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Scientists Unveil New 'Tree of Life' - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html science biology models DNA
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • A team of scientists unveiled a new tree of life on Monday, a diagram outlining the evolution of all living things. The researchers found that bacteria make up most of life’s branches.
  • In his 1859 book “On the Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin envisioned evolution like a branching tree.
  • In the 1970s, Carl Woese of the University of Illinois and his colleagues published the first “universal tree of life” based on this approach. They presented the tree as three great trunks.
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  • Patrick Forterre, an evolutionary biologist at the Pasteur Institute in France, agreed that bacteria probably make up much of life’s diversity. But he had concerns about how Dr. Banfield and her colleague built their tree. He argued that genomes assembled from DNA fragments could actually be chimeras, made up of genes from different species. “It’s a real problem,” he said.
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Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ects-consciousness-brains.html science animals biology consciousness ethics
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Bees find nectar and tell their hive-mates; flies evade the swatter; and cockroaches seem to do whatever they like wherever they like. But who would believe that insects are conscious, that they are aware of what’s going on, not just little biobots?Neuroscientists and philosophers apparently. As scientists lean increasingly toward recognizing that nonhuman animals are conscious in one way or another, the question becomes: Where does consciousness end?Andrew B. Barron, a cognitive scientist, and Colin Klein, a philosopher, at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, propose in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that insects have the capacity for consciousness.
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Same but Different - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...breakthroughs-in-epigenetics science biology genetics nature DNA ethics
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Why are identical twins alike? In the late nineteen-seventies, a team of scientists in Minnesota set out to determine how much these similarities arose from genes, rather than environments—from “nature,” rather than “nurture.” Scouring thousands of adoption records and news clips, the researchers gleaned a rare cohort of fifty-six identical twins who had been separated at birth. Reared in different families and different cities, often in vastly dissimilar circumstances, these twins shared only their genomes. Yet on tests designed to measure personality, attitudes, temperaments, and anxieties, they converged astonishingly. Social and political attitudes were powerfully correlated: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. The same went for religiosity (or its absence), even for the ability to be transported by an aesthetic experience. Two brothers, separated by geographic and economic continents, might be brought to tears by the same Chopin nocturne, as if responding to some subtle, common chord struck by their genomes.
  • It’s one thing to study epigenetic changes across the life of a single organism, or down a line of cells. The more tantalizing question is whether epigenetic messages can, like genes, cross from parents to their offspring.
  • The most suggestive evidence for such transgenerational transmission may come from a macabre human experiment. In September, 1944, amid the most vengeful phase of the Second World War, German troops occupying the Netherlands banned the export of food and coal to its northern parts. Acute famine followed, called the Hongerwinter—the hunger winter. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children died of malnourishment; millions suffered it and survived. Not surprisingly, the children who endured the Hongerwinter experienced chronic health issues. In the nineteen-eighties, however, a curious pattern emerged: when the children born to women who were pregnant during the famine grew up, they had higher rates of morbidity as well—including obesity, diabetes, and mental illness. (Malnourishment in utero can cause the body to sequester higher amounts of fat in order to protect itself from caloric loss.) Methylation alterations were also seen in regions of their DNA associated with growth and development. But the oddest result didn’t emerge for another generation. A decade ago, when the grandchildren of men and women exposed to the famine were studied, they, too, were reported to have had higher rates of illness. (These findings have been challenged, and research into this cohort continues.) “Genes cannot change in an entire population in just two generations,” Allis said. “But some memory of metabolic stress could have become heritable.”
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BBC - Culture - How optical illusions can save lives - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...tical-illusions-can-save-lives TOK perception
shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Does painting still have the power to stop us in our tracks, let alone save our lives? India’s transport ministry is counting on it.
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How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...477939 TOK language science psychology
shared by markfrankel18 on 01 May 16 - No Cached
  • In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Haslam argues that concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”
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Poland vs. History by Timothy Snyder | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...oland-vs-history-museum-gdansk TOK history bias
shared by markfrankel18 on 04 May 16 - No Cached
  • Most seriously of all, the effects of suppressing national memory could be of critical importance to Poles in coming decades, and to a global audience that has yet to fully absorb the complicated lessons of World War II. In some measure at least, how rising generations of Poles see themselves, democracy, and Europe will depend on whether they can have ready access to their country’s complicated experience in World War II. The collapse of democracy, the museum’s first theme, could hardly be more salient than it is right now. And the presentation of the conflict as a global tragedy could hardly be more instructive. The preemptive liquidation of the museum is nothing less than a violent blow to the world’s cultural heritage.
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The Search for Our Missing Colors - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-search-for-our-missing-colors TOK perception technology
shared by markfrankel18 on 04 May 16 - No Cached
  • But, no matter how closely you watched the news reports or ogled Pantone’s Web site, you never actually saw the color Emerald: the vast majority of televisions, computer monitors, and mobile devices are unable to display it, as Jeff Yurek, a communications manager at Nanosys, a company that makes color-display technology, revealed in a blog post. That’s not the only color we’re missing. If you watched this year’s Super Bowl on television, you never really saw the true shade of the Broncos’ blue helmets (Pantone No. 289). And viewing online photos of London’s famous red double-decker buses (Pantone No. 485) while you plan your vacation falls far short of experiencing that color in person. It’s easy to assume that our constantly proliferating digital devices can easily generate any color we want. But, in fact, our screens paint from a depressingly small palette: most can only recreate about a third of all the colors that our eyes can perceive.
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Debate Erupts in California Over Curriculum on India's History - NYTimes.com - 0 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...-india-history-curriculum.html history TOK language
shared by markfrankel18 on 07 May 16 - No Cached
  • Victors are said to write history. But in California, history is being written by a committee that is at the center of a raging debate over how to tell the story of South Asia as it tries to update textbooks and revise curriculums for Grades 6 and 7.The dispute centers on whether the region that includes modern-day India, Pakistan and Nepal should be referred to as India or as South Asia, to represent the plurality of cultures there — particularly because India was not a nation-state until 1947. It also touches on how the culture of the region is portrayed, including women’s role in society and the vestiges of the caste system.
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Are scientific theories really better when they are simpler? | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...y-better-when-they-are-simpler TOK science
shared by markfrankel18 on 10 May 16 - No Cached
  • If all art should be simple or if all art should be complex, the choice is clear. However, both of these norms seem absurd. Isn’t it obvious that some estimable art is simple and some is complex? True, there might be extremes that are beyond the pale; we are alienated by art that is far too complex and bored by art that is far too simple. However, between these two extremes there is a vast space of possibilities.
  • Science is different, at least according to many scientists. Albert Einstein spoke for many when he said that ‘it can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience’. The search for simple theories, then, is a requirement of the scientific enterprise.
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A legal battle about the Klingon language could affect the future of computer programmi... - 0 views

