BREAKING NEWS: Science (2)

We Asked the 2020 Democrats About Climate Change (Yes, All of Them). Here Are Their Ideas.

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 04:14:55 +0000

The New York Times sent a climate policy survey to the 18 declared candidates. They all want to stick to the Paris Agreement. Beyond that, they diverge.

El Al Airline Warns of Measles After Flight Attendant Falls Into Coma

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 03:26:03 +0000

The woman was hospitalized after contracting the disease, and passengers on a flight from J.F.K. to Tel Aviv are told to watch for symptoms.

Rabbit Bone Dated to First Century A.D. Found in England

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 02:03:55 +0000

WEST SUSSEX, ENGLAND—The Guardian reports that zooarchaeologist Fay Worley of Historic England spotted a small fragment of a rabbit’s tibia bone in a box of artifacts that were unearthed in 1964 at Fishbourne Palace in southeast England. This was the site of a Roman villa whose wealthy inhabitants are known to have kept a varied menagerie. Worley said the bone, dated to the first century A.D., bears no butchery marks and appears to have been part of the earliest known rabbit in England. Further analysis suggests the rabbit was kept in confinement, she added, and may have been an exotic pet. Rabbits are native to Spain and Portugal, and it had been previously thought they were first introduced to Britain in the eleventh century by the Normans. To read about another recent discovery dating to the Roman period in England, go to Foreign Funeral Rites.”

13,500-Year-Old Burial Unearthed in China

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 01:26:11 +0000

GUANGZHOU, CHINA—Xinhua reports that a 13,500-year-old tomb at the site of the Qingtang ruins in southeastern China has yielded the remains of a young woman who died between the ages of 13 and 18 and was buried, without her head, in a squatting position. Liu Suoqiang of the Guangdong Institute of Cultural Heritage and Archaeology said the woman was deliberately put in a squatting posture. “It points to the emergence of the concepts of life and death and of primitive religious beliefs,” Liu explained. Researchers are also trying to determine whether the woman’s head was missing due to natural causes, or whether it was removed. Burials containing remains arranged in a squatting posture have been found in other prehistoric tombs in southern China and Southeast Asia, though the symbolism of the posture is unclear. A bone pin was also found in the young woman's grave. For more on archaeology in China, go to “Early Signs of Empire.”

Urine Salts in Soil May Mark Advent of Herding

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 01:04:47 +0000

NEW YORK, NEW YORK—According to a report in The Atlantic, Jordan Abell of Columbia University and his colleagues were able to detect a possible shift from hunting and gathering to herding at the site of Aşıklı Höyük, in Turkey’s central Anatolia region. Because the area is dry, Abell hypothesized that the sodium, nitrate, and chlorine salts contained in the urine of people and animals would not have been washed away from the soil by rain. The scientists analyzed soil samples from trash heaps, bricks, and hearths from different layers of the site, and found that between 10,000 and 9,700 years ago, the salt concentrations rose dramatically. This possible increase in urine output corresponds with archaeological evidence suggesting that the hunter-gatherers began to keep sheep and goats, but it appears that the shift toward herding may have occurred more rapidly than had been previously thought. Over a period of about 1,000 years, the researchers estimate that on average, some 1,800 people and animals lived at the settlement. That’s many more individuals than archaeologists estimate the housing for people at the site would have accommodated, suggesting that the number of goats or sheep living there had increased. The team members are now looking for a way to distinguish between human and animal urine salts as their research continues. For more on archaeology in Turkey dating to the Neolithic period, go to “Skull Cult at Göbekli Tepe.”

First Female Candidate for Astronaut Dies

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 00:37:00 +0000

America's first female astronaut candidate, pilot Jerrie Cobb, who pushed for equality in space but never reached its heights, has died. Cobb died in Florida at age 88 on March 18 after a brief illness, the AP reports. In 1961, Cobb became the first woman to pass astronaut testing. Altogether,...

