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lilyrashkind

'As a black woman in STEM I'm used for photo opportunities' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...business-59897898

culture

shared by lilyrashkind on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Ms Chapple, then a chemistry researcher at a US university, didn't work with his team directly and had minimal interactions with them personally
  • She looked around her: the research team were all white men, and she was the only black woman in the photo.
  • Cynthia's school, her extended family and all her friends were just five minutes away and evenings were spent exploring the neighbourhood.
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  • "I was the only black girl in those clubs," she recalls. "There weren't really a lot of activities around STEM that you could do in my neighbourhood. So, I found myself sort of leaving my south side community and going elsewhere - to get exposure to certain activities."
  • When she graduated and became a research chemist she noticed another trend.
  • Researchers say that the 'leaky pipeline' refers to women, and particularly women of colour, facing many barriers and obstacles to advancing further in their fields, from childcare obligations to fewer promotion opportunities.
  • Cynthia had an idea whilst doing her masters in 2015, that she would create a club to pull more women like her in to the world of science. By 2018, Black Girls Do STEM became an after-school community in St Louis, Missouri - where she now lives
  • The fortnightly classes used to be held in person but have moved online throughout the pandemic.
criscimagnael

The Kunga Was a Status Symbol Long Before the Thoroughbred - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ient-horses-kungas-hybrid.html

shared by criscimagnael on 15 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • In ancient Mesopotamia 4,500 years ago, long before horses arrived in the region, another spirited member of the equine family, the kunga, took a starring role in pulling four-wheeled wagons into battle.
  • Archaeologists had suspected that these animals — depicted in art, their sales recorded in cuneiform writing, their bodies sometimes laid to rest in rich burial sites — were the result of some kind of crossbreeding. But proof was lacking.
  • studies of ancient DNA showed the kunga was a cross between a female donkey (Equus Africanus asinus) and a male Syrian wild ass (Equus hemionus hemippus).
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  • The kunga is the first known instance of a human-engineered hybrid of two species, a production far beyond the traditional processes of the domestication of animals, the researchers found.
  • Like mules, which are hybrids between horses and donkeys, and which were created much later, the kungas were sterile. Each new kunga was a one-off, a mating between a wild ass stallion and a donkey.
  • The stallions had to be captured and kept in captivity, even though they were highly aggressive, as modern records have indicated.
  • Kungas held their high status for at least 500 years, Dr. Geigl said. Horses did not appear until around 4,000 years ago to take their place in battle and ceremony, and to contribute to the creation of other hybrids. Before the current research, the oldest known hybrid was a mule from a site in Turkey dating to 3,000 years ago. Members of the same team reported on that find in 2020.
  • the “results were very convincing,” showing that people “were experimenting with hybrid equids long before the arrival of the horse.”
  • Fiona Marshall, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who has researched the prehistory of donkeys and their domestication, said the study was “enormously significant” partly because it showed that the breeders had clear intentions. The early process of domestication was always murky — probably part accident, part human intervention — but this research showed what the ancient Syrians were after.
  • “People wanted the qualities of a wild animal,” she said. Donkeys might have been tamer than their ancestors, the African wild ass, but the breeders in Mesopotamia wanted to back breed to other wild asses for strength and speed — and perhaps size.
  • the team sequenced DNA from numerous sources, including modern donkeys, horses and several species of wild asses, and museum samples.
  • Of particular importance were the bones of 44 kungas interred at a rich burial site in Syria called Umm el-Marra. Those skeletons had earlier led Dr. Weber and others to hypothesize that they were hybrids and that they were the kungas described in tablets and represented in art.
  • Their teeth showed bit marks and indicated they had been fed a special diet.
  • Donkeys are plentiful, of course, but the last known Syrian wild asses died in the late 1920s.
  • “The recipe for making the kunga was unknown for thousands of years,” Dr. Bennett said. “And we finally decode it not even 100 years since one element has become extinct.”
Javier E

