Browsed by
Category: Humanity

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

Comments 0 Comment

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…

Read More Read More

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

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

Comments 0 Comment

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…

Read More Read More

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

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

Comments 0 Comment

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…

Read More Read More

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’

Comments 0 Comment

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,…

Read More Read More

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

Comments 0 Comment

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…

Read More Read More

From Afrin to Ghouta

From Afrin to Ghouta

Comments 0 Comment

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,…

Read More Read More

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

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

Comments 0 Comment

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…

Read More Read More

Glacial melting isn’t someone else’s problem

Glacial melting isn’t someone else’s problem

Comments 0 Comment

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…

Read More Read More

The way humans point isn’t as universal as you might think

The way humans point isn’t as universal as you might think

Comments 0 Comment

The universal sign for ‘Look over there!’ isn’t so common in some cultures. Helena Ohman/Shutterstock.com By Kensy Cooperrider, University of Chicago Octopuses have long arms and plenty of smarts, but they don’t point. Nor do chimps, gorillas or other apes, at least not in the wild. Humans, on the other hand, are prodigious pointers. Infants use the gesture before they can talk, often around 1 year of age. By 2, they’ll waddle around, their forefingers sweeping over the world like…

Read More Read More

New mapping shows just how much fishing impacts the world’s seas

New mapping shows just how much fishing impacts the world’s seas

Comments 0 Comment

Science News reports: Fishing has left a hefty footprint on Earth. Oceans cover more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface, and industrial fishing occurred across 55 percent of that ocean area in 2016, researchers report in the Feb. 23 Science. In comparison, only 34 percent of Earth’s land area is used for agriculture or grazing. Previous efforts to quantify global fishing have relied on a hodgepodge of scant data culled from electronic monitoring systems on some vessels, logbooks and onboard…

Read More Read More

The immobilization of life on Earth

The immobilization of life on Earth

Comments 0 Comment

One of the defining characteristics of life is movement, be that in the form of locomotion or simply growth. What is inanimate is not alive and yet humans, through the use of technology, are constantly seeking ways to reduce the need to move our own limbs. We have set ourselves on a trajectory that, if taken to its logical conclusion, will eliminate our need to possess a fully functioning body as we reduce ourselves to a corpse-like condition sustained by…

Read More Read More

How New Zealand became a new Ararat for Silicon Valley’s misanthropic billionaires

How New Zealand became a new Ararat for Silicon Valley’s misanthropic billionaires

Comments 0 Comment

Mark O’Connell writes: Early last summer, just as my interests in the topics of civilisational collapse and Peter Thiel were beginning to converge into a single obsession, I received out of the blue an email from a New Zealand art critic named Anthony Byrt. If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned Thiel’s attraction to New Zealand, he insisted, I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the…

Read More Read More

Why people love animals

Why people love animals

Comments 0 Comment

  When Yashar Ali tweeted this elephant video recently, the comments it solicited bemoaned the lack of love that humans show one another. Pets, on the other hand, are generally experienced as fountains of unconditional love. Is this why people love animals: because, to some degree, they make offset a love deficit? No doubt that’s part of the picture, but just as important is the role animals have in allowing people to express their own love. In a world filled…

Read More Read More