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Category: Humanity

Technology in deep time: How it evolves alongside us

Technology in deep time: How it evolves alongside us

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Tom Chatfield writes: Plenty of creatures can communicate richly, comprehend one another’s intentions and put tools to intelligent and creative use: cetaceans, cephalopods, corvids. Some can even develop and pass on particular local practices: New Caledonian crows, for example, exhibit a “culture” of tool usage, creating distinct varieties of simple hooked tools from plants in order to help them feed. Only humans, however, have turned this craft into something unprecedented: a cumulative process of experiment and recombination that over mere…

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Jacinda Ardern at Christchurch memorial: Only through our common humanity can we confront extremism

Jacinda Ardern at Christchurch memorial: Only through our common humanity can we confront extremism

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  New Zealand PM, Jacinda Ardern, said: To the global community who have joined us today, who reached out to embrace New Zealand, and our Muslim community, to all of those who have gathered here today, we say thank you. And we also ask that the condemnation of violence and terrorism turns now to a collective response. The world has been stuck in a vicious cycle of extremism breeding extremism and it must end. We cannot confront these issues alone,…

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We need contact with nature for the sake of our sanity

We need contact with nature for the sake of our sanity

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Jonathan Lambert writes: The experience of natural spaces, brimming with greenish light, the smells of soil and the quiet fluttering of leaves in the breeze can calm our frenetic modern lives. It’s as though our very cells can exhale when surrounded by nature, relaxing our bodies and minds. Some people seek to maximize the purported therapeutic effects of contact with the unbuilt environment by embarking on sessions of forest bathing, slowing down and becoming mindfully immersed in nature. But in…

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No marine ecosystems left that are unaffected by plastic waste, study suggests

No marine ecosystems left that are unaffected by plastic waste, study suggests

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The Guardian reports: The world’s deepest ocean trenches are becoming “the ultimate sink” for plastic waste, according to a study that reveals contamination of animals even in these dark, remote regions of the planet. For the first time, scientists found microplastic ingestion by organisms in the Mariana trench and five other areas with a depth of more than 6,000 metres, prompting them to conclude “it is highly likely there are no marine ecosystems left that are not impacted by plastic…

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Is a more generous society possible?

Is a more generous society possible?

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By Leah Shaffer In January 2016, Cathryn Townsend set out to live among “the loveless people.” So named by anthropologist Colin Turnbull, the Ik are a tribe of some 11,600 hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers living in an arid and harsh mountainous region of Uganda. Turnbull studied the Ik in the 1960s and famously characterized them as “inhospitable and generally mean” in his book The Mountain People. He documented how young children were abandoned to starve and how people would snatch…

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World’s food supply under ‘severe threat’ from loss of biodiversity

World’s food supply under ‘severe threat’ from loss of biodiversity

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The Guardian reports: The world’s capacity to produce food is being undermined by humanity’s failure to protect biodiversity, according to the first UN study of the plants, animals and micro-organisms that help to put meals on our plates. The stark warning was issued by the Food and Agriculture Organisation after scientists found evidence the natural support systems that underpin the human diet are deteriorating around the world as farms, cities and factories gobble up land and pump out chemicals. Over…

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Humans cannot survive without them yet within a century the world’s insects may be extinct

Humans cannot survive without them yet within a century the world’s insects may be extinct

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The Guardian reports: The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could…

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Rising temperatures could melt most Himalayan glaciers by 2100, threatening the water supply of 25% of global population

Rising temperatures could melt most Himalayan glaciers by 2100, threatening the water supply of 25% of global population

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The New York Times reports: Rising temperatures in the Himalayas, home to most of the world’s tallest mountains, will melt at least one-third of the region’s glaciers by the end of the century even if the world’s most ambitious climate change targets are met, according to a report released Monday. If those goals are not achieved, and global warming and greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rates, the Himalayas could lose two-thirds of its glaciers by 2100, according to…

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Global WEIRDing is a trend we can’t ignore

Global WEIRDing is a trend we can’t ignore

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By Kensy Cooperrider For centuries, Inuit hunters navigated the Arctic by consulting wind, snow and sky. Now they use GPS. Speakers of the aboriginal language Gurindji, in northern Australia, used to command 28 variants of each cardinal direction. Children there now use the four basic terms, and they don’t use them very well. In the arid heights of the Andes, the Aymara developed an unusual way of understanding time, imagining the past as in front of them, and the future…

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The 26 richest people possess as much wealth as half the world’s population

The 26 richest people possess as much wealth as half the world’s population

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The Guardian reports: The growing concentration of the world’s wealth has been highlighted by a report showing that the 26 richest billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the planet’s population. In an annual wealth check released to mark the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the development charity Oxfam said 2018 had been a year in which the rich had grown richer and the poor poorer. It…

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Insect collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’

Insect collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’

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The Guardian reports: “We knew that something was amiss in the first couple days,” said Brad Lister. “We were driving into the forest and at the same time both Andres and I said: ‘Where are all the birds?’ There was nothing.” His return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was to reveal an appalling discovery. The insect population that once provided plentiful food for birds throughout the mountainous national park had collapsed. On the ground, 98%…

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New plant-focused diet would ‘transform’ planet’s future

New plant-focused diet would ‘transform’ planet’s future

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The Guardian reports: The first science-based diet that tackles both the poor food eaten by billions of people and averts global environmental catastrophe has been devised. It requires huge cuts in red meat-eating in western countries and radical changes across the world. The “planetary health diet” was created by an international commission seeking to draw up guidelines that provide nutritious food to the world’s fast-growing population. At the same time, the diet addresses the major role of farming – especially…

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1.32 million Jews were killed in just three months during the Holocaust

1.32 million Jews were killed in just three months during the Holocaust

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Live Science reports: Operation Reinhard, known as the single largest murder campaign during the Holocaust, was worse than historians imagined. In a mere three months, at least 1.32 million Jewish people died — close to one-quarter of all the Jewish victims who perished during World War II, a new study finds. The finding is based on an old data set that tallied the number of Jews who were forced from their homes onto trains, which then took them to the…

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Yuval Noah Harari sees a big-data threat to humanity

Yuval Noah Harari sees a big-data threat to humanity

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Steve Paulson interviews historian Yuval Noah Harari: What’s different about this moment in history? What’s different is the pace of technological change, especially the twin revolutions of artificial intelligence and bioengineering. They make it possible to hack human beings and other organisms, and then re-engineer them and create new life forms. How far can this technology go in changing who we are? Very far. Beyond our imagination. It can change our imagination, too. If your imagination is too limited to…

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Portrait of the Earth at the threshold of climate catastrophe

Portrait of the Earth at the threshold of climate catastrophe

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The Guardian reports: On Sunday morning hundreds of politicians, government officials and scientists will gather in the grandeur of the International Congress Centre in Katowice, Poland. It will be a familiar experience for many. For 24 years the annual UN climate conference has served up a reliable diet of rhetoric, backroom talks and dramatic last-minute deals aimed at halting global warming. But this year’s will be a grimmer affair – by far. As recent reports have made clear, the world…

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