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Without further ado, here’s what’s on deck this week:
🦁 An AI tool to understand animal language
🖼️ New art at The Broad in Los Angeles
🎨 What a french painter reveals about TikTok’s “microfeminism”
But first, here’s a closer look at what’s been going on around the world in the last week or so:
Kelly Kimball for Frame. // Wikimedia Commons
50,000 — The amount of extra calories pregnant people need to eat in order to carry a pregnancy to term, according tonew research published last week in the journal Science. For those who prefer this in snackable terms: It’s the equivalent of roughly 7.5 40 ounce jars of peanut butter, 943 Oreos, or 357 cans of Coca Cola. This research is a true breakthrough, because pregnancy studies throughout the years have garnered a deep understanding of the energy that a baby in uteroalready has, but not necessarily the energy expended by the pregnant parent to nurture them.
115 — The number of charges against Manchester City issued by the Premier League in February 2023 due to alleged breaches of financial rules between 2009 to 2018. The British football club clinched the Premier League title on Sunday for the fourth consecutive year (a first in Premier League history). The team, owned by Emirati royal and politician Sheikh Mansour, may face a Premier League trial later this year, which could fine the club, deduct points from them, or even expel them from the league (that last part would be unlikely, though).
Full list of charges against Manchester City by Premier League. // Source: givemesport.com
11x — The increase in Airbnb listing page views compared to last year of listings located in the French cities that will be hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games this summer, according to the homestay company. Sport fans worldwide have taken to the website to secure housing for the international event, making Paris the #1 most searched city on Airbnb worldwide — with cities like Lille, Versailles, and Lyon also trending.
90+ — The number of wildfires currently burning across Canada as of Sunday, according to Dave Phillips, the senior climatologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada. Last June, the Northeast region of the United States was overcome by ominous yellow skies due to Canada’s record-breaking 200+ wildfires in 2023. But experts warn that yearly mega-wildfires — and its ensuing hazy skies — may become the new normal. A Harvard University senior research fellow, Loretta Mickley, told Gothamist that by 2050 the overall fire activity in Quebec is expected to double, meaning a “greater risk of more large smoke events for the Eastern U.S.”
Why isn’t the world banding together to dial back the needle on this trend? I dove into that question for Heatmap News last year.
A May 21, 2024 screenshot of active wildfires. Yellow denotes “high” fire danger. Brown denotes “very high” fire danger, and red denotes “extreme” fire danger. // Source: Canadian Wildland Fire Information System
2080 — The year that the United States’ population may begin to decline unless immigration increases, according to new U.S. Census Bureau projections released last week. The downward trend may “profoundly reshape the economy and alter society,” Jacob Knutson writes in Axios. But how? Consistently, population research experts have found that immigration could be the largest contributor to population growth, which in turn is an engine for economic growth. Other experts say that population decline is needed in order to prevent the worst of climate change.
And now onto the main course: By now we’ve seen the uncanny valley that generative AI has wrought. From Willy Wonka hellscapes, to creepy hands, and a robot named Sofia who wants to destroy us all. Recently though, I came across a use for generative AI that has me genuinely excited: Understanding the language of animals.
Researchers are building new AI-driven tool that may transform our understanding of the how the animal kingdom communicates. AI scientists, biologists, and conservation experts in organizations like Earth Species Project and the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) are collecting a wide range of data from a variety of species and building machine-learning models to analyze them.
In the case of Earth Species Project, they’ve built a roadmap vetted by biologists and conservationists to establish patterns in animal communication that will “ultimately allow for the creation of new signals that carry meaning and unlock two-way communication with another species,” according to their website.
A pod of sperm whales socializing in the Atlantic Ocean // Source: Will Falcon aka Vitaly Sokol/Wikimedia Commons
Researchers involved with both projects have trepidations about us actually starting to communicate with animals. If humans get to a point where they could play out recordings of AI-generated communications to animals, will it negatively impact their evolutionary development?
