An anonymous reader shares a report: We often think of multiplication and division as calculations that need to be taught in school. But a large body of research suggests that, even before children begin formal education, they possess intuitive arithmetic abilities. A new study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience argues that this ability to do approximate calculations even extends to that most dreaded basic math problem -- true division -- with implications for how students are taught mathematical concepts in the future. The foundation for the study is the approximate number system (ANS), a well-established theory that says people (and even nonhuman primates) from an early age have an intuitive ability to compare and estimate large sets of objects without relying upon language or symbols. For instance, under this non-symbolic system, a child can recognize that a group of 20 dots is bigger than a group of four dots, even when the four dots take up more space on a page. The ability to make finer approximations -- say, 20 dots versus 17 dots -- improves into adulthood.

People who speak limited English struggled to access telehealth services in the US during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new analysis, affecting their ability to connect with medical care. It's something experts worried about as soon as health organizations made the switch from in-person to virtual care. From a report: "That was really a concern of ours -- who is getting left out?" says Denise Payan, an assistant professor of health, society, and behavior at the University of California, Irvine, who worked on the study.

Payan and her colleagues interviewed staff and patients at two community health centers in California about their experiences with telehealth between December 2020 and April 2021. One of the clinics serves a primarily Spanish-speaking population, and the second serves a primarily Chinese-speaking population. Neither had offered video or phone visits before the pandemic started. Both started to them available soon after the California stay-at-home orders in March 2020 -- first with phone calls, then with video. The researchers spoke with 15 clinic workers and nine patients. Clinic patients who spoke limited English struggled to set up and use platforms like Zoom for health visits, the researchers found. "Things like not being able to read FAQs," Payan says. "There's reliance on either clinic personnel, staff, or family members -- like kids, who are helping their parents get connected to video visits."

A newly described bacterium living in the Caribbean "is visible to the naked eye, growing up to 2 centimeters -- as long as a peanut -- and 5,000 times bigger than many other microbes," writes Elizabeth Pennisi via Science.org. "What's more, this giant has a huge genome that's not free floating inside the cell as in other bacteria, but is instead encased in a membrane, an innovation characteristic of much more complex cells, like those in the human body." From the report: The bacterium was unveiled in a preprint (PDF) posted online last week and it has astounded some researchers who have reviewed its features. Aside from upending ideas about how big -- and sophisticated -- microbes can become, this bacterium "could be a missing link in the evolution of complex cells," says Kazuhiro Takemoto, a computational biologist at Kyushu Institute of Technology.

Researchers have long divided life into two groups: prokaryotes, which include bacteria and single-cell microbes called archaea, and eukaryotes, which include everything from yeast to most forms of multicellular life, including humans. Prokaryotes have free-floating DNA, whereas eukaryotes package their DNA in a nucleus. Eukaryotes also compartmentalize various cell functions into vesicles called organelles and can move molecules from one compartment to another -- something prokaryotes can't. But the newly discovered microbe blurs the line between prokaryotes and eukaryotes. [...] Furthermore, that cell includes two membrane sacs, one of which contains all the cell's DNA, [researchers] report in their 18 February preprint on bioRxiv. Volland calls that sac an organelle and that's "a big new step" that implies the two branches of life are not as different as previously thought, [Verena Carvalho, a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst] says. "Perhaps it's time to rethink our definition of eukaryote and prokaryote!" agrees Petra Levin, a microbiologist at Washington University in St Louis. "It's a supercool story."

The other, water-filled sac may be the reason the bacterium could grow so big. [...] The DNA-filled sac, also squished along the inner edge of this bacterium, proved extraordinary as well. When researchers at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute sequenced the DNA inside, they found the genome was huge, with 11 million bases harboring some 11,000 clearly distinguishable genes. Typically, bacterial genomes average about 4 million bases and about 3900 genes. By labeling the DNA with fluorescent tags, [researchers] determined the bacterium's genome was so big because there are more than 500,000 copies of the same stretches of DNA. Protein production factories called ribosomes were inside the DNA-filled sac as well, likely making the translation of a gene's code into a protein more efficient.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Vegetarians have a 14% lower chance of developing cancer than carnivores, according to a large study that links meat-eating to a heightened risk of the disease. A team of researchers from Oxford University analyzed data on more than 470,000 Britons and found that pescatarians had a 10% reduced risk. Compared with people who eat meat regularly -- defined as more than five times a week -- those who consumed small amounts had a 2% lower risk of developing cancer, the study found. "In this large British cohort, being a low meat-eater, fish-eater or vegetarian was associated with a lower risk of all cancer sites when compared to regular meat-eaters," the analysis found.

However, the authors, led by Cody Watling from Oxford's population health cancer epidemiology unit, made clear that their findings did not conclusively prove regular meat-eating increased the risk of cancer. Smoking and body fat could also help explain the differences found, they said. Their study of participants in the UK Biobank study also found that:

- Low meat-eaters -- who consume meat five or fewer times a week -- had a 9% lower risk of developing bowel cancer than regular meat-eaters.
- Vegetarian women were 18% less likely than those who ate meat regularly to develop postmenopausal breast cancer, though that may be due to their lower body mass index.
- Vegetarian men have a 31% lower risk of prostate cancer while among male pescatarians it is 20% lower. The researchers published their findings in the journal BMC Medicine.

Having an asteroid slam into Earth was catastrophic for the dinosaurs, but the season of the strike may have substantially ramped up extinction rates for others species, research suggests. From a report: Scientists have found evidence that the devastating impact 66m years ago, which wiped out three-quarters of Earth's species and created the Chicxulub crater in modern-day Mexico, happened in the spring in the northern hemisphere. The timing means that many animals north of the equator would have been particularly vulnerable to the intense heatwave unleashed by the collision, having just emerged from the harsh months of winter. Other animals in the south may have fared better given that it was autumn, especially if they were hunkering down in burrows. The direct hit from the asteroid triggered an extreme global heatwave that proved lethal for many exposed animals. In the aftermath, temperatures are thought to have plummeted in a nuclear winter that drove many more species to extinction.

Sea ice around Antarctica has reached a record low in four decades of observations, a new analysis of satellite images shows. From a report: As of Tuesday, ice covered 750,000 square miles around the Antarctic coast, below the previous record low of 815,000 square miles in early March 2017, according to the analysis by the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "It's really unprecedented," said Marilyn N. Raphael, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies Antarctic sea ice. Warmer ocean temperatures may have played a role, she said, "but there are other factors that we will be working on finding out in the next months." Antarctic sea ice extent is highly variable from year to year, but overall has increased very slightly, on average, since the late 1970s, when satellite observations began. By contrast, sea ice extent in the Arctic, which is warming about three times as fast as other regions, has decreased by more than 10 percent a decade over the same period.

The two regions are very different. The Arctic Ocean covers high latitudes, including the North Pole itself, and is hemmed in by land masses. In the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctica covers the pole. The Southern Ocean, which surrounds the continent, begins at much lower latitudes and is open to the north. While rapid warming in the Arctic is largely responsible for the shrinking of sea ice there, the effect of climate change on Antarctic sea ice is far less clear. Edward Blanchard-Wrigglesworth, a climate scientist at the University of Washington, said that many scientists expect that global warming will eventually lead to declines in Antarctic sea ice. But right now, he said, "it's really hard to connect the two, especially in terms of single events like this one." Instead, a complex group of factors is at play when it come to Antarctic sea ice. Large-scale atmospheric patterns, often occurring far from the continent, as well as local ocean currents and winds can all increase or reduce sea-ice coverage.

An anonymous reader writes: An object hidden below ground has been located using quantum technology -- a long-awaited milestone with profound implications for industry, human knowledge and national security. University of Birmingham researchers from the UK National Quantum Technology Hub in Sensors and Timing have reported their achievement in Nature. It is the first in the world for a quantum gravity gradiometer outside of laboratory conditions. The quantum gravity gradiometer, which was developed under a contract for the Ministry of Defense and in the UKRI-funded Gravity Pioneer project, was used to find a tunnel buried outdoors in real-world conditions one meter below the ground surface. It wins an international race to take the technology outside. The sensor works by detecting variations in microgravity using the principles of quantum physics, which is based on manipulating nature at the sub-molecular level. The success opens a commercial path to significantly improved mapping of what exists below ground level.

