A study of a large, nationally representative sample of U.S. adults has revealed that those who reported lifetime use of ecstasy (i.e., using ecstasy at least once in their life) were less likely to report having difficulty dealing with strangers, participating in social activities, and being prevented from participating in social activities by their mental health issues. Participants with lifetime use of mescaline also had lower odds of difficulty dealing with strangers. The study was published in Scientific Reports. Human are social beings. We live in a society and performing literally any a...
From Covid-19 to monkey pox, Mers, Ebola, avian flu, Zika and HIV, diseases transmitted from animals to humans have multiplied in recent years, raising fears of new pandemics.
What's a zoonosis?
A zoonosis (plural zoonoses) is a disease or infection transmitted from vertebrate animals to people, and vice versa. The pathogens involved can be bacteria, viruses or parasites.
These diseases are transmitted either directly during contact between an animal and a human, or indirectly through food or through a vector such as an insect, spider or mite.
Some diseases end up becoming specifically human, like Covid-19.
According to the World Organisation for Animal Health, 60 percent of human infectious diseases are zoonotic.
What types of diseases are involved?
The term "zoonoses" includes a wide variety of diseases.
Some affect the digestive system, such as salmonellosis, others the respiratory system, such as avian and swine flu as well as Covid, or the nervous system in the case of rabies.
The severity of these diseases in humans varies greatly depending on the disease and the pathogen's virulence, but also on the infected person, who may have a particular sensitivity to the pathogen.
What animals are involved?
Bats act as a reservoir for many viruses that affect humans.
Some have been known for a long time, such as the rabies virus, but many have emerged in recent decades, such as Ebola, the SARS coronavirus, Sars-CoV-2 (which causes Covid-19) or the Nipah virus, which appeared in Asia in 1998.
Badgers, ferrets, mink and weasels are often implicated in viral zoonoses, and in particular those caused by coronaviruses.
Other mammals, such as cattle, pigs, dogs, foxes, camels and rodents, also often play the role of intermediate host.
All the viruses responsible for major influenza pandemics had an avian origin, either direct or indirect.
Finally, insects such as ticks are vectors of many viral diseases that affect humans.
- Why has the frequency of zoonoses increased?
Having appeared thousands of years ago, zoonoses have multiplied over the past 20 or 30 years.
The growth of international travel has allowed them to spread more quickly.
By occupying increasingly large areas of the planet, humans also contribute to disrupting the ecosystem and promoting the transmission of viruses.
Industrial farming increases the risk of pathogens spreading between animals.
Trade in wild animals also increases human exposure to the microbes they may carry.
Deforestation increases the risk of contact between wildlife, domestic animals and human populations.
Should we fear another pandemic?
Climate change will push many animals to flee their ecosystems for more livable lands, a study published by the scientific journal Nature warned in 2022.
By mixing more, species will transmit their viruses more, which will promote the emergence of new diseases potentially transmissible to humans.
"Without preventative strategies, pandemics will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, kill more people, and affect the global economy with more devastating impact than ever before," the UN Biodiversity Expert Group warned in October 2020.
According to estimates published in the journal Science in 2018, there are 1.7 million unknown viruses in mammals and birds, 540,000 to 850,000 of them with the capacity to infect humans.
But above all, the expansion of human activities and increased interactions with wildlife increase the risk that viruses capable of infecting humans will "find" their host.
Greater experiences of “telepresence” — which refer to a user’s sense of immersion in the world created by social media apps — among both TikTok and Instagram users are linked to higher levels of depression and anxiety, according to new research published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. The study examined “flow” experiences resulting from social media use. Flow was first introduced by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s to describe a mental state that occurs when someone is fully immersed in an activity. In the context of social media, flow experiences may oc...
Before humans started heating the planet by burning fossil fuels in the 19th century, Earth had experienced centuries-long widespread cool period known as the Little Ice Age.
Records of these eruptions are sparse, and much of our knowledge of them comes from the traces left behind in polar ice and tree rings, which are fragmentary and sometimes contradictory.
In a new study published in Nature, an international team of researchers led by Sébastien Guillet at the University of Geneva has found another way to learn about these historical eruptions: by studying descriptions of lunar eclipses in medieval manuscripts.
