Feb 13-17, 2017
Rose loves watching people dance (check out her favorite YouTube videos). This paper about women dancing? She does not love it so much: Oh, so, the paper here isn’t really asking “which woman is a better dancer” but rather “which woman would you rather sleep with?” That is… a completely different question than asking who’s a better dancer.
Jenny might have been a paleontologist if, as a fifth grader, she had found a weird fossil like Saccorhytus coronarious, a wrinkly mouthed sac that is also one of our ancestors: Its form, at some 540 million years old, proves that we vertebrates have been pushing around our greedy mouths to stuff our faces, and letting fly the excess, for a really long time.
America has been great before, says Craig, in the Ice Age: Ours has been a country for refugees and far-flung travelers since the beginning. . . To survive far northern conditions within shooting distance of the land bridge, people had to invent portable architecture and tailored clothing, represented by the advent of stone microblades for precisely cutting skins, and eyed sewing needles fashioned out of mammoth ivory found in both Siberia and Alaska.
Michelle writes about a tree that weighs as much as 10,000 grizzly bears. It’s a quaking aspen named Pando, and it’s in trouble: For Rogers, the clone’s slow but increasingly visible desistance is a sign of larger human failings. “When something that’s so big, and has been around so long, just starts to fall apart,” he says, “that points the finger back at us.”
This idea to cut out the middleman between pharma and consumers? Been there, done that, says Erik: The masses are good at many things. Finding planets, for instance. Or driving the world’s car markets to ever-better quality and efficiency. Or proofreading Taylor Swift’s Wikipedia page. But . . . we are not great at picking effective drugs.