Professor Kai Bongs, head of cold atom physics at the University of Birmingham and principal investigator of the UK Quantum Technology Hub Sensors and Timing, said: "This is an 'Edison moment' in sensing that will transform society, human understanding and economies. "With this breakthrough we have the potential to end reliance on poor records and luck as we explore, build and repair. In addition, an underground map of what is currently invisible is now a significant step closer, ending a situation where we know more about Antarctica than what lies a few feet below our streets." [...] This breakthrough will allow future gravity surveys to be cheaper, more reliable and delivered 10 times faster, reducing the time needed for surveys from a month to a few days. It has the potential to open a range of new applications for gravity survey, providing a new lens into the underground.

When Harry Stamper sets off a bomb to save planet Earth in the film Armageddon, his life flashes before his eyes. Now research has revealed tantalising clues that such recall may not be Hollywood hyperbole. From a report: An international team of scientists has reported an unexpected situation in which they recorded the brain activity of an 87-year-old patient as he died. The man had been admitted to a hospital emergency department after a fall that resulted in a bleed in the brain, and subsequently deteriorated. When doctors carried out an electroencephalography (EEG), they had discovered the patient had developed epilepsy. However, during the EEG recordings he had experienced a heart attack and died.

The team says analysis of recordings of the 30 seconds before and after the man's heart stopped beating suggest that in his final moments he experienced changes in different types of brain waves, including alpha and gamma brain waves. The study suggests that interactions between different types of brain wave continue after the blood stops flowing in the brain. But, the researchers add, it also raises an intriguing possibility. "Given that cross-coupling between alpha and gamma activity is involved in cognitive processes and memory recall in healthy subjects, it is intriguing to speculate that such activity could support a last 'recall of life' that may take place in the near-death state," the team writes in the journal Frontiers in Ageing Neuroscience.

However, the findings are based on the recordings from just one person, and the researchers urge caution, noting among other factors that traumatic brain injuries and white matter damage can affect brain waves, while activity of networks in the brain can be affected by anticonvulsant medication such as that given to the patient. Nonetheless, the researchers say the results could have important implications.

For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public. From a report: When the C.D.C. published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected. The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an oncoming surge of Covid cases. Some states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but it had never before released those findings.

Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country's response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said. Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn't expect to discover an entirely new social behaviour rarely seen in birds. Our goal was to learn more about the movement and social dynamics of these highly intelligent birds, and to test these new, durable and reusable devices. Instead, the birds outsmarted us. As our new research paper explains, the magpies began showing evidence of cooperative "rescue" behaviour to help each other remove the tracker. While we're familiar with magpies being intelligent and social creatures, this was the first instance we knew of that showed this type of seemingly altruistic behaviour: helping another member of the group without getting an immediate, tangible reward. As academic scientists, we're accustomed to experiments going awry in one way or another. Expired substances, failing equipment, contaminated samples, an unplanned power outage -- these can all set back months (or even years) of carefully planned research. For those of us who study animals, and especially behaviour, unpredictability is part of the job description. This is the reason we often require pilot studies.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The exoplanet WASP-121b, which resides about 900 light-years from Earth, is an egg-shaped scorcher. Temperatures on the planet's day side can reach up to 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit. It's so hot that heavy metal elements, like iron and magnesium, exist as gases and are constantly streaming out of the atmosphere and into space. But the planet's night side has, until now, remained in the dark. In a new study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Feb. 21, astronomers shared their first look at the planet's dark side using NASA's Hubble Telescope.

Telescopes at the South African Astronomical Observatory discovered WASP-121b in 2015. The planet, which is a little bigger and heavier than Jupiter, is on the verge of being ripped apart by the gravitational forces of its home star, known as WASP 121. It makes a full orbit of that star once every 1.3 days and is tidally locked -- one side is perpetually bathed in starlight, the other is forever staring out into space. "This is one of the most extreme systems we have," says Ben Montet, an astrophysicist at the University of New South Wales who was not affiliated with the study. He notes its extremely hot day side is hotter than some stars.

Astronomers have only caught glimpses of the two interstellar objects identified in our solar system, reports Space.com — but there's hope that the Webb Space Telescope will show us more: "With Webb, we can do really interesting science at much fainter magnitudes or brightnesses," Cristina Thomas, an astronomer at Northern Arizona University, said in a statement from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which oversees operations for the Webb mission. Thomas is on a research team that has arranged to use the observatory to study an interstellar object, should one appear during the telescope's first year of work.

Webb brings some new talents to the table as well. "The supreme sensitivity and power of Webb now present us with an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the chemical composition of these interstellar objects and find out so much more about their nature: where they come from, how they were made, and what they can tell us about the conditions present in their home systems," Martin Cordiner, principal investigator of the project, said in the statement. Cordiner is an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C....

"We've never been able to observe interstellar objects in this region of the infrared," Thomas said. "It opens a lot of opportunities for the different compositional signatures that we're interested in. That's going to be a huge boon for us!" Specifically, the team would use infrared observations to study any gas and dust that the interstellar object is emitting, giving scientists a taste of the object's native system.
Right now, far out in space, the Webb Telescope has finished the first stage of aligning its 18-segmented primary mirror, reports another article at Space.com. "A single star that the observatory looked at was deliberately rendered 18 times into a hexagonal shape.

"Eventually, those 18 images will perfectly align into a single, sharp focus, but the interim result portrays a star repeated perfectly in a hexagonal pattern reminiscent of a stunning celestial snowflake."

Further Reading: "Exclusive interview: answers to 20 questions from the James Webb Space Telescope team."

Over the past few weeks the sun "has undergone a series of giant eruptions that have sent plasma hurtling through space," reports Science Alert: Perhaps the most dramatic was a powerful coronal mass ejection and solar flare that erupted from the far side of the Sun on February 15 just before midnight. Based on the size, it's possible that the eruption was in the most powerful category of which our Sun is capable: an X-class flare.

Because the flare and CME were directed away from Earth, we're unlikely to see any of the effects associated with a geomagnetic storm, which occurs when material from the eruption slams into Earth's atmosphere. These include interruptions to communications, power grid fluctuations, and auroras. But the escalating activity suggests that we may anticipate such storms in the imminent future. "This is only the second farside active region of this size since September 2017," astronomer Junwei Zhao of Stanford University's helioseismology group told SpaceWeather. "If this region remains huge as it rotates to the Earth-facing side of the Sun, it could give us some exciting flares."

According to SpaceWeatherLive, which tracks solar activity, the Sun has erupted every day for the month of February, with some days featuring multiple flares. That includes three of the second-most powerful flare category, M-class flares: an M1.4 on February 12; an M1 on February 14; and an M1.3 on February 15. There were also five M-class flares in January. The mild geomagnetic storm that knocked 40 newly launched Starlink satellites from low-Earth orbit followed an M-class flare that took place on January 29.
The article suggests this is normal activity, since the sun is about halfway towards "solar maximum" (its peak of sunspot and flare activity) expected to arrive in 2025, while the "solar minimum" was in 2019.

Further Reading: SciTechDaily reports that the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft has now "captured the largest solar prominence eruption ever observed in a single image together with the full solar disc."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story

UPI reports on the results of a new randomized-controlled trial of ivermectin, the "gold standard" of medical research.

UPI reports that treatment with ivermectin "failed to prevent patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 from progressing to serious illness, a study published Friday by JAMA Internal Medicine found." Of 241 patients in the study with mild to moderate symptoms treated with the medication, 52, or 22% developed severe COVID-19, the data showed. Meanwhile, 43 of 249 patients, or 17%, who received "standard" treatment, including corticosteroids and, in a handful of cases, other experimental drugs, progressed to serious illness from the virus, the researchers said.