Dark eclipses
The researchers compiled hundreds of records of lunar eclipses from across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, documenting 187 eclipses between 1100 and 1300.
In particular, they searched for descriptions that provided information on the brightness and color of the Moon during the eclipse. Most of these turned out to be from European monks or clerics, writing in Latin.
Based on these descriptions, the researchers ranked the color and brightness of the Moon reported in each total eclipse. The brighter the eclipse, the clearer the atmosphere at the time: darker eclipses indicated a higher level of aerosol particles in the upper atmosphere – a marker of recent volcanic activity.
During a total lunar eclipse, the Moon turns red due to sunlight refracted by Earth’s atmosphere. A particularly dark eclipse indicates more aerosols in the atmosphere, which is a sign of recent volcanic activity. Chris Harwood / Shutterstock
The next step was to put the eclipse data together with simulations of how aerosol particles behave in the atmosphere, modern satellite observations, and climatic evidence from historical tree ring records.
This allowed the researchers to estimate the timing of the culprit eruptions more precisely than from previous ice core records – and determine which eruptions reached the stratosphere and would be more likely to generate climatic cooling effects.
What lunar eclipses tell us about the state of the atmosphere
A total lunar eclipse is a beautiful sight. When the Sun, Earth and Moon align perfectly, our planet blocks direct sunlight from reaching the Moon’s surface.
However, Earth’s atmosphere bends sunlight around our planet. As a result, some sunlight reaches the Moon even during a total eclipse.
Earth’s atmosphere also scatters sunlight - acting as a giant color filter. The bluer the light, the more it is scattered – which is why the sky is blue in the daytime, and why the Sun appears ruddy at dawn and dusk.
During a total lunar eclipse, the sunlight reaching the Moon has been filtered by Earth’s atmosphere, removing much of the blue and yellow light. The light that reaches the Moon is effectively the sum of all the dawns and all the dusks occurring at that time.
And the state of Earth’s atmosphere at that time controls just how much light is filtered.
NASA video released to explain the total Lunar eclipse seen from the Americas in December 2011.
How volcanoes affect lunar eclipses
If you’ve ever seen a sunset during a dust storm, or on a very smoky day, you know the extra particles clogging up the sky can produce deep, vibrant reds and oranges.
Imagine a total lunar eclipse occurring while wildfires rage overseas. The fires would pump smoke and dust into Earth’s atmosphere, making the Moon redder and darker during the eclipse.
Which brings us to the effect of volcanoes. The largest volcanic eruptions pump vast amounts of material into Earth’s stratosphere, where it can remain for many months.
The spectacular volcanic sunsets seen throughout Australia in the months following the Tongan volcanic eruption of January 2022 are a great example. And that material, once in the stratosphere, will spread around Earth.
What effect does this have on lunar eclipses? It turns out the brightness of the Moon during a lunar eclipse depends the amount of material in our stratosphere. In the months after a large eruption, any lunar eclipse would be markedly darker than normal.
How volcanoes affect the climate
Volcanic eruptions can eject huge amounts of ash, sulphur dioxide, and other gases high into the atmosphere. Eruptions can cause either cooling or warming (both temporary). The effect depends on exactly what the volcano spews out, how high the plume reaches, and the volcano’s location.
Sulphur dioxide is particularly important. If it reaches the stratosphere, it reacts with water vapor to form a lingering veil of sulphate aerosols. These aerosols, along with the volcanic ash, block and scatter Solar radiation, often leading to cooling at the Earth’s surface.
Large volcanic eruptions, such as the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines and the infamous 1815 eruption of Tambora in Indonesia, slightly lowered global temperature in the years after the eruption. After Tambora, Europe and North America experienced a “year without a summer” in 1816.
The plume of ash and smoke from the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption was visible from the International Space Station. EPA / NASA / Kayla Barron
On the other hand, water vapor and carbon dioxide from volcanic eruptions have a warming effect. It’s only small, as all present-day volcanic emissions produce less than 1% of the carbon dioxide released by human activities.
The past and future of volcanoes, eclipses, and the climate
Eyewitness accounts through historical reports and oral traditional knowledge are often overlooked in the study of volcanoes. However, the inclusion of broader sources of knowledge is incredibly valuable to help us understand past impacts of volcanic eruptions on people and the environment.
