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Ellie McGinnis

The Mammoth Cometh - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-mammoth-cometh.html

research science technology ethics conservation

shared by Ellie McGinnis on 27 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Brand helped to establish in 1996 to support projects designed to inspire “long-term responsibility.”
  • The theme of the talk was “Is Mass Extinction of Life on Earth Inevitable?”
  • the resurrection of extinct species, like the woolly mammoth, aided by new genomic technologies developed by the Harvard molecular biologist George Church.
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  • Just as the loss of a species decreases the richness of an ecosystem, the addition of new animals could achieve the opposite effect.
  • National Geographic Society hosted a larger conference to debate the scientific and ethical questions raised by the prospect of “de-extinction.
  • “De-extinction went from concept to potential reality right before our eyes,
  • less scientific, if more persuasive, argument was advanced by the ethicist Hank Greely and the law professor Jacob Sherkow, both of Stanford. De-extinction should be pursued, they argued in a paper published in Science, because it would be really
  • “This may be the biggest attraction and possibly the biggest benefit of de-extinction. It would surely be very cool to see a living woolly mammoth.”
  • They will replace chunks of band-tailed-pigeon DNA with synthesized chunks of passenger-pigeon DNA, until the cell’s genome matches their working passenger-pigeon genome.
  • Scientists predict that changes made by human beings to the composition of the atmosphere could kill off a quarter of the planet’s mammal species, a fifth of its reptiles and a sixth of its birds by 2050
  • This cloning method, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, can be used only on species for which we have cellular material.
  • There is a shortcut. The genome of a closely related species will have a high proportion of identical DNA, so it can serve as a blueprint, or “scaffold.”
  • By comparing the fragments of passenger-pigeon DNA with the genomes of similar species, researchers can assemble an approximation of an actual passenger-pigeon genome.
  • As with any translation, there may be errors of grammar, clumsy phrases and perhaps a few missing passages, but the book will be legible. It should, at least, tell a good story.
  • the genome will have to be inscribed into a living cell.
  • “We’ve framed it in terms of conservation,”
  • MAGE (Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering). MAGE is nicknamed the “evolution machine” because it can introduce the equivalent of millions of years of genetic mutations within minutes
  • Developmental and behavioral biologists would take over, just in time to answer some difficult questions. Chicks imitate their parents’ behavior. How do you raise a passenger pigeon without parents of its own species? And how do you train band-tailed pigeons to nurture the strange spawn that emerge from their eggs; chicks that, to them, might seem monstrous: an avian Rosemary’s Baby?
  • For endangered species with tiny populations, scientists would introduce genetic diversity to offset inbreeding.
  • They will try to alter the birds’ diets, migration habits and environment. The behavior of each subsequent generation will more closely resemble that of their genetic cousins.
  • For species threatened by contagion, an effort would be made to fortify their DNA with genes that make them disease-resistant
  • The scientific term for this type of genetic intervention is “facilitated adaptation.”
  • This optimistic, soft-focus fantasy of de-extinction, while thrilling to Ben Novak, is disturbing to many conservation biologists, who consider it a threat to their entire discipline and even to the environmental movement.
  • The first question posed by conservationists addresses the logic of bringing back an animal whose native habitat has disappeared. Why go through all the trouble just to have the animal go extinct all over again?
  • There is also anxiety about disease
  • “If you recreate a species genetically and release it, and that genotype is based on a bird from a 100-year-old environment, you probably will increase risk.”
  • “There’s always this fear that somehow, if we do it, we’re going to accidentally make something horrible, because only nature can really do it right. But nature is totally random. Nature makes monsters. Nature makes threats. Many of the things that are most threatening to us are a product of nature. Revive & Restore is not going to tip the balance in any way.”
  • De-extinction also poses a rhetorical threat to conservation biologists. The specter of extinction has been the conservation movement’s most powerful argument. What if extinction begins to be seen as a temporary inconvenience?
  • De-extinction suggests that we can technofix our way out of environmental issues generally, and that’s very, very bad.
  • How will we decide which species to resurrect?
  • Philip Seddon recently published a 10-point checklist to determine the suitability of any species for revival, taking into account causes of its extinction, possible threats it might face upon resurrection and man’s ability to destroy the species “in the event of unacceptable ecological or socioeconomic impacts.”
  • But the most visceral argument against de-extinction is animal cruelty.
  • “Is it fair to do this to these animals?” Shapiro asked. “Is ‘because we feel guilty’ a good-enough reason?” Stewart Brand made a utilitarian counterargument: “We’re going to go through some suffering, because you try a lot of times, and you get ones that don’t take. On the other hand, if you can bring bucardos back, then how many would get to live that would not have gotten to live?”
  • In “How to Permit Your Mammoth,” published in The Stanford Environmental Law Journal, Norman F. Carlin asks whether revived species should be protected by the Endangered Species Act or regulated as a genetically modified organism.
  • He concludes that revived species, “as products of human ingenuity,” should be eligible for patenting.
  • The term “de-extinction” is misleading. Passenger pigeons will not rise from the grave
  • Our understanding of the passenger pigeon’s behavior derives entirely from historical accounts.
  • There is no authoritative definition of “species.” The most widely accepted definition describes a group of organisms that can procreate with one another and produce fertile offspring, but there are many exceptions.
  • Theseus’ ship, therefore, “became a standing example among the philosophers . . . one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”
  • What is coming will go well beyond the resurrection of extinct species. For millenniums, we have customized our environment, our vegetables and our animals, through breeding, fertilization and pollination. Synthetic biology offers far more sophisticated tools. The creation of novel organisms, like new animals, plants and bacteria, will transform human medicine, agriculture, energy production and much else.
lucieperloff