"Essentially, our study findings have dismissed the notion of ivermectin being a 'miracle drug' against COVID-19," study co-author Dr. Steven Chee Loon Lim told UPI in an email.... In addition, study participants treated with ivermectin reported more side effects than those given other drugs, Lim said. This "raises concerns about the widespread use of this drug," he said.... 14 of the ivermectin patients developed severe diarrhea and four suffered potentially life-threatening kidney damage, the researchers said.
The new study also examined whether patients had to go on a ventilator, needed intensive care or died from their infections — and discovered "there were no significant differences between groups."

And the researchers' study also points out that two additional randomized clinical trials conducted in 2021 also "found no significant effect of ivermectin on symptom resolution and hospitalization rates." UPI now quotes Dr. Lim as saying Friday that despite early hopes for ivermectin, "large and well-designed randomized clinical trials, including ours, have consistently shown that ivermectin offered little or no significant clinical benefits.

"I believe the findings in our study will likely 'close the door' on the use of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19."

Our ability to process information during decision-making doesn't drop off until age 60, according to new findings that challenge the widespread belief that mental speed starts to decline in our 20s. New Scientist reports: Mischa von Krause at Heidelberg University in Germany and his colleagues analysed data collected from around 1.2 million people aged 10 to 80 who took part in an experiment that was originally designed to measure implicit racial bias. During the task, participants were asked to sort words and images, for example by labelling faces as white or Black, or classifying words such as "joy" or "agony" as good or bad, by pressing one of two buttons. In support of previous studies, the researchers found that people's reaction times speed up from their teens to around age 20, then slow down as they get older. This decline has typically been attributed to slower mental speed, but this isn't the case, says von Krause.

The team used an established model of cognition based on previous research, which assumes people make decisions by continuously considering information until they reach a threshold of certainty. According to this model, the decrease in reaction time from age 20 is probably due to people wanting more certainty before making decisions as they age, visual information taking more time to travel from their eyes to their brain and people taking longer to physically hit the button as they get older. The analysis suggests that people's mental speed increases in their 20s, and stays high until age 60. [...] While the team expects the results will apply to a wide range of cognitive tasks, it is possible that age may affect other tasks differently, such as those relying on memory. The study has been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

dargaud writes: NASA's Parker Solar Probe has captured its first images of Venus' surface in visible light. The images show distinctive areas on the planetary surface, including continental regions, plains and plateaus. The images were taken on the nightside of the planet where the heat reemitted by the various surface areas has differing characteristics. "Venus is the third brightest thing in the sky, but until recently we have not had much information on what the surface looked like because our view of it is blocked by a thick atmosphere," said Brian Wood, lead author on the new study and physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. "Now, we finally are seeing the surface in visible wavelengths for the first time from space."

You can view images of Venus' surface in a video produced by NASA on YouTube.

Researchers from the Graduate School of Science, Osaka City University, have provided evidence to suggest that fish have the capacity for MSR, a behavioral test to determine whether an animal possesses the ability of visual self-recognition. As Phys.Org explains, an animal's capacity for MSR is determined when they "touch or scrape a mark placed on their body in a location that can only be indirectly viewed in a mirror." From the report: Professor [Masanori Kohda] says, "Previously, using a brown marking on the throat area of [cleaner fish Labroides dimidiatus], we had shown three out of four cleaner fish to scrape their throats several times after swimming in front of a mirror, a number on par with similar studies done on other animals like elephants, dolphins, and magpies." However, one of the criticisms laid against this result was sample size and the need for repeated studies showing positive results. Teaming up with researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, this study increased the sample size to 18 cleaner fish, with a 94% positive result of 17 of them demonstrating the same behavior from the previous study.
[...]
Prof. Kohda says, "Our previous study demonstrated MSR in L. dimidiatus; however, studies with other animals have shown that simply moving a mirror reignites aggressive behavior, suggesting the animal has only learned a spatial contingency, not MSR." To address this, the team transferred mirror-trained cleaner fish to a tank with a mirror on one side of the tank and then three days later to a tank with a mirror on the other side, and saw the fish show no aggression toward their mirror image in both tanks. Also, to ensure the L. dimidiatus that passed the mark test truly are recognizing themselves, they placed mirror-trained fish in adjacent tanks that were separated by transparent glass. After two to three days, when fish largely reduced their aggressive behavior towards each other, they were marked the standard way the following night. None of the fish scraped their throat during the 120 mins of exposure to each other the following morning. This new experiment was recently published in PLOS Biology.

