan is almost double the 70-80 years they are conventionally believed to live. North Atlantic right whales were also thought to have a maximum lifespan of about 70 years. We found, however, that this critically endangered species' current average lifespan is only 22 years, and they rarely live past 50. These two species are very closely related ' only 25 years ago they were considered to be one species ' so we'd expect them to have similarly long lifespans. We attribute the stark difference in longevity in North Atlantic right whales to human-caused mortality, mostly from entanglements in fishing gear and ship strikes. We made these new age estimates using photo identification of individual female whales over several decades. Individual whales can be recognized year after year from photographs. When they die, they stop being photographically 'resighted' and disappear. Using these photos, we developed what scientists call 'survivorship curves' by estimating the probability whales would disappear from the photographic record as they aged. From these survivorship curves, we could estimate maximum potential lifespans....

A physicist, a chemist and a mathematician walk into a bar. It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but in my case, it was the start of an idea that could reshape how scientists think about the history of the Moon. The three of us were all interested in the Moon, but from different perspectives: As a geophysicist, I thought about its interior; Thorsten Kleine studied its chemistry; and Alessandro Morbidelli wanted to know what the Moon's formation could tell us about how the planets were assembled 4.5 billion years ago. At a conference in Hawaii in the late 1980s, a group of scientists solved the problem of how the Moon formed. Their research suggested that a Mars-size object crashed into the early Earth, jettisoning molten material into space. That glowing material coalesced into the body now called the Moon. This story explained many things. For one, the Moon has very little material that evaporates easily, such as water, because it began life molten. It has only a tiny iron core, because it was mostly formed from the outer part of the Earth, which has very little iron. And it has a buoyant, white-colored crust made from minerals that floated to the surface as the molten Moon solidified....

Black adults living with long COVID pointed to challenges with their physical health ' rather than their mental health ' when asked to describe their long-COVID symptoms. That is one key finding from our new study, published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. When we examined the data further, however, we found that those living with long COVID in the U.S. had significantly more anxiety, depression, hopelessness, psychosis and suicidal thoughts than those without long COVID. In other words, while participants clearly explained how long COVID impaired their physical health, they were less likely to attribute their recent mental health struggles to any issues stemming from their experiences of long COVID. For the study, we asked nearly 500 Black adults in the U.S. to respond to a series of psychological questionnaires measuring various mental health outcomes in the spring of 2022. All participants, regardless of their long-COVID status, provided responses to these survey questions....

When President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter, who was convicted of three felony charges, the pardon was startling because Biden repeatedly pledged before the election that he would respect the federal jury's conviction. That became a story. Several news outlets adopted the Fox News headline that a prominent liberal commentator was rendered 'speechless,' 'gobsmacked' by the pardon. The next day, conservative commentator Megyn Kelly featured the clip on her Sirius XM program as a 'very fun example' of liberal hypocrisy. The negative reaction to Jong-Fast's caution reveals a troubling trend in American democracy. People are captivated by the 'hot take,' the 'call out,' the 'clap back,' the immediate verdict. That makes for shallow analysis that largely repeats familiar ideas. As I argue in my new book 'Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance,' the trouble is that our social environments are primed to short-circuit our thinking. They engage our reflexes while suppressing our judgment....