Allison J Pugh writes: Paul was a gig worker in the San Francisco Bay Area. Formerly a project manager in tech until several companies in a row laid him off, he started working entirely for platforms like Lyft, Uber and TaskRabbit. He managed to eke out a living, but the jobs posed a different problem. ‘Honestly, a lot of times, I go out and the person doesn’t even know my name, even though I introduced myself as Paul,’ he told…
Phys.org reports: A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has turned traditional thinking on its head by highlighting the role of human interactions during the shift from hunting and gathering to farming—one of the biggest changes in human history—rather than earlier ideas that focused on environmental factors. The transition from a hunter-gatherer foraging lifestyle, which humanity had followed for hundreds of thousands of years, to a settled farming one about 12,000 years ago has been…
Mike Brock writes: [H]ere is what makes AI and Musk and Thiel’s belief in the logic of technology as the basis for civilization so authoritarian. There’s no room for emotion in the cold logic of math. This technocratic vision of society, where algorithms and “rational” systems dictate human affairs, is not just misguided—it’s fundamentally anti-human. It’s a worldview that reduces the rich tapestry of human experience to a series of equations, that sees efficiency as the highest virtue and messiness…
Thomas Moynihan writes: Do you recall the first time you knew you would die? It’s a milestone, realising your time is limited. That things happened before you, and will happen afterward, in your absence. As we grow up, the understanding of death comes in stages, but it culminates in acknowledgment of one’s own – unavoidable yet unpredictable – mortality. Sometime between the ages of six and 10, children become aware that their time is inescapably bounded. Roughly the same might be said…
Àlex Gómez-Marín writes: In 1963 there was an exhibition at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. It was entitled “The Most Dangerous Animal in the World”. In it, next to a window with bars, the following text could be read: “You are looking at the most dangerous animal in the world. It alone of all the animals that ever lived can exterminate (and has) entire species of animals. Now it has the power to wipe out all life on…
frank60/Shutterstock By Jose Yong, Northumbria University, Newcastle Research is showing that many of our contemporary problems, such as the rising prevalence of mental health issues, are emerging from rapid technological advancement and modernisation. A theory that can help explain why we respond poorly to modern conditions, despite the choices, safety and other benefits they bring, is evolutionary mismatch. Mismatch happens when an evolved adaptation, either physical or psychological, becomes misaligned with the environment. Take moths and some species of nocturnal…
GrrlScientist writes: What’s the scariest animal on the planet? Some people claim lions are. Or tigers. Or maybe wolves. Others might say sharks. But, as we learned from a recent question that went viral online, there are a lot of women out here who say that men are the most fearsome of animals — more terrifying even than meeting a bear when alone in the woods. And they are far from alone in this assessment, it appears. A recent study…
Science Alert reports: A new review of literature on global climate change written by an international team of more than 200 researchers leaves no room for doubt: humanity is heading for disaster, unless significant steps are taken to change that course. How disastrous? The research team mentions trillions of US dollars in climate-related damage, billions of people pushed into hardship around the world, and millions of lives lost as a result of a rapidly warming planet. The report focuses specifically…
University of Maine: Central features of human evolution may stop our species from resolving global environmental problems like climate change, says a new study led by the University of Maine. Humans have come to dominate the planet with tools and systems to exploit natural resources that were refined over thousands of years through the process of cultural adaptation to the environment. University of Maine evolutionary biologist Tim Waring wanted to know how this process of cultural adaptation to the environment…
Ross Andersen wrote in July: On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers. With his heel perched on the edge of his swivel chair, he looked relaxed. The powerful AI that his company had released in…
The Washington Post reports: The floods came, and then the sickness. Muhammad Yaqoob stood on his concrete porch and watched the black, angry water swirl around the acacia trees and rush toward his village [Bagh Yusuf, in Sindh province, Pakistan] last September, the deluge making a sound that was like nothing he had ever heard. “It was like thousands of snakes sighing all at once,” he recalled. At first, he thought villagers’ impromptu sandbags, made from rice and fertilizer sacks,…
The New York Times reports: Wildfires are getting worse. Parts of the United States, scientists say, are experiencing wildfires three times as often — and four times as big — as they were 20 years ago. This summer alone, smoke from Canadian blazes turned North American skies an unearthly orange, “fire whirls” were seen in the Mojave Desert and raging flames in Maui led to disaster. Records of the distant past can reveal what once drove increased fire activity and…
GrrlScientist writes: Tragically, the global mass extinction event that we find ourselves in the midst of will be even worse than originally predicted, according to a recent study (ref). The international team of scientists came to their conclusion after analyzing population trends data for more than 71,000 animal species — including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and insects — from around the world to see how their numbers have changed since record-keeping first began. Generally, scientists agree that an extinction…
Rob Dunn writes: Humans engage in mutualisms (mutually beneficial relationships) with many species; scientists describe a subset of these relationships as domestication, where one species exerts control over the other. For example, we might say that leaf-cutter ants have domesticated the fungi that they grow to feed their babies, or that some ants have domesticated the aphids that they rely on as cattle, ferrying them from branch to branch and protecting them from predators and parasites. Generally, when a mutualism…
Samuel Matlack writes: On the Galápagos island of Floreana, a giant tortoise went extinct some 150 years ago, after human settlement. Conservationists are now working to bring its descendants, discovered on nearby islands, back to Floreana. But there is a problem: Rats, which came with the settlers and eat tortoise eggs and babies, run rampant there. If you could help bring back the tortoise by poisoning all of the island’s rats, would you do it? Here is an important detail:…
Robin McKie writes: The Herefordshire hills basked in brilliant sunshine last weekend. Summer had arrived and the skies were cloudless, conditions that would once have heralded succeeding nights of coal-dark heavens sprinkled with brilliant stars, meteorites and planets. It was not to be. The night sky was not so much black as dark grey with only a handful of stars glimmering against this backdrop. The Milky Way – which would once have glittered across the heavens – was absent. Summer’s…