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A new wave of research is shedding light on some of the causes and consequences of chronic loneliness, a condition that significantly raises the risk of a number of physical and psychological health problems, including heart disease and depression.

For a condition that has such an enormous impact on our health and well-being, loneliness has been relatively neglected by psychologists — but that’s beginning to change.

In a special section of the March 2015 issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, psychologists took stock of some of the potential causes and risks of loneliness, as well as possible treatments.

While it’s true that nearly everyone will experience feelings of loneliness at some point in their lives, chronic feelings of loneliness can become a significant health concern.

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midle age man thinking

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Updated December 6, 2017

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LOS ANGELES – SEPTEMBER 15: Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock in the STAR TREK episode, ‘Charlie X.’ Season 1, episode, 2. Original air date September 15, 1966. Image is a screen grab. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)

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NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected a strange burst of methane gas in the atmosphere on Mars, along with other organic chemicals in rocks on the planet’s surface. The findings are raising new questions about the planet’s habitability–today as well as in the past.

“That we detect methane in the atmosphere on Mars is not an argument that we have found evidence of life on Mars, but it is one of the few hypotheses that we can propose that we must consider as we go forward in the future,” Dr. John Grotzinger, Curiosity project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said on Dec. 16 in a news briefing at the American Geophysical Union’s convention in San Francisco.

Using its onboard Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) laboratory, the rover “sniffed” more than a dozen samples of the Martian atmosphere over a 20-month period. Grotzinger and his team found that methane levels shot up tenfold to an average of seven parts per billion over two months in late 2013 and early 2014, according to NASA.

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This image illustrates possible ways methane might be added to Mars’ atmosphere (sources) and removed from the atmosphere (sinks). NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has detected fluctuations in methane concentration in the atmosphere, implying both types of activity occur on modern Mars.

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It turns out the hole in the now-famous ozone layer above the South Pole isn’t the only hole in the atmosphere. Researchers recently discovered, to their considerable surprise, that the atmosphere above part of the western tropical Pacific Ocean is nearly devoid of one of the key chemicals that scrubs pollutants from the air.

This newfound hole occurs naturally over thousands of kilometers in one of the most remote places on the planet (which accounts for its having gone unnoticed until now) and one of the main spots where the air is sent up to the stratosphere. The stratosphere is the layer of Earth’s atmosphere above the troposphere, the layer where humans live and in which most weather occurs. Having air shooting up to this layer without first being “washed” of all the junk that humans and nature put into the atmosphere has uncertain implications for the health of the planet’s protective ozone layer and its overall climate.

In tropical thunderstorms over the West Pacific, air masses and the chemical substances they contain are quickly hurled upward to the edge of the stratosphere. On the way, hydroxyl (OH) molecules “scrub” these substances from the air before it reaches the stratosphere, where they would be able to spread around the globe and would last for longer than in the lower reaches of the atmosphere. Except in a region of the tropical Pacific, a hole in this OH “shield” has been discovered.

“I first suspected a series of false measurements and had to convince myself that the measurements were correct,” Rex told Climate Central in an email.

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This post originally appeared on Climate Central

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Nearly 300 million years ago, during the Paleozoic Era, this predator attempted to eat another, smaller amphibian. The larger creature died mid-meal with the smaller one’s body half-consumed. This type of fossil, in which a predator chokes on its prey, is known as an aspiration.

When a scene like this is captured forever by geology, the value of the fossil goes up, said Jim Walker, director of the nature and science department at the auction house Heritage Auctions. [See Photos of ‘Choking Predators’ and other Fossils for Auction]

“It affects it to the degree of eight or 10 times without any trouble at all,” Walker said. Heritage expects this specimen to sell for between $150,000 and $250,000.

The predator, in this case, is a 28-inch-long (71 centimeters) creature known as Sclerocephalus haeuseri. Artists’ representations of it depict an animal that looks like a cross between an alligator and a salamander, with a heavy skull and jaws, a streamlined body with a menacing-looking tail, and eyes on top of its head.

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Choking

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Four of the five main databases that catalog the discoveries of exoplanets now list more than 900 confirmed alien worlds, and two of them peg the tally at 986 as of Sept. 26. So the 1,000th exoplanet may be announced in a matter of days or weeks, depending on which list you prefer.

That’s a lot of progress since 1992, when researchers detected two planets orbiting a rotating neutron star, or pulsar, about 1,000 light-years from Earth. Confirmation of the first alien world circling a “normal” star like our sun did not come until 1995. [The Strangest Alien Planets (Gallery)]

And the discoveries will keep pouring in, as astronomers continue to hone their techniques and sift through the data returned by instruments on the ground and in space.

The biggest numbers in the near future should come from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which racked up many finds before being hobbled in May of this year when the second of its four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed.

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This artist’s illustration represents the variety of planets being detected by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. Scientists now say that one in six stars hosts an Earth-size planet.

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