The Fading Ways of Indigenous Arctic Hunters - Ragnar Axelsson’s portraits from Greenland reveal the effects of climate change on ice floes, sled dogs, and a traditional culture. - link
“Parallel Mothers,” Reviewed: A Breathless Romance Sparked by a Fight for Historical Truth - Pedro Almodóvar’s film is full of extravagant twists that play out with the relentless confidence of logic. - link
For-Profit Colleges Have Made a COVID-Fuelled Comeback - The Trump Administration trashed a rule that protected students—the Biden Administration can fix that. - link
Remembering Desmond Tutu’s Hope - The archbishop was a consistent voice for nonviolent social change, campaigning against apartheid, advocating for gay rights, and speaking out against the Iraq War. - link
When Williamsburg Was on the Wrong Side of the River - The rise and fall of my Brooklyn apartment. - link
That’s what we’ve done on Unexplainable, a science podcast that Vox launched in March to explore the most important, interesting, and awe-inspiring unanswered questions in science. We set out to ask big questions that inspire scientists to do their work — questions that fill them with wonder or a sense of purpose, or remind them that the universe is still an enormous place with untapped potential.
In exploring these stories, we’ve learned some of the surprising reasons why major scientific mysteries can go unsolved for years or even decades: Some are due to the limits of technology, others are because of human failings. Regardless, working on Unexplainable has reminded us there’s hope in a question. Why ask one if you don’t believe an answer is possible?
Here, we rounded up 11 questions that astounded us the most.
It’s a simple question that’s also bafflingly unanswered: What makes up the universe? It turns out all the stars in all the galaxies in all the universe barely even begin to account for all the stuff out there. Most of the matter in the universe is actually unseeable, untouchable, and, to this day, undiscovered. It’s called dark matter, and despite searching for it for decades, scientists still have no idea what it is.
As you dive deeper into the ocean, less and less sunlight shines through, and about 200 meters beneath the surface, you reach an area called the “twilight zone.” Sunlight fades almost completely out of view, and our knowledge about these dark depths fades too.
“It’s almost easier to define it by what we don’t know than what we do know,” Andone Lavery, an acoustician at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told Vox’s Byrd Pinkerton.
Yet this region of the ocean is extremely important. It’s possible — but not certain — that there are more fish living in the twilight zone than the rest of the ocean combined, and creatures of the dark ocean play a large role in regulating the climate.
“Hellscape” is the most appropriate word to describe the surface of Venus, the second planet from the sun. At 900 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s the hottest planet in the solar system, thanks in part to an atmosphere of almost entirely carbon dioxide. Clouds of highly corrosive sulfuric acid are draped over a volcanic landscape of razor-sharp lava flows. Most crushingly, the pressure on the surface of Venus is about 92 times the pressure you’d feel at sea level on Earth.
Yet some scientists suspect Venus was once much like Earth, with a liquid water ocean like the ones that support life on our planet. This prompts an existential question for life on Earth. “It really is a question about why are we here,” says Robin George Andrews, volcanologist and author of Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond.
“Venus and Earth are planetary siblings,” Andrews says. “They were made at the same time and made of the same stuff, yet Venus is apocalyptic and awful in every possible way. Earth is a paradise. So why do we have a paradise next to a paradise lost?”
There are two leading hypotheses. One is that the sun cooked Venus to death. The other is that volcanoes did.
It’s impossible to completely predict how evolution will play out in the future, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try. Reporter Mandy Nguyen asked biologists and other experts to weigh in: What could animals look like a million years from now?
The experts took the question seriously. “I do think it’s a really useful and important exercise,” Liz Alter, professor of evolutionary biology at California State University Monterey Bay, told Nguyen. In thinking about the forces that will shape the future of life on Earth, we need to think about how humans are changing environments right now.
There is no cure for Alzheimer’s, a neurodegenerative disease that causes dementia, and no highly effective treatments, despite decades of research. Why? For one thing, scientists don’t have a complete understanding of what causes the disease.
For years, the prevailing theory has been that Alzheimer’s is caused by pile-ups of proteins called amyloids, which effectively create plaques in the brain. But drugs that help clear amyloids from the brain don’t seem to work very well in combating the disease.
Some scientists think Alzheimer’s researchers have been too focused on this one theory, at the expense of studying other potential causes, like viral infections.
How is a brainless yellow goo known as “slime mold” so smart?
Slime mold is an extremely simple organism that is also extraordinarily complex.
Technically, they are single-celled organisms. But many individual slime mold cells can fuse themselves together into a huge mass, capable of, well … thinking.
Slime mold can solve mazes and seems to be able to make risk-benefit decisions. There’s even evidence that slime mold can keep track of time. They do this all without a brain or even a single brain cell. Whatever mechanism allows slime mold to solve these problems, it’s evolved in a manner different from humans. How exactly do they do this? And what can it teach us about the nature of intelligence?
Is the first human to live to 150 years old alive today? We don’t know. On average, the human lifespan has risen over the decades in most of the world, but it’s unclear if there’s a ceiling. Could a human live into their second century? The technology and medicine that could make that possible may already be in development. But if it works, there will be unsettling questions for societies to answer.
Further reading: Science reporter Ferris Jabr’s piece “How Long Can We Live?” for the New York Times Magazine inspired this episode.
Are long-haul symptoms unique to Covid-19?
Millions of people around the world have dealt with long-term symptoms of Covid-19 for weeks or months after their initial infection has cleared. Some scientists say these “long-haul” symptoms are not unique to Covid. Instead, they argue that many types of viral infections can leave people with long-term symptoms, which often can go under-recognized in medicine. The question is: What connects all of these long-haul symptoms?
“It has always been [and] is the case that patients who get sick experience high levels of symptoms like those described by long-Covid patients,” Megan Hosey, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, told Vox’s Julia Belluz. “We have just done a terrible job of acknowledging [and] treating them.”
In people with endometriosis, tissue similar to what grows inside the uterus grows elsewhere in the body. It’s a chronic condition that can be debilitatingly painful. Yet doctors don’t fully understand what causes it, and treatment options are limited.
Worse, many people with endometriosis find that doctors can be dismissive of their concerns. It can take years to get an accurate diagnosis, and research into the condition has been poorly funded.
Vox reporter Byrd Pinkerton highlighted how frustrating it can be to suffer from an often-ignored, chronic condition. “It’s just so, so, so soul-crushing to just live in this body day in and day out,” one patient told Pinkerton.
Why do we have anuses — or butts, for that matter?
This is a question we never even knew we wanted to answer — until we heard the Atlantic’s Katherine Wu explain that “the appearance of the anus was momentous in animal evolution.” Before the appearance of the anus, animals had to eat and excrete through the same hole. The anus allowed for a more efficient system, and allowed animal life on Earth to grow bigger and take on new shapes and forms.
But scientists don’t have a complete picture of the evolutionary history here; they don’t know which creature developed the anus first, and when. “It’s so hard to study something that must be millions and millions of years old and doesn’t fossilize,” Wu says.
And then there’s a whole other question: Why is the human butt so big, compared with other mammals?
For millennia, people have been telling stories about mysterious spheres of light that glow, crackle, and hover eerily during thunderstorms. They’ve been spotted in homes, in rural areas, in cities, on airplanes, and even passing through windows.
They seem out of this world, but scientists believe they are very much of this world. These apparitions are called ball lightning, and they remain one of the most mysterious weather phenomena on Earth.
Ball lightning usually only lasts for a few moments, and it’s impossible to predict where and when it’ll show up. You can’t hunt ball lightning and reliably find it. Ball lightning finds you.
It’s rare, but many people have seen it. Scientists don’t know exactly where it comes from, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying to make it themselves, in their labs.
If you have ideas for topics for future shows, send us an email at unexplainable@vox.com.
Covid-19 surges spark chain reactions that strain US hospitals everywhere -
Registered nurse Nvard Termendzhyan, center, sets up a table for Linda Calderon, right, as her twin sister Natalie Balli, far left, rests in her bed in a Covid-19 unit at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, on December 13. The sisters were admitted to the hospital on the same day, a few days after their Thanksgiving gathering. | Jae C. Hong/AP
There are not two Americas when it comes to omicron.
