Carpa uasi. The carpa uasi was the bottom level of this building; it originally ended to the left of the arch (near the right side of the floor level). The 15th-century structure survived because the church built over and around it lent stability. Credit: Stella Nair Courtesy: University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)
UCLA art history professor Stella Nair is collaborating with an interdisciplinary team analyzing a unique Inca building that dates to the mid-15th century.
The building, in the remote town of Huaytará, Peru, appears to have been constructed specifically for the purpose of amplifying music and sound, with three walls and an opening at one end.
The study is important in part because scholars tend to focus on visual evidence when analyzing cultures of the past, but understanding the role of sound can create a more three-dimensional picture.
The Inca empire is renowned for its architecture; its buildings were intricately designed and extraordinarily durable.
But this summer, it was another aspect of Inca construction that captured the attention of Stella Nair, a UCLA associate professor of art history whose expertise is Indigenous arts and architecture of the Americas.
Nair spent three weeks in the remote town of Huaytará, Peru, studying a single Inca building that appears to have been created primarily to amplify sound and music. Known as a carpa uasi, the structure was likely built in the mid-15th century.
“We’re learning that sound was incredibly important from the earliest cities on, dating back several thousand years B.C.,” said Nair, who is working on her third book about Andean (in and around the Andes mountains) architecture. “Builders were incredibly sophisticated with their aural architecture, and the Incas are one part of this long, sophisticated tradition of sonic engineering.”
One of a kind
Nair said the structure is the only known carpa uasi in existence, and although scholars have known about it for many years, the building hasn’t been extensively researched — and no previous studies had identified its potential for amplifying sound.
One of its distinctive characteristics is that, because of its intended use, the carpa uasi was built with only three walls, with an opening at one of the gable ends. (The phrase carpa uasi means “tent house,” a reference to that open-ended structure.) Nair and her colleagues theorize that the design would have made it possible for sound — such as drums being used to announce the beginning or end of a battle — to be focused toward the building’s open end and then out to the surrounding environment.
“Many people look at Inca architecture and are impressed with the stonework, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Nair said. “They were also concerned with the ephemeral, temporary and impermanent, and sound was one of those things.
“Sound was deeply valued and an incredibly important part of Andean and Inca architecture — so much so that the builders allowed some instability in this structure just because of its acoustic potential.” [emphasis mine]
The partially open structure would have made such buildings significantly less stable than most other Inca buildings. Ironically, Nair said, this carpa uasi has survived for centuries because, perhaps at the direction of Spanish settlers, a church was later built on top of it, stabilizing the structure below.
Nair is collaborating on the project with a team of acoustic experts led by Stanford University music professor Jonathan Berger. Nair primarily studied the carpa uasi’s architecture, taking measurements and making drawings and photographs. Next, she will use hand drawings and 3-D modeling to determine what the roof may have looked like and how the building’s overall form influenced its function. Together, the researchers expect to produce a model for how sound would have traveled through and outside the building.
Toward a more complete understanding
“We’re exploring the possibility that the carpa uasi may have amplified low-frequency sounds, such as drumming, with minimal reverberation,” Nair said. “With this research, for the first time, we’ll be able to tell what the Incas valued sonically in this building.”
Investigating the sonic properties of a 600-year-old building in the Andes is much more than an academic exercise for Nair and her collaborators — and not only because it is the only surviving example of its kind.
“Sound studies are really critical, because we tend to emphasize the visual in how we understand the world around us, including our past,” Nair said. “But that’s not how we experience life — all of our senses are critical. So how we understand ourselves and our history changes if you put sound back into the conversation.”
Nair said the project reflects the importance of collaboration across disciplines, institutions and borders. The American scholars also benefited from the cooperation of partners in Peru, including the priest who oversees the Church of San Juan Bautista, the building whose architecture incorporates the carpa uasi, and a local archaeologist.
Nair’s work was funded in part by a grant from the UCLA College Division of Humanities; Berger received funding from the Templeton Religion Trust.
Ella Feldman’s October 30, 2025 article for the Smithsonian magazine enhances the ‘sound’ story with a few more details about the Inca empire. There’s also more about Stella Nair and her work on her UCLA bio webpage.
Anatomy of the sacoglossan mollusc Elysia chlorotica. Sea slug consuming its obligate algal food Vaucheria litorea. Small, punctate green circles are the plastids located within the extensive digestive diverticula of the animal. By Karen N. Pelletreau et al. – http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0097477, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38619279 [[image downloaded from the Elysia chlorotica Wikipedia entry]
When she made the discovery that would thrill her fellow snorkellers and excite researchers across North America, she didn’t think much of it at first.
“I just thought, oh, that’s a rotten leaf, keep going,” says Elli Ofthenorth.
The avid snorkeller passed by this “black gunk” once, twice, but it wasn’t until her third pass that something caught her eye enough to take a closer look, and she realized it was a living creature.
“I just started yelling, there’s a sea slug here!”
Ofthenorth’s mother, who was on the shore at Rainbow Haven Provincial Park near Dartmouth, N.S., lit up the snorkel group chat, and within minutes, members identified it as Elysia chlorotica, or Eastern emerald elysia.
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This unassuming creature could almost pass for your garden-variety slug — the kind that decimates your lettuce every summer. That is, until its crinkly-looking back unfurls a stunning, emerald green “leaf,” complete with pale “veins” branching outward from the centre.
It’s this “leaf,” and what it does for the sea slug, that holds so much promise for research in medicine, clean energy and other fields.
But it’s so elusive that researchers are having a hard time studying it.
E. chlorotica can photosynthesize, stealing the chloroplasts — the photosynthesizing organs — of the algae it eats, keeping them alive in its body, and using them to get energy from the sun. The sea slugs can then subsist for months at a time without consuming food.
“It’s like if I ate a whole bunch of spinach and then I just woke up this morning and I just sunbathed for an hour and then I wouldn’t need to eat for the rest of the week,” says Hunter Stevens, a biologist with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s Nova Scotia chapter. “These slugs are essentially doing the same thing.”
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Elusive and ephemeral
However, this coveted slug excels at eluding researchers.
Historically, known populations have existed in the Minas Basin area of Nova Scotia and in Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts — and theoretically their habitat exists all along the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. — but recent efforts to find them have been unsuccessful.
“For so long it just seemed like nobody had seen them,” says Krug [Patrick Krug, a professor of biological sciences at California State University, Los Angeles]. “It was such a shot in the dark, it wasn’t even worth going to look.”
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Dylan Gagler, a PhD student at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has searched the slug’s favoured habitat off Martha’s Vineyard repeatedly this year, but without luck so far.
When Stevens’s Instagram post about the Rainbow Haven discovery popped up in Gagler’s feed, he says he was “having like a freak-out, FOMO [fear of missing out] moment of, like, I got to get up to Nova Scotia. Like, this is clearly where all the action is.”
Gagler contacted Stevens to get information about the conditions at the Rainbow Haven location, such as the air and water temperature and the depth they were found at, in order to fine-tune his own searches. He’s also exploring the permitting process to collect specimens from Nova Scotia to raise in a lab.