Sharks Nearly Went Extinct 19 Million Years Ago From Mystery Event - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sharks-extinction-oceans.html

research education extinction

shared by lucieperloff on 08 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Analysis of the fossil record shows a mysterious mass extinction that decimated the diversity of sharks in the world’s oceans, and they’ve never fully recovered.
  • these events give scientists an intimate look at how life recovers after a cataclysm
  • This extinction event transpired in the world’s oceans and decimated shark populations
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  • but sharks slough off about 100 denticles for each tooth they lose, making them common in the fossil record.
  • The reddish clay, extracted from two sediment cores that had been drilled deep into the Pacific Ocean seafloor, contained fish teeth, shark denticles and other marine microfossils.
  • Nineteen million years ago, the ratio of shark denticles to fish teeth changed drastically:
  • sharks suddenly became much less common, relative to fish, during an era known as the early Miocene,
  • “We had a lot of them, and then we had almost none of them,”
  • “We wanted to know if the sharks went extinct, or if they just became less prominent.”
  • The reduction in shark diversity suggests that they experienced an extinction around that time,
  • “There were just a small fraction that survived into this post-extinction world,”
  • uggest that this was truly a “global event,”
  • Sharks never fully recovered from this incident, and they have been declining in abundance in recent decades because of overfishing and other human-caused pressures,
katherineharron

Why did the dinosaurs go extinct? Debate rages on - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Ever since a huge crater was discovered off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in the early 1990s, scientists have been confident that an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs and most life on the planet.
  • Now, a group of researchers at Yale University are putting the blame back solely on the asteroid. They say that any environmental impact from the eruptions and lava flows that occurred in the Deccan Traps (located in what is now India) happened well before the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, which scientists call K-Pg.
  • Some researchers believe that emissions from the volcanoes, which released gases like sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide, weakened the ecosystem so that dinosaurs went extinct more easily when the asteroid hit.
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  • The Yale-led study investigated the timing of this outgassing by modeling the effects of carbon dioxide and sulfur emissions on global temperatures and comparing them with paleotemperature records spanning the extinction. They found that at least 50% or more of the major outgassing from the Deccan Traps occurred well before the asteroid impact, and only the impact coincided with the mass extinction event.The volcanoes did "cause a warming event," but its effect had gone by the time extinction happened, said Michael Henehan, a former researcher at Yale who is now based at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.
tongoscar

