Month: September 2022

Enlarge / The northern kōura (Paranephrops planifrons), or freshwater crayfish, is both economically and culturally significant to the indigenous Māori people of New Zealand. (credit: Cultura RM Exclusive/Richard Robinson)

Freshwater crayfish have inhabited New Zealand for millions of years. They have dark, hard, and mottled shells, allowing them to blend in with logs and mud as they seek cover from predators. At night the crustaceans search for food, their strong pincers finding and cutting up fish, mayflies, plants, and snails. They are known here as kōura, a name given to them by the Māori, the Indigenous Polynesian people who first arrived in New Zealand in the 1300s and who now comprise more than 15 percent of the country’s population.

For Māori, the crayfish are economically and culturally significant, both as a delicacy and as part of a traditional value called mahinga kai, which upholds the importance of natural foods, their ecosystems, and the practices of gathering and sustaining them.

Today, kōura populations are on the decline and are considered at risk of becoming threatened due to habitat loss, overfishing, and poor water quality. Makarini Rupene, a mahinga kai expert and cultural land management adviser with the local government of Canterbury, has watched this decline in the country’s South Island. “I was brought up fishing on the rivers, the lakes, the coastline, the ocean,” he said. As a child in the 1970s and ’80s, he learned traditional practices and their relationship with mahinga kai. Now when he returns to the waters of his childhood, he finds few crayfish.

Enlarge / Lenovo's ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

From the basic, boring E-series to the premium X-series, Lenovo's ThinkPads rarely surprise you with their designs. By and large, they are intentionally unremarkable, with straightforward (and sometimes boxy) frames and unassuming black finishes.

So when Lenovo departs from this basic template, as it has for the new ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1, it's worth talking about. The Z13 is recognizable as a ThinkPad, but it has eccentric flourishes like brushed gold accents and a vegan leather lid. There's also a less-flashy gray aluminum version, if a business laptop with gold accents and vegan leather feels less "stylish" and more "dad's midlife crisis" to you.

Hands-down the most impressive thing about the Z13 is its Ryzen 6000 CPU and integrated Radeon GPU. I began testing the Z13 at around the same time as I was being underwhelmed by the 12th-generation Intel processors in the Framework Laptop and Lenovo's own X1 Carbon Gen 10, and the Ryzen CPU is just better than Intel's by just about any conceivable metric. But my reaction to the laptop that has been built around this chip is more reserved.

Enlarge / Nature wants us to reproduce, so how come celibacy evolved? (credit: Carsten ten Brink/Flickr)

Why would someone join an institution that removed the option of family life and required them to be celibate? Reproduction, after all, is at the very heart of the evolution that shaped us. Yet many religious institutions around the world require exactly this. The practice has led anthropologists to wonder how celibacy could have evolved in the first place.

Some have suggested that practices that are costly to individuals, such as never having children, can still emerge when people blindly conform to norms that benefit a group—since cooperation is another cornerstone of human evolution. Others have argued that people ultimately create religious (or other) institutions because it serves their own selfish or family interest, and reject those who do not get involved.

Now our new study, published in Royal Society Proceedings B and conducted in Western China, tackles this fundamental question by studying lifelong religious celibacy in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries.