Rachel Feltman – Worrying you might get hurt is worse than knowing you will, study finds

Sometimes scientific studies reaffirm things we already knew based on good ol’ common sense. You can look at those studies and be all, “Ugh, lol, duh, #wasteofmoney,” or you can say, “Wow, huh, I guess maybe now we can try to get to the root of all these human experiences we take for granted.” This is one of those studies. …

Brien Holden – Half the world to be short-sighted by 2050

Half the world’s population (nearly 5 billion) will be short-sighted (myopic) by 2050, with up to one-fifth of them (1 billion) at a significantly increased risk of blindness if current trends continue, says a study published in the journal Ophthalmology. The number with vision loss from high myopia is expected to increase seven-fold from 2000 to 2050, with myopia to become …

Act Now, Urges Study, or Planet Faces 10,000+ Years of Climate Doom

“The next few decades offer a brief window of opportunity to minimize large-scale and potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.” The actions that policymakers take in the next couple of years will have “profound impacts on global climate, ecosystems and human societies” for the next 10,000 years and beyond, …

CSIRO AUSTRALIA – Plastic in 99 percent of seabirds by 2050

Researchers from CSIRO and Imperial College London have assessed how widespread the threat of plastic is for the world’s seabirds, including albatrosses, shearwaters and penguins, and found the majority of seabird species have plastic in their gut. The study, led by Dr Chris Wilcox with co-authors Dr Denise Hardesty and Dr Erik van Sebille and published today in the journal PNAS, …