scientificamerican--2020-10-04--How to Revolutionize Biodiversity Conservation in the U.S.

The recently released 2020 Democratic Party platform contains a lot of policies that will excite scientists and environmentalists , including an aggressive agenda to fight climate change , the return of science-based decision making to the EPA , and environmental justice .
There ’ s one game-changing passage , however , that ’ s received shockingly little notice outside of a small circle of experts—who are no less than ecstatic to see it mentioned at this level .
Indeed , the inclusion of a statement like this in a national party platform and a presidential campaign promise represents the largest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ policy since the Endangered Species Act .
I ’ m speaking about “ 30 by 30 , ” the goal of using science-based decision-making to protect 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by the year 2030 .
“ Vice President Biden is committed to making the country more resilient to climate change and securing environmental justice , so I suggested that including the goal of conserving 30 percent of America 's lands and oceans by 2030 would be a perfect fit for his platform , '' Representative Deb Haaland ( D–N.M .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Drafting Committee and author of a 30 by 30 resolution in Congress , told me in a statement .
( The platform reads “ Democrats will protect wildlife habitats and biodiversity , slow extinction rates , and grow America ’ s natural carbon sinks by conserving 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.
” Or , as it ’ s phrased in Joe Biden ’ s climate change plan , a commitment to “ Protecting biodiversity , slowing extinction rates and helping leverage natural climate solutions by conserving 30 percent of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2030.
” ) The 30 by 30 goal isn ’ t new , and it isn ’ t radical eco-extremism run amok .
This goal been discussed for years by the science-based conservation community and has been examined in peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and detailed reports from well-respected nonprofits like Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for American Progress .
A resolution in support of this goal has been introduced in Congress and in several state legislatures including that of South Carolina—hardly a hotbed of far-left activism .
It ’ s based on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ evidence that says that the world ’ s wildlife and wild places face existential threats , and a commitment to help save these places not only for the abstract goal of “ protecting the environment , ” but because it matters for people , too .
As Kate Kelly , the public lands director at the Center for American Progress , told me , “ 30 by 30 is a recognition that we have a nature crisis on our hands , and it ’ s a commitment to pursue ambitious and inclusive conservation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is not well on planet Earth.
” According to Lindsay Rosa , a senior conservation GIS scientist at Defenders of Wildlife ’ s Center for Conservation Innovation , the most commonly used figures suggest that currently about 12 percent of U.S. land and 26 percent of U.S. waters are protected—but troublingly , there ’ s a lot of land that ’ s important for biodiversity conservation that isn ’ t yet protected , but could be .
“ About 80 percent of our highest-biodiversity hotspots are currently not protected , ” Rosa told @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way to go , but there ’ s still plenty of opportunity left.
” It ’ s also important to note here that experts I spoke to stressed that it matters which 30 percent we protect .
Conserving a giant , undeveloped stretch of land where little lives and that no one wanted to develop anyway is not especially helpful to biodiversity conservation or climate resilience .
We need to protect at least some of every major ecosystem , an ecological concept called “ representativity.
” We need to protect habitats that species @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ’ d think would be obvious but is often ignored when protected areas don ’ t involve scientific input from the start .
When we ’ re dealing with migratory species , it ’ s important to protect their migratory routes and not just their destination , a concept known as corridor conservation .
Not all habitats are equally helpful in terms of climate resilience .
And , obviously , human needs are vital when determining which habitats should be off-limits to large-scale resource extraction and development ; while some top-down coordination @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have a say , especially concerning natural resource management on Indigenous lands .
And since unequal access to wild spaces and the mental and physical health benefits they provide is a major environmental justice issue , Kelly told me that 30 by 30 isn ’ t just about biodiversity conservation , but “ is an opportunity to hit the reset button on who conservation is for , and who nature can benefit.
” A national program to enact 30 by 30 won ’ t just be a series of new national parks declared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ things like national wildlife refuges , national monuments , state-level protected areas , conservation easements on private land , and co-management with tribal leadership .
Local consultation and support will have to be part of it from the beginning , but it won ’ t be successful without support and leadership from the federal government .
This level of preservation is necessary but isn ’ t guaranteed to happen .
“ We need continued U.S. leadership to reach the goal of 30 by 30 , ” Justin Kenney , the director of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ And it ’ s gaining more and more momentum each day !
” Does such a bold , ambitious , science-based environmental plan have a chance of happening in our hyperpolarized government ?
It really does , because conserving wildlife and wild places often has huge bipartisan support ; in fact , 86 percent of voters somewhat or strongly support the specific goal of 30 by 30 , including 76 percent of Republican voters , according to a poll conducted by the Center for American Progress .
Kenney pointed out that President @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the time the largest marine protected area in the world .
“ Americans are proud of their land , water and wildlife and want to protect them , ” Kelly told me .
Jacob Malcolm , the director of Defender of Wildlife ’ s Center for Conservation Innovation , is optimistic that this plan will attract broad support , telling me that “ we have to do this to protect nature and protect ourselves , and our political leaders will realize that.
” 30 by 30 represents the last best hope for saving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ species and wild places , and is a key step in fighting climate and restoring justice .
It ’ s widely supported by experts and can be achieved in a way that helps everyone .
It won ’ t , however , happen if Donald Trump is reelected to the presidency ; not only is there no pledge like 30 by 30 in President Trump ’ s campaign materials , but he has focused on removing such protections ; the Center for American Progress has described him as “ the only president in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lands than he protected.
” Scientific American ’ s historic endorsement of Joe Biden noted that Biden “ has a record of following the data and being guided by science.
” With his campaign ’ s incorporation of 30 by 30 goals , that ’ s also true when it comes to biodiversity conservation .
We have to do this .
We can do this .
And if Joe Biden becomes the next President of the United States , we will .

