kristenfrench

Trump’s firings of the National Science Board and his other attacks on science over the past year plus do more than just undermine science. They undermine national security, according to Rod Schoonover, ecological security expert and former director for the U.S. National Intelligence Council, and Bradley J. Cardinale, professor at Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences. The pair of scientists recently collaborated on a paper that explores some of the overlooked ways that ecological disruptions can threaten the ability of nations to protect their citizens, institutions, and interests against foreign and domestic threats. When I spoke with them about that work they also noted more broadly how essential good science is for nations to protect against security threats.

volutionary novelties abound,” writes paleobiologist Douglas Erwin in the introduction to his new book The Origins of the New. Take grasses. They’ve carpeted the continents in undulating blankets of green, blue, and brown for millions and millions of years. They’ve been so successful that they’ve completely altered ecosystems across the planet, modifying not just terrestrial habitat but regional climate. But it took grasses a long time to grow to such dominance. They first appeared 55 million years ago, and they were ecological nobodies for a long time after that. First, they were novel. Then, much later, they were wildly successful. There was a huge lag between the two.

This is more important than it might at first seem, argues Erwin. Today, many scientists equate novelty with innovation, and this poses a problem for our understanding and study of evolution.

"The standard of care, particularly for gender therapy, is what a lot of people would call exploratory therapy, where you’re absolutely allowed to talk to people in a non-directive way to help them understand themselves and explore their gender," says psychiatrist Jack Turban in this interview. "That’s what Chiles was saying that she does, and she was describing something that’s quite similar to what the standard treatment is. But exploratory therapy isn’t conversion therapy. Conversion therapy is when you enter the treatment with a predefined goal to change the person. So your predefined goal is to make the person straight or to make the person cisgender. Every major organization has said that that’s dangerous: the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. So that’s a major factual confusion in the case that muddied the waters."

So-called "extinct" volcanoes are filled with a lot more fury than their millennia-long slumber would suggest. These were the findings of an international team of scientists who recently reconstructed the long history of a 1,400-foot volcano known as Methana, near Athens, Greece, which looms over the Saronic Gulf in the Aegean Sea. Methana last erupted around 2,200 years ago. The ancient Greek historian Strabo was there—or close enough: “A seven-stage high mountain was raised from a fiery eruption, during the day inaccessible due to the heat and sulfurous odor, but at night fragrant, glowing from afar and warming the sea for five stadia, and murky,” he wrote.

From lazy ankle biters in a sea of lava to 16-foot heavies in a liquid methane lake, a new model developed by scientists from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, aptly named “PlanetWaves,” models waves on extreme planetary environments for the first time.

they're psychologically adaptive, an evolutionary gift, says Coltan Scrivener. He was fun to chat with.

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it. Just checked that link out and whoa, very cool.

I'm so sorry you did not enjoy it! We wanted to bring Josie Kins' index and research to our readers and did reach out to them for a bit of background.

In an email, study author Hunter Schone followed up with these answers to my questions:

What is the significance of the finding?

Many treatments for phantom limb pain are built on the idea that the brain’s map of the missing limb gets scrambled and needs to be retrained. Our results show these maps aren’t broken — so therapies should move away from the brain and instead target the severed peripheral nerves. This result gives us confidence that brain-computer interfaces can reliably tap into a stable source of bodily signals, despite the loss of the sensory input.

Why didn’t we realize this until now?

Most of the evidence came from animal studies. Though, critically, amputated monkeys couldn't describe that they still feel phantom sensations of a missing limb — a subjective phenomenon unique to humans. By following people before and after amputation and tracking how the cortical body map changes, for the first time, we were finally able to see the stark stability of these maps across the amputation.

People with phantom limb experience vivid sensations, and often pain, in the missing extremity. Based on animal studies, scientists have long believed that this phenomenon arises because maps of the missing limb in the brain get scrambled, with healthy body parts taking over for the missing ones. But now, a team of scientists looked at the actual brains of people with the condition, before and after a limb was amputated. They found that, in fact, those maps of the now missing limb remain the same. This challenges notions of plasticity in the adult brain and will change how clinicians try to treat it. Read more about it at Nautilus: https://nautil.us/how-phantom-limb-tricks-us-1233795/

What do people think about giving legal rights of personhood to inanimate elements of nature as a conservation strategy?

"The movement began in the 1970s with an essay titled “Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” by American law professor Christopher Stone. Stone wrote that the history of law has followed the arc of human moral development, described by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man. “Originally each man had regard only for himself and those of a very narrow circle about him … then ‘his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused.’” The rights-of-nature philosophy shifts the value of nature away from its ability to provide resources for extraction to its capacity to sustain life."

"The movement began in the 1970s with an essay titled “Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” by American law professor Christopher Stone. Stone wrote that the history of law has followed the arc of human moral development, described by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man. “Originally each man had regard only for himself and those of a very narrow circle about him … then ‘his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused.’” The rights-of-nature philosophy shifts the value of nature away from its ability to provide resources for extraction to its capacity to sustain life."

Would love to hear what you all think about this conservation idea..."rights of nature" for inanimate nature like waves.