This Genetic Mutation Makes People Feel Full — All the Time

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 23:55:16 +0000

Two new studies confirm that weight control is often the result of genetics, not willpower.

Award-winning Tauranga resident being made Fellow of Royal Society of London

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 23:48:22 +0000

An award-winning Tauranga mathematician, whose research into rotating black holes was recently proven, is to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. The first image ever captured of a black hole was publicly released on...

Norwich Cathedral peregrine falcons: A photographer's passion

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 23:28:32 +0000

Chris Skipper has been photographing urban peregrines nesting at Norwich Cathedral for nearly a decade.

8 'Bubble Boy' Infants Cured, Thanks to HIV

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 22:32:16 +0000

Eight for eight. That's the record scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital are thrilled about after using gene therapy to cure eight baby boys of the rare disorder commonly known as "bubble boy" disease, reports the BBC . What's more, the researchers used HIV to do it, notes the AP...

Kentucky’s Senator McConnell Supports Bill to Raise Minimum Age to Buy Tobacco to 21

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 22:13:11 +0000

Seeking re-election to a seventh term, the senator cited the rise in teenage vaping as a reason to curtail sales of tobacco and other products.

Mama Bear: Melissa Travis on Parenting, Education, and the Reasons 2019 Conference

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 20:56:39 +0000

In a modern culture where so much attention is focused on public education and educators, it’s worth remembering the mantra that home is the first school, and parents are the first teachers. As a mother of two boys, Professor Melissa Cain Travis has made it her mission to help parents — especially mothers — navigate tough questions about origins and beliefs. As she remarked in my recent interview with her on ID the Future:

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to equip our children well with this kind of knowledge, so that when they are set free into the world of corporate America or the secular university, they’ll have the tools with which to counter some of the arguments that they hear.

Travis, who teaches philosophy at Houston Baptist University, talked about the need for “a non-intimidating introduction” to conversations relating science and faith. Besides authoring Science and the Mind of the Maker for a more general audience, she has written children’s books about faith questions and is affliated with the spirited online community Mama Bear Apologetics. Their motto: “Rise up ladies. Rise up Mama Bears. The battle of ideas is real, and it is not taking prisoners.”

Equipping Parents to Talk About Worldviews

Travis is also taking many opportunities to connect with parents at events and conferences, including Reasons 2019, hosted by Discovery Institute, coming up next month in the Houston area. Melissa recalls:

I have heard many, many, many times from parents who have attended conferences like Reasons. They talk about how that experience has better equipped them to have really great worldview conversations with their kids.

Travis’s presentation at Reasons 2019 will provide important context for the conference theme: New Conversations on Science and Faith. Also speaking at the conference are biologist Michael Behe, science historian Michael Keas, and chemist Marcos Eberlin who leads the intelligent design movement in Brazil. The conference runs May 3-4 at Faith Bible Church in The Woodlands, TX. Register now through May 1 at discovery.org/events.

The post Mama Bear: Melissa Travis on Parenting, Education, and the Reasons 2019 Conference appeared first on Evolution News.

Richards: False Prophecies of a Robotic Future Are Based on a False Darwinian Premise

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 20:41:10 +0000

We’ve just posted some excellent comments by Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Jay Richards who spoke at the launch of Discovery’s Bradley Center on Natural and Artificial Intelligence in Dallas. Watch it here:

As Dr. Richards observes, what he calls the Officially Smart People have been seeding the media conversation with a pair of contradictory prophecies about the rise of robots. One is ridiculously dystopian, the other absurdly utopian. In both, robots replace almost all human workers. In both cases, the scenario of total robotic replacement stems from a Darwinian premise that humans are nothing more than evolved “meat machines.” Richards:

If that’s true, if we’re just machines, we’re produced by this blind Darwinian process and we become conscious and create things, then there’s no reason to assume that machines we designed to do thinking won’t do that better than we can and ultimately replace us without remainder. So that everything about us can ultimately be replaced mentally and then eventually physically through robotics.

The key phrase there is “without remainder.” The rejoinder to this way of thinking, which Jay Richards expresses with wonderful concision, is that humans possess a unique capacity forever setting us apart from machines. It’s the capacity for “creative freedom.” In this quick video, Jay illuminates just what that means. That is George Gilder and Robert Marks with him on the stage.

The post Richards: False Prophecies of a Robotic Future Are Based on a False Darwinian Premise appeared first on Evolution News.

When zapped with a laser, magnets behave like fluids

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 20:31:03 +0000

Scientists have managed to figure out how a magnet manages to recover after being demagnetized by a brief laser blast.

Scientists recover liquid blood from 42,000-year-old foal

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 20:24:18 +0000

An international team of scientists has extracted liquid blood and urine from a 42,000-year-old foal recovered Siberian permafrost.

‘Partly Alive’: Scientists Revive Cells in Brains From Dead Pigs

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 20:19:29 +0000

In a study that upends assumptions about brain death, researchers brought some cells back to life — or something like it.

New York City Passes Historic Climate Legislation

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 19:32:34 +0000

The Climate Mobilization Act lays the groundwork for New York City's own Green New Deal.

A quake every 3 minutes: California shaken by 10 times more temblors than previously known

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 18:20:00 +0000

California has experienced 10 times more earthquakes than previously known, according to groundbreaking new research that has helped scientists better understand the region’s seismology.

Scientists documented 1.8 million earthquakes in Southern California over the last decade — with 90% of them...

Extinction Rebellion: Climate protests 'diverting' London police

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 18:18:47 +0000

Police rest days are cancelled as more than 1,000 officers are deployed in London.

Tiny Earthquakes Happen Every Few Minutes In Southern California, Study Finds

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 18:01:25 +0000

A new catalog of Southern California earthquakes is 10 times larger than its predecessor list. The details of frequent, small quakes help scientists study what triggers large, destructive ones.

(Image credit: Douglas C. Pizac/AP)

Discovering microearthquakes

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 18:00:00 +0000

An animation of an earthquake swarm around the town of Cahuilla, Calif., in 2016 and 2017 shows how seismic activity gradually moved westward and became shallower, probably triggered by the movement of groundwater.

Doubling up piezoelectric performance

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 17:47:28 +0000

Frank Gibson: Women have been involved in astronomy for a long time

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 17:00:00 +0000

What aspect of Powehi appeals to you the most? Are you interested in the Kumulipo – the Hawaiian creation chant that is the origin of the name which translates to English as "the adorned fathomless dark creation". Are you impressed...

Does A Year In Space Make You Older Or Younger?

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 16:24:30 +0000

By Susan Bailey Daily life aboard the International Space Station moves fast. Really fast. Traveling at approximately 17,000

The Trumpeter Swan returns from the brink of extinction

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 16:07:16 +0000

The trumpeter swan was on the brink of extinction 50 years ago. But restoration efforts in Ontario have helped the species make a comeback throughout Canada and the United States, writes Karen Weintraub

Physicists aim to catch slow-decaying dark particle inside LHC

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 15:59:55 +0000

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have developed a new strategy for tracking down dark matter.

Dr. Richard Green, 82, Dies; Challenged Psychiatry’s View of Homosexuality

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 15:33:20 +0000

At a time when being gay was classified as a mental disorder, Dr. Green defied the advice of his colleagues and took a professional risk by arguing otherwise.

Fighters in Crusades had families with locals and recruited offspring to cause, study shows

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 15:32:01 +0000

Research reveals medieval campaign lasting two centuries had little genetic impact on local population

Astronauts might need to wear swimming goggles to avoid vision issues in spaceflight, study says

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 15:23:07 +0000

Study could have 'important potential implications for future manned missions to the Moon, near-Earth asteroids, or Mars', expert says

CEBAF turns on the charm

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 15:16:34 +0000

The world's most advanced particle accelerator for investigating the quark structure of the atom's nucleus has just charmed physicists with a new capability. The production of charm quarks in ...

Critic’s Pick: Celestial Visions on the Met Roof

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 14:52:50 +0000

High above Manhattan, Alicja Kwade’s planetary sculpture captures the music of the spheres.

Researchers use 3-D printer to print glass

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 14:46:54 +0000

For the first time, researchers have successfully 3-D printed chalcogenide glass, a unique material used to make optical components that operate at mid-infrared wavelengths. The ability to 3-D ...

Researcher uses network science to understand how materials work

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 14:46:40 +0000

Network science is how mathematicians and software designers construct complicated social networks like Facebook. But a group of Florida State University researchers has found that these equations ...

Back on Earth, China's Mars simulation base greets first visitors

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 14:41:17 +0000

About 100 excited Chinese teenagers completed a five-hour tour of a space colony against a desolate backdrop not unlike the desert planet of Tatooine, the home world of Luke Skywalker.

Hoard of more than 550 rare gold and silver 14th century coins are worth an estimated £150,000

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 14:17:02 +0000

A gold and silver coins hoard was found by four treasure hunters with a metal detector in a field in Buckinghamshire and includes 12 rare full gold coins from the time of the Black Death.

Pink Moon: Stunning April full moon will actually appear orange

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 13:33:00 +0000

Something known as Rayleigh scattering will mean Earth's satellite will appear a different colour

Media coverage of violent events is found to fuel a cycle of stress

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 13:30:00 +0000

In an era of round-the-clock news cycles and ever-present social media apps, violent events that occur thousands of miles away can feel as though they strike increasingly close to home. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that wall-to-wall media coverage of mayhem can induce post-traumatic...

Ancient urine details hunting-to-herding transition 10,000 years ago

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 13:20:38 +0000

Urine salts helped archaeologists track the adoption of herding among settlers in ancient Turkey.

Kathryn Mariner’s Contingent Kinship

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 13:00:31 +0000

This month, the Association for Black Anthropologists presents an interview with Kathryn Mariner, assistant professor of anthropology and visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester.

Her forthcoming book, Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States, examines the making of kin and futures through the lens of transracial adoption. Based upon ethnographic research with First Steps, an adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption in Chicago, Mariner examines the role of agency workers in negotiating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters.

Many of us begin our work from a central curiosity or frustration with discourse about a subject. What are those seeds in this work, and what brought you to this project?

I came to this project with an abiding interest in race and kinship for reasons which will become clear and are elaborated further in the book. When I started the project, I was intensely curious about the adoption process itself—the nuts and bolts of how social workers brokered these exchanges—how it worked, and what “working” even meant in this context. I had read many accounts of the post-adoption experiences of adoptees and adoptive families, but I wanted to get at their conditions of possibility. I think a major contribution of the book is its attention to the various ways the adoption process can fail. Indeed, I found that the adoptive family is only one possible outcome of the adoption process. Another of my central curiosities with transracial adoption has always been the ways in which popular discourse erases so much of the nuance, and in particular, the structural conditions that make adoptive families possible in the United States. Domestic transracial adoption—often celebrated as progressive or even humanitarian, “the best of a bad situation”—tends to get cleaved off from its own structural conditions of possibility (residential segregation, poverty, dispossession, the devaluation of Black and other forms of marginalized motherhood). I hope my book helps elucidate the reverberations and traces of these enduring historical patterns in the contemporary engineering of kinship, and serves to inspire imaginings of other, better futures.

Contingent Kinship begins with a discussion of your own positionality with respect to adoption—as ethnographer and trained social worker—in your field site. How did you navigate these roles, and what are some of the moments that crystallized this conflict?