The recently released 2020 Democratic Party platform contains a lot of policies that will excite scientists and environmentalists, including an aggressive agenda to fight climate change, the return of science-based decision making to the EPA, and environmental justice. There’s one game-changing passage, however, that’s received shockingly little notice outside of a small circle of experts—who are no less than ecstatic to see it mentioned at this level. Indeed, the inclusion of a statement like this in a national party platform and a presidential campaign promise represents the largest shift in United States science-based biodiversity conservation policy since the Endangered Species Act.
I’m speaking about “30 by 30,” the goal of using science-based decision-making to protect 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by the year 2030. “Vice President Biden is committed to making the country more resilient to climate change and securing environmental justice, so I suggested that including the goal of conserving 30 percent of America's lands and oceans by 2030 would be a perfect fit for his platform," Representative Deb Haaland (D–N.M.), a member of the Platform Drafting Committee and author of a 30 by 30 resolution in Congress, told me in a statement. (The platform reads “Democrats will protect wildlife habitats and biodiversity, slow extinction rates, and grow America’s natural carbon sinks by conserving 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.” Or, as it’s phrased in Joe Biden’s climate change plan, a commitment to “Protecting biodiversity, slowing extinction rates and helping leverage natural climate solutions by conserving 30 percent of America’s lands and waters by 2030.”)
The 30 by 30 goal isn’t new, and it isn’t radical eco-extremism run amok. This goal been discussed for years by the science-based conservation community and has been examined in peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and detailed reports from well-respected nonprofits like Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for American Progress. A resolution in support of this goal has been introduced in Congress and in several state legislatures including that of South Carolina—hardly a hotbed of far-left activism.
It’s based on a huge and growing body of scientific evidence that says that the world’s wildlife and wild places face existential threats, and a commitment to help save these places not only for the abstract goal of “protecting the environment,” but because it matters for people, too. As Kate Kelly, the public lands director at the Center for American Progress, told me, “30 by 30 is a recognition that we have a nature crisis on our hands, and it’s a commitment to pursue ambitious and inclusive conservation policies—because we have a problem, all is not well on planet Earth.”
According to Lindsay Rosa, a senior conservation GIS scientist at Defenders of Wildlife’s Center for Conservation Innovation, the most commonly used figures suggest that currently about 12 percent of U.S. land and 26 percent of U.S. waters are protected—but troublingly, there’s a lot of land that’s important for biodiversity conservation that isn’t yet protected, but could be. “About 80 percent of our highest-biodiversity hotspots are currently not protected,” Rosa told me. “We have a long way to go, but there’s still plenty of opportunity left.”
It’s also important to note here that experts I spoke to stressed that it matters which 30 percent we protect. Conserving a giant, undeveloped stretch of land where little lives and that no one wanted to develop anyway is not especially helpful to biodiversity conservation or climate resilience. We need to protect at least some of every major ecosystem, an ecological concept called “representativity.” We need to protect habitats that species of concern actually live in, which you’d think would be obvious but is often ignored when protected areas don’t involve scientific input from the start.
When we’re dealing with migratory species, it’s important to protect their migratory routes and not just their destination, a concept known as corridor conservation. Not all habitats are equally helpful in terms of climate resilience. And, obviously, human needs are vital when determining which habitats should be off-limits to large-scale resource extraction and development; while some top-down coordination is necessary, local voices have to have a say, especially concerning natural resource management on Indigenous lands. And since unequal access to wild spaces and the mental and physical health benefits they provide is a major environmental justice issue, Kelly told me that 30 by 30 isn’t just about biodiversity conservation, but “is an opportunity to hit the reset button on who conservation is for, and who nature can benefit.”
A national program to enact 30 by 30 won’t just be a series of new national parks declared by the President, but will include things like national wildlife refuges, national monuments, state-level protected areas, conservation easements on private land, and co-management with tribal leadership. Local consultation and support will have to be part of it from the beginning, but it won’t be successful without support and leadership from the federal government. This level of preservation is necessary but isn’t guaranteed to happen. “We need continued U.S. leadership to reach the goal of 30 by 30,” Justin Kenney, the director of the 30x30 Ocean Alliance, told me. “And it’s gaining more and more momentum each day!”
Does such a bold, ambitious, science-based environmental plan have a chance of happening in our hyperpolarized government? It really does, because conserving wildlife and wild places often has huge bipartisan support; in fact, 86 percent of voters somewhat or strongly support the specific goal of 30 by 30, including 76 percent of Republican voters, according to a poll conducted by the Center for American Progress.
Kenney pointed out that President George W. Bush created what was at the time the largest marine protected area in the world. “Americans are proud of their land, water and wildlife and want to protect them,” Kelly told me. Jacob Malcom, the director of Defender of Wildlife’s Center for Conservation Innovation, is optimistic that this plan will attract broad support, telling me that “we have to do this to protect nature and protect ourselves, and our political leaders will realize that.”
30 by 30 represents the last best hope for saving many of the United States’ iconic species and wild places, and is a key step in fighting climate and restoring justice. It’s widely supported by experts and can be achieved in a way that helps everyone. It won’t, however, happen if Donald Trump is reelected to the presidency; not only is there no pledge like 30 by 30 in President Trump’s campaign materials, but he has focused on removing such protections; the Center for American Progress has described him as “the only president in U.S. history to have removed more public lands than he protected.”
Scientific American’s historic endorsement of Joe Biden noted that Biden “has a record of following the data and being guided by science.” With his campaign’s incorporation of 30 by 30 goals, that’s also true when it comes to biodiversity conservation. We have to do this. We can do this. And if Joe Biden becomes the next President of the United States, we will.
A version of this article with the title ”How to Do Conservation the Right Way” was adapted for inclusion in the December 2020 issue of Scientific American.


scientificamerican--2020-10-05--How to Unlearn Racism

How to Unlearn Racism

In February 2016 I sat in a conference room on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with about 35 other @ @ @ @ @ seemed like a straightforward question : What is racism ?

