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it’s time to kill this mistaken idea once and for all. Basically everything in modern agriculture is unnatural. “The cereal crops we eat bear little resemblance to their naturally selected ancestors, and the environments in which we grow them are equally highly manipulated and engineered by us,” she writes. “We have, over the last 10,000 years, bred out of our main food plants all kinds of survival strategies that natural selection put in.”

“Agriculture is the invention of humans,” she adds. “It is the deliberate manipulation of plants (and animals) and the environment in which they grow to provide food for us. The imperative is not that we should stop interfering with nature, but that we should interfere in the best way possible to provide a reliable, sustainable, equitable supply of nutritious food.”

Continued warming of the Earth’s oceans over the next century could trigger disruptions to marine life on a scale not seen in the last 3 million years, scientists warn in a study released Monday.

most dramatic disruptions would likely be averted if the world’s nations can bring greenhouse gas emissions under control in the coming decades, the authors write in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.

“Climate change may rapidly reorganize marine diversity over large oceanic regions,” s

Science holds an esteemed place among citizens and professionals. Americans recognize the accomplishments of scientists in key fields and, despite considerable dispute about the role of government in other realms, there is broad public support for government investment in scientific research.

79% of adults say that science has made life easier for most people and a majority is positive about science’s impact on the quality of health care, food and the environment.

At the same time, both the public and scientists are critical of the quality of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM subjects) in grades K-12.

A walk in the park may soothe the mind and, in the process, change the workings of our brains in ways that improve our mental health, according to an interesting new study

Various studies have found that urban dwellers with little access to green spaces have a higher incidence of psychological problems than people living near parks and that city dwellers who visit natural environments have lower levels of stress hormones immediately afterward than people who have not recently been outside.

Mr. Bratman and his collaborators decided to closely scrutinize what effect a walk might have on a person’s tendency to brood.

Neurologically, how does our brain adapt itself to new technologies? Nicholas Carr: A couple of types of adaptations take place in your brain. One is a strengthening of the synaptical connections between the neurons involved in using that instrument, in using that tool. And basically these are chemical – neural chemical changes. So you know, cells in our brain communicate by transmitting electrical signals between them and those electrical signals are actually activated by the exchange of chemicals, neurotransmitters in our synapses. And so when you begin to use a tool, for instance, you have much stronger electrochemical signals being processed in those – through those synaptical connections. And then the second, and even more interesting adaptation is in actual physical changes,anatomical changes. Your neurons, you may grow new neurons that are then recruited into these circuits or your existing neurons may grow new synaptical terminals. And again, that also serves to strengthen the activity in those, in those particular pathways that are being used – new pathways. On the other hand, you know, the brain likes to be efficient and so even as its strengthening the pathways you’re exercising, it’s pulling – it’s weakening the connections in other ways between the cells that supported old ways of thinking or working or behaving, or whatever that you’re not exercising so much.

And it was only in around the year 800 or 900 that we saw the introduction of word spaces. And suddenly reading became, in a sense, easier and suddenly you had to arrival of silent reading, which changed the act of reading from just transcription of speech to something that every individual did on their own. And suddenly you had this whole deal of the silent solitary reader who was improving their mind, expanding their horizons, and so forth. And when Guttenberg invented the printing press around 1450, what that served to do was take this new very attentive, very deep form of reading, which had been limited to just, you know, monasteries and universities, and by making books much cheaper and much more available, spread that way of reading out to a much larger mass of audience. And so we saw, for the last 500 years or so, one of the central facts of culture was deep solitary reading.

What the book does as a technology is shield us from distraction. The only thinggoing on is the, you know, the progression of words and sentences across page after page and so suddenly we see this immersive kind of very attentive thinking, whether you are paying attention to a story or to an argument, or whatever. And what we know about the brain is the brain adapts to these types of tools.

Fish argued that Watson “does not come within a million miles of replicating the achievements of everyday human action and thought.” In defending this claim, Fish invoked arguments that one of us (Dreyfus) articulated almost 40 years ago in “What Computers Can’t Do,” a criticism of 1960s and 1970s style artificial intelligence.

At the dawn of the AI era the dominant approach to creating intelligent systems was based on finding the right rules for the computer to follow.

GOFAI, for Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence.

THROUGHOUT the debt-ceiling debacle, poll after poll has shown that Americans want politicians in Washington to compromise.

why is compromise so hard to achieve?

“Americans are self-segregating,” said Bill Bishop, author of “The Big Sort,” a 2008 book that examined, in the words of its subtitle, “why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart.”

Skinner's approach stressed the historical associations between a stimulus and the animal's response -- an approach easily framed as a kind of empirical statistical analysis, predicting the future as a function of the past.

Chomsky's conception of language, on the other hand, stressed the complexity of internal representations, encoded in the genome, and their maturation in light of the right data into a sophisticated computational system, one that cannot be usefully broken down into a set of associations.

Chomsky acknowledged that the statistical approach might have practical value, just as in the example of a useful search engine, and is enabled by the advent of fast computers capable of processing massive data. But as far as a science goes, Chomsky would argue it is inadequate, or more harshly, kind of shallow

By watching how the human body and mind adapts in Antarctica, we can plan and predict what would happen in space,"

has felt the effects of living there on both his mind and his body.

