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As people age, a simple slip can have devastating consequences. Falls are the leading cause of injury and death from injury among older people in the U.S., where more than a quarter of adults aged 65 and older report taking a tumble at least once in a given year.

A new study in JAMA Network Open estimates that at least 13 percent of people in this age group have endured a traumatic brain injury in roughly the last two decades, and falling is a leading cause. Even relatively healthy older adults, who aren’t already affected by underlying conditions such as cardiovascular disease or cognitive decline, aren’t spared from this somber statistic, says the study’s lead author Erica Kornblith, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Head injuries are generally more common among older adults because, for them, “injuries are likely to happen due to a fall in the course of everyday activities,” she says.

Fortunately, research points to lifestyle adjustments that can help. For example, it might seem that moving around more could increase the chances of a catastrophic slip, but a group of independent primary care experts on the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recently recommended regular exercise as the simplest strategy to ward off future falls, especially if older adults start early.

Risk Factors

During the twilight years, the body inevitably weakens. Everyone’s muscle mass tends to decline with age, but people with a condition called sarcopenia experience more serious age-related muscle atrophy. Muscle loss whittles away at balance and gait, and shortens the reaction time needed to catch ourselves if we stumble.

A slippery bathroom floor, a loose rug, or other common obstacles can also pose tripping hazards for older adults who might already be unsteady on their feet. Poor lighting may hinder navigation among older adults with deteriorating vision and hence lower their spatial awareness.

Seniors are also more likely than younger people to have chronic health conditions that further increase the risk of falling. Diabetes and cardiovascular disease, for example, can contribute to a loss of sensory and motor function. Medications to treat these conditions as well as others may also inadvertently increase the chances of a tumble, says Kathleen Cameron, senior director of the nonprofit National Council on Aging’s Center for Healthy Aging. Waning kidney and liver function makes the body less efficient at metabolizing drugs. The resulting toxic buildup of such substances increases the risk of adverse effects such as lightheadedness, drowsiness, and confusion; this can impair cognition and threaten navigational ability. “Balancing the risks and the benefits of those medications is really important,” Cameron says.

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Social media is often an integral part of teenage life. But what was once a simple way to stay connected with friends and family, has now evolved into a medium where distinguishing the real from the fake amid alarming trends has become increasingly difficult.

One such trend, sadfishing, is raising concern, particularly among teenagers. The term, which researchers defined in the Journal of American College Health in 2021, refers to social media users who “exaggerate their emotional state online to generate sympathy.” It could be in the form of a sad photo, an ominous quote, or a vague post.  

Journalist Rebecca Reid coined the term in 2019 after a questionable Instagram post by Kendall Jenner. In the post, Jenner described a “debilitating struggle” with acne and received a large amount of sympathetic responses from her followers. However, it was later revealed her post was just an elaborate marketing scheme for her skincare partnership with Proactiv, and Reid labeled her behavior as sadfishing. 

We all may be guilty of posting something vulnerable and emotional on social media from time to time, which isn’t a bad thing. But excessive posting could be a sign of a larger mental health issue in teens, or a cry for help.

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CLIMATEWIRE | Hordes of giant viruses are living on the world’s second-largest body of ice — and may be slowing the impacts of climate change.

Scientists announced the discovery in a recent paper on the Greenland ice sheet. Some of the viruses, they say, have infected algae, potentially limiting the growth of colored snow blooms that can speed up ice melt and raise global sea levels.

“They infect the microalgae,” said Laura Perini, one of the paper’s lead authors and a researcher at Denmark’s Aarhus University. “If they kill the algae, … then they kind of reduce the speed with which the ice is melting.”

The Greenland ice sheet is the largest single contributor to global sea level rise. Algae can darken the surface of the snow, causing it to absorb more sunlight and melt at faster rates.

Researchers suspect that the newly discovered viruses help control that algal growth.

That theory isn’t yet confirmed — and scientists aren’t sure exactly how much algae contributes to melting on the Greenland ice sheet. But algal blooms are growing larger as the planet warms, Perini said, making it important to investigate the factors that affect their growth.