In February 2016 I sat in a conference room on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with about 35 other people attempting to answer what seemed like a straightforward question: What is racism?
I—a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered woman in my 30s—thought that racism was prejudice against an individual because of race or ethnicity. That's why I had signed up for the Undoing Racism Workshop, a two-and-a-half-day antiracist training that analyzes race and power structures in the U.S.: I wanted to gain a better understanding of why some people have so much contempt toward those who are different from them. My yearning for answers came from personal experience with discrimination as a Jewish woman and the daughter of immigrants; my parents fled to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union in 1979. Growing up in a small town in upstate New York followed by an even smaller, more rural town in Georgia, I was picked on and often felt “othered.”
The workshop was hosted by the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), an organization that was founded 40 years ago by community organizers who wanted to create a more equitable society by addressing the root causes of racism. Our leaders—a Black man, a white woman and a Latina woman—called on each of us to share our definitions of racism. People's responses were all over the map, from “a mean-spirited, close-minded way of thinking” to “discrimination based on someone's skin color or ethnic background.” The trainers validated each of our responses before pointing out how varied they were and explaining that few of us had identified racism as a web of institutional power and oppression based on skin color. Not having a simple or agreed-on definition of racism makes it easier to keep racism in place. To undo racism, they said, we need a common language that ties together individual and systemic factors. Hearing racism described as a power hierarchy was eye-opening for me. Having been marginalized myself, I thought I was sensitive toward other groups who faced discrimination. I thought I got it.
Over the past year, America has been reckoning with racism on a scale that has not been seen since the civil-rights movement. The killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and others sparked protests against systemic racism and police violence that have drawn multiracial participation. Some white Americans attended Black Lives Matter protests for the first time—the movement has been active since 2013—and saw up close the police brutality they previously only read about or witnessed through short video clips on phone screens. These experiences were a tiny window into the reality of violence and oppression that Black people endure. The pandemic further emphasizes the racial disparities that people are protesting, with Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities disproportionately affected by COVID-19. It has become widely discussed that police violence and virus deaths are not disparate issues—they are both embedded in a pervasive system of racism.
PISAB's definition of racism (which is similar to that of other antiracism organizations such as the Racial Equity Institute) is race prejudice plus power. It describes how individual and systemic racism are tied together. All of us have individual race prejudice: anyone can prejudge a person based on race alone. But what makes racism different from individual prejudice is who has institutional power. White people control our government systems and institutions in every sector, from law enforcement and education to health care and the media, leading to laws and policies that can advantage white people while disadvantaging everyone else.
White people's dominance in our systems is why you may have heard people refer to the U.S. as a white supremacist society. In this context, white supremacy does not refer to hate groups such as neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan but rather an entire system where one group has all the advantages. “Racism is white supremacy,” says Joseph Barndt, an organizer and core trainer with PISAB and author of Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century Challenge to White America. “It's empowering one alleged racial group over another and creating systems to reinforce that.”
As more white people seek to confront and undo racism in their own lives, they are figuring out how to “do the work.” In recent years implicit bias trainings, which aim to expose people to the negative associations and stereotypes they hold and express unconsciously, have been widely used to raise people's awareness of racism in workplaces. But addressing bias is not sufficient for confronting the racist systems, ideas and legacies that are present in our day-to-day lives. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but research shows that undoing racism often starts with understanding what race and racism actually are. It is also crucial to develop a positive racial identity; to feel—not just intellectualize—how racism harms all of us and, finally, to learn how to break prejudice habits and become an active antiracist. Doing so, however, is not accomplished in a weekend. For me, one of the first steps was unlearning false ideas about the basis of racial categories.
Seeing Whiteness in the Origins of Race
Race is deeply embedded in our society, yet it is persistently misunderstood to be a biological construct rather than a cultural one. The concept of racial categories is actually quite modern, explains Crystal Fleming, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University and author of How to Be Less Stupid about Race:“If we think about our species existing for at least a few hundred thousand years, it's only in the last several centuries that we see the historical emergence of the idea of race.” This is a history that most Americans are not taught in school.
False classifications of humans that would later be called “races” began in the 16th and 17th centuries with Christian clergy questioning whether “Blacks” and “Indians” were human. As colonial expansion and slavery increased, religion was used to justify classifying Black people and other people of color as “pagan and soulless.” But as many of them were converted to Christianity and the Age of Enlightenment took off in the 1700s, religion lost its legitimizing power.
Instead “science” was used to justify the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Indigenous peoples, which had already been occurring in British colonies for more than a century. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist and comparative anatomist, is known for proposing one of the earliest classifications of the human race, which he wrote about in the late 1700s.
His measurement of skulls from around the world led him to divide humans into five groups, which were later simplified by anthropologists into three categories: Caucasoids, Mongoloids and Negroids. It did not seem to matter that some prominent scientists, including Charles Darwin, dismissed a biological basis for race over the next century. Many scientists dedicated themselves to proving a false racial hierarchy in which “Caucasians” were superior to other races.
In the U.S., political and intellectual leaders reinforced the false ideology that Africans were biologically inferior to other races and therefore best suited for slavery. After Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, which had united white and Black indentured servants, Virginia lawmakers began to make legal distinctions between “white” and “Black” people. Poor white indentured servants who served their term could go free and own land; Black servants were committed to lifelong servitude. With the Naturalization Act of 1790, Congress codified white racial advantage into law by limiting citizenship by naturalization to “free white persons,” namely white men. Women, people of color and indentured servants were excluded.
With white superiority cemented firmly into law, the social and political power of whiteness was born. As a category, it was increasingly associated with resources and power: explicit laws and practices that created whiteness as a requirement for being able to live in certain neighborhoods, to be able to vote, to own land, to testify in court before a jury. The legacy of “scientific” racism persists to this day.
Although biology has shown that there are no genetically distinct races, racial identity—how you and others perceive your race—is very real, as are its ramifications. In a white-dominant society like America, white people tend to be unaware of their identity and may think of themselves as neutral, as nonracial. According to the work of psychologist Janet Helms, who published six stages of white racial identity development in 1999, the first stage is defined by a lack of awareness of cultural and institutional racism. This stage is also characterized by being “color-blind”—imagining one does not see people's differences and viewing that as a positive trait others should aspire to.
As scholar and activist Peggy McIntosh notes in a 1989 article, this lack of awareness is common. She describes white privilege as an “invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant' to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.”
To unlearn racism then, white people must first examine their racial identity. Black scholars and writers of color have known this for more than a century; their survival depended on it. Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates and many others have observed, analyzed and written about whiteness for generations. Du Bois made observations about whiteness in 1899 with his sociological study The Philadelphia Negro and in 1935 with his book, Black Reconstruction in America. Recently Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk about Race, wrote in a popular Medium article: “I know white culture better than most white people know white culture.”
It has only been in the past few decades that white scholars have turned the lens on themselves with the emergence of Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), a growing academic field that aims to examine the structures of white supremacy and privilege and to investigate the meaning of white privilege and how it is connected to complicity in racism. According to Barbara Applebaum, a professor of philosophy and education at Syracuse University, CWS shifts the focus, and thus the blame, from the victims of racism to the perpetrators. As she explains, “it names the elephant in the room—the construction and maintenance of whiteness.”
Workshops Aren't Enough
Over the past 20 years or so initiatives to address racism have focused heavily on implicit bias trainings. A growing body of cognitive research demonstrates how these hidden biases impact our attitudes and actions, which result in real-world consequences such as racial profiling.
The trainings, which are often sponsored by human resources departments but delivered to employees by outside consulting firms, may consist of modules that walk people through what implicit bias is and where it comes from, how it shows up in the workplace, how it is measured (typically through the Implicit Association Test) and how to reduce it. Over the past decade these trainings have been widely used in the law-enforcement industry as well as in the tech industry, with companies such as Facebook and Google putting thousands of employees through trainings. More recently, antibias trainings have been implemented in schools for teachers.
While these sessions may be useful in exposing people's hidden biases, those revelations have not been shown to result in long-term behavioral change on an individual or systemic level. In a 2018 paper published in Anthropology Now, Harvard University sociologist Frank Dobbin writes: “Hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.”
A recent meta-analysis of 492 studies (with a total of 87,418 participants) on the effectiveness of implicit bias training found weak effects on unconscious bias. The authors note that “most studies focused on producing short-term changes with brief, single-session manipulations” and that most trainings “produced trivial changes in behavior.” The authors conclude that changes in implicit bias are possible, but they do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit bias or behavior, and there is a significant lack of research on the long-term effects.
“Implicit bias trainings raise awareness, but they also tell people, ‘This is just how the brain works,'” says Rachel Godsil, co-founder and co-director of the Perception Institute, an organization that works with social scientists to identify the efficacy of interventions to address implicit bias, racial anxiety and the effects of stereotypes. “It kind of leaves people feeling like they are let off the hook.” It's not that your brain is hard-wired to be racist, but it is programmed to put people into categories. And the categories that have been constructed in the U.S., Godsil explains, have meanings that tend to be negative for people from marginalized groups. She emphasizes that part of what it means to unlearn racism is to delink stereotypes from identities and absolute truths: “You're not trying to be color-blind or pretend that these categories don't exist, but you don't presume you know anything about a person based on their identity.”
Antiracism trainings, such as the Undoing Racism Workshop, differ significantly from implicit bias trainings in that they are more intense on both an intellectual and emotional level. Because they are not done in a corporate setting, the discussions tend to be more honest and raw. In the PISAB training I attended, we took a hard look at white supremacy and our role in upholding it. After reviewing a history of racism in the U.S., the trainers discussed individual and institutional racial attitudes, oppression and privilege, and how institutions implicitly or explicitly perpetuate racism. We were empowered to be “gatekeepers”—leaders who can affect change in our workplaces and communities.
PISAB's methodology is rooted in community organizing principles that the group's founders honed for decades. Their approach is based on philosopher Paulo Freire's pedagogy, which focuses on linking knowledge to action so people can make real change in their communities. Other antiracist trainings, such as the one offered by Crossroads Antiracism Organizing & Training, provide a similar approach. In contrast, Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, who has received much attention in recent months, gives “keynote presentations” that are more focused on individual prejudice and white privilege.
Whereas these trainings can be powerful in many ways, it is unclear to what degree they are effective—and if they are, how and why they work. A 2015 study published in Race and Social Problems aimed to measure the impact of PISAB's training and found that approximately 60 percent of participants engaged in racial equity work after completing the Undoing Racism Workshop. “These trainings are well intentioned, but we don't know if they work, because there aren't randomized controlled experiments to prove that they do,” says Patricia Devine, a professor of psychology who studies prejudice at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Trainings on implicit bias, diversity and antiracism may be limited in their efficacy in part because they tend to be brief one-off events. Promising research by Devine in 2013 showed that prejudices and biases can be more successfully unlearned through longer-term intervention. The 12-week longitudinal study was based on the premise that implicit bias is like a habit that can be broken through the following steps: becoming aware of implicit bias, developing concern about the effects of that bias and using strategies to reduce bias—specifically, ones that replace biased reactions with responses that reflect one's nonprejudiced goals.
The researchers argue that the motivation to “break the prejudice habit” comes from two sources: First, you have to be aware of your biases, and second, you have to be concerned about the consequences of your biases to be motivated to make the effort needed to eliminate them. Recent research has shown that interacting with a wide variety of racial groups can help people care more about racial justice. For instance, a 2018 review suggested that increased contact among racial groups deepens psychological investment in equality by making people more empathetic.
For Fleming, who has educated thousands of university students, teaching implicit bias within the context of a comprehensive, three-month course “is far more effective than being dragged into a diversity training for an afternoon,” she says. “People have to feel inspired. They have to feel a desire to critically reflect on not just their biases but on their socialization and conditioning and to be part of a positive social transformation. You can't force that on anyone.”
Feeling the Harms of Racism
The inspiration that Fleming speaks to is what motivates me to unlearn racism, to reeducate myself on swaths of American history, and to open my eyes to whiteness and white supremacy. But the process of unlearning is only the first step, and it needs to translate into a commitment to practices such as breaking white silence and bringing an antiracist lens to my work. That is only possible, and sustainable, by building empathy and feeling the ways in which racism is not just harmful for people of color—it hurts white people, too.
This realization didn't hit me until I took PISAB's workshop for a second time in 2019. I had signed up at the urging of Stoop Nilsson, a social worker and racial reeducation coach who shows white people how to become antiracist leaders in their communities. During the workshop, Barndt, one of the trainers, pointed out how easy it can be for white people to think racism does not harm them. But “the truth is, with racism we lose, too,” he said. “All of humanity loses. With the end of racism, we get our lives back.”
H. Shellae Versey, a critical health researcher and professor of psychology at Fordham University, studies how white supremacy culture impacts the mental health of both white and nonwhite populations. In a 2019 paper, she and her co-authors explain how white people are harmed by the myth of meritocracy—the idea that working hard and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps leads to success. When this does not happen (for example, if you do not land a promotion you worked hard for), it threatens your worldview and leads to significant stress, research shows.
Versey notes that many white people oppose social health programs such as the Affordable Care Act that would actually benefit them, in part because they believe these programs are designed to benefit people of color. In his recent book Dying of Whiteness, physician Jonathan Metzl writes about how some white Americans support politicians who promote policies that increase their risk of sickness and death.
Another way we are all harmed on a day-to-day basis is through white supremacy culture. As Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun write in the book Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, the characteristics of white supremacy culture include perfectionism, a sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, paternalism, either/or thinking, power hoarding, individualism, and more.
Understanding and feeling how racism hurts me—even though it is a mere fraction of the pain people of color experience—is part of what helps me internalize the motivation I need to consistently work to undo it. I wonder if white supremacy culture contributes to my elevated anxiety levels, which manifest as migraine headaches and torn-up cuticles. I am more clearly connecting white supremacy culture with climate change denial as well as the paternalism and overly rigid thinking I have experienced in various jobs.
Working with Nilsson is helping me create a positive racial identity of my own—as both a white person and a Russian Jew. Our country prides itself on being a melting pot, but much gets lost in the assimilation to whiteness and white supremacy culture. Markers of ethnic identity such as language, food, culture and music are discouraged; those from a non–Western European heritage are often vilified. In my family, my parents were so committed to learning English that they hardly ever spoke Russian around the house. I never learned it. It saddens me that I can't speak to my own parents in their native language and that I still know so little about our heritage. Recently my mom became frustrated trying to remember a word in English to describe how she was feeling; I worry that her last words will be in Russian, and I'll have no idea what they mean.
In the midst of COVID-19, a high-stakes election season and racial protest movements that illuminate issues affecting everyone, many Americans are reevaluating what matters most. White people may be waking up to areas of their lives that were previously inaccessible to them and to histories and literature and legacies that have long been excluded from school curriculums. This awakening may lead people to work on creating a positive racial identity away from white supremacism, one based on fully acknowledging the power of whiteness in our society and using that knowledge to pursue equality and justice for everyone. Skipping that step risks giving up or doing even more harm; shame and self-loathing are not effective motivators and can inhibit the strength and stamina needed to push for systemic change.
Having been in this process myself for several years, I am certain of only one thing: that antiracism is a lifelong practice. In her book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum compares racism to smog, writing that it is something we all breathe in; no one is immune to it. Attempting to unlearn racism has meant becoming aware of each inhalation—and doing my best to exhale less of it.