qz.com/...future-of-computer-programming TOK language
shared by markfrankel18 on 11 May 16 - No Cached
  • In a document written partly in Klingon, the society argued that while Paramount commissioned the creation of the language in 1984 from linguist Marc Okrand, the language “has taken on a life of its own.” There are groups of fans whose only shared language is Klingon. People have tried to raise children as native Klingon speakers. If a language is copyrighted, the group argued, then all ideas subsequently expressed in it could be too. Owning a language would mean having the right to block any future work in that language.
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Child sex abuse victim in 20s euthanised after suffering irreparable PTSD - 0 views

www.ibtimes.co.uk/owed-choose-euthanasia-1559432 TOK ethics
shared by markfrankel18 on 16 May 16 - No Cached
  • A victim of childhood sex abuse was allowed to end her life under Dutch euthanasia laws after doctors and psychiatrists concluded that the woman's post-traumatic stress disorder and physical health were incurable. The death of the Dutch woman in her 20s has fuelled the ongoing debate on the ethics of euthanasia in Britain, with some MPs arguing that allowing a victim of sex abuse to die is equivalent to punishing the victim.
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Full Exposure - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...diane-arbus-at-the-met-breuer arts ethics photography
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 May 16 - No Cached
  • Female impersonators, midgets, hermaphrodites, tattooed (all over) men, an albino sword swallower, a human pincushion, a Jewish giant: “Characters in a Fairy Tale for Grown Ups” is the way Diane Arbus once described her subjects—“people who appear like metaphors somewhere further out than we do,” she also said, “invented by belief.”
  • She needed to get closer, physically and emotionally. So she asked permission, got to know people, listened to their stories; some relationships went on for years.
  • enrolled in a course with the photographer Lisette Model, who recalled that her main task was urging her nerve-racked student to overcome the fear that photographing her fairy-tale characters was “evil.” In fact, Arbus never entirely lost her qualms about the role she played in other people’s often painfully damaged lives.
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The Vietnam War: How they saw it from both sides - CNN.com - 2 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html TOK war Vietnam history
shared by markfrankel18 on 24 May 16 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 24 May 16
     
    Did Saigon "fall" or was it "liberated"?
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Muslim Boys at a Swiss School Must Shake Teachers' Hands, Even Female Ones - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hool-migrants-shake-hands.html ethics religious knowledge systems culture customs Islam
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 27 May 16 - No Cached
  • When two Syrian immigrant brothers refused to shake their female teacher’s hand this year, it ignited national outrage in Switzerland.This week, the authorities in the northern canton of Basel-Landschaft ruled that the students, who studied at a public school in the small town of Therwil, could not refuse to shake their teacher’s hand on religious grounds. They said that parents whose children refused to obey the longstanding tradition could be fined up to 5,000 Swiss francs, about $5,050.Shaking a teacher’s hand before and after class is part of Switzerland’s social fabric, and is considered an important sign of politeness and respect.
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The Spectacle of the Spectacles - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...he-spectacle-of-the-spectacles arts
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Kevin Nguyen, sixteen, set his opened eyeglasses on the floor, neatly perpendicular to a nearby wall. He and T. J. Khayatan, seventeen, then stood back to watch what ensued: viewers observing the glasses with the curiosity and respect befitting a work of art—which, under the circumstances, they were.
  • But consider: an object manufactured to enhance seeing, presented as something to see. By being underfoot, the glasses were divorced from their function
  • Museums edit, for our convenience, the universe of existing things. What they let in and what they keep out shape culture.
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