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Category: Humanity

What matters

What matters

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Owen Flanagan writes: In “The Strange Order of Things” Antonio Damasio promises to explore “one interest and one idea … why and how we emote, feel, use feelings to construct our selves; how feelings assist or undermine our best intentions; why and how our brains interact with the body to support such functions.” Damasio thinks that the cognitive revolution of the last 40 years, which has yielded cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence, has been, in fact, too cognitive,…

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David Miliband: World must step up support for Rohingya refugees

David Miliband: World must step up support for Rohingya refugees

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The Guardian reports: David Miliband has called on the international community to step up its support of Rohingya refugees in southern Bangladesh before the monsoon. During a visit to the refugee camps, the former UK foreign secretary said the issue must be discussed at the G7 meeting in Quebec, Canada this week, saying there was “real fear” among the refugees about the rainy season. Miliband, the chief executive of the International Rescue Committee, said the positioning of the refugee camp…

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Five myths about the refugee crisis

Five myths about the refugee crisis

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Daniel Trilling writes: The refugee crisis that dominated the news in 2015 and 2016 consisted primarily of a sharp rise in the number of people coming to Europe to claim asylum. Arrivals have now dropped, and governments have cracked down on the movement of undocumented migrants within the EU; many thousands are stuck in reception centres or camps in southern Europe, while others try to make new lives in the places they have settled. But to see the crisis as…

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How music can fight prejudice

How music can fight prejudice

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Tom Jacobs writes: The outpouring of hostility toward immigrants and refugees has reminded us that ethnocentrism remains a fact of life in both Europe and the United States. Combating it will require teaching a new generation to view members of different cultures as potential friends rather than threatening outsiders. But what mode of communication has the power to stimulate such a shift? New research from Portugal suggests the answer may be music. It reports schoolchildren around age 11 who learned…

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Humanity is a tiny fraction of life on Earth but has destroyed over 80% of wild mammals and half of plants

Humanity is a tiny fraction of life on Earth but has destroyed over 80% of wild mammals and half of plants

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The Guardian reports: Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet. The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds. The new work is the first…

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More than 95% of world’s population breathe dangerous air, major study finds

More than 95% of world’s population breathe dangerous air, major study finds

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The Guardian reports: More than 95% of the world’s population breathe unsafe air and the burden is falling hardest on the poorest communities, with the gap between the most polluted and least polluted countries rising rapidly, a comprehensive study of global air pollution has found. Cities are home to an increasing majority of the world’s people, exposing billions to unsafe air, particularly in developing countries, but in rural areas the risk of indoor air pollution is often caused by burning…

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There’s no scientific basis for race — it’s a made-up label

There’s no scientific basis for race — it’s a made-up label

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  Elizabeth Kolbert writes: In the first half of the 19th century, one of America’s most prominent scientists was a doctor named Samuel Morton. Morton lived in Philadelphia, and he collected skulls. He wasn’t choosy about his suppliers. He accepted skulls scavenged from battlefields and snatched from catacombs. One of his most famous craniums belonged to an Irishman who’d been sent as a convict to Tasmania (and ultimately hanged for killing and eating other convicts). With each skull Morton performed…

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Land degradation by human activities pushing Earth into sixth mass extinction and undermining well-being of 3.2 billion people

Land degradation by human activities pushing Earth into sixth mass extinction and undermining well-being of 3.2 billion people

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  Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES): Worsening land degradation caused by human activities is undermining the well-being of two fifths of humanity, driving species extinctions and intensifying climate change. It is also a major contributor to mass human migration and increased conflict, according to the world’s first comprehensive evidence-based assessment of land degradation and restoration. The dangers of land degradation, which cost the equivalent of about 10% of the world’s annual gross product in 2010 through…

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Great Pacific Garbage Patch now covers area three times the size of France

