One Critical Factor Predicts Longevity Better Than Diet or Exercise, Study Reveals

22 Sept. 2026, By D. Nield

https://www.sciencealert.com/one-critical-factor-predicts-longevity-better-than-diet-or-exercise-study-reveals

(rattanakun/Canva)

Diet and exercise can both influence how long you live, but research suggests they're not the single greatest predictor of longevity.

According to a study published in Sleep Advances, something else might have a bigger effect on your lifespan.

While poor sleep has been previously linked to a host of health issues, this investigation found that getting enough shut-eye had a stronger connection to living longer than diet and exercise – factors that are known to add years to your life.

Researchers from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) crunched the numbers on county-level survey data from across the US, from 2019 to 2025.

They compared measures of life expectancy with self-reported sleep duration, using less than seven hours per night as the threshold for insufficient sleep.

They then factored in other variables that can affect life expectancy, including physical inactivity, employment status, and educational level.

The association between insufficient sleep and lower life expectancy remained statistically significant after including those factors.

In the first model, only smoking had a stronger association with life expectancy. In a second model that added obesity and diabetes, obesity also ranked above insufficient sleep.

"I didn't expect [insufficient sleep] to be so strongly correlated to life expectancy," said OHSU sleep physiologist Andrew McHill.

"We've always thought sleep is important, but this research really drives that point home: People really should strive to get seven to nine hours of sleep if at all possible."

As a purely observational study, the research, published in 2025, can't prove that less sleep knocks months or years off your life.

A study like this also can't untangle the complex interactions between sleep, diet, and exercise. The results do suggest the amount of sleep you get each night is a significant indicator of long-term health.

Adequate sleep is vital to almost every aspect of our well-being: missing a single night of slumber can impact brain circuitry and the body's immune system, for example.

It's reasonable to suggest that these health issues may contribute to mortality in the long run. In particular, the researchers highlight obesity and diabetes as two conditions linked with poor sleep that could reduce life expectancy.

"It's intuitive and makes a lot of sense, but it was still striking to see it materialize so strongly in all of these models," said McHill.

"I'm a sleep physiologist who understands the health benefits of sleep, but the strength of the association between sleep sufficiency and life expectancy was remarkable to me."

The good news is that our sleep routines are, at least to some extent, modifiable within the limits of our caregiving and work commitments.

Life expectancy's association with sleep is stronger than with many other factors, including diet and exercise. Although, as this graph shows, physical activity and social connections also influence life expectancy. 

(McAuliffe et al., Sleep Adv., 2025)

It might be worth quitting that habit of doomscrolling in bed, or squeezing in a session of yoga or tai chi now and then.

Both the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society recommend getting at least seven hours of sleep a night, although some evidence suggests you might be able to catch up on the weekends if you need to.

"This research shows that we need to prioritize sleep at least as much as we do what we eat or how we exercise," said McHill.

"Getting a good night's sleep will improve how you feel but also how long you live."

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Scavengers Stay Healthy By Not Eating Their Own Kind, New Science Suggests

26 Sept. 2026, By I. Farkas

https://www.sciencealert.com/scavengers-stay-healthy-by-not-eating-their-own-kind-new-science-suggests

(Annette Shaff/Canva)

Nature is a cycle in which nothing is wasted and death leads to life.

When an animal dies, it becomes carrion, a source of nutriment that upholds ecosystems.

For example, a "whale fall" settling on the seafloor creates a thriving mini-environment for decades.

However, these hotspots also pose dangers to the opportunists that feed here, including the risk of pathogen transmission and predation.

Accordingly, it has long been suggested that scavengers avoid eating carcasses that are more closely related to them to reduce the risk of infection.

But the evidence to explore that idea is scarce and limited in scale.

So researchers recently expanded that scale, examining an essential gap in the ecology of some of nature's most derided denizens: those who scavenge.

In a study published in the journal Ecology Letters, a quartet of Spanish biologists, ecologists, and zoologists used camera traps, phylogenetic analyses, and computational modeling to see what kind of carcasses these consumers choose to chow down upon.

"Here, we provide the first empirical evidence from a diverse vertebrate scavenger assemblage that phylogenetic distance is a key driver of selective carrion consumption," the researchers say.

From February 2020 through May 2021, they placed nearly 200 fish, bird, and small mammal carcasses across El Hondo Natural Park in Alicante, in southeastern Spain, along with two cameras at each spot to capture images and video of the resultant feeding frenzies.

These animals – including carp, quails, ducks, rodents, and rabbits from sources like roadkill and invasive-carp-reducing efforts – are present in the park and were strategically placed where each would naturally die; the researchers did not, say, airlift a whale carcass into a swamp.

They chose El Hondo because it's a highly productive wetland featuring extensive reedbeds, marshes, and even salt flats.

It's abundant in resources and hosts many species in a relatively small area, creating frequent opportunities for carrion.

Interestingly, despite its diversity, it does not host large predators or the world's most famous obligate scavengers: vultures.

They also consulted a species-level phylogenetic tree to ascertain the genetic distance between carrion and its scavenger, gauged by the millions of years of independent evolution between different taxa.

The phylogenetic tree employed in this work.

 (Pessano-Serrat et al., Ecol. Lett., 2026)

They observed that animals often consumed carrion that was more distantly related to them than would be expected through random occurrence.

"We found a consistent pattern across the assemblage: scavengers generally avoided consuming carcasses of phylogenetically related species," the researchers explain.

"This trend held for both the probability of consuming a given carcass species and the total number of carcasses consumed, although the strength of the relationship varied between taxonomic classes (birds vs. mammals)."

At the extreme ends of the observed trends, the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) – notoriously and erroneously blamed for the 'Chicago rat hole' – proved the main consumer, chomping on 38 carcasses, mostly fish.

A box plot showing random and real values (observed) for feeding choices among scavengers.

 (Pessano-Serrat et al., Ecol. Lett., 2026)



Among the few species that fed on more closely related carrion was a bird, the Iberian grey shrike (Lanius meridionalis), observed to feed only on bird carcasses.

Incidentally, shrikes further belie their birdly cuteness by impaling their prey on spikes.

Animals that didn't seem to care about what they ate included the Eurasian magpie (Pica pica) and the globally ubiquitous red fox (Vulpes vulpes).

The latter has also established itself as the land mammal with the largest distribution, second only to humans, according to the National Park Service.

The researchers suggest that avoiding closely related carrion may serve as a first line of defense, helping animals avert infections and the energy costs of immune responses.

Since more closely related animals are more likely to share physiological traits, they are also more likely to share pathogens and transmit diseases among each other.

Scavenging probability 

(A) and number of carcasses eaten 

(B) both rose with evolutionary distance, more sharply for mammals. (Pessano-Serrat et al., Ecol. Lett., 2026)

Study limitations include the absence of fish as scavengers.

And since some of the scavenging animals in this study only exhibited a few feeding events, more evidence is necessary to explore specific factors, such as how their feeding behaviors are affected by their health, life stages, sociability, or environmental food scarcity.

Importantly, this work highlights that scavengers are essential parts of their ecosystems, cycling nutrients and shaping food webs. They also help boost public health by reducing zoonotic disease potential.

As an example, a crash in vulture populations in India has been linked to the deaths of more than half a million people.

"Recognizing and preserving healthy scavenger communities may therefore provide both ecosystem-­level benefits and contribute to mitigating zoonotic risks," the researchers conclude.

"These insights highlight the importance of integrating scavenger species into broader wildlife management and conservation frameworks."

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

The Solar System’s First Worlds Were Built From Fire, Not Ice

By J. Shelton, Yale U., Sept. 25, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/the-solar-systems-first-worlds-were-built-from-fire-not-ice/

This artist’s concept shows a very young star encircled by a disk of gas and dust, the raw materials from which rocky planets such as Earth are thought to form. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A study led by Yale provides the first chemical evidence that gas began sorting the building materials for the solar system’s earliest solid bodies sooner than previously known.

If the outer solar system’s first solid bodies had come with a recipe, it would have called for a generous helping of chondrules, millimeter-sized beads of rock forged by heat, and very little icy dust. That dust, known as matrix, carried water ice and organic molecules, yet only a small share made it into the earliest bodies researchers studied.

A Yale-led team has now found the first geochemical evidence that this preference for chondrules was already established within the solar system’s first million years. Previous evidence of such sorting came from objects that formed 2 to 4 million years after the solar system began.

Reconstructing that early mixture meant looking for ingredients that no longer physically survive. The researchers examined iron meteorites from parent bodies that had melted completely, destroying the chondrules inside them. Chemical traces preserved through that melting allowed the team to work backward to the original proportions. The findings were published September 18 in Nature Astronomy.

“These ubiquitous little beads of rock are the basic building blocks from which the planets themselves were eventually assembled,” said study first author Damanveer Grewal, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “And now we know they were already being sorted and incorporated into the first generation of solid bodies from the very start.”

Damanveer Grewal. Credit: Dan Renzetti

Two tracers recover the original recipe

Those early bodies, called planetesimals, had accumulated enough radioactive aluminum-26 to generate the heat responsible for their melting. No preserved bodies from the first million years retain their original, unmelted mixture of chondrules and matrix, so the researchers needed another way to determine their composition.

Grewal and his colleagues used two independent chemical tracers linked to matrix. Sulfur is concentrated in matrix, so it can help reveal how much dust a parent body originally contained. The oxidation state of iron, a measure of its chemical condition, provides a separate indication of how much water ice and oxidized dust went into that body.

Both measurements pointed to an original matrix content of just 8% to 17%, lower than that found in any known chondrites, the primitive meteorites that still contain chondrules.

“Both tracers independently tell the same story: these early planetesimals were remarkably matrix-poor,” Grewal said. “That convergence is what makes the result robust.”

Chondrules dominated the earliest bodies

The reconstruction reaches further back in time than the evidence preserved in carbonaceous chondrites from the outer solar system. These primitive, stony meteorites contain organic compounds and water alongside silicate minerals. Researchers already knew that earlier-forming carbonaceous chondrites had more chondrules and less matrix than those that formed later. That pattern suggested that the regions where planetesimals assembled favored the rocky beads over icy dust, but it could not establish the mixture in the first generation of bodies.

“Our work shows that this assembly process was remarkably selective from the very beginning,” Grewal said. “The earliest bodies in the outer solar system were built from 83% to 92% chondrules, with very little of the icy, volatile-rich dust that dominates later-forming objects.”

The chondrules preserved in chondrites offer a tangible connection to this ancient process. Chondrites are the most primitive meteorites in geological collections, allowing researchers to examine material that escaped the complete melting experienced by the iron meteorites’ parent bodies.

“You can hold them in your hand and know that they began as part of a process that started billions of years ago,” Grewal said. “It’s a timescale that’s hard to wrap your head around.”

The findings also help explain why older chondrules are scarce in the meteorite record, Grewal said. They were incorporated into early bodies that subsequently melted, erasing the beads while leaving chemical clues to their former presence.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

3 Warnings From Isaac Asimov That Came True

COSMIC MINDS, 21 Sept 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwOdeg2z4NY

Isaac Asimov died in 1992. 

Years before that, he sat down and described the world we live in now — the screens, the vanishing jobs, the crowds — and almost nobody listened, because he wrote science fiction, and we decided that meant he was making things up. He wasn't. 

Asimov was a scientist who read the present harder than anyone else and refused to blink at where it was heading. 

This video walks through three of his warnings that came true with unsettling precision: 

a society that comes to worship its own ignorance, 

a world where machines take the work and hand us nothing back, 

and a planet so crowded that a single human life slides toward worthless.

 He saw all three forming decades ago, said them plainly, and watched us march toward each one anyway. The thread running through all of them is a single race he spent his life pointing at — our power growing faster than our wisdom. He didn't warn us to frighten us. He warned us because he thought we could still turn the wheel.

The birth of modern Man

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Sunspot 40 Times Wider Than Earth Shows Our Sun Is Capable of Superflares

25 Sept. 2026, By D. Nield

https://www.sciencealert.com/sunspot-40-times-wider-than-earth-shows-our-sun-is-capable-of-superflares

(© MPS/Alexey Chizhik)

Solar flares are huge eruptions of radiation that blast out of the Sun – sometimes several times a day – and at their strongest, they can release the energy equivalent of a billion hydrogen bombs.

Our planet's magnetic field and atmosphere, together with tens of millions of miles of space, protect us from these bursts and other space weather.

However, distant stars similar to the Sun have generated so-called superflares, hundreds or thousands of times more energetic than what's been observed in our Solar System.

Could those superflares also potentially erupt from our own Sun – and have they been occurring throughout Earth's history, in the billions of years before we had the instruments required to measure them?

Some Sun-like stars produce a superflare about once a century.

 (© MPS/Alexey Chizhik)



That's the question researchers led by a team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany wanted to ask.

In a new study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, the researchers analyzed the 300 strongest solar flares measured between 2010 and 2016, and the energy they produced.

"Of course, we knew that no superflares had occurred during the observation period, but the statistical relationship we found between the released energy and the size of the active region should hold true for more powerful events as well," says astrophysicist Natalie Krivova, from MPS.

By studying the corresponding active regions on the Sun for each flare – the intense magnetic disturbances that eruptions emerge from, which often include dark sunspots – the researchers were able to calculate how energy corresponded to active region size.

They then went back to some of the largest sunspots recorded on the Sun – records that go back much further, around four centuries. One sunspot stands out: the giant sunspot observed in 1947, which covered around 0.6 percent of the visible solar disk.

A sunspot that size, with a diameter some 40 times that of Earth, could theoretically produce a flare reaching the lower end of the superflare range seen on other stars.

A historical hand-drawn illustration of the 1947 sunspot.

 (Mount Wilson Observatory)



"Our Sun has superflare potential," says Krivova.

"It can produce massive sunspots that, in principle, can serve as the starting point for the most extreme bursts of radiation."

This fits with the evidence we have of extreme solar particle events (ESPEs), storms of radiation way beyond anything that's been directly observed in history. We haven't seen these events, but there are signs of them in tree-ring records.

We therefore know Earth has been hit by ESPEs – and the new study suggests that superflares may well have caused them.

Krivova is also the senior author on another related study, also recently published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, which looks in more detail at the relationship between ESPEs and superflares. The prevailing hypothesis is that superflares can trigger ESPEs, but only if conditions are right for energetic particles to escape into space.

Returning to the first paper, the researchers say the relationship between ESPEs and superflares is something for future studies to build on. More detailed modeling, investigating how sunspots can combine together and the magnetic field conditions that keep superflares confined, will be important here.

While the direct impact on human health would be limited, future solar storms have the potential to cause significant disruption to the technology and infrastructure we rely on in the modern day, which means understanding when and how our Sun might ramp up to a superflare level is an important field of research.

"Our goal was to provide constraints on the maximum possible flare energies that could arise from the most extreme sunspot groups in the historical record," write the researchers in their published paper.

"We emphasize that this analysis does not address the probability or expected frequency of such events."

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Even After 300 Years, Scientists Find Recovering Grasslands Can Remain Fundamentally Different

By R. Smith, Michigan State U., Sept. 24, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/even-after-300-years-scientists-find-recovering-grasslands-can-remain-fundamentally-different/

India’s savannas shrunk from 100 million acres in 1880 to 60 million acres in 2010, according to one estimate. 

Credit: Ashish Nerlekar

Even centuries after disturbance, recovering grasslands can remain dominated by a different kind of plant than the old-growth ecosystems they replaced.

Even after centuries of recovery, a grassland can still support a noticeably different plant community from an ancient landscape that was never plowed.

A global analysis of 742 plant species found that secondary grasslands, those regrowing after farming or other disturbance, tend to favor taller, faster-growing plants. Old-growth grasslands, by contrast, are more likely to support slow-growing, long-lived perennials with traits that help them withstand drought, fire, and grazing.

The pattern appeared across six continents despite enormous differences among the grasslands themselves. “Our analysis indicates that differences between old-growth and secondary grasslands are remarkably consistent around the globe,” said Lars Brudvig, a Michigan State University professor and co-author of the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings help explain a puzzle scientists have documented for years: grassland vegetation can return after land is plowed or otherwise converted without fully recovering the biological character of the ecosystem that was lost.

Previous work by lead author Ashish Nerlekar, a postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University, found that secondary grasslands can take decades to regain the biodiversity of ancient grasslands. Even after centuries of regrowth, some plant species remain missing.

The Cerrado of Brazil is considered the most biodiverse savanna in the world. But because so little of it is protected, tens of thousands of acres are cleared each year for agriculture.

