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We are hurtling toward global suicide

We are hurtling toward global suicide

Ben Ehrenreich writes: On January 13, one week before the inauguration of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth president of the United States and seven long days after the storming of the Capitol by an armed right-wing mob, it was easy enough to miss an article published in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science, despite its eye-catching title: “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.” The headline was itself a train wreck: six dully innocuous words piling up in front…

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U.S. to send millions of vaccine doses to Mexico and Canada

U.S. to send millions of vaccine doses to Mexico and Canada

The New York Times reports: The United States plans to send millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Mexico and Canada, the White House said Thursday, a notable step into vaccine diplomacy just as the Biden administration is quietly pressing Mexico to curb the stream of migrants coming to the border. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said the United States was planning to share 2.5 million doses of the vaccine with Mexico and 1.5 million with Canada,…

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Asian-Americans are being attacked. Why are hate crime charges so rare?

Asian-Americans are being attacked. Why are hate crime charges so rare?

The New York Times reports: On a cold evening last month, a Chinese man was walking home near Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood when a stranger suddenly ran up behind him and plunged a knife into his back. For many Asian-Americans, the stabbing was horrifying, but not surprising. It was widely seen as just the latest example of racially targeted violence against Asians during the pandemic. But the perpetrator, a 23-year-old man from Yemen, had not said a word to the victim…

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White supremacists, conspiracy theorists, are targeting critical infrastructure for sabotage

White supremacists, conspiracy theorists, are targeting critical infrastructure for sabotage

The Intercept reports: As the Biden administration turns its attention to an infrastructure system beset with problems, a strange new issue has emerged: conspiracy theorists. That’s according to a detailed intelligence report, produced by the New York Police Department and obtained by The Intercept, which finds that cellphone towers and other critical infrastructure have become an attractive target for conspiracy theorists, especially in the weeks and months following the presidential election. Conspiracy theorists, joined by far-right white supremacist groups, “increasingly…

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New intelligence report adds evidence that Trump was a Russian asset

New intelligence report adds evidence that Trump was a Russian asset

William Saletan writes: Donald Trump was a tool in a long-running Russian campaign to weaken the United States. That’s been documented in Republican-led investigative reports, and now it has been updated with new evidence, thanks to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of the 2020 election. The report, drafted by the CIA, the FBI, and several other agencies, was released in unclassified form on Tuesday, but it was presented in classified form on Jan. 7. In other words, it was compiled,…

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Your face is not your own

Your face is not your own

Kashmir Hill writes: In May 2019, an agent at the Department of Homeland Security received a trove of unsettling images. Found by Yahoo in a Syrian user’s account, the photos seemed to document the sexual abuse of a young girl. One showed a man with his head reclined on a pillow, gazing directly at the camera. The man appeared to be white, with brown hair and a goatee, but it was hard to really make him out; the photo was…

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How bacteria and archaea influence one of Earth’s largest carbon stores as it begins to thaw

How bacteria and archaea influence one of Earth’s largest carbon stores as it begins to thaw

Monique Brouillette writes: For most of human history, permafrost has been Earth’s largest terrestrial carbon sink, trapping plant and animal material in its frozen layers for centuries. It currently stores about 1,600 billion tonnes of carbon — more than twice the amount in the atmosphere today. But thanks to rising temperatures, permafrost is fracturing and disappearing, leaving behind dramatic changes in the landscape. Scientists are becoming increasingly worried that the thaw will lead to an epic feast for bacteria and…

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Europe’s vaccine suspension may be driven more by politics than science

Europe’s vaccine suspension may be driven more by politics than science

The New York Times reports: After days of touting the safety of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, Italy’s health minister, Roberto Speranza, took a call from his German counterpart on Monday and learned that Germany was concerned enough about a few cases of serious blood clots among some who had received the vaccine to suspend its use. For Italy and its neighbors, that call could not have come at a worse time. Their vaccine rollouts were already lagging because of shortages, and they…

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Some long-haul covid-19 patients say their symptoms are subsiding after getting vaccines

Some long-haul covid-19 patients say their symptoms are subsiding after getting vaccines

The Washington Post reports: Arianna Eisenberg endured long-haul covid-19 for eight months, a recurring nightmare of soaking sweats, crushing fatigue, insomnia, brain fog and muscle pain. But Eisenberg’s tale has a happy ending that neither she nor current medical science can explain. Thirty-six hours after her second shot of coronavirus vaccine last month, her symptoms were gone, and they haven’t returned. “I really felt back to myself,” the 34-year-old Brooklyn therapist said, “to a way that I didn’t think was…

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Democrats, pushing stimulus, admit to regrets on Obama’s 2009 response

Democrats, pushing stimulus, admit to regrets on Obama’s 2009 response

The New York Times reports: As Democrats pushed this month to pass the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, they were eager to rebuke Republicans for opposing en masse a measure filled with aid to struggling Americans. But they had another target as well: the core policy of President Barack Obama’s first-term agenda. Party leaders from President Biden on down are citing Mr. Obama’s strategy on his most urgent policy initiative — an $800 billion financial rescue plan in 2009 in…

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Russia stoked Ukraine allegations to undermine Biden, U.S. intel agencies say

Russia stoked Ukraine allegations to undermine Biden, U.S. intel agencies say

Politico reports: Russia tried again last year to help then-President Donald Trump win the White House, the U.S. intelligence community said Tuesday in a long-awaited postmortem — adding that a “primary” tactic in that effort was the spreading of corruption allegations involving Democratic challenge Joe Biden and Ukraine. But the effort fell short of the Kremlin-backed efforts to assist Trump in his 2016 contest against Hillary Clinton, the spy community wrote in its unclassified assessment of foreign threats to the…

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Nature knows how to avoid network collapse

Nature knows how to avoid network collapse

Ruth DeFries writes: Sometime in the first billion years of the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history, a cell emerged in a primordial stew of chemicals brewing in liquid water. At that moment, the predictable chemistry and physics of the early Earth gave way to seething, roiling complexity. Primitive life thrived in the deep sea, where underwater volcanoes vented heat and spilled a cocktail of chemicals into seawater. Once life was underway, the course of the planet and the life it supported became…

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Neanderthals helped create early human art, researcher says

Neanderthals helped create early human art, researcher says

The Guardian reports: When Neanderthals, Denisovans and homo sapiens met one another 50,000 years ago, these archaic and modern humans not only interbred during the thousands of years in which they overlapped, but they exchanged ideas that led to a surge in creativity, according to a leading academic. Tom Higham, a professor of archaeological science at the University of Oxford, argues that their exchange explains “a proliferation of objects in the archaeological record”, such as perforated teeth and shell pendants,…

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Is consciousness everywhere?

Is consciousness everywhere?

Christof Koch writes: What is common between the delectable taste of a favorite food, the sharp sting of an infected tooth, the fullness after a heavy meal, the slow passage of time while waiting, the willing of a deliberate act, and the mixture of vitality, tinged with anxiety, just before a competitive event? All are distinct experiences. What cuts across each is that all are subjective states, and all are consciously felt. Accounting for the nature of consciousness appears elusive,…

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