Revolution

What the Anthropocene’s critics overlook – and why it really should be a new geological epoch

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, March 13, 2024

The entire process was controversial and the two us who are on the subcommission (chair Jan Zalasiewicz and vice-chair Martin Head) even refused to cast a vote as we did not want to legitimise it.

Key Points: 
  • The entire process was controversial and the two us who are on the subcommission (chair Jan Zalasiewicz and vice-chair Martin Head) even refused to cast a vote as we did not want to legitimise it.
  • In any case, the proposal ran into opposition from longstanding members.
  • Many geologists, used to working with millions of years, find it hard to accept an epoch just seven decades long – that’s just one human lifetime.
  • He and his colleagues were perfectly aware that humans had been doing that for millennia.


It makes no sense, Crutzen said, to use the Holocene for present time. He conceived the Anthropocene as the time when human impacts intensified, suddenly, dramatically, enough to push the Earth into a new state. The science journalist Andrew Revkin (who thought up the name “Anthrocene” even before Crutzen’s inspiration) aptly called it the “big zoom”.

Flesh on bones

  • We’re part of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) that has been gathering evidence to put geological flesh on the bones of Crutzen’s concept.
  • The AWG had a mandate: to assess the Anthropocene as a potential geological time unit during which “human modification of natural systems has become predominant”.
  • It’s a nicely laid out, easy-to-understand picture that summarises the changes caused by human activity over the last million years.
  • But what is lost here is any sense of the quantified rate and magnitude of change, other than by a little shading.
  • The Y-axis is what scientists use to show the magnitude of measurements such as temperature and mass.
  • They show that Crutzen’s Anthropocene is real, evidence based, and represents an epoch-scale change (at least).
  • The repercussions cannot fail to last for many thousands of years – and some will change the Earth for ever.

Epoch vs event

  • So the Anthropocene as an epoch is very different from the “event” of Erle Ellis and others, which encapsulates all human influence on the planet (and so is about a thousand times longer than the epoch, and differs in many other ways).
  • ), it could perfectly well complement an Anthropocene epoch.
  • That’s the Anthropocene as an epoch.


Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 30,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

  • Colin Waters is Chair of the Anthropocene Working Group.
  • Martin Head is part of the Anthropocene Working Group and the Quaternary Subcommission.

Revolution Medicines to Report Financial Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 After Market Close on February 26, 2024

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, February 20, 2024

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Feb. 20, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Revolution Medicines, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVMD), a clinical-stage oncology company developing novel targeted therapies for RAS-addicted cancers, today announced that it will report financial results for the fourth quarter and full year 2023 on Monday, February 26, 2024, after market close.

Key Points: 
  • REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Feb. 20, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Revolution Medicines, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVMD), a clinical-stage oncology company developing novel targeted therapies for RAS-addicted cancers, today announced that it will report financial results for the fourth quarter and full year 2023 on Monday, February 26, 2024, after market close.
  • At 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time that day (1:30 p.m. Pacific Time), Revolution Medicines’ senior management team will host a webcast to discuss the financial results for the quarter and full year, and provide an update on corporate progress.
  • To listen to the live webcast, or access the archived webcast, please visit: https://ir.revmed.com/events-and-presentations .
  • Following the live webcast, a replay will be available on the company’s website for at least 14 days.

New Parts Identification Tool Backed by AI Increases Equipment Uptime in Foodservice Equipment Repair

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, March 5, 2024

The artificial intelligence (AI)-backed solution helps service companies find and identify the right parts faster than ever by accurately predicting the most frequently used parts for specific equipment issues.

Key Points: 
  • The artificial intelligence (AI)-backed solution helps service companies find and identify the right parts faster than ever by accurately predicting the most frequently used parts for specific equipment issues.
  • PartPredictor is the first tool of its kind designed specifically for the commercial foodservice industry.
  • They can simply enter three key details: the manufacturer of the equipment, the model number, and the reported issue.
  • This proactive approach significantly increases the first-time fix rate and equipment uptime, delivering enhanced efficiency and satisfaction for both technicians, foodservice operators, and manufacturers.