One of the things that has drawn me to anthropology is its robust tradition of reflective critique. Locating ourselves with respect to our sites and subjects is such a crucial skill and tool for social analysis. In addition to being an ethnographer trained in clinical social work, I am also a transracial adoptee, so my positionality was often front-and-center throughout my fieldwork—allowing me to connect more deeply with my interlocutors at certain times, and creating uncomfortable distance and misunderstanding at others.[pquote]One of the things that has drawn me to anthropology is its robust tradition of reflective critique. [/pquote] My way of navigating this in the book was to consider a question posed to me by my series editor, Kevin Lewis O’Neill: “When are you evidence?” The question was initially a way to think through the writerly issue of using the first person, but it really helped me fold issues of positionality into the analysis itself, rather than simply relegating it to something like a “positionality statement” or similar mechanism in the discussion of methods. In this way, I could think of my refusal to participate in expectant mother recruitment at one point in my fieldwork as evidence of the politics of invisibility I describe in relation to the figure of the “birth mother.” I could think of one expectant mother’s curiosity about my experience growing up as evidence of the temporal logics of imagined future kinship. I could think more critically about the ways in which my interviewing encounters with prospective adopters sometimes reproduced certain aspects of home study surveillance. I think my position as an adoptee complicated the research in perhaps more interesting ways than my position as a “social worker,” since I completed my social work degree in the midst of my fieldwork and went right back into my anthropology PhD program, without formally practicing social work beyond my graduate training. In that sense, during fieldwork, “ethnographer” was my primary professional identity, although it was one highly inflected by social-work-y ways of thinking and my association with the adoption agency as institution, if that makes sense. As a result, I tend to think of social work as a kind of field language that shaped the way I moved through ethnographic spaces in a variety of ways.

You develop the concept of “intimate speculation” with respect to the relationships between actors in cases of adoption. Can you share what you mean by this?

To go back to this movement of attention from outcomes to process, in the book, intimate speculation is way to describe the temporally-inflected aspects of the adoption process—so it is a shift in thinking away from the adoptive family as adoption’s logical outcome. This move doesn’t so much ignore outcomes, as it opens up all kinds of other possibilities for what an outcome might be. The concept of intimate speculation describes the construction of adoptive kinship as at once anticipatory, economic, and visual—three frames for thinking through speculation more broadly. I chart how, for example, the anxieties felt by prospective adopters, the brokerage activities of social workers, and the erasure of expectant mothers are all deeply imbricated in the production of the adoptable child as a potent and highly contingent imagined future.

I’m struck by how language associated with the economic and financial markets—risk, investment, futures—permeates the adoption landscape. How can we think through adoption as an enterprise that is economic but not, as you say, “all about the money”?

This goes back to intimate speculation as a frame for thinking both through and beyond the economic. [pquote]The concept of intimate speculation describes the construction of adoptive kinship as at once anticipatory, economic, and visual—three frames for thinking through speculation more broadly.[/pquote] In adoption, the child is an imagined future that is produced not only through the investment and circulation of money, but also through practices of observation, waiting, and worry, involving tremendous investments of time and affective energy too. Adoptive kinship is thus highly speculative, in more ways than one. My hope is that within the contemporary climate of neoliberalism, a multivalent concept like intimate speculation can help us think through various social formations beyond adoption—such as home ownership, higher education, and immigration, all areas where understanding the temporal resonances of intimacy and economy are crucial. The work of Viviana Zelizer and the Gens collective (Laura Bear, Karen Ho, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Sylvia Yangisako), among other scholars grappling with these intersections, has been really influential for me in this respect.

Much like birth, bringing a book into the world is a complex endeavor. What have you learned about ethnography, and what advice might you give to scholars doing this for the first time?