It's been one year since a nuclear-powered, one-armed, six-wheeled robot punched through the Martian atmosphere at a blazing 12,000 miles per hour, and a supersonic parachute slowed it way down until a rocket-powered "jetpack" could fire its engines and then gently lower it onto the surface. NPR: NASA's Perseverance rover was too far away for engineers on Earth to control it in real time -- which meant that the spacecraft had to execute that daredevil maneuver all by itself. All that the robot's handlers on Earth could do was wait for confirmation that it had touched down safely. "It is a nail-biting experience," Rick Welch, Perseverance's deputy project manager. "There's no doubt about it." Dramatic as the Feb. 18, 2021 touchdown was, the milestones that the car-sized rover has hit in the year since then could one day prove far more momentous.

Perseverance is hunting for evidence of microbes that may have once lived on the red planet -- a first for a NASA robot. It begins a new chapter of Martian exploration: one that not only searches for ancient signs of microbial Martians, but that lays the groundwork to send samples of Mars rocks and dirt back to Earth. One of the mission's main objectives is to collect samples of rocks and dirt and stash them on the surface of Mars so that a future mission could pick them up and bring them back to Earth to study. The $2.7-billion rover is equipped with a suite of scientific instruments including a rock-blasting laser, cameras and spectrometers. But a robot geologist -- even one as advanced as Perseverance -- can only do so much. Scientists really hope to get pieces of the planet back to their labs.

Repeated heading and accidental head impacts in football cause changes to blood patterns in the brain, potentially interfering with signalling pathways, according to a study of players in Norway. From a report: The peer-reviewed research, published in the Brain Injury journal, is the latest item in a growing body of evidence pointing to the dangers of heading. It discovered "specific alterations" in levels of microRNAs in the brain upon analysing blood samples from 89 professional players in the country's top flight.

MicroRNAs are molecules that help to regulate gene expression, through which DNA instructions are converted into products such as proteins, in bodily fluids. The findings suggest that, given the change in levels, they may be able to be used as biomarkers to detect brain injury. Blood samples were taken from players after accidental head impacts in matches and after specifically designed training sessions. Forty-eight of the players, drawn from three teams, took part in a session that included repetitive heading drills from set pieces and similar scenarios; they also undertook one that involved other high-intensity exercise, with no head contact allowed. The results found specific changes in certain microRNA levels whose numbers were unaffected by the other high-intensity exercise.

Herman Pontzer, a biological anthropologist at the Pontzer lab at Duke University, works with his colleagues to "systematically measure the total energy used per day by animals and people in various walks of life," reports Science.org. "The answers coming from their data are often surprising: Exercise doesn't help you burn more energy on average; active hunter-gatherers in Africa don't expend more energy daily than sedentary office workers in Illinois; pregnant women don't burn more calories per day than other adults, after adjusting for body mass." Here's an excerpt from the report: Pontzer's skill as a popularizer can rankle some of his colleagues. His message that exercise won't help you lose weight "lacks nuance," says exercise physiologist John Thyfault of the University of Kansas Medical Center, who says it may nudge dieters into less healthy habits. But others say besides busting myths about human energy expenditure, Pontzer's work offers a new lens for understanding human physiology and evolution. As he wrote in Burn, "In the economics of life, calories are the currency." "His work is revolutionary," says paleoanthropologist Leslie Aiello, past president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which has funded Pontzer's work. "We now have data ... that has given us a completely new framework for how we think about how humans adapted to energetic limits."