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in title, tags, annotations or urlThe Royal Oak | History Today - 0 views
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Following his defeat at the Battle of Worcester in September 1651, Charles Stuart found himself a fugitive
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Rather than a symbol of defeat, the Royal Oak became one of defiance, of loyalty to the kingdom and of the stoicism of its subjects
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Historians began to contest the ‘facts’ about the king’s time in the tree
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Did Climate Change Happen Once Before In Earth's History? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica, sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86 degrees Fahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of any sort.
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This is what you get in an ancient atmosphere with around 1,000 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. If this number sounds familiar, 1,000 ppm of CO2 is around what humanity is on pace to reach by the end of this century. That should be mildly concerning.
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“You put more CO2 in the atmosphere and you get more warming, that’s just super-simple physics that we figured out in the 19th century,” says David Naafs, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol. “But exactly how much it will warm by the end of the century, we don’t know. Based on our research of these ancient climates, though, it’s probably more than we thought.”
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Protect biodiversity to fight climate change - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Giant kelp is among the best organisms on the planet for taking planet-warming gases out of the atmosphere. Buoyed by small, gas-filled bulbs called “bladders,” these huge algae grow toward the ocean surface at a pace of up to two feet per day. Their flexible stems and leafy blades form a dense underwater canopy that can store 20 times as much carbon as an equivalent expanse of terrestrial trees.
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Yet this powerful force for planetary protection is under siege. Warming waters and worsening storms caused by climate change have weakened the kelp forests.
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Most significantly, the demise of important predators such as otters and sea stars has led to an explosion in the population of sea urchins, which eat kelp.
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A Single Fire Killed At Least 10% Of The World's Giant Sequoias, Study Says : NPR - 0 views
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At least a tenth of the world's mature giant sequoia trees were destroyed by a single California wildfire that tore through the southern Sierra Nevada last year, according to a draft report prepared by scientists with the National Park Service.
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Castle Fire, which charred 273 square miles (707 square km) of timber in Sequoia National Park.
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Researchers used satellite imagery and modeling from previous fires to determine that between 7,500 and 10,000 of the towering species perished in the fire. That equates to 10% to 14% of the world's mature giant sequoia population, the newspaper said.
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Summer Is Normal. Heat Season Is Deadly. - The Atlantic - 0 views
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too few Americans think about heat waves, which claim more lives globally than any other weather-related hazard, as a problem for which systematic, long-term preparation is warranted. To protect human life as temperatures soar, we need to conceive of what we might call heat season as a phenomenon distinct from summer—a part of the year that people in much of the country have traditionally viewed with great fondness.
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Historically, wildfire season in the United States has begun in May and ended in October; however, wildfires raged well into December last year.
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The annual Atlantic hurricane season formally begins June 1 and ends November 30. The emergence of Tropical Storm Ana on May 22 made 2021 the seventh consecutive year that a storm strong enough to be named formed off-season.
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Bones of ape living 12m years ago point to genesis of upright walking | Science | The Guardian - 0 views
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The distinctive human habit of walking upright may have evolved millions of years earlier than thought, according to researchers who uncovered the remains of an ancient ape in southern Germany.
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Excavations from the Hammerschmiede clay pit in Bavaria turned up fossilised bones belonging to a previously unknown baboon-sized ape that lived nearly 12m years ago
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Analysis of the bones shows that the animal, named Danuvius guggenmosi, had an unusual mix of anatomical features. While its long forearms, curved fingers and powerful, grasping thumbs were hallmarks of life spent dangling from branches, the hips, knees and feet were more human-like and better suited to walking upright, the scientists said.
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Denver Wants to Fix a Legacy of Environmental Racism - The New York Times - 0 views
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DENVER — In most American cities, white residents live near parks, trees and baseball fields, while communities of color are left with concrete and the heat that comes with it. Now, in a push that could provide a road map for other cities, officials in Denver are working to rectify that historical inequity.
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Correcting decades of discriminatory municipal planning is especially important as climate change heats up American cities. Adding green space, researchers have found, can help residents cope with rising heat and brings all sorts of side benefits, like filtering air pollution or boosting residents’ mental health.
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“It’s always just felt more like it’s a whole front,” said Alfonso Espino, a community activist and lifelong Denver resident, speaking of the city’s parks initiative. “Not for us, you know. It’s for the people that are coming.”
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How environmental damage can lead to new diseases | The Economist - 1 views
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THE WORLD’S monitored populations of wild animals have decreased by an average of 68% in the past 50 years
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intensive farming and the changing use of land are largely to blame
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More than 100 countries recognised the need to reverse species decline by 2030 and acknowledged the consequences of harmful environmental practices and climate change for biodiversity.
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Timothy Keller: Becoming Stewards of Hope-Part 1 - outreachmagazine.com - 0 views
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Imagine if you were middle-aged in 1948. You’d have lived through a worldwide influenza pandemic, two world wars and an economic depression all within the space of about 40 years. Life seemed fragile. It felt like anything could happen. Nothing seemed secure.
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I was born two years after Auden’s Pulitzer, in 1950. The feeling was that even if there were, say, an economic downturn, things would be better afterward than they had been before. We just assumed that our lives and society were going to get better and better. There was a long period in the second half of the 20th century, in which the anxiety that had defined the first half went away. For a couple generations we lived largely free of insecurity about the world in which we lived.
