Sergio Parra

According to him WWF Living Planet Report 2020 (World Wide Fund for Nature), Wild animal populations have fallen by two thirds since 1970. Specifically, 68% in global populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish between 1970 and 2016.

Freshwater wildlife have also suffered a decline of 84%, the steepest average population decline in any biome, equivalent to 4% per year since 1970.

The principal cause

The main factor in this animal loss is due to our diet.: We need a lot of land to produce food, which results in habitat loss and degradation, including deforestation.

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Large coral reefs protected marine diversity

That is, to solve the problem, drastic measures must be taken, both in the way we eat and manage food, as well as invest more in the protection of certain environments.

The Living Planet Index (LPI), provided by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) tracked almost 21,000 populations of more than 4,000 vertebrate species between 1970 and 2016. As Gun explains Tim Newbold, from the UCL Biodiversity and Environment Research Center (University College London):

Changing land use, whether for agriculture, energy, transport or housing, has a profound impact on biodiversity, as many plants and animals can no longer survive in an environment, and the remaining wild nature may not be large enough to support a species. This is now affecting the composition of plants and animals, as generalist species are better able to survive while more specialized species become extinct.

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Global animal populations have declined by an average of two-thirds in less than half a century.

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Unlike the estimation of other social costs of releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, one has been made that goes beyond the year 2100.

In this way, it is estimated that carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere will cost future generations $100,000 per ton, a thousand times more than what was calculated for our generation.

Generational costs

The study, carried out by two geoscientists and a philosopher from the University of Chicago, published in the journal Climatic Change, calculates the so-called “social cost of carbon”, a number intended to represent the value of all future damages to our generation in today's dollars.

The calculations take into account the full magnitude of sea level rise, which reduces, among other things, cropland. The final costs are a thousand times higher than the normally calculated present value of those costs because climate change will persist a thousand times longer than our generation, according to one of the authors, David Archer, computational climate scientist:

What we wanted to achieve with this calculation is a better idea of the burden we are imposing on future generations. This is not intended to be a realistic estimate of the present value of costs, but is our attempt to try to put the enormous time scales into more understandable units. Most people are not geologists, and even for us it's really hard to think about how long the changes we're making now are going to last.

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This new material captures CO2 from the air and transforms it into useful organic materials

The authors emphasized that the model is not intended to be an exact measurement, but rather to help people visualize the future. The costs are also added assuming that there is no economic growth in the current world.

Because it is impossible to reliably predict humanity's long-term future, we had to make unrealistic simplifying assumptions, such as that humanity lives in a stable state with a planet's carrying capacity without changes in technology.

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The future cost of pollution: around $100,000 per ton of carbon

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Chadwick Boseman, who will play King T'Challa in the film Black Panther, died recently of colon cancer at age 43 after years of fighting.

A study conducted with 16,382 patients has found that African Americans are, in fact, less likely to receive life-saving medical care, such as chemotherapy, so they have 17% more likely to die from colon cancer than their white peers.

Poor medical care

The researchers of City of Hope National Medical Center in California analyzed data from 2000 to 2012 on California patients with colon cancer that has spread to the liver, comparing treatments, outcomes, and demographics such as race, age, sex, and concurrent health problems.

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It is possible to efficiently create the synthetic version of a very promising compound as an anti-cancer agent

They found that black people are 10% less likely overall to receive life-saving colorectal cancer treatment. They are also 17% more likely to die than their white peers.

According to the research, this could be attributed to factors such as lower referral rate to cancer specialists, late detection of colorectal cancer metastases, and patient-reported barriers, including fear of cancer and its treatment, costs and burdens of transportation, and childcare during therapy.

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Human activity could be behind the cancer suffered by mussels, clams and cockles

That is to say, that we are not simply dealing with genetic or biological factors, but as a result of complex intersections of discrimination and inequality in employment, housing, stress and other chronic diseases, as well as reliable access to both preventive care and medical treatment.

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African Americans are more likely to die from colorectal cancer, and the system is to blame

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The Puerto Rican Amazon Amazona vittata, Przewalski's horse Equus ferus, the alagoas Antwren Myrmotherula snowi, the Iberian lynx Lynx pardinus and the black mosquito Himantopus novaezelandiae They are some of the species that have become extinct in recent decades.

However, as published in A study in Conservation Letters, This has not happened thanks to our prevention and conservation actions.

From 21 to 32 bird extinctions

The research team, which includes experts from BirdLife International, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and the Zoological Society of London, among others, identified species of birds and mammals that were listed as threatened on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List. Nature Conservation.

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Large coral reefs protected marine diversity

Specifically, since 1993, researchers have found that from 21 to 32 bird extinctions and from 7 to 16 mammal species. The findings are highly relevant to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which came into force in 1993.

21 bird species benefited from the control of invasive species, 20 from conservation in zoos and collections, and 19 from site protection. 14 mammal species benefited from the legislation and nine from the reintroduction and conservation of species in zoos and collections.

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Preserve biodiversity in palm oil plantations

The findings also show that without conservation actions, extinction rates they would have been around 3 to 4 times larger. As explained Rike Bolam, from the University of Newcastle, lead author of the study:

It is encouraging that some of the species we studied have recovered very well. Therefore, our analyzes provide a surprisingly positive message that conservation has substantially reduced bird and mammal extinction rates. While extinctions have also occurred during the same time period, our work shows that it is possible to prevent extinctions.

Negotiations are currently underway to develop a new framework to address biodiversity loss by 2030.

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Since 1993, we have prevented the extinction of at least 28 species of birds and mammals

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Men's conversations with other men tend to focus on depersonalized topics, such as shared activities, politics, football, etc.

On the contrary, with women, men tend to reveal their emotions more frequently and report that relationships with women are more meaningful, intimate, satisfying and pleasant than relationships between men

Intimacy and sex

Men's concern about status differences has implications for their friendships, so they tend to be cautious about entering into very intimate relationships with other men where weaknesses or concerns are revealed: such information could one day be used against you.

As suggested in A study by Valerian J. Derlega, Bonnie Durham, Barbara Gockel, and David Sholis: If men do not reveal personal information, other people cannot understand, predict, or control their behavior.

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Despite the fact that there is more gender equality, women prefer to be asked on a date instead of doing it themselves

Although men will reveal facts about themselves, They are much less willing than women to share emotions. They are particularly unlikely to share negative emotions that reveal vulnerability, such as depression, anxiety and fear, as suggested in this other study.

Men's conversations with other men tend to focus on shared activities or depersonalized topics, such as politics and sports. Compared to women, they are more likely to define intimacy with other men in terms of shared activities rather than shared emotional experiences.

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Due to COVID, the university entrance exams were not in person and that meant that more women entered (with a but)

However, when they are with women rather than men, men make more emotional disclosures.. Which could partially explain why '(1) men tend to fall in love more easily than women; (2) women tend to fall out of love more easily than men.'

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Men are more emotionally open to women than to other men.

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Christopher C. Gilbert, from Arizona State University, has filled an important void in the fossil record of apes with the discovery of a 13 million year old fossil unearthed in northern India comes from a newly discovered ape, the oldest known ancestor of the modern gibbon.

The find was by chance, on a small hill in an area where a fossil primate jaw had been found the previous year.

Kapi ramnagarensis

The fossil, a complete lower molar, belongs to a previously unknown genus and species (Kapi ramnagarensis) and represents the first new species of fossil ape discovered at the famous Ramnagar fossil site, India, in almost a century.

The molar was photographed and scanned by computed tomography (CT), and comparative samples of teeth from living and extinct apes were examined to highlight important similarities and differences in dental anatomy. According to Gilbert explains.:

From the shape and size of the molar, our initial assumption was that it might be from a gibbon ancestor, but that seemed too good to be true, given that the fossil record of lesser apes is virtually nonexistent. There are other primate species known during that time, and no gibbon fossils had been found anywhere near Ramnagar. So we knew we would have to do our homework to find out exactly what this little fossil was.

