Restoring coral reefs, how the opioid epidemic hits toddlers, old fossils, a new snakeworm, and why we love those sounds booming-out-a-jeep
Issue #9 of American Journalist
Friday, March 8, 2024
1) The groove is in the art
Something there is that loves a wall of music!**
Our universal love of grooving to a beat and our human passion for music is evident from the fact that you can find festive crescendos thumping through every culture that ever roamed the Earth. Few would argue over music’s universality. What accounts for its ubiquitous appeal? An even more mysterious story is how tastes can vary a lot, even within a single culture—even within a single household!
**Author’s note: For fans of both Robert Frost and the Ronettes, that one’s for you!
Now a group of psychologists and musicologists led by researchers at Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds & Machines has found a common feature of musical cognition that accounts for some of the similarities and differences between musical tastes. Conducting a large-scale cross-cultural study of music perception, they looked at mental representations of music among 39 groups of people from diverse backgrounds in multiple cities and rural parts of 15 countries crisscrossing the continents, from Boston to Botswana to Bolivia to Bulgaria.
They found one common feature of music cognition were discrete signatures of rhythm, which they call “categories.” The rhythmic intervals in music sampled worldwide tended to follow discrete patterns of small-integer ratios. Those ratios tended to vary across groups, often reflecting local taste and musical offerings.
The work provides “unambiguous evidence” that aspects of music cognition are present across cultures, and “it also demonstrates substantial cultural variation linked to culture-specific musical experience,” the researchers write.
In other words, as an American living in the 21st century, it’s OK to love hip-hop and still hate country (sorry Beyoncé!). Nature Human Behavior
2) The opioid epidemic among U.S. toddlers
For the not-faint-of-heart, sobering statistics out of Oregon Health and Science University in Portland this week bring home the scale of the U.S. opioid epidemic. Everybody knows we are in the midst of a slow-moving crisis of synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl. Fatal overdoses have increased 12-fold in the past eight years, and we are reaching a category-5 level crisis of 80,000 Americans dying every year.
But what does this crisis look like among little children?
Using a decade of statistics collected from 2013–2023 by the National Poison Data System, which gathers data from every local poison control center in the United States, the researchers show there has been an explosion of accidental overdose cases among children. They found reported cases of illicit fentanyl exposure in children younger than six increased from 5 in 2013 to 539 in 2023. Most of the children were under age two—and 82 percent of them were exposed to the drugs in their own home. New England Journal of Medicine
3) High hopes for coral reef restoration
According to researchers at the University of Exeter in England, efforts to restore coral reefs can bring them back to a fully recovered state of humming reef growth productivity within four years, which they hope will inspire more reef restoration projects around the world.
Working at the Mars Coral Reef Restoration Program in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, one of the largest restoration projects in the world, the researchers compared rates of carbonate production (a measure of coral growth) at 12 restoration sites. They found that active management at those sites—transplanting corals and adding structural materials to consolidate loose rubble—rapidly brought those coral communities back.
“We found that restored coral reefs can grow at the same speed as healthy coral reefs just four years after coral transplantation,” said study co-author Ines Lange in a statement to the press. Current Biology
To capture a sense of the rich biodiversity we stand to lose when corals die, here’s an illustration from another story on reefs, from researchers at the University of Oxford.
This study looked at 290,000 fossils covering more than 9,200 genera of and other invertebrate ocean critters over the past 485 million years to develop a model to understand what drives the risk of extinction during climate change. Science
4) Eugenics in the New England Journal of Medicine
One of the top medical journals in the world is printing an apologetic accounting today of its role in the international eugenics movement from 1906–1948. In those years, New England Journal of Medicine was part of the problem, giving voice to the racist and dehumanizing policies of the eugenicists, which ranged from immigration restrictions, forced sterilization, and outright murder.
A number of organizations and journals have issued apologies in the last few years—including the American Society of Human Genetics last year. Now in NEJM, a scholar at the Georgia State University College of Law in Atlanta dives deep into that journal’s former complicity and reflects on the lingering legacy of eugenics as reflected in modern views about genetic determinism. Call it “dark eugenics”—modern attitudes that are similar, if not identical, to those embraced by the eugenicists 100 years ago and “are still very much a part of life in the United States today.” New England Journal of Medicine
5) Creature of the week: The deep-sea snakeworm
Is it a snake? Is it a worm? No—it’s a snakeworm—and it’s just about the creepiest crawler we’ve seen all year. Meet mister Pectinereis strickrotti, the newly discovered deep-sea snakeworm, photographed by marine biologists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The feathery appendages of this critter are called parapodia, and they carry the worm’s gills, according to the paper in PLOS ONE describing it.
One thing worth noting is that the worm is named after Bruce Strickrott, the lead pilot for the deep-sea submersible named Alvin, who first spotted the critter in 2009 at a depth of 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) off Costa Rica. He went back in 2018 and captured live snakeworms using a five-chambered vacuum canister called the “slurp gun,” to collect several specimens for study.
6) Show me to the fossil drawer
A collaboration billing itself as “The openVertebrate Thematic Collections Network,” or oVert for short, announced the creation of an open-access database of 3D reconstructions made from CT scans of thousands of amphibians, reptiles, fish, mammals, and other vertebrate species that would otherwise go on collecting dust in the specimen drawers of 18 natural science museums.
OK, maybe not literally collecting dust, since these collections are no doubt housed in high-tech, climate-controlled settings—but you know what we mean. The database is the result of a five-year, $2.5 million initiative funded by the National Science Foundation, and the article and 3D scans are open access and freely available. BioScience
7) How to make your voice heard in policy circles
There are 150,000 professional social scientists in academia, writes a sociologist at Harvard University, but “we often feel locked out of federal policymaking processes.”
In a perspective this week, the sociologist defines the problem and what universities, professors, and policymakers can do to correct them. She argues “both higher education institutions and all levels of government can do more to help academic social scientists put our knowledge to work in service of the public good.” PNAS
8) The worst places to find yourself in prison this summer: Texas and Florida!
Finally, researchers at Montana State University in Bozeman and Columbia University in New York City are sounding warnings of heat-related health risks to people imprisoned in the United States. They looked at 4,078 U.S. prisons over the past 40 years and showed that the number of hot days per year increased from 1982–2020 for 42 percent of them—especially in southern states.
By far the worst offenders were Florida and Texas. In 2018, their state-run facilities housed 12 percent of all U.S. prisoners—145,240 people in Texas and 98,941 people in Florida. But together they accounted for 52 percent of total exposure to hazardous heat conditions, which they define as indoor temperatures exceeding 28°C (83° F).
More work is needed show exactly how vulnerable the U.S. prison population really is and how to mitigate the threat. “Doing so is critical to environmental justice,” the researchers say, “particularly for incarcerated people with limited social and political agency. Nature Sustainability