Above, Lars Schmitz, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, guides us “through a giant tree of life mapping the evolution of eyes in the animal kingdom: how they work, why they’ve taken the form they have, and the evolutionary advantages they’ve unlocked across species.” The video comes courtesy of Wired. It’s 36 minutes and downright fascinating.
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I mean, the idea that you would give a psychedelic—in this case, magic mushrooms or the chemical called psilocybin that’s derived from magic mushrooms—to people dying of cancer, people with terminal diagnoses, to help them deal with their — what’s called existential distress. And this seemed like such a crazy idea that I began looking into it. Why should a drug from a mushroom help people deal with their mortality?
Around the same time Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD in the early 1940s, a pioneering ethnobotanist, writer, and photographer named Richard Evan Schultes set out “on a mission to study how indigenous peoples” in the Amazon rainforest “used plants for medicinal, ritual and practical purposes,” as an extensive history of Schultes’ travels notes. “He went on to spend over a decade immersed in near-continuous fieldwork, collecting more than 24,000 species of plants including some 300 species new to science.”
Described by Jonathan Kandell as “swashbuckling” in a 2001 New York Times obituary, Schultes was “the last of the great plant explorers in the Victorian tradition.” Or so his student Wade Davis called him in his 1995 bestseller The Serpent and the Rainbow. He was also “a pioneering conservationist,” writes Kandell, “who raised alarms in the 1960’s—long before environmentalism became a worldwide concern.” Schultes defied the stereotype of the colonial adventurer, once saying, “I do not believe in hostile Indians. All that is required to bring out their gentlemanliness is reciprocal gentlemanliness.”
Schultes returned to teach at Harvard, where he reminded his students “that more than 90 tribes had become extinct in Brazil alone over the first three-quarters of the 20th century.” While his research would have significant influence on figures like Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, and Carlos Castaneda, “writers who considered hallucinogens as the gateways to self-discovery,” Schultes was dismissive of the counterculture and “disdained these self-appointed prophets of an inner reality.”
Described onAmazon as “a nontechnical examination of the physiological effects and cultural significance of hallucinogenic plants used in ancient and modern societies,” the book covers peyote, ayahuasca, cannabis, various psychoactive mushrooms and other fungi, and much more. In his introduction, Schultes is careful to separate his research from its appropriation, dismissing the term “psychedelic” as etymologically incorrect and “biologically unsound.” Furthermore, he writes, it “has acquired popular meanings beyond the drugs or their effects.”
Schultes’ interests are scientific—and anthropological. “In the history of mankind,” he writes, “hallucinogens have probably been the most important of all the narcotics. Their fantastic effects made them sacred to primitive man and may even have been responsible for suggesting to him the idea of deity.” He does not exaggerate. Schultes’ research into the religious and medicinal uses of natural hallucinogens led him to dub them “plants of the gods” in a book he wrote with Albert Hofmann, discoverer of LSD.
Neither scientist sought to start a psychedelic revolution, but it happened nonetheless. Now, another revolution is underway—one that is finally revisiting the science of ethnobotany and taking seriously the healing powers of hallucinogenic plants. It is hardly a new science among scholars in the West, but the renewed legitimacy of research into hallucinogens has given Schultes’ research new authority. Learn from him in his Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants online here.
Pierre-Joseph Redouté made his name by painting flowers, an achievement impossible without a meticulousness that exceeds all bounds of normality. He published his three-volume collection Les Roses and his eight-volume collection Les Liliacées between 1802 and 1824, and a glance at their pages today vividly suggests the painstaking nature of both his process for not just rendering those flowers, but also for seeing them properly in the first place. While Redouté’s works have long been available free online, the digital forms in which they’ve been available haven’t quite done them justice — certainly not to the mind of designer and data artist Nicholas Rougeux.
Hence Rougeux’s decision to undertake a restoration of Les Roses and Les Liliacées, an “opportunity to become intimately familiar with his techniques and develop a deeper appreciation for his efforts.” The project ended up demanding eleven months, only some of which were taken up by bringing the original colors back to Redouté’s paintings, which “not only depict the physical characteristics of the roses but also convey their delicate beauty and fragrance.” Rougeux also had to digitally re-create the reading experience of these books for the internet, custom-designing a digital gallery for viewing their roses and lilies as they pop out against their newly added dark backgrounds.