Climate change: 1 in 3 plant and animal species extinct in 50 years, study warns - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Take a moment to cherish your plants and appreciate the animals you see around you.In 50 years, a third of them may no longer exist.
  • approximately one in three plant, insect and animal species could face extinction by 2070. However, things could be even worse if emissions continue to rise as rapidly as they have in recent decades.
  • In a worst-case scenario, that number could rise to over 55%.
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  • Of the 538 species studied, 44% of them have already experienced an extinction in a particular local area.
  • While many species were able to tolerate a moderate increase in maximum temperatures, 50% of the species had local extinctions if maximum temperatures increased by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. That number rose to 95% if temperatures increased by more than 2.9 degrees Celsius.
  • With January going in the record books as the warmest January in 141 years and statistical analysis done by NOAA scientists predicting 2020 to be one of the five warmest years on record, the researchers believe there will be more local extinctions across the globe.
  • The Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 by ministers from 195 countries from around the globe.It committed these countries to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and below 1.5 degrees, if possible.
  • "Based on our sample of 538 species, we projected a loss of 30% of the species under a more extreme warming scenario, but only about 16% if we stick to the Paris Agreement," Wiens told CNN. "So, think in 1 in 6 species, not 1 in 3."
  • The Paris Agreement is an international pact aimed at curbing global emissions of heat-trapping gases.Unfortunately, studies have shown that so far, many countries are failing to meet the emissions cuts they set to limit climate change.
  • "Some researchers have estimated that two-thirds of all species of plants and animals could be lost due to tropical deforestation alone," Wiens said. "If you combine that with climate change (which can impact species in protected forests and other reserves), then it really is terrible. Even from our data alone, there are extreme warming scenarios where 55% of the species would be lost from intact habitats. And note that deforestation also increases global warming. It is a double whammy against biodiversity."
johnsonma23

Unprecedented Level of Human Harm to Sea Life Is Forecast - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-for-health-of-ocean-life.html

human sea life nytimes science

shared by johnsonma23 on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Unprecedented Level of Human Harm to Sea Life Is Forecast
  • A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.
  • A number of experts said the result was a remarkable synthesis, along with a nuanced and encouraging prognosis.
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  • “We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,”
  • There are clear signs already that humans are harming the oceans to a remarkable degree, the scientists found. Some ocean species are certainly overharvested, but even greater damage results from large-scale habitat loss, which is likely to accelerate as technology advances the human footprint, the scientists reported.
  • Coral reefs, for example, have declined by 40 percent worldwide,
  • Fragile ecosystems like mangroves are being replaced by fish farms, which are projected to provide most of the fish we consume within 20 years.
  • Mining operations, too, are poised to transform the ocean. Contracts for seabed mining now cover 460,000 square miles underwater, the researchers found, up from zero in 2000.
  • ecosystems may seem impervious to change.
  • The fossil record indicates that a number of large animal species became extinct as humans arrived on continents and islands.
  • But it was only after 1800, with the Industrial Revolution, that extinctions on land really accelerated.
  • Humans began to alter the habitat that wildlife depended on, wiping out forests for timber, plowing under prairie for farmland, and laying down roads and railroads across continents.
  • Over the past five centuries, researchers have recorded 514 animal extinctions on land
kushnerha

Our Natural History, Endangered - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...atural-history-endangered.html