scientificamerican--2020-10-05--Humans Are All More Closely Related Than We Commonly Think

The late esteemed English actor Christopher Lee traced his ancestry directly to Charlemagne .
In 2010 Lee released a symphonic metal album paying homage to the first Holy Roman emperor—but his enthusiasm may have been a tad excessive .
After all , says geneticist Adam Rutherford , “ literally everyone ” with European ancestry is directly descended from Charlemagne .
The family tree of humanity is much more interconnected than we tend to think .
“ We ’ re culturally bound and psychologically conditioned to not think about ancestry in very broad terms , ” Rutherford says .
Genealogists can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ family tree at a time , making it easy to forget how many forebears each of us has .
Imagine counting all your ancestors as you trace your family tree back in time .
In the nth generation before the present , your family tree has 2n slots : two for parents , four for grandparents , eight for great-grandparents , and so on .
The number of slots grows exponentially .
By the 33rd generation—about 800 to 1000 years ago—you have more than eight billion of them .
That is more than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and it is certainly a much larger figure than the world population a millennium ago .
This seeming paradox has a simple resolution : “ Branches of your family tree don ’ t consistently diverge , ” Rutherford says .
Instead “ they begin to loop back into each other.
” As a result , many of your ancestors occupy multiple slots in your family tree .
For example , “ your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother might have also been your great-great-great-great-aunt , ” he explains .
The consequence of humanity being “ incredibly inbred ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more closely than our intuition suggests , Rutherford says .
Take , for instance , the last person from whom everyone on the planet today is descended .
In 2004 mathematical modeling and computer simulations by a group of statisticians led by Douglas Rohde , then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , indicated that our most recent common ancestor probably lived no earlier than 1400 B.C .
and possibly as recently as A.D. 55 .
In the time of Egypt ’ s Queen Nefertiti , someone from whom we are all descended @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Go back a bit further , and you reach a date when our family trees share not just one ancestor in common but every ancestor in common .
At this date , called the genetic isopoint , the family trees of any two people on the earth now , no matter how distantly related they seem , trace back to the same set of individuals .
“ If you were alive at the genetic isopoint , then you are the ancestor of either everyone alive today or no one alive today , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and began dispersing throughout the world at least 120,000 years ago , but the genetic isopoint occurred much more recently—somewhere between 5300 and 2200 B.C.
, according to Rohde ’ s calculations .
At first glance , these dates may seem much too recent to account for long-isolated Indigenous communities in South America and elsewhere .
But “ genetic information spreads rapidly through generational time , ” Rutherford explains .
Beginning in 1492 , “ you begin to see the European genes flowing in every direction until our estimates are that there are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don ’ t have European ancestry.
” In fact , even more recent than the global genetic isopoint is the one for people with recent European ancestry .
Researchers using genomic data place the latter date around A.D. 1000 .
So Christopher Lee ’ s royal lineage is unexceptional : because Charlemagne lived before the isopoint and has living descendants , everyone with European ancestry is directly descended from him .
In a similar vein , nearly everyone with Jewish ancestry , whether Ashkenazic or Sephardic , has ancestors who were expelled from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s a very nice example of a small world but looking to the past , ” says Susanna Manrubia , a theoretical evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology .
Not everyone of European ancestry carries genes passed down by Charlemagne , however .
Nor does every Jew carry genes from their Sephardic ancestors expelled from Spain .
People are more closely related genealogically than genetically for a simple mathematical reason : a given gene is passed down to a child by only one parent , not both .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her colleagues showed that the average number of generations separating two random present-day individuals from a common genealogical ancestor depends on the logarithm of the relevant population ’ s size .
For large populations , this number is much smaller than the population size itself because the number of possible genealogical connections between individuals doubles with each preceding generation .
By contrast , the average number of generations separating two random present-day individuals from a common genetic ancestor is linearly proportional to the population size because each gene can be traced through only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ family tree .
Although Manrubia ’ s model unrealistically assumed the population size did not change with time , the results still apply in the real world , she says .
Because of the random reshuffling of genes in each successive generation , some of your ancestors contribute disproportionately to your genome , while others contribute nothing at all .
According to calculations by geneticist Graham Coop of the University of California , Davis , you carry genes from fewer than half of your forebears from 11 generations back .
Still , all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ human population can be traced to the people alive at the genetic isopoint .
“ If you are interested in what your ancestors have contributed to the present time , you have to look at the population of all the people that coexist with you , ” Manrubia says .
“ All of them carry the genes of your ancestors because we share the [ same ] ancestors.
” And because the genetic isopoint occurred so recently , Rutherford says , “ in relation to race , it absolutely , categorically demolishes the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has forebears from just one ethnic background or region of the world .
And your genealogical connections to the entire globe mean that not too long ago your ancestors were involved in every event in world history .
So the next time you hear someone claim to be descended from royalty , take heart : you are , too .
“ You are very special , and you are very generic , in a sense , ” Manrubia says .