Though E. chlorotica has been hard to find, Krug says there have been a few sightings in recent months, including the one in Nova Scotia, as well as in the Carolinas and in Tampa Bay, Fla.
He says the populations are “ephemeral,” seeming to go through cycles of boom and bust — sometimes abundant, but then vanishing suddenly.
…
The fact that the recent discovery of this thriving population was made within the bounds of a provincial park in Nova Scotia underscores how important protected areas are to biodiversity, Stevens says.
“As coastal development proliferates and continues to advance, some of these populations, we may not even know about them, and they’ll disappear,” he says. “And so these slugs will probably get rarer as time goes on.”
Stevens says Ofthenorth’s discovery highlights the importance of citizen science.
“It just shows the power of curiosity and how anybody here can go into the water and there’s still that potential to find this really scientifically significant observation.”
I always look forward to this Christmas posting as it’s an opportunity to publish some stories that wouldn’t ordinarily be featured here like the sea slug/leaf that opened this post.The focus will be (mostly) on animals. Note: I will not be removing links from the news/press releases nor will I be providing separate citations and links.
On to the rest of the programme, there should always be a little dance in one’s life.
Watch their feet. There’s a reason dancers still talk about those two; the synchronization is something. There was link to the Nicholas Brothers’ routine in Stormy Weather (1943 film) was in my December 24, 2025 posting but …
Given the past year, I think it’s time to revisit the brothers and Emma Taggart’s October 4, 2019 article on My Modern Met (scroll down to see Cab Calloway and his band performing ‘Jumpin Jive’ as an introduction to what is one of the most lauded tap routines ever recorded on film).
What makes it jaw-dropping is that it was done in one take and with no rehearsal .Do read Taggart’s October 4, 2019 article for a detail I found a little mystifying (what was the director thinking?).
I have a little more about ‘Stormy Weather’ and the dance. Nick Castle was the dance director (uncredited) for the movie and the Nicholas Brothers’ routine was something he worked out with the brothers..I found that bit of information in “C’mon, Get Happy; the Making of Summer Stock,” a 2023 book by David Frantle and Tom Johnson. The book has a number of dancers and choreographers commenting on the movie’s (Summer Stock) dance routines (Gene Kelly was in the movie) in detail. Castle was the ‘dance stager’ for “Summer Stock,” which is why the routine and the Nicholas Brothers are mentioned.
8,000 years ago, before numbers existed, art demonstrated early mathematical thinking (ethnomathematics)
A December 16, 2025 news item on ScienceDaily makes an extraordinary statement about art, mathematics, and prehistoric civilization,
A study published in the Journal of World Prehistory suggests that some of the earliest known images of plants created by humans served a deeper purpose than decoration. According to the researchers, these ancient designs also reveal early mathematical thinking.
By closely examining prehistoric pottery, Prof. Yosef Garfinkel and Sarah Krulwich of the Hebrew University traced the oldest consistent use of plant imagery in human art to more than 8,000 years ago. The pottery comes from the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia (c. 6200-5500 BCE). Their findings show that early farming communities carefully painted flowers, shrubs, branches, and trees, arranging them in ways that reflect deliberate geometric structure and numerical order.
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A meticulously executed drawing of a single large flower, depicted in a symmetrical arrangement with 16 or 32 petals, and a bowl with 64 (+ 12) flowers Courtesy Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
A new study reveals that the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia (c. 6200–5500 BCE) produced the earliest systematic plant imagery in prehistoric art, flowers, shrubs, branches, and trees painted on fine pottery, arranged with precise symmetry and numerical sequences, especially petal and flower counts of 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64. This suggests that early farming villages in the Near East already possessed sophisticated, practical mathematical thinking about dividing space and quantities, likely tied to everyday needs such as fairly sharing crops from collectively worked fields, long before writing or formal number systems existed.
A new study published in the Journal of World Prehistory reveals that some of humanity’s earliest artistic representations of botanical figures were far more than decorative, they were mathematical.
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In an extensive analysis of ancient pottery, Prof. Yosef Garfinkel and Sarah Krulwich of the Hebrew University have identified the earliest systematic depictions of vegetal motifs in human history, dating back over 8,000 years to the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia (c. 6200–5500 BCE). Their research shows that these early agricultural communities painted flowers, shrubs, branches, and trees with remarkable care, and embedded within them evidence of complex geometric and arithmetic thinking.
A New Understanding of Prehistoric Art
Earlier prehistoric art focused primarily on humans and animals. Halafian pottery, however, marks the moment when the plant world entered human artistic expression in a systematic and visually sophisticated way.
Across 29 archaeological sites, Garfinkel and Krulwich documented hundreds of carefully rendered vegetal motifs, some naturalistic, others abstract, all reflecting conscious artistic choice.
…
“These vessels represent the first moment in history when people chose to portray the botanical world as a subject worthy of artistic attention,” the authors note. “It reflects a cognitive shift tied to village life and a growing awareness of symmetry and aesthetics.”
Among the study’s most striking insights is the precise numerical patterning in Halafian floral designs. Many bowls feature flowers with petal counts that follow geometric progression: 4, 8, 16, 32, and even arrangements of 64 flowers.
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These sequences, the researchers argue, are intentional and demonstrate a sophisticated grasp of spatial division long before the appearance of written numbers.
“The ability to divide space evenly, reflected in these floral motifs, likely had practical roots in daily life, such as sharing harvests or allocating communal fields,” Garfinkel explains.
This work contributes to the field of ethnomathematics, which identifies mathematical knowledge embedded in cultural expression.
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The motifs documented span the full botanical spectrum:
Flowers with meticulously balanced petals
Seedlings and shrubs, rendered with botanical clarity
Branches, arranged in rhythmic, repeating bands
Tall, imposing trees, sometimes shown alongside animals or architecture
Notably, none of the images depict edible crops, suggesting that the purpose was aesthetic rather than agricultural or ritualistic. Flowers, the authors note, are associated with positive emotional responses, which may explain their prominence.
Revising the History of Mathematics
While written mathematical texts appear millennia later in Sumer, Halafian pottery reveals an earlier, intuitive form of mathematical reasoning, rooted in symmetry, repetition, and geometric organization.
“These patterns show that mathematical thinking began long before writing,” Krulwich says. “People visualized divisions, sequences, and balance through their art.”
…
By cataloguing these vegetal motifs and revealing their mathematical foundations, the study offers a new perspective on how early communities understood the natural world, organized their environments, and expressed cognitive complexity.
The research paper titled “The Earliest Vegetal Motifs in Prehistoric Art: Painted Halafian Pottery of Mesopotamia and Prehistoric Mathematical Thinking” is now available in Journal of World Prehistory and can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-025-09200-9
And now, back to the animal stories
Frogs! There must always be at least one story here at Christmas about these critters.
Caption: Pristimantis chinguelas. Credit: Germán Chávez
High in the cloud-wrapped peaks of the Cordillera de Huancabamba, where the Andes dip and twist into isolated ridges, a team of Peruvian scientists has brought three secretive frogs out of obscurity and into the scientific record. The study [appears to be open access], led by herpetologist Germán Chávez and published in Evolutionary Systematics, describes Pristimantis chinguelas, P. nunezcortezi, and P. yonke—three new species discovered in the rugged, misty highlands of northwestern Peru.
