Nicola Jones

The skies outside my home near Whistler, BC, are blanketed in smoke from all the fires south of the border. With this constant reminder of forest fires hanging over our heads, I thought I would re-post this piece I co-wrote last year with Mike Flannigan, Director of Canada Wildfire at the University of Alberta, for the Our Future On Earth 2020 report... (to chase down the references, open the PDF linked here). Burning Up Fire on the planet today is different than it has ever been before.16 Climate change is increasing wildfire hazard over the majority of the planet, while a growing human presence is creating more sources of ignition and putting more infrastructure in the path of flames. Policies of fire suppression have made some forests more prone to larger fires. And the intentional clearing of rainforests for agriculture with fire is altering those landscapes forever – and creating deadly smoke. There isn’t necessarily more fire: wildfire activity today is actually less than it was...

I contributed a little to this NY Times package on homeschooling, profiling an old acquaintance from Pemberton we used to know as "super mom". It doesn't get to the heart of if/how we should be homeschooling now, in the coming months... but it's still an interesting read. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/ 08/18/parenting/homeschool- families.html

I don't post all the articles I edit here on this blog, but this one is particularly worth mentioning... Anthropologist Gabriella Soto writes a compelling piece comparing the unknown death count from COVID-19 to the unknown deaths from undocumented migration into the United States, along with the uncounted deaths from systemic racism and police violence. Such miscounts suffer from politics, bureaucracy, and the complex trail of social factors that lie behind the biological causes of death. Worth a read! https://www.sapiens.org/culture/migrant-death-counts/

Obviously I know you have all been waiting for this :) The geek within me is thrilled to see that the new calibrations for radiocarbon dating are now out. Calibration might sound excessively technical, but suffice it to say this pushes back reliable dating of things like bones, sea shells, etc to 55,000 years ago (5000 years further back than previously possible).  https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/recalibration-is-the-biggest-shake-up-in-the-carbon-dating-world-for-seven-years/4012241.article

The pandemic is making our noisy planet quieter for a while... and here's some more notes about that (not written by me). This paper shows that mankind's vibrations, from traffic to football games, has declined by as much as 50% in some spots from January to May: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid19-pandemic-lockdowns-seismic-noise-humans And this report looks at the net impacts of the pandemic, from a reduction in ocean noise to an increase in disposable single-use plastics, on marine life: https://theprovince.com/news/covid-19-ocean-wise-report-looks-at-pandemic-impact-on-marine-life/wcm/f7cc2944-ed57-46aa-afe1-56e9bb5e5926

It has been exactly a year since I stood on stage in Edinburgh to give my TED talk. That talk, on ocean noise pollution, was released on 11 March 2020--the day the WHO declared a pandemic. Back then, this seemed like unfortunate timing. But now the two topics have collided. Read my essay on Medium .

Happy to have helped edit this fascinating piece on bias in animal behaviour studies, in Nature today: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01751-5 Ten years ago, researchers noted that social psychology experiments don't really tell us how people behave; they tell us how Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) people behave, because the vast majority of these studies have been done on WEIRD people from US universities. Now a different set of researchers are highlighting the same problems in animal studies: the animals used in many such studies are STRANGE (see the full piece to get the acronym spelled out). Honeybees learn better in the morning, so how well they do depends on when you test them; pheasants, monkeys, mice, fish and crows may behave differently depending on their genetics, how they were raised, and even their personality (bolder animals may select themselves for study by stepping into traps or into experimental zones). So... anima...