Joe Biden is poised to name Antony Blinken as his secretary of state on Tuesday,
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Why Biden's secretary of state pick tells us a lot about his priorities as president - ... - 0 views
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There's no set order to these things, of course, but it is absolutely purposeful and therefore noteworthy that Biden is not only leading his Cabinet announcements with the nation's top diplomat but also that he is doing it so early in his transition.
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"You're going to see the first of the President-elect's cabinet appointments on Tuesday of this week. Meeting the pace -- beating, in fact, the pace that was set by the Obama/Biden transition, beating the pace set by the Trump transition."
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Fixing America's standing in the world -- after four years of President Trump fighting our traditional allies and making nice with our longtime enemies -- is absolutely urgent. There's no time to waste.
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The primacy of the secretary of state pick is meant to send that message not just to the federal bureaucracy, but, more importantly, to the world community.
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The last four years are an aberration. It is not who we will be.Read More .duval-3{width:100%;position: relative; border: 1px solid #979797; border-left: none; border-right: none;padding: 20px 0; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; -moz-box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0 0 20px 0; max-width: 660px;} .duval-3 a{color: #1a1a1a; text-decoration: none;font-size: 0;} .duval-3 a:hover { color: #d9d9d9; text-decoration: underline; -moz-text-decoration-color: #d9d9d9; text-decoration-color: #d9d9d9; } .duval-3>a>*{vertical-align: top; display: inline-block;} .duval-3>a>div{display: inline-block; font-size:1.0666667rem;width: 80%; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 2%;} .duval-3>a>img{width: 18%; height: auto;} @media screen and (max-width:640px){ .duval-3>a>*{display:block; margin: auto;} .duval-3>a>div{width: 100%;} .duval-3>a>img{width: 50%;} }
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He, like Klain, has deep roots with Biden. He served as staff director at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden chaired it.
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And like Klain, he is a longtime Democratic policy hand. Blinken served in the Clinton administration as special assistant to the president and chief foreign policy speechwriter for the president. close dialogSign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sCNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1219472 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1219472 *//* custom css from creative 47804 */@-ms-keyframes bx-anim-1219472-spin { from { -ms-transform: rotate(0deg); } to { -ms-transform: rotate(360deg); } } @-moz-keyframes bx-anim-1219472-spin { from { -moz-transform: rotate(0deg); } to { -moz-transform: rotate(360deg); } } @-webkit-keyframes bx-anim-1219472-spin { from { -webkit-transform: rotate(0deg); } to { -webkit-transform: rotate(360deg); } } @keyframes bx-anim-1219472-spin { from { transform: rotate(0deg); } to { transform: rotate(360deg); } }/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1219472 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;padding: 15px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 400px;}}@media all and (min-width: 737px) and (max-width: 1024px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 737px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 230px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {background-color: #fefefe;border-style: solid;border-color: rgb(213, 213, 213);border-width: 1px 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 20px;stroke: rgb(169, 169, 169);}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-group-1219472-tBtYNNU {width: 100%;padding: 0px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-group-1219472-tBtYNNU {padding: 0px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-vnxQeDA> *:first-child {font-weight: 700;font-size: 18px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-vnxQeDA> *:first-child {font-size: 14px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-group-1219472-zNZm3ba {width: auto;height: 100px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-bWybe9u {width: 254px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-bWybe9u {width: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-bWybe9u> *:first-child {height: 100px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-group-1219472-9wCndcV {width: 300px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-XG1hSFu {padding: 0px 0px 20px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-XG1hSFu {width: auto;padding: 0 0 15px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-XG1hSFu> *:first-child {font-size: 14px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;color: #262626;letter-spacing: 0.01em
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Blinken is a striking contrast to Trump's first secretary of state, former Exxon boss Rex Tillerson, who Trump touted as the crown jewel of his Cabinet but who proved ineffective at building relationships within the State Department or with the President.
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The Blinken pick -- and Biden's decision to name him first among his Cabinet choices -- is best understood, then, as the President-elect doing everything he can to make clear that he will be the exact opposite of the man who preceded him in office.
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If Trump ran and governed as the anti-Barack Obama, then Biden is signaling that he will govern as the anti-Trump. And the wheel turns.
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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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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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Growing evidence points to a connection between destructive environmental practices and emerging diseases.
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Of more than 330 diseases which emerged between 1940 and 2004, nearly two-thirds were zoonotic, meaning they were transmitted from animals to humans, as with, for example, HIV/AIDS and probably covid-19.
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Replacing old-growth forests with a single crop, such as oil palm, can also lead to the transmission of disease. If predators’ habitats are destroyed and their populations dwindle, other creatures such as rodents, mosquitoes, bats and some primates can proliferate.
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scientists are increasingly turning their attention to how altering land interferes with a pathogen’s journey from animals to humans
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correlation between the loss of forests in west and central Africa and outbreaks of Ebola between 2004 and 2014
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Cutting down trees may also increase the threat to humans posed by viral infections transmitted through mosquito bites, such as Zika, dengue and chikungunya.
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link between changes in global forest cover between 1990 and 2016 and an increase in reported epidemics, even accounting for the fact that deforestation usually means more humans living nearby
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These harbour potentially zoonotic pathogens and tend to cluster in places where they will be more frequently exposed to humans and livestock. Rodents, for example, often inhabit the border areas between newly created pastures and forests.
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Wildlife may also move towards human settlements in search of food. Mango trees planted on pig farms in Malaysia probably attracted fruit bats carrying nipah, a virus that infected local pig farmers in 1999 and still breaks out yearly in Bangladesh.