“They’re small and unassuming,” Chávez says, “but these frogs are powerful reminders of how much we still don’t know about the Andes.”
Between 2021 and 2024, the team carried out a series of tough expeditions, hiking steep trails and combing mossy forests and wet páramo for signs of amphibian life. It was in this setting—both harsh and enchanting—that they encountered the new species.
Each frog tells a different story:
P. chinguelas, discovered on a cliffside of Cerro Chinguelas, has a body dotted with prominent large tubercles on both sides. Its high-pitched “peep” can be heard on humid nights.
P. nunezcortezi lives near a cool mountain stream in a regenerating forest. With large black blotches on axillae and groins, it was named in honour of ornithologist Elio Nuñez-Cortez, a conservation trailblazer in the region.
P. yonke, the smallest of the three, was found nestled in bromeliads at nearly 3,000 meters. Its name nods to “yonque,” a sugarcane spirit consumed by locals to brave the highland chill.
“Exploring this area is more than fieldwork—it’s an immersion into wilderness, culture, and resilience,” says co-author Karen Victoriano-Cigüeñas.
“Many of these mountain ridges are isolated, with no roads and extreme terrain,” adds Ivan Wong. “The weather shifts within minutes, and the steep cliffs make every step a challenge. It’s no wonder so few scientists have worked here before. But that’s exactly why there’s still so much to find.”
Despite the thrill of discovery, the frogs’ future is uncertain. The team observed signs of habitat degradation, fire damage, and expanding farmland. For now, the species are listed as Data Deficient under IUCN criteria, but the call to action is clear.
“The Cordillera de Huancabamba is not just a remote range—it’s a living archive of biodiversity and cultural legacy,” says co-author Wilmar Aznaran. “And we’ve barely scratched the surface.”
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Caption: A new study publishing in Current Biology on September 18 reveals that dogs with a vocabulary of toy names—known as Gifted Word Learners—can extend learned labels to entirely new objects, not because the objects look similar, but because they are used in the same way. Credit: Department of Ethology / Eötvös Loránd University
BUDAPEST, Hungary — A new study publishing in Current Biology on September 18 by the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University reveals that dogs with a vocabulary of toy names—known as Gifted Word Learners—can extend learned labels to entirely new objects, not because the objects look similar, but because they are used in the same way.
In humans, “label extension” is a cornerstone of early language development. In non-humans, until now, it had only been documented in few so-called language-trained individual animals, after years of intensive training in captivity.
But learning to extend labels to objects that share the same function, rather than visual similarities, is considered an even more complex skill. A toddler learns that the word “cup” can apply to mugs, tumblers, and sippy cups, or that both a spoon and a ladle are “for scooping.” While individuals of many animal species can group items by appearance, extending a learned label to a functionally similar but visually different object has long been considered an advanced skill.
The time and efforts needed to train animals in captivity to learn verbal labels, as well as the very limited number of subjects that successfully acquired such vocabulary, have until now limited the feasibility of this type of research.
But here comes the twist! “Gifted Word Learner dogs offer a unique possibility to study this phenomenon because they rapidly learn verbal labels – the names of toys – during natural interactions in their human families” said Dr. Claudia Fugazza, lead author of the study.
“Our results show that these dogs do not just memorize object names,” continues Dr. Fugazza. “They understand the meaning behind those labels well enough to apply them to new, very different-looking toys— by recognizing what the toys were for.”
Researchers of the Department of Ethology, at Eötvös Lorand University tested 7 Gifted Word Learner dogs—(six Border collies and a Blue heeler)—known for their unusual ability to learn the names of dozens of toys naturally, through everyday play.
The experiment had four stages, all of them conducted in a natural setup, at the house of each dog owner, during playful interactions:
Fist, in the Learning Phase, Dogs learned two new labels, such as “Pull” and “Fetch,” each referring not to a single item, but to a group of toys that looked completely different but were used in the same way during play (tug or retrieve).
Second, during a formal Assessment, the dogs showed that they had successfully learned those labels and could appropriately choose the “Pulls” and “Fetches” when asked.
The crucial part of the experiment was carried out after this Assessment: in the Generalization Phase, the dogs were introduced to new toys, also with diverse physical features, and the owner played in the same two ways as before, but this time saying no labels.
Test– When asked for a “Pull” or “Fetch,” the dogs selected the correct unlabelled toy significantly above chance, indicating they had generalized the labels to a functional category.
Why This Matters
The study provides the first evidence that dogs can generalize verbal labels to functional categories during natural-like playful interactions in their human families—mirroring, in functional terms, the natural context of human language development.
“This ability shows that classification linked to verbal labels can emerge in non-human, non-linguistic species living in natural settings,” said Dr. AdamMiklosi, coauthor of the study. “It opens exciting new avenues for studying how language-related skills may evolve and function beyond our own species.”
Key Points
Dogs extended verbal labels to objects that shared only functional properties, not appearance.
The skill emerged naturally through play with owners—no formal training required.
While the mechanisms of such learning are not known, the context in which it happens present a striking parallel with that of human infants: daily life in a human family.
The study of these skills in a non-human species in its natural environment paves the way for understanding the how language-related skills evolved and function.
Çağan Şekercioğlu was an ambitious, but perhaps naive graduate student when, 26 years ago, he embarked on a simple data-compilation project that would soon evolve into a massive career-defining achievement.
With the help of countless students and volunteers, the University of Utah conservation biologist has finally released BIRDBASE, an encyclopedic dataset of traits covering all the bird species recognized by the world’s four major avian taxonomies.
Described this week in a study published in the journal Scientific Data, the dataset covers 78 ecological traits, including conservation status, for 11,589 species of birds in 254 families. The main trait categories tracked are body mass; habitat; diet; nest type; clutch size; life history; elevational range; and movement strategy, that is whether and how they migrate.
While some little-known species still have incomplete data, the dataset provides a foundation for ornithologists around the world to conduct new global analyses in ornithology, conservation biology and macroecology, including the links between bird species’ ecological traits and their risk of extinction, according to Şekercioğlu, a professor in the university’s School of Biological Sciences. He also hopes BIRDBASE will help other biologists win support for studying avian conservation.
“To get funding you have to have a big question, but without data, how are you going to answer those big questions?” Şekercioğlu posed. “It also shows we still have ways to go. Birds are the best-known class of organism, but even though they are the best known, we still have big data gaps.”
BIRDBASE’s public launch coincides with the release of the first unified global checklist for birds, known as AviList, a grand taxonomy under one cover.
The BIRDBASE project started in 1999 when Şekercioğlu was a graduate student at Stanford University, spending field seasons in Costa Rica. While writing the first chapter of his Ph.D. thesis, he needed to know the percentage of tropical forest understory bug-eating birds, technically known as insectivores, that are threatened with extinction. He was perplexed to discover that information had yet to be determined.
“I realized that statistic doesn’t exist because nobody had analyzed all the birds of the world and their threat status based on diet,” he said. “I’m like, this is unbelievable. There’s no global database on birds. I’m lucky that I was in grad school because I was naive and I love birds.”