Searching for Our Urban Future in the Ruins of the Past - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-newitz-four-lost-cities.html

cities archaeology urban culture history

shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • Though Annalee Newitz began work on “Four Lost Cities” long before the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s impossible to read it today without periodic is-this-where-we’re-headed? musings. The book functions as a travel guide to places that no longer exist
  • The chapters on Pompeii, the volcano-buried city in the orbit of ancient Rome, famous for its exquisitely preserved ruins, its brothels and taverns and graffiti, and on Angkor, a metropolis of medieval Cambodia, didn’t fire my imagination so much, perhaps because I already knew something of their histories.
  • Nine thousand years ago, the people of Catalhoyuk, maybe 10,000 of them, lived in cuboid clay houses packed against one another above the Konya Plain of south-central Turkey. Their dwellings were uniform, suggesting a highly regulated society: one or two rooms, painted in white or with red ocher designs. You exited not via a front door but by climbing a ladder to the roof. Much of life was lived up there: cooking, socializing, ambling along sidewalks that ran across the top of the city.
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  • The oldest of the books of the Hebrew Bible date to roughly 3,000 years ago; the pyramids of Egypt go back about 5,000 years. These were not prehumans or near relatives. They were like us: complex, organized, alive to meaning and living at a time beyond reckoning.
  • Ruth Tringham of the University of California, Berkeley, who has devoted years to humanizing the remnants of this city of the dim past by focusing on one skeleton, of a woman she has dubbed Dido. Dido replastered her walls regularly, kept her home swept clean, covered the floor in reed mats and decorated the place with art: clay figures of animals and stylized human females. In other words: much like us.
  • Catalhoyuk was founded by pioneers of urban living. “When the earliest construction began,” Newitz writes, “many people coming to live at Catalhoyuk were only a generation or two removed from nomadism.” It was brand-new, this fixed settlement thing, but it proved remarkably successful. By the time Dido was born, the city was about 600 years old
  • A thousand years ago, meanwhile, East St. Louis, Ill., was the site of an urban sanctuary that archaeologists today call Cahokia. With a population of 30,000, it was larger than Paris was at the time. Like Paris, with its Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame, it had distinguishing physical landmarks in the form of black earthen pyramids. It sprawled across both sides of the Mississippi River, beckoning visitors from all over the present-day Southern United States.
  • Cahokia seems to have been a place of spiritual pilgrimage, which drew diverse groups of Native American peoples, who spoke different languages and worshiped in various ways but came to share a reverence for this city and its ceremonial customs, which included human sacrifice. Its multiethnic, year-round population apparently serviced the religious pilgrims and, in the off-season, went about their own affairs.
  • Cahokia died not as a result of sudden catastrophe, like Pompeii, but seemingly because it lost its spiritual significance over time. Its people didn’t perish. The pilgrims just stopped coming; the local residents merged with other tribes. There is linguistic and other evidence that the Sioux are their descendants.
  • Newitz devotes space to debunking the popular notion that civilizations of the past “collapse” and become “lost,” pointing instead to indications of gradual change.
  • The operative lesson from the past, at least from this curated offering of former metropolises, seems to be that human culture is a plastic thing. Rather than lamenting the fragility of our current urban structures, we might do better figuring out how to bend and shape society for the future.
  • the effect of reading “Four Lost Cities” was more meditative. This is a long, long, long ride we are on. Much is beyond our control. Humanity trundles on.
Javier E

You Are Going to Get COVID Again … And Again … And Again - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...639436

