Ancient prophecies of worlds destroyed by fire are becoming realities. How will we respond?
New discoveries demystify the bizarre force that binds atomic nuclei together
HARVARD MAGAZINE May/June2024 :
How long will the world’s forests impound carbon below ground?
by Jonathan Shaw
MARYVILLE, Tennessee, lies near the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, a range home to more tree species than exist in all of Europe. Benton Taylor grew up amidst this abundance, but as a boy, he barely noticed the plants. In the nearby national park, a family friend was raising—together with a menagerie of other mammals—a pair of bears orphaned as cubs. Taylor dreamed of studying these apex denizens of the forest, who forage at the top of the food chain. But as his education and understanding grew, his curiosity shifted to seed-dispersing animals, plants, and the soil and nutrients that sustain them: a trip down the trophic pyramid, driven by an appreciation of forests as ecological systems in which plants are primary producers. “Now I’ve half moved into the basement,” jokes the assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, whose research encompasses the strategies plants use to obtain essential nutrients such as nitrogen, and how that, in turn, affects their ability to store another vital element with a global climate impact: carbon.
by Nina Pasquini
DIVERSIFYING one’s assets is useful not only in finance but also in diet, according to an October study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). Though not many people have heard of the “portfolio diet”—consisting of plant-based foods proven to lower unhealthy cholesterol, such as nuts, oats, berries, and avocados—it is one of the easiest ways to improve long-term cardiovascular health. “The idea was that each of these foods lowers cholesterol quite minimally, but if you make a whole diet based on these different foods, you will see large reductions in [unhealthy] cholesterol,” said Andrea Glenn, an HSPH postdoctoral research fellow in nutrition and the lead author of the study. The more of these foods one eats, the higher the protection—but one need not include them all to reap the diet’s benefits, she said. “Like a business portfolio, you can choose the ones you want.”
Mina Cikara explores how political tribalism feeds the American bipartisan divide.
by Max J. Krupnick
People who had the most vegetation near their residences were the least likely to report depression and anxiety.
Applying a ‘base editor’ allows cells to crank out increased levels of a vital metabolic enzyme.
Climate change is partly to blame for a storm that pounded Girona province with record-breaking hailstones.
Was Lucy the mother of us all? Fifty years after her discovery, the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton has rivals
Flexible fiber electronics couple with the human body for wireless tactile sensing
Copper-containing ‘nanoclusters’ form glasses with an orderly structure and unusual properties.
The operation’s early success has made researchers hopeful that clinical trials for xenotransplanted organs will start soon.
The Simons Observatory will search for signs of gravitational waves that originated from the Big Bang.
Scientists identify a molecule that halts cholesterol production in the liver when dietary consumption is high. Research Highlight
House prices drop by 1% if wind turbines are close and visible, but they rebound quickly. Research Highlight
Data from billions of proton collisions reveal that subatomic particles called W+ and W− bosons keep company with a photon .Research Highlight
Scientists turn waste wood into an ‘ink’ that can be printed into a variety of structures.
Plans for Perseverance to explore past crater rim may be in jeopardy
A false “equity versus excellence” debate over mathematics curricula has long disrupted education in the United States
A gene for mate preference has been shared between hybridizing butterfly species
Clustering organic cropland can reduce pesticide use on nearby conventional farms
Nature Magazine (March 15, 2024):Verbose robots, and why some people love Bach: Books in Brief
Vision Impairment
Michael Crossland UCL Press (2024)
On a typical day in his clinic, London-based optometrist Michael Crossland assesses both young children and centenarians with low vision. Severe vision impairment affects 350 million people around the world, many of whom in poorer countries lack access to any eye care. His fascinating, sometimes moving, account — mixing ophthalmology with the stories of his patients and many others — reveals that life with vision impairment can be “just as rich and rewarding as life with 20/20 vision”.
Literary Theory for Robots
Dennis Yi Tenen W. W. Norton (2024)
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rooted in the humanities, argues Dennis Yi Tenen, a comparative-literature professor and former Microsoft engineer. Chatbots are trained using electronic versions of tools such as “dictionaries, style guides, schemas, story plotters [and] thesauruses” that were historically part of the collective activity of writing. Indeed, a statistical model called the Markov chain, crucial to AI, arose from an analysis of vowel distribution in poems by Alexander Pushkin. Tenen’s cogitation is a witty, if challenging, read.
The Last of Its Kind
Gísli Pálsson Princeton Univ. Press (2024)
Living species could never become extinct, thought naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Charles Darwin disagreed, saying extinction was a natural process. Then ornithologists John Wolley and Alfred Newton began studying great auks, flightless birds living on remote islands in the North Atlantic Ocean. They visited Iceland in 1858 to see great auks, but instead met locals who described killing off the birds — revealing how humans could extinguish a species. Anthropologist Gísli Pálsson tells the engaging story of this “key intellectual leap”.
All Mapped Out
Mike Duggan Reaktion (2024)
Cultural geographer Mike Duggan works in partnership with the UK national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, to study everyday digital-mapping practices. Important as it is, digital mapping is not superseding analogue maps, he observes in his global history of cartography, which begins with Palaeolithic carvings. Sales of Ordnance Survey paper maps are rising, perhaps because of their convenience. “Although digital maps are improving constantly in accuracy and design, they do not always live up to those promises.”
The Neuroscience of Bach’s Music
Eric Altschuler Academic (2024)
Physician and neuroscientist Eric Altschuler regards J. S. Bach as the greatest composer ever, as do many others. Altschuler’s pioneering study — illustrated with numerous musical examples — aims to show how Bach-centred neuroscience “can help us better appreciate perceptual and cognitive affects in Bach” and create better performances of the composer’s work. It also teaches us how music perception is not localized to one region of the brain but occurs throughout it, and varies from person to person.
OpenAI’s debut of its impressive Sora text-to-video tool has raised important questions.
Semaglutide reduces weight and fat accumulation associated with the antiretroviral regimen that keeps HIV at bay.
A burgeoning technique called time-resolved cryo-EM is granting insights into the tiny motors and devices that power life.
Blood tests can detect the disease process early, avoiding complications and aiding treatment
Inspectors faulted analyses of clinical trial samples by Hoau-Yan Wang for drug developer Cassava Sciences
“Smart cables” will detect earthquakes, tsunamis, and global warming
Jeanne Marrazzo, an HIV prevention researcher, sees need for more “holistic” approach to community health problems
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