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Wise Animals by Tom Chatfield 2024. A Review and a Perplexity.AI Experiment. | by Rob T... - 0 views
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Chatfield's background in philosophy and his keen interest in the digital world have positioned him as a thought leader in the field. He has published several books exploring various aspects of digital culture,
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In his latest book, "Wise Animals," Chatfield delves into the complex relationship between humans and technology, tracing our co-evolution from early tool usage and fire to the present day.
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aims to provide a fresh perspective on how innovation has shaped our world and how technology continues to influence us
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One of the key themes in "Wise Animals" is the idea that technology is far from neutral. Chatfield argues that the way innovation has progressed was not the only possible path and that we must keep an open mind about the possibilities
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BBC News - US black rhino hunter Corey Knowlton faces death threats - 0 views
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A Texas hunter who won an auction to hunt and kill an endangered black rhino in Namibia has said he has received death threats from animal lovers
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Corey Knowlton bid $350,000 (£212,000) for a permit auctioned by the Dallas Safari Club, which said it would help fund future conservation.
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"No, it is a scientific process and we're going to make sure we get the ones that are causing the most problem."
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But he said those criticising him had failed to understand that the idea behind the hunt was to target an old, non-breeding male rhino that was endangering the rest of the herd.
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Mr Knowlton said his name had been posted on Facebook and threats had been made to harm both him and his children.
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Namibia issues three hunting permits per year, and this is the first time an auction has been held outside the southern African nation. However, tens of thousands of people signed online petitions against the auction, and animal rights groups condemned as "perverse" claims that the hunt was really about conservation.
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The money raised from the 11 January auction will go to the Namibian government and will be earmarked for conservation projects, according to the Dallas Safari Club.
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"It takes money for these animals to exist. A lot of people don't recognise that," club executive Ben Carter told NPR radio.
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Namibia's plan: Pay off poachers, save wildlife - 0 views
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Many animals inhabiting the communal lands of Namibia were critically endangered until the 1980s, when a radical revolution of thought took place in the minds of the poachers: "turning poachers into stewards of land and wildlife transformed situation," increasing wildlife numbers and reversing the situation of endangered animals.
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Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer - The New York Times - 0 views
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He worries that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and ushering in a dystopian hellscape in which voting is obsolete.
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He worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will.
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He worries that because the technological revolution’s work requires so few laborers, Silicon Valley is creating a tiny ruling class and a teeming, furious “useless class.”
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When Mr. Harari toured the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was incongruously joyful. Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, threw him a dinner party. The leaders of X, Alphabet’s secretive research division, invited Mr. Harari over. Bill Gates reviewed the book (“Fascinating” and “such a stimulating writer”) in The New York Times.
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it’s insane he’s so popular, they’re all inviting him to campus — yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,
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Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else
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he brought up Aldous Huxley. Generations have been horrified by his novel “Brave New World,” which depicts a regime of emotion control and painless consumption. Readers who encounter the book today, Mr. Harari said, often think it sounds great. “Everything is so nice, and in that way it is an intellectually disturbing book because you’re really hard-pressed to explain what’s wrong with it,” he said. “And you do get today a vision coming out of some people in Silicon Valley which goes in that direction.”
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The story of his current fame begins in 2011, when he published a book of notable ambition: to survey the whole of human existence. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” first released in Hebrew, did not break new ground in terms of historical research. Nor did its premise — that humans are animals and our dominance is an accident — seem a likely commercial hit. But the casual tone and smooth way Mr. Harari tied together existing knowledge across fields made it a deeply pleasing read, even as the tome ended on the notion that the process of human evolution might be over.
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He followed up with “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” which outlined his vision of what comes after human evolution. In it, he describes Dataism, a new faith based around the power of algorithms. Mr. Harari’s future is one in which big data is worshiped, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and some humans develop Godlike abilities.
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Now, he has written a book about the present and how it could lead to that future: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.” It is meant to be read as a series of warnings. His recent TED Talk was called “Why fascism is so tempting — and how your data could power it.”
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At the Alphabet talk, Mr. Harari had been accompanied by his publisher. They said that the younger employees had expressed concern about whether their work was contributing to a less free society, while the executives generally thought their impact was positive
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Some workers had tried to predict how well humans would adapt to large technological change based on how they have responded to small shifts, like a new version of Gmail. Mr. Harari told them to think more starkly: If there isn’t a major policy intervention, most humans probably will not adapt at all.
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It made him sad, he told me, to see people build things that destroy their own societies, but he works every day to maintain an academic distance and remind himself that humans are just animals. “Part of it is really coming from seeing humans as apes, that this is how they behave,” he said, adding, “They’re chimpanzees. They’re sapiens. This is what they do.”
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this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Mr. Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. “Basically,” Mr. Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.”
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He said he had resigned himself to tech executives’ global reign, pointing out how much worse the politicians are. “I’ve met a number of these high-tech giants, and generally they’re good people,” he said. “They’re not Attila the Hun. In the lottery of human leaders, you could get far worse.”
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Some of his tech fans, he thinks, come to him out of anxiety. “Some may be very frightened of the impact of what they are doing,” Mr. Harari said
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as he spoke about meditation — Mr. Harari spends two hours each day and two months each year in silence — he became commanding. In a region where self-optimization is paramount and meditation is a competitive sport, Mr. Harari’s devotion confers hero status.
