Language

The period preceding the emergence of behaviourally modern humans was characterized by dramatic climatic and environmental variability--it is these pressures, occurring over hundreds of thousands of years that shaped human evolution.

Language is one of our species' most important skills, as it has enabled us to occupy nearly every corner of the planet. Among other things, language allows indigenous societies to use the biodiversity that surrounds them as a "living pharmacy" and to describe the medicinal properties of plants. Linguists estimate that there are nearly 7,400 languages in the world today.

The way we search online hasn't changed in decades. A new idea from Google researchers could make it more like talking to a human expert

Oceanic islands are among the most recent areas on Earth to have been colonized by humans, in many cases in just the past few thousand years. Therefore, they are important laboratories for the study of human impacts on natural vegetation and biodiversity. Nogué et al. provide a quantitative palaeoecological study of 27 islands around the world, focusing on pollen records of vegetation composition before and after human arrival. The authors found a consistent pattern of acceleration of vegetation turnover after human invasion, with median rates of change increasing by a factor of six. These changes occurred regardless of geographical and ecological features of the island and show how rapidly ecosystems can change and how island ecosystems are set on new trajectories. Science , this issue p. [488][1] Islands are among the last regions on Earth settled and transformed by human activities, and they provide replicated model systems for analysis of how people affect ecological functions. By analyzing 27 representative fossil pollen sequences encompassing the past 5000 years from islands globally, we quantified the rates of vegetation compositional change before and after human arrival. After human arrival, rates of turnover accelerate by a median factor of 11, with faster rates on islands colonized in the past 1500 years than for those colonized earlier. This global anthropogenic acceleration in turnover suggests that islands are on trajectories of continuing change. Strategies for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration must acknowledge the long duration of human impacts and the degree to which ecological changes today differ from prehuman dynamics. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.abd6706

GPT-3 is best known as a text-generating system, but now that it's out in the wild, it's being used for far more than just written words.