In other words, he set out to figure it out himself. That meant gathering and organizing life history traits for all such bird species, including their diets, habitats and conservation status. For a keen birder like Şekercioğlu, it seemed like a simple task that would be fun, compiling data found on thousands of bird species published in huge beautifully illustrated volumes. It turned out to be tedious and seriously time consuming, but worthwhile.
Thanks to a cadre of volunteers in the Stanford Volunteer Program and undergraduates, whose labors were compensated by the Stanford Center for Conservation Biology, Şekercioğlu answered his question within a couple years. Twenty-seven percent of tropical understory insectivores were threatened or near threatened with extinction. This finding wound up not supporting the hypothesis of his research, but that’s science.
Yet the dataset was so helpful that he labored on with the data-compiling project to eventually cover all bird species and expanded the number of traits included. “What started as this little specialized question turned into this global database, the first of its kind” he said.
BIRDBASE has proven a boon to many other avian researchers who have tapped it to support dozens of papers, most of them listing Şekercioğlu as co-author. The tally of Şekercioğlu’s papers that have used BIRDBASE currently stands at 98, accounting for 14,000 of Şekercioğlu’s 24,000-plus citations.
Among the conclusions the dataset has enabled is that a majority of the world’s bird species, or 54%, are insectivores, and many species in this group are under pressure.
“Most of them are tropical forest species. It is a very important group and they’re declining,” he said. “They’re sensitive even though they’re not hunted. They are small, so they don’t need a big area. You wouldn’t expect them to be the most sensitive group to habitat fragmentation but they are highly specialized.”
The dataset also showed that fish-eating seabirds are at elevated risk of extinction as well, and fruit-eating birds are vital to the survival of tropical rain forests.
“The most important seed dispersers in the tropics are frugivorous birds,” Şekercioğlu said. “In some tropical forests, over 90% of all woody plants’ seeds are dispersed by fruit-eating birds who eat them and then defecate the seeds somewhere else and they germinate.”
Now for the first time BIRDBASE is publicly available to all researchers online, “no strings attached.” It can be found as an Excel spreadsheet on a site hosted by Figshare, with separate worksheet tabs for trait values, trait definitions, nest details and data sources, packaged on one row per species.
Şekercioğlu emphasized that BIRDBASE remains a work in progress that will be continuously updated. Kind of like a medieval cathedral that is open for worship, but never really finished. He estimated that nearly 30 person-years of labor have gone into the project, work that entails entering data collected from various authoritative sources, such as BirdLife International, Birds of the World, hundreds of bird books and ornithological papers, and Şekercioğlu’s field observations of more than 9,400 bird species.
“Thanks to my being naïve, something that started with just a little question in grad school led to the foundation of my career. Right now, if one of my students came to me and said, ‘Hey, as part of my PhD I want to enter the world’s birds into a dataset,’ I’m like, ‘No, you’re not doing that. You’ll never finish your Ph.D.’ Fortunately I finished my Ph.D., but think about it, 1999 is when I had the idea and we are still putting finishing touches in 2025.”
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have shown for the first time that an insect – the bumblebee Bombus terrestris – can decide where to forage for food based on different durations of visual cues.
In Morse code, a short duration flash or ‘dot’ denotes a letter ‘E’ and a long duration flash, or ‘dash’, means letter ‘T’. Until now, the ability to discriminate between ‘dot’ and ‘dash’ has been seen only in humans and other vertebrates such as macaques or pigeons.
PhD student Alex Davidson and his supervisor Dr Elisabetta Versace, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Queen Mary, led a team that studied this ability in bees. They built a special maze to train individual bees to find a sugar reward at one of two flashing circles, shown with either a long or short flash duration. For instance, when the short flash, or ‘dot’, was associated with sugar, then the long flash, or ‘dash’, was instead associated with a bitter substance that bees dislike.
At each room in the maze, the position of the ‘dot’ and ‘dash’ stimulus was changed, so that bees could not rely on spatial cues to orient their choices. After bees learned to go straight to the flashing circle paired with the sugar, they were tested with flashing lights but no sugar present, to check whether bees’ choices were driven by the flashing light, rather than by olfactory or visual cues present in the sugar.
It was clear the bees had learnt to tell the light apart based on their duration, as most of them went straight to the ‘correct’ flashing light duration previously associated with sugar, irrespective of spatial location of the stimulus.
Alex Davidson said: “We wanted to find out if bumblebees could learn to the difference between these different durations, and it was so exciting to see them do it”.
“Since bees don’t encounter flashing stimuli in their natural environment, it’s remarkable that they could succeed at this task. The fact that they could track the duration of visual stimuli might suggest an extension of a time processing capacity that has evolved for different purposes, such as keeping track of movement in space or communication”.
“Alternatively, this surprising ability to encode and process time duration might be a fundamental component of the nervous system that is intrinsic in the properties of neurons. Only further research will be able to address this issue.”
The neural mechanisms involved in the ability to keep track of time for these durations remain mostly unknown, as the mechanisms discovered for entraining with the daylight cycle (circadian rhythms) and seasonal changes are too slow to explain the ability to differentiate between a ‘dash’ and a ‘dot’ with different duration.
Various theories have been put forward, suggesting the presence of a single or multiple internal clocks. Now that the ability to differentiate between durations of flashing lights has been discovered in insects, researchers will be able to test different models in these ‘miniature brains’ smaller than one cubic millimetre.
Elisabetta Versace continued: “Many complex animal behaviours, such as navigation and communication, depend on time processing abilities. It will be important to use a broad comparative approach across different species, including insects, to shed light on the evolution of those abilities. Processing durations in insects is evidence of a complex task solution using minimal neural substrate. This has implications for complex cognitive-like traits in artificial neural networks, which should seek to be as efficient as possible to be scalable, taking inspiration from biological intelligence.”
Duration discrimination in the bumblebee Bombus terrestris
The bumblebee image at the start of this news bit is from Bumblebee Conservation Trust in the UK; their website can be found here.
Joyeux Noël!
We live in such an extraordinary world: able to watch the Nicholas Brothers give a performance that is decades old, observe a leaf that’s really a sea slug, discover that bumblebees can learn Morse code, etc.
I’m ‘wrapping’ this up with two more items.
The mathematics of gift wrapping
Credit: Krysten Casumpang. Courtesy: University of British Columbia (UBC)
UBC Mathematics postdoctoral fellow Adam Martens talks about the geometry of gift wrapping—and why you can’t wrap a ball perfectly (so don’t even bother!).
From Christmas to Hanukkah to Kwanzaa, the gift-giving season is upon us. After we track down the perfect items for our favourite people, another task awaits us: gift wrapping. It’s not just an art—it’s math in disguise.
We spoke to Dr. Adam Martens, UBC mathematics postdoctoral fellow and differential geometer about the best shapes to reduce waste—and why a donut-shaped object can be wrapped perfectly, but only if you work in four dimensions.
What is a differential geometer?
A geometer is a specialist in geometry, or the study of points, lines, angles, surfaces, and solids. A differential mathematician studies smooth objects called ‘manifolds’, for example, a flat piece of paper or the surface of a ball. We also think about higher-dimensional objects, like the space-time of the universe.
