The Ed's Up #193

What Would It Take to Completely Sterilize the Earth?

"In a paper delightfully titled “The Resilience of Life to Astrophysical Events,” David Sloan and Rafael Alves Batista, both from the University of Oxford, and Avi Loeb, from Harvard University, estimated the odds that a space-borne catastrophe like an incoming asteroid would completely sterilize the Earth. Reassuringly, they think those odds are astronomically low—about one in 10 million for every billion years. “The conclusion we come to is that life, once it starts anywhere, is hard to eradicate,” Sloan says. In other words: Life finds a way (even if you bludgeon it with a giant space rock or an exploding star)." (Image: Andrew Winning)
 

Scientists Can Use CRISPR to Store Images and Movies in Bacteria

"In 1872, Eadweard Muybridge captured a series of photos of a running horse. His images settled a debate about whether the animal ever lifted all four feet off the ground at once—it did. They also formed the basis of one of the first motion pictures. And now, Seth Shipman, from Harvard Medical School, has immortalized the running horse in a new and very different medium: the genomes of bacteria. Shipman encoded a GIF of Muybridge’s horse into DNA, and then inserted those strands into living microbes using CRISPR. This technique is best known as a tool for editing genes by cutting strands of DNA at precise locations. But it has another trait that’s often overlooked: It’s an amazing tool for recording information. Shipman effectively turned bacteria into living hard drives." (Image: Library of Congress)
 

One Man's Plan to Make Sure Gene Editing Doesn't Go Haywire

"His team is also remarkably transparent about their work—and not just for the Lyme project. More often than not, scientists keep their plans to themselves, only unveiling the details of their research once their results are in and their publications are accepted by an academic journal. “Virtually all of science is done in secret before the moment of publication,” says Esvelt. “This is an insane way of setting up your scientific system. No one in their right mind would set it up this way. Even beginning to do the work in the lab means you’re making a decision that could affect people out of a lab. For gene drive, the closed-door model is morally unacceptable. You don’t have the right to go into your lab and build something that is ineluctably designed to affect entire ecosystems. If it escapes into the wild, it would be expected to spread and affect people’s lives in unknown ways. Doing that in secret denies people a voice.”" (Image: USGS)
 

Ravens Can Plan for the Future

"For years, Osvath has been trying to work out if animals have foresight—if species other than humans can plan for the future. And his latest experiments suggest that ravens can. Based on their previous experiences, the birds will select tools that can help them solve a puzzle in the future, or pick up tokens that they can later use to barter for food with human experimenters. And that, Osvath says, puts them “on par with apes.”" (Also, a hint: the ending of this piece has a special treat.) (Image: Mario Anzuoni)
 

It's a Mistake to Focus Just on Animal Extinctions

"All told, “as much as 50 percent of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone, as are billions of populations,” Ceballos and his colleagues write. “While the biosphere is undergoing mass species extinction, it is also being ravaged by a much more serious and rapid wave of population declines and extinctions.” (Image: Radu Sigheti)

Sea Spiders Pump Blood With Their Guts, Not Their Hearts

"If sea spiders had a creation myth, it would go something like this. An inebriated deity stumbles home after a hard day’s creating, finds a bunch of leftover legs, glues them together, and zaps them to life before passing out and forgetting to add anything else. The resulting creature—all leg and little else—scuttles away to conquer the oceans. This is fiction, of course, but it’s only slightly more fanciful than the actual biology of sea spiders." (Image: Rob Robbins)
 

More good reads: science and technology

• Peter Brannen takes us on a road trip of that time when everything almost died
• The Qatar political crisis is screwing up the world's helium supply because the country provides 25% of that supply. Fascinating story by Sarah Zhang. Also by her: Why are there so many more species on land when the sea is bigger?
• Carl Zimmer and I talk about genes, microbiomes, viruses, Neanderthals, and more cool stuff.
• The fake news problem is only going to get worse as tech allows you to create videos of real people lip-synced to anything, says Adrienne LaFrance. (See also Rose Eveleth’s Flash Forward episode on exactly this problem.)
• Sam Lubell on the weird scientific illustrations that shaped pop culture.
• A big terrifying piece on climate change from New York Magazine went viral this week. I can’t recommend it. Here, a large number of climate scientists annotate the mistakes and problems in the piece, while Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic has a thoughtful response. David Roberts at Vox, however, quite liked it.
• First-of-its-kind study reveals harassment faced by women of color in space science
• Algorithmic bias is becoming a major societal issue at a critical moment in the evolution of machine learning and AI.
• Scientists recreate an extinct virus, triggering new warnings about controversial research
• Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Science Committee but doesn’t think climate change is real, went on a secret tour of the melting Arctic. Zahra Hirji explains what that means.
• How Donald Trump got human evolution wrong, by the wonderful Holly Dunsworth

 

More good reads: politics and society 

• This is an amazing story about a woefully unprepared 20-woman team who trekked to the North Pole. Rose Eveleth does incredible work.
• “I’m bewildered at the American court system. Surely it matters that the right monkey is suing me.” More on the photographer who is being sued by PETA on behalf of a monkey.
• Emails obtained by the New York Times and eventually tweeted by Donald Trump Jr. reveal how he agreed to meet with a Russian government attorney who said she had information about Hillary Clinton that would help his father win the election. (But his emails!) The family offers a series of ever-changing and increasingly implausible excuses, Molly Ball explains why junior is “his father’s Mini-Me”, and David Graham wonders: If the collusion accusation is true, what else is?
• Trump’s travel ban gets another court defeat.
• The White House’s dwindling science office leaves major research programmes in limbo

You can also follow me on Twitter or find my writing at The Atlantic. My New York Times-bestselling book, I Contain Multitudes, is out now. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you can sign up yourself.

And that's it. Thanks for reading.

- Ed