Dump, QAnon and The Return of Magic

this should have been watched a few years ago, but hopefully not too late for some of you or your friends who need to know.

School of Life Monday:Who are you to say that?

Getting agreement on big questions has become ever harder because we either put our trust in science or insist that everyone’s opinion is equal to everyone else’s. That might not be quite true

How The NRA Silenced the Science of Gun Violence Prevention

from Medium:

If, as the NRA claims, more guns lead to less crime, why are they opposed to funding studies that could back up their assertion?

Another mass shooting.

Another body count.

Another unending list of questions.

Why does this keep happening? Are we missing warning signs? Can we identify high-risk individuals ahead of time? Are there laws that could prevent or reduce firearm injuries and deaths? If so, what laws are most effective at mitigating the risks?

These are questions that are answerable through the scientific method. Indeed, we might very well know the answers to these questions, or at least have a growing body of evidence to guide us, if leading government scientists and federal agencies were given the funding to study them.

But they’re not: Thanks to a 23-word rider attached to a federal spending bill in 1996 and enacted in 1997, research on gun violence has been frozen for two decades.

The Scandalous History of The Federal Freeze on Gun Violence Research Funding

The freeze on federal funding for gun violence research can be traced back to 1993, when Dr. Arthur Kellerman and colleagues published the results of a CDC-funded study in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The study, “Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home,” found that keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide. Rather than confer protection, the study concluded that people who keep guns in the home faced a 2.7-fold greater risk of homicide and a 4.8-fold greater risk of suicide.

The NEJM article was the subject of significant media attention, and the National Rifle Association (NRA) responded by trying to shut down the entire center that had funded the study, the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention. The center itself survived, but in 1996, Dickey — backed by the NRA — authored an amendment that cut $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget — the exact amount the CDC had invested in research on firearm injuries the previous year.

Passed by a Republican-dominated Congress, the NRA-backed ‘Dickey Amendment’ stated that “[n]one of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” While the amendment doesn’t explicitly ban research on gun violence, the deliberately vague wording — combined with an onslaught of harassment of researchers — had a chilling effect on scientific progress, effectively ending all federal research programs related to gun violence. As Dr. Mark Rosenberg, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, put it: “The scientific community has been terrorized by the NRA.”



“Precisely what was or was not permitted under the clause was unclear,” Dr. Kellerman wrote in a December 2012 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “But no federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency’s funding to find out. Extramural support for firearm injury prevention research quickly dried up.”

It’s important to note that the freeze on funding doesn’t just impact federal agencies — it applies to federally-funded researchers everywhere. At universities and medical centers nationwide, where research is highly dependent on federal grants, published studies on gun violence dropped off dramatically after the passage of the Dickey Amendment — by about 60% between 1996 and 2010 — while federally funded gun violence research dropped by approximately 96% during the same period. Furthermore, CDC officials say the funding freeze and subsequent lapse in gun violence research caused lasting damage to the field. After funding was cut off, leading researchers moved on to other areas of study that were still supported by the government, and some researchers even discouraged students from specializing in gun violence research because of the lack of funding. Although private violence prevention agencies continued to support research on gun violence, they were unable to produce or analyze nationwide data on gun violence without the work of institutions like the CDC.

The amendment — and the message it sent to scientists — also had the effect of making gun-related research questions controversial even for studies not funded by the government, as scientists feared such research would be held against them if they applied for federal grants in the future. According to a 2017 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, gun violence was the least-researched cause of death in the U.S. and the second-least funded cause of death over the past decade.

“As a result of [the Dickey Amendment], many, many people stopped doing gun research, [and] the number of publications on firearm violence decreased dramatically,” Dr. Fred Rivara, a professor of Pediatrics and Epidemiology at the University of Washington at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and a co-author of the 1993 NEJM study, told PRI’s The Takeaway. “It was really chilling in terms of our ability to conduct research on this very important problem.”