In this study, the combination of historical observations with ice records and climate reconstructions from tree rings has enabled more precise timing of those ancient eruptions. In turn, this has allowed us to better understand their potential impact on the climate during the European Middle Ages. Such information can help us to understand the role these eruptions may have played in the transition to the Little Ice Age.
In the future, volcanoes may have to work a little harder to create a “dark” eclipse. As the atmosphere warms, the altitude of the stratosphere will increase. As a result, it may take a bigger eruption to put significant amounts of aerosols into the upper layer where they will hang around to darken the Moon for future generations!
There are many changes that can come with old age – hair turns gray, eyesight isn’t quite what it used to be, mobility often becomes limited. But beyond these physiological changes, people also experience changes to their social world. As we age, our social circles tend to get smaller.
In the past decade, however, scientists have started to think that the shrinking of social networks with age might not be all bad.
Rather than social declines being driven exclusively by the death of friends or deteriorating health, people might become more selective in their social interactions as they age. After all, many older adults tend to focus their social effort on family and close friends. This change in social focus might result from older adults’ being aware of the limited time they have left and prioritizing their most important relationships.
An older female macaque sits alone on Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Noah Snyder-Mackler, CC BY-ND
To investigate whether other animals share these patterns of social selectivity with age, we turned to a free-roaming population of over 200 macaques on the island of Cayo Santiago in Puerto Rico. In collaboration withourcolleagues, we collected eight years of data about how these monkeys interacted with one another as they got older.
We focused specifically on female macaques, because they have the most stable long-term relationships in this population. With the help of several dedicated research technicians, we followed these females for up to seven hours a day over the course of eight years.
Daniel Phillips, a research technician, collects data on macaque social relationships on Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Erin Siracusa, CC BY-ND
First, we found that female macaques did indeed spend time with fewer social partners as they got older. Aging macaques sat near fewer partners and also groomed fewer partners. Grooming is an important bonding behavior in macaques that females do only with their besties.
Importantly, this reduction in females’ social circles was not precipitated by their partners dying or by older monkeys being seen as somehow undesirable and therefore to be avoided. We observed that how often other monkeys sought out older females as social partners did not change with age.
Instead, there seemed to be clear evidence that females were actively reducing the size of their social networks over time. Specifically, as females got older, they initiated interactions with fewer group mates. We observed these declines beginning in females who were in their prime years (around 10 years old) all the way through those who were near the end of their lives (around 28 years old).
A family matter
Of course, an important piece of this puzzle is who these female macaques did choose to interact with as they got older.
We found that, similar to humans, aging female macaques focused their time and effort on family members and “friends” with whom they shared a particularly strong and stable bond.
While this narrowing of networks and focus on kith and kin does not necessarily result from macaques’ being aware they are nearing death – scientists aren’t sure if nonhuman animals have an awareness of their own mortality – it does suggest that there may be a shared evolutionary reason for social selectivity in humans and other primates.
A female macaque grooms her offspring on Cayo Santiagio, Puerto Rico. Lauren Brent, CC BY-ND
Why might this be?
One possibility stems from the fact that as humans and other mammals get older they experience declines in their immune system. We get sick more easily and have a harder time recovering when we do come down with something.
Reducing one’s social circle with age may be an important way to avoid acquiring a disease or other illness. Such a decrease need not be a deliberate strategy, but could be an unconscious tendency that was selected for over evolutionary time because it enhanced biological fitness in our primate ancestors. As a result, this pattern might persist today, even in humans well beyond their reproductive years.
A hopeful outlook
So, what does this all mean? Understanding how people can live longer and healthier lives is a central priority for health organizations worldwide. Figuring out how to maintain valuable social relationships into old age is likely to play a key role in that endeavor.
An older female macaque spends time with her family on Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Lauren Brent, CC BY-ND
The results from this study indicate that the shrinking of networks across the life span is an aging pattern that is not unique to humans but may be present in other primates.
While loneliness in the elderly is a health concern that should not be ignored, there may be important distinctions between those who are unwillingly isolated as they get older and those who choose to stick to a smaller social circle. In the latter cases, shrinking networks with age may not be all bad.