What is the easiest shape to wrap?
No surprises here, but a box. The nice thing about wrapping a box is that each side is flat, and the flat edges meet at simple creases. Wrapping paper can be easily folded over the edges—mathematicians call this a manifold with corners.
Wrapping paper is inherently flat and rigid. It can be folded, but from a mathematical point of view, it cannot be warped so that it lies flat on a curved surface.
This means it’s mathematically impossible to wrap a sphere perfectly i.e. without any creases or folds. The only way to effectively wrap a ball is to put the ball in a box. A closely related theorem in calculus is the “hairy ball theorem,” which says you can’t comb a hairy ball flat without creating a cowlick or hair swirl.
What is the most difficult shape to wrap?
Technically, any shape that is not flat is equally difficult because they are all impossible. You cannot bend the wrapping paper to fit non-flat shapes. You could work around this by cutting and taping, but if any point is not flat, it’s impossible – at least not without creasing the wrapping paper.
That being said, there are shapes that seem impossible to wrap but are actually technically doable. Take a donut shape, what we call a “torus” in math. This object sits inside four-dimensional space where, if you were a 4D creature, you could make a torus flat and wrap it— so potentially not very helpful for your holiday shopping since we’re 3D beings and can’t visualize what is going on.
We can see this by taking a flat piece of paper. If you glued the long sides together, you would get a cylinder. You can’t do this in 3D because the paper would crinkle, but if you bend the paper and glue the short ends together, you’re able to take a flat piece of paper and bend it into a torus.
What gift-container shape minimizes the amount of wrapping needed?
In geometry, the isoperimetric inequality is a principle that tells us that a sphere is the most efficient shape for enclosing an item. An example of this is when we blow bubbles in a glass of water—the bubbles form as spheres because the air inside of them wants to take up as little space as possible due to the air pressure they face on the outside. In this sense, a sphere would be your most optimal shape for minimizing wrapping, except it wouldn’t really because, as we know, you can’t really wrap a sphere very well.
The next best option would be a cube—not an arbitrary rectangular box—where all sides are equal in length. For a fixed volume, a cube minimizes the surface area that needs to be covered in wrapping paper.
How about gift bags?
It’s not always about optimization. As human beings, we tend to find things aesthetically pleasing when they’re not square. Gift bags, for example, are elongated in one direction. We like the look of this. A lot of it has to do with the golden ratio—1.618, also known as Phi—which we can find in nature, including in the radial spiral of pinecones or sunflower seeds, in art in the proportions of the Mona Lisa’s face and torso, and architecture, in the proportions of the Parthenon. I even have it tattooed on my arm. Many people think that some of these appearances in nature are just a coincidence or selection bias, but something about this ratio is very pleasing to the eye.
3D Printed Ice Christmas Tree Image: University of Amsterdam [downloaded from https://www.homecrux.com/3d-printed-ice-christmas-tree/353009/]
A tree made entirely of ice with not a freezer nor piece of refrigeration equipment nor chainsaw and ice block in sight. You might call if a physics miracle.
An interdisciplinary team of experts in green chemistry, engineering and physics at Flinders University in Australia has developed a safer and more sustainable approach to extract and recover gold from ore and electronic waste.
Explained in the leading journal Nature Sustainability, the gold-extraction technique promises to reduce levels of toxic waste from mining and shows that high purity gold can be recovered from recycling valuable components in printed circuit boards in discarded computers.
The project team, led by Matthew Flinders Professor Justin Chalker, applied this integrated method for high-yield gold extraction from many sources – even recovering trace gold found in scientific waste streams.
The progress toward safer and more sustainable gold recovery was demonstrated for electronic waste, mixed-metal waste, and ore concentrates.
“The study featured many innovations including a new and recyclable leaching reagent derived from a compound used to disinfect water,” says Professor of Chemistry Justin Chalker, who leads the Chalker Lab at Flinders University’s College of Science and Engineering.
“The team also developed an entirely new way to make the polymer sorbent, or the material that binds the gold after extraction into water, using light to initiate the key reaction.”
Extensive investigation into the mechanisms, scope and limitations of the methods are reported in the new study, and the team now plans to work with mining and e-waste recycling operations to trial the method on a larger scale.
“The aim is to provide effective gold recovery methods that support the many uses of gold, while lessening the impact on the environment and human health,” says Professor Chalker.
The new process uses a low-cost and benign compound to extract the gold. This reagent (trichloroisocyanuric acid) is widely used in water sanitation and disinfection. When activated by salt water, the reagent can dissolve gold.
Next, the gold can be selectively bound to a novel sulfur-rich polymer developed by the Flinders team. The selectivity of the polymer allows gold recovery even in highly complex mixtures.
The gold can then be recovered by triggering the polymer to “un-make” itself and convert back to monomer. This allows the gold to be recovered and the polymer to be recycled and re-used.
Global demand for gold is driven by its high economic and monetary value but is also a vital element in electronics, medicine, aerospace technologies and other products and industries. However, mining the previous metal can involve the use of highly toxic substances such as cyanide and mercury for gold extraction – and other negative environmental impacts on water, air and land including CO2 emissions and deforestation.
The aim of the Flinders-led project was to provide alternative methods that are safer than mercury or cyanide in gold extraction and recovery.
The team also collaborated with experts in the US and Peru to validate the method on ore, in an effort to support small-scale mines that otherwise rely on toxic mercury to amalgamate gold.
Gold mining typically uses highly toxic cyanide to extract gold from ore, with risks to the wildlife and the broader environment if it is not contained properly. Artisanal and small-scale gold mines still use mercury to amalgamate gold. Unfortunately, the use of mercury in gold mining is one of the largest sources of mercury pollution on Earth.
Professor Chalker says interdisciplinary research collaborations with industry and environmental groups will help to address highly complex problems that support the economy and the environment.
“We are especially grateful to our engineering, mining, and philanthropic partners for supporting translation of laboratory discoveries to larger scale demonstrations of the gold recovery techniques.”
Lead authors of the major new study – Flinders University postdoctoral research associates Dr Max Mann, Dr Thomas Nicholls, Dr Harshal Patel and Dr Lynn Lisboa – extensively tested the new technique on piles of electronic waste, with the aim of finding more sustainable, circular economy solutions to make better use of ever-more-scarce resources in the world. Many components of electronic waste, such as CPU units and RAM cards, contain valuable metals such as gold and copper.
Dr Mann says: “This paper shows that interdisciplinary collaborations are needed to address the world’s big problems managing the growing stockpiles of e-waste.”
ARC DECRA Fellow Dr Nicholls, adds: “The newly developed gold sorbent is made using a sustainable approach in which UV light is used to make the sulfur-rich polymer. Then, recycling the polymer after the gold has been recovered further increases the green credentials of this method.”
Dr Patel says: “We dived into a mound of e-waste and climbed out with a block of gold! I hope this research inspires impactful solutions to pressing global challenges.”
“With the ever-growing technological and societal demand for gold, it is increasingly important to develop safe and versatile methods to purify gold from varying sources,” Dr Lisboa concludes.
