Six on Science and Geography: The Systemic Roadblocks to Climate Action; Jill Lepore: The History of Loneliness; Trillions of locusts descend on East Africa in second wave; Science Language for All; The Nurturing Nature of Spider Moms; Scientists hop
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Thanks John and Gary
Constant growth, fundamental to the capitalist economy, drives climate change and environmental degradation. All capitalist businesses embrace a “grow or die” imperative, constantly pursuing rising sales to accumulate wealth (or profit maximization). Capitalism’s embedded growth imperative exploded when banks started creating money by expanding credit, and, therefore, increasing interest rates.1 That move forced companies to impress financial markets by showing a growing profit. Companies that couldn’t sustain internal growth started merging with or acquiring other companies to grow, in turn creating a small number of mega-corporations. No longer just optional, as neoclassical monetary theory held, growth in a 21st century financialized and globalized economy has become the norm.
Just as companies look to their balance sheets to ensure that profits are maximized, the United States uses the gross domestic product (GDP) to evaluate performance and to guide national policies—neither of which the GDP was originally designed to do.2 Gradually, the capitalist firm has become our economy’s core institution, and the country has doubled down on the growth imperative by making GDP the end-all indicator of our society’s “well-being.”
This obsession with growth as the ultimate solution to all of our societal problems—full employment, an end to poverty, better education, health nationwide, more muscle to solve environmental degradation, and so on—has led our economic and political leaders astray. Yes, the average yearly growth of 3 percent over the past 70 years has made us the world’s richest country,3 but economic growth at any cost has also made climate change spiral upward and American communities and civil liberties decay. In Pope Francis’ words: “[t]he exploitation of the planet has already exceeded acceptable limits and we still have not solved the problem of poverty.”4 Notwithstanding the voluminous evidence of growth’s shortcomings in promoting equitable prosperity society-wide, our government continues to undermine effective action to limit fossil fuel production, pursuing short-term economic “health” instead."
"One tragedy of loneliness is that lonely people can’t see that lots of people feel the same way they do."
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"Even worse, the widespread emphasis of vocabulary drilling in science classrooms completely, and to terrible effect, misses the point. When our science classes feel like memorization marathons, who does this approach to teaching and learning hurt? Most decidedly, our English learners. Students already tasked with so much language acquisition must then tackle the world of science language. This emphasis can also land hard on our students with learning disabilities. These students risk falling further and further behind in the face of giant word lists, especially when words must be matched with definitions on the big unit test.
Scientific words come from a long tradition of white European and white American men. The language we teach and learn shouts of these roots: Latin, Greek, with many egos competing for naming privileges, and thus many terms that actually mean the same thing. Students who find this language increasingly detached from the ways they speak at home face the biggest uphill battle to gaining fluency and finding ease with scientific language.
My own highly critical view of science vocabulary instruction began when I started to teach. The words we taught were often more elite versions of everyday vocabulary. Leaf epidermis? Why not leaf skin or surface? Other words came in three versions, all of which were used interchangeably in textbooks and videos. Was that cell structure the Golgi apparatus, Golgi complex, or Golgi body? Yes to all three. And students should probably learn all the variations, just to be safe. Yet more words represented content far beyond the current subject level — “dauer,” “oogenesis,” “zygomatic process.” They might be fun to say and bandy about, but added little to student thinking."
"All spiders lay eggs and wrap them with silk into some kind of egg sac. Most spider species wrap their eggs completely, making a tidy bundle, but some spin just a few threads that barely hold their egg clutches together. Egg sacs are often distinctive in color and shape and can even be used to identify a species. More elaborate egg sacs might comprise multiple layers of wrapping, including extra tough silk or colored silk, or even incorporating soil or sticks. For most spider mothers, finishing an egg sac is where their parental duties end. But for some, the parenting journey is just beginning.
Mothers from several diverse and widespread spider families guard their egg sacs from predators and parasites. Some even look after the baby spiders, called spiderlings, for a time after they hatch. Egg sac guarding is an important maternal commitment, because spider eggs can be a tasty morsel for other invertebrates. An entire subfamily of wasps specializes in parasitizing spider egg sacs. A female wasp will lay her own eggs inside the spider’s silk egg wrappings; when the wasp larvae hatch, they munch up all the spider eggs.
