Tea Leaves LA

Primate Uprising Update:

Meet Kanzi. He’s a bonobo, a species in the Great Ape family that was previously known as the pygmy chimpanzee. Scientists who study primates know that apes and chimpanzees often use twigs and leaves for tools, but Kanzi is going one step further into “human” territory.

He can make a fire. He gathers kindling, breaks it up, strikes a match, then cooks some food over the open flame.

They’ve mastered fire, ladies and gentlemen. Prepare to walk out your front door one day to see cigarette-smoking chimps driving cars down your street. It’s coming.

It’s Stuff Like This That Will Cause the Rise of the Apes

Scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Center have created the world’s first chimeric monkeys. Three healthy rhesus monkeys were born recently, each created by “gluing” embryonic stem cells from several different genome types together. The cells didn’t fuse —as scientists predicted would happen, based on chimeric mice experiments— but instead worked together to form a normal, healthy monkey fetus.

The experiment provides valuable insight into the limitations of stem cell therapy, especially methods that could eventually be used on humans. Even so, the “success” of producing genetically-altered monkeys sets a dangerous precedent for the human race’s stance on bioethics. Should we continue playing God by creating hybrid monkeys? Altering the genes of mice is one thing, but messing with our closest relatives might not be the best idea.

If the primates do rise up, I hope they like reading about themselves on Tumblr. I really want to make it clear that I’m against manipulating and creating hybrid primates, and I’m totally on their side. Go Team Primate.

WHAT’S FOR DINNER IN 2030? YOUR NEIGHBORS!

In a dystopian future, the citizens of Earth must suffer the consequences of pollution and climate change as the oceans die and the hot climate scorches the once-fruitful soil. Survival becomes a daily struggle as food shortages, overpopulation, poverty and war plague the world.

That’s basically the setup for the early 70’s B sci-fi movie, Soylent Green. The film is most famous for Charlton Heston’s final line of the film: Soylent Green is PEOPLE! In order to control the population and feed the Earth’s inhabitants, the government serves up human corpses, cleverly disguised as a “high-energy plankton” wafer.

Soylent Green is set in 2022, a mere eleven years away from the year we currently inhabit. It’s eerie how accurate the Soylent Green dystopia has come to be. Overpopulation, climate change and poverty are very real and serious problems that leaders of the world are presently trying to solve. 

In 2008, Thomas Fingar, then-chairman of the National Intelligence Council, predicted global citizens will be faced with insurmountable food shortages, droughts and political upheaval by the year 2025. He and many colleagues believe developing nations will be hit the hardest, like South Asia and southern Africa. Experts expect to see large migrations away from areas devoid of clean water and fruitful crop fields. 

Stanford University’s David Lobell and colleagues have attempted to create a strategy that would lessen the effects of the impending climate changes. They suggest cultivating drought-resistant crops and spending more money on current seeds and fertilizer. 

Agronomist Tom Sinclair believes the biggest worry is the water scarcity that some countries, like China, are already experiencing. Scientists and world leaders must work fast in order to prevent mass hysteria and chaos that looms within the next two decades. 

It isn’t that far-fetched to think the global powers might entertain the idea of sustaining a population by feeding them the bodies of those who have died. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that it doesn’t come to that. 

Çatalhöyük is one of the largest Neolithic settlements archaeologists have ever discovered. It was found in the 1950s by James Mellaart in modern-day Turkey. The site was abandoned shortly thereafter due to scandal until Ian Hodder began a new dig in 1993.

He and an international team have excavated 16 layers of domestic structures, enough to house close to 8,000 people. They believe Çatalhöyük was inhabited between 7500 BC to 5700 BC, making it the most well-preserved Neolithic site in the world. 

Murals drawn with deep red paint have been found across the settlement. Hodder believes they are tied to burials, as most are located near buried human remains. Hodder thinks the murals were an attempt to communicate with the dead, protect the dead from the living, or protect the living from the dead. 

THE NEANDERTHAL INSIDE YOU

The near completion of the Neanderthal Genome has shed light on the evolutionary path of modern humans. We now have genetic proof that our ancestors mated with similar species, and that Neanderthal genes are present in modern human DNA.

Authors of a study published recently in Nature write that some modern humans possess up to 2% of Neanderthal genomes. They believe the “mix” occurred nearly 35,000 years ago, as homo sapians first ventured out of Africa. 

NASA’S ANIMATION OF A BLACK HOLE DEVOURING A STAR

from nasa.gov:

Astronomers soon realized the source, known as Swift J1644+57, was the result of a truly extraordinary event — the awakening of a distant galaxy’s dormant black hole as it shredded and consumed a star. The galaxy is so far away, it took the light from the event approximately 3.9 billion years to reach Earth.

“Incredibly, this source is still producing X-rays and may remain bright enough for Swift to observe into next year,” said David Burrows, professor of astronomy at Penn State University and lead scientist for the mission’s X-Ray Telescope instrument. “It behaves unlike anything we’ve seen before.”