Central America

An image of Hoffmann's two-toed sloth (Choloepus hoffmanni) is circulating in science news coverage. The species, native to Central and South America, is known for its slow movement and nocturnal, tree-dwelling lifestyle. The item appears in a biology-focused news listing, drawing attention to the animal among readers following wildlife and zoology stories.

A new report from Oregon Public Broadcasting examines whether the desire to hunt and eat mammoths helped push early humans across Beringia and into the Americas. The idea suggests that following herds of mammoths, a rich source of food, could have motivated some of the first migrations into North America. Scientists continue to debate how central big-game hunting was to these early journeys.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies has published an introduction to 'The Derisking Race', an examination of how China and the United States are reducing economic dependence on each other. The piece frames this mutual derisking as driving a broader fragmentation of the global economy into competing blocs, reshaping trade, investment and supply chains worldwide.

El Niño is a natural climate pattern marked by unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific, which shifts global weather. It can bring heavier rain and flooding to parts of the Americas, drought to Australia, Southeast Asia and southern Africa, and generally pushes global temperatures higher. News outlets are running explainers to help readers understand its impacts.

Scientists have discovered cut marks made by stone tools on the bones of extinct elephant relatives at Tagua-Tagua lake in central Chile. The find indicates that early inhabitants of the region hunted or processed these large animals thousands of years ago, offering new evidence about when and how humans first settled South America and their interaction with now-extinct megafauna.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the US Health and Human Services Secretary, set out plans for broad collection of Americans' health data during an event tied to the Make America Healthy Again movement. He described a wide-ranging data-gathering agenda as central to the administration's health agenda, drawing attention and criticism over privacy implications.