Placing all of Redouté’s flowers against those backgrounds entailed the real Photoshop labor, taking each image and “making the layer mask manually by carefully and slowly tracing along every edge” — for all 655 plates of Les Roses and Les Liliacées, as Rougeux writes in a detailed making-of blog post. “No matter the complexity, I traced every flower, every leaf, every stem, every root, and every hair to preserve all the details and ensure that Redouté’s hard work looked as good on a dark background as it did on a light one.” Translating art from one medium to another can be a supremely effective way to cultivate a full appreciation of the artist’s skill — and in this case, a no less full appreciation of his patience. See the online restoration of Les Roses et Les Liliacées here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Since the Victorian era, Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” has been, for generation upon generation in the English-speaking world, the kind of poem that one simply knows, whether one remembers actually having read it or not. As with most such works that seep so permanently into the culture, it doesn’t quite represent its author in full. Though more or less of a piece with his celebrated “nonsense” verse (which I myself read in childhood, more than a century after its initial publication), it hints only vaguely at his intense artistic engagement with the natural world, through the observation and lively portrayal of which he made his name as an illustrator.
“Lear was an attentive and informed reader of Darwin; he worked with John Gould, the natural-history entrepreneur who had actually picked apart the varieties of finch that Darwin had brought back from the Galápagos Islands,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, noting that his work evidences a Linnaean obsession “with the power of naming, with sticking a tag on a thing which gives it a place at, and on, the table.” Lear gave Latin names to at least two real species of parrots, but he also fabricated such chimeras as Phattfacia Stupenda, Armchairia Comfortabilis, Tigerlilia Terribilis, examples of which he also illustrates in his Nonsense Botany series of the eighteen-seventies.
Lear’s “penchant for the natural world,” says The Dilettante, shaped his “knack for inventing ridiculous landscapes and anthropomorphizing all kind of creatures and objects. The result is a surreal Learean world of Scroobious Pips, Quangle Wangles, and Great Gromboolian Plains.” His “fanciful re-sculpting of the physical world is brilliantly exemplified” in his Nonsense Botany, with its “sketches and entertaining captions read as a taxonomy of incongruous plant-creatures.” Whether at the Public Domain Review or Project Gutenberg, you can gaze upon them all and experience not just light amusement, but also a kind of astonishment at Lear’s peculiar talent: he doesn’t “find the amazing in the ordinary,” as Gopnik puts it; “he finds the ordinary in the amazing.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Judging by how certain American cities smell these days, you’d think cannabis was invented last week. But that spike in enthusiasm, as well as in public indulgence, comes as only a recent chapter in that substance’s very long history. In fact, says the presenter of the PBS Eons video above, humanity began cultivating it “in what’s now China around 12,000 years ago. This makes cannabis one of the single oldest known plants we domesticate,” even earlier than “staples like wheat, corn, and potatoes.” By that time scale, it wasn’t so long ago — four millennia or so — that the lineages used for hemp and for drugs genetically separated from each other.
The oldest evidence of cannabis smoking as we know it, also explored in the Science magazine video below, dates back 2,500 years. “The first known smokers were possibly Zoroastrian mourners along the ancient Silk Road who burned pot during funeral rituals,” a proposition supported by the analysis of the remains of ancient braziers found at the Jirzankal cemetery, at the foot of the Pamir mountains in western China. “Tests revealed chemical compounds from cannabis, including the non-psychoactive cannabidiol, also known as CBD” — itself reinvented in our time as a thoroughly modern product — and traces of a THC byproduct called cannabinol “more intense than in other ancient samples.”
What made the Jirzankal cemetery’s stash pack such a punch? “The region’s high altitude could have stressed the cannabis, creating plants naturally high in THC,” writes Science’s Andrew Lawler. “But humans may also have intervened to breed a more wicked weed.” As cannabis-users of the sixties and seventies who return to the fold today find out, the weed has grown wicked indeed over the past few decades. But even millennia ago and half a world away, civilizations that had incorporated it for ritualistic use — or as a medical treatment — may already have been agriculturally guiding it toward greater potency. Your neighborhood dispensary may not be the most sublime place on Earth, but at least, when next you pay it a visit, you’ll have a sound historical reason to cast your mind to the Central Asian steppe.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
From The Florida Museum of Natural History comes the openVertebrate project, a new initiative to “provide free, digital 3D vertebrate anatomy models and data to researchers, educators, students and the public.” Introducing the new project (otherwise known as oVert), the museum writes:
Between 2017 and 2023, oVert project members took CT scans of more than 13,000 specimens, with representative species across the vertebrate tree of life. This includes more than half the genera of all amphibians, reptiles, fishes and mammals. CT scanners use high-energy X‑rays to peer past an organism’s exterior and view the dense bone structure beneath. Thus, skeletons make up the majority of oVert reconstructions. A small number of specimens were also stained with a temporary contrast-enhancing solution that allowed researchers to visualize soft tissues, such as skin, muscle and other organs.
