For World Water Week, we have stories of too much and not enough water. Drought conditions are extensive in Europe, the western U.S., and parts of Africa, while other regions are experiencing 1,000 year floods and record-setting rainfall.
Tonight’s science news looks at the pattern of drought and flood, plus these other topics:
- Associations between space and numbers may be wired into the brains of humans and other animals
- Increased pharmaceutical pollution of ecosystems
- A vast and interconnected web of misinformation about spiders
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The James Webb telescope spotted CO2 in an exoplanet’s atmosphere
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Peatlands are experiencing diverse hydrological responses to climate change
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Some Monkeys Use Stone Tools for Pleasure, Study Suggests
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NASA’s Artemis I mission sets the stage for our return to the moon
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People with similar faces likely have similar DNA, even if they aren't related
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The sound of a black hole
Here, about 70 miles north of Sacramento, a coalition of water agencies is setting out to build the first major reservoir in California in nearly half a century. The $4 billion plan calls for flooding miles of ranchlands with flows from the nearby Sacramento River and sending the water to cities and irrigation districts as far away as the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
Much of the money is already lined up, and as state water shortages have intensified, the project has won increasing bipartisan support, including from Gov. Gavin Newsom.
But there’s a problem: There may not be enough water to fill the new reservoir.
In a letter sent out by state regulators on Friday, project officials were told that their application for a water right is incomplete because they failed to show that there’s sufficient flow to draw from in the Sacramento River. The Sites Project Authority, the agency formed by the water suppliers to get the reservoir built, has 60 days to strengthen the application.
Please share other stories that interest you in a comment.
Drought
A painful lack of rain and relentless heat waves are drying up rivers in the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Many are shrinking in length and breadth. Patches of riverbed poking out above the water are a common sight. Some rivers are so desiccated, they have become virtually impassable.
The human-caused climate crisis is fueling extreme weather across the globe, which isn't just impacting rivers, but also the people who rely on them. Most people on the planet depend on rivers in some way, whether for drinking water, to irrigate food, for energy or to ship goods.
Floods and heavy rains
Studies show humans prefer to position larger numbers to the right and smaller numbers to the left. People are usually faster and more accurate at comparing numbers when larger ones are to the right and smaller ones are to the left, and people with brain damage that disrupts their spatial processing also show similar disruptions in number processing.
But so far, there has been little research testing whether the horizontal dimension is the most important one we associate with numbers. In new research published in PLOS ONE, we found that humans actually process numbers faster when they are displayed vertically—with smaller numbers at the bottom and larger numbers at the top.
Our associations between number and space are influenced by language and culture, but these links are not unique to humans.
Tests on three-day-old chicks show they seek smaller numbers with a leftwards bias and larger numbers with a rightwards one. Pigeons and blue jays seem to have a left-to-right or right-to-left mental number line, depending on the individual.
These findings suggest associations between space and numbers may be wired into the brains of humans and other animals.
Catherine Scott, an arachnologist at McGill University, is familiar with the bad rap spiders get. When she tells people what she does, she is often presented with a story about “that one time a spider bit me.” The thing is, she says, if you don’t see a crushed up spider near you, or see one on your body, it’s likely that the bite mark on your skin came from something else. There are more than 50,000 known species of spiders in the world, and only a few can harm humans.
“Even medical professionals don’t always have the best information, and they very often misdiagnose bites,” Dr. Scott said.
It turns out that these fears and misunderstandings of our eight-legged friends are reflected in the news. Recently, more than 60 researchers from around the world, including Dr. Scott, collected 5,348 news stories about spider bites, published online from 2010 through 2020 from 81 countries in 40 languages. They read through each story, noting whether any had factual errors or emotionally fraught language. The percentage of articles they rated sensationalistic: 43 percent. The percentage of articles that had factual errors: 47 percent.
These findings, published on Monday in the journal Current Biology, revealed a vast and interconnected web of misinformation.