Health & Science

A worrisome population decline in the seas

Phytoplankton, the floating, microscopic algae that serve as the fuel on which the marine food chain runs, are in steep decline, new research shows. The culprit: warming seas, most likely caused by global climate change. Researchers at Canada’s Dalhousie University analyzed a century’s worth of records and satellite imagery, which can track concentrations of chlorophyll, the green pigment that phytoplankton use in photosynthesis. The results suggest that phytoplankton populations worldwide have dropped 1 percent a year since 1900, and 40 percent overall since 1950—a “shocking” decline, marine scientist and lead author Daniel Boyce tells the Los Angeles Times. The temperature of the oceans is rising, and in warmer water, there is less movement of rich nutrients from deep in the sea to the surface, making it less hospitable to the growth of phytoplankton. Everything in the ocean either eats phytoplankton or eats what eats them, so their dwindling means less food for fish—and fewer fish for people to eat. “The rest of the food web would basically contract,” says co-author Boris Worm. If that weren’t bad enough, phytoplankton also help capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and generate as much oxygen as all the trees and plants on land. As the numbers of phytoplankton decline, more CO2 stays airborne, warming the world further and wiping out even more phytoplankton. “It will be one of the biggest biological changes in recent times,” Worm says, “simply because of its scale.”

How to run faster and longer

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Who needs steroids or human growth hormone? Athletes can enhance their performance with something that is both legal and easily obtained. It’s called music, says BBC.com. In a study of Australian triathletes, researchers found that listening to music tracks by the likes of Queen, Madonna, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers increased the athletes’ energy efficiency by 1 percent to 3 percent, enabling them to do more with the same amount of oxygen. ���Music is like a legal drug for athletes,” says British researcher Costas Karageorghis. “It can reduce the perception of effort significantly and increase endurance by as much as 15 percent.” The key is finding music whose tempo is synchronous with a runner’s desired stride; Haile Gebrselassie, who recently set a new world-record marathon time, likes running to the techno pop song “Scatman,” with a tempo of about 135 beats per minute. Even recreational runners, researchers say, can benefit from musical accompaniment.

The charity of the poor

Poor people are naturally more charitable than the rich, new research has found. In a series of social experiments, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley found that people from lower socioeconomic levels consistently are more generous with their money than their upper-class counterparts are. Subjects were given 10 credits, worth actual money, and the choice of keeping them or sharing them with an anonymous partner in another room, in whatever percentage they wished. People who were ranked at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, which factored in education as well as income, gave away nearly 50 percent more of their credits than did those at the top. When asked what percentage of one’s income should be donated to charity, the average response of lower-class individuals was 5.6 percent; the average of the wealthiest was just 2.1 percent. “Counterintuitively,” psychologist and study author Paul Piff tells The Economist, “the needy or the relatively less wealthy are actually more generous.” People lower in society’s pecking order, Piff theorizes, know they are more dependent on other people to get by; for them, altruism and compassion are a form of currency that helps build a social network “that instead of money is going to be the resource they can turn to in times of hardship and need.”

Busy really is better

Once again, science has proved that your grandparents were right: Being busy makes you content, while idleness is bad for your head. University of Chicago researchers gave students a survey and, after they had filled it out, a choice: Sit idly or walk the paperwork to a location 15 minutes away. Two-thirds chose the lazy option, but the ones who walked were in a better mood afterward, a subsequent survey revealed. That held true even for participants who were given no choice whether to perform the errand. In additional experiments, the researchers found that just being busy, per se, boosts happiness, regardless of whether the work produces anything of value. “Even if there really is no point to what you are doing, you will feel better for it,” behavioral scientist Christopher Hsee tells the London Daily Telegraph. In fact, he says, governments could “increase the happiness of idle citizens by having them build bridges that are actually useless.”