Faye Flam

Sep 29, 2024 | deccanherald.com | Faye Flam

By F D FlamIt’s hurricane season once again, and once again Floridians were warned to evacuate as a deadly storm bore down on the state. Not everyone follows such warnings, but many do. That saves lives. Now, thanks to advances in biotechnology, we can do even better with disease outbreaks — alerting people when and where a threat is growing long before it can become a pandemic.

Sep 19, 2024 | deccanherald.com | Faye Flam

By F D FlamScientists have pieced together enough clues to Earth’s past climate to graph the average temperature from 485 million years ago to the present — back to a time long before dinosaurs and even trees, when the land was either barren or hosted mostly moss, millipedes and primitive insects. This new work shows temperatures spent hundreds of millions of years bouncing up and down, from climates similar to ours to ones that were steamier by about 15C (30F).

Sep 5, 2024 | deccanherald.com | Faye Flam

By F D FlamIf you’re confronting an endless string of unread emails after a long weekend or summer vacation, try thinking of responding as a game. A status game. Since reading the 2012 book Games Primates Play, by University of Chicago behavioral scientist Dario Maestripieri, I’ve never looked at my inbox the same way. Email, writes Maestripieri, is governed by the rules of dominance hierarchy, which is central to the games we social primates are wired to play.

Sep 4, 2024 | eastbaytimes.com | Faye Flam

It's routine practice for government officials to kill animals deemed invasive or destructive. For the most part, Americans accept this or look the other way - especially if the "pests" are insects, rodents or garden-munching deer. That's changed now that the Fish and Wildlife Service plans to shoot thousands of owls in California, Oregon and Washington. The species on the hit list is the barred owl - a creature whose adaptability has enabled it to spread into new areas.

Aug 5, 2024 | deccanherald.com | Faye Flam

By F D FlamWhen Italian boxer Angela Carini reported that she had “never felt a punch like that” after conceding to Algeria’s Imane Khelif 46 seconds after their Olympic match began, social media exploded with accusations. Elon Musk and J.K. Rowling chimed in, accusing Khelif of being a man posing as a woman to cheat. The case highlights what’s wrong with Musk, Rowling and others who think of themselves as bravely opposing excess political correctness.