Instead, there may be important benefits to be gained from being selective in our socializing as we get older, which has allowed this pattern to persist for millennia.
ORLANDO, Fla. — With less than 2 inches of rain this year, Orlando is enduring its second driest stretch from Jan. 1 to April 5 since the late 1800s and also its hottest on record for that period.
The city, Central Florida and much of the state’s peninsula are experiencing a widening severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a collaboration of universities and federal environmental agencies. “When was the last time it rained?” said Fran Boettcher, a master gardener at the Orange County and University of Florida agricultural extension center.
A mega exhibition honoring the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II opens this week in Paris, with his sarcophagus making a rare voyage abroad for the occasion.
But in 1976 the French capital hosted the great man himself when his 3,000-year-old mummy was brought to Paris for a once-in-a-deathtime makeover.
The story of how France literally saved the skin of Ramses II, while hosting a major exhibition on his legendary rule at the Grand Palais museum, is one of the little-known chapters in Egyptology.
Then French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing convinced his Egyptian counterpart Anwar Sadat to temporarily part with the mummy by promising Ramses a reception "fit for a king".
And he meant it.
When a French military transport plane bearing the remains of the venerable Egyptian leader touched down at Le Bourget airport in Paris on September 26, 1976, the red carpet had been rolled out, the Republican Guard were standing to attention and a government minister was waiting to greet him.
Contrary to a popular rumor Ramses did not travel on a passport with a picture of his 3,200-year-old mug -- but it would not have been out of keeping with the pomp and ceremony.
In a sign of the abiding French fascination with ancient Egypt, the welcoming ceremony was carried live on national television.
Onboard the plane with Ramses was French archaeologist Christiane Desroches Noblecourt from the Louvre museum, who travelled to Cairo to accompany Ramses on the journey, submerging the mummy in a bath of plastic balls to cushion it from any knocks.
Mummy needs a makeover
Once in Paris, the mummy did not head to the exhibition, but instead whisked off for urgent medical attention.
The remains of the pharaoh, who was in his nineties when he died in 1213 BC, were starting to show their age.
When the mummy of Ramses II was discovered in 1881 in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, it was in remarkably good condition.
But contact with fresh air brought creeping damage from parasites and fungi and a major restoration was needed.
The alarm was first raised in 1975, when a French archaeologist doing research at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo discovered the mummy's fungal affliction.
When the Ramses II exhibition opened in Paris, Sadat finally accepted France's offer of a restoration.
Eight months intensive care
The delicate job of restoring the mummy to full health was entrusted to conservationists at the Musee de l'Homme anthropology museum, which sits on a hill across the Seine River from the Eiffel Tower.
Pictures from the era show a phalanx of scientists in white coats gathered around the mummy's bedside in a sterile room.
After X-raying the brittle body and subjecting it to a battery of biological and chemical tests, they got down to work, restoring tissues and creating new bandages before sending Ramses off for radiation treatment to the French Atomic Energy Commission.
After eight months in intensive care, Ramses was "set for a new round of immortality", AFP wrote.
On April 10, 1977, the rejuvenated pharaoh was flown back to Cairo and put back on display alongside other royal mummies in the Egyptian Museum.
Peer-reviewed research out Wednesday shows that parts of a huge ice sheet covering Eurasia retreated up to 2,000 feet per day at the end of the last ice age—by far the fastest rate measured to date.
The new finding, published in the journal Nature, upends "what scientists previously thought were the upper speed limits for ice sheet retreat," The Washington Post reported, and it has sparked fears about "how quickly ice in Greenland and Antarctica could melt and raise global sea levels in today's warming world."
As the Post explained:
Scientists monitor ice sheet retreat rates to better estimate contributions to global sea-level rise. Antarctica and Greenland have lost more than 6.4 trillion tons of ice since the 1990s, boosting global sea levels by at least 0.7 inches (17.8 millimeters). Together, the two ice sheets are responsible for more than one-third of total sea-level rise.
The rapid retreat found on the Eurasian ice sheet far outpaces the fastest-moving glaciers studied in Antarctica, which have been measured to retreat as quickly as 160 feet per day. Once the ice retreats toward the land, it lifts from its grounding on the seafloor and begins to float, allowing it to flow faster and increase the contribution to sea-level rise.
If air and ocean temperatures around Antarctica were to increase as projected and match those at the end of the last ice age, researchers say ice marching backward hundreds of feet in a day could trigger a collapse of modern-day glaciers sooner than previously thought. That could be devastating for global sea levels.
"If temperatures continue to rise, then we might have the ice being melted and thinned from above as well as from below," lead author Christine Batchelor, a physical geographer at Newcastle University, told the newspaper. "That could kind of end up with a scenario that looks more similar to what we had [off] Norway after the last glaciation."
Using ship-borne imagery of ridges along the seafloor, Batchelor and her colleagues found that the Norwegian continental ice shelf retreated 180 to 2,000 feet per day, with the fastest retreat rates lasting for a period of days to a few months.
"This is not a model. This is real observation," Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California at Irvine who was not involved in the new study, told the Post. "And it is frankly scary. Even to me."
Prior to the publication of the new research, one of the fastest glacial retreat rates detected was at Pope Glacier in West Antarctica. This smaller glacier is not far from the massive Thwaites Glacier, which is nicknamed the "doomsday glacier" due to projections about how its melting is poised to contribute significantly to sea-level rise.
Rignot was part of the team that published a paper last year documenting the retreat of Pope Glacier. Based on satellite calculations, the 2022 study found that during a period in 2017, the glacier retreated at a rate of roughly 105 feet per day, or about 20 times slower than the fastest rate detected for the Eurasian ice sheet in the new study.
"Ice sheets are retreating fast today, [especially] in Antarctica," Rignot said Wednesday. "But we see traces in the seafloor that the retreat could go faster, way faster, and this is a reminder that we have not seen everything yet."
Temperature rise, meanwhile, shows no signs of slowing down.
Before last year's COP27 climate summit—which ended, like the 26 meetings before it, with no concrete plan to rapidly move away from planet-heating fossil fuels—the U.N. warned that existing emissions reductions targets and policies are so inadequate that there is "no credible path" currently in place to achieve the Paris agreement's goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, beyond which impacts will grow increasingly deadly, particularly for people in low-income countries who have done the least to cause the crisis.
The U.N. made clear that only "urgent system-wide transformation" can prevent catastrophic temperature rise of up to 2.9°C by 2100, but oil and gas corporations—bolstered by trillions of dollars in annual public subsidies—are still planning to expand fossil fuel production in the coming years, prioritizing short-term profits over the lives of those who will be harmed by the resulting climate chaos.
From Seattle to Palm Beach, Florida, city leaders agree that urban areas need more trees to alleviate the effects of climate change. Amid the growing attention to tree canopy — and an infusion of federal funding — more than a dozen cities are convening to share ideas and plan the urban forests of the future. Leaders in many communities now consider trees to be critical infrastructure, providing shade, absorbing stormwater runoff and filtering air pollution. The focus on urban forests has coincided with a growing recognition that low-income neighborhoods and communities of color often have far ...
Artificial intelligence is better than humans at assessing heart ultrasounds, the main test of overall cardiac health, the most rigorous trial yet conducted on the subject found on Wednesday.
While previous research has illustrated the potential power of AI models for reading medical scans, the authors of the new US study said it is the first blinded, randomised clinical trial for heart health.
"There's a lot of excitement around AI," but rigorous evaluation remains critical, the study's senior author David Ouyang told AFP.
This successful trial "really strengthens the argument that now we're ready for primetime," added the cardiologist at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Heart ultrasounds, also known as echocardiograms, are carried out on patients by sonographers, who usually give an initial assessment of the scan before handing it over to a cardiologist.
The new study, published in the journal Nature, pitted an AI model against sonographers to see who would give the most accurate initial assessment.
Both assessed the ultrasound for what is called left ventricular ejection fraction, which measures the heart's ability to pump blood out to the body in the space of a heartbeat.
The test is the main way to measure how well a heart is functioning. It is used to tell if patients have had a heart attack or if they will be able to undertake serious treatments such as implanting a defibrillator.
