publishedmedium:natural history

The Met Will Turn Down Sackler Money Amid Fury Over the Opioid Crisis - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/arts/design/met-museum-sackler-opioids.html

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art said on Wednesday that it would stop accepting gifts from members of the Sackler family linked to the maker of OxyContin, severing ties between one of the world’s most prestigious museums and one of its most prolific philanthropic dynasties.

The decision was months in the making, and followed steps by other museums, including the Tate Modern in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, to distance themselves from the family behind Purdue Pharma. On Wednesday, the American Museum of Natural History said that it, too, had ceased taking Sackler donations.

The moves reflect the growing outrage over the role the Sacklers may have played in the opioid crisis, as well as an energized activist movement that is starting to force museums to reckon with where some of their money comes from.

“The museum takes a position of gratitude and respect to those who support us, but on occasion, we feel it’s necessary to step away from gifts that are not in the public interest, or in our institution’s interest,” said Daniel H. Weiss, the president of the Met. “That is what we’re doing here.”

“There really aren’t that many people who are giving to art and giving to museums, in fact it’s a very small club,” said Tom Eccles, the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. “So we have to be a little careful what we wish for here.”

There is also the difficult question of where to draw a line. What sort of behavior is inexcusable?

“We are not a partisan organization, we are not a political organization, so we don’t have a litmus test for whom we take gifts from based on policies or politics,” said Mr. Weiss of the Met. “If there are people who want to support us, for the most part we are delighted.”

“We would only not accept gifts from people if it in some way challenges or is counter to the core mission of the institution, in exceptional cases,” he added. “The OxyContin crisis in this country is a legitimate and full-blown crisis.”

Three brothers, Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, bought a small company called Purdue Frederick in 1952 and transformed it into the pharmaceutical giant it is today. In 1996, Purdue Pharma put the opioid painkiller OxyContin on the market, fundamentally altering the company’s fortunes.

The family’s role in the marketing of OxyContin, and in the opioid crisis, has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. Documents submitted this year as part of litigation by the attorney general of Massachusetts allege that members of the Sackler family directed the company’s efforts to mislead the public about the dangers of the highly addictive drug. The company has denied the allegations and said it “neither created nor caused the opioid epidemic.”

Nan Goldin, a photographer who overcame an OxyContin addiction, has led demonstrations at institutions that receive Sackler money; in March 2018, she and her supporters dumped empty pill bottles in the Sackler Wing’s reflecting pool.

“We commend the Met for making the ethical, moral decision to refuse future funding from the Sacklers,” a group started by Ms. Goldin, Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, or PAIN, said in a statement. “Fourteen months after staging our first protest there, we’re gratified to know that our voices have been heard.”

The group also called for the removal of the Sackler name from buildings the family has bankrolled. Mr. Weiss said that the museum would not take the more drastic step of taking the family’s name off the wing, saying that it was not in a position to make permanent changes while litigation against the family was pending and information was still coming to light.

The Met also said that its board had voted to codify how the museum accepts named gifts, formalizing a longstanding practice of circulating those proposals through a chain of departments. The decision on the Sacklers, Mr. Weiss said, was made by the Met leadership in consultation with the board.

#Opioides #Sackler #Musées

Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS)

The #Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) and the Palestine Museum of Natural History (PMNH) have been established in order to research, educate about, and conserve our natural world, culture and heritage and use the knowledge we have gained to promote responsible human interactions with our environment.

▻https://www.palestinenature.org
#biodiversité #nature #patrimoine #environnement #protection_de_l'environnement
cc @reka

Studying The Biodiversity Of Palestine
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu65JUCU5bk

The Secretive Family Making Billions From the Opioid Crisis
►https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-family-oxycontin

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The Sackler Courtyard is the latest addition to an impressive portfolio. There’s the Sackler Wing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which houses the majestic Temple of Dendur, a sandstone shrine from ancient Egypt; additional Sackler wings at the Louvre and the Royal Academy; stand-alone Sackler museums at Harvard and Peking Universities; and named Sackler galleries at the Smithsonian, the Serpentine, and Oxford’s Ashmolean. The Guggenheim in New York has a Sackler Center, and the American Museum of Natural History has a Sackler Educational Lab. Members of the family, legendary in museum circles for their pursuit of naming rights, have also underwritten projects of a more modest caliber—a Sackler Staircase at Berlin’s Jewish Museum; a Sackler Escalator at the Tate Modern; a Sackler Crossing in Kew Gardens. A popular species of pink rose is named after a Sackler. So is an asteroid.

