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Assad urged Syrian refugees to come home. Many are being welcomed with arrest and interrogation

Assad urged Syrian refugees to come home. Many are being welcomed with arrest and interrogation

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The Washington Post reports: Hundreds of Syrian refugees have been arrested after returning home as the war they fled winds down — then interrogated, forced to inform on close family members and in some cases tortured, say returnees and human rights monitors. Many more who weathered the conflict in rebel-held territory now retaken by government forces are meeting a similar fate as President Bashar al-Assad’s regime deepens its longtime dependence on informers and surveillance. For Syrian refugees, going home usually…

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Prehistoric humans invented stone tools multiple times, study finds

Prehistoric humans invented stone tools multiple times, study finds

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The Independent reports: Prehistoric humans invented tools on multiple occasions, according to researchers who have found a collection of 327 stone weapons carved more than 2.58 million years ago. This is the first evidence of ancient hominids sharpening stones to create specific tools, according to new research led by Arizona State University and George Washington University. The collection of “Oldowan” tools – which are created by chipping off bits of stone – were found in the Afar region of north-eastern…

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Can soil solve the climate crisis?

Can soil solve the climate crisis?

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Kenneth Miller writes: When Rattan Lal was awarded the Japan Prize for Biological Production, Ecology in April—the Asian equivalent of a Nobel—the audience at Tokyo’s National Theatre included the emperor and empress. Lal’s acceptance speech, however, was down-to-earth in the most literal sense. “I’d like to begin, rather unconventionally, with the conclusion of my presentation,” he told the assembled dignitaries. “And the conclusion is four words: In soil we trust.” That statement could serve as the motto for a climate…

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Climate crisis seriously damaging human health, report finds

Climate crisis seriously damaging human health, report finds

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The Guardian reports: A report by experts from 27 national science academies has set out the widespread damage global heating is already causing to people’s health and the increasingly serious impacts expected in future. Scorching heatwaves and floods will claim more victims as extreme weather increases but there are serious indirect effects too, from spreading mosquito-borne diseases to worsening mental health. “There are impacts occurring now [and], over the coming century, climate change has to be ranked as one of…

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Russia’s manipulation of Twitter was vastly more extensive than previously believed

Russia’s manipulation of Twitter was vastly more extensive than previously believed

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Politico reports: Russia’s infamous troll farm conducted a campaign on Twitter before the 2016 elections that was larger, more coordinated and more effective than previously known, research from cybersecurity firm Symantec out Wednesday concluded. The Internet Research Agency campaign may not only have had more sway — reaching large numbers of real users — than previously thought, it also demonstrated ample patience and might have generated income for some of the phony accounts, Symantec found. The company analyzed a massive…

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Lies pave the way for anti-abortion laws. To defeat the laws we must fight the lies

Lies pave the way for anti-abortion laws. To defeat the laws we must fight the lies

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Rebecca Solnit writes: Anti-abortion laws are built on anti-abortion lies. Lies about things like who has abortions, how abortions work, how women’s bodies work and how fetuses develop. The lies pave the way for the laws. There are the old lies, like the ones suggesting that the women having abortions are careless hussies (51% of abortions are to women who were using contraception; 59% are to women who are already mothers; 75% are to poor and low-income women). Lately, there’s…

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People eat at least 50,000 plastic particles a year, study finds

People eat at least 50,000 plastic particles a year, study finds

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The Guardian reports: The average person eats at least 50,000 particles of microplastic a year and breathes in a similar quantity, according to the first study to estimate human ingestion of plastic pollution. The true number is likely to be many times higher, as only a small number of foods and drinks have been analysed for plastic contamination. The scientists reported that drinking a lot of bottled water drastically increased the particles consumed. The health impacts of ingesting microplastic are…

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The dancing species: How moving together in time helped make us human

The dancing species: How moving together in time helped make us human

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By Kimerer LaMothe Dancing is a human universal, but why? It is present in human cultures old and new; central to those with the longest continuous histories; evident in the earliest visual art on rock walls from France to South Africa to the Americas, and enfolded in the DNA of every infant who invents movements in joyful response to rhythm and song, long before she can walk, talk or think of herself as an ‘I’. Dancing remains a vital, generative…

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We taught bees a simple number language – and they got it

We taught bees a simple number language – and they got it

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Maybe the differences between human and non-human animals are not as great as we might previously have thought. from www.shutterstock.com By Scarlett Howard, Université de Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier; Adrian Dyer, RMIT University, and Andrew Greentree, RMIT University Most children learn that written numbers represent quantities in pre-school or junior primary school. Now our new study shows that honeybees too can learn to match symbols and numerosities, much like we humans do with Arabic and Roman numerals.

Climate change is our World War III. It needs a bold response

Climate change is our World War III. It needs a bold response

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Joseph Stiglitz writes: Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with climate change and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. They are right. They use the term “New Deal” to evoke the massive response by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States government to the Great Depression. An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II. Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and…

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My green manufacturing plan for America

My green manufacturing plan for America

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Elizabeth Warren writes: While much of the debate around the Green New Deal has focused on the path to aggressive reductions in domestic greenhouse gas emissions, the science is clear: even if we reduce America’s emissions so that they are net-zero by 2030, we will still fall far short of the reduction in global emissions needed to avert a climate crisis. To satisfy this global need, we need rapid innovation on par with the space race along with widespread domestic…

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China wants us to forget the horrors of Tiananmen as it rewrites its history

China wants us to forget the horrors of Tiananmen as it rewrites its history

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Louisa Lim and Ilaria Maria Sala write: Remembering the deaths of 4 June 1989 is no neutral task. It is a civic duty, a burden and an act of resistance in countering a state-level lie that risks spreading far beyond China’s borders. On that day the Communist party sent tanks to clear protesters from Tiananmen Square in the centre of Beijing, killing hundreds of people, maybe more than a thousand. In the intervening years, China has systematically erased the evidence…

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When China massacred its own people

When China massacred its own people

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Nicholas Kristof writes: Thirty years ago in the spring of 1989, as the world’s most populous country teetered on the edge of freedom, I received a late-night phone call in my apartment in Beijing: The Chinese Army was invading its own capital. Students and workers had made roads impassable by setting up barricades to block the army, so I jumped on my bicycle and pedaled furiously toward the gunfire. I reached Tiananmen Square shortly before the army, and then I…

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The State Department has been funding trolls. I’m one of their targets

The State Department has been funding trolls. I’m one of their targets

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Jason Rezaian writes: Even after spending a year and a half in prison in Tehran, I knew that if I wanted to go on writing about Iran, I would be a target for plenty of public attacks despite the abuse I had suffered at the hands of the Islamic Republic. And so it has been. But I never imagined the U.S. State Department would be funding my attackers. Last week, several astute Iran watchers drew attention to a series of…

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