new york times history nature preservation

shared by kushnerha on 01 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Worse, this rumored dustiness reinforces the widespread notion that natural history museums are about the past — just a place to display bugs and brontosaurs. Visitors may go there to be entertained, or even awe-struck, but they are often completely unaware that curators behind the scenes are conducting research into climate change, species extinction and other pressing concerns of our day. That lack of awareness is one reason these museums are now routinely being pushed to the brink. Even the National Science Foundation, long a stalwart of federal support for these museums, announced this month that it was suspending funding for natural history collections as it conducts a yearlong budget review.
  • It gets worse: A new Republican governor last year shut down the renowned Illinois State Museum, ostensibly to save the state $4.8 million a year. The museum pointed out that this would actually cost $33 million a year in lost tourism revenue and an untold amount in grants. But the closing went through, endangering a trove of 10 million artifacts, from mastodon bones to Native American tools, collected over 138 years, and now just languishing in the shuttered building. Eric Grimm, the museum’s director of science, characterized it as an act of “political corruption and malevolent anti-intellectualism.”
  • Other museums have survived by shifting their focus from research to something like entertainment.
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  • The pandering can be insidious, too. The Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, which treats visitors to a virtual ride down a hydraulic fracturing well, recently made headlines for avoiding explicit references to climate change. Other museums omit scientific information on evolution. “We don’t need people to come in here and reject us,”
  • Even the best natural history museums have been obliged to reduce their scientific staff in the face of government cutbacks and the decline in donations following the 2008 economic crash. They still have their collections, and their public still comes through the door. But they no longer employ enough scientists to interpret those collections adequately for visitors or the world at large. Hence the journal Nature last year characterized natural history collections as “the endangered dead.”
  • these collections are less about the past than about our world and how it is changing. Sediment cores like the ones at the Illinois State Museum, for instance, may not sound terribly important, but the pollen in them reveals how past climates changed, what species lived and died as a result, and thus how our own future may be rapidly unfolding.
  • Natural history museums are so focused on the future that they have for centuries routinely preserved such specimens to answer questions they didn’t yet know how to ask, requiring methodologies that had not yet been invented, to make discoveries that would have been, for the original collectors, inconceivable.
  • THE people who first put gigantic mammoth and mastodon specimens in museums, for instance, did so mainly out of dumb wonderment. But those specimens soon led to the stunning 18th-century recognition that parts of God’s creation could become extinct. The heretical idea of extinction then became an essential preamble to Darwin, whose understanding of evolution by natural selection depended in turn on the detailed study of barnacle specimens collected and preserved over long periods and for no particular reason. Today, those same specimens continue to answer new questions with the help of genome sequencing, CT scans, stable isotope analysis and other technologies.
  • These museums also play a critical role in protecting what’s left of the natural world, in part because they often combine biological and botanical knowledge with broad anthropological experience.
  • “You have no nationality. You are scientists. You speak for nature.” Just since 1999, according to the Field Museum, inventories by its curators and their collaborators have been a key factor in the protection of 26.6 million acres of wilderness, mainly in the headwaters of the Amazon.
  • It may be optimistic to say that natural history museums have saved the world. It may even be too late for that. But they provide one other critical service that can save us, and our sense of wonder: Almost everybody in this country — even children in Denver who have never been to the Rocky Mountains, or people in San Francisco who have never walked on a Pacific Ocean beach — goes to a natural history museum at some point in his life, and these visits influence us in deep and unpredictable ways.
  • we dimly begin to understand the passage of time and cultures, and how our own species fits amid millions of others. We start to understand the strangeness and splendor of the only planet where we will ever have the great pleasure of living.
dpittenger

We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...253821

extinction knowledge technology

shared by dpittenger on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • we humans will destroy ourselves.
  • I think the biggest existential risks relate to certain future technological capabilities that we might develop, perhaps later this century. For example, machine intelligence or advanced molecular nanotechnology could lead to the development of certain kinds of weapons systems. You could also have risks associated with certain advancements in synthetic biology.
  • all observations require the existence of an observer. This becomes important, for instance, in evolutionary biology
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  • It's hard to know what that might look like, because our human experience might be just a small little crumb of what's possible. If you think of all the different modes of being, different kinds of feeling and experiencing, different ways of thinking and relating, it might be that human nature constrains us to a very narrow little corner of the space of possible modes of being. I
clairemann