The Sackler name is no less prominent among the emerald quads of higher education, where it’s possible to receive degrees from Sackler schools, participate in Sackler colloquiums, take courses from professors with endowed Sackler chairs, and attend annual Sackler lectures on topics such as theoretical astrophysics and human rights. The Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science supports research on obesity and micronutrient deficiencies. Meanwhile, the Sackler institutes at Cornell, Columbia, McGill, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Sussex, and King’s College London tackle psychobiology, with an emphasis on early childhood development.

The Sacklers’ philanthropy differs from that of civic populists like Andrew Carnegie, who built hundreds of libraries in small towns, and Bill Gates, whose foundation ministers to global masses. Instead, the family has donated its fortune to blue-chip brands, braiding the family name into the patronage network of the world’s most prestigious, well-endowed institutions. The Sackler name is everywhere, evoking automatic reverence; the Sacklers themselves, however, are rarely seen.

Even so, hardly anyone associates the Sackler name with their company’s lone blockbuster drug. “The Fords, Hewletts, Packards, Johnsons—all those families put their name on their product because they were proud,” said Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine who has written extensively about the opioid crisis. “The Sacklers have hidden their connection to their product. They don’t call it ‘Sackler Pharma.’ They don’t call their pills ‘Sackler pills.’ And when they’re questioned, they say, ‘Well, it’s a privately held firm, we’re a family, we like to keep our privacy, you understand.’ ”

By any assessment, the family’s leaders have pulled off three of the great marketing triumphs of the modern era: The first is selling OxyContin; the second is promoting the Sackler name; and the third is ensuring that, as far as the public is aware, the first and the second have nothing to do with one another.

#Opioides #Sackler #Communication

Make Concrete Roman Again! - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/make-concrete-roman-again

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Pliny’s literary challenge, in composing his “Natural History” in 1st century A.D., was giving “novelty to what is old, and authority to what is new.” Modern engineering’s is to see that what is old has some authority, too.“Roman Capriccio: The Pantheon and Other Monuments,” by Giovanni Paolo Panini (1735)The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder can be charmingly self-deprecating. He attempted, in the 1st century A.D., to curate all ancient knowledge in his Natural History, yet he described its 37 volumes to his close friend’s son, Titus, the Emperor of Rome, as having “such inferior importance.” To Pliny, they did “not admit of the display of genius,” nor “of anything particularly pleasant in the narration, or agreeable to the reader.” But he reminded Titus of his basic challenge—that it was, “indeed, (...)

Rock’n’roll shrimp named after Pink Floyd because of its deafening vocal ability
▻http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/11/rocknroll-shrimp-named-pink-floyd-deafening-vocal-ability

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A shrimp that produces a sound louder than a rock concert has been named after the band Pink Floyd by a rock fan zoologist.

The pistol shrimp, named Synalpheus pinkfloydi, has a distinctive pink snapping claw that it uses to stun prey with sonic energy.

Zoologist and Pink Floyd fan Dr Sammy de Grave, from Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History, had been waiting for the chance to honour the prog rock legends by giving their name to a new species.
[…]
Like any self-respecting rock band, pistol shrimps have the ability to generate a huge amount of volume.

By snapping its enlarged claw shut at rapid speed the shrimp creates a high-pressure #cavitation bubble which collapses to produce one of the loudest sounds in the ocean.

The sonic blast can reach 210 decibels - far louder than the sound of a gunshot - and is powerful enough to stun or even kill small fish.

For a split-second, the imploding bubble also generates temperatures of 4,400C, which is nearly as hot as the surface of the sun.

Some species of pistol shrimp use their sonic weapon to drill burrows into solid basalt rock.

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg10Et8FEWc

Angry Apes “Flick” Each Other Off. Is That Where We Got Our Gesture? - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/angry-apes-flick-each-other-off-is-that-where-we-got-our-gesture

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One evening last spring, I sat down at the American Museum of Natural History’s 85th annual James Arthur lecture, in New York, on the evolution of the brain. This year’s speaker was Richard Byrne, who studies the evolution of cognitive and social behavior, particularly gestural communication in the great apes, at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. He began with a short video. Sitting in a mess of leaves and branches in Budongo, Uganda, a male chimpanzee shakes a branch with his right arm while scratching that arm with his left hand in a quick, back-and-forth motion. A female chimp in the shot looks on, apparently quite uninterested. “He waits, looks at her, she’s not reacting,” Byrne says. The male shakes the branch once more. No response; so he tries “the floppy arm,” instead, says Byrne, (...)