Earlier this month, with a new wave of Covid-19 cases looking likely after the omicron variant was identified, Rhode Island emergency doctors wrote their state leaders to warn that any new surge of patients would “lead to collapse of the state health care system.” In Kansas, patients in rural hospitals have been stuck in the ER for days while they wait for a transfer to a larger hospital with the capacity and resources to care for them.
With the fast-spreading omicron variant now upon us, some of the rhetoric around the pandemic has changed. Government officials, starting with President Joe Biden, are pointedly differentiating between the risks for vaccinated and unvaccinated people. This could create the perception that some places face more of a risk than others: Perhaps omicron will threaten rural communities (where vaccination rates are lowest) and their health systems, but perhaps more vaccinated cities and their hospitals will be better off.
Such thinking would be misguided. As convoluted and sometimes siloed as the US health system may seem at times, it is still a system. Patients transfer between facilities based on capacity or clinical need. If rural hospitals are shipping seriously ill patients to their urban neighbors, which already tend to run close to capacity even in normal times, a rural Covid-19 crisis could quickly become a crisis for everybody.
One hospital being overwhelmed isn’t a one-hospital problem, it’s an every- hospital problem. Even if your community is not awash with Covid-19 or if most people are vaccinated, a major outbreak in your broader region, plus all the other patients hospitals are treating in normal times, could easily fill your hospital, too. That makes it harder for the health system to treat you if you come to the ER with heart attack symptoms or appendicitis or any acute medical emergency.
Already, because of existing staffing shortages, rural hospitals are finding it difficult to find room for their patients at larger hospital systems. With omicron spreading rapidly, increasing the number of patients seeking care while sidelining health workers who have to quarantine, systemic overload may not be far off.
“When you have a Covid patient who needs ICU care, those hospitals are turning away patients,” Carrie Saia, CEO of Holton Community Hospital, located in a town of 3,000 people about 90 minutes east of the Kansas City metropolitan area, told me earlier this month. “We’re sending our patients farther away. Not because they’re full, they’re just out of staff.”
At earlier points in the crisis, large hospitals would limit transfers from smaller facilities in order to preserve their capacity to treat the most seriously ill patients. As a new wave driven by the omicron variant takes off, that could happen again.
As Karen Joynt Maddox, a practicing cardiologist and associate professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, told me in August: “During Covid surges, we were told to limit transfers only to patients who had needs that could not be met at their current hospital (i.e. decline transfers because the family requested it, but equal services available at both places) because that was the only way we could make sure that we did have the ability to accept patients that only we (or another major referral center) could handle.”
The feedback loop works in reverse as well. Recently, the HCA hospital in Conroe, Texas, about 40 miles north of Houston, was dealing with such a staffing shortage in its emergency department that the facility temporarily asked ambulances to bypass it because the ED couldn’t handle any more patients, according to a spokesperson. Suddenly, hospitals in the heart of Houston were seeing an unexpected surge of patients who needed emergency care, causing long wait times at their facilities.
America’s hospitals are all in this together. So what can we do quickly to relieve the burden for all of our hospitals and prevent unnecessary deaths?
How we can all help hospitals handle a surge in omicron patients
Last week, the Biden White House detailed a new plan for helping hospitals handle the coming surge of Covid-19 patients. They are deploying emergency medical personnel to six states: Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Vermont. They are also planning to deploy another 1,000 military doctors and nurses in January and February, as well as ordering FEMA to work with states to add hospital beds. The White House also said it had 100,000 ventilators in the federal stockpile that could be deployed as needed.
Those policies could certainly help to alleviate the pressure on hospitals in places facing particularly acute crises. But the truth is, they can only do so much. US hospitals cannot suddenly grow the staff and physical capacity to handle another enormous surge of Covid-19 patients.
