UNDER STRICT EMBARGO UNTIL 6:30 PM November 28, 2024: A recent major review of data published by the Lancet and led by Emory sports cardiologist Jonathan Kim, MD, shows that Black athletes are approximately five times more likely to experience sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) and sudden cardiac death (SCD) compared to White athletes, despite some evidence of a decline in rates of SCD overall. The disparities in SCA/D rates highlights the need for increased research into the social determinants of health in younger athletes, a topic that remains understudied, according to Kim.

In 2023, the United Nations climate conference (COP28) officially recognized the importance of agriculture in influencing and mitigating climate change. In a Policy Forum, Johan Swinnen and colleagues offer an approach to overcome challenges related to improving climate-sensitive farming practices across the globe. They discuss the importance of working with Agricultural Value Chains (AVC) by incentivizing small businesses who play an important role in the support of small- and medium-sized farms. This would involve both upstream enterprises related to seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, and insurance, for example, and downstream enterprises like those related to distribution, storage, and transportation. Most agricultural production occurs within small- to medium-sized farms – a fragmented farm sector – leading to pessimism about the possibility to enact change. But the authors counter this pessimism, citing decades of evidence of AVC companies having employed their tools – such as resource provision, training, and loans – to encourage farmers to be more “climate smart.” Targeting these institutional relationships with farmers can be a positive force for needed policy transformation, say the authors.

Newly discovered footprints show that at least two hominid species were walking through the muddy submerged edge of a lake in Kenya’s Turkana Basin at the same time, about 1.5 million years ago. The find from the famous hominid fossil site of Koobi Fora described by Kevin Hatala and colleagues provides physical evidence for the co-existence of multiple hominid lineages in the region—something that has only been inferred previously from overlapping dates for scattered fossils. Based on information on gait and stance gleaned from the footprints, Hatala et al. think that the two species were Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei. This is the first evidence of two different patterns of bipedalism among Pleistocene hominids appearing on the same footprint surface. After examining the new Koobi Fora footprints, the researchers analyzed other similar-age hominid footprints and conclude there is a distinct pattern of two different types of bipedalism across the East Turkana region. The overall analysis indicates that the different species were contemporaneously using these lake habitats, with varying possibilities of competition or niche partitioning that could have impacted trends in human evolution. William Harcourt-Smith discusses the implications of the footprints in a related Perspective.

 

Podcast: A segment of Science's weekly podcast with Kevin Hatala, related to this research, will be available on the Science.org podcast landing page [www.science.org/podcasts] after the embargo lifts. Reporters are free to make use of the segments for broadcast purposes and/or quote from them – with appropriate attribution (i.e., cite "Science podcast"). Please note that the file itself should not be posted to any other Web site.

Social media posts containing misinformation evoke more moral outrage than posts with trustworthy information, and that outrage facilitates the spread of misinformation, according to a new study by Killian McLoughlin and colleagues. The researchers also found that people are more likely to share outrage-evoking misinformation without reading it first. The findings suggest that attempts to mitigate the online spread of misinformation by encouraging people to check its accuracy before sharing may not be successful, the researchers note. McLoughlin et al. conducted eight studies using U.S. data from Facebook and Twitter over multiple time periods, along with two behavioral experiments, to learn more about outrage related to the spread of misinformation. In the study, outrage is defined as the mix of anger and disgust triggered by perceived moral transgressions. The researchers found that outrage-evoking posts facilitated “the spread of misinformation at least as strongly as trustworthy news.” People may share outrageous misinformation without checking its accuracy because sharing is a way to signal their moral position or membership in certain groups, note McLoughlin et al. The way that social media platforms rank content to show to users likely also plays a part in the spread of misinformation, they add: “Since outrage is associated with increased engagement online, outrage-evoking misinformation may be likely to spread farther in part because of the algorithmic amplification of engaging content,” they write. “This is important because algorithms may up-rank news articles associated with outrage, even if a user intended to express outrage toward the article for containing misinformation.”