Silencing The Science of Gun Violence Prevention

Over the last two decades, Republicans have exploited the Dickey Amendment to argue their case that gun violence is not a public health issue — a view that stands in stark contrast to the position of professional medical and public health organizations, at least 52 of which have independently urged lawmakers to treat gun violence as a pressing public health epidemic. Despite this overwhelming consensus from the scientific community, congressional Republicans actually expanded the scope of the Dickey Amendment to apply to the National Institutes of Health in 2011, after Dr. Douglas Wiebe, an epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, authored a 2009 NIH study that confirmed a significant association between gun possession and gun assault.

In 2013, following the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, President Obama called on the CDC to resume funding for research into the causes of gun violence. He also asked on Congress to give the CDC $10 million so they could carry out such research, but Congress has not allotted any of those funds in subsequent budgets. While the CDC developed a plan to use this funding on studies addressing firearm injury prevention and control, the agency’s research agenda remains frozen due to congressional inaction. Most recently, in the wake of the 2015 Charleston church shooting, the GOP-controlled Appropriations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives rejected an amendment that would have lifted the federal funding freeze. Former House Speaker John Boehner defended the lack of government research, saying “a gun is not a disease.”

Notably, we heard the exact same argument back in the middle of the 20th century, when motor vehicle accidents were responsible for killing more than 50,000 Americans a year. The common wisdom, as told by carmakers, was that automobile fatalities were the fault of individual drivers — in other words, ‘cars don’t kill people; drivers kill people.’ This assertion was ultimately shown to be false, but we only discovered the truth after years of rigorous injury prevention and control research conducted by scientists at the CDC. Contrary to the claims of the automobile industry, vehicle design was found to be just as much to blame for high fatality rates as bad drivers. Researchers also discovered that motor vehicle deaths could be significantly reduced with simple safety devices such as air bags and seat belts, as well as road design features such as median barriers. The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 mandated many of these improvements. It also marked the start of a decades-long federal effort to better understand automobile and highway safety through systematic data collection and analysis. As a result of these studies — and the policies that grew out of them— the motor vehicle fatality rate per mile traveled has fallen 80 percent since 1966.

The insights that emerged from this line of research formed the foundation of the public health approach to injury prevention, an evidence-based model that incorporates 1) ongoing surveillance and monitoring of trends in injury-related morbidity and mortality; 2) identification of risk and protective factors; 3) continuous evaluation and development of prevention strategies; and 4) dissemination of the most efficacious strategies for reducing the incidence and burden of injuries. In addition to motor vehicle safety, this basic model has been applied successfully to reduce the public health burden of intentional and unintentional causes of injury, including poisonings, drownings, child and elder abuse, dating violence, and sexual violence.



We could use the same injury prevention model to study gun violence and reduce its massive public health impact. But unlike car manufacturers, the gun industry — led by the NRA — has been successful in their efforts to suppress scientific inquiry into gun violence and potential approaches to prevention. Moreover, while certain federal agencies like the ATF collect basic data on criminal uses of firearms, prohibitions on data-sharing have stymied scientific research on the subject. For example, as Jennifer Mascia explained in The Trace, the ATF is prohibited from “releasing crime-gun trace data to anyone other than a law enforcement agency or prosecutor — leaving academics and researchers without easy access to valuable data.”

The end result is that many fundamental questions about gun deaths and injuries, such as how many Americans are shot each year, remain unanswered, and we lack the data to establish basic parameters like the magnitude, scope, characteristics, and consequences of firearm violence. That’s important, as public health professionals rely on this type of data to identify risk and protective factors, as well as to develop effective violence prevention strategies. Insufficient research also makes it difficult for policymakers, even in states with strong firearm laws like Massachusetts and California, to know which laws will be effective, since there’s very little data for evaluation. This has meant in practice that “there is no scientific consensus on the best approach to limiting gun violence,” the New York Times reported in a 2011 article, “and the NRA is blocking work that might well lead to such a consensus.”