Baby steps, no pun intended! In all seriousness, it is vital to remember that a book—most academic writing projects, really, at least in my experience—is a marathon, not a sprint. This book took ten years. I found it really helpful to set goals at various scales, and also to simply trust the process. Also, and apropos of this, I think I have learned that the book is not my “baby,” but rather the crystallization of perhaps a decade of thought frozen at a particular moment in time. As in, it isn’t really finished; it just ends in what I hope is an interesting place. Books can be distressing to write, as we know, because life “in the field” goes on happily (or unhappily, as the case may be) after we leave. And we keep growing and developing as ethnographers too. I am starting a new project now on urban racial segregation, and it is exciting to refine my ethnographic technique this time around, as I am sure I will continue to do with each subsequent project. It is a great comfort to me that I will hopefully get to write another book after this one—indeed, I hope Contingent Kinship is the “worst” book I ever write (in the sense that ongoing improvement is the goal). Lastly, it is important to remember that although writing can be isolating at times, we do not write books alone—so many people helped usher this book into the world, not least of whom are those in whose lives its insights are rooted. So while in a sense it is “my” book, it belongs to them as well. They are its condition of possibility, and for that I am grateful.

Kathryn Mariner is assistant professor of anthropology and visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. Her book, Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States is forthcoming in 2019.

This interview was brought to you by Michelle Munyikwa and Amelia Herbert, Contributing Editors for the Association of Black Anthropologists. If you’d like to contribute to this column, please reach out to us at munyikwa@sas.upenn.edu and ash2189@tc.columbia.edu.

Cite as: Mariner, Kathryn. 2019. “Kathryn Mariner’s Contingent Kinship.” Anthropology News website, April 18, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1144

Climate change: Sir David Attenborough warns of 'catastrophe'

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 12:42:27 +0000

Veteran naturalist's BBC programme on climate change is his strongest warning yet on threat of rising temperatures.

Light and peptides: New method diversifies natural building blocks of life

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 12:16:49 +0000

Discovering new biological targets is a critical part of our ongoing battle against diseases. Over the years, scientists have made impressive progress towards the understanding of biological ...

Multistep self-assembly opens door to new reconfigurable materials

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 12:16:47 +0000

Self-assembling synthetic materials come together when tiny, uniform building blocks interact and form a structure. However, nature lets materials like proteins of varying size and shape assemble, ...

Lasers make magnets behave like fluids

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 12:16:42 +0000

For years, researchers have pursued a strange phenomenon: When you hit an ultra-thin magnet with a laser, it suddenly de-magnetizes. Imagine the magnet on your refrigerator falling off.

Scientists measure what makes viper fangs so sharp

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 12:10:51 +0000

In an effort to figure out which physical characteristics best correlate with puncturing performance, scientists chose to study the sharpness of viper fangs.

Fossils of massive 'lion' larger than a polar bear discovered in Kenya

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 12:06:26 +0000

Once apex predator across Africa, species weighed over a tonne and half and ate elephant-like creatures

Fossil hunter tries to sell baby T-Rex skeleton on eBay for £2.25m, enraging scientists

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 11:37:30 +0000

Alan Detrich, who has chased dinosaur remains for 30 years, was voted one of People magazine's 'Top Bachelors' in 2001

Out of a drawer and into your nightmares comes a vicious ancient beast

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 11:10:48 +0000

When Ohio University integrative biologist Nancy Stevens peered into a drawer in the wooden cabinets on the top floor of a Nairobi museum in 2010, she saw a chunk of rock containing massive teeth and knew she had come across something important.

Imperial Irrigation District sues to block Colorado River drought plan

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 10:00:00 +0000

Just as a long-negotiated agreement for how California and six other Western states will deal with drought on the Colorado River was about to cross the finish line, the river’s biggest user put up a roadblock.

The Imperial Irrigation District in southeast California filed a lawsuit Tuesday asking...

'Giant lion' fossil found in Kenya museum drawer

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 09:42:47 +0000

The bones of the huge creature belong to a new species which roamed east Africa 20 million years ago.

‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars’

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 09:00:02 +0000

Women at the Salk Institute say they faced a culture of marginalization and hostility. The numbers from other elite scientific institutions suggest they’re not alone.