For the study, nearly 3,500 heart ultrasounds were randomly split between sonographers and the AI model.
Their assessments were then evaluated by cardiologists, who did not know which ones came from humans and which from the AI model.
'Exciting'
The cardiologists made a substantial change in more than 27 percent of the sonographer assessments -- and in nearly 17 percent of those done by the AI model, the study found.
"The AI was faster, more precise, and indistinguishable by the cardiologists," Ouyang said.
There is a "tremendous shortage" of sonographers in the United States and across the world, and this would save them valuable time, he added.
The AI model, called EchoNet-Dynamic, was trained on nearly 145,000 echocardiograms and uses what is called deep learning to process large amounts of data.
The researchers are currently applying for the method to be approved by the Federal Drug Administration, and hope to do the same in the European Union and elsewhere soon, Ouyang said.
Patricia Pellikka, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in the United States not involved in the research, told AFP the study was "exciting" and that the integration of AI tools will increase efficiency and standardization.
French cardiologist Florian Zores said that the study was well conducted but the technology would not be as useful in France, where cardiologists give the initial assessments of heart ultrasounds.
Systemic racism and sexism have permeated civilization since the rise of agriculture, when people started living in one place for a long time. Early Western scientists, such as Aristotle in ancient Greece, were indoctrinated with the ethnocentric and misogynistic narratives that permeated their society. More than 2,000 years after Aristotle’s writings, English naturalist Charles Darwin also extrapolated the sexist and racist narratives he heard and read in his youth to the natural world.
Darwin presented his biased views as scientific facts, such as in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man,” where he described his belief that men are evolutionarily superior to women, Europeans superior to non-Europeans and hierarchical civilizations superior to small egalitarian societies. In that book, which continues to be studied in schools and natural history museums, he considered “the hideous ornaments and the equally hideous music admired by most savages” to be “not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in birds,” and compared the appearance of Africans to the New World monkey Pithecia satanas.
Science isn’t immune to sexism and racism.
“The Descent of Man” was published during a moment of societal turmoil in continental Europe. In France, the working class Paris Commune took to the streets asking for radical social change, including the overturning of societal hierarchies. Darwin’s claims that the subjugation of the poor, non-Europeans and women was the natural result of evolutionary progress were music to the ears of the elites and those in power within academia. Science historian Janet Browne wrote that Darwin’s meteoric rise within Victorian society did not occur despite his racist and sexist writings but in great part because of them.
It is not coincidence that Darwin had a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, an honor emblematic of English power, and was publicly commemorated as a symbol of “English success in conquering nature and civilizing the globe during Victoria’s long reign.”
Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in the last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in science, medicine and education. As a teacher and researcher at Howard University, I am interested in combining my main fields of study, biology and anthropology, to discuss broader societal issues. In research I recently published with my colleague Fatimah Jackson and three medical students at Howard University, we show how racist and sexist narratives are not a thing of the past: They are still present in scientific papers, textbooks, museums and educational materials.
From museums to scientific papers
One example of how biased narratives are still present in science today is the numerous depictions of human evolution as a linear trend from darker and more “primitive” human beings to more “evolved” ones with a lighter skin tone. Natural history museums, websites and UNESCO heritage sites have all shown this trend.
The fact that such depictions are not scientifically accurate does not discourage their continued circulation. Roughly 11% of people living today are “white,” or European descendants. Images showing a linear progression to whiteness do not accurately represent either human evolution or what living humans look like today, as a whole. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence supporting a progressive skin whitening. Lighter skin pigmentation chiefly evolved within just a few groups that migrated to non-African regions with high or low latitudes, such as the northern regions of America, Europe and Asia.
Illustrations of human evolution tend to depict progressive skin whitening.
Sexist narratives also still permeate academia. For example, in a 2021 paper on a famous early human fossil found in the Sierra de Atapuerca archaeological site in Spain, researchers examined the canine teeth of the remains and found that it was actually that of a girl between 9 and 11 years old. It was previously believed that the fossil was a boy due to a popular 2002 book by one of the authors of that paper, paleoanthropologist José María Bermúdez de Castro. What is particularly telling is that the study authors recognized that there was no scientific reason for the fossil remains to have been designated as a male in the first place. The decision, they wrote, “arose randomly.”