Even former Congressman Dickey — the Republican who wrote the original provision banning gun violence research — has recanted and urged Congress to repeal the ban, writing in an op-ed that, unlike researchers studying car accidents or infectious disease, “U.S. scientists cannot answer the most basic question: what works to prevent firearm injuries?”

If, as the NRA claims, more guns lead to less crime, why are they opposed to funding studies that could back up their assertion? The very thought is apparently enough to terrify the NRA, which is why they’ve gone to such extreme lengths to suppress this line of research and any policies that might grow out of it.

“If there is no research, it is harder to make suggestions for policy reform,” Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis, told the Huffington Post. “And if you have a vested interest in stopping policy reform, what better way to do it than to choke off the research? It was brilliant and it worked. And my question is how many people died as a result?”

We didn’t have to ban automobiles to cut motor vehicle fatalities — and we don’t have to ban guns to reduce gun-related deaths. What we do need, however, is a willingness to objectively examine the causes of gun violence — and elected leaders who care enough about American lives to go where the data lead.

click on the original article link to see more references.

Dolphins Mug for the Camera in Awareness Test

Dolphins Show Self-Recognition Earlier Than Children

Noam Chomsky - Surviving the 21st Century

Some Pacific Islanders Have DNA Not Linked To Any Known Human Ancestor

from ATI:

Researchers have now uncovered the DNA of a previously unknown group of hominids.



Most everyone knows that the islands of the South Pacific are some of the most remote and unique places on Earth, but a new study reveals just how unique they really are.

According to a report from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, researchers have found traces of a previously unknown extinct hominid species in the DNA of the Melanesians, a group living in an area northeast of Australia that encompasses Papua New Guinea and the surrounding islands.

A computer analysis suggests that the unidentified ancestral hominid species found in Melanesian DNA is unlikely to be either Neanderthal or Denisovan, the two known predecessors of humankind to this point.

Archaeologists have found many Neanderthal fossils in Europe and Asia, and although the only Denisovan DNA comes from a finger bone and a couple of teeth discovered in a Siberian cave, both species are well represented in the fossil record.

But now genetic modeling of the Melanesians has revealed a third, different human ancestor that may be an extinct, distinct cousin of the Neanderthals.

“We’re missing a population, or we’re misunderstanding something about the relationships,” researcher Ryan Bohlender told Science News. “Human history is a lot more complicated than we thought it was.”

An Accidental Discovery Could Solve Earth's Plastic Waste Problem

from Big Think:

Scientists might have stumbled upon an unexpected way to solve pollution from plastics. A caterpillar bred to be fishing bait is apparently able to biodegrade polyethylene - a commonly used plastic found in shopping bags. With people using around a trillion plastic bags every year, and with up to 40% of them ending up in landfills, this could be a very significant discovery.

The wax worm caterpillar that eats plastic is the larvae of the common insect Galleria mellonella, aka greater wax moth.

The team working on the study, published in the journal Current Biology,included Federica Bertocchini from the Spanish Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria, and biochemists Paolo Bombelli and Christopher Howe from the University of Cambridge in the UK.

The discovery was made by sheer chance when Bertocchini, who is an amateur beekeeper, removed the worms living in a beehive as parasites - a common problem across Europe. She collected them in a plastic bag and soon noticed holes throughout the bag. The worms ate their way out! 

This prompted a timed experiment by her team, who placed about a hundred such worms in a plastic bag from a UK supermarket. They realized that the holes started to materialize just after 40 minutes, continuing to develop at a very fast rate compared to other attempts to biodegrade plastics. The worms reduced the plastic mass by 92 mg in 12 hours, in contrast to the rate of 0.13 mg per day maintained by bacteria, recently utilized in a similar effort.

Here's a video of the worms in action:

After digesting the plastic, the worms left behind ethylene glycol, the key ingredient in antifreeze.  

Plastic is hard to break down, taking from 100 to 400 years to degrade naturally, and has been blamed for adversely affecting the environment. The scientists propose that digesting beeswax requires the worms to break down chemical bonds in a process similar to breaking down polyethylene.