 Credit: Angeladepaula, Wikimedia Commons

Recovery favors faster-growing plants

The new study investigated why recovery can be so slow. Nerlekar, Brudvig, Michigan State professor Lauren Sullivan, and a global group of collaborators compared old grasslands that had never been plowed or converted to farmland with younger grasslands at different stages of recovery.

They found that disturbance tends to favor a different kind of plant.

When old-growth grasslands are plowed, the species that disappear are often tough, slow-growing perennials with leathery leaves. “These traits help them deal with stressful situations like droughts, or being eaten by herbivores, or burned,” Brudvig said.

Those same survival strategies can become a disadvantage after the landscape is disturbed.

Many of the plants characteristic of old grasslands “are also very slow-growing,” Nerlekar added. “And that prevents them from competing in the post-destruction grasslands.”

White-top aster flowers in a longleaf pine savanna in the Econ River Wilderness Area, near Orlando, Florida.

 Credit: Nash Turley, Pennsylvania State University

Instead, recovering grasslands tend to fill with species built for speed. They grow rapidly, reproduce more quickly, and are better able to capture resources.

The contrast shows up in individual species. Wiregrass (Aristida stricta), a tough, drought-tolerant perennial characteristic of pine savannas in the southeastern United States, was not a defining feature of secondary grasslands. Regrowing sites were more associated with fast-reproducing annuals such as white goosefoot (Chenopodium album), which is better able to compete for water and nutrients.

Plants in secondary grasslands also tended to grow taller, giving them an advantage in the competition for sunlight.

“When they reproduce the next generation does the same and they quickly take over,” said Nerlekar, who is currently at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research-Pune.

Plant differences can persist for centuries

Those differences can persist for remarkably long periods. In one case, plants in secondary grasslands remained taller than their old-growth counterparts even after 300 years.

That matters because grasslands are far more than open land without trees. Their extensive root systems can reduce runoff and erosion, and grasslands store roughly a third of Earth’s terrestrial carbon.

They also support livestock and distinctive communities of plants and animals, from American bison and African wildebeests to Asia’s great bustards. Grasslands cover nearly a quarter of Earth’s land and help support the livelihoods of more than a billion people.

They include some of the planet’s most expansive landscapes, from the roughly 5,000-mile Eurasian steppe stretching from Hungary to China to the prairies of North America’s Great Plains and the African savanna.

Old-growth savannas of western Maharashtra, India.

 Credit: Ashish Nerlekar

Ancient grasslands are disappearing worldwide

But many ancient grasslands have been converted to cropland, tree plantations, and urban development over the past two centuries. Brazil’s species-rich Cerrado, for example, loses an area the size of London every three months. India’s savannas shrank from 100 million acres in 1880 to 60 million acres in 2010, according to one study, while less than half of North America’s historical grassland acreage remains.

At the same time, millions of acres of farmland are being abandoned worldwide, creating opportunities for secondary grasslands to develop.

That raises an increasingly important question: if grass returns, does the original ecosystem return with it?

The findings suggest that the answer is often no, at least when judged by the kinds of plants that characterize the recovering landscape.

“But these findings clearly show that secondary grasslands are really different from old-growth grasslands,” Brudvig said.

Researchers still do not know exactly what those lasting shifts mean for functions such as removing heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or cycling nutrients through ecosystems. More research is needed to determine whether secondary grasslands perform those functions differently from old-growth systems.

Grassland recovery may need intervention

The results nevertheless have practical implications for restoration. Allowing previously cultivated land to recover on its own may not recreate the plant community that existed before disturbance.

“What these findings suggest is that we need to be taking an active hand in grassland recovery — doing things like sowing seeds and transplanting — if we want secondary grasslands to function like the old-growth ones,” Brudvig said.

The findings also underscore the importance of protecting ancient grasslands before they are lost.

“Preserving and conserving existing old-growth grasslands matters because you don’t quickly get back what is lost,” Nerlekar said.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Chuck's picture corner to Sept. 24 2026

Fall began Sept. 22 2026 at 8:05 pm this year. 

These are the last pics of summer. 

Harvest has been a little poorer this year, from rats eating seedling early to excess rain through summer. As usual conditions are great for some and not so good for others. My world has gone from winters shades of grey to summer's green and spots of flower colour. Now fall begins and colour will change massively to reds' yellows, oranges and browns till once again shades of grey and sparkles and shapes of ice and frost.