Infected medical workers add to the strain on hospitals. Hospitals have seen a spike in nurses and doctors testing positive; by late December, the El Centro Regional Medical Center, about two hours east of San Diego near the US-Mexico border, was seeing 5 to 10 percent of its staff either infected or being tested for exposure at any given time, according to CEO Adolphe Edward. Other hospitals have told me they are also seeing a growing number of workers test positive, which requires them to stop working and isolate.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently revised its isolation protocols for health care workers who test positive for Covid-19, shortening the standard isolation period from 10 days to 7 (if accompanied by a negative test). But that still takes doctors and nurses out of commission for several days if they contract the virus. (On Monday, the CDC released new guidelines for the general public stating that those who test positive can stop isolating after five days if they do not have symptoms.)
“You can send all the ventilators you want,” Roberta Schwartz, executive vice president at Houston Methodist Hospital, told me. “I have no one to staff them.”
Nearly 99 percent of rural hospitals said in a survey released in November they were experiencing a staffing shortage; 96 percent of them said they were having the most difficulty finding nurses. According to a September study commissioned by the American Hospital Association, the average cost of labor expenses for each discharged patient has grown by 14 percent in 2021 — even as the number of full-time employees has dropped by 4 percent.
“The only things I can think of could not be accomplished in two weeks,” Peter Viccellio, associate chief medical officer at Stony Brook University Hospital in New York, said. “We have a severe staffing shortage everywhere, and it’s not going to go away. It existed before Covid, and Covid just exacerbated it.”
Some policy changes — smoothing schedules that better distribute surgeries (and therefore patient volume) throughout the day or week, earlier discharges or more weekend discharges — could help. “But this won’t happen without a mandate,” Viccellio said.
“We won’t prevent future catastrophes because of a very simple reason. It requires that we think of the future and plan for it,” he added. “You can see how that’s working out. We can’t frigging plan for one month from now.”
More money from the federal government could also allow hospitals to beef up their staffing, said Beth Feldpush, senior vice president of policy and advocacy at America’s Essential Hospitals, which represents critical access facilities. But all of these policies targeted directly to hospitals may only help at the margins. The American health system’s capacity is what it is — the time to act was long ago. Instead, the US health care system is behind many of its wealthy peers in the number of practicing medical staff in its hospitals.
So the quickest and surest action to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed is actually to prevent people from needing to go to the hospital with Covid-19 in the first place, hospital leaders said. Get vaccinated — with three doses. Wear masks indoors in public places. Test before you see people who don’t live in your house.
Following the pandemic playbook can make a difference for hospitals bracing for another grim winter in this pandemic.
“The more we can help keep the public protected, the more we can keep our workers here,” Schwartz said, “and lessen the burden of this.”
This legendary 92-year-old biologist has some advice for saving Earth -
In an interview with Vox, renowned naturalist E.O. Wilson shares his stories from the field, plan to protect nature, and advice for young scientists. | Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images
E.O. Wilson, who was considered a modern-day Darwin, wanted you to go out and look for new species.
Editor’s note, December 27, 2021: E.O. Wilson died on December 26, according to his biodiversity foundation. The following interview was conducted with him on November 18.
In the spring of 1955, E.O. Wilson, then a young entomologist at Harvard, traveled to northeastern Papua New Guinea to study ants. Hiking with local guides through dense rainforests, he climbed 13,000 feet to the summit ridge in the Saruwaged mountains — becoming, by his account, the first Western scientist to reach the peak.
So much of what Wilson saw during that expedition was new to Western science, including a number of types of ants, he told Vox in a recent interview. “There were a lot of adventures like that,” said Wilson.
Today, it may seem as though scientists have explored nearly every corner of the Earth, from the thick, humid jungles of Central Africa to the rust-red, arid outback of Australia. Walking into an ecosystem and stumbling upon species that have yet to be cataloged in academic journals now seems like something you can only read about in books that people like E.O. Wilson have written. (He’s written more than 30, and if you don’t have time to read them all, you can check out a new biography by Richard Rhodes out about him entitled Scientist: E.O. Wilson: A Life in Nature.)
But that’s not how Wilson, a research professor emeritus at Harvard, sees it. In fact, much of the world’s biodiversity remains undiscovered, he told Vox. “A rough estimate suggests that there are upwards of 10 million species on the planet, and we know only a small fraction of them,” said Wilson, who popularized the term “biodiversity” in the 1980s. “The opportunities are endless.”
