Exacerbate

Global food insecurity has risen substantially since pre-pandemic times, exacerbated by extreme weather, climate change, war and conflict. What the U.N. World Food Program calls “a hunger crisis of unprecedented proportions” plays out differently around the world. In this story, three of Mongabay’s Y. Eva Tan Conservation Reporting Fellows detail the local situation in their region – from rising inflation and flooding in Nigeria to diminished local food production in Suriname and the environmental and…

There's a new way in which going to space could mess with the human body.A study on rats in simulated space environments suggests that being weightless and exposed to space radiation unprotected by Earth's atmosphere could have a deleterious effect on the vascular tissues associated with erectile dysfunction.Even more than a year after the experiment, the rats showed signs of erectile dysfunction – and the culprit seems mostly to be the galactic cosmic radiation streaming through space."While erectile dysfunction affects…

Scientists fear using AI models such as ChatGPT in healthcare will exacerbate inequalities. The epidemiologists, from the universities of Cambridge and Leicester, warn that large language models (LLMs) could entrench inequities for ethnic minorities and lower-income countries. Their concern stems from systemic data biases. AI models used in healthcare are trained on information from websites and scientific literature. But evidence shows that ethnicity data is often missing from these sources.…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain The decision of where to send a child for their K-12 education is a big one. According to new research from Rice University sociologists, approximately one-third of parents in their Dallas-based study make the call based on their own experiences in the classroom. This method of decision making can…

Scientists have known for years that unhealthy diets – particularly those that are high in fat and sugar – may cause detrimental changes to the brain and lead to cognitive impairment.Many factors that contribute to cognitive decline are out of a person's control, such as genetics and socioeconomic factors. But ongoing research increasingly indicates that a poor diet is a risk factor for memory impairments during normal aging and increases the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.But when evaluating how some diets may…