LINKS - February 15th, 2023
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
A Link Between Hearing Voices and Hearing Your Own Voice
By Veronique Greenwood, The New York Times
“Scientists would like to understand what parts of the brain allow us to recognize ourselves speaking, but studying this using recordings of people’s own voices has proved tricky. When we talk, we not only hear our voice with our ears, but on some level we feel it as the sound vibrations travel through the bones of the skull.
“A study published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science attempted a workaround. A team of researchers investigated whether people could more accurately recognize their voices if they wore bone-conduction headphones, which transmit sound via vibration.”
Navigating the Ethics of Ancient DNA Research
By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, Knowable Magazine
“‘Consent takes on new meaning’ when participants are no longer around to make their voices heard, Bader and colleagues write. Scientists instead must regulate themselves, and navigate the sometimes contradictory guidelines — some of which prioritize research outcomes; others, the wishes of descendants, even very distant ones, and local communities. There are no clear-cut, ironclad rules, says Bader, now at McGill University in Montreal, Canada: ‘We don’t necessarily have one unified field standard for ethics.’”
Marburg Virus Outbreak: Researchers Race to Test Vaccines
By Ewen Callaway, Nature
“The World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, convened an urgent meeting yesterday to discuss the feasibility of testing Marburg vaccines that are in various stages of development. But the odds are against a successful trial, they say, because other control measures such as quarantine could end the outbreak before a single vaccine dose can be administered.”
Climate ‘teleconnections’ May Link Droughts and Fires Across Continents
“These profound patterns, known as climate teleconnections, typically occur as recurring phases that can last from weeks to years. ‘They are a kind of complex butterfly effect, in that things that are occurring in one place have many derivatives very far away,’ says Sergio de Miguel, an ecosystem scientist at Spain’s University of Lleida and the Joint Research Unit CTFC-Agrotecnio in Solsona, Spain.”
Why the US Might Be Finding More Unidentified Flying Objects
By Kelsey D. Atherton, Popular Science
“Increasing sensor sensitivity means expanding the scope of what a system, like a radar, is trained to detect. The change will allow it to include other signals that it has been set to filter out as irrelevant previously. Often, there is a good reason for this. In 2015, after an activist flew a gyrocopter onto the east lawn of the US Capitol, Congress held hearings to understand why his small flying machine wasn’t detected. Toggling area radar to be sensitive enough to see a gyrocopter would also mean getting alerts from flocks of birds, or low-lying rainclouds. What radar ‘sees’ is reflected radio signals, and making that useful means prioritizing for known threats, like jets and missiles.”