Sure, you might have to travel farther or study smaller organisms to find something new, he said, but there remains so much potential for discovery. And those discoveries are useful, he added, especially as we seek to conserve nature. While we already know plenty about the forces that harm ecosystems and wildlife, from habitat loss to oil spills, there’s tremendous value in knowing what we have to lose, in better understanding the planet that supports us.
I spoke with Wilson about scientific discovery for a recent episode of Vox Conversations (you can find a link below). We also chatted about how studying ants helped him understand human behavior and led to a big new conservation initiative called the Half-Earth Project. Inspired by Wilson’s book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, which he published in 2016, the initiative seeks to protect 50 percent of all land and ocean on the planet. The project backbone is a large dataset that shows where new protected areas would be most useful to protect biodiversity.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Most species on Earth are still undiscovered
Benji Jones
One of my favorite parts of reading your books is hearing about your incredible expeditions. In some cases, you were the first Western scientist to explore these places, like in New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea. What was that like?
E.O. Wilson
Exciting. That’s why I went halfway around the world. I think the most important adventure I did was when I climbed to the center of the Saruwaged Range mountains on the peninsula of Papua New Guinea as the first non-native — that is, the first scientist. With the help of locals, I went up to the 13,000-foot crest of the mountains.
Everything was new. Most of the animals that I saw, including kinds of ants, had never been found before.
Hugh Patrick Brown/Getty Images
E.O. Wilson first made a name for himself in the study of ants.
Hugh Patrick Brown/Getty Images
He made many discoveries throughout his life, including the finding that ants communicate with each other primarily through pheromones.
Benji Jones
Was there a particular wildlife encounter that stands out to you from all of your travels?
E.O. Wilson
I believe probably the most important was when I visited a little set of islands off the coast of Australia called New Caledonia and set out to be the first entomologist to arrive there and celebrate a tremendous variety of new species.
Benji Jones
Your books have really inspired people to go out and explore the world. But I can’t imagine that there are many places in the world today that haven’t been touched by humans. What you did is almost impossible to do now.
E.O. Wilson
It’s certainly more difficult, but there’s still a lot of unclaimed territory, so to speak. There are manyundiscovered and unstudied species in the world — especially in remote areas in the tropics — that await even the most elementary studies, and the results are going to continue to unfold across several generations of scientists.
Benji Jones
Why is there still a strong need for basic science and cataloging more species? It seems like there’s so much pressure to solve the problem of habitat loss and other forces that are driving down biodiversity. Should we not focus instead on stopping those forces?
E.O. Wilson
We should be doing both. A rough estimate suggests that there are upward of 10 million species on the planet, and we know only a small fraction of them. [Estimates for the number of species on Earth vary, but a widely cited figure is 8.7 million, which comes from this paper.] In most cases, we just have a few specimens in museums. It would be enormously productive and useful if we made more of an effort to identify all of the species on Earth — to find out where they are and what their status is.
The opportunities are endless. They represent the equivalent of the first explorations made by people when they came out of Europe and began to explore the rest of the world. That’s what we have before us.
Benji Jones
I love this idea that there’s so much wonder still left in the world. You can go out today and find something new that might contribute to science in a productive way.
E.O. Wilson
Yes, even if you have to travel a little farther than would have been the case a few years ago. The most important discoveries are going to be made in examining the smallest of the ants, the animals, the plants. We just need to know what is on this planet. We need to have a more complete and productive understanding of how to care for the life that we’ve inherited.
Hugh Patrick Brown/Getty Images
Wilson discovered hundreds of species of ants throughout his career.
Benji Jones
Along those lines, why should we care about a species if we don’t even know about it? If a species that we haven’t discovered is going extinct, for example, why does it matter?
E.O. Wilson
We won’t see the magnitude of our ignorance, of our excitement, or of the useful knowledge embedded in the living environment until we set out to explore all of it. That includes large numbers of small, inconspicuous species.
Benji Jones
We need to know what we have to lose.