Variety is a spice of Life.

Asters in the mountains at Rachelle's

Some red oak we got as bare root plants this spring, doing well ready for planting into the ground now or next spring.

a wild flower in Rachelle's garden.

The change of colour begins in the mountains

food for bees as the season ends.

the mountain asters are small but fully flowered, compared to those here in Cardinal

Autumn joy sedum has done well.

Black eyed susans, so bright.

Joyfull success at making seed for another year.

not a spiders web, a thistle come to fruition

waiting for the ferry for my drive into the mountains

morning out the office window highlighting fall colours, the nut trees are the first to change.

the sun is getting up later and later as am I, lol

These hot peppers are out hanging on the front porch now.

The apple tree has done well and apple butter making has begun.

Wild asters here in Cardinal

The Jalapeno peppers I grow are hot , the only way to go. This is almost the last of this years garden.

The new tomato (and other things) mill in operation.

Toad lilies such a beautiful flower

another day is done.

Enjoy the day

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Africa Is Breaking Apart Faster Than We Thought, Forming a New Ocean

17 Sept. 2026, By M. Irving

https://www.sciencealert.com/africa-is-breaking-apart-faster-than-we-thought-forming-a-new-ocean

(FrankRamspott/E+/Getty Images)

Geologists have discovered that the African continent will split apart sooner than we thought. An active rift has reached a "critical threshold" and will soon break apart, forming a new ocean.

That said, 'soon' is a relative term – it'll still take a few million years more, but that's a blink of an eye on a geological scale.

"We found that rifting in this zone is more advanced, and the crust is thinner, than anyone had recognized," says Christian Rowan, a geoscientist at Columbia University.

"Eastern Africa has progressed further in the rifting process than previously thought."

The most intriguing thing about the find is its implications for our own history. The Turkana Rift Zone in Kenya is rich in early hominin fossils, which implies it was a key location for human evolution.

But the new find suggests the region may not necessarily have been more important to our ancestors than anywhere else in Africa – instead, it may just be that these geologic processes created very favorable conditions for fossilization.

A diagram illustrating how the Turkana Rift region's geological processes led to higher sedimentation rates around 4.6 million years ago (red line), which in turn increased fossil preservation. 

(Rowan et al., Nat. Commun., 2026)

Earth's current arrangement of continents feels like a constant to us, but they're always moving – albeit extremely slowly.

More than 200 million years ago, they were all smushed together in one supercontinent, and it's predicted that in the distant future, they'll (mostly) end up getting back together again.

Where two tectonic plates meet, mountains form. Where they drift apart, oceans are born.

The East African Rift System is a clear example of the latter. The African plate is currently splitting into two: the massive Nubian plate to the west, which contains most of the continent; and the smaller Somali plate, which contains much of the eastern coast and the island of Madagascar.

For the new study, scientists focused on a specific part of that system: the Turkana Rift, which stretches for hundreds of kilometers through Kenya and Ethiopia. The team analyzed seismic measurements previously taken in the region, and calculated how thick the crust is there.


It turns out that it's much thinner than expected: only around 13 kilometers (8 miles) thick in the center of the rift. For comparison, the crust is more than 35 kilometers thick along the edges of the rift region.

And when crust in a rift zone becomes thinner than about 15 kilometers, that means it's entered a phase called 'necking.' After it reaches that point, a continental breakup is all but inevitable.

"The thinner the crust gets, the weaker it becomes, which helps promote continued rifting," says Rowan.

In a few million years, it will complete this phase and enter the next: oceanization. As the name suggests, this is how a new ocean forms.

The crust will stretch so thin that magma erupts from beneath, which then pools and cools to form a basin. This will become a new seafloor, as water begins to rush in from the Indian Ocean.

This process is already beginning in the Afar Depression, which lies in northeast Africa near the Red Sea.

The researchers estimate that the Turkana Rift entered its current necking phase around 4 million years ago, after an extended period of volcanic activity. Intriguingly, this lines up with the age of the earliest hominin fossils and evidence found in the area.

This is probably no coincidence, the team suggests. As the rift began necking, sedimentation began accumulating faster, making it perfect for capturing a detailed record of the life that lived there at the time.

"The temporal coincidence between this tectonic transition and the onset of continuous, thick fossil-bearing strata suggests that the necking phase provided critical conditions for fossil preservation," the researchers write.

