October 16, 2023: Climate misinformation in Texas textbooks, we might someday be able to talk to our pets and what's wrong with our conservation efforts. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Climate Misrepresentation | New science textbooks under consideration for use in Texas classrooms starting in fall 2024 downplay the role of fossil fuels in warming the planet's atmosphere. In some cases the books present the issue as a debate, which could leave students with the misunderstanding that the causes of the climate crisis are also debated by scientists, which they are not. An investigation by Scientific American showed that fossil fuel industry representatives such as the Texas Energy Council, an industry association that primarily represents oil and gas companies, limited the breadth and depth of the state's climate science standards, influencing the language included in the latest textbooks. E&E News reported in spring that the State Board of Education changed its textbook policy to explicitly favor books that emphasize fossil fuels' "positive" aspects.
Why this matters: Texas is among the largest textbook markets in the U.S. Content written with Texan politics—and the state's fossil-fuel industry—in mind winds up in classrooms across the country. And textbooks have a long shelf life, so the approved materials will likely be read by children into the 2030s.
What's next: The Texas State Board of Education is expected to make its final decision about the textbooks at its next meeting, which will take place during the week of November 14. Texas residents can submit written comments on the proposed textbooks until October 30. | | | Machine learning may soon make it possible to decipher things like crow calls, sperm whale vocalizations, or even what our pets are trying to tell us. Artificial-intelligence scientists, biologists and conservation experts are collecting a wide range of data from a variety of animal species and building machine-learning models to analyze them.
How it works: Just as large language models are trained on terabytes of language text data (45 terabytes in the case of ChatGPT-3), animal researchers are feeding recorded animal sounds to AI so that the programs might recognize patterns. One researcher, for example, is using AI to translate our dogs' communications with us–he has discovered that they use multimodal signals, such as a bark combined with a body posture, to communicate, yet we usually miss the physical element. An app using AI could change that.
What the experts say: Aza Raskin, one of the founders of the nonprofit Earth Species Project, suspects we will discover widely shared messages. "It wouldn't surprise me if we discovered [expressions for] 'grief' or 'mother' or 'hungry' across species," he says. After all, the fossil record shows that creatures such as whales have been vocalizing for tens of millions of years. "For something to survive a long time, it has to encode something very deep and very true." | | | • Some people can quickly and easily speak backward (a form of slang in some South American countries, for example). Studies of their brains demonstrate humans' tremendous capacity for language. | 7 min read | | | • Climate change is making saltwater intrusion worse in coastal areas, threatening drinking water and ecosystems. | 5 min read | | | • There is increased pressure on insurance companies to cover weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic, which can cost $1000 a month out-of-pocket. | 9 min read | | | • Most conservation efforts today, whether reintroducing extirpated species or setting protection priorities, generally are based on timescales of a century or less. We need to consider ecosystems over longer timescales--say millennia--in order to truly understand how we might protect or restore them, say Scott D. Sampson and Peter D. Roopnarine, both scientists at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. "In short, what we assume we know about an ecosystem based on the recent past may impede our ability to fully understand and protect it," they say. | 5 min read | | | Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Massey (CC by 4.0) | | | Abell 3827 is a cluster of hundreds of galaxies about 1.3 billion light-years from Earth. Hubble Space Telescope images of the cluster show a bright central quartet of merging galaxies. For all its gleam, only some 10 percent of the cluster's mass is visible. The remaining 90 percent exists in halos of an invisible substance called dark matter—halos so massive that the cluster bends nearby spacetime to act as a giant magnifying glass, which astronomers call a gravitational lens. The wispy, glowing "engagement ring" wrapped around the cluster's center is actually a set of amplified, warped and multiplied apparitions of an aligned, far-distant background galaxy. | | | Researchers who study animal behavior (some of whom are trying to decode their language using AI) have noticed that many creatures besides humans appear to grieve the loss of individuals close to them--their offspring or companions, for example. Read more in this lovely feature by famed animal researcher Barbara J. King. | Reach out any time with your feedback and suggestions for this newsletter: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow! | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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