E.O. Wilson
Yes. We need to not carelessly let any species slip away from us. If we want to know what is on this planet and why it is a live planet — what contributes to that life and what it all means, ultimately, for human existence — we should try to save it all.
Benji Jones
If you were going to give advice to a student of biology today, to explore a type of life, a type of organism, where would you recommend starting?
E.O. Wilson
If you wish, you can take a map of the world and throw a dart. Where the dart hits, you will find animals and plants and mysteries of great magnitude.
What ants can teach us about human behavior
Benji Jones
You’ve also written a lot about the biological basis of human behavior. What has studying ants and ecology taught you about the behavior of humans?
E.O. Wilson
My early interests as a kid in the American South led me to the study of ants. And I discovered, in my hometown, the first US colony of [red imported] fire ants.
What makes ants stand out and interesting to a young scientist is that they communicate with each other using chemicals — with pheromones. My interest in chemical communication among ants led me to broader studies on the origin of social behavior more generally. This brings us to humans.
Human society can be illuminated more effectively by studying how societies are put together in the vast array of organisms, from deer to starlings to ants to bees. Each species creates societies in different ways, using different senses. From that, early on in my career at Harvard, I saw the option of doing a comparative study across many species, using different sensory modalities. I saw the opportunity of building a discipline out of this.
And so about 50 years ago, I proposed a new discipline called sociobiology. I couldn’t stay away from humans. I decided to include the peculiarities of human social behavior and how it could be illuminated — the evolution of human and social behavior — by making a comparison with societies of all kinds. That got some attention.
Benji Jones
You got a lot of flack, as Rhodes details in his book, for your work trying to understand the biological or evolutionary basis of certain human behaviors. Looking back on that now, would you have done anything differently?
E.O. Wilson
As the unfavorable attention started to fade away, I was happy that I had taken the course of study that I did.
There are not many areas of science that are sensitive to the conflict with moral reasoning. It’s a challenge — that goes way back before Darwin and the idea of evolution — that causes an outpouring from time to time due to the seeming animalization of humanity and the human condition.
I can understand why sociobiology — which included human behavior as just one more possibility in the evolution of social behavior — caused alarm. But it’s held its ground, and I think sociobiology is now well-accepted.
Benji Jones
There’s obviously a lot we still don’t know. Do you think it is important that we fully understand all the biological roots of behavior? That we fill in the remaining gaps?
E.O. Wilson
I think it’s extremely important. Human behavior, as a whole generation of poets, writers, and scientists have come to realize, is deeply rooted in instinct, and there’s a history to that instinct that occurred as humans — protohumans — evolved gradually into the full species, homo sapiens. That is history. It’s prehistory, but it’s history. And it’s enormously important because human instinctive behavior and all of its consequences and all of its possible manifestations are enormously important for our understanding of our own species, our self.
Benji Jones
Part of me is a little bit scared to know the biological basis of everything. I feel like it could be a slippery slope. So, for example, I’m gay. If you could figure out the biological basis of homosexuality, that could come with some serious and perhaps unpredictable consequences. Are there any concerns that you have about knowing too much?
E.O. Wilson
No. It’s only by completely open and honest research done to the best of our ability that we can understand where we fit as a species that has evolved in the midst of a living world that has peculiar properties that have deeply influenced what we’ve become.
Wildlife conservation “has many victories in a losing war”
Benji Jones
I can’t help but think that decades of efforts to save nature haven’t accomplished much. Do you think conservation has worked?
E.O. Wilson
We have had many successes — a rainforest here, the protection of a savanna or tropical grassland there, and so on. But the sum of it all is inadequate. We don’t have a generally recognized, universally accepted moonshot effort to combine all the activity directed toward conservation into a unified, fundamentally accepted ethic of conservation. We have many victories in a losing war.
Benji Jones
Would it be fair to say that this kind of universal ethic is in line with the Half-Earth Project — your work to conserve half of the planet, both land and sea?
E.O. Wilson
In the 1960s, a young professor at Princeton, Robert MacArthur, and I decided to create a theory together on something related to our work — research on biodiversity and on what determines the number of species in a particular part of the world. We created the Theory of Island Biogeography.