Great Pacific Garbage Patch now covers area three times the size of France

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The Washington Post reports: Seventy-nine thousand tons of plastic debris, in the form of 1.8 trillion pieces, now occupy an area three times the size of France in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii, a scientific team reported on Thursday. The amount of plastic found in this area, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is “increasing exponentially,” according to the surveyors, who used two planes and 18 boats to assess the ocean pollution. “We wanted to have a…

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Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, dies in Kenya

Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, dies in Kenya

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The New York Times reports: The last male northern white rhinoceros died on Monday at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya following a series of infections and other health problems. At 45, Sudan was an elderly rhino, and his death was not unexpected. Hunted to near-extinction, just two northern white rhinos now remain: Najin, Sudan’s daughter, and Fatu, his granddaughter, both at the conservancy. The prospect of losing the charismatic animals has prompted an unusual scientific effort to develop new…

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After a volcano’s ancient supereruption, humanity may have thrived

After a volcano’s ancient supereruption, humanity may have thrived

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Shannon Hall writes: The Toba supereruption [about 74,000 years ago] expelled roughly 10,000 times more rock and ash than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. So much ejecta would have darkened skies worldwide, causing scientists to speculate that it might have plunged the Earth into a volcanic winter whose chill could be felt far from Indonesia. Climate models suggest that temperatures may have plummeted by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit. And in such a cold world, plants may have…

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Women in Iran are pulling off their headscarves — and hoping for a ‘turning point’

Women in Iran are pulling off their headscarves — and hoping for a ‘turning point’

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The Washington Post reports: Iranian women have been raising a new challenge to their Islamic government, breaking one of its most fundamental rules by pulling off their headscarves in some of the busiest public squares and brandishing them in protest. While these guerrilla protesters number only in the dozens, Iran’s government has taken notice of their audacity. On Thursday, planned demonstrations to coincide with International Women’s Day were preempted by a heavy police presence on the streets of the capital,…

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Across human history, there’s little evidence large-scale social organization necessitates enduring inequality

Across human history, there’s little evidence large-scale social organization necessitates enduring inequality

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David Graeber and David Wengrow write: Stonehenge, it turns out, was only the latest in a very long sequence of ritual structures, erected in timber as well as stone, as people converged on the plain from remote corners of the British Isles, at significant times of year. Careful excavation has shown that many of these structures – now plausibly interpreted as monuments to the progenitors of powerful Neolithic dynasties – were dismantled just a few generations after their construction. Still…

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From Afrin to Ghouta

From Afrin to Ghouta

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G. M. Tamás writes: Yes, of course, we are all indignant and horrified and incredulous and ashamed: the death and decomposition of the international state system causes mayhem and suffering that defies reason and imagination. Everybody has seen the wordless statement of UNICEF: they could not find words to express what they have seen and what they have felt. Various ethnic and political groups in Syria are killing each other and they are also killed by the states of Turkey,…

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Conservation efforts are failing to address the importance of preserving intact forests

Conservation efforts are failing to address the importance of preserving intact forests

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Morgan Erickson-Davis reports: When it comes to habitat quality and ecosystem services, research has shown that natural landscapes do it best. A new study, published recently in Nature, adds fodder to this argument, describing how intact forests are critically important for mitigating climate change, maintaining water supplies, safeguarding biodiversity, and even protecting human health. However, it warns that global policies aimed at reducing deforestation are not putting enough emphasis on the preservation of the world’s dwindling intact forests, instead relying…

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Glacial melting isn’t someone else’s problem

Glacial melting isn’t someone else’s problem

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By Dana J. Graef High in the Ecuadorian Andes, the peak of Cotacachi was once reliably white. But by the early 2000s, the glacier on top of this dormant volcano, which reaches more than 16,200 feet, had disappeared. This made it—as anthropologist Robert E. Rhoades and his co-authors Xavier Zapata Ríos and Jenny Aragundy Ochoa wrote in the 2008 book Darkening Peaks—one of “the first Andean mountains in the past half-century to completely lose its glacier as a result of…

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