Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Nearly 1.8 million acres of grassland destroyed in US and Canada in 2020

Nearly 1.8 million acres of grassland destroyed in US and Canada in 2020
Since 2016, a total of almost 10 million acres have been plowed across the region, which is an area nearly as large as New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined.

Published October 23, 2022 at 07:00PM
View on Worldwildlife.org

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

How business can help scale ocean conservation

How business can help scale ocean conservation
To protect our rapidly changing seas—and those who depend on them—we need to tackle challenges in a systematic way and focus on holistic improvements: place-based approaches.

Published October 10, 2022 at 07:00PM
View on Worldwildlife.org

Thursday, October 6, 2022

KAZA's first-ever coordinated aerial elephant survey launched

KAZA's first-ever coordinated aerial elephant survey launched
Launched in northwest Zimbabwe in August, the survey is undertaken by the five KAZA partner countries—Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe—and with support from WWF and other partners.

Published October 05, 2022 at 07:00PM
View on Worldwildlife.org

OECMs: A new paradigm for area-based conservation

OECMs: A new paradigm for area-based conservation
Background for the 2022 Fuller Symposium.

Published October 05, 2022 at 07:00PM
View on Worldwildlife.org

Tuesday, October 4, 2022

Critically endangered Arctic foxes successfully breed in Finland

Critically endangered Arctic foxes successfully breed in Finland
This is the first time in over 25 years the Arctic fox has successfully bred in Finland. In recent years, more Arctic fox observations have been made at the feeding stations maintained.

Published October 03, 2022 at 07:00PM
View on Worldwildlife.org

Monday, September 26, 2022

Why tracing seafood from sea to plate is the next frontier in sustainability

Why tracing seafood from sea to plate is the next frontier in sustainability
Seafood is one of the most frequently traded commodities on earth, so it’s essential that fishing is well-regulated around the world. But regulations must be complied with to be effective.

Published September 25, 2022 at 07:00PM
View on Worldwildlife.org

Thursday, September 22, 2022

How gorilla tourism can benefit wildlife and people

How gorilla tourism can benefit wildlife and people
Although mountain gorillas are still an endangered species, there are signs of hope for their recovery. And gorilla tourism also benefits local communities.

Published September 21, 2022 at 07:00PM
View on Worldwildlife.org

Monday, September 19, 2022

What to expect for Climate Week 2022

What to expect for Climate Week 2022
Climate Week is finally back at full force this year. Here's what I'm looking for during this moment when the bright lights of the big city of New York are trained squarely on the climate crisis.

Published September 18, 2022 at 07:00PM
View on Worldwildlife.org

Saturday, July 30, 2022

Pleasure and Panic

Pleasure and Panic: Offers a range of perspectives on the debate about liberalizing drug and alcohol laws. Booze, dope, smokes, and weed. Mind-altering, mood-changing substances have been part of human society for millennia. The history of drugs and alcohol is infused with what we understand as their proper and improper use. Pleasure and Panic reveals how cultural fears and social, political, and economic disparities have always been deeply embedded in attitudes about drugs and alcohol. Long before John Lennon testified at Canada’s Le Dain Commission in favor of marijuana decriminalization, social movements existed to challenge the view that consumption of mind-altering substances, especially by young people, posed a danger to society. The contributors to this collection explore how drugs and alcohol intersect with diverse histories, including gender, medicine, popular culture, and business.

Osiris, Volume 37

Osiris, Volume 37: Highlights the importance of translation for the global exchange of medical theories, practices, and materials in the premodern period. This volume of Osiris turns the analytical lens of translation onto medical knowledge and practices across the premodern world. Understandings of the human body, and of diseases and their cures, were influenced by a range of religious, cultural, environmental, and intellectual factors. As a result, complex systems of translation emerged as people crossed linguistic and territorial boundaries to share not only theories and concepts, but also materials, such as drugs, amulets, and surgical tools. The studies here reveal how instances of translation helped to shape and, in some cases, reimagine these ideas and objects to fit within local frameworks of medical belief.Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds features case studies located in geographically and temporally diverse contexts, including ninth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Seville, seventeenth-century Cartagena, and nineteenth-century Bengal. Throughout, the contributors explore common themes and divergent experiences associated with a variety of historical endeavors to “translate” knowledge about health and the body across languages, practices, and media. By deconstructing traditional narratives and de-emphasizing well-worn dichotomies, this volume ultimately offers a fresh and innovative approach to histories of knowledge.