It began when I put together data for ants all through the Pacific region, island by island. I saw that there was a relationship between the area of the island and the number of species found there — in this case, of ants. It turns out it applies to pretty much any organism.
Courtesy of Jay Vavra
E.O. Wilson in Gorongosa National Park, one of the many locations where he did field work.
A relatively small increase in the area of an island resulted in a different number of species. If you can set aside 15 percent more area when building a nature reserve, you can increase the number of species that can live there, stably, by about 85 percent.
This suggested to me — just this one phenomenon — that we ought to translate that into a policy. I suggested that idea in a book entitled Half- Earth. If you can somehow make half of the Earth a reserve, you could save the vast majority of species on it.
Benji Jones
There’s been a lot of criticism of approaches that aim to increase the size of protected areas. In the past, some of those efforts removed Indigenous people from their land. Can we both add more reserves and protect the rights of Indigenous people?
E.O. Wilson
Yes. Generally, we have enough examples now from around the world to show that reserves can be created or enlarged in a safe and thoughtful manner with due consideration given to people living there — who own the property and have the methods and philosophies of conservation of their own. We can accomplish both.
Benji Jones
What advice do you have for scientists or biologists that are just starting their careers today?
E.O. Wilson
If you have even a glimmering of interest in entering the field of biology, it’s a career that, at this point in our history, is potentially enormously useful. We know that reserves are very fragile and that we need to have a science and technology of reserve creation. We need to know what is in the reserves, down to the smallest invertebrate, animal, alga, fungus, and so on — down to the last species. I would hope every student with any interest in biology at all carefully considers this type of career.
Benji Jones
How about for people who are not scientists and are just trying to live in a way that doesn’t harm the planet? What do you tell people about their own responsibility?
E.O. Wilson
Don’t cut down a boreal forest or the Amazon and have a general sense of responsibility for the remaining natural areas of the world. That doesn’t require a PhD in biodiversity. It requires a sense of personal responsibility and merit to save parts of the world that are very valuable for our history, for our welfare, and — unfortunately — are very vulnerable to careless destruction.
Benji Jones
What does that actually look like for someone in their day-to-day? What is the behavior that we should be living by?
E.O. Wilson
I’ve found that, in different parts of our country and in foreign countries, when people become familiar with what’s in their natural environment, what’s interesting, what’s important on a broader scale, what gives them pleasures, that depth of understanding leads to a long-term improvement in their quality of life.
Correction, December 3, 11 am: Due to a transcription error, a previous version of this article misstated when E.O. Wilson proposed the new discipline of sociobiology. It was 50 years ago.
From The Hindu: Sports
Bajrang Punia lands in Moscow for pre-season training - Tokyo Olympics wrestling bronze medallist Bajrang Punia arrived in Moscow on Monday for a 26-day pre-season training stint, scheduled until January 21
Samuel Eto’o faces tax charges in Spain - Spanish tax authorities say Eto’o owes nearly one million euros
South African team is searching for its identity, says Alviro Petersen - Alviro Petersen made his Test debut, against India at the Eden Gardens in 2010
Chelsea taking ‘huge risks’ with players, says manager Thomas Tuchel - While pleased with the three points, Tuchel was concerned about the players he must pitch back into action
Mirabai Chanu lifted Indian spirits with a silver at Tokyo - But weightlifting, with its history of decades of rampant doping, faces an uncertain Olympic future
From The Hindu: National News
Water level in Mullapeiryar, Vaigai dams - Water level in Mullaperiyar dam stood at 141.50 feet (maximum permissible level is 142 ft.) with an inflow of 379 cusecs and a discharge of 600 cusecs
Multiple strategies to tackle Omicron spread - Focus on ensuring that COVID care does not follow the Delta pattern and non-COVID care does not suffer
Vice Admiral Puneet K. Bahl takes charge as Commandant of INA, Ezhimala, Kanur district - He has held an array of operational, staff and training assignments
ED seizes over ₹293 crore worth shares of ex-Tamil Nadu Mercantile Bank chairman in FEMA probe - “Since, the amount of foreign investment was SGD 5,29,86,250, the assets of equivalent value thereof of ₹293.91 crore have been seized,” the agency said
Sun Pharma to set up end to end integrated manufacturing unit in Andhra Pradesh - Company MD Dilip Shanghvi meets CM
From BBC: Europe
Austria’s Innsbruck airport denies 110 Britons entry over new Covid rules - Innsbruck airport in Austria refused to let in tourists caught out by updated restrictions.