Since being classified in the 1980s, scientists have found giant viruses — or nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses — all over the world in soil, rivers, and oceans. Perini and her team wanted to find out if they also inhabited icy Greenland.

Researchers conducted genetic analyses on samples taken from the ice sheet. They found viral genes hiding in algal cells, indicating that the viruses have been infecting the algae populations for a while — likely hundreds of years.

Those pathogens are likely killing algae cells and obstructing the growth of blooms, though that was not investigated in the paper, said Frederik Schulz, a microbiologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and one of the world’s top giant virus researchers.

“We have some examples that are reasonably well studied” of marine algal blooms, Schulz said in an interview. “Giant viruses play a role there in terminating the algae.”

If the viruses are keeping the algae population in check on the Greenland ice sheet, he said, that would mean they are allaying climate-driven global sea-level rise.

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While people don’t eat houseplants and rarely munch on shrubs or ground cover, your pets probably do. That’s why you need to be really, really sure your pet won’t try to snack on your plants before installing a plant that might be toxic—and it turns out that a lot of plants are.

While people don’t eat houseplants and rarely munch on shrubs or ground cover, your pets probably do. That’s why you need to be really, really sure your pet won’t try to snack on your plants before installing a plant that might be toxic—and it turns out that a lot of plants are.

Toxic vs. poisonous

Not all plants are toxic to pets; some are merely poisonous—and yes, there’s a difference. Toxic plants can do harm in all kinds of ways—through surface contact or inhalation. Just being around them can be bad for your pet, even if they’re not likely to chew. Poisonous plants, on the other hand, have to be ingested to be dangerous, so they are mildly less problematic. That said, some plants are poisonous enough that they only need to be consumed once to have dire consequences, so you’d need to really trust that your pet is isolated from the plant or would never look at, for example, a hydrangea branch as a chew toy. Dan Teich, DVM, who runs District Veterinary Hospitals in Washington, DC, notes, “The good news is most plants will not cause permanent damage to your pet. Many are irritants, can cause excessive salivation, and upset stomach, but usually these signs will pass. This is common with philodendrons, poinsettias, pothos, and many common houseplants.”

Avoid these common plants

Teich notes that the most common plant-related incidents they see involve a commonly gifted flower. “True lilies are the most dangerous of all plants for cats; even the pollen can be deadly. Lilies can lead to irreversible kidney failure in a cat within days. Calla lilies and peace lilies are not true lilies and may cause intestinal upset in your pet.” He warns that if you suspect lily ingestion, you should seek immediate care for your cat.

Other plants present similar risks, according to Teich. Consuming large amounts of azalea leaves can lead to cardiac collapse, and even death. Ingesting sago palms—a popular outdoor and indoor plant—can be fatal, and any consumption by a pet should be treated as an emergency.

Foxglove, an easily spread outdoor flower, is also dangerous. Like lily of the valley and oleander, it can have a grave effect on your pet’s heart.

If you are uncertain if a plant is dangerous to your pet, you may contact the ASPCA 24/7 Poison Control Hotline at 888-426-4435 or the Pet Poison Helpline at 855-764-7661.

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If you want to discover a hidden world of new life-forms, you don’t have to scour dark caves or slog through remote rainforests. Just look under your feet. When then-graduate student Anna Rosling went to northern Sweden to map the distribution of a particular root-loving fungus, she found something much more intriguing: Many of her root samples contained traces of DNA from unknown species. Weirder still, she never encountered a complete organism. When the field season ended, she had only isolated bits of raw genetic material. The fragments clearly belonged to the fungal kingdom, but they revealed little else. “I got obsessed,” recalls Rosling, now a professor of evolutionary biology at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Since then, mycologists have realized that such phantoms are everywhere. Point to a patch of dirt, a body of water, even the air you’re breathing, and odds are that it is teeming with mushrooms, molds and yeasts (or their spores) that no one has ever seen. In ocean trenches, Tibetan glaciers and all habitats between, researchers are routinely detecting DNA from obscure fungi. By sequencing the snippets, they can tell they’re dealing with new species, thousands of them, that are genetically distinct from any known to science. They just can’t match that DNA to tangible organisms growing out in the world.