The 50 Most Beautiful College Quads in America

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, February 27, 2024

College Rank conducted in-depth research to find the 50 most beautiful quads in America.

Key Points: 
  • College Rank conducted in-depth research to find the 50 most beautiful quads in America.
  • Several impressive buildings, including Johnson Chapel and Converse Hall, surround the main quad at Amherst College.
  • Check out the 50 most beautiful quads in America for a full description of these beautiful examples of an American tradition.
  • Then check out the College Rank podcast and College Rank's Instagram .

nRichDX to Debut New Products & Present Latest Research at AACR 2024 Annual Meeting this April

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, February 20, 2024

SAN DIEGO, Feb. 20, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- nRichDX®, best known for the development of its Revolution Sample Prep System™, will be introducing new products, presenting new data, and exhibiting at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) 2024 Annual Meeting. Held April 5-10 at the San Diego Convention Center, the conference is dedicated to exploring and recognizing the latest discoveries in cancer research. nRichDX will exhibit in booth #3721, just inside the main registration entrance, and co-present three posters on April 8 & 9. Exhibits open at 1 PM on Sunday April 7 and close at 12:30 PM on Wednesday April 10.

Key Points: 
  • nRichDX will exhibit in booth #3721 , just inside the main registration entrance, and co-present three posters on April 8 & 9.
  • "nRichDX is proud to introduce the next generation of Revolution Sample Prep Instruments and Kits at this year's AACR Annual Meeting."
  • To meet with nRichDX people at AACR 2024 or schedule an in-booth demo, attendees are encouraged to schedule an appointment .
  • To find the latest information about nRichDX's schedule at AACR 2024, please visit nrichdx.com/aacr2024 .

One of NZ’s most contentious climate cases is moving forward. And the world is watching

Retrieved on: 
Monday, February 12, 2024

The Supreme Court overturned lower court rulings which had struck out Smith’s ambitious claim seeking to establish civil (tort) liability for those emitters’ contributions to climate change.

Key Points: 
  • The Supreme Court overturned lower court rulings which had struck out Smith’s ambitious claim seeking to establish civil (tort) liability for those emitters’ contributions to climate change.
  • With the Supreme Court decision, Smith has won the right to present his full case before the High Court.

The case against the corporate emitters

  • Smith argued the activities and effects of the corporate defendants amount to three forms of “tort” or civil wrong: public nuisance, negligence, and a new form of civil wrong described as a “proposed climate system damage tort”.
  • Read more:
    Children's climate change case at the European Court of Human Rights: what's at stake?
  • The first two causes of action – public nuisance and negligence – have long lineages in the common law.
  • A key plank of the corporate emitters’ argument was that the courts “are ill-suited to deal with a systemic problem of this nature with all the complexity entailed”.

The challenges of establishing causation

  • Questions of causation and proximity have been stumbling blocks for litigants overseas attempting to bring similar tort claims to Smith’s.
  • In this case, the seven corporate emitters are associated with around 30% of total New Zealand emissions.
  • The court suggested that there may be scope for adjusting the causation rules to better reflect the nature of modern environmental issues like climate change.

What role for tikanga and where now?

  • Recent Supreme Court decisions have accepted and applied tikanga as the “first law of New Zealand” including in relation to environmental protection.
  • The Court followed that approach in this case, accepting that crucial aspects of Smith’s case rely on tikanga principles.
  • The court pronounced that “addressing and assessing matters of tikanga simply cannot be avoided”.


Vernon Rive has previously received funding from the New Zealand Law Foundation.

The surprisingly Australian history of Chinese dragon parades

Retrieved on: 
Thursday, February 8, 2024

While dragon parades are popularly viewed as displays of Chinese or Cantonese tradition and culture, their history demonstrates how deeply Australian they also are.

Key Points: 
  • While dragon parades are popularly viewed as displays of Chinese or Cantonese tradition and culture, their history demonstrates how deeply Australian they also are.
  • Our historical research shows that until relatively recently Australia’s dragon parade tradition was closely associated with Chinese-Australian philanthropy and engagement with Australian civic life, rather than with Chinese spiritual practice.

