99 Percent Invisible: For the Love of Peat

Some scientists from Switzerland tried to calculate how much carbon could be removed if we planted trees all around the world. They published a paper in the journal Nature arguing that if humans planted a trillion trees, it could remove one-third of all of the CO2 we had put up there in the first place. It was a dramatic finding that led to a lot of dramatic headlines. The way that the paper was being described in some articles, you would think that trees were some kind of climate change panacea, that they were the key to fixing global warming. [...]

Richard Lindsay is a scientist at the University of East London’s Sustainability Institute. “Everybody’s saying, let’s plant a million trees, let’s plant a billion trees,” he says, “Yes, I’m all in favor of that. But let’s plant the right tree in the right place.” Lindsay has personal experience watching a lot of trees get planted in the wrong place. Back in the 1980s, he saw firsthand the impact of a controversial tree planting scheme in Scotland that ended up threatening one of the most special ecosystems in the world.

In the 1980s, the British government started using tax breaks to private citizens to encourage tree planting efforts around the country. The goal was to boost the UK’s timber supply. And it was a really good tax break, especially for the super-rich. But questions started to emerge about where exactly these trees were going to go. In order for this to work, investors needed large tracts of undeveloped, unwanted land. And there was one place that met the criteria—it was called the Flow Country. The Flow Country is a vast open area in the far north of Scotland that looks almost like the arctic tundra. The best way to appreciate the flow country might be in an airplane. From the sky, it looks like a Persian rug—streaked with colorful sphagnum mosses and dotted with little pools of water.

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Aeon: Sex is real

There’s no need to reject how biologists define the sexes to defend the view that trans women are women. When we look across the diversity of life, sex takes stranger forms than anyone has dreamt of for humans. The biological definition of sex takes all this in its stride. It does so despite the fact that there are no more than two biological sexes in any species you’re likely to have heard of. To many people, that might seem to have ‘conservative’ implications, or to fly in the face of the diversity we see in actual human beings. I will make clear why it does not. [...]

Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. As well as simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites are first one sex and then the other. There are also individual organisms that are neither male nor female. The biological definition of sex is not based on an essential quality that every organism is born with, but on two distinct strategies that organisms use to propagate their genes. They are not born with the ability to use these strategies – they acquire that ability as they grow up, a process which produces endless variation between individuals. The biology of sex tries to classify and explain these many systems for combining DNA to make new organisms. That can be done without assigning every individual to a sex, and we will see that trying to do so quickly leads to asking questions that have no biological meaning.

While the biological definition of sex is needed to understand the diversity of life, that doesn’t mean it’s the best definition for ensuring fair competition in sport or adequate access to healthcare. We can’t expect sporting codes, medical systems and family law to adopt a definition simply because biologists find it useful. Conversely, most institutional definitions of sex break down immediately in biology, because other species contradict human assumptions about sex. The United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) uses a chromosomal definition of sex – XY for males and XX for females. Many reptiles, such as the terrifying saltwater crocodiles of northern Australia, don’t have any sex chromosomes, but a male saltie has no trouble telling if the crocodile that has entered his territory is a male. Even among mammals, at least five species are known that don’t have male sex chromosomes, but they develop into males just fine. Gender theorists have extensively criticised the chromosomal definition of human sexes. But however well or badly that definition works for humans, it’s an abject failure when you look at sex across the diversity of life. [...]

Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from defining each sex by the ability to do one thing: to make eggs or to make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can’t do either. Consider the sex-switching species described above: what sex are they when they’re halfway through switching? What sex are they if something goes wrong, perhaps due to hormone-mimicking chemicals from decaying plastic waste? Once we see the development of sex as a process – and one that can be disrupted – it is inevitable that there will be many individual organisms that aren’t clearly of either sex. But that doesn’t mean that there are many biological sexes, or that biological sex is a continuum. There remain just two, distinct ways in which organisms contribute genetic material to their offspring.

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Vox: How Mitch McConnell is changing the Democratic Party

 And oh, what a difference McConnell has made. He will go down as one of the most consequential Senate leaders in history. But his legacy isn’t defined by bills passed or pacts struck. McConnell’s legislative record, in terms of both his accomplishments and those he’s shepherded through as leader, is meager. He has passed tax cuts, cut regulations, and confirmed judges. He failed to repeal Obamacare, shrink or restructure entitlements, or pass infrastructure or immigration reform. Historians will not linger long over the laws McConnell passed. As McConnell himself has said, his most consequential decision was an act of negation: blocking Merrick Garland from being appointed to the Supreme Court. [...]

Under McConnell, the Senate has been run according to a simple principle: Parties should use as much power as they have to achieve the outcomes they desire. This would have been impossible in past eras, when parties were weaker and individual senators stronger, when political interests were more rooted in geography and media wasn’t yet nationalized. But it is possible now, and it is a dramatic transformation of the Senate as an institution, with reverberations McConnell cannot control and that his party may come to regret. Indeed, McConnell’s single most profound effect on the Senate may be what he convinces Democrats to do in response to his machinations. [...]