"We propose that these tectonic changes played a fundamental role in shaping the Turkana Rift Zone's exceptional paleoanthropological record."

The researchers say that future work could investigate this connection.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Rich US Neighborhoods Are More Likely to Burn in Wildfires, Study Reveals

24 Sept. 2026, By S. Vartan

https://www.sciencealert.com/rich-us-neighborhoods-are-more-likely-to-burn-in-wildfires-study-reveals

Fire comes close to houses near Los Angeles. 

(MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images)

Wildfires that ravage developed areas of the US tend to hit a particular kind of neighborhood: suburban, owner-occupied, and relatively well-off, new research has found.

Wildfires in the US aren't just a problem for communities near remote forests – they are literally in people's backyards, especially for people who live on hillsides near wildlands on the outskirts of urban areas – which is exactly where rich neighborhoods tend to be.

"These urban fires consistently occur in suburban, high-income, owner-occupied development," says co-author Dion Kucera, an urban ecologist at the University of California, Riverside (UCR).

"That hasn't changed in more than 40 years."

Kucera and UCR landscape ecologist Darrel Jenerette analyzed 141 fires that intersected urban areas across the US between 1984 and 2025.

The number of fires each year did not increase significantly.

But the larger fires have been getting larger, with fires burning at least 0.5 square kilometers (0.2 square miles) showing an upward trend in total area burned – though that trend is driven largely by a handful of extreme fire years, and isn't statistically robust under every test.

Meanwhile, more people are living in the path of these fires.

The proportion of the US population living in fire-exposed census tracts has remained remarkably stable, at around 0.9 percent, but the absolute number of people in those areas rose from about 2.1 million in 1990 to 2.8 million in 2023.

The researchers say population growth in general, rather than a major shift of people into increasingly fire-prone areas, appears to explain much of that increase.

Locations of and temporal trends for all assessed urban-intersecting fires between 1984-
2025. 

(Kucera & Jenerette, npj Urban Sustainability, 2026)



The fires also weren't necessarily preceded by the kind of prolonged drought that might seem like an obvious warning sign. Instead, they tended to occur after relatively short-term drying – a recent drop in moisture that can arrive after a wetter period.

"That suggests three- to six-month moisture measures may be more important for city managers trying to identify periods of heightened risk, rather than longer-term drought assessments," Kucera says.

In roughly 4 out of every 10 fires examined, the researchers found evidence of this abrupt transition from wetter to drier conditions. That kind of "hydroclimate whiplash" may become more common as weather grows more variable, but it also provides a shorter-term warning signal to watch for.

But the most striking part of the study looked at what happened after the flames were long gone.

Using satellite measurements of vegetation and land-surface temperature, the researchers found that severely burned areas lost substantial greenness and became hotter.

High-severity burn areas warmed by about 2.4 °C in the first three months after the fire.

And recovery was slow: five years later, nearly three-quarters of highly burned areas had still not returned to their pre-fire level of greenness, while about 78 percent had not returned to their previous thermal conditions.

A neighborhood can look green again without necessarily being ecologically back to normal. Vegetation that replaces burned woody plants may be shorter-lived or less structurally complex, potentially providing less shade and carbon storage and altering the local microclimate and future fire risk.

And this is where money comes back into the picture.

Although the neighborhoods exposed to these fires tended to be richer, those higher-income areas showed faster long-term recovery of land-surface temperature.

The researchers suggest that resources for debris removal, rebuilding, irrigation, and landscaping could help explain the difference – creating a kind of second layer of inequality after the fire.

The findings don't mean wealthier residents are uniquely endangered by urban wildfire, nor that poorer neighborhoods are unaffected.

The study looked at census-tract patterns rather than individual households, and its analysis focused on fires large enough to meet its study threshold, potentially missing smaller but highly destructive urban fires.

Kucera also argues that scientists need to stop treating fires that reach developed areas as simple extensions of wilderness fires.

"The urban fire problem isn't just structured by climate like it is in wildlands," Kucera says.

"Adapting to the growing intensity of urban fires requires looking beyond the forest and into the social fabric of our cities."