Some Elephants in Africa Are Just a Step From Extinction - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ephants-africa-endangered.html

education psychology science research animals

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The threat of extinction has diminished the odds of spotting one of these wood-dwelling elephants in recent decades,
  • The shy forest elephants have lost nearly nine-tenths of their number in a generation and are now critically endangered — just one step from extinction in the wild.
  • The population of savanna elephants has fallen at least 60 percent, the team found. Forest elephants have declined by more than 86 percent.
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  • More than two decades ago, a study of 295 skulls in museums found “enormous differences” between the two types of elephants, he said. In life, forest elephants have smaller bodies, rounder ears and straighter tusks than savanna elephants.
  • Elephants being killed for their ivory tusks isn’t a new problem, and neither is the habitat loss they face.
  • Savanna elephants are “thriving,”
  • “At the moment we are getting to the minds of the people,” Dr. Okita said. “But we need to get to the hearts.”
  • The average savanna elephant mother gives birth at 25 years; forest elephant moms are 31 on average. Because the earliest surveys researchers could find were from the 1960s and 1970s, they could peer back only two generations for savanna elephants, and a single generation for forest elephants.
  • “The forest elephants, in most cases, have been largely ignored,” he said. Grouping the two elephants together probably masked just how bad things were for the forest elephant, he said.
lucieperloff

Ancient Dog DNA Shows Early Spread Around the Globe - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ancient-dog-dna.html

research science

shared by lucieperloff on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • pins their likely origin to a group of extinct wolves.
  • pins their likely origin to a group of extinct wolves.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 02 Nov 20
       
      extinct?
  • Now an international team of researchers has sequenced and analyzed an additional 27 genomes of ancient dogs.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 02 Nov 20
       
      Where did they find the new genomes?
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  • that domestication probably began around 20,000 years ago.
  • much more diverse genetically than modern dogs.
  • All European dogs appear to have descended from one group of ancient European dogs, and the great modern diversity of dog shapes and sizes indicates an emphasis by breeders on certain very powerful genes.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 02 Nov 20
       
      European domesticated dogs came from ancient european dogs
  • Modern wolves, however, do show the incorporation of some dog DNA.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 02 Nov 20
       
      Wolf DNA is recessive?
  • The extraordinarily rich amount of information gathered from the 27 genomes provided many new perspectives on dog domestication and their association with humans.
  • even while they were sometimes breeding with wolves, no new wolf DNA entered their genomes.
  • Pigs can be a little wild but “if you’re a dog and you’ve got a little bit of wolf in you, that’s not a good thing and those things get knocked on the head very quickly or run away or disappear but they don’t get integrated into the dog population.”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 02 Nov 20
       
      Dogs with more wolf genes are less favorable - less common today
  • But then there was the sudden loss of diversity in dogs starting around 4,000 years ago.
  • The exact where and when of dog domestication remain unclear, and will never be pinned down to the kind of moment in time that dog owners like to imagine, but, in terms of a period of time and geographic area, Dr. Larson said, “We’re getting closer.”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 02 Nov 20
       
      No obvious answer to this question
ilanaprincilus06

Manipulating memory to treat addiction | Mo Costandi | Neurophilosophy blog | Science |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...1

brain manipulation addiction extinction exposure therapy

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • the procedure involves manipulating addicts' memories of past drug use, and could lead to non-pharmacological therapy for addiction, as well as psychiatric conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and phobia.
  • the procedure involves manipulating addicts' memories of past drug use, and could lead to non-pharmacological therapy for addiction, as well as psychiatric conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and phobia.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Could this manipulation affect other parts of the brain?
  • addicts quickly associate paraphernalia and other drug-associated cues with the pleasurable effects of the drug, so that seeing these cues triggers cravings and drug-seeking behaviour.
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  • Current treatments effectively relieve cravings in the clinic, but not when addicts return to their usual environment
  • This process – called 'extinction' – forms the basis of cue exposure therapy, in which addicts are repeatedly exposed to drug-associated cues and prevented from responding to them in the usual way of using the drug.
  • It combines cue exposure with manipulation of a process called memory reconsolidation, in which information is retrieved from long-term storage and then reactivated so that it can be strengthened.
  • "We did the extinction training during reconsolidation, and what seems to have happened is that we somehow updated the old fear memory,"
  • also manipulates reconsolidation of addicts' memories of past drug use to weaken their habitual responses to paraphernalia and other drug-related stimuli.
  • so it remains to be seem whether the procedure will be effective in preventing cravings outside of the clinical setting.
Emily Horwitz