In addition to determining that the new ape represents the oldest known fossil gibbon, the age of the fossil, around 13 million years, is contemporary with known great ape fossils.

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Missing link in ape fossil record found in India

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Using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in Western Australia, it has been done the deepest and widest search at low frequencies for alien technologies.

After searching a patch of sky known to include at least 10 million stars, around the constellation Vela, no trace of them has been found. The telescope searched for powerful radio emissions at frequencies similar to those of FM, that could indicate the presence of an intelligent source.

Murchison Widefield Array

The MWA is an inherently versatile instrument with a very large field of view (on the order of 30 degrees wide) capable of covering a wide range of scientific objectives. An MWA antenna consists of a regular four-by-four grid of dual-polarized dipole elements arranged on a 4 m x 4 m steel mesh ground plane. Each antenna (with its 16 dipoles) is known as a "mosaic".

He cited study was carried out by CSIRO astronomer Chenoa Tremblay and Steven Tingay, from the Curtin University node of the Centre, and has been published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

As Tremblay explains:

We watched the sky around the Vela constellation for 17 hours, looking more than 100 times wider and deeper than ever before. With this data set, we found no technological signatures, no signs of intelligent life.

The MWA is a precursor to the next instrument, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a €1.7 billion observatory with telescopes in Western Australia and South Africa.

The SKA will be built in the same location as the MWA, but will be 50 times more sensitive and will be able to conduct much deeper SETI experiments, which is equivalent to saying that will be able to detect Earth-like radio signals from relatively nearby planetary systems. Let's keep our fingers crossed for then.

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In the sky around the Vela constellation, with at least ten million stars, no trace of civilization is detected

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According to a new study, blue jeans are a major source of microfiber pollution in oceans and lakes.

A pair of jeans can release more than 50,000 microfibers per wash. Which is a relevant environmental problem if we take into account that Approximately half of the world's population wears this item of clothing.

polluting clothing

Yves Saint Laurent would like to have invented jeans, as he confessed in 1983 to The New York Times: "They have expression, modesty, sex appeal and simplicity, everything I want in my clothes." Not in vain, blue jeans are the most popular garment in the world.

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Thousands of masks are beginning to be found in the sea: what should we do with the used masks?

The microfibers included between 87% and 90% of anthropogenic particles found in sediments of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, the Laurentian Great Lakes, and shallow suburban lakes in southern Ontario. Twenty-one to fifty-one percent of all microfibers in the sediments were anthropogenically modified cellulose (AC), of which 40-57% were indigo denim microfibers (12-23% of all microfibers analyzed).

Microfibers from washed jeans were consistent in chemical composition and morphology with those found in the environment.

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What you consume, especially what you eat, is much more important for the environment than you think

Thus, the study concludes, blue jeans are an indicator of the widespread burden of anthropogenic pollution by significantly increasing the environmental accumulation of microfibers from temperate to arctic regions.

Furthermore, as indicated Dana Thomas in his book Fashionopolis, making a pair of jeans requires 70 liters of water, 1.5 kilo-watts of energy and 150 grams of chemicals. More than 4 billion pieces of denim leave textile factories every year, most dyed blue with synthetic indigo fixed with a powerful bleach that makes it highly polluting.

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Nine million people die annually due to pollution

Indigo is the only pigment capable of giving jeans their unmistakable bluish color. It is currently synthesized chemically on a global scale and it is estimated that around 45,000 tons are produced annually, of which 95 % are used to dye jeans.

Thus, More ecological alternatives are being sought for the manufacture of this textile, like the one proposed by a group from the University of Berkley (USA) could have been achieved, according to A study recently published in Nature Chemical Biology.

Clothing is the second cause of pollution on the planet, to the point that in 2015 textile production emitted into the atmosphere 1.2 million tons of CO2That is, more than all the ships and planes on the planet emitted that year, according to data from the International Energy Agency.