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Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, observes that empirically we are living healthier and longer lives. Nevertheless, people feel more culturally and emotionally dislocated than ever. Younger generations are experiencing far more depression and anxiety than those that came before them. We can feel the cultural anxiety today. There’s a real pessimism about the future that I’ve not seen in my lifetime. We find ourselves in a new age of anxiety.
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One Man Was Wrongly Blamed For Bringing AIDS to America - The Atlantic - 0 views
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How One Man Was Wrongly Blamed for Bringing AIDS to America
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One of those 40 cases was a Canadian flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas.
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“When the study got written up and was circulated beyond the immediate team to other people within the CDC, that ambiguous oval got interpreted by some as a zero,”
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Long Before Making Enigmatic Earthworks, People Reshaped Brazil's Rain Forest - The New York Times - 0 views
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Deep in the Amazon, the rain forest once covered ancient secrets. Spread across hundreds of thousands of acres are massive, geometric earthworks. The carvings stretch out in circles and squares that can be as big as a city block, with trenches up to 12 yards wide and 13 feet deep. They appear to have been built up to 2,000 years ago.
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“A lot of people have the idea that the Amazon forests are pristine forests, never touched by humans, and that’s obviously not the case.”
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Dr. Watling and her team reconstructed a 6,000-year-old environmental history of two geoglyph sites in the Amazon rain forest. To do this, they searched for clues in soil samples in and around the sites. Microscopic plant fossils called phytoliths told them about ancient vegetation. Bits of charcoal revealed evidence of burnings. And a kind of carbon dating gave them a sense of how open the vegetation had been in the past.
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Pollen Study Points to Culprit in Bronze Era Mystery - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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To the north lay the mighty Hittite empire; to the south, Egypt was thriving under the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Cyprus was a copper emporium. Greece basked in the opulence of its elite Mycenaean culture, and Ugarit was a bustling port city on the Syrian coast. In the land of Canaan, city states like Hazor and Megiddo flourished under Egyptian hegemony. Vibrant trade along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean connected it all.
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Experts have long pondered the cause of the crisis that led to the Late Bronze Age collapse of civilization, and now believe that by studying grains of fossilized pollen they have uncovered the cause.
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Theories have included patterns of warfare, plagues and earthquakes.
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Ecce Homo naledi | The Economist - 0 views
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a shift in palaeoanthropological wisdom. Evolution’s little experiments yield a many-branched tree and not just a timeline; physical features arise and disappear or persist in a way that frustrates efforts to define ancestry just on the basis of what old bones look like. As a result, the idea that there is one clear lineage from the australopithecines to humans via some small number of progressively more human-like ancestors must now be thrown out. And the more excavations are carried out far from eastern Africa, where most of the fossils underpinning our current understanding of the human family tree were dug up, the more diverse and interesting the human story will become.
Tree of Failure - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.
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every sensible person in public life also feels redeemed by others. You may write a mediocre column or make a mediocre speech or propose a mediocre piece of legislation, but others argue with you, correct you and introduce elements you never thought of. Each of these efforts may also be flawed, but together, if the system is working well, they move things gradually forward. Each individual step may be imbalanced, but in s
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Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation. They are useless without the conversation.
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Opinion | Athens in Pieces: The Stench of the Academy - The New York Times - 0 views
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Behind that fiction stands the library, the editing and copying rooms, and the entire research engine of the Academy, which was devoted to the careful production and dissemination of knowledge through texts and teaching. Much as we may flinch at the idea, philosophy has always been academic and linked to the activity of schools since its inception
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Plato was rich and had wealthy patrons and very probably wealthy students
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In fact, we don’t even know that he was called Plato, which might have been a nickname. Laertius claims that he was actually called Aristocles, after his grandfather. “Plato” is close to the word “broad” in Greek, like the broad leaves of the platanos or plane tree under which Socrates and Phaedrus sit and talk about eros. Some think that Plato was so called because he was broad-shouldered because of his prowess in wrestling.
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Pakistan moves to ban single-use plastic bags - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Each time someone in Pakistan runs out to the store for a carton of milk, a half-pound of loose sugar or an after-school snack, it comes in a flimsy plastic bag that usually gets thrown away
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If all those bags are added up, officials estimate, they total 55 billion a year. Easily torn and too weak to use again, they end up clogging city drains and sewers, piled up in vacant lots and parks, ingested by grazing goats and dogs foraging for food, and polluting canals and streams.
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all single-use polyethylene bags will be banned in the capital region of about 1.5 million people. Anyone who uses, sells or manufactures them will face a fine.
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Sucking carbon out of the air is no magic fix for the climate emergency | Simon Lewis | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views
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To have just a 50% chance of meeting the 1.5C means halving global emissions over the next decade and hitting “net zero” emissions by about 2050
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That means every sector of every country in the world needs to be, on average, zero emissions. That’s electricity, transport, industry, farming, the lot.
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there are some areas where zero emissions by 2050 is impossible. There will, for example, always be some emissions from the farming needed to feed more than 10 billion people this century
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Experts fear coronavirus will become a pandemic - The Washington Post - 0 views
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There are outbreaks. There are epidemics. And there are pandemics, where epidemics become rampant in multiple countries and continents simultaneously. The novel coronavirus that causes the disease named covid-19 is on the verge of that third, globe-shaking stage
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Amid an alarming surge in cases with no clear link to China, infectious disease experts believe the flulike illness may soon be impossible to contain
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the language coming from the organization’s Geneva headquarters has turned more ominous in recent days as the challenge of containment grows more daunting.
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