The models give an intimate look at internal portions of a specimen that could previously only be observed through destructive dissection and tissue sampling.
In the coming years, the openVertebrate team will “CT scan 20,000 fluid-preserved specimens from U.S. museum collections, producing high-resolution anatomical data for more than 80 percent of vertebrate genera.” The project will also make digital images and 3D mesh files available to download and 3D print.
The video below provides a short, visual introduction to the digital collection. You can learn more about the project here.
The nature documentary series Our Planetopens with a startlingly stark observation courtesy of broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, and author Sir David Attenborough:
Just 50 years ago, we finally ventured to the moon…
Since then, the human population has more than doubled…
(and) In the last 50 years, wildlife populations have, on average, declined by 60 percent.
The twelve-episode series, narrated by Attenborough, is the result of a four-year collaboration between Netflix, Silverback Films and the World Wildlife Fund. The creators aren’t shy that it’s a race to beat the clock:
For the first time in human history, the stability of nature can no longer be taken for granted.
Rather than take viewers on a doom scroll of global proportions, they cultivate their conservationist impulses with gorgeous, never-before-filmed views of ice caps, deep ocean, deserts and distant forests.
The high def footage of the multitudinous creatures inhabiting these realms is even more of a hook.
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Whether the frame is filled by a Philippine eagle chick, a herd of migrating elephants, a hunting Bengal tiger or a male orchid bee perfuming himself to better his chances of attracting a mate, Our Planet’s non-human stars are consistently captivating.
Some of the footage speaks directly to the hardships these creatures are experiencing as the result of climate change, dwindling habitats, and other havoc wreaked by our species.
Field producer Ed Charles said Attenborough remarked that the plight of a starving polar bear and her cubs paddling around the Arctic Ocean in search of food was “a real heartbreaker, and that it would capture people’s imaginations:”
This mother and her cubs should have been hunting on the ice, even broken ice. That’s where they’re supremely adapted to be, but we found them in water that was open for as far as the eye could see. That’s the reality of the world they live in today. Nature can be brutal. But to see this family with the cub, struggling due to no fault of their own, it makes it very hard.
Given how many non-human creatures’ fates hinge on human action, and the filmmakers’ goal of helping us “truly understand why nature matters to us all, and what we can do to save it, (so) we can create a future where nature and people thrive”, it’s awfully sporting of Netflix to bring the series out from behind its subscription paywall.
The first season can currently be enjoyed for free on YouTube here.
Not that we adults should sit back and wait for the younger generation to bail us out of this seemingly insoluble mess.
Our Planet’s website shares ways in which all of us can take an active role in saving and restoring precious parts of the planet our species has nearly destroyed.
Again, it’s better than doom scrolling.
Consider our remaining jungles and rainforests, “a natural ally in the fight against climate change” due to the incredible diversity of life they harbor.
They help regulate global weather, cool the planet by reflecting the sun’s heat, generate and send out vast amounts of water, and remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Attenborough points out that humans have cleared jungle and forest sufficient to meeting all future human demand for food and timber. The trick will be learning how to use this previously cleared land more efficiently while practicing environmental stewardship.
Individuals can start by educating themselves and hold themselves to a high standard, refusing to buy any item whose production is tied to deforestation.
Governments can offer financial incentives to companies with a proven commitment to using this land in thoughtful, ecologically sustainable ways.
Rather than succumb to overwhelming despair, take heart from innovators breathing new life into a deforested part of Brazil seven times the size of the United Kingdom.
Ecological concerns did not seem nearly so pressing when vast amounts of rain forest once occupying this land were cleared in order to pasture cattle. A lack of foresight and sustainable practices led it to become so degraded it could no longer support grazing.
(Cattle aside, birds, insects, mammals, plants and other former inhabitants were also SOL.)
Rather than cut down more precious jungle, trailblazing environmental visionaries are promoting regeneration with native seedlings, planting fast-growing, super-efficient crops, and restoring the jungle adjacent to growing areas as a form of natural pesticide.
That provides a glimmer of hope, right?
The 97-year-old Attenborough can even get on board with ecotourism, a risky move given how a large carbon footprint can translate to a dim public view.
Perhaps he’s banking that first-hand encounters with wonders once encountered only in documentaries could help keep the planet spinning long after we’re no longer here to bear witness.
Watch the first season of Our Planet for free here.
Early in the 20th century, crowds flocked to New York City’s Coney Island, where wonders awaited at every turn.