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Blue jeans are a major source of microfiber pollution in oceans and lakes

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Until the arrival of the French philosopher Rene Descartes, there was nothing conceptually similar to a universal law of nature, a set of instructions that are always the same under all conditions and serve to predict what is going to happen.

The modern idea of the laws of nature, then, was not only a byproduct of Descartes' philosophy, but it constituted an impressive undertaking that It started during the Scientific Revolution and that allowed us to unravel the Matrix-type code that underlay nature.

The laws of the Revolution

The ancients had known, according to estimates, only four physical laws: the law of the lever, the optical law of reflection, the law of buoyancy and the parallelogram law of velocities. That is, rather, four principles that we call laws had been discovered.

While they referred to these "laws" as evidence that nature was sometimes regular and predictable, They never identified any specific scientific principle as law.

But, for example, the Romans talked a lot about the law of nature (lex naturae), but they generally meant moral law. And, although Galileo, Harriot and Beeckman had each independently discovered the so-called "law of the fall", none of them had used the term "law" in this context. The identification of laws in its strict sense was born with the Scientific Revolution, among which the following were deciphered:

• Stevin's law of hydrostatics.
• Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
• Snell's law of refraction.
• Boyle's gas law.
• Hooke's law of elasticity.
• Huygens's pendulum law.
• Torricelli's law of flow.
• Pascal's law of fluid dynamics.
• Newton's law of gravitation.

Only a minority of these laws had already acquired eponymous labels: the rest had yet to be named after their discoverers. Just as he wrote Isaac Newton to define his aims when, in 1703, he became president of the Royal Society:

Natural philosophy consists in discovering the structure and operations of nature, and reducing them, as far as possible, to general rules or laws, establishing these rules by observations and experiments, and from thence deducing the causes and effects of things. .

The physicist-mathematician Henri Poincare (provides a similar definition: "What is a law? It is a constant link between an antecedent and a consequent, between the current state of the world and its immediately subsequent state."

Given this, the certainty began to emerge that, if everything is governed by laws, everything can be predictable (even if it were not computable) and therefore We lived in a deterministic universe where free will was only a cognitive illusion. You can delve deeper into this difficult topic in the following video:

Nowadays it is known that there are scientific laws that are both causal and probabilistic or stochastic. Hence, in the concept of scientific law, both types of law (deterministic and stochastic) must be considered. but it is based on four principles:

1. Everything that exists is governed by natural laws
2. These laws are invariant in time and space.
3. The scientist's activity consists of describing them
4. The existence of these laws is independent of whether the human being describes them or not.
5. It is possible, in principle, to know all the laws

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The discoverers of the first laws of nature

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It is often rumored that NASA spent millions of dollars developing a pen that would write in the absence of gravity, but that The Russians solved the problem using a simple pencil. However, It's nothing more than an urban legend.

Right now, on the International Space Station (ISS), astronauts use pencils. Still, concerns about its flammability in a pure oxygen atmosphere and the threat of tiny floating pieces of graphite inspired Paul Fisher to develop the Space Pen in 1965, a fairly cheap invention.

Back to pencils

Both American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts initially used pencils on space flights, but those writing instruments were not ideal: pencil tips can chip and break, and have such objects floating around space capsules in near-zero gravity. represents potential harm to astronauts and equipment.

NASA began developing a space pen, but project costs rose, so the project was canceled and the astronauts used pencils like the Russians again. NASA never contacted Paul Fisher to develop a pen, just as he did not receive any funding from the government to develop it.

The curious thing about the whole thing is that to write in space you don't need a special pen. Sometimes special pens are used, but also normal ones, as As it explains in Spanish astronaut Pedro Duke:

I'm writing these notes on the Soyuz with a cheap pen. Why is that important? It turns out that I have been working in space programs for seventeen years, eleven as an astronaut, and I have always believed, because it was explained to me, that normal pens do not write in space.

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Despite all the technology available, normal pens are still used in space

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