Music: Pino Palladino, Blake Mills & Sam Gendel — ‘Soundwalk’
The Amazon rainforest could die in your lifetime — here’s why
Anna Funk writes: Deforestation in the Amazon has long been the poster child of man-made environmental destruction. But recent trends reveal that the changing climate will likely come for this beloved rainforest long before the last tree is cut down. One researcher has even put a date on his prediction for the Amazon’s impending death: 2064. That’s the year the Amazon rainforest will be completely wiped out. Dramatic? Yes. “I’m a doom-sayer,” admits Robert Walker, a quantitative geographer at the…
How scientific taxonomy constructed the myth of race
By Brittany Kenyon-Flatt, SAPIENS As a graduate assistant in biological anthropology at the University at Buffalo, I was tasked with curating the primate skeletal collection. The collection of skeletons—taken from cadavers studied during a primate anatomy class—had been neglected for a few years. Most of the specimens had lost their labels. So, when I began re-cataloguing the collection in 2016, I ran into trouble. I knew that the skeletons were from three different species of macaques, but I didn’t know…
Where Europe went wrong in its vaccine rollout, and why
The New York Times reports: The calls began in December, as the United States prepared to administer its first batches of Covid-19 vaccine. Even then, it was clear that the European Union was a few weeks behind, and its leaders wanted to know what they could learn from their American counterparts. The questions were the same, from President Emmanuel Macron of France, President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission, and Alexander De Croo, the prime minister of Belgium….
Republicans fear the prospect of too many Americans exercising their right to vote
ABC News reports: In the aftermath of the GOP’s assault on the integrity of the 2020 presidential election and amid a torrent of Republican measures aimed at restricting voting rights in the name of security, Democrats are pushing for a far-reaching solution to counter attempts at narrowing access to the ballot box. H.R. 1, known as the For the People Act, seeks to abolish hurdles to voting, reform the role of money in politics and tighten federal ethics rules. Among…
‘Democracy Pledge’ aims to put businesses on the spot over Trump’s election lie
HuffPost reports: A former federal prosecutor has launched a campaign to press American businesses to openly reject the core assertion that former President Donald Trump and many in his party continue to make, that the 2020 election was somehow illegitimate. “The 2020 presidential election was free and fair, and produced accurate, reliable results,” reads the explanation behind the “Democracy Pledge” that Glenn Kirschner hopes to put before “every company in the country” in the coming months. “Those who sought to…
‘Fundamentally at odds’: China, U.S. retreat to their corners after Alaska talks
Politico reports: The first showdown is over, and each side came out throwing punches. Now China and the United States will huddle with their partners in hopes of building international support to pressure the other on multiple fronts. Senior officials from the two countries held three sessions in Anchorage, Alaska, on Thursday and Friday — the first high-level gathering of U.S. and Chinese officials since President Joe Biden took office. The gathering began with bitter exchanges, and ended with somber…
Music: Pino Palladino, Blake Mills & Sam Gendel — ‘Just Wrong’
Five reasons why Covid herd immunity is probably impossible
Nature reports: As COVID-19 vaccination rates pick up around the world, people have reasonably begun to ask: how much longer will this pandemic last? It’s an issue surrounded with uncertainties. But the once-popular idea that enough people will eventually gain immunity to SARS-CoV-2 to block most transmission — a ‘herd-immunity threshold’ — is starting to look unlikely. That threshold is generally achievable only with high vaccination rates, and many scientists had thought that once people started being immunized en masse,…
Coronavirus is evolving but so are our antibodies
Antibodies (white) binding to a coronavirus (red and orange). Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock By Sarah L Caddy, University of Cambridge and Meng Wang, University of Cambridge The emergence of “variants of concern” has raised questions about our long-term immunity to the coronavirus. Will the antibodies we make after being infected with or vaccinated against the dominant lineage, called D614G, protect us against future viral variants? To answer this question, scientists have been examining how our antibody responses to the coronavirus develop over…
The science of making Americans hurt their own country
Anne Applebaum writes: The National Intelligence Council has released an unclassified report assessing, retrospectively, foreign threats to the 2020 election. It has a few twists and turns: The Iranian government attempted to run some kind of online influence campaign; the Chinese government considered doing the same but then dropped the idea. But most of the report is about Russia. Unlike in 2016, Russian intelligence operatives weren’t in the business of hacking and leaking this time around. Instead they concentrated on…
Racist anti-Asian hashtags spiked after Trump first tweeted ‘Chinese virus,’ study finds
The Washington Post reports: As the coronavirus spread across the globe last February, the World Health Organization urged people to avoid terms like the “Wuhan virus” or the “Chinese virus,” fearing it could spike a backlash against Asians. President Donald Trump didn’t take the advice. On March 16, 2020, he first tweeted the phrase “Chinese virus.” That single tweet, researchers later found, fueled exactly the kind of backlash the WHO had feared: It was followed by an avalanche of tweets…
Racism is behind anti-Asian American violence, even when it’s not a hate crime
Children attend a March 17 vigil at Clemente Park in Lowell, Massachusetts, for the victims of the shooting spree in Atlanta. Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images By Pawan Dhingra, Amherst College Over the past year, attacks on Asian Americans have increased more than 150% over the previous year, including the March 16 murders of eight people, including six Asian American women, in Atlanta. Some of these attacks may be classified as hate crimes. But whether they meet that…
Who is making sure the AI machines aren’t racist?
Cade Metz writes: Hundreds of people gathered for the first lecture at what had become the world’s most important conference on artificial intelligence — row after row of faces. Some were East Asian, a few were Indian, and a few were women. But the vast majority were white men. More than 5,500 people attended the meeting, five years ago in Barcelona, Spain. Timnit Gebru, then a graduate student at Stanford University, remembers counting only six Black people other than herself,…
When Assad’s end comes
Lina Sergie Attar writes: “Who is the hope for the future of Syria?” A teacher paces in a drab classroom in Syria, asking the young students. “Who is the hope to lead us to a better future?” She adds, “We have the right to choose.” She calls on a few to answer, one by one, later marking them as orphans of the war. They dutifully stand and state the same (and only) answer, “The President, Bashar Hafez al-Assad.” This video…
A critically endangered bird is losing its song
Brisbane Times reports: When Michael Alfa was setting up to photograph wildlife at Woolgoolga’s sewage works near the northern NSW town of Coffs Harbour last year, the avid birdwatcher could hardly believe his senses. There, among the warbling wattlebirds hanging off a coastal banksia tree, was a lone, critically endangered regent honeyeater, distinctive in its yellow and black plumage. But not its birdsong. “It was making the exact same song [as the wattlebirds]. If you hadn’t seen it, you wouldn’t…