But these choices are not truly “random.” Depictions of human evolution frequently only show men. In the few cases where women are depicted, they tend to be shown as passive mothers, not as active inventors, cave painters or food gatherers, despite available anthropological data showing that pre-historical women were all those things.
Another example of sexist narratives in science is how researchers continue to discuss the “puzzling” evolution of the female orgasm. Darwin constructed narratives about how women were evolutionarily “coy” and sexually passive, even though he acknowledged that females actively select their sexual partners in most mammalian species. As a Victorian, it was difficult for him to accept that women could play an active part in choosing a partner, so he argued that such roles only applied to women in early human evolution. According to Darwin, men later began to sexually select women.
Sexist narratives about women being more “coy” and “less sexual,” including the idea of the female orgasm as an evolutionary puzzle, are contradicted by a wide range of evidence. For instance, women are the ones who actually more frequently experience multiple orgasms as well as more complex, elaborate and intense orgasms on average, compared to men. Women are not biologically less sexual, but sexist stereotypes were accepted as scientific fact.
The vicious cycle of systemic racism and sexism
Educational materials, including textbooks and anatomical atlases used by science and medical students, play a crucial role in perpetuating biased narratives. For example, the 2017 edition of “Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy,” commonly used by medical students and clinical professionals, includes about 180 figures that show skin color. Of those, the vast majority show male individuals with white skin, and only two show individuals with “darker” skin. This perpetuates the depiction of white men as the anatomical prototype of the human species and fails to display the full anatomical diversity of people.
Textbooks and educational materials can perpetuate the biases of their creators in science and society.
Authors of teaching materials for children also replicate the biases in scientific publications, museums and textbooks. For example, the cover of a 2016 coloring book entitled “The Evolution of Living Things”“ shows human evolution as a linear trend from darker "primitive” creatures to a “civilized” Western man. Indoctrination comes full circle when the children using such books become scientists, journalists, museum curators, politicians, authors or illustrators.
One of the key characteristics of systemic racism and sexism is that it is unconsciously perpetuated by people who often don’t realize that the narratives and choices they make are biased. Academics can address long-standing racist, sexist and Western-centric biases by being both more alert and proactive in detecting and correcting these influences in their work. Allowing inaccurate narratives to continue to circulate in science, medicine, education and the media perpetuates not only these narratives in future generations, but also the discrimination, oppression and atrocities that have been justified by them in the past.
The sarcophagus of Ramses II left Egypt for the first time in 1976 for France, where the mummy was treated against fungal decay.
Now the ancient Egyptian ruler is back in France to go on display in Paris as part of the travelling exhibition "Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs."
The exhibition, which has already stopped in San Francisco and Houston in the US, is the only site where the sarcophagus will join the tour.
France greatly appreciates this trust by Egypt, said French Minister Rima Abdul Malak on Monday at the unveiling of the sarcophagus.
The fact that it is back in Paris after more than 40 years is also proof of the excellent relationship between the two countries, she added.
The wooden coffin was taken out of a high-security transport crate at the Grande Halle de la Villette, where it will be the highlight of the exhibition from April 7 onwards.
Until September 6, over 180 objects from the reign of Ramses will be presented, including royal masks, statues and jewellery. Ramses II is considered one of the most important pharaohs of Ancient Egypt.
He was born around 1303 BC and died in 1213 BC. Ruling for 66 years, he was one of the longest reigning heads of state in the world. He had numerous palaces and temples built, such as the temple complex of Abu Simbel.
In 1976, the sarcophagus was received like a head of state - with a red carpet and much pomp. While the wooden coffin was on display in the Grand Palais in Paris, scientists treated the mummy with radiation against its increasing decay caused by bacteria and moisture.
SARASOTA, Fla. — With red tide again frustrating beachgoers since October, many residents may be wondering what can be done about it. Scientists have been working to find technologies that will help lessen the hazardous effects of red tide thanks to the Florida Red Tide Mitigation & Technology Development Initiative, a partnership between Mote Marine Laboratory and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. After red tide fouled beaches along seven Florida counties in 2018 — aggravating health problems and costing local communities millions of dollars — then-Gov. Rick Scott declare...
