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The COVID-19 pandemic has focused attention on the importance of having a well-functioning immune system.

This revolutionary gene-editing system has taken science by storm.

For the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw,climate change has forced a permanent retreat inland

You have 86 billion of them inside you, but do you understand how hard it was for us to learn that?

The air was likely frigid as the hunter lit a small fire. The caribou would come in the morning—forced through the narrow strip of marshland where he camped. There was nowhere else to go. The land was flanked by water on both sides, and large stones had been laid out in slanting lines to funnel the animals into this bottleneck. The hunter struck his weapon to sharpen its edge in anticipation. In that moment, two glassy flakes splintered away from the point of impact and fell to his feet. They would be buried there for nearly 10,000 years.

In 2013 those two shards of obsidian, a natural volcanic glass, would be recovered from a sample of earth, roughly the volume of a quart of milk, that was pulled from the bottom of Lake Huron, under 100 feet of water. And the story the flakes would tell was one of an even longer journey.

John M. O’Shea of the University of Michigan and his team of underwater archaeologists have found something extraordinary about these two pieces of obsidian: they traveled nearly 2,500 miles from central Oregon before coming to rest at what is now the bottom of one of the Great Lakes.

The samples were recovered from the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, a geologic formation below Lake Huron that connects Michigan to Ontario. O’Shea and his team have been diving at the site for more than a decade, collecting artifacts and environmental samples to prove that 9,000 years ago—as ice age glaciers were receding and the Great Lakes were forming—the area was dry land inhabited by Native Americans, who built hunting structures on it to trap and kill caribou.

Obsidian was highly prized by ancient stone toolmakers. The flakes identified by Brendan Nash, a member of O’Shea’s team at the University of Michigan, have strike marks and sharp, feathered edges—both telltale signs of human modification. This evidence, combined with the distance to the obsidian’s original source, paint a picture of an extensive trade or exchange network that spanned the continent nearly 3,000 years after the end of the last ice age.

Stone tools recovered from the Alpena-Amberley Ridge are much smaller than artifacts found nearby that date to the same time period. This suggests that a group of ancient people, with a different way of life and system of hunting, existed on the ridge around 9,000 years ago.

In their study, O’Shea, Nash and their colleagues wrote, “These specimens provide greater resolution, as well as greater complexity, to an important and poorly understood time period in the North American past.”

In two small flakes, one can gain a view of a world lost to time and the waves.

The mysteries packed inside these invisible space objects stretch our concepts of space and time.

These sometimes deadly packets of genetic information are more numerous in number than the stars in the cosmos.

Vaccines are medicines that train the body to defend itself against future disease, and they have been saving human lives for hundreds of years.

In March 2020 Ruth DeFries finished a manuscript more than five years in the making. It turned out to be both prescient and prophetic. In this document, the Columbia University professor argued that global crises arenow inevitable because of the complexity and interconnectedness of our modern civilization. And just as she wrapped up the project, as she puts it, “all hell broke loose with COVID.”

That manuscript would become a book, released at the end of 2020. “These were exactly the kinds of shocks that I was trying to be convincing [about], in the book, [when I told readers] that they could actually happen,” DeFries says. But her tome is more guide and less screed. It shows that there is good news—and hope—to be found in a model that surrounds all of us every day and that has survived for billions of years: nature.

DeFries points to the shortage of personal protective equipment and hand sanitizer at the start of the pandemic as an example of what she means. Instead of depending on single sources for important goods, she writes, we can look at coral skeletons and the tiny veins of dragonfly wings and leaves. They loop into one another, creating what is called a redundant network. That way, for instance, if a bug takes a bite of a leaf, it can still transport water and sugar to the rest of the plant. In the face of uncertainty, one of the best ways we can protect ourselves is to invest in flexibility—such as by maintaining a diverse set of trade partners when it comes to both food and medical supplies.

The idea that we should observe nature when designing our modern world has ancient roots in Indigenous cultures. But the common scientific term for this approach is only a couple of decades old: “biomimicry” according to Lex Amore, who directs partnerships and advocacy at the nonprofit Biomimicry Institute, “is the conscious emulation of nature’s genius.”

Copying nature’s strategies can have real-world benefits when we’re put in a tough spot. For example, in March 2020 northern Italy–based manufacturer COPANwas impacted by COVID-19, which led to a nationwide shortage of diagnostic nasal swabs in the U.S. In response, a network of scientists and industry partners in Boston mobilized to source and manufacture new designs. As part of this effort, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University drew inspiration from an unlikely place: cat tongues. The team’s lead engineer Richard Novak ended up designing injection-molded nasal-testing swabs modeled on a feline’s oral multitool.

This kind of nature-inspired thinking is needed now more than ever because “the solutions we seek are right outside,” Amore says. Her organization supports innovations that not only serve humans in the short term but that, in its words, also sustainably “create conditions conducive to life”—for all species.

The novel coronavirus has created conditions that are less than conducive to human life, and there will likely be more existential shocks to follow. Beyond the pandemic, we still have to deal with the fact that humans have altered 70 percent of the planet’s land surface and compromised two thirds of its oceans. As a result, 20 percent of all species are facing near-term extinction, and the world is warming.

It used to be easy to go through our daily lives and ignore the invisible processes that keep us afloat. This was a delusion, DeFries says. “We depend on nature for food, for water, for taking care of our wastes, for air, for everything,” she adds. The pandemic perhaps shook us out of our routines. The thing to do now, according to DeFries, is to deepen this dependency. “The more connected we are, the more we become a complex system, which is more and more like nature,” she says.

Video produced in partnership with The Great Courses. All Great Courses video content is available only to subscribers with the password sent via email.

Video produced in partnership with The Great Courses. All Great Courses video content is available only to subscribers with the password sent via email.

Video produced in partnership with The Great Courses. All Great Courses video content is available only to subscribers with the password sent via email.