The late esteemed English actor Christopher Lee traced his ancestry directly to Charlemagne. In 2010 Lee released a symphonic metal album paying homage to the first Holy Roman emperor—but his enthusiasm may have been a tad excessive. After all, says geneticist Adam Rutherford, “literally everyone” with European ancestry is directly descended from Charlemagne.
The family tree of humanity is much more interconnected than we tend to think. “We’re culturally bound and psychologically conditioned to not think about ancestry in very broad terms,” Rutherford says. Genealogists can only focus on one branch of a family tree at a time, making it easy to forget how many forebears each of us has.
Imagine counting all your ancestors as you trace your family tree back in time. In the nth generation before the present, your family tree has 2n slots: two for parents, four for grandparents, eight for great-grandparents, and so on. The number of slots grows exponentially. By the 33rd generation—about 800 to 1,000 years ago—you have more than eight billion of them. That is more than the number of people alive today, and it is certainly a much larger figure than the world population a millennium ago.
This seeming paradox has a simple resolution: “Branches of your family tree don’t consistently diverge,” Rutherford says. Instead “they begin to loop back into each other.” As a result, many of your ancestors occupy multiple slots in your family tree. For example, “your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother might have also been your great-great-great-great-aunt,” he explains.
The consequence of humanity being “incredibly inbred” is that we are all related much more closely than our intuition suggests, Rutherford says. Take, for instance, the last person from whom everyone on the planet today is descended. In 2004 mathematical modeling and computer simulations by a group of statisticians led by Douglas Rohde, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicated that our most recent common ancestor probably lived no earlier than 1400 B.C. and possibly as recently as A.D. 55. In the time of Egypt’s Queen Nefertiti, someone from whom we are all descended was likely alive somewhere in the world.
Go back a bit further, and you reach a date when our family trees share not just one ancestor in common but every ancestor in common. At this date, called the genetic isopoint, the family trees of any two people on the earth now, no matter how distantly related they seem, trace back to the same set of individuals. “If you were alive at the genetic isopoint, then you are the ancestor of either everyone alive today or no one alive today,” Rutherford says. Humans left Africa and began dispersing throughout the world at least 120,000 years ago, but the genetic isopoint occurred much more recently—somewhere between 5300 and 2200 B.C., according to Rohde’s calculations.
At first glance, these dates may seem much too recent to account for long-isolated Indigenous communities in South America and elsewhere. But “genetic information spreads rapidly through generational time,” Rutherford explains. Beginning in 1492, “you begin to see the European genes flowing in every direction until our estimates are that there are no people in South America today who don’t have European ancestry.”
In fact, even more recent than the global genetic isopoint is the one for people with recent European ancestry. Researchers using genomic data place the latter date around A.D. 1000. So Christopher Lee’s royal lineage is unexceptional: because Charlemagne lived before the isopoint and has living descendants, everyone with European ancestry is directly descended from him. In a similar vein, nearly everyone with Jewish ancestry, whether Ashkenazic or Sephardic, has ancestors who were expelled from Spain beginning in 1492. “It’s a very nice example of a small world but looking to the past,” says Susanna Manrubia, a theoretical evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology.
Not everyone of European ancestry carries genes passed down by Charlemagne, however. Nor does every Jew carry genes from their Sephardic ancestors expelled from Spain. People are more closely related genealogically than genetically for a simple mathematical reason: a given gene is passed down to a child by only one parent, not both. In a simple statistical model, Manrubia and her colleagues showed that the average number of generations separating two random present-day individuals from a common genealogical ancestor depends on the logarithm of the relevant population’s size. For large populations, this number is much smaller than the population size itself because the number of possible genealogical connections between individuals doubles with each preceding generation. By contrast, the average number of generations separating two random present-day individuals from a common genetic ancestor is linearly proportional to the population size because each gene can be traced through only one line of a person’s family tree. Although Manrubia’s model unrealistically assumed the population size did not change with time, the results still apply in the real world, she says.
Because of the random reshuffling of genes in each successive generation, some of your ancestors contribute disproportionately to your genome, while others contribute nothing at all. According to calculations by geneticist Graham Coop of the University of California, Davis, you carry genes from fewer than half of your forebears from 11 generations back. Still, all the genes present in today’s human population can be traced to the people alive at the genetic isopoint. “If you are interested in what your ancestors have contributed to the present time, you have to look at the population of all the people that coexist with you,” Manrubia says. “All of them carry the genes of your ancestors because we share the [same] ancestors.”
And because the genetic isopoint occurred so recently, Rutherford says, “in relation to race, it absolutely, categorically demolishes the idea of lineage purity.” No person has forebears from just one ethnic background or region of the world. And your genealogical connections to the entire globe mean that not too long ago your ancestors were involved in every event in world history.
So the next time you hear someone claim to be descended from royalty, take heart: you are, too. “You are very special, and you are very generic, in a sense,” Manrubia says.


scientificamerican--2020-10-05--Discovery of Hepatitis C Snags Nobel Prize in Medicine

This year ’ s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus , which causes severe liver disease in more than 70 million people worldwide .
The prize was jointly awarded to Harvey J .
Alter and Charles M. Rice , both Americans , and British-born scientist Michael Houghton .
Three hepatitis viruses are known to infect the liver : Hepatitis A is transmitted by water or contaminated food , and causes a short-term infection that typically resolves within weeks ; hepatitis B and C are transmitted by contaminated blood , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the liver for decades .
This can lead to cirrhosis or liver cancer , only treatable through liver transplants .
As a result of hepatitis C ’ s discovery and blood screening programs , the virus has been nearly eliminated and most cases are treatable .
Hepatitis B and C were first noticed in patients who had received numerous blood transfusions or drugs made from blood products .
In 1965 the American physician Baruch Blumberg discovered the hepatitis B virus ( for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize ) , but this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ post-transfusion liver disease .
In the late 60s , Alter ( who was working at the National Institutes of Health Blood Bank ) began to suspect an as-yet-unknown pathogen was causing the disease .
He later showed that the illness could be transferred to monkeys from patients ’ blood .
Isolating the hepatitis C virus was harder , but Houghton—then working at the pharmaceutical company Chiron—and his colleagues were able to successfully clone it in 1989 by introducing viral DNA from an infected animal into bacteria , and using human antibodies to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It resembled viruses from a family called flaviviruses .
It was the first time this type of molecular biology approach had been used to identify a virus .
The discovery led to a blood test that could screen for hepatitis C. This immediately reduced the number of cases resulting from blood transfusions worldwide .
But one question remained : did the virus alone cause disease ?
Rice , working at Washington University in St. Louis , and his colleagues cloned the virus and injected the copies into animals—but the virus did not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of many viral clones , he saw they contained genetic mutations that made them defective .
But when he repaired the mutations , the clones caused clinical signs of hepatitis C in chimpanzees ; this showed that the cloned virus could cause disease .
Last year ’ s prize was awarded to scientists William Kaelin , Jr. , Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg Semenza for the discovery of how cells sense oxygen .

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, which causes severe liver disease and chronically infects more than 70 million people worldwide. The prize was jointly awarded to American researchers Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton.
Three hepatitis viruses are known to infect the liver: Hepatitis A is transmitted by water or contaminated food, and it causes a short-term infection that is typically resolved within weeks. Hepatitis B and C are transmitted by contaminated blood, and they cause chronic infections that can silently attack the liver for decades. This damage can lead to cirrhosis or liver cancer, which are sometimes only treatable through liver transplants. As a result of hepatitis C’s discovery and blood-screening programs, the virus has been nearly eliminated, and most cases are treatable.
“I’m surprised but not that surprised” about the Nobel announcement, says Timothy Sheahan, a virologist and an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Public Health. Sheahan did his postdoctoral work on hepatitis C in Rice’s laboratory at the Rockefeller University. “Charlie Rice’s work in discovering the hepatitis C virus and creating systems to study the biology and do drug discovery for [the virus] led to the development of antiviral drugs that can cure people of hepatitis C. The same effort ... led to the discovery and use of what is now called remdesivir,” an antiviral drug that has been shown to shorten the duration of COVID-19, adds Sheahan, who has studied the medication’s effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses. “And now this is being used on the president of the United States.”
Hepatitis B and C were first noticed in patients who had received numerous blood transfusions or therapeutics made from donated blood. In the mid-1960s American physician Baruch Blumberg discovered the hepatitis B virus (for which he was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine). But this virus did not explain all cases of post-transfusion liver disease. In the late 1960s, Alter, who was then working at the National Institutes of Health Blood Bank, began to suspect an as yet unknown pathogen was causing the disease. He later showed that the illness could be transferred to monkeys from patients’ blood.
Isolating the hepatitis C virus was harder, but Houghton—then working at the pharmaceutical company Chiron—and his colleagues were able to successfully clone it in 1989 by introducing viral DNA from an infected animal into bacteria, and using human antibodies to the virus to screen for its genetic sequence. They found that Hepatitis C resembled viruses from a family called flaviviruses. It was the first time this type of molecular biology approach had been used to identify a virus. The discovery led to a blood test that could screen for hepatitis C. This immediately reduced the number of cases resulting from blood transfusions worldwide.
But one question remained: Did the virus alone cause disease? Rice, then at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues cloned the pathogen and injected the copies into animals, but the virus did not replicate. When Rice compared the sequences of many viral clones, he saw they contained genetic mutations that made them defective. But when he repaired the mutations, the clones caused clinical signs of hepatitis C in chimpanzees. This result showed that the cloned virus could cause disease.
Rice says he was not expecting the award, “and I’m still not!” His first reaction to hearing the phone ringing in the living room at 4:30 A.M. was “not good,” he says. He figured it was either a wrong number or a telemarketer. “The secretary of the [Nobel] Committee, with a slight Swedish accent, was on the line. And I sort of thought it might be a crank phone call,” Rice says. “He said that if I didn't believe him, I should watch this event that was going to take place at 11:30 Swedish time. And so I did.”
Rice did not intentionally set out to study what is now called hepatitis C. At the time, he was studying yellow fever virus, which is also a flavivirus but is very different from the hepatitis C virus. When Alter and Houghton published seminal papers on a mysterious hepatitis virus in Science in 1989, Rice was intrigued. “This was a new virus, at least in terms of being able to study it,” he says. “It started off as a small side project that really nobody in lab was excited about.” Scientists could not even grow the virus in cells. From there, Rice’s team built on the work of Houghton and his colleagues to help flesh out the pathogen’s genome sequence, clone the viral RNA and infect animals with it, ultimately demonstrating that the hepatitis C virus alone was the cause of the disease.
“I think Alter truly deserved it,” says Patrizia Farci, chief of the hepatic pathogenesis section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been collaborating with him for years. “This work, together with [that of] Michael Houghton and Charlie Rice, has saved millions of lives and also shows that science does not have any barrier.” Farci says she first met Alter in the 1980s, and she says he used to write and read poetry about science. “He’s not only science!” she adds.
Sheahan speaks similarly highly of Rice. “He’s just a special person,” Sheahan says. “I’ve had two mentors, [including Rice]. They’re both really smart. But these are famous people who are actually good at being humans.”
“All three laureates have made tremendous contributions,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist and an associate research scientist at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Rasmussen, who did her postdoctoral work on the hepatitis C virus (but not with Alter, Houghton or Rice). She admits she was a bit surprised that the award went to this area of research. though shesays it is very relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic because hepatitis C is also a global disease. While Rasmussen says the recipients are all deserving, she notes that the Nobel Committee has once again honored three white men with the prestigious award. “It really puzzles me that the Nobel Committee says they are awarding the best science,” she says, “but the reality is: there are lots of people contributing to the best science that are women and people of color. They could do more to address that disparity.”
Last year’s prize was awarded to scientists William Kaelin, Jr., Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg Semenza for the discovery of how cells sense oxygen.
Editor’s Note (10/5/20): This story has been updated after posting to include comments from Timothy Sheahan, Patrizia Farci, Angela Rasmussen and Charles Rice.