Spark of Science: Childhood Discovery - Issue 33: Attraction
▻http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/spark-of-science-childhood-discovery

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Kirk Johnson hadn’t yet earned his Ph.D., or become director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. After all, he was just 6. But what he did have then, as today, was a consuming fascination with fossils. In this, the first of a series of animations focused on how people got interested in science, Johnson recounts a formative childhood adventure that still thrills him today. The animation is part of a larger collection of origin stories for both scientists and non-scientists, that is jointly produced by Nautilus and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. You can read about people’s stories, and contribute your own, here. View VideoRead (...)

Ingenious : Kirk Johnson - Issue 33 : Attraction
▻http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/ingenious-kirk-johnson

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Not all of the 100 million specimens that Kirk Johnson oversees as director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History can be seen or touched. For 20 years, Johnson has been collecting stories along with dinosaur bones and seed pods—stories of how a lifelong passion for science is sparked. His capacity as director gives him access to 1,000 museum employees, 8 million yearly museum visitors (the third-greatest total of any museum in the world), and countless colleagues and fellow scientists. Through a combination of everything from direct video interviews to anecdotal interactions, Johnson has developed a remarkable bird’s-eye view of what motivates (and de-motivates) young scientists today. Nautilus caught up with Johnson last month to talk about what he’s learned. And, (...)

Natural History is Dying, and We Are All the Losers | The Artful Amoeba, Scientific American Blog Network
▻http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/2014/06/20/the-slow-painful-decline-of-natural-history-and-its-uninte

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Future of Fossils: Print Your Own Dinosaur at Home? - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/future-of-fossils-print-your-own-dinosaur-at-home

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A 3D printout of the Plateosaurus vertebra placed next to the (mislabeled) field jacket that contains the original fossilRene Schilling et al. / Radiology In 1898, the American Museum of Natural History was presented with a golden opportunity along with a challenge almost as significant. Paleontologist Walter Granger had returned from a trip to the West with an amazing find: a large set of fossilized bones from a 30-foot-tall, 80-foot-long dinosaur. (At the time the sauropod was known as Brontosaurus but later came to more accurately be called Apatosaurus.) The challenge was what to do with it.The museum preparators and exhibitors had to improvise. They devised a frame of “repurposed pipes and plumbing fixtures” to support the structure. The skeleton Granger found was incomplete, so the (...)

The Mammoth Cometh - NYTimes.com
►http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/magazine/the-mammoth-cometh.html

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Bringing extinct animals back to life is really happening — and it’s going to be very, very cool. Unless it ends up being very, very bad.

Mammouths et pigeons voyageurs, ça c’est pour @mad_meg

Ingenious: Ian Tattersall - Issue 8: Home
▻http://nautil.us/issue/8/home/ingenious-ian-tattersall

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In his essay, “In Search of the First Human Home,” in this issue of Nautilus, Ian Tattersall calls humans’ modern notion of home “revolutionary.” In our video interview (above), the paleontologist and former chairman of the department of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History explains why. Our idea of home is characteristic of symbolic thinking, he maintains, a revolution in human development that separates us from all other animals; what’s more, “it’s something that is completely accidental.” The millions of people who have passed through the august doors of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City have experienced Tattersall’s work. For the past four decades, Tattersall, now a curator emeritus at the museum, has shaped its magnificent exhibitions on human (...)

Study: Arctic ’Greening’ Will Bring Global Ecological Consequences, More Warming | Common Dreams
▻http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/01-6

In their study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change, the team of scientists write that wooded areas in the Arctic could increase by 52% by the 2050s, and warming temperatures will shift vegetation zones further and further north.

“Such widespread redistribution of Arctic vegetation would have impacts that reverberate through the global ecosystem,” Richard Pearson, lead author on the paper and a research scientist at the American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, said in a statement.

“These impacts would extend far beyond the Arctic region,” Pearson stated. “For example, some species of birds seasonally migrate from lower latitudes and rely on finding particular polar habitats, such as open space for ground-nesting.”

The Smithsonian’s Surprising Science blog explains how the “greening” will create a vicious warming cycle:

Most troubling, the conversion of white, snow-covered land to dark vegetation will further affect the warming of the planet. Because darker colors absorb more radiation than the white of ice and snow, shifting large masses of land to a darker color is projected to further accelerate warming, creating a positive feedback loop: more warming leads to a greener Arctic, which leads to more warming .