One family of spiders with protective mothers is crab spiders. Named for their habit of holding their front legs in a crab-like pincer position, many species in this family perch high on vegetation to ambush flying insects. A personal favorite is the goldenrod crab spider, a spider with orangey-red stripes on its abdomen that can change its color from white to yellow. I once watched a crab spider guard an egg sac tucked into a curled leaf on one of my ornamental trees. She sat vigil next to her egg sac and would turn to face me if I ventured too close, keeping a wary eye on the perceived intruder. Over the course of a couple weeks I would peek in on her every few days, until the day all the tiny spiderlings came out and ballooned away.
A few spiders take their mothering a step further and will carry their egg sacs with them, then care for their newly hatched spiderlings. Wolf spider mothers carry their egg sacs on their spinnerets, the organs on the end of their abdomen that make silk. I frequently see these brown roving spiders in my garden, often with a spherical white egg sac snugly attached to their back ends. Carrying their egg sacs this way, however, isn’t always a very effective guarding strategy; when researchers hatched these egg sacs in the laboratory, they found a large percentage had been parasitized by wasps.
So why do wolf spider mothers bother to carry their egg sacs? It leaves them the freedom to hunt, yet still be present when their dozens to hundreds of spiderlings hatch. After their mother helps them out of the egg sac, these spiderlings climb up her legs and piggy-back around with her. A first layer of spiderlings will cling to special knobbed hairs on her abdomen, with upper layers of spiderlings hanging on to their siblings below. A brood of spiderlings can ride around with their mother for more than a week. Typically, spiderlings don’t need to eat right after hatching, but their mother will stop by water regularly so her spiderlings can hop off for a drink."
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"As if 2020 weren’t terrifying enough, now we have to worry about ‘murder hornets.’
Asian giant “murder hornets” attack honeybee hives, decapitate the bees and bring their bodies back to the young hornets for food. (Washington State Department of Agriculture)The world’s largest hornet — the size of a matchbox — is known for invading honeybee hives, decapitating all the bees in a matter of hours and carrying the mangled thoraxes back to feed their young.
In other words, Asian giant hornets are literally murderers. And now they’re in the United States.
The Washington State Department of Agriculture is trying to track down the fearsome insects, also nicknamed “yak-killer hornets” or “giant sparrow bees,” after officials received and verified four reports of them in December in the northwest part of the state. They were also spotted in two sites in the Canadian province of British Columbia in the fall.
In a New York Times story that made the term “murder hornets” trend on Twitter on Saturday, Conrad Bérubé, a beekeeper and entomologist in Nanaimo, Canada, described being stung by an Asian giant hornet as “like having red-hot thumbtacks being driven into my flesh.”
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The hornets primarily attack insects but will direct their aggression toward people if they’re threatened. Their quarter-inch stingers, which can penetrate beekeeping suits, deploy a venom potent enough to dissolve human flesh.
Absorbing multiple stings can be deadly. The nervous system can shut down, and an allergic reaction may occur and cause anaphylactic shock. The insects kill roughly 30 to 40 people each year in Japan, where they’re most common.
The giant hornets are primarily a danger to bees. Scientists are hunting for the insects, whose queens can grow to two inches long, in hopes of rounding them up before they become rooted in the United States and destroy bee populations that are crucial to crop pollination.
“This is our window to keep it from establishing,” Chris Looney, an entomologist at the Washington State Department of Agriculture, told the Times. “If we can’t do it in the next couple of years, it probably can’t be done.”
Some insects native to the northwest United States have been confused for the invasive hornets, but real Asian giant hornets have distinctive qualities: large orange and yellow heads with teardrop eyes, black-and-yellow striped abdomens and papery wings that span up to three inches.
A colony of Asian giant hornets can kill nearly 30,000 bees in a few hours. The attack begins when a scout finds a new hive and marks it with a pheromone secreted from glands in its back legs, signaling to other hornets to gather.
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As the bees try to defend their colonies, worker hornets use powerful mandibles — appendages near their mouths — to chop up the bees and chew them into gooey “meatballs” before carrying the protein-heavy remains back to their young."
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