…
Fast Facts:
Electronic waste (e-waste) is one of the fastest growing solid waste streams in the world. In 2022, an estimated 62 million tonnes of e-waste was produced globally. Only 22.3% was documented as formally collected and recycled.
E-waste is considered hazardous waste as it contains toxic materials and can produce toxic chemicals when recycled inappropriately. Many of these toxic materials are known or suspected to cause harm to human health, and several are included in the 10 chemicals of public health concern, including dioxins, lead and mercury. Inferior recycling of e-waste is a threat to public health and safety.
Miners use mercury, which binds to gold particles in ores, to create what are known as amalgams. These are then heated to evaporate the mercury, leaving behind gold but releasing toxic vapours. Studies indicate that up to 33% of artisanal miners suffer from moderate metallic mercury vapor intoxication.
Between 10 million and 20 million miners in more than 70 countries work in artisanal and small-scale gold mining, including up to 5 million women and children. These operations, which are often unregulated and unsafe, generate 37% of global mercury pollution (838 tonnes a year) – more than any other sector.
Most informal sites lack the funding and training needed to transition towards mercury-free mining. Despite accounting for 20% of the global gold supply and generating approximately US$30 billion annually, artisanal miners typically sell gold at around 70% of its global market value. Additionally, with many gold mines located in rural and remote areas, miners seeking loans are often restricted to predatory interest rates from illegal sources, pushing demand for mercury.
High quality gold recovered from electronic waste in the Flinders University study. Credit: Flinders University
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Sustainable gold extraction from ore and electronic waste (2025) by Maximilian Mann, Thomas P Nicholls, Harshal D Patel, Lynn S Lisboa, Jasmine MM Pople, Le Nhan Pham, Max JH Worthington, Matthew R Smith, Yanting Yin, Gunther G Andersson, Christopher T Gibson, Louisa J Esdaile, Claire E Lenehan, Michelle L Coote, Zhongfan Jia and Justin M Chalker .Nature Sustainability 8, pages 947–956 (2025) Published online: 26 June 2025 Issue Date: August 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s41893-025-01586-w
A luxurious fiber once reserved exclusively for emperors in ancient times has been brought back to life through the scientific ingenuity of Korean researchers. A team led by Professor Dong Soo Hwang (Division of Environmental Science and Engineering / Division of interdisciplinary bioscience & bioengineering, POSTECH) and Professor Jimin Choi (Environmental Research Institute) has successfully recreated a golden fiber, akin to that of 2,000 years ago, using the pen shell (Atrina pectinata) cultivated in Korean coastal waters. This breakthrough not only recreates the legendary sea silk but also reveals the scientific basis behind its unchanging golden color. The study was recently published in the prestigious journal Advanced Materials.
Sea silk—often referred to as the “golden fiber of the sea”—was one of the most prized materials in the ancient Roman period, used exclusively by figures of high authority such as emperors and popes. This precious fiber is made from the byssus threads secreted by Pinna nobilis, a large clam native to the Mediterranean, which uses the threads to anchor itself to rocks. Valued for its iridescent, unfading golden color, light weight, and exceptional durability, sea silk earned its reputation as the “legendary silk.” A notable example is the Holy Face of Manoppello, a relic preserved for centuries in Italy, which is believed to be made from sea silk.
However, due to recent marine pollution and ecological decline, Pinna nobilis is now an endangered species. The European Union has banned its harvesting entirely, making sea silk an artifact of the past—produced only in minuscule quantities by a handful of artisans.
The POSTECH research team turned their attention to the pen shell Atrina pectinata, a species cultivated in Korean coastal waters for food. Like Pinna nobilis, this clam secretes byssus threads to anchor itself, and the researchers found that these threads are physically and chemically similar to those of Pinna nobilis. Building on this insight, they succeeded in processing pen shell byssus to recreate sea silk.
However, their achievement goes beyond mere replication of its appearance. The team also revealed the scientific secret behind sea silk’s distinctive golden hue and its resistance to fading over time.
The golden color of sea silk is not derived from dyes, but from structural coloration—a phenomenon caused by the way light reflects off nanostructures. Specifically, the researchers identified that the iridescence arises from a spherical protein structure called “photonin,” which forms layered arrangements that interact with light to produce the characteristic shine. Similar to the color seen in soap bubbles or butterfly wings, this structure-based coloration is highly stable and does not fade easily over time.
Moreover, the study revealed that the more orderly the protein arrangement, the more vivid the structural color becomes. Unlike traditional dyeing, this color is not applied but instead generated by the alignment of proteins within the fiber, contributing to the material’s remarkable lightfastness over millennia.
Another significant aspect of this research is the upcycling of pen shell byssus, previously discarded as waste, into a high-value sustainable textile. This not only helps reduce marine waste but also demonstrates the potential of eco-friendly materials that carry cultural and historical significance.
Professor Dong Soo Hwang noted, “Structurally colored textiles are inherently resistant to fading. Our technology enables long-lasting color without the use of dyes or metals, opening new possibilities for sustainable fashion and advanced materials.”
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Structurally Colored Sustainable Sea Silk from Atrina pectinata by Jimin Choi, Jun-Hyung Im, Young-Ki Kim, Tae Joo Shin, Patrick Flammang, Gi-Ra Yi, David J. Pine, Dong Soo Hwang. Advanced Materials Volume37, Issue30 July 29, 2025 2502820 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202502820 First published online: 29 April 2025
This is a little bit outside my usual range but the researchers are using some high end equipment for their analyses so I’m using that as an excuse to make an exception.
Caption: Example ceramic drinking cup from the Wari site of Cerro Baúl, Moquegua, Peru that are similar to the sherds included in the Laser Ablation sampling. Credit: Courtesy Cerro Baúl Archaeological Project, photo by P. R. Williams, Catalog number CB-V001.
Peru’s first great empire, the Wari, stretched for more than a thousand miles over the Andes Mountains and along the coast from 600-1000 CE. The pottery they left behind gives archaeologists clues as to how the empire functioned. In a new study in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, researchers showed that rather than using “official” Wari pottery imported from the capital, potters across the empire were creating their own ceramics, decorated to emulate the traditional Wari style. To figure it out, the scientists analyzed the pottery’s chemical make-up, with help from laser beams.
“In this study, we looked at the idea of cosmopolitanism, of incorporating different cultures and practices into a society,” says M. Elizabeth Grávalos, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago and the study’s lead author. “We’re trying to show that potters were influenced by the Wari, but this influence was blended with their own local cultural practices.”
Grávalos says this model of cosmopolitanism is a little like trying to replicate a recipe from another culture, but with a local spin. “If you live in the US and you’re making pad thai at home, you might not have access to all the ingredients that someone living in Thailand would have, so you substitute some things,” she says. “Wari ceramics are a little like that — people throughout the empire were interested in Wari material culture, but they weren’t necessarily getting it directly from the Wari heartland. More often than not, we see local people trying to make their own version of Wari pottery.”
Grávalos and her colleagues led archaeological digs throughout Peru, working with local communities to excavate the thousand-year-old remains of households, tombs, and administrative centers, in search of Wari lifeways. The researchers were then granted permission from Peru’s Ministry of Culture to bring samples of ceramics from their excavations to Chicago for analysis.