The earliest dragon arrivals

  • The first dragon, nicknamed the “Duck Bill” dragon, was imported from Southern China to Bendigo more than 100 years ago and paraded from 1892 to 1898.
  • Nearby, Ballarat’s first dragon – also the oldest surviving dragon – was purchased in 1897.
  • The “Moon Face” dragon was Bendigo’s second dragon, paraded for just one year in 1900.
  • Read more:
    It's the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac − associated with good fortune, wisdom and success

A valued part of local fundraising

  • Chinese communities were as keen as everyone else to assist with fundraising, display their culture and participate in festivities.
  • Historian Pauline Rule has shown that Chinese communities have contributed to public fundraising displays in rural cities since at least 1866.

The popularity of dragons


Dragons were expensive and valued, and as such were also loaned to other communities for fundraising displays. In 1897, Bendigo’s Duck Bill dragon travelled to Sydney to participate in the Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee fundraiser. Then, both Bendigo’s Moon Face and the Ballarat dragon, as well as costumes from Bendigo, Beechworth and Castlemaine, were loaned to raise funds for the Melbourne Women’s Hospital in May 1900.
That so many Victorian communities could purchase dragons demonstrated their prosperity and joint commitment to Australia philanthropy and public life. It perhaps also encouraged a friendly intercity rivalry. Processional dragons were so popular that some communities that couldn’t access one would make their own imitation ones.

Royal welcome

  • Of the five Chinese dragons brought to Victoria in the 19th century, three participated in Federation celebrations.
  • As John Fitzgerald shows, many Chinese Australians were as excited about the possibilities of Federation as other Australians.
  • To mark the royal visit, welcome arches were constructed in Melbourne, Ballarat and Perth.


Only a few long-distance photographs of the other dragon survive.

  • According to a 1903 newspaper article, Melbourne’s Chinese Bo Leong Society had specifically purchased this dragon for the 1901 celebrations, at a cost of 250 pounds.
  • The third dragon involved in the festivities, the Ballarat dragon, was used to decorate the Chinese arch that welcomed the royal couple during their visit to Ballarat.

A legacy in Australia

  • Astoundingly, these three Federation-era dragons – three of the five oldest surviving imperial dragons in the world – still survive today.
  • Traditionally, when dragons reach the end of their life they are ritually burned.


Sophie Couchman has undertaken research work for the See Yup Society on a voluntary basis and formerly curator at the Museum of Chinese Australian History. Leigh McKinnon is the Research Officer at Bendigo's Golden Dragon Museum, the home of the world's oldest complete processional dragon Loong.

Fascination, persistence and optimism: how Fei-Fei Li helped shape the AI revolution in a field dominated by alpha males

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, February 6, 2024

One of the key figures in this, as a contributor to both the science and the debate, is Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, and co-director of AI4All, a non-profit organisation promoting diversity and inclusion in the field of AI.

Key Points: 
  • One of the key figures in this, as a contributor to both the science and the debate, is Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, and co-director of AI4All, a non-profit organisation promoting diversity and inclusion in the field of AI.
  • One thread is the coming-of-age of the science of AI; the other is an account of her own coming-of-age as a scientist.
  • The personal dimension came to the fore, she says, after what was initially a “very nerdy book” was given the thumbs-down by a colleague.

Matter becomes mind

  • Her academically trained maternal grandparents found themselves on the wrong side of history during the Cultural Revolution.
  • He was, says Li, the kind of parent a child might design for themselves if left to their own devices.
  • Throughout The Worlds I See, Li reflects on the influence of this parental binary on her advancing career as a scientist.
  • Without her father’s childlike capacity to pay total attention to random phenomena, her research might never have found its innovative path.
  • Her own audacious question – “what is vision about?” – came into focus by degrees.
  • For someone given to describing her enterprise in terms of revelation and revolution, her actual research on vision seems anything but visionary.
  • Matter somehow becomes mind.”

    Read more:
    AI is our ‘Promethean fire': using it wisely means knowing its true nature – and our own minds

What is data?

