Human-Made Stuff Now Outweighs All Life on Earth

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December 09, 2020

Dear Reader, How does your body produce your voice? And can you tell the difference between a machine voice and a human one? Watch our video to find out. Next, experts have warned that a "new normal" is settling over the Arctic. Temperatures in the region are currently rising at least twice as fast as the global average. Also, humanity has reached a new milestone in its dominance of the planet: human-made objects may now outweigh all of the living beings on Earth. Today's lead story has the details.

Sunya Bhutta, Senior Editor, Audience Engagement @sunyaaa

EARTH Human-Made Stuff Now Outweighs All Life on Earth The sheer scale of buildings, infrastructure and other anthropogenic objects underscores our impact on the planet By Stephanie Pappas

Evolution Pterosaur Origins Flap into Focus Fossils of small, delicate animals may reveal the early history of gigantic flying reptiles By Riley Black

EARTH Three Signs a 'New Arctic' Is Emerging Record wildfires, dwindling sea ice and ecosystem disruptions all point to the rapid change besetting the region By Chelsea Harvey,E&E News

Biology Electricity-Carrying Bacteria Lead to New Applications--and New Questions As researchers develop sensors and other devices based on conductive microbes' nanowires, they continue to debate exactly how the organisms conduct electricity By Sophie Bushwick

Artificial Intelligence Is Now Shockingly Good At Sounding Human Can you tell the difference between a human voice and the voice of a machine? By Meghan McDonough

Behavior & Society What Motivates COVID Rule Breakers? The answer turns out to be complicated By Jocelyn Bélanger,Pontus Leander

Space Asteroid Dust from Hayabusa2 Could Solve a Mystery of Planet Creation The enigmatic origins of chondrules—tiny inclusions in most meteorites—may be revealed at last, thanks in part to pristine material returned to Earth from asteroid Ryugu By Jonathan O'Callaghan

Policy & Ethics In Case You Missed It Top news from around the world By Sarah Lewin Frasier

FROM THE STORE Ask the Experts: Physics and Math Scientific American's  "Ask the Experts" column has been answering reader questions for nearly two decades. Now, we've combed through our archives and compiled some of the most interesting entries into a series of eBooks organized by subject. In the first of the series – Physics and Math – professors and researchers tackle a wide range of natural phenomena and mathematical concepts from what is antimatter to applications of game theory to what we know about tachyons.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY "In the next 20 years, we will get as much waste as from the last 110 years together. Most of what we have now has been built in the last couple of decades, since the 1960s. Now this is becoming end-of-life, so we are really facing huge, huge waste flows." Fridolin Krausmann, the Institute of Social Ecology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna

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