When I was growing up this was the closest thing to a futurist magazine I could find.

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Omni was a science and science fiction magazine published in the US and the UK. It contained articles on science, parapsychology, and short works of science fiction and fantasy. It was published as a print version between October 1978 and 1995. The first Omni e-magazine was published on CompuServe in 1986 and the magazine switched to a purely online presence in 1996. It ceased publication abruptly in late 1997, following the death of co-founder Kathy Keeton; activity on the magazine’s website ended the following April.

The Yahoo Human Rights Fund was intended to support imprisoned Chinese dissidents. Instead, a lawsuit alleges that only a small fraction of the money went to help former prisoners.

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Fairy circles, a nearly hexagonal pattern of bare-soil circular gaps in grasslands, initially observed in Namibia and later in other parts of the world, have fascinated and baffled scientists for years. Theories for their appearance range from spatial self-organization induced by scale-dependent water-vegetation feedback to pre-existing patterns of termite nests.

Prof. Ehud Meron of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has been studying the Namibian fairy circles as a case study for understanding how ecosystems respond to water stress. He believes that all theories to date have overlooked the coupling between two robust mechanisms essential for understanding ecosystem response: phenotypic plasticity at the level of a single plant, and spatial self-organization in vegetation patterns at the level of a plant population.

Phenotypic plasticity is the plant’s ability to change its own traits in response to environmental stresses.

Innes, P.A., Goebl, A.M., Smith, C.C.R. et al. Gene expression and alternative splicing contribute to adaptive divergence of ecotypes. Heredity (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-023-00665-y.

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A team of researchers has been studying the Ngogo community of wild chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park for over twenty years. Their recent publication in the journal Science reveals that female chimpanzees in this population can experience menopause and have a postreproductive lifespan.

Prior to the study, these traits had only been found among mammals in a few species of toothed whales, and among primates — only in humans. These new demographic and physiological data can help researchers better understand why menopause and post-fertile survival occur in nature, and how it evolved in the human species.

Some researchers publish a new paper every five days, on average. Data trackers suspect not all their manuscripts were produced through honest labour.