LINKS - June 28th, 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.
Scientists Debut Lab Models of Human Embryos
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times
"Ethicists have long cautioned that the advent of embryo models would further complicate the already complicated regulation of this research. But the scientists behind the new work were quick to stress that they had not created real embryos and that their clusters of stem cells could never give rise to a human being.
“‘Our aims are never for the purpose of human reproduction,’ said Tianqing Li, a developmental biologist at Kunming University of Science and Technology in China, who led one of the new studies.
“Instead, Dr. Li and his fellow scientists hope that embryo models will lead to new treatments for infertility and even diseases such as cancer.”
Did our human ancestors eat each other? Carved-up bone offers clues
By Lilly Tozer, Nature
“The 1.45-million-year-old hominin bone, described in Scientific Reports1 on 26 June, features cuts similar to butchery marks found on fossilized animal bones from around the same time. The scrapes are located at an opportune spot for removing muscle, suggesting that they were made with the intention of carving up the carcass for food.
“‘The most logical conclusion is, like the other animals, this hominin was butchered to be eaten,” says study co-author Briana Pobiner, a palaeoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. The discovery was ‘shocking, honestly, and very surprising, but very exciting’, she adds.”
The first gene therapy for muscular dystrophy has been approved for some kids
By Tina Hesman Saey, Science News
“The first gene therapy for children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The therapy can be used in 4- and 5-year-olds with the degenerative muscle disease, the agency announced June 22.”
Brain zaps during sleep enhance memories
By Mo Costandi, Big Think
“To achieve this, the researchers monitored the patients’ brain activity while they slept, in order to identify the non-rapid eye movement (NREM) stage of sleep, during which memory consolidation occurs. When the patients entered this sleep stage, the researchers delivered small pulses of electricity to both the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, which effectively caused cells in both regions to synchronize their firing.
“Electrical stimulation apparently improved memory consolidation by enhancing sleep spindles, a pattern of brain waves that occurs during NREM sleep, and also by coupling brain waves in the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, and the thalamus, which relays and processes information flowing to the cerebral cortex.”
Humans Living on Mars May Not Be Human for Long
“But the changes wouldn’t necessarily stop there. The Martians might do away with flesh and blood bodies altogether and transition to electronic ones. In that form, they wouldn’t need an atmosphere to survive and their bones wouldn’t need the tug of Mars’ gravity to stay strong. ‘They’d be near immortal,’ Rees says, ‘and would go off into interstellar space. The far future would be one in which our remote descendants, mediated by these crazy adventurers on Mars, will start spreading throughout the Milky Way.’”
Bonus LINK
American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress
By Wesley Lowery, Mariner Books
Editor’s Note: I ordinarily don’t link to books—especially when I know the author personally. Not really the intent of LINKS. However, this book cites this Rhapsody article in which I discuss Italian heritage and the process by which Italian immigrants have, over time, come to be seen as “white.” So I am making an exception. It also speaks to something profoundly, fundamentally human—how race affects societal organization.
“In American Whitelash, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Wesley Lowery charts the return of this blood-stained trend, showing how the forces of white power retaliated against Obama's victory--and both profited from, and helped to propel, the rise of Donald Trump. Interweaving deep historical analysis with gripping firsthand reporting on both victims and perpetrators of violence, Lowery uncovers how this vicious cycle is carrying us into ever more perilous territory, how the federal government has failed to intervene, and how we still might find a route of escape.”