“Humans have been passing down culture vocally for maybe 300,000 years. Whales and dolphins have been passing down culture vocally for 34mn,” [co-founder of Earth Species Project Aza Raskin] explains. If researchers start emitting AI-synthesised whalesong into the mix “we may create like a viral meme that infects a 34mn-year-old culture, which we probably shouldn't do.” — Financial Times
“The last thing any of us want to do is be in a scenario where we look back and say, like Einstein did, ‘If I had known better I would have never helped with the bomb,’” says [Biology Lead for Project CETI Shane] Gero. — Financial Times
What do you think?
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On Thursday, May 23 — Kenyan President William Ruto visits the White House, following a pit stop in Atlanta, to talk about quelling gang-led unrest in Haiti, among other topics. Last November, Kenya volunteered to lead the mission to fight violence in Haiti by agreeing to send 1,000 police officers to the state amid its humanitarian, political and security crisis. But opposition groups and its Supreme Court stalled the process — until recently. Any day now, the first wave of Kenyan police forces may finally touch down at Port-au-Prince to assist local authorities with tamping down on gang violence that has overtaken the country. We’ve covered the unrest in Haiti before. You can take a peak at that here and here.
Any day now — NASA will launch its PREFIRE mission, AKA the “Polar Radiant Energy in the Far InfraRed Experiment.” The effort aims to more deeply understand some major unknowns in climate change research: How much heat is being released from the Earth’s Arctic and Antarctic poles, and what does this reveal about global warming, sea ice loss, ice sheet melt, and sea level rise? The main characters gathering this data are two tiny satellites hovering high above each pole that will capture information about the radiant energy emitted by Earth.
On Saturday May 25 — The African American artist Mickalene Thomas opens her art exhibition, “All About Love”, at The Broad in Los Angeles. Thomas cut her teeth producing vibrant works of art centered on Black women. (A great example of her work is shown below, from the artist’s Instagram account.) Her latest showcase, inspired by the feminist author bell hook’s book of the same name, boasts over 80 pieces that celebrate “Black female representation … centered on the theme of love as a tool for healing.”
Also on Saturday, May 25 — U.S. diplomat and Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues Julie Turner finishes up her five-day trip to South Korea. Her main goal while there is to connect at a policy level with relatives of abductees, detainees, and un-repatriated POWs from North Korea. North Korea has had human rights-related sanctions pressed upon it by a number of countries, including the United States, due to its ongoing mistreatment of its citizens amid its multi-generational totalitarian and hyper-isolationist rule. Turner’s visits hope to shine a light on the ongoing yet underreported “plight of families of [South Korean] citizens abducted and detained by the DPRK, as well as issues of family separation created by the DPRK’s policies,” a State Department memo says.
In recent months, women on TikTok have started sharing small acts of feminism they practice but normally never talk about. They’re calling these acts microfeminism, with the hashtag now appearing on millions of videos on the platform.
Examples of these small gestures include addressing a woman first in an email (e.g. Hi Rebecca, Will, and Arjun), assuming that someone in a position of power is a woman if you don’t know their gender (e.g. “Could you get in contact with their CEO?” “Yes, I’ll reach out to her.”), not using exclamation points in an email in order to be more assertive, and going for a handshake instead of a hug.
Here’s one of the microfeminism videos that went viral on TikTok in April:
These small acts that encourage people to question their assumptions around gender and adjust gender norms that uphold patriarchal thoughts and behaviors have existed a lot longer than the microfeminism trend on TikTok (think the 19th century French painter Rosa Bonheur who uncharacteristically for her time wore pants). But the social platform, with its ability to upload first-person video testimonials that whoosh to billions of users around the world, is further popularizing these small acts and increasing their visibility in the public consciousness.
The painter Rosa Bonheur in her atelier. painted by George-Achille Fould. // 1893 // Source: Wikimedia Commons
One TikTok user who is credited with making the term go viral, producer and host Ashley Chaney, said this about microfeminism in an interview with Glamour:
“I like that somehow we’ve all created this secret pact that we weren't even saying out loud, to take these little tiny micro moments of support for women … And it's beautiful to see. I certainly can't say it's original thought or action, but it might be the first time it's been voiced in a way that we can all go, ‘Oh, there's a name for that.’”
— Ben
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