Extreme thirst: Human dietary flexibility best defence against dehydration
There was a reason I asked Julio, my guide, about “hidden” sources of water, such as vines, that Tsimane’ consumed. Dino Nate, my local research assistant and my colleague Kelly Rosinger and I were being taken around the Bolivian Amazon by Julio, one of my Tsimane’ friends. This was after...
How climate evolution in Africa preset human’s extreme thirst for water
We trekked through the Bolivian Amazon, drenched in sweat. Draped head to toe in bug repellent gear, we stayed just ahead of the clouds of mosquitoes as we sidestepped roots, vines and giant ants. My local research assistant Dino Nate, my partner Kelly Rosinger and I were following Julio, one...
Identity crisis: What is considered American history is explicitly defined as White
The term identity politics was born in 1977, when a group of Black lesbian feminists called the Combahee River Collective released a statement defining their work as self-liberation from the racism and sexism of “white male rule”: “The major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates...
Scientific research has become a silent war zone as authorship rows take centre-stage
Team science suffers when junior researchers see their career-defining contributions to a paper downplayed. Here’s how to tackle disputes that have the potential to frustrate the best efforts in innovation. “It felt like a slap in the face. It was as though the credit for half of my PhD was...
Zoom fatigue: Some people get ‘cyber-sickness’ akin to motion sickness
Technology also offers huge opportunity for broadening the scope and possibilities of education. EdX, one of the largest platforms for massive open online courses (MOOCs), started 2020 with 80 million enrolments. That went up to 100 million by May. Online courses are often based around pre-recorded video lectures with text-based...
‘Spy industry’ now biggest threat to human rights, conscience freedom – lawyer
The increased number of prisoners of conscience in the world has been linked to proliferation of surveillance technology. Aware of the dangers posed to the right to privacy and association, human rights lawyer and freedom of expression crusader Eitay Mack is pushing for transparency in the Israeli war industry. In...
Precarisation of journalists by employers is main cause of decline in quality of editorial production – EFJ
The Forum on Information and Democracy published yesterday its report titled A New Deal for Journalism. The report presents, among other things, a plan to guarantee up to 0.1 per cent of GDP per year to journalism “in order to preserve its social function for the future”. The document, however,...
Real America’s attitude toward the rest of the world is isolationist, hostile to humanitarianism
From its beginnings, Real America has also been religious and in a particular way: evangelical and fundamentalist, hostile to modern ideas and intellectual authority. The truth will enter every simple heart and it doesn’t come in shades of grey. “If we have to give up either religion or education, we...
America grapples with millions of people with organ transplants in need of extra Covid vaccination
Covid vaccination in the US has been framed as a binary: People either seek out the inoculation, or they distrust the formula or the politics that produced it and reject the shot. People who accept the vaccine get to return to normal life. For the people who don’t, “Your health...
Ethical and moral red flag raised about DNA data use without informed consent
Last year, forensic geneticist a Berlin research hospital Lutz Roewer removed profiles that had been uploaded by the authors of a paper describing DNA studies of Uyghur, Kazakh and Hui minority groups in China. He did so after Springer Nature investigated and retracted that paper. The authors said that the...