covid effects response pandemic history crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 28 May 22 - No Cached
  • You’re not just likely to get the coronavirus. You’re likely to get it again and again and again.
  • “I personally know several individuals who have had COVID in almost every wave,” says Salim Abdool Karim, a clinical infectious-diseases epidemiologist and the director of the Center for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa, which has experienced five meticulously tracked surges, and where just one-third of the population is vaccinated.
  • er best guess for the future has the virus infiltrating each of us, on average, every three years or so. “Barring some intervention that really changes the landscape,” she said, “we will all get SARS-CoV-2 multiple times in our life.”
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  • that would be on par with what we experience with flu viruses, which scientists estimate hit us about every two to five years, less often in adulthood. It also matches up well with the documented cadence of the four other coronaviruses that seasonally trouble humans, and cause common colds.
  • For now, every infection, and every subsequent reinfection, remains a toss of the dice. “Really, it’s a gamble,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist and long-COVID researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. Vaccination and infection-induced immunity may load the dice against landing on severe disease, but that danger will never go away completely, and scientists don’t yet know what happens to people who contract “mild” COVID over and over again
  • Or maybe not. This virus seems capable of tangling into just about every tissue in the body, affecting organs such as the heart, brain, liver, kidneys, and gut; it has already claimed the lives of millions, while saddling countless others with symptoms that can linger for months or years.
  • considering our current baseline, “less dangerous” could still be terrible—and it’s not clear exactly where we’re headed. When it comes to reinfection, we “just don’t know enough,”
  • Perhaps, as several experts have posited since the pandemic’s early days, SARS-CoV-2 will just become the fifth cold-causing coronavirus.
  • A third or fourth bout might be more muted still; the burden of individual diseases may be headed toward an asymptote of mildness that holds for many years
  • Future versions of SARS-CoV-2 could continue to shape-shift out of existing antibodies’ reach, as coronaviruses often do. But the body is flush with other fighters that are much tougher to bamboozle—among them, B cells and T cells that can quash a growing infection before it spirals out of control
  • Those protections tend to build iteratively, as people see pathogens or vaccines more often. People vaccinated three times over, for instance, seem especially well equipped to duke it out with all sorts of SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Omicron and its offshoots.
  • promising patterns: Second infections and post-vaccination infections “are significantly less severe,” she told me, sometimes to the point where people don’t notice them at all
  • Bodies, wised up to the virus’s quirks, can now react more quickly, clobbering it with sharper and speedier strikes.
  • “There are still very good reasons” to keep exposures few and far between, Landon, of the University of Chicago, told me. Putting off reinfection creates fewer opportunities for harm: The dice are less likely to land on severe disease (or chronic illness) when they’re rolled less often overall. It also buys us time to enhance our understanding of the virus, and improve our tools to fight it.
  • Immunity, though, is neither binary nor permanent. Even if SARS-CoV-2’s assaults are blunted over time, there are no guarantees about the degree to which that happens, or how long it lasts.
  • A slew of factors could end up weighting the dice toward severe disease—among them, a person’s genetics, age, underlying medical conditions, health-care access, and frequency or magnitude of exposure to the virus.
  • for everyone else, no amount of viral dampening can totally eliminate the chance, however small it may be, of getting very sick.
  • Long COVID, too, might remain a possibility with every discrete bout of illness. Or maybe the effects of a slow-but-steady trickle of minor, fast-resolving infections would sum together, and bring about the condition.
  • Every time the body’s defenses are engaged, it “takes a lot of energy, and causes tissue damage,” Thomas told me. Should that become a near-constant barrage, “that’s probably not great for you.”
  • Bodies are resilient, especially when they’re offered time to rest, and she doubts that reinfection with a typically ephemeral virus such as SARS-CoV-2 would cause mounting damage. “The cumulative effect is more likely to be protective than detrimental,” she said, because of the immunity that’s laid down each time.
  • people who have caught the virus twice or thrice may be more likely to become long-haulers than those who have had it just once.
  • Some other microbes, when they reinvade us, can fire up the immune system in unhelpful ways, driving bad bouts of inflammation that burn through the body, or duping certain defensive molecules into aiding, rather than blocking, the virus’s siege. Researchers don’t think SARS-CoV-2 will do the same. But this pathogen is “much more formidable than even someone working on coronaviruses would have expected,
  • Seasonal encounters with pathogens other than SARS-CoV-2 don’t often worry us—but perhaps that’s because we’re still working to understand their toll. “Have we been underestimating long-term consequences from other repeat infections?” Thomas said. “The answer is probably, almost certainly, yes.”
  • the rhythm of reinfection isn’t just about the durability of immunity or the pace of viral evolution. It’s also about our actions and policies, and whether they allow the pathogen to transmit and evolve. Strategies to avoid infection—to make it as infrequent as possible, for as many people as possible—remain options, in the form of vaccination, masking, ventilation, paid sick leave, and more.
  • Gordon and Swartz are both hopeful that the slow accumulation of immunity will also slash people’s chances of developing long COVID.
  • The outlooks of the experts I spoke with spanned the range from optimism to pessimism, though all agreed that uncertainty loomed. Until we know more, none were keen to gamble with the virus—or with their own health. Any reinfection will likely still pose a threat, “even if it’s not the worst-case scenario,” Abdool Karim told me. “I wouldn’t want to put myself in that position.”
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