Limits of the Numerical

Limits of the Numerical: This collection examines the uses of quantification in climate science, higher education, and health.   Numbers are both controlling and fragile. They drive public policy, figuring into everything from college rankings to vaccine efficacy rates. At the same time, they are frequent objects of obfuscation, manipulation, or outright denial. This timely collection by a diverse group of humanists and social scientists challenges undue reverence or skepticism toward quantification and offers new ideas about how to harmonize quantitative with qualitative forms of knowledge.    Limits of the Numerical focuses on quantification in several contexts: climate change; university teaching and research; and health, medicine, and well-being more broadly. This volume shows the many ways that qualitative and quantitative approaches can productively interact—how the limits of the numerical can be overcome through equitable partnerships with historical, institutional, and philosophical analysis. The authors show that we can use numbers to hold the powerful to account, but only when those numbers are themselves democratically accountable.

Friday, July 8, 2022

How the Clinic Made Gender

How the Clinic Made Gender: An eye-opening exploration of the medical origins of gender in modern US history.  Today, a world without “gender” is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political and social debates, shapes policy decisions, and informs our everyday lives. Its formulation, however, is lesser known: Gender was first used in clinical practice. This book tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering.  Sandra Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. Following gender outside the clinic, she reconstructs the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the 1970s. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and the route by which gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested. In historicizing the emergence of the sex/gender binary, Eder reveals the role of medical practice in developing a transformative idea and the interdependence between practice and wider social norms that inform the attitudes of physicians and researchers. She shows that ideas like gender can take on a life of their own and%...

Limits of the Numerical

Limits of the Numerical: This collection examines the uses of quantification in climate science, higher education, and health.   Numbers are both controlling and fragile. They drive public policy, figuring into everything from college rankings to vaccine efficacy rates. At the same time, they are frequent objects of obfuscation, manipulation, or outright denial. This timely collection by a diverse group of humanists and social scientists challenges undue reverence or skepticism toward quantification and offers new ideas about how to harmonize quantitative with qualitative forms of knowledge.    Limits of the Numerical focuses on quantification in several contexts: climate change; university teaching and research; and health, medicine, and well-being more broadly. This volume shows the many ways that qualitative and quantitative approaches can productively interact—how the limits of the numerical can be overcome through equitable partnerships with historical, institutional, and philosophical analysis. The authors show that we can use numbers to hold the powerful to account, but only when those numbers are themselves democratically accountable.

Friday, June 17, 2022

Pandemics Throughout History

Pandemics Throughout History: The emergence and spread of infectious diseases with pandemic potential occurred regularly throughout history. Major pandemics and epidemics such as plague, cholera, flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) have already afflicted humanity. The world is now facing the new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Many infectious diseases leading to pandemics are caused by zoonotic pathogens that were transmitted to humans due to increased contacts with animals through breeding, hunting and global trade activities. The understanding of the mechanisms of transmission of pathogens to humans allowed the establishment of methods to prevent and control infections. During centuries, implementation of public health measures such as isolation, quarantine and border control helped to contain the spread of infectious diseases and maintain the structure of the society. In the absence of pharmaceutical interventions, these containment methods have still been used nowadays to control COVID-19 pandemic. Global surveillance programs of water-borne pathogens, vector-borne diseases and zoonotic spillovers at the animal-human interface are of prime importance to rapidly detect the emergence of infectious threats. Novel technologies for rapid diagnostic testing, contact tracing, drug repurposing, biomarkers of disease severity as well as new platforms for the development and production of vaccines are needed f...

Saturday, April 30, 2022

Power in the Wild

Power in the Wild: From the shell wars of hermit crabs to little blue penguins spying on potential rivals, power struggles in the animal kingdom are as diverse as they are fascinating, and this book illuminates their surprising range and connections.   The quest for power in animals is so much richer, so much more nuanced than who wins what knock-down, drag-out fight. Indeed, power struggles among animals often look more like an opera than a boxing match. Tracing the path to power for over thirty different species on six continents, writer and behavioral ecologist Lee Alan Dugatkin takes us on a journey around the globe, shepherded by leading researchers who have discovered that in everything from hyenas to dolphins, bonobos to field mice, cichlid fish to cuttlefish, copperhead snakes to ravens, and meerkats to mongooses, power revolves around spying, deception, manipulation, forming and breaking up alliances, complex assessments of potential opponents, building social networks, and more. Power pervades every aspect of the social life of animals: what they eat, where they eat, where they live, whom they mate with, how many offspring they produce, whom they join forces with, and whom they work to depose. In some species, power can even change an animal’s sex. Nor are humans invulnerable to this magnificently intricate melodrama: Dugatkin’s tales of the researchers studying power in animals are full of unexpected pitfalls, twists and turns, serendipity, a...