"The caterpillars are not just eating the plastic without modifying its chemical make-up. We showed that the polymer chains in polyethylene plastic are actually broken by the wax worms,“ said the study’s first author Paolo Bombelli. "The caterpillar produces something that breaks the chemical bond, perhaps in its salivary glands or a symbiotic bacteria in its gut. The next steps for us will be to try and identify the molecular processes in this reaction and see if we can isolate the enzyme responsible," he added.

Wax worm next to biodegraded holes in a UK plastic bag used in the experiment. Credit: Paolo Bombelli.

If the scientists can isolate the enzyme used by the worms to break down plastic, they will look to turn their findings into an industrial-scale solution for polyethylene waste. 

"If a single enzyme is responsible for this chemical process, its reproduction on a large scale using biotechnological methods should be achievable,” said Bombelli. “This discovery could be an important tool for helping to get rid of the polyethylene plastic waste accumulated in landfill sites and oceans.” 

Scientists, and their moral duty to resist trumpism

from Boing Boing:

A trio of "scientists against a fascist government" set out a program for resisting trumpism with science, delving into the moral duty of scientists to resist the perversion of their work to attain cruel and evil ends.

Trumpism includes savage attacks on ideologically inconvenient science -- climate science especially -- as well as xenophobic attacks on scientists themselves; as with Max Planck's arguments for sparing Jewish theoretical physicists (because they were different from other kinds of Jews), the trumpist agenda will likely grant exemptions for Muslim scientists if they're working on projects revelant to the Trump program -- there are a lot of oil engineers who graduate from universities in the Islamic world, for example.

In order to move away from a constrained, collaboration-oriented stance, we propose that starting points for discussion should include those with the most power taking the highest risks. Among a growing number of proposed ways to engage in resistance, one option is for tenured faculty to engage in work slowdowns and strikes, with teaching and committee work stoppages. We cannot afford to normalize this administration’s attempts to subvert the rule of law, which has often fallen short in protecting people at the margins and more often than not has established their place at the margins.

It is not up for debate; science can be, and has been, used as a tool of fascism.

We cannot do business as usual anymore, regardless of how much we love our research or how important it feels. It is for the love of science and our long-term ability to study it that we must take a stand now, while there is still time. This is not just a matter of individual action, but collective action: Faculty and administrations must visibly oppose marginalizing policies, whether they target immigrants from majority Muslim countries or further institutionalize destructive mass incarceration of American residents.

We believe that scientific research is a creative enterprise and expect that scientists can and should come up with creative ways to stand in solidarity with society’s most vulnerable, whether or not they are members of the scientific community. There is a proud tradition of the revolutionary scientist. Linus Pauling, a nobel laureate and protein chemist, worked with the Black Panther Party to develop inexpensive diagnostic tests for sickle cell anemia. Albert Einstein worked as an anti-racist and peace activist during and after World War II. Max von Laue resisted Nazi infiltration of German physics and maintained relationships with Jewish scientists, while publicly eulogizing those who were lost. This is a tradition we see as our duty to uphold.

We Are The Scientists Against A Fascist Government [Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Sarah Tuttle, and Joseph Osmundson/The Establishment]

Elon Musk unveils plan to colonise Mars

Elon Musk unveils SpaceX’s future Mars vehicle and discusses the long-term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars. The presentation focuses on potential architectures for sustaining humans on the Red Planet that industry, government and the scientific community can collaborate on in the years ahead.

The Loneliest Tree in the World

Tucked away in a corner of London's Royal Botanic Gardens, the last of an ancient plant grows. Though it resembles a stumpy palm tree, the Encephalartos woodii is incredibly rare. In fact, it may well be the very last of its kind on Earth. Get to know this Jurassic cycad, the loneliest bachelor on Earth.

Sunday Special: 10 Harsh Truths About Religion

One of the Best Explanations For Why We Haven't Found Alien Life

from Gizmodo

So far, the only examples of sentient life we’ve found are right here on our own planet. It’s not for lack of trying, though—we’ve sent out spacecraft deep into our solar system and, so far, still remain alone. What if the problem isn’t where we are looking, though, but when?

A forthcoming study in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle looks at the possibility that life as we know it may not require a star similar to our sun but could emerge on planets orbiting much smaller, weaker stars. If we do allow for the possibility of life around non-sunlike stars, then it turns out that the universe is likely to be much more habitable in the distant future than it is today.

“It’s natural for us to think that we are the most common form of life, simply because that’s the only one that we know of,” lead author of the paper, Harvard University’s Avi Loeb, told Gizmodo. “Therefore, people assumed that being next to star like the sun was the most likely place for life to emerge.”

If you throw out the assumption that we need a sun-like star, though, then there’s a whole new class of stars—smaller and less powerful than the sun, but far more common—that suddenly start to look like good candidates. They’re called low mass stars.

Although these stars throw out less light and heat than our powerful sun, they still emit enough to create potentially habitable zones that could support liquid water on close-orbiting rocky planets. Not only are these types of stars more common in the universe than sun-like stars, but they also have much considerably longer lifespans of more than 1,000 times that of the sun.

Using this information, Loeb calculated that it was much more likely for life to have emerged in the distant future around one of those low mass stars than to have emerged in our time on a sun-orbiting planet like Earth.

“If you allow low mass stars to have life, just like we find here on Earth, then the probability of life emerging in the future 10 trillion years from now is one thousand times bigger to find life,” noted Loeb.

And yet, we are not orbiting a low mass star, trillions of years in the future. We are here and now, orbiting our Sun—and this is the only place we’ve ever found sentient life. That suggests an intriguing explanation. Perhaps we are simply searching way too soon.

In other words, we may be alone in the universe right now. But that’s only because we showed up long before life really started to get going. If this hypothesis is the correct one, then the real explosion of life in the universe hasn’t yet happened—and likely won’t happen for trillions of years after us.

There’s also a second, alternate explanation that would account for all the facts. Perhaps there’s something about low mass stars which, even in zones that are technically habitable, suppresses life from ever forming.

“We still keep the notion that, perhaps, we are at the center of the biological universe, that we are really the only ones or special in that regard, or in terms of intelligence,” Loeb said. “If it turns out that we are rare and early on in the game then that would be really surprising to me because, so far, whenever we look we have found that we are not special and we are not the center of the universe.”

Figuring out which of these two possibilities are correct hinges on the question of whether low mass stars can indeed support life. We won’t necessarily have to wait several trillions of years to find out, though. Instead, Loeb suggests that the answers could be found in the next decade or so.

By sampling the atmospheres of planets around nearby low mass stars, researchers can search for biomarkers that would suggest whether these planets are capable of supporting life. If they keep finding atmospheres devoid of signs that they are capable of supporting life, then it’s likely that something about these low mass stars—perhaps their frequent solar flares or some other attribute—renders the planets orbiting them sterile.

If, however, they find that these planets do appear able to support life then it may be that the lack of other life in the universe is simply because we showed up too soon to see any of it.

Could The Language Barrier Actually Fall Within The Next 10 Years?

from IFL:

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to travel to a foreign country without having to worry about the nuisance of communicating in a different language?

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, technology policy expert Alec Ross argued that, within a decade or so, we’ll be able to communicate with one another via small earpieces with built-in microphones.

No more trying to remember your high school French when checking into a hotel in Paris. Your earpiece will automatically translate “Good evening, I have a reservation” to Bon soir, j’ai une réservation – while immediately translating the receptionist’s unintelligible babble to “I am sorry, Sir, but your credit card has been declined.”

Ross argues that because technological progress is exponential, it’s only a matter of time.

Indeed, some parents are so convinced that this technology is imminent that they’re wondering if their kids should even learn a second language.

