The Ed's Up #180
A 130-Year-Old Fact About Dinosaurs Might Be Wrong
"For most of my life, I’ve believed that the dinosaurs fell into two major groups: the lizard-hipped saurischians, which included the meat-eating theropods like Tyrannosaurus and long-necked sauropodomorphs like Brontosaurus; and the bird-hipped ornithischians, which included horned species like Triceratops and armored ones like Stegosaurus. That’s how dinosaurs have been divided since 1887. It’s what I learned as a kid. It’s what all the textbooks and museums have always said. And according to Baron, a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, it’s wrong. By thoroughly comparing 74 early dinosaurs and their relatives, Baron has radically redrawn the two major branches of the dinosaur family tree. Defying 130 years of accepted dogma, he splits the saurischians apart, leaving the sauropods in one branch, and placing the theropods with the ornthischians on the other. Put it this way: This is like someone telling you that neither cats nor dogs are what you thought they were, and some of the animals you call “cats” are actually dogs." (Image: Alessandro Bianchi)
Artificial Intelligence: The Park Rangers of the Anthropocene
"The work of conservationists typically involves reducing human influence: breeding the species we’ve killed, killing the species we’ve introduced, removing the pollutants we’ve added, and so on. But all of these measures involve human action—some, intensively so. But could a hypothetical artificial intelligence autonomously protect wild spaces? We’d create it, obviously, but then let it go, so it would develop its own strategies for protecting nature. Maybe it blocks out human-made light or noise. Maybe it redirects the flow of water or destroys litter. Maybe it deploys drones to cull invasive species. Think Skynet crossed with Captain Planet, or the Matrix meets Ranger Rick, or IBM’s Watson meets Greenpeace." (Image: Dado Ruvic)
The Parrot With a Call as Infectious as Laughter
"Raoul Schwing remembers sitting on a New Zealand mountaintop, watching a kea hovering in front of him, just an arm’s reach away. The large green parrot had jumped into an updraft, and was flying into the rushing air with such skill that it stayed in exactly the same spot. And then, it made an almost imperceptible shift in its wings, and shot off like a cannon. Keas do this a lot, and since they rarely hover more than a meter or so off the ground, they’re clearly not doing it for the view. Instead, Schwing says, they’re playing. That might sound a bit anthropomorphic, were it not for, well, everything else about keas. They’ll chase each other through the air, doing loops and spirals and wheeling side-by-side, before landing in the same spot from which they took off. They’ll toss a rock back and forth, like some kind of parrot tennis. They’ll sneak up and briefly grab each other by the feet. They’ll wrestle: One kea will lie on its back like a kitten, and another will jump on it." (Image: Raoul Schwing)
The Tiny Trump Budget Cut That Could Blind America to the Next Zika
[NB: With the Obamacare repeal bill dead in the water, the threat described in this piece is also dead. But it's still worth reading it to learn about just how important a little budget line can be in an era where gigantic cuts are being proposed.]
More good reads in science and technology
- “Often I found myself expelling a quivering, involuntary Whoa.” Jon Mooallem communes with the biggest trees on Earth.
- What it’s like to watch your life’s work blow up on a rocket—twice. By Marina Koren
- An excellent summary of the Wansink affair—alleged scientific shenanignas at Cornell’s famous food lab. By Tom Bartlett.
- I highly recommend The Ends of the World, a book about the Earth’s great mass extinctions, by Peter Brannen. It’s beautifully written, and much funnier than any book about six apocalypses has any right to be.
- The March for Science can’t figure out how to handle diversity, by Zuleyka Zevallos.
- "When a researcher comes they enrich themselves of our culture & knowledge. But our communities remain in poverty." San people of Africa draft ethics code for researchers.
- Fascinating story of alleged fraud in a study about fish and microplastics. By Martin Enserink.
- China’s stubborn winter smog is shaped by distant forces: Siberian snowstorms, the melty Arctic.
- A NASA Physicist Turned Origami Artist
- A delightful interview with the CDC's mosquito photographer
- Arielle Duhaime-Ross interviews Mustafa Ali, the head of the EPA's environmental justice program, who resigned last week.
More good reads in politics and society
- The FBI director publicly confirmed that the Justice Department is investigating whether President Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election, in a bizarre hearing in which he was forced to fact-check the President's inaccurate tweets in real-time. It’s the “most serious legal scandal to confront a sitting President in nearly 2 decades.” “There is more than circumstantial evidence now,” said the Democratic vice chair of the House intelligence committee. Meanwhile, the AP reports that former campaign manager Paul Manafort “secretly worked for a Russian billionaire with a plan to greatly benefit the Putin Government.”
- The GOP relent and retreat after a failed attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare. Partly, it’s because “their lawmakers forgot how to make laws." Trump says it’s not his fault, but who will voters blame?
- “Sooner or later, this president, too, will learn of the stubbornness of facts.” Yoni Appelbaum on whether anyone will tell the emperor that he has no clothes.
- “When photographers asked for a handshake, Merkel asked Trump if they should shake hands. He either did not hear or pretended not to.”
- Almost every week, a disabled person in the US is murdered by their carer.
- Trump prepares to reverse Obama’s climate change legacy
- In the face of terror attacks, London exhibits “bravery and simple humanity”, and just “gets on with it”.
- In the Age of Trump, Scientists See Reproducibility as Risky Business
- Glenn Thrust and Maggie Haberman continue a string of great reporting about the beleaguered White House. “People close to the president say Mr. Trump’s Twitter torrent had less to do with fact, strategy or tactic than a sense of persecution bordering on faith.”
- And finally, the Beauty and the Beast Opening Number adjusted for Belle’s giant sense of entitlement.
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And that's it. Thanks for reading.
- Ed