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Category: Humanity

Did humans inadvertently produce super insects?

Did humans inadvertently produce super insects?

Lina Zeldovich writes: One day, about 60 million years ago, a little leafcutter moth landed on an ancient sycamore tree to lay eggs in its leaves. The larvae grew, nestled inside a comfy enclosure akin to a sleeping bag made between the leaf’s thin layers. Once hatched, they ate their way through to the surface and left to perpetuate their kin. Most of the chewed-up leaves swirled down to the earth, decomposing shortly after. But this leaf, along with a…

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What does water want?

What does water want?

Erica Gies writes: Walking across spongy tundra, among bonsai shrubs on fire with autumn colours, I came upon a river too wide to cross. Gazing up the valley from which it flowed, I saw that the obstacle blocking my path was just one strand of a broad, braided system spread languidly across a floodplain in Denali National Park in Alaska. I watched the McKinley River’s fluid columns shift apart, then twine together. Although at that time I knew little about…

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The capitalist transformations of the countryside

The capitalist transformations of the countryside

Sven Beckert and Ulbe Bosma write: Sometimes, what is most common is most remarkable. For those of us living in a city or suburb, a typical day starts with rising from (cotton) sheets, hopping under the shower for a quick wash with (palm oil-based) soaps, dressing in (cotton) shirts and pants, drinking a hot beverage (coffee or tea) and then eating a (sugary) cereal or jam, perhaps followed by a (soy-fed) processed meat sandwich, wrapped in (fossil-fuel-based) plastic. What describes…

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‘Phenomenal’ ancient DNA data set provides clues to origin of farming and early languages

‘Phenomenal’ ancient DNA data set provides clues to origin of farming and early languages

Science reports: Few places have shaped Eurasian history as much as the ancient Near East. Agriculture and some of the world’s first civilizations were born there, and the region was home to ancient Greeks, Troy, and large swaths of the Roman Empire. “It’s absolutely central, and a lot of us work on it for precisely that reason,” says German Archaeological Institute archaeologist Svend Hansen. “It’s always been a bridge of cultures and a key driver of innovation and change.” But…

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The Anthropocene demands a massive realignment of priorities

The Anthropocene demands a massive realignment of priorities

Martin Rees and Charles F. Kennel write: Our Earth has existed for 45 million centuries; and humans for a few thousand. But this century is the first when our species is so numerous—and so demanding of energy and natural resources—that we risk collectively despoiling our planet. It’s surely an ethical imperative that we should not deny future generations the wonders and beauty of the natural world. Policy must, in the words of the Brundtland Commission, “meet the needs of the…

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Caring about the unborn should mean caring about the future of our planet

Caring about the unborn should mean caring about the future of our planet

William MacAskill writes: Humanity, today, is in its adolescence. Most of a teenager’s life is still ahead of them, and their decisions can have lifelong effects. Similarly, most of humanity’s life lies ahead – an estimated 118 billion people have already lived, but vastly more people, perhaps thousands or even millions of times that number, are yet to be born. And some of the decisions we make this century will impact the entire course of humanity’s future. Contemporary society does…

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Simone de Beauvoir on facing old age and avoiding bad faith

Simone de Beauvoir on facing old age and avoiding bad faith

Kate Kirkpatrick and Sonia Kruks write: Old age is not exactly a time of life that most of us welcome, although globally speaking it is a privilege to reach it. In Western societies, the shocked realisation that we are growing old often fills us with alarm and even terror. As Simone de Beauvoir writes in her magisterial study of the topic, La vieillesse (1970) – translated in the UK as Old Age, and in the US as The Coming of…

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The banks collapsed in 2008. Our food system is about to do the same

The banks collapsed in 2008. Our food system is about to do the same

George Monbiot writes: For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008. While financial collapse would have been devastating to human welfare, food system collapse doesn’t bear thinking about. Yet the evidence that something is going badly wrong has been escalating rapidly. The current surge in food prices looks like the latest sign of…

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The more technological power grows, the smaller we become

The more technological power grows, the smaller we become

Audrey Borowski writes: For [the philosopher Günther] Anders, the disasters of the 20th century were simply the logical outcome of a pernicious process that had already been underway for many years, involving the gradual exclusion of mankind from all production processes – and, ultimately, from the world created by those processes. The real catastrophe in this regard, which Anders hoped to make ‘visible for the first time’, lay in the transformation of the human condition, a transformation that had become…

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Why the father of neuroscience, toward the end of his career, preferred to study ants

Why the father of neuroscience, toward the end of his career, preferred to study ants

Benjamin Ehrlich writes: In 1914, when World War I broke out, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the most influential neuroscientist in the world—the man who discovered brain cells, later termed neurons— published only one article, by far his lowest output ever. “The horrendous European war of 1914 was for my scientific activity a very rude blow,” Cajal recalled. “It altered my health, already somewhat disturbed, and it cooled, for the first time, my enthusiasm for investigation.” Cajal’s tertulia, or café social…

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Seed banks — the last line of defense against a global food crisis

Seed banks — the last line of defense against a global food crisis

The Guardian reports: As the risks from the climate crisis and global conflict increase, seed banks are increasingly considered a priceless resource that could one day prevent a worldwide food crisis. Two in five of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction, and though researchers estimate there are at least 200,000 edible plant species on our planet, we depend on just three – maize, rice and wheat– for more than half of humanity’s caloric intake. There are roughly…

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Energy requirements of a good life are surprisingly low

Energy requirements of a good life are surprisingly low

Anthropocene magazine reports: The average global energy consumption—79 gigajoules per person per year—is sufficient to power a healthy, comfortable life for everyone on the planet, according to a new study. The analysis is part of a growing body of research aimed at figuring out how to achieve climate goals while also providing modern energy resources to those who lack it. The findings suggest that this balance might be easier than expected to strike: the world doesn’t need a massive expansion…

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New database reveals impact humans are having on evolution

New database reveals impact humans are having on evolution

Wired reports: Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates. “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages,” he wrote in On the Origin of Species, his famous 1859 treatise on natural selection. But by the 1970s, scientists were finding evidence that Darwin might be wrong—at least about the timescale. Peppered moths living in…

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How long can humans survive?

How long can humans survive?

Tom Chivers writes: In the deep ocean, occasionally, a whale carcass falls to the bottom of the sea. Most of the time, in the state of nature, creatures have just about enough to survive. But the first creatures to find the whale have more food than they could ever eat. These scavengers live lives of extraordinary plenty — some of the smaller, faster-breeding species might do so for several generations. There is enough to go around a thousand times over….

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Waste is central, not peripheral, to everything we design, make and do

Waste is central, not peripheral, to everything we design, make and do

Justin McGuirk writes: The opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is problematic for many reasons, but there’s one that we rarely discuss. The ‘nature vs culture’ dualism leaves out an entire domain that properly belongs to neither: the world of waste. The mountains of waste that we produce every year, the torrents of polluting effluent, the billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, the new cosmos of microplastics expanding through our oceans – none of this has ever been entered into the…

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