Nautilus: When one thinks of Antarctica, one imagines a vast landscape in shades of blinding white, ice and snow stretching as far as the eye can see. But to really consider Antarctica is to consider its water. The Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica, is where the ocean exhales. It is the primary place where the water of the deep oceans rises to the surface, mingles with the atmosphere in a kind of embrace, and then sinks back into the depths….
Live Science reports: Crows can count out loud, a startling new study has revealed, and they may even have the same numeracy skills as human toddlers. Researchers found that carrion crows (Corvus corone) can produce a specific number of caws in response to visual or auditory stimuli, enabling them to count out loud between one and four. The discovery is the first time that animals have been definitively shown to count by making a distinct number of vocalizations. The researchers…
These public comments from Satterfield confirm what I’ve already heard privately: the impact on civilians of the Rafah operation is as bad as the administration feared, Biden has simply chosen not to enforce his red line. https://t.co/30PDE7Cxnc pic.twitter.com/YuofGtThoH — Matt Duss (@mattduss) May 26, 2024 Jacobin reports: A little more than a month ago, President Joe Biden very publicly and explicitly identified the point that he would not allow Israel’s war on Gaza to reach: an offensive on the city…
The Associated Press reports: The European Union’s foreign policy chief insisted Sunday that Israel must abide by the U.N. top court’s rulings and end its offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah and, at the same time, questioned the possible involvement of authorities in the settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. On a day that visiting Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa basked in the attention after two EU nations and Norway pledged to recognize a Palestinian…
The Associated Press reports: When New York City resolved a lawsuit brought by Black Lives Matter demonstrators last year by agreeing to overhaul how police respond to protests, Mayor Eric Adams praised the suite of reforms as sensible steps to “move our city forward.” But some civil rights lawyers are now questioning the mayor’s commitment to the deal in the wake of the New York Police Department’s aggressive response to a pro-Palestinian demonstration Saturday. Police arrested more than 40 people…
Chris Lehmann writes: President Joe Biden has stepped up efforts to reverse his disastrous loss of support among young voters, announcing a new round of cancellations for federal student loans. The initiative, covering $77 billion in debts, will forgive loans for some 160,000 borrowers via existing programs—a total that brings the overall ratio of canceled loans to one in 10, or 5 million borrowers, according to administration officials. The new program comes on the heels of the White House’s decision…
Hamilton Nolan writes: Imagining that you are capable of seeing twenty steps ahead on the chaotic chessboard of political life is almost always wrong. Selling out now in order to reap some supposed benefits that you believe you will accrue after a tortured chain of events often results in you selling out for nothing, when those events go in a different direction than you thought they would. This is the great flaw in the thinking of the “accelerationists,” who reckon…
The New York Times reports: U.S. and allied intelligence officials are tracking an increase in low-level sabotage operations in Europe that they say are part of a Russian campaign to undermine support for Ukraine’s war effort. The covert operations have mostly been arsons or attempted arsons targeting a wide range of sites, including a warehouse in England, a paint factory in Poland, homes in Latvia and, most oddly, an Ikea store in Lithuania. But people accused of being Russian operatives…
Researchers have generated a nanoscale-resolution reconstruction of a millimeter-scale fragment of human cerebral cortex, giving an unprecedented view into the structural organization of brain tissue at the supracellular, cellular, and subcellular levels. https://t.co/AO946Lnsir pic.twitter.com/UeacNkEbym — Science Magazine (@ScienceMagazine) May 26, 2024 Science News reports: It’s a bit like seeing a world in a grain of sand. Except the view, in this case, is the exquisite detail inside a bit of human brain about half the size of a grain of…
Khaled Dawas is a British-Palestinian surgeon who has a leadership role within one of Britain’s most prestigious hospitals, at University College London. He provides his testimony and ask you to make your own mind up – are these war crimes?
“[Columbia] deserves a better administration than they’ve got right now” This week on Real Talk, we speak to Bruce Robbins, a Jewish professor at Columbia University, about what really happened during the recent student protests on campus, their demands for divestment from Israel, and the media coverage of it all. Filmed: 14 May 2024 Real Talk is a Middle East Eye interview show hosted by Mohamed Hashem that delves into the stories and experiences of a diverse range of…
Middle East Eye reports: A suspected Israeli reservist has threatened mutiny if the war on Gaza ends before “complete victory”, saying he wants to annihilate Palestinians in the besieged enclave. The masked soldier, who has not been identified, said in a video posted on Friday he will not obey orders by Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. He said he and “100,000 reservists” reject plans to hand Gaza back to Palestinians, including the Palestinian Authority, Hamas or another “Arab entity”. “Yoav Gallant,…
Zack Beauchamp writes: I met Raqib Naik, a journalist who had fled his native India, at a coffee shop in suburban Maryland. We sat at the same metal table where he once discussed the prospect of his assassination with FBI agents. Naik is a Muslim from Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. In August 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked the state’s longstanding self-determination rights and temporarily imposed martial law. Indian officials arbitrarily detained thousands of Kashmiris, including many…
Amanda Gefter writes: Science has been missing something. Something central to its very existence, and yet somehow just out of view. It is written out of papers, shooed away, shoved into laboratory closets. And yet, it’s always there, behind the scenes, making science possible. “Lived experience is both the point of departure and the point of return for science,” astrophysicist Adam Frank, physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson write in their new book, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot…