Rose loves watching people dance (check out her favorite YouTube videos). This paper about women dancing? She does not love it so much: Oh, so, the paper here isn’t really asking “which woman is a better dancer” but rather “which woman would you rather sleep with?” That is… a completely different question than asking who’s a better dancer.
Jenny might have been a paleontologist if, as a fifth grader, she had found a weird fossil like Saccorhytus coronarious, a wrinkly mouthed sac that is also one of our ancestors: Its form, at some 540 million years old, proves that we vertebrates have been pushing around our greedy mouths to stuff our faces, and letting fly the excess, for a really long time.
America has been great before, says Craig, in the Ice Age: Ours has been a country for refugees and far-flung travelers since the beginning. . . To survive far northern conditions within shooting distance of the land bridge, people had to invent portable architecture and tailored clothing, represented by the advent of stone microblades for precisely cutting skins, and eyed sewing needles fashioned out of mammoth ivory found in both Siberia and Alaska.
Michelle writes about a tree that weighs as much as 10,000 grizzly bears. It’s a quaking aspen named Pando, and it’s in trouble: For Rogers, the clone’s slow but increasingly visible desistance is a sign of larger human failings. “When something that’s so big, and has been around so long, just starts to fall apart,” he says, “that points the finger back at us.”
This idea to cut out the middleman between pharma and consumers? Been there, done that, says Erik: The masses are good at many things. Finding planets, for instance. Or driving the world’s car markets to ever-better quality and efficiency. Or proofreading Taylor Swift’s Wikipedia page. But . . . we are not great at picking effective drugs.
I can’t help but notice that placebos have crept into the political news in recent weeks. Okay, maybe they aren’t in the headlines but they’re there, just below the surface. That’s because when you see a headline about the Food and Drug Administration, you should immediately start thinking of placebos.
The Trump administration hasn’t named an FDA head yet, but they have laid out their priorities. Namely, to clear away the impediments between drug companies and end-users. In December, it was whispered that Trump might pick Jim O’Neill, who believes that the market should dictate which drugs get to the shelves, rather than a faceless bureaucracy. Which is a great idea when it comes to tennis shoes and sports cars, but an absolutely catastrophe when it comes to drugs.
But, you say, information wants to be free, people should feel they are in control of their own health, and life-saving drugs should be available as soon as possible. No. When it comes to drugs, this is absolutely wrong because – oddly enough – of the placebo effect.
How do I know this? Because we’ve been down this exact same road before.
On the western edge of the Colorado Plateau, in the mountains of central Utah, is a tree that weighs an estimated 13 million pounds—as much as three giant sequoias, or 55 blue whales, or 10,000 grizzly bears. (Hey, I just thought you might like to imagine a pile of 10,000 bears.) This tree is the most massive living organism in the world, according to most of the people who argue about such things, and while estimates of its age have varied wildly, from a few hundred years to more than a million, it certainly predates any of us. Some twenty years ago, a trio of Colorado scientists nicknamed it Pando, Latin for “I spread,” and the name has stuck.
Pando, which is a quaking aspen, doesn’t look like a single tree. Like many plant species but only a few trees, aspen usually reproduce asexually, by sending out horizontal roots which then sprout new stems. Over its long lifetime, Pando has sprouted around 47,000 genetically identical stems from a single root system, creating one organism that covers more than 100 acres. Quaking aspen do occasionally reproduce sexually, and each clone’s flowers are either all male or all female. Pando, as it happens, is a boy. One 13-million-pound boy tree. Continue reading →
We were great in the Ice Age. Big weapons, big animals, big land.
While parts of the world were crawling with hominids for a million years or more, this side of the planet was off limits. Getting here was never easy, not in the late Pleistocene, not now. The Americas are bookended by the world’s two largest oceans and occasionally connected by an Arctic land bridge. For most of human history, this country was vast, open, and unexplored, and anyone who arrived had to either really want it, or they were terribly lost.
As a new assault rises against refugees and a freshly minted president tries to keep the door open for some and close it for others, it is time to consider the longer history of this place. Continue reading →
Our microscopic relative might have looked like this.The fossil, waaaaay bigger than real life.
Let’s get down to brass tacks. Mouth. Anus. Reproductive bit in between. Isn’t that all one really needs to get by?
I’m oversimplifying, of course. Lungs are helpful if you live on land, for example.
But check out our newly discovered really ancient fossilized ancestor. Saccorhytus coronarious, unearthed recently by paleontologists in sedimentary rock in the Shaanxi Province of central China, falls into the group of bilateral creatures known as deuterostomes. (Here’s a nice description of that group.) Hardly an exclusive club, the deuterostomes include critters like starfish and urchins, but also giraffes, naked mole rats, and humans. All vertebrates, in fact. This particular animal’s body was a little more than a globular bag. It had a supersize wrinkly maw-anus combo (decluttering is not a new concept). Its form, at some 540 million years old, proves that we vertebrates have been pushing around our greedy mouths to stuff our faces, and letting fly the excess, for a really long time.
I’m truly amazed by how much paleontologists can figure out from microscopic lines left in stone. Having examined this millimeter-long creature under an electron microscope—without which the thing appears to be a grain of black rice— the scientists can say with some confidence where the animal lived (on the sea bed), how it moved (by wriggling and nestling between sand grains), and what its peculiar parts were for (e.g., lateral slits probably let it flush out excess water (precursors to modern gills), while mouth folds let it open extra wide when prey was bigger than predator’s head).
The researchers also know what the animal lacked: an anus. It had no dedicated release valve. No clearly marked exit. Apparently, butts aren’t mandatory after all. For some animals, a mouth or other opening does double duty. (See what I did there? Of course you do.)
So, here is the common ancestor of whole host of species, for now the earliest known knot in the evolutionary net that stretched to humans hundreds of million years later. (I’m testing out a new analogy for the tree of life. Apologies.)
Such analyses make me feel pretty small. To discover a miniature rock imprinted with what is clearly an alien face with four chins and maxed-out lips, and then to figure out aspects of the ancient animal’s physiology and behavior, life history, and its relationship to humans, well, that’s quite a thing.
I’m not sure whether my much younger self would have been as impressed. When I was in 5th grade we kids had the chance to go to work with someone who had the job we thought we wanted when we grew up. There were few marine mammologists hanging around Chicago, so I opted for my second choice. I hopped into a pickup truck at dawn with a soft-spoken bearded paleontologist and traveled to a site in Wisconsin where an excavation was in progress. I don’t remember what we were looking for there; I just know I was hoping for skeletons. Lots and lots of skeletons.
I recall the tidy square pits, some sunken like 1970s living rooms, and spray-painted markings in the dirt. Students with tremendous patience, in wide-brimmed hats, knelt on the hard ground sifting out tiny nothings from the dust. I was given a couple of tools and shown how to very carefully scrape away the earth around objects and brush away the excess. My digging experience limited to building drip sand castles, the area I was given to work was no doubt insignificant. If memory serves, I spent several hours gently freeing a stick from the soil.
This was what I envisioned unearthing during my day as a paleontologist. No such luck.
Memory definitely serves when it comes to the pain. The sun was a fireball stuck under my hat, and the ground punished my knees. My back was quickly drenched and sore and the edges of my ears turned an angry red. I hobbled around the next day as if I’d fallen into a well. It was the most tedious work I’d ever done, and by then I’d diagrammed a lot of sentences. Where was the grinning skull, the bony hand, the eerily crooked spine rising from the grave? I probably cried at some point that day.
Now, a day poking around in the dirt, even sans skeletons, sounds like a good time. (Being an adult has its perks, including enthusiasm over geeky things that don’t come easy.) If only that scientist had lied to me, telling me that somewhere under my bruised knees lay the imprint of our earliest ancestor’s absurd “face,” a find that would fill a gap in the fossil record so vital it would change everything we knew about everything. (A little drama makes all the difference in 5th grade.)
Just that little fib and maybe, just maybe, I’d be a happily sunburned paleontologist today.
Last week, researchers published a paper about dancing in the journal Scientific Reports. And the internet was really into it. The little dancing lady GIF was all over the place, and Shakira jokes washed over us all. But after I made my own jokes, I had some questions about the study. So, being a journalist, I read it. And hoo boy, does it make a whole lot of assumptions! Let’s talk about them.
This week, Craig unplugs from the wired world during his travels, and it’s not the blissful state of nature he imagined it to be—at least, not entirely. “I’d like to tell you it was sweet silence, but I could feel the Pavlovian side of myself wanting to drool. The limb ached.”
Ann interviews Mike Lemonick, whom she’s known for yonks, about his new book. It tells the story of a woman who lost her memory but—interestingly—not herself. ‘If you asked [H.M.] what he’d be doing the following day, he’d usually reply: “whatever is beneficial.”’
Meteors are usually shooting stars that make a pretty streak across the sky, except in the disturbingly frequent instances when they are huge fireballs whose sound cracks your windows. Cassie has videos. “The meteoroid was about the size of a minivan when it entered the atmosphere. The meteorite that splashed down was about the size of a lunch box.”
Michelle’s parenting duties include delivering a feminist education, enveloped in an age-appropriate spoonful of sugar. She has some bedtime story recommendations for parents who want more non-traditional female exemplars for their families, including “several fascinating subjects who are not what you’d call role models, such as suspected double agent Mata Hari and bloodthirsty pirate captain Ching Shih.”
Speculation about the perils of AI has been preceded by centuries of Jewish folklore about golems, writes Rose. The golem concept informs our ideas of what a robot is. “And the fears here are the same as well: what happens when the creature no longer wants to obey. What happens if it falls in love and is rebuffed?”
Image: Rabbi Loew and Golem by Mikoláš Aleš, 1899.
In Jewish folklore there’s a thing called a golem — a creature created by magic to serve its creator. There are lots of variations on the golem story, but the way I learned it goes like this: to bring a golem to life you form it out of dirt and then walk around it several times while chanting certain letters of the alphabet. Walking the other way around, saying those same letters and words backwards, kills the golem.
We were great in the Ice Age. Big weapons, big animals, big land.
