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Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet

The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.

A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions

While some African elephants parade across the savanna and thrill tourists on safari, others are more discreet. They stay hidden in the forests, eating fruit.

The threat of extinction has diminished the odds of spotting one of these wood-dwelling elephants in recent decades, according to a new I.U.C.N. Red List assessment of African elephants released Thursday. The Red List categorizes species by their risk of forever vanishing from the world. The new assessment is the first in which the conservation union treats Africa’s forest and savanna elephants as two species instead of one.

Led by Dr. Gobush, the assessment team gathered data from 495 sites across Africa. A statistical model let them use the elephant numbers from each site to see broader trends for both species.“We essentially looked at data from as far back as possible,” Dr. Gobush said. The I.U.C.N. aims for three generations of data to get a full picture of an animal’s well-being. But for the long-lived elephants, that’s a challenge. 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.

he number of insects is declining rapidly and 41% of bug species face extinction, scientists say.

"Three quarters of our crops depend on insect pollinators. Crops will begin to fail. We won't have things like strawberries," he told CNN."We can't feed 7.5 billion people without insects."

Pesticide reduction targets.

They’ve glued themselves to trains, blockaded major bridges, and chained themselves to government buildings

They’ve glued themselves to trains, blockaded major bridges, and chained themselves to government buildings

nonviolent civil disobedience is our only shot at countering the climate emergency.

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.

Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

Leatherback turtles are making exhausting journeys, in some cases nearly twice as long as usual, from nesting to feeding grounds, because of rising ocean temperatures and changing sea currents.

In another stark example of the dangers to marine life from human actions, one turtle followed was found dead on a beach in Suriname only 120km (74 miles) from the starting point, drowned after having become enmeshed in a discarded fishing net.

Warming oceans pose clear dangers to human life as they lead to more intense storms and rising sea levels, but the impact of the increasing frequency of heatwaves at sea on marine species is much less studied. There is evidence that some species, including commercially important fish such as cod, are migrating towards the poles in search of cooler waters, but more research is needed for a fuller picture.

Although historians differ on our most crucial presidential elections, four of them seem especially significant: those of 1800, 1860, 1932, and 1940. In 2007, Harvard historian Jill Lepore wrote that the 1800 election pitting John Adams against Thomas Jefferson “is the most important election in American history.” In 2012, another scholar, David Mayhew of Yale, considering various criteria, selected the election of 1860 as the most important one, followed by that of 1932. Finally, FDR scholar Paul Sparrow considers the 1940 election our most important: “If you step back and look at its impact on the world, no election was more important.”

But why these four? Regarding 1800, Lepore notes that the election “marked the first transition of power from one party to another. It led to the passage, in 1804, of the Twelfth Amendment, separating the election of Presidents and Vice-Presidents. . . . It might have—and should have—spelled the end of the Electoral College.” Mayhew concurs that 1800 “settled the point that the incumbent party would accept a loss and hand power over to the opposition--thus ensuring that we would continue to have elections

Lincoln’s 1860 election was followed by the Civil War and the end of slavery. If any of Lincoln’s three main opponentshad won, secession, the civil war, and the abolition of slavery would likely not have immediately followed

He was speaking in support of legislation he introduced on Thursday that aims to prohibit use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project, an initiative from the New York Times that reframes US history around August 1619 and the arrival of slave ships on American shores for the first time.

“The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project … is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable,” Cotton told the Democrat-Gazette.

He added: “We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as [Abraham] Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”

What people ate in colonial America largely depended on where they lived. Due to differences in climate, available natural resources and cultural heritage of the colonists themselves, the daily diet of a New Englander differed greatly from his counterparts in the Middle Colonies—New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware—and even more so from those in the South.

Though regional, seasonal and other differences make it difficult to generalize about a typical colonial diet, the following seven foods and beverages are a small sample of what might have been found on many colonial tables.

With its multicolored white, blue, red and brown hues, flint corn—also known as Indian corn—is one of the oldest varieties of corn. It was a staple food for Native Americans, who essentially saved the earliest colonists from starvation by teaching them how to plant the crop, when to harvest it and how to grind it into meal. Corn became a dietary staple across all 13 colonies, with cornmeal used in favorite recipes such as hasty pudding (corn boiled in milk) and johnnycakes, a fortifying and highly portable food similar to pancakes

Scientists have revealed a surprisingly complex origin of our species, rejecting the long-held argument that modern humans arose from one place in Africa during one period in time.

By analyzing the genomes of 290 living people, researchers concluded that modern humans descended from at least two populations that coexisted in Africa for a million years before merging in several independent events across the continent.