Covid: France tightens restrictions amid Omicron surge - Germany and Greece also toughen measures in a bid to tackle infections amid fears about Omicron.
Andrzej Duda: Polish president vetoes controversial media law - Opponents say the law banning foreign ownership in the media aimed to silence government critics.
What a Greek tragedy teaches us about modern migration - A production of Antigone seeks to overturn prejudices about Africans arriving in Sicily.
Pope Francis Urbi et Orbi address: World ignoring huge tragedies - In his Christmas Day speech, the Pope said “immense tragedies” were being passed over in near silence.
From Ars Technica
Elizabeth Holmes and “pinch-to-zoom” in Rittenhouse trial: 2021’s top policy stories - Holmes trial, ISPs behaving badly, and many other big stories from the past year. - link
Sparks fly between Caped Crusader and Catwoman in latest The Batman trailer - Also: the Riddler wants Batman to “unmask the truth about this cesspool we call a city.” - link
Scientists draw inspiration from catchweed to create biodegradable Velcro - Artificial micro-hook structure enables the creation of microdevices for monitoring plants. - link
Coffee’s health benefits aren’t as straightforward as they seem—here’s why - Coffee is very chemically complex; its different components affect us in different ways. - link
This may finally be the year we see some new chunky rockets take flight - Many of these rockets, you may recall, were supposed to fly in 2020. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
“Doc, I think my son has gonorrhea,” a patient told his urologist on the phone. “The only woman he’s screwed is our maid.” -
“OK, don’t be hard on him. He’s just a kid,” the doc soothed. “Get him in here right away and I’ll take care of him.”
“But Doc, I’ve been screwing the maid too, and I’ve got the same symptom she has.”
“Then you come in with him and I’ll fix you both up,” replied the doctor.
“Well,” the man admitted, “I think my wife now has it too.”
“Son of a bitch!” the physician roared. “That means we’ve all got it!”
Aliens visit Earth. They come in peace and surprisingly , they speak English. -
Obviously, all of the heads of government and religious leaders want to speak to the aliens so they set up a meeting with our new visitors. When it’s the Pope’s turn, he asks: “Do you know about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?”
“You mean JC?”, responds the alien. “Yeah, we know him! He’s the greatest, isn’t he? He swings by every year to make sure that we are doing ok”.
Surprised, the pope follows up with: “He visits every year?! It’s been over two millennia and we’re still waiting for his SECOND coming!”
The alien sees that the pope has become irate at this fact and starts trying to rationalize. “Maybe he likes our chocolate better than yours?”
The pope retorts “Chocolates? What are you talking about? What does that have to do with anything?”
The alien says “Yea, when he first visited our planet we gave him a huge box of chocolates! Why? What did you guys do?”
The monkey jumps on the counter and gobbles up a bowl of peanuts.
The bartender asked the guy, “Did you see what your monkey just did?”
The guy replied, “Yeah, he does that all the time. He’s always hungry. I’ll pay for the peanuts”, and hands the bartender a buck. The bartender clinks a couple of pennies as change onto the counter, which the monkey promptly grabs and swallows.
The guy said, “Oh he eats random things all the time”.
As if on cue, the monkey jumps onto the pool table and stuffs the cue ball down his throat. Sighing, the man brings out his wallet.
The next week, the man and his monkey go back to the bar. This time, the monkey sees cherries on the counter. He grabs one, rams it up his buttcrack, removes it and eats it.
Disgusted, the bartender asks the guy, “Did you see what your monkey just did?”
The guy says, “Yeah, ever since he had to shit out that cue ball he ate last time, he’ll be darned if he doesn’t measure everything first”.
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Courtesy of Jay Vavra