Consumers in the US spend more money when grocery shopping online, but spend less on sweets and desserts than when they shop in store.

In recent years, online grocery shopping has grown massively. Since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, the amount that consumers spend through online shopping has more than doubled in the US.

at Harvard University and her colleagues have investigated how people’s habits change when they are spending in store versus shopping online. They recruited 137 participants from two supermarkets of the same chain in the US state of Maine. Each participant was the key shopper for their household, and they also had experience shopping both online and in-store.

The researchers studied each participant for a total of 44 non-consecutive weeks and tracked what items they purchased between 2015 to 2017. They collected data from a total of 5573 transactions, 1062 of which were made online and 4511 in store.

“We found differences in both the quantity of foods that people purchased and the types of foods that people purchase when they’re shopping online versus in store,” says Zatz.

People spent more money on sweets and desserts when shopping in store, spending on average $2.50 more per transaction. However, there was no difference in spending on sugary drinks or salty snacks, such as crisps.

“They purchase more items [when shopping online], both in terms of overall number of items but also a greater variety of unique items,” says Zatz. On average, participants spend 44 per cent more per transaction when shopping online than in store.

It seems that in-store shopping entices shoppers to unhealthier food choices. “When you are in store, you are exposed to all sorts of stimuli that could encourage you to buy unhealthy impulse-sensitive food groups when you might not have otherwise planned to,” says Zatz. Unhealthy food choices are often displayed in supermarkets at the end of aisles and at checkouts to encourage unplanned purchases.

The findings could help to inform us about how to encourage healthier food purchasing choices, especially as sophisticated marketing is coming online, says Zatz.

at the University of Oxford is surprised there was no difference in the purchases of “olfactorily-tempting foods”, such as freshly baked bread and coffee. “[They did not] suffer in the online environment, given the absence of smell,” says Spence.

Surveillance of right whales in the North Atlantic show that individuals born today will grow to be 1 metre shorter, on average, than whales born in the early 1980s.

at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in San Diego, California, and his colleagues have used surveillance data collected from aircraft and drones to investigate how North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) have changed over time.

The whales have been monitored consistently for decades, and researchers can identify individuals and know when each was born. Stewart’s team collected 202 length measurements of 129 of the whales born between 1981 and 2019: 133 measurements were taken from aircraft between 2000 and 2002, and 69 measurements were obtained using remotely operated drones between 2016 and 2019.

The researchers then paired these length measurements with each whale’s birth year and whether or not the whale and its mother had a history of being entangled with fishing gear.

Whales born in 1981 were typically longer as fully grown adults than whales born more recently. The measurements suggest that, on average, for every year after 1981 a given whale was born, its body length was 2.5 centimetres shorter. This corresponds to a 7.3 per cent decline in maximum body length – and means a whale born this year would be expected to reach an adult size a metre shorter than that of a right whale born in 1981.

“The whales that are born more recently are growing to sizes that are shorter than we would expect,” says Stewart.

Given that North Atlantic right whales are among the most endangered whales in the world, there is detailed individual-level information available on each whale and their entanglement history with fishing gear. “We’re interested in this species in particular because they’re a critically endangered species – there are fewer than 400 left,” says Stewart.

“[The stunted growth] could be due to cumulative impacts as there’s so much going on in the North Atlantic,” says Stewart. Although North Atlantic right whales are protected from direct catch, they are susceptible to fishing gear entanglements. More than 80 per cent of individual whales have scars from rope entanglements, says Clay George at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Increased drag from swimming while pulling fishing gear behind them could cause the right whales to expend energy that would have otherwise been used for growth.

Stewart and his colleagues also found that whales whose mothers were entangled during the nursing period were significantly shorter.

“Rapidly changing ocean conditions as a result of climate change is affecting their prey availability, which could be another contributor,” says Stewart. “They also get lots of vessel traffic which disrupts them on their feeding grounds where they can even get hit by boats.”

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Newly discovered plant fossils from China, dating back more than 125 million years, may help to establish which seed plants evolved into modern flowering plants.

Flowering plants, known as angiosperms, dominate most land ecosystems, providing food and habitats for a variety of animal species. The hallmarks of angiosperms are the carpel, the female reproductive organ that encloses the ovules, and a second outer layer of tissue covering the seeds. This second outer layer – known as the angiosperm second integument – is a characteristic feature of angiosperms that isn’t seen in other modern seed plants.

However, at Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia and his colleagues think some ancient seed plants did possess a similar and related structure. They excavated several hundred well-preserved, now-extinct, seed plant fossils from a fossilised peat deposit in Inner Mongolia, China, that formed about 125.6 million years ago. The team then examined the fossil plants’ anatomy.

The fossil specimens had seeds enclosed in a structure known as a cupule. What’s more, these cupules were similar to the angiosperm second integument we see in flowering plants today – most notably they curved back on themselves to look a little like the scroll at the top of the neck of a violin, which is a distinctive feature of the angiosperm second integument.

“We think of the cupules as comparable to the centre of angiosperms,” says team member  at Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, China. “So, this group of extinct seed plants are closely related to angiosperms.”

Although previous plant fossils have suggested that cupules were the precursors of structures seen in flowering plants, poor preservation of the fossils meant that the evidence was weak. The researchers think their newly discovered fossils provide stronger evidence for the idea.

The team also compared the newly discovered fossil specimens to plant fossils collected in the past, some dating as far back as 252 million years ago. Many of them displayed a similar cupule structure, although angiosperms themselves don’t appear to have evolved so long ago.

“[Angiosperms] show up rather late, appearing around 135 million years ago based on the fossil records alone,” says Crane.

Although it has long been known that flowering plants arose from a now-extinct group of seed plants, the identity of this extinct group hasn’t been clear. The new findings suggest we may now have found evidence of the group that gave rise to angiosperms, which the team suggest should be called the “angiophytes”.

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