Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

Szlia

Szlia

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I can see the moral argument for preserving endangered species (even if it leaves me lukewarm), and I can see the value of biodiversity for science and health/food security, but... why should we care about a large herbivore mammal?
 
iannis

iannis

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This is radio clash tearing up the seven veils
This is radio clash please save us, not the whales

Edit: I mean it's too bad about the rhino and all. But unless you count hotdogs, it's not like I eat rhino meat.
 
Alexzander

Alexzander

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Be it that pseudo-scientific traditional Chinese medicine played a significant role in the extinction of the spices, people in this thread ought to care.
 
Tripamang

Tripamang

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I watched a VICE HBO news episode on the harvesting of Rhino horn. Apparently it's the same material nails and hair are made of, nothing else. It's possible to harvest the material from the Rhino without killing it and there are people trying to change the laws and setup Rhino farms to meet the demand. So in this case the law preventing export is actually causing harm.

The episode showed how they take the horns from the Rhinos and I'll spare the details but jesus christ are the people poaching them savages.
 
Jysin

Jysin

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The episode showed how they take the horns from the Rhinos and I'll spare the details but jesus christ are the people poaching them savages.
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They pretty much just chainsaw them the fuck off, right?
 
iannis

iannis

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Nice one!

It is indeed barbaric as fuck. And it is science news. And it is sad.

But I don't practice oriental medicine, and I don't eat rhino meat. I refuse to feel guilty or indignant about it.

If I have a choice between Chinamen treating their human prisoners better, or Chinamen not drinking Monkey-ball tea instead of rockhard weekend, I'm going for the prisoners thing. And truthfully, neither one is an option anyway.
 
Alexzander

Alexzander

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TCM is responsible for larger and more far-reaching human rights abuses than their prison system. While a small minority of Chinese are ever abused by their "justice" system, most Chinese believe in TCM in the same what religious people believe in God. Fortunes are made off the gullible and it's supported by the government. We think that science literacy is a problem in the US and it is. But holy shit, Chinese people manage a wildly superstitious worldview due to CCP propaganda and fierce nationalism. To make matters worse, it is endorsed to various levels by the WTO/UN and somehow still legal in civilized countries.

What to focus on the US? I'm fine with that too. Alternative medicine ought to be forced to the same standards as, you know, real medicine.
 
Tolan

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Iannis_sl said:
If I have a choice between Chinamen treating their human prisoners better, or Chinamen not drinking Monkey-ball tea instead of rockhard weekend, I'm going for the prisoners thing.
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The solutions to those two problems are interdependent?
 
Chanur

Chanur

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I think we have a responsibility to try and preserve species we are wiping out for no good cause. Picture I took on the San Diego Zoo tour. Fed them from the back of the truck. Placed leaves right in their mouths.
uP7n2RA.jpg
 
hodj

hodj

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Biologists and geologists and paleontologists and the like aren't starting to refer to this period as the Anthropocene for nothing.
 
Alexzander

Alexzander

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On a related note, the Beijing zoo is one of the most depressing tourist spots I've ever encountered. Nothing like watching people throw trash at tigers to see if they can get them to do something. In the States, they'd get kicked out for such behavior; in China, the crowd cheers them on.
 
BrutulTM

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Running Dog_sl

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The strange afterlife of Einstein's brain

...The pathologist who conducted the autopsy, Dr Thomas Harvey, had gone further than simply identifying the cause of death - a burst aorta. He had sawed open Einstein's cranium and removed its celebrated contents.

"He had some big professional hopes pinned on that brain," says Carolyn Abraham, who met Harvey while researching her book Possessing Genius: The Bizarre Odyssey of Einstein's Brain. "I think he had hoped to make a name for himself in medicine in a way that he had been unable to do. And then he comes to work one morning and finds Albert Einstein on his autopsy table."

...Harvey, controversially, took possession of the brain. "Whether he took it for himself, or took it for science - it was hard for people to know which, and that's what put him in the crosshairs for a lot of people," says the journalist Michael Paterniti, who met Harvey near the end of his life. Harvey was not a neurologist, but he promised to marshal the country's greatest specialists to study the brain, and to publish their findings soon. Years passed, however, and no scientific paper emerged. After a while, Einstein's brain was forgotten.

...When Levy pressed Harvey to see some pictures of the brain, a strange look came over the doctor's face. Grinning sheepishly, he stood up, walked behind Levy to the corner of the room, and removed a beer cooler from a stack of cardboard boxes. The bottom box was labelled Costa Cider.

"He reaches in, pulls out these big mason jars," says Levy. "And there was Einstein's brain. It was amazing."
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The strange afterlife of Einstein's brain - BBC News
 
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