Clay from different regions has a different chemical makeup, so studying the ceramics’ chemical makeup could tell the researchers if the pots were produced in different places or if they were all imported from the Wari capital.
“We’d take a tiny piece of a pot and used a laser to cut an even tinier piece, basically extracting a piece of the ceramic’s clay paste,” says Grávalos. “Then helium gas carried it to the mass spectrometer, which measures the elements present in the clay paste.” (The lab set-up didn’t have open laser beams and floating shards of pottery cutting across the room, though — the whole process takes place on a microscopic scale inside a big boxy machine.)
The analysis showed that the pots excavated from distinct regions of Peru have different chemical signatures, and were therefore made with distinct clays. That helps show how the Wari culture spread.
Some empires, like the ancient Romans, took a “top-down” approach to spreading their aesthetic, shipping pottery across the Mediterranean so that people throughout the empire were using the official Roman style. Local potters emulating the traditional Wari style in their own work seems to hint at a more “bottom-up” approach.
“Of course, local people in all empires have some degree of agency and creative control — the only empire that’s truly top-down is the Borg from Star Trek,” says Patrick Ryan Williams, Curator of Archaeological Science and Director of the Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum and the study’s senior author. “Even the Romans had local people doing things their own way. But what we’re finding in this study is the agency of local peoples and the importance of local economies. In some regions, we find that Wari colonists had their own production centers and were recreating Wari lifeways locally. In other areas, we see that local communities made Wari pottery in their own way. I think that’s what’s really important about this study.”
The researchers say that the patterns revealed by this pottery could help explain why the Wari empire was able to thrive for so long. “Local production, even in a cosmopolitan society with lots of far-flung connections, makes a society more resilient,” says Williams. “If you’re entirely dependent on someone far away sending you things you need, you’re extremely vulnerable.”
Beyond the economic lessons that we might learn from the Wari, Grávalos says that the study matters because “this work challenges some of the assumptions we have about how societies work, particularly Indigenous groups who are often misrepresented or left out of broader narratives of world history. There are many people whose stories haven’t been told, and this study shows their resilience and their accomplishments.”
(Matias Careaga) [downloaded from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-made-matchcom-profile-bolivias-loneliest-frog-180968140/]
That is a very soulful look. How could any female Sehuencas water frog resist it? Sadly, that’s the problem. They havn’t found any female Sehuencas water frogs yet.
It’s not for want of trying. Back in February 2018 worldwide interest was raised when scientists as the Cochabamba Natural History Museum (Bolivia) started a campaign to find a mate and raise funds for a search. ( I don’t know how I missed this story the first time. For long time readers, this is my frog story for this year.) From a February 14, 2018 article by Anoop Menon for India.com,
…
Scientists are scouring for a mate for Romeo, who has been calling forth for mates for the last nine years now. But alas, a mate hasn’t been found in the rivers and streams of the Sehuencas water frog’s natural habitat so far. So scientists have decided to make a Match.com profile for the lovelorn frog, according to the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation]. The effort hopes to raise awareness of the condition of the Sehuencas water frog and raise money to fund searches for the Sehuencas water frog in areas where they once thrived.
Romeo’s dating profile reads, “I’m a pretty simple guy. I tend to keep to myself and have the best nights just chilling at home, maybe binge-watching the waters around me. I do love food, though, and will throw a pair of pants on and get out of the house if there’s a worm or snail to be eaten!” His preference is for females between two to three inches tall and is okay with drinkers but not smokers. But honestly, at this point, he should be fine with just about anything.
All jokes aside, Romeo’s plight is an important one. The profile links to the campaign donation page that it is part of, with an aim of raising USD 15,000 to search for more Sehuencas water frogs. And Match.com is doing its part by matching all donations made from February 9 to today, Valentine’s Day.
…
Zoe Schlanger’s February 10, 2018 article for Quartz, in the context of Romeo’s (and the scientists’) quest, offers information about the ‘current state of amphibia’, Note: Links have been removed)
…
As the Earth faces what some experts call its “sixth mass extinction,” amphibians, like frogs, are among the most imperiled. Around half of amphibian species (which includes toads, salamanders, frogs, and newts) are reported to be in decline. A third are considered to be threatened with extinction.
Last year, 10,000 critically endangered “scrotum frogs” that lived in Lake Titicaca on the border between Bolivia and Peru died en masse. In the US, federal scientists say the overall amphibian population is shrinking in size by 3.8% every year. That trend has continued since the 1960s, due to a mix of climate change, pesticide applications, and diseases like infectious fungi which can quickly decimate populations.
Frogs seem to be especially vulnerable. Roughly 74% of frog species globally are in decline, and 80% of the frog species that live in India are threatened, a researcher recently told the Hindustan Times.
Hande Atay Alam‘s February 12, 2018 article for CNN adds a few more details about Romeo and about the effort to save him,
Arturo Munoz [Arturo Muñoz Saravia] , founder of the Bolivian Amphibian Initiative and GWC [Global Wildlife Conservaation] associate conservation scientist, said, “When biologists collected Romeo 10 years ago, we knew the Sehuencas water frog, like other amphibians in Bolivia, was in trouble, but we had no idea we wouldn’t be able to find a single other individual in all this time.”
Romeo started to call for a mate about a year after he was brought into captivity and Munoz pointed out that those calls have slowed in the last few years.
“We don’t want him to lose hope, and we continue to remain hopeful that others are out there, so we can establish a conservation breeding program to save this species,” Munoz said.
Update
They raised almost $25,000 in funds to search for a female but there’s been no luck yet. Sehuencas water frogs live for about 15 years and Romeo has lived in the Cochabamba Natural History Museum for the last nine or 10 years. You do the arithmetic.
Apparently, Sehuencas water frogs were once found in both Ecuador and Bolivia. Today, there are only two regions of Bolivia (Cochabamba and Santa Cruz) where they are reputed to live. (There is more about the current search for a mate in a July 26, 2018 news item on phys.org.)The Sehuencas water frog Wikipedia entry has this to say (Note: Links have been removed),
While it is currently listed as vulnerable by the IUCN [International Union for Conservation of Nature], this is based on an assessment that has not been updated since 2004.[1] No individuals have been encountered in the wild since 2008.
One possibility occurred to me (and I imagine others), if there’s someone out there who has a female Sehuencas water frog in their aquarium at home, please consider saving the species. I’m certain a deal can be made.
Peru’s El Cascajo Lake has undergone a successful nanotechology-enabled remediation technique developed by scientist Marino Morikawa and which he hopes can be used to clean up Lake Titicaca according to a July 6, 2016 news item on news.co.cr,
Peruvian scientist Marino Morikawa, who “revived” polluted wetlands in 15 days using nanotechnology, now plans to try to clean up Lake Titicaca and the Huacachina lagoon, an oasis in the middle of the desert.
El Cascajo, an ecosystem of roughly 50 hectares (123 acres) in Chancay district, located north of Lima, began its recovery in 2010 with two inventions that Morikawa came up with using his own resources and money.