These slippery beings are so widespread that scientists are calling them “dark fungi.” It’s a comparison to the equally elusive dark matter and dark energy that make up 95 percent of our universe and exert tremendous influence on, well, everything. Like those invisible entities, dark fungi are hidden movers and shakers. Scientists are convinced they perform the same vital functions as known fungi, directing the flow of energy through ecosystems as they break down organic matter and recycle nutrients. Dark fungi are prime examples of what biologist E. O. Wilson called “the little things that run the world.” But their cryptic lifestyle has made it a maddening challenge for scientists trying to show how exactly they run it.

Taxonomists have described just 150,000 of the millions of fungi predicted by global biodiversity estimates, and recent discoveries suggest a huge portion of what’s left may be off-limits to routine biological investigation. “We have not even started to scratch the surface,” says Henrik Nilsson, a mycologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “I’d be willing to bet that the clear majority will be dark.” Given the central place of fungi in the web of life that sustains us, experts argue we should get a better grasp on them.

Everything we know about dark fungi comes from environmental DNA, or eDNA. That term refers to strings of base pairs—the building blocks of DNA that are constantly sloughing off all living things. Researchers can analyze these free-floating bits of double helix to determine which species have been hanging around an area without seeing them. To identify fungi specifically, scientists look to a handy genetic marker called the internal transcribed spacer (ITS), which consists of several hundred base pairs that evolve quickly and thus help distinguish between species. Although the ITS is only a tiny fraction of the genome, researchers can single it out and amplify it with the same polymerase chain reaction technology used in COVID lab tests. If an ITS sequence is different enough from all others in genetic databases, it is thought to represent a new species, whether scientists lay eyes on its physical form or not.

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In a new preprint paper—which, for context, is not peer reviewed, and is more of an editorial or set of observations than a theory or study—mathematician Kevin Buzzard is grappling with a simple idea from coding that becomes a “thornier concept” when translated into math: what does the equal sign actually mean? And what does it not mean?

Buzzard has been in the news for his efforts to turn classic math proofs into code that can be verified by a computer, including Fermat’s Last Theorem. For him, as a classically trained mathematician, the world of computer code includes some surprises.

“Six years ago, I thought I understood mathematical equality,” Buzzard wrote in his paper. “I thought that it was one well-defined term, and that there was nothing which could be said about it which was of any interest to me as a working mathematician with a knowledge of, but no real interest in, the foundations of my subject. Then I started to try and do masters level mathematics in a computer theorem prover, and I discovered that equality was a rather thornier concept than I had appreciated.”

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Noland Arbaugh has a computer chip embedded in his skull and an electrode array in his brain. But Arbaugh, the first user of the Neuralink brain-computer interface, or BCI, says he wouldn’t know the hardware was there if he didn’t remember going through with the surgery. “If I had lost my memory, and I woke up, and you told me there was something implanted in my brain, then I probably wouldn’t believe you,” says the 30-year-old Arizona resident, who has been paralyzed below the middle of his neck since a 2016 swimming accident. “I have no sensation of it—no way of telling it’s there unless someone goes and physically pushes on it.”

The Neuralink chip may be physically unobtrusive, but Arbaugh says it’s had a big impact on his life, allowing him to “reconnect with the world.” He underwent robotic surgery in January to receive the N1 Implant, also called “the Link,” in Neuralink’s first approved human trial.

BCIs have existed for decades. But because billionaire technologist Elon Musk owns Neuralink, the company has received outsize attention. It’s brought renewed public interest to a technology that could significantly improve the life of those living with quadriplegia, such as Arbaugh, as well as people with other disabilities or neurodegenerative diseases.