Max Ventilla, one of AltSchool Brooklyn’s founders, recently told The New Yorker

…if the reason you are having your child learn a foreign language is so that they can communicate with someone in a different language twenty years from now – well, the relative value of that is changed, surely, by the fact that everyone is going to be walking around with live-translation apps.

Needless to say, communication is only one of the many advantages of learning another language (and I would argue that it’s not even the most important one).

Furthermore, while it’s undeniable that translation tools like Bing Translator, Babelfish or Google Translate have improved dramatically in recent years, prognosticators like Ross could be getting ahead of themselves.

As a language professor and translator, I understand the complicated nature of language’s relationship with technology and computers. In fact, language contains nuances that are impossible for computers to ever learn how to interpret.

Language rules are special

I still remember grading assignments in Spanish where someone had accidentally written that he’d sawed his parents in half, or where a student and his brother had acquired a well that was both long and pretty. Obviously, what was meant was “I saw my parents” and “my brother and I get along pretty well.” But leave it to a computer to navigate the intricacies of human languages, and there are bound to be blunders.

Even earlier this month, when asked about Twitter’s translation feature for foreign language tweets, the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey conceded that it does not happen in “real time, and the translation is not great.”

Still, anything a computer can “learn,” it will learn. And it’s safe to assume that any finite set of data (like every single work of literature ever written) will eventually make its way into the cloud.

So why not log all the rules by which languages govern themselves?

Simply put: because this is not how languages work. Even if the Florida State Senate has recently ruled that studying computer code is equivalent to learning a foreign language, the two could not be more different.

Programming is a constructed, formal language. Italian, Russian or Chinese – to name a few of the estimated 7,000 languages in the world – are natural, breathing languages which rely as much on social convention as on syntactic, phonetic or semantic rules.

Words don’t indicate meaning

As long as one is dealing with a simple written text, online translation tools will get better at replacing one “signifier” – the name Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure gave to the idea that a sign’s physical form is distinct from its meaning – with another.

Or, in other words, an increase in the quantity and accuracy of the data logged into computers will make them more capable of translating “No es bueno dormir mucho” as “It’s not good to sleep too much,” instead of the faulty “Not good sleep much,” as Google Translate still does.

Replacing a word with its equivalent in the target language is actually the “easy part” of a translator’s job. But even this seems to be a daunting task for computers.

Lost in translation. Images.com/Corbis

So why do programs continue to stumble on what seem like easy translations?

It’s so difficult for computers because translation doesn’t – or shouldn’t – involve simply translating words, sentences or paragraphs. Rather, it’s about translating meaning.

And in order to infer meaning from a specific utterance, humans have to interpret a multitude of elements at the same time.

Think about all the contextual clues that go into understanding an utterance: volume, pitch, situation, even your culture – all are as likely to convey as much meaning as the words you use. Certainly, a mother’s soft-spoken advice to “be careful” elicits a much different response than someone yelling “Be careful!” from the passenger’s seat of your car.

So can computers really interpret?

As the now-classic book Metaphors We Live By has shown, languages are more metaphorical than factual in nature. Language acquisition often relies on learning abstract and figurative concepts that are very hard – if not impossible – to “explain” to a computer.

Since the way we speak often has nothing to do with the reality that surrounds us, machines are – and will continue to be – puzzled by the metaphorical nature of human communications.

This is why even a promising newcomer to the translation game like the website Unbabel, which defines itself as an “AI-powered human-quality translation,” has to rely on an army of 42,000 translators around the world to fine-tune acceptable translations.

You need a human to tell the computer that “I’m seeing red” has little to do with colors, or that “I’m going to change” probably refers to your clothes and not your personality or your self.

If interpreting the intended meaning of a written word is already overwhelming for computers, imagine a world where a machine is in charge of translating what you say out loud in specific situations.

The translation paradox

Nonetheless, technology seems to be trending in that direction. Just as “intelligent personal assistants” like Siri or Alexa are getting better at understanding what you say, there is no reason to think that the future will not bring “personal assistant translators.”