It worked that way because the parties, and their Supreme Court nominees, were different than they are now. The parties were ideologically mixed rather than ideologically polarized, and Supreme Court nominees were ideologically unpredictable rather than heavily vetted and ideologically consistent. From the 1950s through the 1990s, knowing the party that nominated a justice told you little about how that justice would vote. All of that lowered the stakes on each nomination. [...]

What Democrats now believe is McConnell won’t let them govern if they win, and in the aftermath of Garland and of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, he won’t show them any quarter if he wins. Republicans, to be fair, believe the same about Democrats. Compared to the Senates of yore, both sides are right. McConnell has gone further, faster, than the Democratic leaders in torching old precedents and making the realpolitik principles of the new era clear. But in doing, he’s potentially done something that liberal activists and pundits were never able to achieve: convince Senate Democrats that the Senate is broken, and that new rules are needed.

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SciShow Psych: Identity Politics: How All Your Identities Sway Your Vote

People throw out the term "identity politics" as a way to say that someone is wrong, but the truth is, it's something that affects the way all of us vote.

TLDR News: How Will the EU Vaccinate 446 Million People? Europe's COVID Vaccination Plans Explained

 COVID is clearly one of the greatest challenges any country has faced in decades, so it's unsurprising many are praying for a Coronavirus vaccine. The problem is that even when a vaccine's ready it takes a whole lot of work to actually get people vaccinated, especially 446 million people in 27 member states. So in this video we explain the EU's vaccination strategy, who will get vaccines first and what it means for Europe.

CityLab: How Reykjavik's Sheet-Metal Homes Beat the Icelandic Winter

 This housing’s relative newness still reveals a striking factor that distinguishes Iceland from the rest of Europe: Though Iceland has been inhabited for almost 1,200 years, only a modest number of its surviving domestic buildings predate the late 19th century.

That’s partly because, as Iceland emerged from centuries of hardship, it turned its back on traditional building types associated with poverty, leaving them to deteriorate. Until the late 19th century, most Icelanders lived in turf houses. Compensating for a lack of local trees, which grow slowly in Iceland, these houses built up walls of earth and grass-growing sod around timber frames. The few remaining survivals look delightful under their coating of lush grass. To live in, they were frequently damp, dark and poorly warmed by a single kitchen hearth, while the walls needed regular repair or rebuilding to remain solid and watertight. “People think of turf houses as like regular ones but with grass-growing roofs” says Icelandic TV host, former city councilor and campaigner Gísli Marteinn Baldursson, “but in fact living in one was almost like living in a hole in the ground.” [...]

These houses became the default type both in Reykjavik and elsewhere in Iceland. When the city experienced a major fire in 1915 that left metal-clad houses largely unharmed, the city made this trend into law, requiring a corrugated coating for all new houses built close together. Kept in place until the mid-1920s, this bylaw ended up giving Iceland’s capital the largest cluster of metal-clad buildings in the world.

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Politico: Here’s How the Pandemic Finally Ends

 “It will take two things to bring this virus under control: hygienic measures and a vaccine. And you can’t have one without the other,” says Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. [...]

They agree there’s a lot of fog left in the Covid-19 crystal ball, but most accept several likelihoods: At least one effective vaccine—hopefully several—will be approved in the U.S. by early next year. Producing and distributing a vaccine will take months, with the average American not receiving their dose (or doses) until at least mid- or late 2021. And while widespread inoculation will play a large role in bringing life back to normal, getting the shot will not be your cue to take off your mask and run free into a crowded bar. The end of the pandemic will be an evolution, not a revolution, the vaccine just another powerful tool in that process. [...]

This kind of unpredictability is why Sarah Cobey, an epidemiologist at the University of Chicago, chose her field in the first place: “One of the reasons I wanted to study infectious disease dynamics is that they can be really unintuitive. They can be mathematically very predictable, but they can always be unintuitive.” [...]

The goal is for the vaccine to be effective and widespread enough for the U.S. population to reach the herd immunity threshold—the point at which, theoretically, Americans can safely take off their masks and attend large sporting events. A rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate for Covid-19 (derived from calculating the point at which each infected person, on average, infects less than one other person) is that society will reach herd immunity when around 60 percent to 70 percent of the population is immune.

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The Guardian: New Caledonia rejects independence from France for second time

 As it had in 2018, the “no” vote for independence prevailed, this time 53.3% to 46.7%, according to unofficial results declared by the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

But a significantly improved “yes” vote, up from 43% last referendum and now approaching the simple majority needed for secession, has given a massive fillip to the independence campaign, and laid the foundations for a third and final referendum on the question in two years’ time. [...]

Sunday’s poll was the second of potentially three national referendums agreed under the 1998 Nouméa Accord, a carefully negotiated de-colonisation plan brokered to end a deadly conflict between the mostly pro-independence Kanak population and the descendants of European settlers, known as Caldoches, in the 1980s. [...]

While the yes/no divide is regularly cast as a contest between separatist Kanaks and loyalist Europeans, New Caledonia’s 180,000-strong voting roll also includes descendants of indentured Indochinese labourers, as well as more recent migrants from France, Wallis and Futuna, Vanuatu and other French dependencies.

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