Tag Archives: Scientific American
March 2022 Previews: Scientific American Mind
Astonishing Conscious Mind
Neuroscientists may have discovered the brain regions that give rise to our identity
- By Andrea Gawrylewski |
Human consciousness remains one of the biggest puzzles in science. Indeed, we have made moderate progress on how to measure it but less on how it arises in the first place. And what gives rise to our sense of self? In February we published a special collector’s edition exploring these mysteries and more. This issue’s cover story, by researcher Robert Martone, is a fascinating look at new discoveries on a region of the brain that helps us create a mental picture of our present and future identities (see “How Our Brain Preserves Our Sense of Self”).
Elsewhere in this issue, contributing editor Daisy Yuhas talks with linguist Sarah Frances Phillips about new research illuminating the neurological basis for multilingualism (see “How Brains Seamlessly Switch between Languages”). How the brain both creates our individual reality and enables us to thrive in that reality is nothing short of astonishing.
Covid-19: Review Of Latest Medicines & Treatments
Cover Preview: Scientific American – February 2022
Cover Previews: Scientific American – January 2022
Wildfires: The Alder Creek Giant Sequoia Graveyard
On a dead still November morning in the Sierra Nevada, two researchers walk through a graveyard of giants. Below their feet: a layer of ash and coal. Above their heads: a charnel house of endangered trees.
This is Alder Creek Grove, a once idyllic environment for a majestic and massive specimen: the giant sequoia. It is now a blackened monument to a massive wildfire—and humankind’s far-reaching impact on the environment. But these two researchers have come to do more than pay their respects.
Linnea Hardlund and Alexis Bernal, both of the University of California, Berkeley, are studying the effects of record-breaking fires such as the one that destroyed large swaths of Alder Creek Grove in the hopes that their findings will inform forest management that might preserve giant sequoias for future generations.
So far, those findings are grim: mortality in Alder Creek Grove is near 100 percent. Of the mighty trees that stood watch for thousands of years, only charred skeletons remain. About a century of aggressive fire suppression and a warming, drier climate have created a perfect environment for unprecedented fire.
On August 19, 2020, it came to the Giant Sequoia National Monument. The SQF Complex was two fires—the Castle and Shotgun fires—that burned for more than four months, affecting nearly 175,000 acres. And a preliminary report on the Castle Fire estimated that 10 to 14 percent of all living giant sequoias were destroyed.
Hardlund, who is also at the nonprofit Save the Redwoods League, and Bernal fear that, without scientifically informed intervention, such fires will continue to return to the Sierra Nevada—leaving the once proud guardians of the forest a memory and another casualty of our ecological failure.