Drought May Have Killed Sumerian Language | LiveScience - 1 views

www.livescience.com/-killed-sumerian-language.html

language mesopotamia livescience drought science geology

shared by Emily Horwitz on 05 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says.
  • no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues.
  • his was not a single summer or winter, this was 200 to 300 years of drought," said Matt Konfirst, a geologist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.
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  • Sumerian culture disappeared around 4,000 years ago, and the Sumerian language went extinct soon after that.
  • geological records point to a long period of drier weather in the Middle East around 4,200 years ago, Konfirst said. The Red Sea and the Dead Sea had increased evaporation; water levels dropped at Lake Van in Turkey, and cores from marine sediments around that period indicate increased dust in the environment.
  • Around the same time, 74 percent of the ancient Mesopotamian settlements were abandoned, according to a 2006 study of an archaeological site called Tell Leilan in Syria. The populated area also shrank by 93 percent, he said.
  • great drought, two waves of marauding nomads descended upon the region, sacking the capital city of Ur. After around 2000 B.C., ancient Sumerian gradually died off as a spoken language in the region. For the next 2,000 years, the tongue lingered on as a dead written language, similar to Latin in the Middle Ages, but has been completely extinct since then, Konfirst said.
demetriar

Languages Are Going Extinct Even Faster Than Species Are - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...mic-development_n_5759850.html

languages research knowledge

shared by demetriar on 15 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The world's roughly 7000 known languages are disappearing faster than species, with a different tongue dying approximately every 2 weeks.
  • researchers have identified the primary threat to linguistic diversity: economic development.
  • It’s well known that economic growth or the desire to achieve it can drive language loss, he notes—dominant languages such as Mandarin Chinese and English are often required for upward mobility in education and business, and economic assistance often encourages recipients to speak dominant languages.
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  • Certain aspects of geography seemed to act as a buffer or threat, Amano says.
  • More research is necessary to determine precisely what it is about economic development that kills languages, he adds. Figuring out how growth interacts with other factors such as landscape is the next step, he says.
  • Economics is far from the whole story, however, she says.
  • Generations of disease, murder, and genocide—both historic and present, in some regions—have also played an important role and were not included in the new study's analysis, she says.
maxwellokolo

The Woolly Mammoth's Last Stand - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-mammoth-extinct-genetics.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 06 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 06 Mar 17
     
    The mammoths on St. Paul survived until 5,600 years ago, but the reasons for their extinction have long been a matter of speculation. Last August, a team led by Russell W. Graham of Pennsylvania State University ruled out all the leading candidates, including human predation, polar bears, increased winter snowpack, volcanic activity and changing vegetation.
lucieperloff

On the Verge of Extinction, These Whales Are Also Shrinking - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...shrinking-whales.html

research knowledge technology extinction

shared by lucieperloff on 08 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Most of the 360 or so North Atlantic right whales alive today bear scars from entanglements in fishing gear and collisions with speeding ships and, according to a new study, they are much smaller than they should be.
  • they are much smaller than they should be.
  • suggests that human-induced stressors, primarily entanglements, are stunting the growth of North Atlantic right whales, reducing their chances of reproductive success and increasing their chances of dying.
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  • scientists have been monitoring the dwindling population of right whales in the North Atlantic.
  • the animals’ lengths have declined by roughly 7 percent since 1981
  • “We saw 5 and even 10-year-old whales that were about the size of 2-year-old whales,” Dr. Stewart said. In one case, an 11-year-old whale was the same size as a 1½-year-old whale.
  • Entanglement in fishing gear is an ever-present threat for the mammals and one of the primary drivers of their decline.
  • Whales who don’t drown or starve right away will often drag gear for several years.
  • “What we think is going on here is that dragging these big trailing heaps of gear is creating all this extra drag, which takes energy to pull around, and that’s energy that they would probably otherwise be devoting to growth,
  • ​Smaller right whales are less resilient to climate change as they do not have the nutritional buffer they need to adapt during lean food years,”
  • the species can hardly afford declines in its birthrate.
  • “this population has recovered from very small numbers before, so it’s not completely grim.
  • “If we all were to demand these management changes of our elected officials the situation would change dramatically.”
caelengrubb