scientificamerican--2020-10-05--The Earth Is on Fire

The Earth Is on Fire

I ’ ve never known an Earth that wasn ’ t on fire .
I ’ m 23 years old , and I ’ m not alone .
My entire generation has come of age in a world so defined by climate change and human destruction—by forests burning and glaciers melting , by extinguished species and rising seas—that it ’ s sometimes been hard to fathom what an even more dismal future might look like .
That is , until the pandemic reared its ugly head , bringing about the kind of worldwide lockdowns and upheavals of daily life that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ global emergency ” while still falling far short of what scientists say will be the worst environmental catastrophes that await us .
The fate of nature , like so much else , has been an agonizing side-story to the virus—a real-time plot that is being followed most closely , I think , by those of us young enough to one day see the worst of it .
At first , things seemed hopeful .
Struggling to adjust to the new normal of life in quarantine in March and April , we were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dipped , even if only temporarily , and that the skies over New Delhi and Los Angeles and Buenos Aires had cleared of smog .
I smiled , as we all did , to see that animals were roaming free through quiet cities and traffic-free streets ( in photos that became so popular that others were inevitably falsified ) .
Nature seemed to be reclaiming spaces humans had abandoned .
Perhaps , I wrote in April in a letter to a friend , we were all peculiarly drawn to those news stories of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ emptied of humans because we ’ ve long been aching for reminders of a natural world that has overwhelmingly been lost .
In the midst of so much present grief , such storylines gave us faith in Nature ’ s resilience .
And maybe , some optimists speculated , it would even inspire us to be better stewards of our planet when this was over .
Indeed , there were some concrete benefits to what scientists in the journal Nature have recently coined the “ anthropause ” : it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wildlife in a crowded world that seemed , for a moment , a little less crowded .
But pandemics like this happen , and will keep happening , because we humans have long encroached upon wild spaces .
So , I was hardly surprised when the more significant , more harrowing evidence began to rear its ugly head .
The great rainforests and tropical wetlands of Latin America , in the absence of international watchdogs and local enforcement , have been slaughtered and burned like never before .
As the pandemic rages on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inconvenience , global emissions have returned to normal levels .
In May , there was an Exxon Valdez–sized oil spill in the Russian Arctic , followed by others in places like Mauritius and Venezuela—unfathomable ecological catastrophes that are buried beneath headlines of case numbers and mortality rates .
Illegal poaching is on the rise in Africa .
The list goes on .
And that ’ s only what we ’ re seeing from afar .
While some of us may feel guiltier than others , we ’ ve all somehow regressed in our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ plastic bag at the supermarket , ordering takeout despite all the single-use containers , and , if we ’ re privileged enough , driving instead of taking public transportation—because , well , “ it ’ s a global pandemic , ” we say to ourselves .
Take a walk outside , and you ’ ll find the potentially virus-laden masks and latex gloves that now litter our streets and beaches and parks , and which will eventually fill our rivers and lakes and seas .
It ’ s as if the pandemic has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a license to dirty the world—if that ’ s even possible—with carelessness , if not outright contempt .
And I fear that for every day it continues , unabated by the decisions of our vile president , today ’ s young people will be paying the ecological price for the rest of our lives .
By young people , I ’ m not just talking about for those of us living in the United States , about to vote in the most consequential presidential election we may ever live to see .
I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ families worldwide whose health and food security has plunged into even more uncertainty because of the devastating one-two punch of climate change and the virus—for the global environment emergency , like the pandemic , also lays bare systemic racism and socioeconomic inequities .
I ’ m talking about young climate organizers across the globe who have been calling out people ’ s ignorance of science for years—the same problem that has gotten us into the worst of the pandemic and our current ecological catastrophe—and feel now more than ever that they ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ perhaps most brutally , I ’ m talking about young Indigenous people all over places like Latin America whose entire cultures ( many of them predicated on harmony with nature ) are being erased as their elders die of infection and as illegal ranchers and miners , ever-encroaching during the pandemic , violently remove them from their ancestral lands .
Here in the U.S. , though , the chorus is louder now than it ’ s ever been—as some of the worst wildfires on record tear through the American West , painting the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the South , leaving behind apocalyptic fields of ruin .
In today ’ s pandemic moment , nature ’ s storyline has reached a low point .
It ’ s unfathomable to me that some people can still so easily shrug it off—especially if they have kids , or love anyone who is younger than them—while for so many in my generation , it is such a constant , excruciating worry .
Apathy , let alone denial , can no longer be an acceptable option , because we know that if we stay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inevitably come for us , too .
But I like to think that the research and reckoning of resilience from the original “ anthropause ” still gives some hope—perhaps if we all live a little lighter , if we listen to those who are in harmony with the land , and if we take solace in all that there is to love in the world—that nature might meet us halfway .
That if we start by turning things around in November and following it up with the most drastic action possible , we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opportunity to build a cleaner and greener future for us all .
The planet , and our fate on it , hang in the balance .