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

First New Wild Cat Species Identified in Over 100 Years Is An Adorably Tiny 'Tiger'

23 Sept. 2026, By I. Farkas

https://www.sciencealert.com/first-new-wild-cat-species-identified-in-over-100-years-is-an-adorably-tiny-tiger

Leopardus tilcayo. (Juan Karita/AP Photo)

It's not every day that a new species is discovered.

Nope, that figure is closer to 44 new species per day, on average, as science identifies over 16,000 new organisms per year.

Many of these may be insects, arthropods, plants, or fungi, which are all fantastic.

But now, we've all been privileged to witness a potentially once-in-a-lifetime discovery: a new cat.

Its scientific name is Leopardus tilcayo, and it's the first new living wild cat species described in more than 100 years – since the Uruguayan pampas cat (Leopardus colocola) was formally identified in 1923.

The evidence is fluffy and irrefutable: a 10-year-old cat nicknamed 'Tigrino'.

Intriguingly, this firstling has been right under science's nose since 2017, living at the Senda Verde Wildlife Sanctuary in the Bolivian Yungas, the cloud forest ecoregion where the Andes Mountains slope down into the Amazon River basin.

It's here due to its kitten-like cuteness, as it was previously 'adopted' by a family that failed to turn Tigrino into a house cat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qU43pSf7qc

They, and the whole world, finally know why.

This newly famous felid – who is being begrudgingly swarmed and presumably pspsps'ed at by scores of gawking visitors – is only 46 centimeters (18 inches) in length from its tiny head to the base of its swishing tail.

It also only weighs 1.4 kilograms (3 pounds), making it smaller than your average house cat and effectively infinitesimal in chonker culture.

A large, international team of researchers and conservationists has recently described this cat and its "tiger cat" relatives, both genetically and ecologically, in a paper published in the journal Current Biology.

The researchers analyzed the complete genomes of 38 individuals from the Leopardus genus, comprising 30 modern cats, including 12 previously published genomes, and eight specimens from museums.

They also included two more distantly related "outgroup" species as a reference: the larger, less-leopard-y-looking jungle cat (Felis chaus) and puma (Puma concolor).

Cute may be an understatement.

  (Paola Nogales Ascarrunz/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)

These Leopardus tiger cats, except L. tilcayo, of course, have been known for well over a century – their taxonomic namesake, the oncilla (Leopardus tigrinus), was identified in 1775.

"In combination with ecological studies, we ultimately hope to understand how anthropogenic activities will impact the conservation of tiger cats," the researchers explain, which were "once considered a single, broadly distributed species and now understood as five distinct species, each of which is likely adapted to a distinct environment."

The researchers calculated that the earliest split among tiger cats occurred over 2.3 million years ago, following the Great American Biotic Interchange – an evolutionary swap meet between North America and South America as the Isthmus of Panama rose from the seas to connect the two continents.

Additionally, the researchers also identified a new subspecies, the Peruvian Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo, which differs from L. tilcayo by its shorter fur, less bushy tail, and different markings – such subtle phenotypical features set the tiger cats apart.

Leopardus tilcayo. 

(Juan Karita/AP Photo)



Alas, the tiger cats have generally faced long-term population decline (up to 80 percent) over the past two epochs, spanning up to 2.58 million years of deep time.

Yet none of the researchers' new samples show high levels of inbreeding, which has occurred in other isolated or declining populations, including historical felids like the famed saber-toothed cats.

Although, at the moment, "We really don't know how many cats are still in the wild," notes Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a National-Geographic-sponsored conservationist and study co-author who helped identify L. tilcayo at the sanctuary.

So, importantly, L. tilcayo is raising awareness. First, through its name, which derives not from a discoverer but from the local name given to it by the communities of the cloud forest, who have known this tiny tiger for generations.

A graphical abstract displaying the cats and regions explored in this work.

 (Lescroart et al., Curr. Biol., 2026)

Secondly, "Tigrino has become, in just a few days, an ambassador for conservation," says Marcelo Levy, the co-founder of the sanctuary where Tigrino resides.

"He's such a tiny animal, and he has become something so important."

As a result of this work, the researchers have shown the value of genomic analyses for disentangling similar species and their unique needs.

Each type of tiger cat must be protected in a unique, informed way, "implying major changes in current strategies employed to determine challenges, goals, and priorities for ensuring their long-term survival," the researchers conclude.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/