BCIs record electrical activity in the brain and translate those data into output actions, such as opening and closing a robotic hand or clicking a computer mouse. They vary in their design, level of invasiveness, and the resolution of the information they capture. Some detect neurons’ electrical activity with entirely external electroencephalogram (EEG) arrays placed over a subject’s head. Others use electrodes placed on the brain’s surface to track neural activity. Then there are intracortical devices, which use electrodes implanted directly into brain tissue, to get as close as possible to the targeted neurons. Neuralink’s implant falls into this category.

Capturing neural activity can be like trying to record chitchat between two people in a packed stadium, says Douglas Weber, a mechanical engineer and neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University. To hear anything more than the crowd’s roar, you need to get up close with the person speaking. “The farther away from the speaker you are, the more mixed and muddled the conversations become,” he explains. Neuralink threads electrodes into the brain’s motion-controlling motor cortex, positioning “sensors right up next to the individual neurons that are conversing.”

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What does being “passive-aggressive” mean, exactly? It’s when you express negative emotions, such as anger or hostility, in an indirect (or passive) manner, explained Los Angeles clinical psychologist Ryan Howes — “particularly in a way that is easily deniable or not directly linked to the aggressor.”

He offered an example: Say you were frustrated with a loved one. Instead of telling them how you feel, you just “forget” to pick them up from the train station that day.

“This is easily deniable as a simple brain fart, but deep down you know you didn’t pick them up because you wanted payback for whatever they did to anger you,” Howes explained. “It’s classified as a defense mechanism because you are defending yourself from the potential pain of expressing your pain or anger directly and reaping their response, which might hurt.”

When you’re being passive-aggressive, you’re attempting to convey your feelings about something without actually saying what you want to say, Toronto-based relationship expert and sexologist Jess O’Reilly told HuffPost.

“It can be confusing, annoying, and harmful to relationships,” said O’Reilly, founder of Happier Couples Inc. “And you’re less likely to get what you want if you’re unclear in the first place.”

Though we all engage in passive-aggressive behavior now and then, this type of communication tends to be more habitual among people who are avoidant and conflict-averse, as well as those lacking self-esteem.

You might communicate this way because you find it too difficult or uncomfortable to directly express yourself, associate clinical social worker Miya Yung told HuffPost.

“Being passive-aggressive often entails a desire to avoid face-to-face conflict, not being truly honest about what [someone is] thinking, or making subtle comments that appear harmless yet have an underlying negative impact on the receiver,” said Yung, who works at The Connective, a Northern California therapy and wellness practice.

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Researchers are investigating how an iron infusion from glacial meltwater might change Antarctica’s seas and the climate.

Rachel Feltman: Antarctica is the largest, coldest desert on the planet, with snowfall dropping less than six inches of water there each year. But for such a dry place, Antarctica has an outsize impact on the world’s oceans: the ice sheet that covers much of the continent contains most of Earth’s fresh water. You’ve probably heard that a lot of that ice is melting because of climate change and contributing to sea-level rise. But glaciers and ice shelves aren’t just made of frozen water. What else is the melt sending out to sea?

For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to the first episode of a four-part Fascination series on Antarctica.

For the next four Fridays, we’ll follow award-winning Brazilian journalist Sofia Moutinho as she travels on the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a U.S. icebreaker on a mission to help us understand how the climate crisis will unfold.

Today we’ll meet her on the ship as she and her fellow passengers encounter the fastest-melting glaciers and ice shelves on the continent.

Sofia Moutinho: I am on the bridge of the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a U.S. icebreaker that is slowly cruising along the coast of the coldest and most remote continent on Earth: Antarctica.

Thirty-five international researchers are onboard for a 60-day mission. Their goal is to collect thousands of gallons of water, plus lots of sea ice, to help uncover the future of our oceans and Earth’s climate.

Phoebe Lam: Ooh, what is that?

Moutinho: That’s Phoebe Lam, a chemical oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Lam: I think that’s land. That’s land—land ahoy [laughs]! Ooh, how exciting!

Moutinho: She is one of three scientists leading this cruise, and this is her third time in Antarctica.

Lam: Hey, it’s our first land since—a while.

Moutinho: Our journey started more than 20 days ago, when we left port in the small southern Chilean town of Punta Arenas at the end of November 2023.

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