As if air travel weren’t annoying enough, new research suggests that global warming could force planes to carry fewer passengers to get off the ground. While a little more legroom might sound good, it could make flying more expensive.

Researchers examined the impact of rising temperatures on five types of commercial planes flying out of 19 of the world’s busiest airports. In the coming decades, an average of 10 to 30 percent of flights that take off during the hottest time of day could face weight restrictions.

That’s because warmer air particles are more spread out, generating less lift under a plane’s wings as it goes down the runway. So a plane must be lighter to take off. In some cases, a Boeing 737-800 would have to jettison more than 700 pounds — several passengers’ worth of weight — the researchers report online July 13 in Climatic Change.

We’re going through a comic book phase at my house. Since lucking into the comics stash at the library, my 4-year-old refuses any other literary offering. Try as I might to rekindle her love of Rosie Revere, my daughter shuns that scrappy little engineer for Superman every single night.

I know that comic fans abound, but I’ll admit that I get a little lost reading the books. The multi-paneled illustrations, the jumpy story lines and the fact that my daughter skips way ahead make it hard for me to engage. And I imagine that for a preliterate preschooler, that confusion is worse.

There’s evidence to this idea (although it won’t help me force my daughter to choose girl-power science lit over Superman). A recent study found that kids better learn new vocabulary from books when there’s just one picture to see at a time.

Psychologist Jessica Horst and colleague Zoe Flack, both of the University of Sussex in England, read stories to 36 3½-year-olds. These were specially designed storybooks, with pages as big as printer paper. And sprinkled into the text and reflected in the illustrations were a few nonsense words: An inverted, orange and yellow slingshot that mixed things, called a tannin, and a metal wheel used like a rolling pin, called a sprock.

The researchers wanted to know under which reading conditions kids would best pick up the meaning of the nonsense words. In some tests, a researcher read the storybook that showed two distinct pictures at a time. In other tests, only one picture was shown at a time. Later, the kids were asked to point to the “sprock,” which was shown in a separate booklet among other unfamiliar objects.

Kids who saw just one picture at a time were more likely to point to the sprock when they saw it again, the researchers found. The results, published June 30 in Infant and Child Development, show how important pictures can be for preliterate kids, says Horst.

“As parents, it’s easy to forget that children do not look at the written text until they themselves are learning to read,” she says. (This study shows how infrequently preschoolers look at the words.) That means that kids might focus on pictures that aren’t relevant to the words they’re hearing, a mismatch that makes it harder for them to absorb new vocabulary.
Does this mean parents ought to trash all books with multiple pictures on a page? Of course not. Horst and Flack found that for such books, gesturing toward the relevant picture got the word-learning rate back up. That means that parents ought to point at Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth or wave at the poor varlet that Shrek steals a lunch from. (Shrek!, the book by William Steig, contains delightful vocabulary lessons for children and adults alike.)

Those simple gestures, Horst says, will help you and your child “literally be on the same page.”

ORLANDO, Fla. — Interbreeding with Neandertals restored some genetic heirlooms that modern humans left behind in the ancient exodus from Africa, new research suggests.

Those heirlooms are versions of genes, or alleles, that were present in humans’ and Neandertals’ shared ancestors. Neandertals carried many of those old alleles, passing them along generation after generation, while developing their own versions of other genes. A small number of humans left Africa around 100,000 years ago and settled in Asia and Europe. These migrants “lost” the ancestral alleles.
But when the migrants or their descendants interbred with Neandertals, Eurasians reinherited the ancestral heirlooms along with Neandertal DNA, John “Tony” Capra reported October 20 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics.

Present-day Europeans have more than 47,000 of these reintroduced ancestral alleles, and East Asians — who have more Neandertal ancestry than Europeans (SN Online: 2/12/15) — carry more than 56,000, said Capra, an evolutionary geneticist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Capra and others have evidence that Neandertal versions of genes make humans more prone to some diseases (SN: 3/5/16, p. 18). Of the thousands of ancestral variants reintroduced into modern humans, only 41 have been linked in genetic studies to diseases, such as skin conditions and neurological and psychiatric disorders, he said. The researchers can’t tell for sure whether the effect is from the ancestral variant or neighboring Neandertal DNA. Capra and Vanderbilt colleague Corinne Simonti’s analyses indicate that the Neandertal DNA is more likely to blame. Many of the ancestral alleles are still present in modern-day Africans, Capra said, “so they’re unlikely to be very, very bad.”