The alphabets at risk of extinction - BBC Future - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...lphabets-at-risk-of-extinction

shared by caelengrubb on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • There are between 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world. Yet 96% are spoken by just 3% of the global population. And 85% are endangered,
  • Along with the spoken words, something else is also at risk: each language’s individual script. When we talk about “endangered languages”, most of us think of the spoken versions first. But our alphabets can tell us huge amounts about the cultures they came from.
  • Language is innate to all humans, but scripts have to be invented and actively learned. This has happened rarely.
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  • Even by the middle of the 19th Century, only 10% of adults knew how to write, and there are only about 140 scripts in use today. 
  • “Endangered alphabets and scripts just haven’t been brought to people’s attention in the same way as languages,”
  • By their very artificiality, alphabets arguably say more about a culture than mere language. That starts with the characters themselves
  • Writing can tell us about a culture in other ways, too. Because they live in the thick forests of the Philippines, users of Hanunuo have traditionally inscribed messages into bows of bamboo. Different fonts depend on the way that scribes wield the knife.
  • Not that scripts are simply a means of communication. Some burrow right into the values of the people who use them, and not just because they often record sacred prayers or ancient remedies.
  • Some alphabet devotees are taking these lessons so seriously that they invent whole new scripts.
  • One of the most spectacular examples comes from a pair of Guinean brothers, Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry. Tired of squashing their native Fulani tongue into the French (Latin) or Arabic alphabets, neither of which could accurately represent the range of Fulani sounds, they developed something better.
  • The result was Adlam, named after the first four letters of the alphabet. 
runlai_jiang

Elephant Seal Facts (Genus Mirounga) - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/elephant-seal-facts-4154853

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The elephant seal (genus Mirounga) is the world's largest seal. There are two species of elephant seals, named according to the hemisphere in which they are found. Northern elephant seals (M. angustirostris) are found in coastal waters around Canada and Mexico, while southern elephant seals (M. leonina) are found off the coast of New Zealand, South Africa, and Argentina.
  • At sea, elephant seals range solo. They return to established breeding colonies each winter. Females become mature around 3 to 6 years of age, while males mature at 5 to 6 years.However, males need to achieve alpha status to mate, which is normally between the ages of 9 and 12. Males battle each other using body weight and teeth. While deaths are rare, scarring is common. An alpha male's harem ranges from 30 to 100 females. Other males wait on the edges of the colony, sometimes mating with females before the alpha male chases them away. Males remain on land over the winter to defend territory, meaning they don't leave to hunt.
  • Elephant seals have been hunted for their meat, fur, and blubber. Both northern and southern elephant seals were hunted to the brink of extinction. By 1892, most people believed the northern seals to be extinct. But in 1910, a single breeding colony was found around Guadalupe Island off Mexico's Baja California coast. At the end of the 19th century, new marine conservation legislation was put in place to protect the
peterconnelly

An Extinct, Head-Butting Animal May Help Explain Giraffes' Long Necks | Smart News| Smi... - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...-giraffes-long-necks-180980193

smithsonian

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Charles Darwin held up giraffes as a prime example of natural selection, his theory that’s often summarized as “survival of the fittest.” Giraffes with comparably longer necks could reach food high up in trees, which gave them an advantage over other animals and members of their own species with shorter necks. These longer-necked individuals thrived and reproduced more, leading to generations of giraffes with their signature lengthened anatomy.
  • Yes, giraffes may have evolved to be able to reach food at higher elevations, but their long necks may also be the result of fierce competition for mates
  • For many years, researchers simply called the mysterious animal “guài shòu,” or “strange beast.” Now, scientists have given the mammal a name—Discokeryx xiezhi—and they’ve pieced together a rough outline of how the animal may have lived some 16.9 million years ago.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Discokeryx xiezhi was an early relative of today’s giraffes, but more like a cousin and not a direct ancestor.
  • “To the best of our knowledge, D. xiezhi exhibits the most optimized head-butting adaptation in vertebrate evolution,” the researchers write in the paper.
  • The discovery of Discokeryx xiezhi suggests this fighting style and competition for mates may be a contributing factor in their long-neck evolution.
  • “In reality, it was likely a combination of natural selection ... for a particular dietary preference and sexual selection in that lineage that drove the evolution of modern giraffe necks and limbs,” Advait Jukar, a paleobiologist at Yale University who was not involved in the study tells Scientific American’s Rachel Nuwer.
Javier E

The Reality of New America Brings Obama Victory -- Daily Intel - 0 views

nymag.com/...rica-brings-obama-victory.html

obama victory Republicans survival crisis

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • he essence of Team Obama's reelection strategy was to capitalize on their man's strength with what National Journal's Ron Brownstein calls "the coalition of the ascendant" has long been clear. Back in May, I wrote a cover story for the magazine laying out Chicago's plan to focus laser-like on four key voting blocs: African-Americans, Hispanics, college-educated white women, and voters of all ethnicities aged 18-29. At bottom, their theory of the case was that, despite the fragility of the recovery and the doubts that many voters had about Obama's capacity to put America firmly back on the road to prosperity, the deft and aggressive exploitation of coalition politics (along with the ruthless disqualification of Romney as a credible occupant of the Oval Office) could secure the president a second term. That in 2012, in other words, demographics would trump economics.
  • A quick glance at the exit polls confirms the extent to which the coalition of the ascendant is responsible for that performance. Contrary to the assumptions of the Romney campaign, the electorate that turned out on Tuesday was more diverse than 2008's, not less. Nationally, the share of the vote comprised by whites fell from 74 to 72 percent, while the black vote held steady at 13 and rose among Hispanics from 9 to 10, among Asians from 2.5 to 3 percent, among women from 53 to 54 percent, and among young voters from 18 to 19 percent. Obama's share of each of those blocs was overwhelming: 93 percent of African-Americans, 71 percent of Latinos, 73 percent of Asians, 55 percent of the ladies, and 60 percent of the kids. T
  • the challenges facing the Republican Party are far greater and far graver; indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that they are existential. Before Election Day, there were some in GOP yakkety-yakosphere who were warming up to pin the blame for Romney's impending defeat on Hurricane Sandy, a dubious proposition rendered utterly absurd by what happened yesterday. Not only was the problem not Sandy — it wasn't even simply Romney. True, the weaknesses of the Republican nominee were manifold and glaring, but they had nothing to do with the party's having squandered its chance to take back control of the Senate by pissing away two eminently winnable seats (in Missouri and Indiana) by dint of having nominated abject cretins (Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock). Or with the passage, for the first time, of ballot initiatives in two states (Maine and Maryland) legalizing same-sex marriage, and the legalizing of marijuana in two others (Colorado and Washington).
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  • the Republicans now find themselves facing a moment similar to the one that Democrats met in the wake of the 1988 election, when the party found itself markedly out of step with the country — shackled to a retograde base, in the grip of an assortment of fads and factions, wedded to a pre-modern policy agenda. And so, like the Ds back then, the Rs today must undertake a wholesale modernization of their party, starting with, but not limited to, making real inroads with those ascendant elements of the electorate. Doing so will be a Herculean task, and one that will require not just institutional resolve but individual leadership; it will require, that is to say, that the Republicans find their own version of Bill Clinton circa 1990. But daunting as the task may be, what last night indicated is that the party has no choice but to undertake the assignment — because to forgo it would be to risk not just irrelevance but extinction.
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