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Texto II
CITIES DRIVE ANIMALS AND PLANTS TO EVOLVE
Species are adapting to urban pollution, traffic and shrinking habitats through changes in their genes
By Sharon Oosthoek - Apr 6, 2017

    Ever seen a raccoon open a trash can in search of leftovers? Or walk across power lines to get from one rooftop to another? If so, you've witnessed an animal adapting its behavior to city life. That's been going on since people started building cities thousands of years ago. Now, biologists are seeing signs that animals and plants are also adapting in a more basic way to survive in cities. Their genes are changing.

    Genes are segments of DNA that influence how an organism looks and functions. An animal or plant’s DNA is like an instruction book for how it develops and grows. Some instructions guide its reproductive habits. Others influence the way it moves. Still others might let it withstand poison. Urban pollution, traffic and shrinking wild spaces have been causing changes in these genetic instructions. And scientists have been tracking more and more signs of these genetic changes.

    When genes change in response to their environment, it’s called evolution. Some of those changes may leave animals and plants better suited to their homes. It may offer new traits that increase the odds of surviving long enough to reproduce. This means the individuals will pass on these new traits to their offspring. Eventually, traits that had once been rare can now become common throughout a population.
Fonte: <https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/cities-drive-animals-and-plants-evolve> Acesso: 06/06/2017.

Lucy’s Big Brother Reveals New Facets of her Species

  First came Lucy. Then came Lucy’s baby, an infant of her species. Now comes Lucy’s “big brother”: the partial skeleton of a large male of Australopithecus afarensis, unveiled this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The roughly 40% complete skeleton has been nicknamed Kadanuumuu, which means “big man” in the Afar language of the Afar Depression of Ethiopia, where it was found. “It was huge – a big man, with long legs”, says lead author Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a palaeoanthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio.

  Dated to 3.6 million years ago, the new skeleton is almost half a million years older than Lucy and the second oldest skeleton found of a possible human ancestor. It had long legs and a torso and a pelvis more like those of a modern human than an African ape, showing that fully upright walking was in place at this early date, Haile-Selassie says. Although headless, the skeleton also preserves parts not found before in Lucy’s species. “It is important because it provides the ribs and scapula”, says palaeoanthropologist Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, Columbia.

  In 2005, a sharp-eyed member of Haile-Selassie’s team, Alemayehu Asfaw, spotted a fragment of lower arm bone on the ground at Woranso-Mille, about 48 kilometers north of Lucy’s grave at Hadar. Over the next 4 years, the team unearthed the shoulder blade, collarbone, ribs, and neck vertebra, the first time those bones were found together in an A. afarensis adult. The team also found a pelvis, an arm, and leg bones. Although they never found the skull or teeth, which are typically used to assign species, the skeleton’s age and similarity to Lucy suggest that it belongs to her species, says co-author Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio.

  The robust male stood between 1.5 and 1.7 meters tall, about 30% larger than Lucy. Isolated bones of other individuals suggest that some males were even larger, so the new skeleton doesn’t settle a long-standing debate over just how much sexual dimorphism there was in A. afarensis, Lovejoy says. The shoulder blade looks more like that of a gorilla and a modern human than that of a chimpanzee. The curvature of the second rib suggests a wide rib cage at the top and a barrel shape overall, similar to that of modern humans and distinct from the more funnel-shaped rib cage of a chimpanzee, the authors say.

(Science Magazine, 25 June 2010.)

Men Adrift
Cynthia Fuchs Epstein
The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi, William Morrow & Co., 1999 662 pp. $27.50

    Scores of men, their wives and partners, friends and kin, and the sharks that have exploited them come alive through Faludi’s keen reporting. The men she writes about are presented as prototypes of the generation of baby-boomer men who have experienced layoffs, broken promises of upard mobility, the Vietnam War, meaningless work, and new definitions of “what it means to be a man” in contemporary America. A further “cause” of their plight, she writes, is the emphasis on celebrity in American culture. The narratives in Faludi’s book are woven through with themes of loss and the substitution of superficial values for the “real” values of meaningful work.

     Faludi asserts that many men today feel “shipwrecked” in a service economy, but that this is only the start of their troubles. Victims of downsizing and de-skilling, they no longer play breadwinner roles in their families and develop difficulties in their marriages. In some cases, wives they once supported now support them.

     Through this book she hopes to make men conscious of their condition and to encourage them to mobilize in ways approximating the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This is a commendable task, but it is doubtful whether men will either accept its premises or identify with the individuals Faludi refers to in making her case.

(Adapted from https://www.dissentmagazine.org)

TEXTO:

    Bizarre tales of people cooking, wandering
outdoors, and even driving around while fast asleep
are part of a phenomenon known as somnambulism,
or sleepwalking. While your natural inclination might
[5] be to wake up someone who is fumbling around in a
daze, it’s commonly thought that this could be
dangerous.
    Dr. Mark Mahowald, a sleep specialist at Stanford
University, says that, while it wouldn’t necessarily hurt
[10] to try to wake a sleepwalker, it’s notoriously difficult to
rouse them in this state. Rousing a sleepwalking person,
especially vigorously, might confuse or distress them
temporarily. Disoriented, they may strike out at anyone
close. “Best thing you can do is turn them around and
[15] send them back to bed. It is not likely that a sleepwalker
when woken up suddenly will have a cardiac event. It
is no different from when a person sleeping normally is
suddenly awakened by, say, a loud noise. The important
thing is to protect a sleepwalker from themselves.
[20]    While still somewhat stigmatized, sleepwalking
is incredibly common. Actually, between 1 percent
and 15 percent of the United States population
sleepwalks, and almost all children have had
sleepwalking episodes, according to The National Sleep
[25] Foundation.”Sleepwalking is part of the human
condition,” Mahowald said. “It is absolutely not
associated with psychiatric disorders.”
    People who sleepwalk tend to have no memory
of the episode, Mahowald explained. This is
[30] because the behaviors take place without conscious
awareness — they originate from the brain’s central
pattern generator, where the neural pathways for
learned and heavily practiced movements are stored.
For this reason, you won’t find a sleepwalker playing
[35] the piano if that person has no prior musical training or
speaking a language they don’t already know, he said.

GOLDBAUM, Kate. Disponível em: https://www.livescience.com/ 55332-should-you-wake-a-sleepwalker.html.Acesso em: 1 nov. 2018. Adaptado.