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He told the audience that free will is an illusion, and that human rights are just a story we tell ourselves. Political parties, he said, might not make sense anymore. He went on to argue that the liberal world order has relied on fictions like “the customer is always right” and “follow your heart,” and that these ideas no longer work in the age of artificial intelligence, when hearts can be manipulated at scale.
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Everyone in Silicon Valley is focused on building the future, Mr. Harari continued, while most of the world’s people are not even needed enough to be exploited. “Now you increasingly feel that there are all these elites that just don’t need me,” he said. “And it’s much worse to be irrelevant than to be exploited.”
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The useless class he describes is uniquely vulnerable. “If a century ago you mounted a revolution against exploitation, you knew that when bad comes to worse, they can’t shoot all of us because they need us,” he said, citing army service and factory work.
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Now it is becoming less clear why the ruling elite would not just kill the new useless class. “You’re totally expendable,” he told the audience.
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This, Mr. Harari told me later, is why Silicon Valley is so excited about the concept of universal basic income, or stipends paid to people regardless of whether they work. The message is: “We don’t need you. But we are nice, so we’ll take care of you.”
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On Sept. 14, he published an essay in The Guardian assailing another old trope — that “the voter knows best.”
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“If humans are hackable animals, and if our choices and opinions don’t reflect our free will, what should the point of politics be?” he wrote. “How do you live when you realize … that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? These are the most interesting questions humanity now faces.”
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Today, they have a team of eight based in Tel Aviv working on Mr. Harari’s projects. The director Ridley Scott and documentarian Asif Kapadia are adapting “Sapiens” into a TV show, and Mr. Harari is working on children’s books to reach a broader audience.
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Being gay, Mr. Harari said, has helped his work — it set him apart to study culture more clearly because it made him question the dominant stories of his own conservative Jewish society. “If society got this thing wrong, who guarantees it didn’t get everything else wrong as well?” he said
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“If I was a superhuman, my superpower would be detachment,” Mr. Harari added. “O.K., so maybe humankind is going to disappear — O.K., let’s just observe.”
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They just finished “Dear White People,” and they loved the Australian series “Please Like Me.” That night, they had plans to either meet Facebook executives at company headquarters or watch the YouTube show “Cobra Kai.”
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This Roman 'gate to hell' killed its victims with a cloud of deadly carbon dioxide | Sc... - 0 views
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a deep fissure running beneath Hierapolis constantly emits volcanic carbon dioxide (CO2), which pours forth as a visible mist
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Sacrificial animals were not tall enough to keep their heads fully clear of the CO2 lake, and as they became dizzy, their heads would have dropped even lower, exposing them to higher CO2 concentrations and leading to death by asphyxiation. The priests, however, were tall enough to keep their heads above the dangerous gasses, and may have even stood on stones to add to their height
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The new findings are "tremendously exciting," says Gil Renberg, a classicist who researches Greek and Roman religious beliefs at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. "This scientific information proves the veracity of ancient sources and helps explain not only why people could enter, but also why animals would die." It's likely that at least some of the other Plutoniums worked in the same way. Renberg thinks the chemical survey methods used by Pfanz and his team could help provide a firmer idea of the exact location of the gate to hell at a site called Akaraka, also in modern-day Turkey.
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Avoiding meat and dairy is 'single biggest way' to reduce your impact on Earth | Enviro... - 0 views
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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
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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.
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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
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Dr Peter Alexander, at the University of Edinburgh, UK, was also impressed but noted: “There may be environmental benefits, eg for biodiversity, from sustainably managed grazing and increasing animal product consumption may improve nutrition for some of the poorest globally. My personal opinion is we should interpret these results not as the need to become vegan overnight, but rather to moderate our [meat] consumption.” Poore said: “The reason I started this project was to understand if there were sustainable animal producers out there. But I have stopped consuming animal products over the last four years of this project. These impacts are not necessary to sustain our current way of life. The question is how much can we reduce them and the answer is a lot.”
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Dolphin 'happiness' measured by scientists in France - BBC News - 0 views
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Scientists working with dolphins at a marine park near Paris have attempted to measure how the animals feel about aspects of their lives in captivity.
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With colleagues at the University of Paris animal behaviour lab, she designed experiments to decode dolphin behaviour - essentially looking for physical postures that indicate how the animals were feeling.
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The lifting of that ban was a huge relief for Birgitta Mercera, who runs the dolphinarium. She told the BBC that allowing the dolphins to breed, to raise their own offspring, was a critical part of what she suggested was a happy - though very different - life from that in the wild.
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According to the UK charity Whale and Dolphin Conservation, there are at least 3,000 cetaceans - the group of "toothed whales" that dolphins belong to - in captivity in 50 countries around the world.
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In addition, in the more than 150 years since the first whales and dolphins were brought from the wild and into aquariums, scientists have learned a huge amount about their intelligence and complex social lives.
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Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground - Washington Post - 0 views
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Siberia has warmed up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. Scientists say the planet's warming must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius — but Siberia's temperatures have already spiked far beyond that.
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the region near the town of Zyryanka, in an enormous wedge of eastern Siberia called Yakutia, has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times — roughly triple the global average.
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The permafrost that once sustained farming — and upon which villages and cities are built — is in the midst of a great thaw, blanketing the region with swamps, lakes and odd bubbles of earth that render the land virtually useless.
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For the 5.4 million people who live in Russia’s permafrost zone, the new climate has disrupted their homes and their livelihoods. Rivers are rising and running faster, and entire neighborhoods are falling into them. Arable land for farming has plummeted by more than half, to just 120,000 acres in 2017.