Friday, April 29, 2022

What Is Regeneration?

What Is Regeneration?: Two historians and philosophers of science offer an essential primer on the meaning and limits of regeneration.   In punishment for his stealing fire, the Greek gods chained Prometheus to a rock, where every day an eagle plucked out his liver, and every night the liver regenerated. While Prometheus may be a figure of myth, scholars today ask whether ancient Greeks knew that the human liver does, in fact, have a special capacity to regenerate. Some organs and tissues can regenerate, while others cannot, and some organisms can regenerate more fully and more easily than others. Cut an earthworm in half, and two wiggly worms may confront you. Cut off the head of a hydra, and it may grow a new head. Cut off a human arm, and the human will be missing an arm. Why the differences? What are the limits of regeneration, and how, when, and why does it occur?   In this book, historians and philosophers of science Jane Maienschein and Kate MacCord explore biological regeneration, delving into a topic of increasing interest in light of regenerative medicine, new tools in developmental and neurobiology, and the urgent need to understand and repair damage to ecosystems brought on by climate change. Looking across scales, from germ, nerve, and stem cells to individual organisms and complex systems, this short and accessible introduction poses a range of deep and provocative questions: What conditions allow some damaged microbiomes to regenerate where ...

Saturday, April 16, 2022

Plankton

Plankton: Ask anyone to picture a bird or a fish and a series of clear images will immediately come to mind. Ask the same person to picture plankton and most would have a hard time conjuring anything beyond a vague squiggle or a greyish fleck. This book will change that forever. Viewing these creatures up close for the first time can be a thrilling experience—an elaborate but hidden world truly opens up before your eyes. Through hundreds of close-up photographs, Plankton transports readers into the currents, where jeweled chains hang next to phosphorescent chandeliers, spidery claws jut out from sinuous bodies, and gelatinous barrels protect microscopic hearts. The creatures’ vibrant colors pop against the black pages, allowing readers to examine every eye and follow every tentacle. Jellyfish, tadpoles, and bacteria all find a place in the book, representing the broad scope of organisms dependent on drifting currents. Christian Sardet’s enlightening text explains the biological underpinnings of each species while connecting them to the larger living world. He begins with plankton’s origins and history, then dives into each group, covering ctenophores and cnidarians, crustaceans and mollusks, and worms and tadpoles. He also demonstrates the indisputable impact of plankton in our lives. Plankton drift through our world mostly unseen, yet they are diverse organisms that form ninety-five percent of ocean life. Biologically, they are the foundation of the aquatic food web%2...

Biopower

Biopower: Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” has been a highly fertile concept in recent theory, influencing thinkers worldwide across a variety of disciplines and concerns. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault famously employed the term to describe “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” With this volume, Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar bring together leading contemporary scholars to explore the many theoretical possibilities that the concept of biopower has enabled while at the same time pinpointing their most important shared resonances.             Situating biopower as a radical alternative to traditional conceptions of power—what Foucault called “sovereign power”—the contributors examine a host of matters centered on life, the body, and the subject as a living citizen. Altogether, they pay testament to the lasting relevance of biopower in some of our most important contemporary debates on issues ranging from health care rights to immigration laws, HIV prevention discourse, genomics medicine, and many other topics.

Thursday, March 31, 2022

Where Research Begins

Where Research Begins: Plenty of books tell you how to do research. This book helps you figure out WHAT to research in the first place, and why it matters.The hardest part of research isn't answering a question. It's knowing what to do before you know what your question is. Where Research Begins tackles the two challenges every researcher faces with every new project: How do I find a compelling problem to investigate—one that truly matters to me, deeply and personally? How do I then design my research project so that the results will matter to anyone else?This book will help you start your new research project the right way for you with a series of simple yet ingenious exercises. Written in a conversational style and packed with real-world examples, this easy-to-follow workbook offers an engaging guide to finding research inspiration within yourself, and in the broader world of ideas.Read this book if you (or your students):have difficulty choosing a research topicknow your topic, but are unsure how to turn it into a research projectfeel intimidated by or unqualified to do researchworry that you’re asking the wrong questions about your research topichave plenty of good ideas, but aren’t sure which one to commit tofeel like your research topic was imposed by someone elsewant to learn new ways to think about how to do research.Under the expert guidance of award-winning researchers Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea, you will find yourself on the path to a compelling...

What happened to all the American Chestnuts?

 The American Chestnut Insect Ecology Series What happened to the Insects that feed on them? Every species is connected in an ecosystem. The...