But translating is an altogether different task than finding the nearest Starbucks, because machines aim for perfection and rationality, while languages – and humans – are always imperfect and irrational.

This is the paradox of computers and languages.

If machines become too sophisticated and logical, they’ll never be able to correctly interpret human speech. If they don’t, they’ll never be able to fully interpret all the elements that come into play when two humans communicate.

Therefore, we should be very wary of a device that is incapable of interpreting the world around us. If people from different cultures can offend each other without realizing it, how can we expect a machine to do better?

Will this device be able to detect sarcasm? In Spanish-speaking countries, will it know when to use “tú” or “usted” (the informal and formal personal pronouns for “you”)? Will it be able to sort through the many different forms of address used in Japanese? How will it interpret jokes, puns and other figures of speech?

Unless engineers actually find a way to breathe a soul into a computer – pardon my figurative speech – rest assured that, when it comes to conveying and interpreting meaning using a natural language, a machine will never fully take our place.

Facts I Want You to Know.

This is incredible.

The Story of the real "Boy In The Bubble" (short film - retro report) from The New York Times

In the early 1970s, an unusual boy captivated the nation. Now, decades later, his story continues to unfold in remarkable ways.

Animated Life: Mary Leakey from The New York Times

Incredible learning going on here...

This short documentary remembers the paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey, who discovered footprints of human ancestors on the African savanna.

Scientists name "muscular" fossil fireworm after Henry Rollins

from Dangerous Minds:

In the never ending mashup of cool nerds and music enthusiasts, a group of scientists from the University of Bristol in the UK and the Natural History Museum in London have named a newly discovered species of particularly muscular fossil fireworms after D.C. hardcore punk rocker (who has worn many creative hats throughout the decades), Henry Rollins.

During a study of the fossilized remains of the Rollinschaeta myoplena (fossilization is a rare event in nature when it comes to worms) the team was able to determine the species was a close relative of earthworms and leeches as well as a member of the “fireworm” (or “Amphinomidae”) family. All of which (unlike Mr. Rollins), have soft bodies. Comparatively speaking, this worm’s got a six-pack, in worm terms.



The fossilized remains of Rollinschaeta myoplena

According to Greg Edgecombe of the Natural History Museum, (the co-author of the study) this was the first time that “any fossil has been identified by its muscle anatomy.” Sadly, the Rollinschaeta is extinct so we can’t all run out and start a new hardcore punk rock worm colony in our basements.

No word on what Rollins thinks of all this, but he joins a growing list of musicians who have had animals speciesnamed after them like Lou Reed, whose name is now synonomous with a species of velvet spider known as Loureedia, David Bowie provided the namesake for a rare type of Malaysia spider, Heteropoda davidbowie, and Frank Zappa who had the distinct honor to have a jellyfish named after him, the Phialella zappai. 



Zappa has an even stranger claim to scientific immortality: a type of bacteria that causes pimples was dubbed Propionibacterium zappae:

Loureedia annulipes, an underground-dwelling genus of velvet spider discovered in Israel



‘Spider from Mars’: Heteropoda davidbowie, discovered in Malaysia in 2009.

"School of Life" Monday's Watch and Listen This Week: HISTORY OF IDEAS - Religion

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Urgent science note in Last week's New York Times

What Would Happen To Earth If All Humans Disappeared?

From IFLScience.com (I Fucking Love Science)

Snap! You’re gone.

If this happened to every human on Earth at the exact same time, what consequences would ensue? This thought experiment not only explores the impact humanity has on the planet, but also the incredible resilience of nature.

So what would transpire? First of all, power plants would run out of fuel and electrical fences would cease to work, releasing nearly 1.5 billion cows, 1 billions pigs and 20 billion chickens into the wild. Roadways would turn into rivers, wood houses would catch on fire, concrete buildings would crumble, and yet, one thing would remain—our plastic