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As the permafrost thaws, animals and plants frozen for thousands of years begin to decompose and send a steady flow of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere — accelerating climate change.
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Siberians who grew up learning to read nature’s subtlest signals are being driven to migrate by a climate they no longer understand.
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This migration from the countryside to cities and towns — also driven by factors such as low investment and spotty Internet — represents one of the most significant and little-noticed movements to date of climate refugees. The city of Yakutsk has seen its population surge 20 percent to more than 300,000 in the past decade.
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In Yakutia, an area one-third the size of the United States, cattle and reindeer herding have plunged 20 percent as the animals increasingly battle to survive the warming climate’s destruction of pastureland.
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Winters, though still brutal, turned milder — and shorter. Fed by the more rapidly thawing permafrost, rivers started flooding more, leaving some communities inaccessible for months and washing others away, along with the ground beneath them.
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ornithologists in the region have identified 48 new bird species in the past half century, an increase of almost 20 percent in the known diversity of bird life.
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“It used to be man was in control,” said Pyotr Kaurgin, head of the Chukchi indigenous community in the village of Kolymskoye, on the northern reaches of the Kolyma River. “Now nature is in control.”
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Formed during the late Pleistocene, the Earth’s last glacial period, which ended about 11,700 years ago, Yedoma consists of thick layers of soil packed around gigantic lodes of embedded ice. Because Yedoma contains so much ice, it can melt quickly — reshaping the landscape as sudden lakes form and hillsides collapse.
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In the summer, huge blazes tore through Siberian boreal forests, unleashing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Some scientists fear worsening northern fires are amplifying the permafrost damage.
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on the Yamal Peninsula, monstrous craters have opened up in the tundra. Scientists suspect they represent sudden explosions of methane gas freed by thawing permafrost.
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Due to thawing permafrost — along with the demise of Soviet-era state farms — the area of cultivated land in Yakutia has plummeted by more than half since 1990. The region’s cattle herds have shrunk by about 20 percent, to 188,100 head in 2017 from 233,300 in 2011. Reindeer herds have also declined sharply
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he degradation of crop and pastureland caused by the thawing permafrost helped bring about the collapse of the region’s agriculture.
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Yegor Prokopyev, the retired head of Nelemnoye, says climate change is the latest shock to befall the Kolyma River region. There was communism and forced collective farming. Then capitalism and government cutbacks.
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. The radical transformation underway here, she said, should serve as a warning to people in every corner of the globe. “Changing our ways is imminent,” Crate said.
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The town of Zyryanka has warmed by just over 2 degrees Celsius from 1966 to 2016, according to their analysis.
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The Post’s analysis, which uses a data set from Berkeley Earth, looks further back. It shows that Zyryanka and the roughly 2,000-square-mile area surrounding it has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius when the past five years are compared with the mid- to late 1800s.
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From 2005 to 2014, his team found, the number of days with below-freezing temperatures three feet below the surface fell from around 230 days a year to 190.
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“The permafrost is thawing so fast,” said Anna Liljedahl, an associate professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “We scientists can’t keep up anymore.”
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In the 1970s, Desyatkin said, the ground in the Middle Kolyma District, just north of Zyryanka, thawed to a depth of about two feet every summer. Now it thaws to more than three feet. That extra foot of thawing means that, on average, every square mile of territory has been releasing an additional 700,000 gallons of water into the environment every year
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Meanwhile, ancient plant and animal remains trapped inside the Yedoma are exposed to nonfreezing temperatures — or even the open air. That, in turn, activates microbes, which break down the remains and unleash carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, especially from the thawing plant material.
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Scientists estimate that the Earth’s Yedoma regions contain between 327 billion and 466 billion tons of carbon. Were it all released into the atmosphere, that would amount to more than half of all human-caused emissions from greenhouse gases and deforestation between 1750 and 2011
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As the permafrost thaws and riverbanks erode, more tusks will emerge. Though mammoths disappeared from the Siberian mainland some 10,000 years ago, the government estimates that 500,000 tons of their tusks are still buried in the frozen ground.
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Supply and demand are so great that some people are collecting mammoth tusks at near-industrial scale. They use high-pressure hoses to blast away riverbanks and hire teams of young men to comb the wilderness for months at a time.
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. In the glutted market, Sivtsev said, the price for top-quality tusks has fallen from about $500 a pound five years ago to around $180.
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climate change is leaving people with few choices. “They have to somehow support and feed their families.”
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The ducks and geese are just about gone, he said, possibly moving to new habitats in Siberia as the climate shifts. The sable pelts aren’t as thick as they used to be. The shorter winters mean that once reliably frozen-over lakes and rivers are now less predictable, making hunting grounds harder to reach and restricting his ability to get goods to market.
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In Nelemnoye, the population has declined to 180 from 210 in the past decade, according to village head Andrei Solntsev. Just 82 of the residents have work. Many factors are pushing people to move to the city — lack of Internet access, poor flight connections, limited job opportunities — but the uncertainty born of a changing climate looms over everything
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As the permafrost thaws and recedes, a handful of apartment buildings there are showing signs of structural problems. Sections of many older, wooden buildings already sag toward the ground — rendered uninhabitable by the unevenly thawing earth. New apartment blocks are being built on massive pylons extending ever deeper — more than 40 feet — below ground
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a study published this year that the value of buildings and infrastructure on Russian permafrost amounts to $300 billion — about 7.5 percent of the nation’s total annual economic output. They estimate the cost of mitigating the damage wrought by thawing permafrost will probably total more than $100 billion by 2050.
