How Much Can the Seasons Bend Before They Break? | Bats Could Hold the Secret to Better, Longer Human Life | Lawmaking in Britain is becoming worse | Where Was the Actual Ice During the Ice Age?

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� � � � � � How Much Can the Seasons Bend Before They Break? - The Atlantic    In a strip of soil outside my house, between the sidewalk and the curb, there’s a living symbol of the seasons. In winter, it is a sleeping skeleton, branches bare except for the occasional mantle of ice or snow. In early spring, tufts of pale leaves burst from gray bark. By summer, its overlapping foliage is a vivid green, fluttering in the slightest breeze. Around this time every year, it gradually catches fire, tinges of red spreading through the cells of each leaf until they all glow. As the maple tree finishes reabsorbing its stores of chlorophyll and sealing itself against the coming chill, it allows its leaves to fall to the ground—and the cycle continues. The seasons have shaped humanity for millions of years. When our ancestors migrated across continents, dramatic fluctuations in the weather determined what was available to hunt and gather; demanded innovation in clothing, shelter, and transportation; and dictated agricultural practices. Perhaps the long, hard winters of glacial periods encouraged early humans to linger in caves, which became incubators of art and language. Since at least the time of ancient Greece, the four seasons have been a mainstay of Western art and culture. We still organize major holidays around the seasons and celebrate their ephemera, decorating our homes with daffodils, gourds, and simulated snow. And we keep drawing analogies between the progression of the seasons and the life spans of both individuals and empires. In short, we still depend on one of the oldest and most fundamental concepts in the history of human thought: that our environment changes in an orderly way, year after year. Yet the seasons as we know them are warping. Climate change cannot substantially alter Earth’s axial tilt or elliptical orbit, and therefore does not have much effect on the solstices and equinoxes that define the astronomical seasons. But as our species makes the planet hotter, the atmosphere wetter, and weather more extreme and unpredictable, we are starting to experience the four seasons differently. Broadly speaking, climate change is prolonging summer, compressing winter, and weirding every season. From 1952 to 2011, the annual period of warmest weather in the Northern Hemisphere increased from 78 to 95 days, while the stretch of coldest weather decreased from 76 to 73 days. Scientists predict that if climate change continues unabated, then by 2100, the weather we associate with summer will span nearly six months of each year, whereas wintry weather will last less than two. Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Bats Could Hold the Secret to Better, Longer Human Life - The Atlantic    A team of researchers dreams of anti-aging, disease-tempering drugs—all inspired by bats. Wang, a biochemist and zoonotic-disease expert at Duke-NUS Medical School, in Singapore, has no illusions about people flapping about the skies or echolocating to find the best burger in town. The point is “not to live like a bat,” Wang told me, but to take inspiration from their very weird physiology in order to boost the quality, or even the length, of human life. They might not look it, but bats, Wang said, are “the healthiest mammals on Earth.” That thought might be tough to square with bats’ recent track record. In the past three decades—from 1994, when Hendra virus jumped to humans, to 2019, when SARS-CoV-2 emerged—at least half a dozen of the most devastating viral epidemics known to have recently leapt into people from wildlife have had their likeliest origins in bats. But bats themselves rarely, if ever, seem to fall ill. Ebola, Nipah, Marburg, and various coronaviruses don’t appear to trouble them; some bats can survive encounters with rabies, which, left untreated in humans, has a near 100 percent fatality rate. “They’ve evolved mechanisms to limit the damage of disease,” says Emma Teeling, a bat biologist at University College Dublin, who collaborates with Wang. Continued here � � � � � � Lawmaking in Britain is becoming worse - The Economist    When civil servants in Britain first learn about how laws are made, they are given a board game. “Legislate?!” was devised by the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, which drafts government legislation. The players roll dice and move counters as they steer legislation around Whitehall and through Parliament. They turn over cards revealing the hurdles of the system. “Forget to signify Queen’s Consent. Go back 2 spaces.” “New programme motion needed. Miss a turn.” The first player to have their policy become the law of the land wins. As with many family games, much of the procedure that governs Parliament is a product of custom rather than of iron laws. The rules can be bent. Corners can be cut. And that is what is now happening. Parliament’s most vital job is to scrutinise legislation, and it is neglecting it. This is no rubber-stamp body. The bills set out in the King’s Speech on November 7th will not sail through unopposed. Prime Minister’s Questions is as raucous as ever. Rebels still humiliate their leaders in late-night votes. But the theatre of confrontation obscures the fact that MPs spend increasingly little time on fine-bore examination of proposed legislation. Laws are too often driven through Parliament at speed. A swaggering executive at times treats scrutiny as an inconvenience. This is not just constitutionally objectionable. It also has practical costs. This is a story of how the machinery of lawmaking can start to fail, almost unnoticed. Continued here � � � � � � Where Was the Actual Ice During the Ice Age? - The Atlantic    On November 14, 2016, a huge earthquake rocked Kaikōura, a town on New Zealand’s South Island, killing two people, triggering a tsunami, and thrusting stretches of coastline 18 feet up out of the sea. The biologists Ceridwen Fraser and Jon Waters were watching the aftermath on television. “We were seeing images of kelp and [abalone] lifted out of the water and dying,” Waters says. For these two scientists who had spent much of the previous decade looking for evidence of ecological upheaval on the coast, Fraser says, there was only one thing to do: “We got on a plane.” A decade or so earlier, in the mid-2000s, Fraser was a student in Waters’s lab at the University of Otago, in New Zealand. The pair were studying how the genetics of New Zealand bull kelp vary across the Southern Hemisphere, and they noticed something very strange. Continued here

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