I’ve never known an Earth that wasn’t on fire.
I’m 23 years old, and I’m not alone. My entire generation has come of age in a world so defined by climate change and human destruction—by forests burning and glaciers melting, by extinguished species and rising seas—that it’s sometimes been hard to fathom what an even more dismal future might look like.
That is, until the pandemic reared its ugly head, bringing about the kind of worldwide lockdowns and upheavals of daily life that have given terrifying prescience to the term “global emergency” while still falling far short of what scientists say will be the worst environmental catastrophes that await us. The fate of nature, like so much else, has been an agonizing side-story to the virus—a real-time plot that is being followed most closely, I think, by those of us young enough to one day see the worst of it.
At first, things seemed hopeful. Struggling to adjust to the new normal of life in quarantine in March and April, we were relieved to read that emissions levels had dipped, even if only temporarily, and that the skies over New Delhi and Los Angeles and Buenos Aires had cleared of smog. I smiled, as we all did, to see that animals were roaming free through quiet cities and traffic-free streets (in photos that became so popular that others were inevitably falsified). Nature seemed to be reclaiming spaces humans had abandoned.
Perhaps, I wrote in April in a letter to a friend, we were all peculiarly drawn to those news stories of goats and lions and dolphins reoccupying spaces emptied of humans because we’ve long been aching for reminders of a natural world that has overwhelmingly been lost. In the midst of so much present grief, such storylines gave us faith in Nature’s resilience. And maybe, some optimists speculated, it would even inspire us to be better stewards of our planet when this was over. Indeed, there were some concrete benefits to what scientists in the journal Nature have recently coined the “anthropause”: it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for humans to understand our impact on wildlife in a crowded world that seemed, for a moment, a little less crowded.
But pandemics like this happen, and will keep happening, because we humans have long encroached upon wild spaces. So, I was hardly surprised when the more significant, more harrowing evidence began to emerge. The great rainforests and tropical wetlands of Latin America, in the absence of international watchdogs and local enforcement, have been slaughtered and burned like never before. As the pandemic rages on and quarantine is treated as a tiresome inconvenience, global emissions have returned to normal levels. In May, there was an Exxon Valdez–sized oil spill in the Russian Arctic, followed by others in places like Mauritius and Venezuela—unfathomable ecological catastrophes that are buried beneath headlines of case numbers and mortality rates. Illegal poaching is on the rise in Africa. The list goes on.
And that’s only what we’re seeing from afar. While some of us may feel guiltier than others, we’ve all somehow regressed in our daily choices since this began—accepting that extra plastic bag at the supermarket, ordering takeout despite all the single-use containers, and, if we’re privileged enough, driving instead of taking public transportation—because, well, “it’s a global pandemic,” we say to ourselves. Take a walk outside, and you’ll find the potentially virus-laden masks and latex gloves that now litter our streets and beaches and parks, and which will eventually fill our rivers and lakes and seas.
It’s as if the pandemic has suddenly given people everywhere even more of a license to dirty the world—if that’s even possible—with carelessness, if not outright contempt. And I fear that for every day it continues, unabated by the decisions of our vile president, today’s young people will be paying the ecological price for the rest of our lives.
By young people, I’m not just talking about for those of us living in the United States, about to vote in the most consequential presidential election we may ever live to see. I’m talking about children from impoverished families worldwide whose health and food security has plunged into even more uncertainty because of the devastating one-two punch of climate change and the virus—for the global environment emergency, like the pandemic, also lays bare systemic racism and socioeconomic inequities. I’m talking about young climate organizers across the globe who have been calling out people’s ignorance of science for years—the same problem that has gotten us into the worst of the pandemic and our current ecological catastrophe—and feel now more than ever that they’re screaming into a void.
And, perhaps most brutally, I’m talking about young Indigenous people all over places like Latin America whose entire cultures (many of them predicated on harmony with nature) are being erased as their elders die of infection and as illegal ranchers and miners, ever-encroaching during the pandemic, violently remove them from their ancestral lands.
Here in the U.S., though, the chorus is louder now than it’s ever been—as some of the worst wildfires on record tear through the American West, painting the sky orange, and as hurricanes ravage the South, leaving behind apocalyptic fields of ruin. In today’s pandemic moment, nature’s storyline has reached a low point. It’s unfathomable to me that some people can still so easily shrug it off—especially if they have kids, or love anyone who is younger than them—while for so many in my generation, it is such a constant, excruciating worry. Apathy, let alone denial, can no longer be an acceptable option, because we know that if we stay on this course, the destruction will inevitably come for us, too.
But I like to think that the research and reckoning of resilience from the original “anthropause” still gives some hope—perhaps if we all live a little lighter, if we listen to those who are in harmony with the land, and if we take solace in all that there is to love in the world—that nature might meet us halfway. That if we start by turning things around in November and following it up with the most drastic action possible, we could still harness that final, fleeting opportunity to build a cleaner and greener future for us all. The planet, and our fate on it, hang in the balance.


scientificamerican--2020-10-05--'Supernova Slice' Simulates Blasts of Dying Stars

When a star explodes at the end of its lifetime , it smears the elements forged in its heart across vast stretches of space .
The results , dramatic designs of gas and dust known as supernova remnants , contain structures that have long puzzled researchers .
But supernovae occur in the Milky Way only once or twice a century , often without warning , making it difficult to study their initial moments .
Researchers have modeled these events through simulations , but computing limitations require them to make assumptions about the finer details .
Researchers at the Georgia Institute @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a new experiment to look at how gases in a supernova might mix , confirming and helping to refine previous simulations .
Their wedge-shaped apparatus—which they sometimes call “ supernova pizza ” —is about four feet wide at the top and roughly the thickness of a double door , enclosing two separated , inert gases .
Its shape lets it re-create physical dynamics as they would occur within a slice of a cylinder or sphere in space .
The team sets off commercial detonators at the point of the wedge , which mimics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the blast waves mix the two gases .
A high-speed camera snaps images of the process every 0.1 millisecond , revealing the equivalent of roughly the first hour after a supernova explosion .
The researchers described the experiment in June in the Astrophysical Journal .
The team observed how small perturbations along the line where the two gases meet are amplified by the push-and-pull nature of the blast waves , forming mushroom-shaped disturbances that quickly grow larger .
These curls of gas create turbulence , eventually forming low-density bubbles and long , high-density @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enough , it can break off and accelerate like a bullet to pierce several layers of gas .
Researchers have puzzled over outflows of heavy elements that come from deep within supernova explosions and behave similarly to those spikes .
“ It is n't clear if we 're seeing something due to the intrinsic , asymmetric nature of the explosion or if it 's actually due to the turbulence happening , ” says Anthony Piro , a supernova theorist at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena , Calif. , who was not involved in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strong an effect turbulence might have , Piro says , although further checks are necessary to understand the model 's limitations .
Most supernova models incorporate basic assumptions about what happens at the smaller scales to avoid weeks of extra computational time , Piro says .
The new research helps to evaluate such assumptions .
Scientists now “ can see different , smaller-scale structures evolve , ” says Carolyn Kuranz , a physicist at University of Michigan , who was also not involved in the work .
The structures created by the experiment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how plasmas mix : “ Theory predicted that they should be similar , and [ the researchers ] found them to be.
” According to Piro , the experiment provides “ an amazing confirmation of a lot of the physics ” involved in supernovae .
He says it will help calibrate the models he works with while giving scientists a better understanding of supernova and remnant observations .
Building a supernova-in-a-box came with its own challenges .
Earth 's gravity is much weaker than a dying star 's , and tiny commercial blasters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even though the explosive pop is smaller , the other things we are dealing with are also smaller , so the ratios match , ” says Benjamin Musci , a Georgia Tech graduate student and the study 's lead author .
Preventing gases from bouncing off the experiment 's sidewalls , which obviously do not exist in space , “ was a long and arduous battle , ” Musci says .
It took him nearly a year to figure out a surprisingly simple solution : lining the walls with packing foam from a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ absorbs the gases , stopping them from reflecting .
“ This foam gets blown to bits every so often by the explosive , so it slows down our run time , ” he adds .
“ But without it the physics would be completely different.
” Another concern is dimensionality .
Piro notes that gases expanding in two dimensions tend to act differently than they would in three , creating larger eddies and taking longer to break apart .
This is something the researchers may work on in the future .
Previous supernova @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , says the study 's principal investigator , Georgia Tech astrophysicist Devesh Ranjan .
Sites such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory train dozens of lasers on material the size of a pencil eraser , evaporating it to trigger an impressive blast .
The trade-off comes in the amount of detail , Ranjan says : the bigger experiments generate few images , with only fleeting glimpses of the structures produced .
But the supernova pizza manages 200 shots in a few seconds as the gases mix .
“ What our experiment provides is a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Ranjan says .
By combining insights from both kinds of experiments , “ we should be able to say something jointly about what 's going on in a real-life supernova.
” Piro is not surprised that the team 's experiment is the first of its kind .
“ You have to be an expert in all different types of experimental techniques to put this all together , ” he says .
“ The creativity of this group in trying to address these problems in a laboratory setting is really inspiring to see.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ probe different aspects of supernovae , along with evolving models , will help researchers eventually tease out details they can not observe when a real star explodes .
“ If a universal model that describes what is occurring on different scales is the overall goal , ” Kuranz says , “ using these experiments—especially at different scales and under different conditions—can help push toward that .
”

