BlogPaper

A new law in France bans spanking of children, making it the 52nd country to prohibit the practice. The law, known as the "equality and citizenship bill," was passed in France on Dec. 22, according to Marta Santos Pais, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) on Violence against Children. It forbids "all cruel degrading or humiliating treatment, including corporal punishment," by parents, according to the SRSG. The ban falls under the country's civil law, which means that people who break the law will not face criminal charges. [Read More]

After destroying the mammal populations in the Florida Everglades, pythons have turned to attacking birds to feed their 16-foot-long hunger. The snakes are not only eating the area's birds, but also the birds' eggs straight from the nest. "This finding is significant because it suggests that the Burmese python is not simply a sit-and-wait predator, but rather is opportunistic enough to find the nests of birds," study researcher Carla Dove, of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, said in a statement. [Read More]

Sinkholes and fissures are opening up the earth around Tehran, Iran's capital city. And according to the Associated Press, they threaten people's homes and the local infrastructure. The ground is cracking open, according to the AP, thanks to a water crisis that has deepened as Tehran's population has ballooned. The region is in the midst of a three-decade-long drought and ongoing desertification. According to a 2018 report from Circle of Blue, a nonprofit focused on water issues, that problem has been compounded as the city's population has grown to close to 8. [Read More]

The king crab could soon take over a whole new kingdom, and it has global warming to thank for the conquest. King crabs live on seafloors all over the world (perhaps most famously off the Alaskan coast), but scientists didn't know that these large crustaceans had ventured all the way down to the frigid waters off Antarctica until recently. And now that the large crustaceans have arrived, they could seriously disrupt the thriving marine ecosystem off the Antarctic mainland, according to a new study. [Read More]

Updated on Nov. 7 at 9:12 a.m. ET. The partial skeleton of a castaway found in the 1940s on the Pacific island Nikumaroro shows some similarities to Amelia Earhart, scientists say. Though extensive searches have failed to turn up the bones, scientists have found a record of the bones' measurements taken by a British doctor in 1941, they said. And those measurements match up with Earhart's build, according to Richard Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which launched a project to piece together Earhart's disappearance in 1988. [Read More]

The novel coronavirus likely originated in bats, but the pathogen may have then hopped into dogs before infecting humans, a new study suggests.  But not everyone agrees with that hypothesis. One expert told Live Science that "there are a lot of weaknesses" in the study and that the data don't support the study's conclusions. Evolution of a virus Before the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 made the jump to humans, two other coronaviruses, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, evolved in bats and passed through other animals on their way to people. [Read More]

One of Stephen Hawking's most famous theories about dark matter — that this mysterious and invisible substance is made up of primordial black holes — recently suffered a huge blow. That conclusion comes from a massive telescope that captured an image of an entire galaxy in one shot. The findings don't completely rule out Stephen Hawking's famous notion. But they suggest that primordial black holes would have to be truly tiny to explain dark matter. [Read More]

Getting the flu is never a pleasant experience, but for pregnant women, the illness can be particularly bad. That's because pregnant women are considered one of the "high-risk" groups who are more likely to develop complications from the flu. Despite this risk, last flu season, just 49.1 — less than half — of the pregnant women in the U.S. got a flu vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). [Read More]

The first case of human monkeypox in the U.S. in nearly 20 years has been confirmed in a U.S. resident who recently returned from traveling to Nigeria. The patient, who is currently hospitalized in Dallas, flew from Lagos, Nigeria, to Atlanta on July 8, and then flew on to Dallas, arriving on July 9, according to a statement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Masks were required on the flights and at U. [Read More]

A galaxy that is supposedly devoid of all dark matter might actually be full of it. And that, paradoxically, could mean dark matter doesn't exist. What?! Back in March, a team of astrophysicists published a paper(opens in new tab) in the journal Nature claiming to have found a galaxy lacking dark matter — a hypothetical form of invisible matter that seems to exert gravitational pull without interacting with light. Scientists have suggested the existence of this bizarre matter to explain a just-as-bizarre phenomenon: Based on the light astronomers can see with their telescopes, the universe acts like there is much more mass, and therefore much more gravitational force, than Albert Einstein's theories predict based on what we can see. [Read More]