Pandemics: Humans are the culprits

The intensive agribusiness in northeast Brazil is responsible for the massive deforestation of the Cerrado, one of the world’s most diverse tropical ecosystems.

The destruction of ecosystems is not just bad news for the planet, it’s also harmful for the health of humans. The emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 is just one manifestation of the proliferation of zoonoses – diseases transmitted from animals to humans.

John Vidal

Journalist, author, and former environment editor of The Guardian newspaper

What’s in a kiss? Nothing less than the very essence of what it is to be human

James Dean & Julie Harris – East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955)

As new anthropological research shows the different ways we express love, Sheril Kirshenbaum, author of The Science of Kissing, takes a romantic trip through history and around the world

Sheril Kirshenbaum

The Observer, Sunday 19 July 2015

Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever

Oscar Ghiglia (Italian, 1876-1945), La mela [Apple], c.1922-25

Robert Macfarlane

 

Friday 1 April 2016 Last modified on Monday 4 April 2016

 

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever

 

We are living in the Anthropocene age, in which human influence on the planet is so profound – and terrifying – it will leave its legacy for millennia. Politicians and scientists have had their say, but how are writers and artists responding to this crisis?

Chinese Scientists Edit Genes of Human Embryos, Raising Concerns

Georgia O’Keeffe.  The Chestnut Grey, 1924

By GINA KOLATA The New York Times, APRIL 23, 2015

The experiment with human embryos was dreaded, yet widely anticipated. Scientists somewhere, researchers said, were trying to edit genes with a technique that would permanently alter the DNA of every cell so any changes would be passed on from generation to generation.

Pirate Radical Philosophy

Walden Glenn 2008  by Norman Engel

 

RP 173 (May/Jun 2012), Gary Hall

Pirate … from the Latin pirata (-ae; pirate)… transliteration of the Greek piratis (pirate; πειρατής) from the verb pirao (make an attempt, try, test, get experience, endeavour, attack; πειράω). … In modern Greek… piragma: teasing [πείραγμα] …pirazo: tease, give trouble [πειράζω].1

Stephen Hawking Wonders Whether Capitalism or Artificial Intelligence Will Doom the Human Race

Creative Commons image via NASA

It shouldn’t be especially controversial to point out that we live in a pivotal time in human history—that the actions we collectively take (or that plutocrats and technocrats take) will determine the future of the human species—or whether we even have a future in the coming centuries. The threats posed by climate change and war are exacerbated and accelerated by rapidly worsening economic inequality. Exponential advances in technology threaten to eclipse our ability to control machines rather than be controlled, or stamped out, by them.

Propose Earth’s ‘Anthropocene’ Age of Humans Began With Fallout and Plastics

https://graphicanthropology.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/how2catchanibex001.jpg

 

By ANDREW C. REVKIN JANUARY 15, 2015 7:11 AM January 15, 2015 7:11 am 98 Comments

A research team assessing when a new geological epoch shaped by humans began has settled on the mid 20th century. Two markers are carbon isotopes from nuclear explosions and plastics, here seen in the remains of a dead albatross.Credit Left, U.S. Air Force Photo; right, Chris Jordan, midwayfilm.com

 

What is the Human Genome Project?

Begun formally in 1990, the U.S. Human Genome Project was a 13-year effort coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. The project originally was planned to last 15 years, but rapid technological advances accelerated the completion date to 2003.

The Human Family Tree Bristles With New Branches

Researchers who discovered this jaw fossil say it belongs to a new species, Australopithecus deyiremeda. CreditYohannes Haile-Selassie/Cleveland Museum of Natural History

 

Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, May 27, 2015

Tiny, Vast Windows Into Human DNA

 

Genes found on chromosomes of the fruit fly are regulated much like those of humans though they are but distant relatives. CreditEd Reschke/Getty Images

 

By CARL ZIMMER, The New York Times,  SEPT. 1, 2014

In the history of biology, two little animals loom large.

Five insights challenging science’s unshakable ‘truths’

 

Methyl groups, which affect our genes, often come from what we eat. Photograph: Science Photo Library

 

If you thought dying of loneliness was just an old wives’ tale, or that genetic inheritance is fixed – think again. Michael Brooks on science’s most unexpected findings

Michael Brooks, The Observer, Sunday 29 June 2014

The Brain’s Inner Language

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By JAMES GORMAN FEB. 24, 2014, The New York Times

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Clay Reid and colleagues are going deep into the mouse brain to decipher the conversations and decisions of neurons.

SEATTLE — When Clay Reid decided to leave his job as a professor at Harvard Medical School to become a senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle in 2012, some of his colleagues congratulated him warmly and understood right away why he was making the move.

Others shook their heads. He was, after all, leaving one of the world’s great universities to go to the academic equivalent of an Internet start-up, albeit an extremely well- financed, very ambitious one, created in 2003 by Paul Allen, a founder of Microsoft.