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.