LINKS - January 18th, 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.
Humans plunder the periodic table while turning blind eye to the risks of doing so, say researchers
By Phys.org
“A recent article, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution and written by researchers from CREAF, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), warns that the range of chemical elements humans need (something scientifically known as the human elementome) is increasingly diverging from that which nature requires (the biological elementome).”
What Happened to All of Science’s Big Breakthroughs?
By William J. Broad, New York Times
“This month in the journal Nature, the report’s researchers told how their study of millions of scientific papers and patents shows that investigators and inventors have made relatively few breakthroughs and innovations compared with the world’s growing mountain of science and technology research. The three analysts found a steady drop from 1945 through 2010 in disruptive finds as a share of the booming venture, suggesting that scientists today are more likely to push ahead incrementally than to make intellectual leaps.”
Gene Drives Could Fight Malaria and Other Global Killers but Might Have Unintended Consequences
By Matthew Cobb, Scientific American
“Following the advent of CRISPR-based gene editing in 2013, this dream became a reality. And in 2015 researchers at the University of California, San Diego, created a lab-based gene drive in the innocuous vinegar flies Drosophila that simply made all the flies’ eyes turn yellow. They said they had built “a mutagenic chain reaction.” In other words, they had made what might be considered a ‘genetic atom bomb.’ If one of these things were released into the wild, there would be no way of stopping it.’“
The idea of ‘precolonial Africa’ is vacuous and wrong | Aeon Essays
“In reality, ‘precolonial’ Africa never existed. It is a figment of the imagination of scholars, analysts, political types, for whom Africa is a homogeneous place that they need not think too hard about, much less explain to audiences. It was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a racist philosopher, who argued in the 1820s that Africa was a land ‘outside of Time’ and not a part of the movement of ‘History’. Our intellectual forebears in the 19th century fought against this false characterisation. They were the first to remind people of the fact that Africa had always been a part of the movement of history and the global circuit of ideas. They knew what was behind Hegel’s effort to divide Africa into ‘Africa proper’, or ‘Black Africa’, and ‘European Africa’ – it was his need to reconcile his idea that Africa stood outside of history with the undeniable reality of the attainments of ancient Egypt. His ‘solution’ was to identify the achievements of Egyptian Africans as coming from exogenous sources and to remove it from ‘Africa proper’.”
How our microbiome is shaped by family, friends and even neighbors
By Ewen Callaway, Nature
“The conclusion — based on an 18 January study in Nature of the gut and mouth microbiomes of thousands of people from around the world1 — raises the possibility that diseases linked to microbiome dysfunction, including cancer, diabetes and obesity, could be partly transmissible.”