In 1902, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle published a few of the highlights in store for visitors at Coney Island’s soon-to-open “electric Eden,” Luna Park:
…the most important will be an illustration of Jules Verne’s ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’, which will cover 55,000 square feet of ground, and a naval spectatorium, which will have a water area of 60,000 square feet. Beside these we will have many novelties, including the River Styx, the Whirl of the Town, Shooting the White Horse Rapids, the Grand Canyon, the ’49 Mining Camp, Dragon Rouge, overland and incline railways, Japanese, Philippine, Irish, Eskimo and German villages, the infant incubator, water show and carnival, circus and hippodrome, Yellowstone Park, zoological gardens, performing wild beasts, sea lions and seals, caves of Capri, the Florida Everglades and Mont Pelee, an electric representation of the volcanic destruction of St. Pierre.
Hold up a sec…what’s this about an infant incubator? What kind of name is that for a roller coaster!?
As it turns out, amid all the exotica and bedazzlements, a building furnished with steel and glass cribs, heated from below by temperature-controlled hot water pipes, was one of the boardwalk’s leading attractions.
Antiseptic-soaked wool acted as a rudimentary air filter, while an exhaust fan kept things properly ventilated.
The real draw were the premature babies who inhabited these cribs every summer, tended to round the clock by a capable staff of white clad nurses, wet nurses and Dr. Martin Couney, the man who had the ideas to put these tiny newborns on display…and in so doing, saved thousands of lives.
Couney, a breast feeding advocate who once apprenticed under the founder of modern perinatal medicine, obstetrician Pierre-Constant Budin, had no license to practice.
Initially painted as a child-exploiting charlatan by many in the medical community, he was as vague about his background as he was passionate about his advocacy for preemies whose survival depended on robust intervention.
Having presented Budin’s Kinderbrutanstalt — child hatchery — to spectators at 1896’s Great Industrial Exposition of Berlin, and another infant incubator show as part of Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee Celebration, he knew firsthand the public’s capacity to become invested in the preemies’ welfare, despite a general lack of interest on the part of the American medical establishment.
Thusly was the idea for the boardwalk Infantoriums hatched.
As word of Couney’s Infantorium spread, parents brought their premature newborns to Coney Island, knowing that their chances of finding a lifesaving incubator there was far greater than it would be in the hospital. And the care there would be both highly skilled and free, underwritten by paying spectators who observed the operation through a glass window. Prentice notes that “Couney took in babies from all backgrounds, regardless of race or social class:”
… a remarkably progressive policy, especially when he started out. He did not take a penny from the parents of the babies. In 1903 it cost around $15 (equivalent to around $405 today) a day to care for each baby; Couney covered all the costs through the entrance fees.
The New Yorker’s A. J. Lieblingobserved Couney at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, where he had set up in a pink-and-blue building that beckoned visitors with a sign declaring “All the World Loves a Baby:”
The backbone of Dr. Couney’s business is supplied by the repeaters. A repeater becomes interested in one baby and returns at intervals of a week or less to note its growth. Repeaters attend more assiduously than most of the patients’ parents, even though the parents get in on passes. After a preemie graduates, a chronic repeater picks out another one and starts watching it. Dr. Couney’s prize repeater, a Coney Island woman named Cassatt, visited his exhibit there once a week for thirty-six seasons. Repeaters, as one might expect, are often childless married people, but just as often they are interested in babies because they have so many children of their own. “It works both ways,” says Dr. Couney, with quiet pleasure.
It’s estimated that Couney’s incubators spared the lives of more than 6,500 premature babies in the United States, London, Paris, Mexico and Brazil.
Despite his lack of bonafides, a number of pediatricians who toured Couney’s infantoriums were impressed by what they saw, and began referring patients whose families could not afford to pay for medical care. Many, as Liebling reported in 1939, wished his boardwalk attraction could stay open year round, “for the benefit of winter preemies:”
In the early years of the century no American hospital had good facilities for handling prematures, and there is no doubt that every winter many babies whom Dr. Couney could have saved died. Even today it is difficult to get adequate care for premature infants in a clinic. Few New York hospitals have set up special departments for their benefit, because they do not get enough premature babies to warrant it; there are not enough doctors and nurses experienced in this field to go around. Care of prematures as private patients is hideously expensive. One item it involves is six dollars a day for mother’s milk, and others are rental of an incubator and hospital room, oxygen, several visits a day by a physician, and fifteen dollars a day for three shifts of nurses. The New York hospitals are making plans now to centralize their work with prematures at Cornell Medical Center, and probably will have things organized within a year. When they do, Dr. Couney says, he will retire. He will feel he has “made enough propaganda for preemies.”
Listen to a StoryCorps interview with Lucille Horn, a 1920 graduate of Couney’s Coney Island incubators below.
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