The idea of restoring the wetlands came from a call from Morikawa’s father, who told the scientist that El Cascajo, where they used to go fishing when Marino was a child, “was in very bad condition,” Morikawa told EFE.
Marino Morikawa, who earned a degree in environmental science from Japan’s Tsukuba University, visited the wetlands and found a dump for sewage ringed by an illegal landfill where migratory birds fed.
The stinky swamp was covered by aquatic plants, Morikawa said.
The fifteen day timeline for the cleanup seems to be contradicted in this June 22, 2014 article by Rosana Pinheiro for Agencia Plano (a Latin American news portal) describes the situation at Lake El Cascajo and the nanotechnology in more detail,
Peruvian scientist Marino Morikawa created a cleanse system using nanobubbles to decontaminate lake El Cascajo, located at Chancay district, north of Lima, Peru’s capital. After nearly four years of the start of the project, 90% of the lake waters are recovered, and the place is now visited once again by at least 70 species of migratory birds.
…
The lake was once home to more than a thousand species of migratory birds in the 1990s. …
…
The [nanotechnology-enabled] treatment is done with tiny bubbles, the nanobubbles, a thousand times smaller than the ones we can see in a glass of soda. These bubbles attract bacteria and metals using static charge and then decompose, releasing free radicals which destroy viruses present in water. The process has been recognized by the Commission of Science, Technology and Innovation of the Peruvian Congress.
Biofilters were also deployed to ease the cleaning process of the water. Morikawa divided the wetland area with pieces of bamboo, creating sectors to order the withdrawal of the aquatic weeds.
… At the beginning, in December 2010, he worked alone, making daily visits to the region to develop the project. After some time, he started receiving help from friends, local population and local government.
A few months after the beginning of the treatment, it was possible to see that El Cascajo waters were more crystalline. However, it was only in January 2013 that “a miracle happened” as Morikawa says: Thousands of migratory birds returned to the lake and occupied about 70% of the area, forming a white cover around the water.
Whether this took fifteen days or several months seems less important than the remediation of the wetlands, Lake El Cascajo, the return of the birds, and a better functioning ecosystem. Let’s hope the same success can be enjoyed at Lake Titicaca.
There are more details in both pieces which I encourage you to read in their entirety.
The United Nations (UN) and cultural rights don’t immediately leap to mind when the subjects of copyright and patents are discussed. A Mar. 13, 2015 posting by Tim Cushing on Techdirt and an Oct. 14, 2015 posting by Glyn Moody also on Techdirt explain the connection in the person of Farida Shaheed, the UN Special Rapporteur on cultural rights and the author of two UN reports one on copyright and one on patents.
Shaheed said a “widely shared concern stems from the tendency for copyright protection to be strengthened with little consideration to human rights issues.” This is illustrated by trade negotiations conducted in secrecy, and with the participation of corporate entities, she said.
She stressed the fact that one of the key points of her report is that intellectual property rights are not human rights. “This equation is false and misleading,” she said.
The last statement fires shots over the bows of “moral rights” purveyors, as well as those who view infringement as a moral issue, rather than just a legal one.
Shaheed also points out that the protections being installed around the world at the behest of incumbent industries are not necessarily reflective of creators’ desires. …
There is no human right to patent protection. The right to protection of moral and material interests cannot be used to defend patent laws that inadequately respect the right to participate in cultural life, to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications, to scientific freedoms and the right to food and health and the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities.
Patents, when properly structured, may expand the options and well-being of all people by making new possibilities available. Yet, they also give patent-holders the power to deny access to others, thereby limiting or denying the public’s right of participation to science and culture. The human rights perspective demands that patents do not extend so far as to interfere with individuals’ dignity and well-being. Where patent rights and human rights are in conflict, human rights must prevail.
The report touches on many issues previously discussed here on Techdirt. For example, how pharmaceutical patents limit access to medicines by those unable to afford the high prices monopolies allow — a particularly hot topic in the light of TPP’s rules on data exclusivity for biologics. The impact of patents on seedindependence is considered, and there is a warning about corporate sovereignty chapters in trade agreements, and the chilling effects they can have on the regulatory function of states and their ability to legislate in the public interest — for example, with patent laws.
I have two Canadian examples for data exclusivity and corporate sovereignty issues, both from Techdirt. There’s an Oct. 19, 2015 posting by Glyn Moody featuring a recent Health Canada move to threaten a researcher into suppressing information from human clinical trials,
… one of the final sticking points of the TPP negotiations [Trans Pacific Partnership] was the issue of data exclusivity for the class of drugs known as biologics. We’ve pointed out that the very idea of giving any monopoly on what amounts to facts is fundamentally anti-science, but that’s a rather abstract way of looking at it. A recent case in Canada makes plain what data exclusivity means in practice. As reported by CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] News, it concerns unpublished clinical trial data about a popular morning sickness drug:
Dr. Navindra Persaud has been fighting for four years to get access to thousands of pages of drug industry documents being held by Health Canada.
He finally received the material a few weeks ago, but now he’s being prevented from revealing what he has discovered.
That’s because Health Canada required him to sign a confidentiality agreement, and has threatened him with legal action if he breaks it.
The clinical trials data is so secret that he’s been told that he must destroy the documents once he’s read them, and notify Health Canada in writing that he has done so….
For those who aren’t familiar with it, the Trans Pacific Partnership is a proposed trade agreement including 12 countries (Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam) from the Pacific Rim. If all the countries sign on (it looks as if they will; Canada’s new Prime Minister as of Oct. 19, 2015 seems to be in favour of the agreement although he has yet to make a definitive statement), the TPP will represent a trading block that is almost double the size of the European Union.
An Oct. 8, 2015 posting by Mike Masnick provides a description of corporate sovereignty and of the Eli Lilly suit against the Canadian government.
We’ve pointed out a few times in the past that while everyone refers to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement as a “free trade” agreement, the reality is that there’s very little in there that’s actually about free trade. If it were truly a free trade agreement, then there would be plenty of reasons to support it. But the details show it’s not, and yet, time and time again, we see people supporting the TPP because “well, free trade is good.” …
… it’s that “harmonizing regulatory regimes” thing where the real nastiness lies, and where you quickly discover that most of the key factors in the TPP are not at all about free trade, but the opposite. It’s about as protectionist as can be. That’s mainly because of the really nasty corprorate sovereignty clauses in the agreement (which are officially called “investor state dispute settlement” or ISDS in an attempt to make it sound so boring you’ll stop paying attention). Those clauses basically allow large incumbents to force the laws of countries to change to their will. Companies who feel that some country’s regulation somehow takes away “expected profits” can convene a tribunal, and force a country to change its laws. Yes, technically a tribunal can only issue monetary sanctions against a country, but countries who wish to avoid such monetary payments will change their laws.
Remember how Eli Lilly is demanding $500 million from Canada after Canada rejected some Eli Lilly patents, noting that the new compound didn’t actually do anything new and useful? Eli Lilly claims that using such a standard to reject patents unfairly attacks its expected future profits, and thus it can demand $500 million from Canadian taxpayers. Now, imagine that on all sorts of other systems.
Cultural rights, human rights, corporate rights. It would seem that corporate rights are going to run counter to human rights, if nothing else.