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Next Pandemic: Scientists Worry That Another Coronavirus Will Spill Over : Goats and So... - 0 views
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When the pandemic began last year, scientists went looking for the origins of the coronavirus. Right away, they made a huge discovery. It looked like the virus jumped from a bat into humans.Now, scientists are worried that another coronavirus will strike again, from either a bat or some other animal. So they've gone hunting for potential sources — and the news is a bit concerning.
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This past year, Holmes and his colleagues trapped several hundred bats in a tiny section of the Yunnan province in southern China — an area about the size of Los Angeles International Airport. They took samples of the bats' saliva, urine and feces. Then they looked for coronavirus genes inside the samples. What they found surprised him.
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Holmes and his team found that the bats harbored 24 new coronaviruses, including four closely related to the virus that causes COVID-19, or SARS-CoV-2, and three viruses closely related to SARS-CoV, which caused a smaller outbreak back in 2003.
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On top of that, Holmes says, the bat species carrying these viruses are common across most of Southeast Asia. "So imagine if you ran our experiment across the whole of Southeast Asia. You'd find an amazing diversity of coronaviruses," Holmes says. "And there's just an enormous number of them."
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And depending on how you define a virus species, Holmes says, there are likely thousands of different coronaviruses all around the world. "We're only just starting to scratch the surface," he says. "The virusphere of coronaviruses is just immense."
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In one area, they found that nearly 3% of people had been infected with an unknown coronavirus in the past few years. "
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If you expand those findings to all parts of Southeast Asia where people are exposed to these bats, Daszak estimates that more than a million people are infected with unknown coronaviruses each year.
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"It's happening every day," Daszak says. "I look at the spillover event a bit like rain or snow. These viruses are getting into and trickling across our populations."
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But each one gives the virus the opportunity to adapt and spread more easily from person to person. Every once in a while, a contagious virus infects a person who finds their way to a dense city, such as Wuhan.
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"Coronavirus pandemics are not a once in a hundred year event. "The next one could come at any time. It could come in 50 years or in 10 years. Or it could be next year."
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Sperm whales in 19th century shared ship attack information | Whales | The Guardian - 0 views
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research addresses an age-old question: if whales are so smart, why did they hang around to be killed? The answer? They didn’t
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Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years, the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. This simple fact leads to an astonishing conclusion: that information about what was happening to them was being collectively shared among the whales, who made vital changes to their behaviour. As their culture made fatal first contact with ours, they learned quickly from their mistakes.
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Before humans, orca were their only predators, against whom sperm whales form defensive circles, their powerful tails held outwards to keep their assailants at bay. But such techniques “just made it easier for the whalers to slaughter them”, says Whitehead.
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Their culture is matrilinear, and information about the new dangers may have been passed on in the same way whale matriarchs share knowledge about feeding grounds.
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Sperm whales are highly socialised animals, able to communicate over great distances. They associate in clans defined by the dialect pattern of their sonar clicks
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It was a frighteningly rapid killing, and it accompanied other threats to the ironically named Pacific. From whaling and sealing stations to missionary bases, western culture was imported to an ocean that had remained largely untouched
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Sperm whales also possess the largest brain on the planet. It is not hard to imagine that they understood what was happening to them.
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The hunters themselves realised the whales’ efforts to escape. They saw that the animals appeared to communicate the threat within their attacked groups. Abandoning their usual defensive formations, the whales swam upwind to escape the hunters’ ships, themselves wind-powered. ‘This was cultural evolution, much too fast for genetic evolution,’
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Now, just as whales are beginning to recover from the industrial destruction by 20th-century whaling fleets – whose steamships and grenade harpoons no whale could evade – they face new threats created by our technology. ‘They’re having to learn not to get hit by ships, cope with the depredations of longline fishing, the changing source of their food due to climate change,’ says Whitehead
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Whitehead and Randall have written persuasively of whale culture, expressed in localised feeding techniques as whales adapt to shifting sources, or in subtle changes in humpback song whose meaning remains mysterious. The same sort of urgent social learning the animals experienced in the whale wars of two centuries ago is reflected in the way they negotiate today’s uncertain world and what we’ve done to it.
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human evolution | Stages & Timeline | Britannica.com - 0 views
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Viewed zoologically, we humans are Homo sapiens, a culture-bearing upright-walking species that lives on the ground and very likely first evolved in Africa about 315,000 years ago.
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the exact nature of our evolutionary relationships has been the subject of debate and investigation since the great British naturalist Charles Darwin published his monumental books On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871).
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In fact, the human “family tree” may be better described as a “family bush,” within which it is impossible to connect a full chronological series of species, leading to Homo sapiens, that experts can agree upon.
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In devising such scenarios and filling in the human family bush, researchers must consult a large and diverse array of fossils, and they must also employ refined excavation methods and records, geochemical dating techniques, and data from other specialized fields such as genetics, ecology and paleoecology, and ethology (animal behaviour)—in short, all the tools of the multidisciplinary science of paleoanthropology.
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It is generally agreed that the taproot of the human family shrub is to be found among apelike species of the Middle Miocene Epoch (roughly 16–11.6 mya) or Late Miocene Epoch (11.6–5.3 mya). Genetic data based on molecular clock estimates support a Late Miocene ancestry. Various Eurasian and African Miocene primates have been advocated as possible ancestors to the early hominins, which came on the scene during the Pliocene Epoch (5.3–2.6 mya)
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'Frightening' number of plant extinctions found in global survey | Environment | The Gu... - 0 views
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Human destruction of the living world is causing a “frightening” number of plant extinctions, according to scientists who have completed the first global analysis of the issue.