“There is no single birthplace,”

It’s also dubbed a “supervolcano” — a rare but unofficial label given to those that have produced the most intense eruptions in Earth’s history. Camp Flegrei’s super outburst occurred around 39,000 years ago (determined through rock records) and spewed gases and nearly a trillion gallons of molten rock, blocking sunlight and triggering intense cooling

The most recent eruption, much smaller, occurred in 1538 and created a roughly 120-meter-tall mound.

recent months of earthquake activity at Campi Flegrei — more than 2,500 earthquakes as intense as a 4.3-magnitude since September — has stirred concerns that the volcano could super-strike again soon.

Ezra Klein, who devoted his weekend column to arguing for an optimistic, life-affirming response to the challenges of rising temperatures.

I endorse my colleague’s argument unreservedly, especially his reasonable historical perspective on how the risks of a hotter future compare to the far more impoverished and brutal straits in which our ancestors chose life for their children and, ultimately, for us

In worrying about hypothetical kids faring badly under climate change, the secular imagination is letting itself be steered toward the harsh analysis of Blaise Pascal:Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men.

Ezra Klein, has done some of the most dedicated reporting on the topic since he moved to the Bay Area a few years ago, talking with many of the people creating this new technology.

one is that the people building these systems have only a limited sense of what’s actually happening inside the black box—the bot is doing endless calculations instantaneously, but not in a way even their inventors can actually follow

an obvious question, one Klein has asked: “’If you think calamity so possible, why do this at all?

To hear Bankman-Fried tell it, the idea was to make billions through his crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, and FTX, the exchange he created for it — funneling the proceeds into the humble cause of “bed nets and malaria,” thereby saving poor people’s lives.

ast summer Bankman-Fried was telling The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus something quite different. “He told me that he never had a bed-nets phase, and considered neartermist causes — global health and poverty — to be more emotionally driven,” Lewis-Kraus wrote in August. Effective altruists talk about both “neartermism” and “longtermism.

Bankman-Fried said he wanted his money to address longtermist threats like the dangers posed by artificial intelligence spiraling out of control. As he put it, funding for the eradication of tropical diseases should come from other people who actually cared about tropical diseases: “Like, not me or something.”

The human species Homo erectus evolved out of earlier human forms 1.8 million years ago and survived until 143,000 years ago. He and she walked on two feet and used tools and gradually spread over Africa and western and eastern Asia. Out of Homo erectus evolved, it is thought, Homo heidelbergensis. This common ancestor of both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens existed from 400,000 to 350,000 years ago. Homo heidelbergensis used fire and was the first to build shelters as opposed to just finding shelter, although they did that too. The European branch of Homo heidelbergensis evolved into the Neandertals 300,000 or more years ago. The Neandertals were big-bodied, light-skinned, cold-adapted humans. Some, at least, were redheads. The African branch of Homo heidelbergensis evolved into Homo sapiens—us—200,000 years ago. We were slighter-bodied. We had narrower hips and darker skin

Homo sapiens began moving out of Africa to the Near East 40,000 years ago. There they encountered a southern remnant of Neandertals. Most of that species had long since gone extinct. But we shared the region for 15,000 years, until the Neandertals disappeared.

Contrary to previous suppositions and speculations, Neandertals ate a varied diet including not only large mammals like mammoths but also birds, rabbits, and seafood. They possessed the “language gene,” just as we do, and likely communicated in some sort of language. They manufactured tools, although not in as great a variety as we did. They decorated their bodies and wore jewelry—an index of symbolic cognition. They likely adorned themselves with feathers.

Hawking told the audience that Earth's cataclysmic end may be hastened by humankind, which will continue to devour the planet’s resources at unsustainable rates

“Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”

“I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” Hawking told the BBC in a 2014 interview that touched upon everything from online privacy to his affinity for his robotic-sounding voice.

how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences.

Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age

In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

Conservative talk-show hosts, who stoke right-wing populism for a living, reacted very differently. Sean Hannity appeared in one of Trump’s campaign videos. Laura Ingraham spoke at the Republican National Convention. Rush Limbaugh declared in March that, “with the case of Trump, there’s a much bigger upside than downside.” In July, Hugh Hewitt wrote, “Of course I am voting for Donald Trump.”

Even the most moralistic conservative talkers—including William Bennett and Dennis Prager, who have made careers of arguing that private character is key to political leadership—endorsed Trump. Mark Levin, who hosts a popular show on the Westwood One radio network, vowed not to. “Count me as Never Trump,” he declared in April. But in September he announced, “I’m voting for Trump.”

Among big-time national conservative talk-show hosts, Beck—who is tied with Levin for the third-largest listenership after Limbaugh and Hannity—was a rare exception. He didn’t just oppose Trump. He compared him to Hitler. He warned that Trump was a possible “extinction-level event” for American democracy and capitalism.