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How animals map three-dimensional spaces surprises brain researchers

How animals map three-dimensional spaces surprises brain researchers

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: Leaping, scurrying, flying and swimming through their natural habitats, animals compile a mental map of the world around them — one that they use to navigate home, find food and locate other points of vital interest. Neuroscientists have chiseled away at the problem of how animals do this for decades. A crucial piece of the solution is an elegant neural code that researchers uncovered by monitoring the brains of rats in laboratory settings. That landmark discovery was…

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A secretive hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, is gutting newsrooms

A secretive hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, is gutting newsrooms

McKay Coppins writes: The Tribune Tower rises above the streets of downtown Chicago in a majestic snarl of Gothic spires and flying buttresses that were designed to exude power and prestige. When plans for the building were announced in 1922, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the longtime owner of the Chicago Tribune, said he wanted to erect “the world’s most beautiful office building” for his beloved newspaper. The best architects of the era were invited to submit designs; lofty quotes about…

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Primate memory

Primate memory

Tetsuro Matsuzawa writes: The most recent common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans lived between five and seven million years ago. This shared heritage became evident when sequencing revealed a 1.2% DNA difference between species. Chimpanzees have a living sister species, bonobos, that is equally closely related to humans. Both chimpanzees and bonobos are found only in Africa; this is also true of gorillas. Chimpanzees and humans shared a common ancestor with gorillas between eight and nine million years ago. Another…

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Biden administration plans wind farms along nearly the entire U.S. coastline

Biden administration plans wind farms along nearly the entire U.S. coastline

The New York Times reports: The Biden administration announced on Wednesday a plan to develop large-scale wind farms along nearly the entire coastline of the United States, the first long-term strategy from the government to produce electricity from offshore turbines. Speaking at a wind power industry conference in Boston, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said that her agency will begin to identify, demarcate and hope to eventually lease federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Maine and off the…

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As the rich get richer during the pandemic, U.S. sees biggest revenue surge in 44 years

As the rich get richer during the pandemic, U.S. sees biggest revenue surge in 44 years

Politico reports: Despite a pandemic, a recession and a slew of tax cuts, federal tax receipts are booming. Revenues jumped 18 percent in the fiscal year that just ended, analysts say — the biggest one-year increase since 1977. That translates into $627 billion more than in 2020, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which estimates that, for the first time, total government revenues topped $4 trillion. “They are just booming,” said Mark Booth, a former top revenue forecaster at…

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Counties with more Confederate monuments also had more lynchings, study finds

Counties with more Confederate monuments also had more lynchings, study finds

The Washington Post reports: It was 1898, and John Henry James was on a train headed toward certain death. The Black ice cream vendor had been falsely accused of raping a white woman, arrested and taken to a neighboring town to avoid a lynch mob. But the next morning, authorities put him on a train back to Charlottesville, where he was to be indicted at the Albermarle County Courthouse. He never made it; an angry crowd pulled him from the…

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Halt destruction of nature or risk ‘dead planet’, leading businesses warn

Halt destruction of nature or risk ‘dead planet’, leading businesses warn

The Guardian reports: World leaders must do more to prevent the destruction of nature, business leaders have warned before a summit in China that aims to draw up a draft UN agreement for biodiversity. In an open letter, the chief executives of Unilever, H&M and nine other companies have called on governments to take meaningful action on mass extinctions of wildlife and the collapse of ecosystems or risk “a dead planet”. The warning comes as China prepares to assume the…

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Imminent Red Sea oil spill could leave 8 million people without water

Imminent Red Sea oil spill could leave 8 million people without water

The Guardian reports: The impact of an oil spill in the Red Sea from a tanker that is rotting in the water could be far wider than anticipated, with 8 million people losing access to running water and Yemen’s Red Sea fishing stock destroyed within three weeks. Negotiations are under way to offload the estimated 1.1m barrels of crude oil that remains onboard the FSO Safer, which has been deteriorating by the month since it was abandoned in 2017. The…

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Why is simplicity so unreasonably effective at scientific explanation?

Why is simplicity so unreasonably effective at scientific explanation?

Johnjoe McFadden writes: It’s May 1964 and, on a low hillside in New Jersey, the physicists Robert Woodrow Wilson and Arno Allan Penzias are listening in on the Universe. They are standing beneath what looks like a gargantuan ear trumpet attached to a garden shed: the Holmdel Horn Antenna, built by Bell Laboratories to investigate microwaves as an alternative to radio waves for telecommunication. When interest in microwave communication waned, Bell lent out the Holmdel horn to interested scientists. Penzias…

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Arabia was ‘cornerstone’ in early human migrations out of Africa, study suggests

Arabia was ‘cornerstone’ in early human migrations out of Africa, study suggests

Charles Q. Choi writes: The largest-ever study of Arab genomes has revealed the most ancient of all modern Middle Eastern populations and is shedding light on how modern humans may have first expanded across the globe. The Arabian Peninsula — which today includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — has long served as a key crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia. Recent archaeological, fossil and DNA findings suggest that analyzing the Middle East and…

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The mysterious case of the coronavirus lab-leak theory

The mysterious case of the coronavirus lab-leak theory

Carolyn Kormann writes: Since the coronavirus first appeared, at the end of 2019, four and a half million people have died, countless more have suffered, whole economies have been upended, schools have been shuttered. Why? Did the virus jump from an animal to its first human host, its patient zero? Or, as some suspect, was the catastrophe the result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan, a city of eleven million people in central China? Kristian Andersen, an infectious-disease expert at…

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Covid is the most common cause of duty-related deaths among police officers

Covid is the most common cause of duty-related deaths among police officers

The New York Times reports: Over the last year and a half, a majority of the roughly 40 police officers who patrol Baker, La., a suburb of Baton Rouge, tested positive for the coronavirus. All of them recovered and went back to work — until Lt. DeMarcus Dunn got sick. Lieutenant Dunn, a 36-year-old shift supervisor who coached youth sports and once chased down someone who fled the police station after being arrested, died from Covid-19 on Aug. 13. His…

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By attacking me, Justice Alito proved my point

By attacking me, Justice Alito proved my point

Adam Serwer writes: Last month, Justice Samuel Alito insisted that the Supreme Court’s critics are wrong. The Court is not “a dangerous cabal” that is “deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way, in the middle of the night, hidden from public view,” he said. Reading aloud from a piece I wrote in the aftermath of the Court’s recent ruling on an abortion law, Alito insisted that it was “false and inflammatory” to say that the 1973 Roe v….

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A record number of workers are quitting their jobs, empowered by new leverage

A record number of workers are quitting their jobs, empowered by new leverage

The Washington Post reports: The number of people quitting their jobs has surged to record highs, pushed by a combination of factors that include Americans sensing ample opportunity and better pay elsewhere. Some 4.3 million people quit jobs in August — about 2.9 percent of the workforce, according to new data released Tuesday from the Labor Department. Those numbers are up from the previous record set in April, of about 4 million people quitting, reflecting how the pandemic has continued…

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