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“Plants underpin all life on Earth,” said Dr Eimear Nic Lughadha, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who was part of the team. “They provide the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat, as well as making up the backbone of the world’s ecosystems – so plant extinction is bad news for all species.”
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The number of plants that have disappeared from the wild is more than twice the number of extinct birds, mammals and amphibians combined. The new figure is also four times the number of extinct plants recorded in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list.
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There are thousands of “living dead” plant species, where the last survivors have no chance of reproducing because, for example, only one sex remains or the big animals needed to spread their seeds are extinct.
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ew species a year. A sixth mass extinction of life on Earth is under way, according to some scientists. A landmark report in May said human society was in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems, with 1 million species of plants and animals at risk of extinction.
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mong the other plants lost are the Chile sandalwood, exploited into oblivion for its aromatic wood, and the Saint Helena olive, the last two specimens of which succumbed to a termite attack and fungal infections in 2003.
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“We suffer from plant blindness. Animals are cute, important and diverse but I am absolutely shocked how a similar level of awareness and interest is missing for plants. We take them for granted and I don’t think we should.”
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Gorillas at Zoo in San Diego Test Positive for Coronavirus - The New York Times - 0 views
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Several gorillas at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park have tested positive for the coronavirus, becoming what federal officials said on Monday were the first known apes in the nation to be infected.
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gorillas were infected by an asymptomatic staff member who had been following safety recommendations, including wearing personal protective equipment when near animals.
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The gorillas in San Diego are among the latest animals to become infected with the coronavirus, which has killed more than 375,000 people in the United States, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
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Inevitable Planetary Doom Has Been Exaggerated - The Atlantic - 0 views
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pocalypse often feels inevitable. After all, aren’t we in the “sixth mass extinction”? Haven’t populations of wild animals already crashed by 60 percent? Don’t we have just “10 years left” to avert climate meltdown? Do we really dare to hope?
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But to cause an extinction event on the scale of those seen millions of years ago, in which more than 75 percent of species disappeared, we would have to lose all our threatened species within a century and then keep losing species at that same super-high rate for between 240 and 540 more years. In other words, the concept assumes that we won’t save anything, ever, and that hundreds of years into the future, we will still be as inept at protecting biodiversity as we are now.
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That’s just not true. As of today, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, the conservation status of 128,918 species has been assessed. Of those, 902 have gone extinct since the year 1500. This is absolutely too many. One is too many.
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this study actually looked at the average decline of a given population (not species) of wild animal. So severe declines in small populations disproportionately increase the average decline.
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You might have also heard that we’ve lost something like 60 percent of wild animals since the 1970s? Surely this suggests that a lot more extinctions are imminent?
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More recently, a new analysis of the data showed that, indeed, the 60 percent average decline was driven by very severe crashes in a very small number of vertebrate populations. For example, one small population of Australian waterfall frogs declined 99.5 percent over two years. This decline became one data point, which was averaged with 14,000 others, many from stable or increasing populations.
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This means that declines are not the rule everywhere. It means that the specific populations in crisis can be identified and helped. And we have the knowledge to save them, if we can marshal the will and resources.
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This targeted approach works for environmental policy too. The Trump administration pushed for more than 100 rollbacks of pollution standards, land protections, and other green policies,
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Jill Tauber, the vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice, told me that her organization has more than 100 lawsuits pending against the Trump administration and that so far, once cases pass any procedural hurdles, her side is winning more than 80 percent of them
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The U.S. could spend about what it already spends on energy—a mere 4 to 6 percent of gross domestic product—and still reach this goal, according to a new report out of Princeton University.
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as the cost of key technologies such as solar panels and batteries has fallen, the price tag to move the country to net-zero emissions by 2050—as President Joe Biden has pledged—has also dropped
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The necessary changes would have to start immediately, and they aren’t minor. Visualize a huge build-out of solar, wind, and transmission lines, for starters
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What they need to be able to say clearly to politicians is: ‘I value this; this is an important priority to me.’
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On Wednesday, Biden signed an executive order on climate, which sets a goal of conserving at least 30 percent of the country by 2030, launches a Civilian Climate Corps, and hits pause on fossil-fuel development on public lands
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Jenkins also rejects the idea that if we fail to keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, the key target in an influential United Nations report, all is lost. “Any time you see a round number like 2.0 or 1.5 or 20 percent by 2020, that is a political number,” he said. “The reality is that every 10th of a degree matters.” There is no threshold after which it is not worth fighting.
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climate change and extinction have been ongoing problems for as long as many of us can remember, feeling that they’re impossible to engage with right now is only natural.
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But many of our problems are so thoroughly tangled up with one another that we may not need to fight them separately.
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So fighting for racial or economic justice, or against voter suppression, still can mean fighting for the environment.
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Not everything can be saved. But 2021 can be better than 2020, and 2031 can be much, much better than 2021, if we demand it.