"You're cut off from the rest of the world and in winter, completely cut off as no flights go in or out," he adds.

We may be captivated by the thought of organisms on another planet, but we seem to have lost interest in our own. The Oxford Junior Dictionary has been excising the waymarks of the living world. Adders, blackberries, bluebells, conkers, holly, magpies, minnows, otters, primroses, thrushes, weasels and wrens are now surplus to requirements.

past four decades, the world has lost 50% of its vertebrate wildlife. But across the latter half of this period, there has been a steep decline in media coverage

as many news stories broadcast by the BBC and ITV about Madeleine McCann (who went missing in 2007) as there were about the entire range of environmental issues.

the proposal that foreign language learning can be replaced by computer coding knowledge is misguided:

It stems from a widely held but mistaken belief that science and technology education should take precedence over subjects like English, history and foreign languages.

more urgent is my alarm at the growing tendency to accept and even foster the decline of the sort of interpersonal human contact that learning languages both requires and cultivates.

Facebook and Google have become “obstacles to innovation” and are a “menace” to society whose “days are numbered”

“Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment,” said the Hungarian-American businessman, according to a transcript of his speech.

“This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.”

the big problem with bad news about the environment is that it too easily leads to resignation and then passivity. Consider Paul Kingsnorth, the former British environmental activist who suggests that the magnitude of the “ecocide” we face means that we have to come to terms with the reality that there is no hope. “We are not going to stop this from happening,”

A group of academics and activists recently published a book with an emblematic title: “Mourning Nature.”

Small wonder that a series of recent polls have detected many Americans declaring that they’re experiencing “eco-anxiety.” If nature is already too far gone, why go to the trouble of trying to save it?

After moving last month against Barack Obama’s efforts to limit fossil fuel exploration and combat climate change, President Trump will complete his effort to overturn environmental policy this week, signing two executive orders to expand offshore drilling and roll back conservation on public lands.

The president is then expected to follow up on Friday with another executive order aimed at opening up protected waters in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans to offshore drilling.

Friday’s order is also expected to call for the lifting of a permanent ban on drilling in an area including many of those same waters — a measure Mr. Obama issued in December 2016 in a last-ditch effort to protect his environmental legacy from his drilling-enthusiast successor.

In 2013, five years after he co-authored a paper showing that Democratic candidates in the United States could get more votes by moving slightly to the right on economic policy1, Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University in New York City, was chagrined to learn of an error in the data analysis. In trying to replicate the work, an undergraduate student named Yang Yang Hu had discovered that Gelman had got the sign wrong on one of the variables.

Gelman immediately published a three-sentence correction, declaring that everything in the paper's crucial section should be considered wrong until proved otherwise.

Reflecting today on how it happened, Gelman traces his error back to the natural fallibility of the human brain: “The results seemed perfectly reasonable,” he says. “Lots of times with these kinds of coding errors you get results that are just ridiculous. So you know something's got to be wrong and you go back and search until you find the problem. If nothing seems wrong, it's easier to miss it.”

When a Nigerian judge ruled in 2005 that Shell’s practice of gas flaring in the Niger Delta was a violation of citizens’ constitutional rights to life and dignity, Nnimmo Bassey, a local environmental activist, was thrilled.

“For the first time, a court of competence has boldly declared that Shell, Chevron and the other oil corporations have been engaged in illegal activities here for decades,” Bassey said on Nov. 14, 2005, the day the Federal High Court of Nigeria announced the ruling. “We expect this judgement to be respected and that for once the oil corporations will accept the truth and bring their sinful flaring activities to a halt.”

“Shell could ignore [the case] because it wasn’t in the international media but if it had gone to the ICC, it would have gotten global attention and shareholders would have known what the company was doing,” he says. “If we had had an ecocide law, things would have turned out differently.”

the “inactivists”, as I call them, haven’t given up; they have simply shifted from hard denial to a new array of tactics that I describe in the book as the new climate war.

Who is the enemy in the new climate war?It is fossil fuel interests, climate change deniers, conservative media tycoons, working together with petrostate actors like Saudi Arabia and Russia. I call this the coalition of the unwilling.

Today Russia uses cyberware – bot armies and trolls – to get climate activists to fight one another and to seed arguments on social media. Russian trolls have attempted to undermine carbon pricing in Canada and Australia, and Russian fingerprints have been detected in the yellow-vest protests in France.

So many of our hopes are based on the idea that the key to change is education.

Second, some researchers argue that the training activates stereotypes in people’s minds rather than eliminates them.

Fourth, the mandatory training makes many white participants feel left out, angry and resentful, actually decreasing their support for workplace diversity.

Our national reckoning on race has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials.

Valid intellectual and artistic endeavor must hold the battle against white supremacy front and center, white people are to identify and expunge their complicity in this white supremacy with the assumption that this task can never be completed, and statements questioning this program constitute a form of “violence” that merits shaming and expulsion.

Another defense of sorts has been to claim that even this cancel-culture lite is not dangerous, because it has no real effect. When, for instance, 153 intellectuals signed an open letter in Harper’s arguing for the value of free speech (I was one of them), we were told that we were comfortable bigwigs chafing at mere criticism, as if all that has been happening is certain people being taken to task, as opposed to being shamed and stripped of honors.