Health & Science

The sweltering reality of climate change

The relentless heat and drought broiling the U.S. this summer is definitely caused by man-made climate change, a new study asserts. Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies reviewed 60 years’ worth of climate data and found that, on average, extreme summer heat occurred on far less than 1 percent of the surface of the globe before 1980; over the past three decades, however, that number has soared to as high as 13 percent. Man-made global warming “is not some scientific theory,’’ said NASA scientist James Hansen. “We are now experiencing scientific fact.’’ Hansen, a climate-change activist who is sometimes called “the godfather of global warming,’’ says his statistical study proves that extreme weather events such as this year’s heat wave, last year’s fierce Texas drought, and the 2010 heat waves in Russia and the Middle East are occurring at least 10 times more frequently than they did decades ago. Hepredicts that in coming years such events “will become even more frequent and severe.” This July was the hottest month ever recorded in the U.S., and 2012 may be the hottest year ever. Some climatologists say it’s still not possible to make a certain link between climate change and specific weather events, but Hansen disagrees: “You would not have these extremes without global warming.”

The sexiest seasons

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Human beings become friskier in early summer and early winter, new research has found. Villanova University psychologists analyzed Americans’ Google searches over five years and discovered a semiannual jump in words related to sex. “Whether it was searches for ‘eHarmony’ or ‘brothel,’ there was this exact same pattern,” study author Patrick Markey tells MyHealthNewsDaily.com: one above-average spike in June and July and another in December and January. Previous research into birth records, condom sales, and rates of abortions and sexually transmitted diseases has suggested heightened pursuit of intercourse during those months. One reason for the seasonal amorousness could be that during winter holidays or summer vacations, “being around more people, or being around people more often,” triggers an increased desire for connection, Markey says. It could also be that humans are hormonally hardwired to copulate at those times, perhaps because giving birth in early spring or autumn presented an evolutionary advantage for our earliest ancestors.

How to lock in memories

Simply shutting your eyes and relaxing after learning something new may be the best way to remember it, LiveScience.com reports. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh asked a group of healthy volunteers between the ages of 60 and 90 to listen to stories and try to remember as many details from them as possible. Then, some were asked to close their eyes for 10 minutes in a quiet room and daydream about anything they liked, while others were asked to play a computer game. When it came time to recall what they’d heard—both 30 minutes afterward and a week afterward—the volunteers who had rested remembered far more details than those who hadn’t. That suggests that “the formation of new memories is not completed” in mere seconds, and “that activities that we are engaged in for the first few minutes after learning new information” determine how well our brains absorb it, says study author Michaela Dewar. Previous research has shown that sleep is crucial to crystallizing memories, but taking a brief waking rest—without studying what you’ve learned or facing any external distractions—appears to return similarly beneficial results.

House cats’ secret predations

When let outside, the typical house cat turns into a killing machine. University of Georgia researchers made that discovery when they strapped specially designed cameras onto the collars of 60 domestic felines and observed their behavior over a week. They found that 44 percent of the cats went hunting, but they brought home only about a quarter of their prey, including lizards, snakes, frogs, chipmunks, and birds. That suggests that previous estimates of the damage that America’s 74 million house cats do to local wildlife “were probably too conservative because they didn’t include the animals that cats ate or left behind,” study author Kerrie Anne Loyd tells USA Today. The American Bird Conservancy says that cat predation is one reason why one in three American bird species is in decline. The footage—the first to offer a long-range picture of what domestic cats do when they roam outdoors—also showed that the pets are often a danger to themselves: 85 percent engaged in potentially life-threatening behaviors like crossing roads, eating and drinking unknown substances, and exploring tight spaces. Several of the felines, unbeknownst to their owners, also routinely visited a second family for extra treats and petting.