When a star explodes at the end of its lifetime, it smears the elements forged in its heart across vast stretches of space. The results, dramatic designs of gas and dust known as supernova remnants, contain structures that have long puzzled researchers. But supernovae occur in the Milky Way only once or twice a century, often without warning, making it difficult to study their initial moments. Researchers have modeled these events through simulations, but computing limitations require them to make assumptions about the finer details.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology hope to change that with a new experiment to look at how gases in a supernova might mix, confirming and helping to refine previous simulations. Their wedge-shaped apparatus—which they sometimes call “supernova pizza”—is about four feet wide at the top and roughly the thickness of a double door, enclosing two separated, inert gases. Its shape lets it re-create physical dynamics as they would occur within a slice of a cylinder or sphere in space. The team sets off commercial detonators at the point of the wedge, which mimics the center of a supernova, and the blast waves mix the two gases. A high-speed camera snaps images of the process every 0.1 millisecond, revealing the equivalent of roughly the first hour after a supernova explosion. The researchers described the experiment in June in the Astrophysical Journal.
The team observed how small perturbations along the line where the two gases meet are amplified by the push-and-pull nature of the blast waves, forming mushroom-shaped disturbances that quickly grow larger. These curls of gas create turbulence, eventually forming low-density bubbles and long, high-density spikes. If a spike travels fast enough, it can break off and accelerate like a bullet to pierce several layers of gas.
Researchers have puzzled over outflows of heavy elements that come from deep within supernova explosions and behave similarly to those spikes. “It isn't clear if we're seeing something due to the intrinsic, asymmetric nature of the explosion or if it's actually due to the turbulence happening,” says Anthony Piro, a supernova theorist at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., who was not involved in the research. The new study illustrates how strong an effect turbulence might have, Piro says, although further checks are necessary to understand the model's limitations.
Gases expand outward in the milliseconds after a simulated supernova blast. Credit: DEVESH RANJAN, STAM LAB AND GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Most supernova models incorporate basic assumptions about what happens at the smaller scales to avoid weeks of extra computational time, Piro says. The new research helps to evaluate such assumptions. Scientists now “can see different, smaller-scale structures evolve,” says Carolyn Kuranz, a physicist at University of Michigan, who was also not involved in the work. The structures created by the experiment resemble what she has seen while investigating how plasmas mix: “Theory predicted that they should be similar, and [the researchers] found them to be.”
According to Piro, the experiment provides “an amazing confirmation of a lot of the physics” involved in supernovae. He says it will help calibrate the models he works with while giving scientists a better understanding of supernova and remnant observations.
Building a supernova-in-a-box came with its own challenges. Earth's gravity is much weaker than a dying star's, and tiny commercial blasters produce far less energy. But “even though the explosive pop is smaller, the other things we are dealing with are also smaller, so the ratios match,” says Benjamin Musci, a Georgia Tech graduate student and the study's lead author.
Preventing gases from bouncing off the experiment's sidewalls, which obviously do not exist in space, “was a long and arduous battle,” Musci says. It took him nearly a year to figure out a surprisingly simple solution: lining the walls with packing foam from a new computer's box. The material absorbs the gases, stopping them from reflecting. “This foam gets blown to bits every so often by the explosive, so it slows down our run time,” he adds. “But without it the physics would be completely different.”
Another concern is dimensionality. Piro notes that gases expanding in two dimensions tend to act differently than they would in three, creating larger eddies and taking longer to break apart. This is something the researchers may work on in the future.
Previous supernova experiments have been performed at larger scales, says the study's principal investigator, Georgia Tech astrophysicist Devesh Ranjan. Sites such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory train dozens of lasers on material the size of a pencil eraser, evaporating it to trigger an impressive blast. The trade-off comes in the amount of detail, Ranjan says: the bigger experiments generate few images, with only fleeting glimpses of the structures produced. But the supernova pizza manages 200 shots in a few seconds as the gases mix. “What our experiment provides is a dynamic view of the whole process,” Ranjan says. By combining insights from both kinds of experiments, “we should be able to say something jointly about what's going on in a real-life supernova.”
Piro is not surprised that the team's experiment is the first of its kind. “You have to be an expert in all different types of experimental techniques to put this all together,” he says. “The creativity of this group in trying to address these problems in a laboratory setting is really inspiring to see.”
Combining this study with others that probe different aspects of supernovae, along with evolving models, will help researchers eventually tease out details they cannot observe when a real star explodes. “If a universal model that describes what is occurring on different scales is the overall goal,” Kuranz says, “using these experiments—especially at different scales and under different conditions—can help push toward that.”


scientificamerican--2020-10-05--Technology vs. Truth: Deception in the Digital Age

1.1 Are Digital Devices Altering Our Brains ?
by Elena Pasquinelli 1.2 Your Brain on Google Maps by Zeynep Tufekci Section 2 : The Enemy Is Us : How Social Media Manipulates Human Behavior 2.1 Why We Trust Lies by Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall 2.4 How Fake News Goes Viral—Here ’ s the Math by Madhusree Mukerjee 2.5 Social Media 's Stepped-Up Crackdown on Terrorists Still Falls Short by Larry Greenemeier 2.6 When `` Like '' Is a Weapon by the Editors 3.2 Could AI Be the Future of Fake News and Product Reviews by Larry Greenemeier 3.3 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Greenemeier 3.4 AI-Generated Deepfakes and the Challenge of Detection by Siwei Lyu 3.5 Why Are Deepfakes So Effective ?
by Martijn Rasser 4.3 How NIST Tested Facial Recognition Algorithms for Racial Bias by Craig Watson & Sophie Bushwick 4.4 Bias Detectives : The Researchers Striving to Make Algorithms Fair by Rachel Courtland 4.5 Facial-Recognition Technology Needs More Regulation by the Editors Section 5 : Your Democracy Has Been Hacked 5.1 How to Defraud Democracy by J. Alex Halderman & Jen Schwartz 5.2 “ Fake News ” Web Sites May Not Have a Major @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Facebook Controversy : Privacy Is Not the Issue by Peter Bruce

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scientificamerican--2020-10-06--New Nobel Laureate Talks Today's Virology

“ I guess we 're in the middle of a sort of a major virology education.
” Charles Rice , of the Rockefeller University in New York City .
“ I think that , you know , the field has definitely changed , you know , since the days when I was a graduate student .
And I think one of the things that is very reassuring now is really the global response to this pandemic in the sort of academic and clinical and , you know , sort of pharma communities .
The rate of progress.
” Earlier today @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was informed that he had won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the virus that causes hepatitis C. The identification of the virus has led to tests and treatments for the condition .
Rice shared the prize with Harvey Alter of the National Institutes of Health and Michael Houghton of the University of Alberta .
“ It took us months and months of toil to sequence a single viral genome .
Now people can do that in a matter of hours .
And the rate at which people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ understanding SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 is just spectacular.
” Rice spoke this morning on a web press conference from Rockefeller University .
“ So I think it 's taught us a lot of things about science in general .
If there 's really a pressing problem we mobilize people all around the world to sort of work on these problems .
Really great progress can be made .
People would love to have a cure in a week or a vaccine in a week .
I mean , that 's not feasible , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vaccines will be developed for SARS-CoV-2 to prevent COVID-19 is going to be spectacular .
“ And it 's really sort of changing the way that science is done to really make it more of a community effort rather than something that many years ago might have been pursued by a few labs in isolation .
So I think young virologists today just have this amazing collection of tools and capabilities to understand what 's going on in virus biology and the host response at a level that was just never before possible @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the future of this and I do hope that maybe the success with hepatitis C and what I would predict the sort of eventual success and getting a handle on the current coronavirus pandemic that we face will sort of encourage us to not only recruit more virologists , but also just encourage people to study these little troublemakers , because you never know when they 're gon na pop up and cause trouble .
So it 's worth a small investment .
”

Full Transcript
“I guess we're in the middle of a sort of a major virology education.”
Charles Rice of the Rockefeller University in New York City.
“I think that, you know, the field has definitely changed, you know, since the days when I was a graduate student. And I think one of the things that is very reassuring now is really the global response to this pandemic in the sort of academic and clinical and, you know, sort of pharma communities. The rate of progress.”
Earlier today, October 5, 2020, Rice was informed that he had won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the virus that causes hepatitis C. The identification of the virus has led to tests and treatments for the condition. Rice shared the prize with Harvey Alter of the National Institutes of Health and Michael Houghton of the University of Alberta.
“It took us months and months of toil to sequence a single viral genome. Now people can do that in a matter of hours. And the rate at which people have been able to make progress on understanding SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 is just spectacular.”
Rice spoke this morning on a Web press conference from Rockefeller University.
“So I think it’s taught us a lot of things about science in general. If there’s really a pressing problem, we mobilize people all around the world to sort of work on these problems. Really great progress can be made. People would love to have a cure in a week or a vaccine in a week. I mean, that’s not feasible, but the speed with which good therapeutics and vaccines will be developed for SARS-CoV-2 to prevent COVID-19 is going to be spectacular.
“And it's really sort of changing the way that science is done to really make it more of a community effort rather than something that, many years ago, might have been pursued by a few labs in isolation. So I think young virologists today just have this amazing collection of tools and capabilities to understand what’s going on in virus biology and the host response at a level that was just never before possible.
“I’m very optimistic on the future of this, and I do hope that maybe the success with hepatitis C and, what I would predict, the sort of eventual success and getting a handle on the current coronavirus pandemic that we face will sort of encourage us to not only recruit more virologists but also just encourage people to study these little troublemakers, because you never know when they're gonna pop up and cause trouble. So it’s worth a small investment.”
—Steve Mirsky
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]