And it’s even lonelier being stranded on a planet millions of miles from Earth, without communication, adequate food, or much hope of getting back home. That’s the grim prospect Matt Damon’s character faces in “The Martian,” the upcoming film based on the novel by Andy Weir.
That’s the opposite way round to how many other geneticists work. They often start with the trait and try to find relevant genes. Nielsen, however, started by finding genes that evolution had already flagged as being important, and then worked out what traits those genes influence. “First, we find the bit of the haystack where the needle might be,” he explains. And his team did the same thing in Tibet and Ethiopia, identifying genes that help local people cope with air that has 40 percent less oxygen than what most of us inhale.
The gig economy is thought to be dominated by younger workers. But the factors that make it attractive to millennials—few barriers to entry, flexible commitments—may be starting to pull in older Americans.
These are the instruments that brought down polio, smallpox and diphtheria—diseases that in the past two centuries have killed thousands annually. By the end of the 20th century, however, mass vaccination programs have completely eradicated or brought these diseases under control both in the United States and abroad.
Cities used to grow by accident. Sure, the location usually made sense—someplace defensible, on a hill or an island, or somewhere near an extractable resource or the confluence of two transport routes. But what happened next was ad hoc. The people who worked in the fort or the mines or the port or the warehouses needed places to eat, to sleep, to worship. Infrastructure threaded through the hustle and bustle—water, sewage, roads, trolleys, gas, electricity—in vast networks of improvisation. You can find planned exceptions: Alexandria, Roman colonial towns, certain districts in major Chinese cities, Haussmann’s Paris. But for the most part it was happenstance, luck, and layering the new on top of the old.
At least, that’s the way things worked for most of human history.
Many people have some level of colour deficiency but an island where a tenth of the population is totally colour-blind gives us some fascinating insights, writes Michael Mosley.
“The idea for a Solidarity Fridge started with the economic crisis — these images of people searching dumpsters for food — the indignity of it. That’s what got me thinking about how much food we waste,” Saiz told NPR over Skype from Mongolia, where he’s moved onto his next project, living in a yurt and building a hospital for handicapped children.
Whistled Turkish is a non-conformist. Most obviously, it bucks the normal language trend of using consonants and vowels, opting instead for a bird-like whistle. But more importantly, it departs from other language forms in a more fundamental respect: it’s processed differently by the brain.
Amid the corn and soybean fields of western Ohio lies a progressive crossroads where black and white isn’t black and white, where the concept of race has been turned upside down, where interracial marriages have been the norm for nearly two centuries. The heavy boots of Jim Crow have never walked here.
Founded by James Clemens, a freed slave from Virginia who became a prosperous farmer, Longtown was a community far ahead of its time, a bold experiment in integration.