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U.S. government scientists announced that 2020 was one of the two hottest years in recorded history. The other hottest year was 2016: fittingly, the year that the United States elected Donald Trump president, a disaster for the environment as well as democratic norms
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scientists sounding the alarm about high extinction rates, and in the years that followed, the idea that we are in the midst of one of the planet’s greatest mass-extinction events
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One very good reason to feel overwhelmed is that everything seems screwed up at once. As a country, we’re facing climate change, the pandemic, racial injustice, the threat of dangerous fascist elements
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Environmental destruction disproportionately harms people of color and lower-income people. And people of color are, on average, significantly more concerned about climate change than white people. A leading cause of inaction on climate change is the hoarding of power by some of the world’s wealthiest people, who profit from planetary destruction that they don’t have to deal with personally. They can simply crank up the air conditioner, pay more for the last remaining champagne and oysters, or fly to their New Zealand bunker, so they have no incentive to change unsustainable systems that they benefit from. When political power is more fairly distributed, the environment will benefit.
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shared by Javier E on 21 Jul 20
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'Friendliest,' not fittest, is key to evolutionary survival, scientists argue in book -... - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...a-a99f-3bbdffb1af38_story.html
survival darwin cooperation group politics biology evolution
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Most people assume that Darwin was talking about physical strength when referring to “survival of the fittest,” meaning that a tougher, more resilient species always will win out over its weaker counterparts. But what if he didn’t mean that at all
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researchers at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, believe something else has been at work among species that have thrived throughout history, successfully reproducing to sustain themselves, and it has nothing to do with beating up the competition.
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Their new book, “Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity,” posits that friendly partnerships among species and shared humanity have worked throughout centuries to ensure successful evolution. Species endure — humans, other animals and plants — they write, based on friendliness, partnership and communication.
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“Survival of fittest, which is what everyone has in mind as evolution and natural selection, has done the most harm of any folk theory that has penetrated society,”
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“People think of it as strong alpha males who deserve to win. That’s not what Darwin suggested, or what has been demonstrated. The most successful strategy in life is friendliness and cooperation, and we see it again and again.”
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Dogs were the population of wolves that decided to rely on humans — rather than hunting — and that population won big.
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flowering plants attract animals to spread their pollen, forming a partnership that benefits both. “The plants provide food and energy, while the animals provide transportation for the pollen,” Hare says.
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Chimps make war — males take charge — and can be quite violent, even killing one another. Bonobos, on the other hand, are governed by females, don’t kill one another and engage in sex to maintain a peaceful collective temperament. Bonobos also are natural sharers. They enjoy sharing food with other bonobos, and never outgrow their willingness to do so, unlike chimpanzees, who become more selfish in adulthood.
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“The friendliest male bonobo is more successful than the unfriendliest chimpanzee,” Hare says, referring to reproduction. “The most successful bonobo males have more offspring than the most successful alpha male chimpanzees”
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“friendliness is the winning strategy. Social problems require social solutions. The secret to our species’ success is the same as it is with dogs and bonobos.
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How did Neanderthals and other ancient humans learn to count? - 0 views
www.nature.com/...d41586-021-01429-6
ancient human origins number counting anthropology archaeology linguistics history Culture math
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Rafael Núñez, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the leaders of QUANTA, accepts that many animals might have an innate appreciation of quantity. However, he argues that the human perception of numbers is typically much more sophisticated, and can’t have arisen through a process such as natural selection. Instead, many aspects of numbers, such as the spoken words and written signs that are used to represent them, must be produced by cultural evolution — a process in which individuals learn through imitation or formal teaching to adopt a new skill (such as how to use a tool).
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Although many animals have culture, one that involves numbers is essentially unique to humans. A handful of chimpanzees have been taught in captivity to use abstract symbols to represent quantities, but neither chimps nor any other non-human species use such symbols in the natural world.
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during excavations at Border Cave in South Africa, archaeologists discovered an approximately 42,000-year-old baboon fibula that was also marked with notches. D’Errico suspects that anatomically modern humans living there at the time used the bone to record numerical information. In the case of this bone, microscopic analysis of its 29 notches suggests they were carved using four distinct tools and so represent four counting events, which D’Errico thinks took place on four separate occasions1.
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D’Errico has developed a scenario to explain how number systems might have arisen through the very act of producing such artefacts. His hypothesis is one of only two published so far for the prehistoric origin of numbers.
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It all started by accident, he suggests, as early hominins unintentionally left marks on bones while they were butchering animal carcasses. Later, the hominins made a cognitive leap when they realized that they could deliberately mark bones to produce abstract designs — such as those seen on an approximately 430,000-year-old shell found in Trinil, Indonesia6. At some point after that, another leap occurred: individual marks began to take on meaning, with some of them perhaps encoding numerical information
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The Les Pradelles hyena bone is potentially the earliest known example of this type of mark-making, says D’Errico. He thinks that with further leaps, or what he dubs cultural exaptations, such notches eventually led to the invention of number signs such as 1, 2 and 37.
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Overmann has developed her own hypothesis to explain how number systems might have emerged in prehistory — a task made easier by the fact that a wide variety of number systems are still in use around the world. For example, linguists Claire Bowern and Jason Zentz at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, reported in a 2012 survey that 139 Aboriginal Australian languages have an upper limit of ‘three’ or ‘four’ for specific numerals. Some of those languages use natural quantifiers such as ‘several’ and ‘many’ to indicate higher values
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here is even one group, the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon, that is sometimes claimed not to use numbers at all10.
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In a 2013 study11, Overmann analysed anthropological data relating to 33 contemporary hunter-gatherer societies across the world. She discovered that those with simple number systems (an upper limit not much higher than ‘four’) often had few material possessions, such as weapons, tools or jewellery. Those with elaborate systems (an upper numeral limit much higher than ‘four’) always had a richer array of possessions.