  • She becomes convinced that the principle can be applied to machine learning.
  • Amazon Mechanical Turk escalated the scale and speed of their research as categories multiplied, from the original ten to thirty, a hundred, a thousand.
  • For Li, the apparently humdrum conviction that learning should be driven by data rather than algorithms arrives as “a moment of epiphany”.
  • Digital agents scan diverse areas of data and exchange what they have learned to generate more sophisticated modes of correlation.

Distributed intelligence

  • Distributed intelligence means distributed opportunities to participate in the co-evolution of human and machine intelligence.
  • Big science and high technology cease to be the exclusive preserve of specialists whose modes of knowledge are beyond the understanding of ordinary people.
  • It is the dedicated school teacher, Li says, who is the real emblem of the future in human technology.
  • She completed high school while supplementing the family income with a $2 an hour job in a Chinese restaurant.
  • Her exams at Princeton were done by special arrangement at the hospital clinic where her mother was undergoing surgery for a deteriorating cardiovascular condition.
  • If Li’s efforts can be seen as a feminist enterprise, it is perhaps because the field in which she works is dominated by male celebrities, who persist in seeing the future as a Darwinian struggle between human and machine intelligence.
  • If there is an overriding theme in The Worlds I See, it is that human and artificial intelligence form a double helix.


Jane Goodall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Why now is the time to address humanity’s impact on the moon

Retrieved on: 
Monday, February 5, 2024

Every human civilization has looked to the stars and used celestial movements to measure time and find meaning.

Key Points: 
  • Every human civilization has looked to the stars and used celestial movements to measure time and find meaning.
  • This insatiable thirst for knowledge combined with technological advancements have made it possible for us to dream of travelling in space.
  • Six decades later, plans are ramping up for space tourism, missions to the moon and Mars, and mining on the moon.

The dawn of the Anthropocene

  • There is a movement among the international geologic scientific community calling for a new epoch — the Anthropocene — reflecting the enormous extent to which human activity has altered the planet since the end of the Second World War.
  • According to their research, the starting point for the Anthropocene has been identified as beginning in the 1950s, and the fallout from nuclear testing.
  • The case for a lunar Anthropocene is interesting.

Damaging the Earth

  • For humanities researchers and artists, the importance of the Anthropocene lies in the power the concept has to evoke human responsibility for bringing the Earth’s system to a tipping point.
  • For millenia, most societies understood the importance of their relationship with the natural world for survival.
  • Read more:
    'Killing' trees: How true environmental protection requires a revolution in how we talk about, and with, our forests

A lunar Anthropocene

  • And now the Anthropocene, this age of human impact, is also arriving on the moon.
  • An increasing number of moon missions and extracting resources from the moon could destroy lunar environments.
  • If the intent is to issue a word of caution and pre-emptively shock and elicit a feeling of responsibility on the part of those actors likely to impact the moon’s surface, it may very well be the right time to name a lunar Anthropocene.


Christine Daigle receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Liette Vasseur receives funding from the Exploration New Frontiers Research Funds. Jennifer Ellen Good does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Revolution Medicines to Participate in Upcoming Investor Conferences

Retrieved on: 
Thursday, February 1, 2024

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Feb. 01, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Revolution Medicines, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVMD), a clinical-stage oncology company developing targeted therapies for RAS-addicted cancers, today announced that Mark A. Goldsmith, M.D., Ph.D., the company’s chief executive officer and chairman, will be a featured speaker at the Guggenheim Healthcare Talks 6th Annual Biotechnology Conference and the TD Cowen 44th Annual Health Care Conference.

Key Points: 
  • REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Feb. 01, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Revolution Medicines, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVMD), a clinical-stage oncology company developing targeted therapies for RAS-addicted cancers, today announced that Mark A. Goldsmith, M.D., Ph.D., the company’s chief executive officer and chairman, will be a featured speaker at the Guggenheim Healthcare Talks 6th Annual Biotechnology Conference and the TD Cowen 44th Annual Health Care Conference.
  • Details of the company’s participation are as follows:
    To access the live webcasts of the presentations, please visit the “Events & Presentations” page of Revolution Medicines’ website at https://ir.revmed.com/events-and-presentations .
  • Additionally, replays of the webcasts will be available on the “Events & Presentations” page of the Revolution Medicines website for at least 14 days following each conference.