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In societies with complex number systems, there were clues to how those systems developed. Significantly, Overmann noted that it was common for these societies to use quinary (base 5), decimal or vigesimal (base 20) systems. This suggested to her that many number systems began with a finger-counting stage.
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This finger-counting stage is important, according to Overmann. She is an advocate of material engagement theory (MET), a framework devised about a decade ago by cognitive archaeologist Lambros Malafouris at the University of Oxford, UK12. MET maintains that the mind extends beyond the brain and into objects, such as tools or even a person’s fingers. This extension allows ideas to be realized in physical form; so, in the case of counting, MET suggests that the mental conceptualization of numbers can include the fingers. That makes numbers more tangible and easier to add or subtract.
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The societies that moved beyond finger-counting did so, argues Overmann, because they developed a clearer social need for numbers. Perhaps most obviously, a society with more material possessions has a greater need to count (and to count much higher than ‘four’) to keep track of objects.
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An artefact such as a tally stick also becomes an extension of the mind, and the act of marking tally notches on the stick helps to anchor and stabilize numbers as someone counts.
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some societies moved beyond tally sticks. This first happened in Mesopotamia around the time when cities emerged there, creating an even greater need for numbers to keep track of resources and people. Archaeological evidence suggests that by 5,500 years ago, some Mesopotamians had begun using small clay tokens as counting aids.
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Overmann acknowledges that her hypothesis is silent on one issue: when in prehistory human societies began developing number systems. Linguistics might offer some help here. One line of evidence suggests that number words could have a history stretching back at least tens of thousands of years.
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Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel at the University of Reading, UK, and his colleagues have spent many years exploring the history of words in extant language families, with the aid of computational tools that they initially developed to study biological evolution. Essentially, words are treated as entities that either remain stable or are outcompeted and replaced as languages spread and diversif
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Using this approach, Pagel and Andrew Meade at Reading showed that low-value number words (‘one’ to ‘five’) are among the most stable features of spoken languages14. Indeed, they change so infrequently across language families — such as the Indo-European family, which includes many modern European and southern Asian languages — that they seem to have been stable for anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 years.
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In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered Pig - The New York Times - 0 views
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A 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs.
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“This is a watershed event,” said Dr. David Klassen, the chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing and a transplant physician. “Doors are starting to open that will lead, I believe, to major changes in how we treat organ failure.”
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It’s working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before
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Last year, some 41,354 Americans received a transplanted organ, more than half of them receiving kidneys,
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But there is an acute shortage of organs, and about a dozen people on the lists die each day. Some 3,817 Americans received human donor hearts last year as replacements, more than ever before, but the potential demand is still higher.
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Researchers hope procedures like this will usher in a new era in medicine in the future when replacement organs are no longer in short supply for the more than half a million Americans who are waiting for kidneys and other organs.
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He is also being monitored for infections, including porcine retrovirus, a pig virus that may be transmitted to humans, although the risk is considered low.
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But he added that there were many hurdles to overcome before such a procedure could be broadly applied, noting that rejection of organs occurs even when a well-matched human donor kidney is transplanted.
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Mr. Bennett decided to gamble on the experimental treatment because he would have died without a new heart, had exhausted other treatments and was too sick to qualify for a human donor heart, family members and doctors said.
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Mr. Bennett is still connected to a heart-lung bypass machine, which was keeping him alive before the operation, but that is not unusual for a new heart transplant recipient, experts said.
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The new heart is functioning and already doing most of the work, and his doctors said he could be taken off the machine on Tuesday. Mr. Bennett is being closely monitored for signs that his body is rejecting the new organ, but the first 48 hours, which are critical, passed without incident.
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It is the first successful transplant of a pig’s heart into a human being. The eight-hour operation took place in Baltimore on Friday, and the patient, David Bennett Sr. of Maryland, was doing well on Monday, according to surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
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Xenotransplantation, the process of grafting or transplanting organs or tissues from animals to humans, has a long history. Efforts to use the blood and skin of animals go back hundreds of years.
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In the 1960s, chimpanzee kidneys were transplanted into some human patients, but the longest a recipient lived was nine months.
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In 1983, a baboon heart was transplanted into an infant known as Baby Fae, but she died 20 days later.
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Two newer technologies — gene editing and cloning — have yielded genetically altered pig organs less likely to be rejected by humans.
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the time to carry out better screening for infectious diseases, and the possibility of a new organ at the time that the patient needs it.
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The heart transplanted into Mr. Bennett came from a genetically altered pig provided by Revivicor, a regenerative medicine company based in Blacksburg, Va.
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The pig had 10 genetic modifications. Four genes were knocked out, or inactivated, including one that encodes a molecule that causes an aggressive human rejection response.
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A growth gene was also inactivated to prevent the pig’s heart from continuing to grow after it was implanted,
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In addition, six human genes were inserted into the genome of the donor pig — modifications designed to make the porcine organs more tolerable to the human immune system.
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The team used a new experimental drug developed in part by Dr. Mohiuddin and made by Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals to suppress the immune system and prevent rejection.
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“The anatomy was a little squirrelly, and we had a few moments of ‘uh-oh’ and had to do some clever plastic surgery to make everything fit,”
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He said his father had had a pig’s valve inserted about a decade ago, and he thought his father might be confused. But after a while, Mr. Bennett said, “I realized, ‘Man, he is telling the truth and not going crazy. And he could be the first ever.’”