SERI -WOMEN-HONOURS- SEAT : MEXICO LENS

 

In late 2016, I traveled to India to cover a story about a nongovernmental organization that were training women from rural areas to build and repair solar panels and storage batteries in their local communities.

Four of the trainees were Seri women : Guillermina, Veronica, Francisca and Cecilia.

They would spend the next six months in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, learning about solar engineering.

When I heard the women speaking Spanish, I went to greet them and listened as they told me their stories.

Concerned about the survival of their people, a nation of about only 1,000 people, the four women had traveled thousands of times - to a country where the language and customs were entirely foreign to them - to learn a set of skills that would help them improve the conditions in their own community. I was moved by their struggle.

While documenting the work of the N.G.O., I became close with the Seri women, eventually promising them that, when I could, and when they were back in Mexico, I would visit them to help share their stories.

Several months later, in 2017, I was finally able to fulfill my promise.

The Seri people live in a stark and unforgiving - and intensely biodiverse - corner of the Sonoran Desert in northwestern Mexico. Most of the community's members live either in Punta Chueca or in the nearby coastal village of EL Desemboque, some 40 miles to the north.

Traditionally, their communal homeland also included Tiburon Island, where certain bands of Seri lived for hundreds, or even thousands of years. The island - the largest in the Sea of Cortez - is now administered as a nature and ecological preserve.

It remains as a sacred place to the Seri people, who maintained exclusive fishing rights in the channel between Tiburon and the mainland.

The identity of the Seri is integrally tied to their natural environment, which in recent decades has been vulnerable to to an increasing number of existential threats : rising temperatures, more intense storms, regional development, encroachment from mining companies, the overfishing of the surrounding waters and loss of traditional knowledge about local plants and animals.

For decades, the Seri have also contended with limited access to fresh water - although the recent installation of a second desalination plant in Punta Chueca has offered some relief.

These threats have caused major changes in the Seri's habits and customs. One consequence - the result of a decline in traditional diets that relied on fish and once-abundant plants, paired with the introduction of sugary drinks and processed foods - is a significant increase in the prevalence of diabetes.

The community, whose territory overlaps with a corridor for drug trafficking to the United States border, has also reported an increase in drug abuse among its members.

And yet the community remains fiercely protective of its territory and its heritage.

In 2014, for example, a small group of Seri women - with the support of the tribe's traditional guard -defended themselves and their land against a mining company that had begun prospecting for gold, silver and copper at a nearby site.

The operation, they said, threatened a sacred site where the tribe traditionally gathered medicinal plants and cactus fruits.

DESPITE these challenges, and a relative lack of economic opportunity, young people like Paulina do want to leave their community. ''We are the future,'' they told me, adding that she planned to become a  lawyer so she could help her people.

''I won't leave here,'' she said.

The World Students Society thanks author Nuria Lopez Torres.

HATRED -ONLINE- HAUNTS : MASTER ESSAY

By his own account, the young man's radicalization began not long after the start of the pandemic, when he was largely restricted to his home like millions of other Americans.

He described getting his news mostly from Reddit before joining 4chan, the online message board. He followed topics on guns and the outdoors before finding another devoted to politics, ultimately settling on a place that allowed a toxic melange of racist and extremist disinformation.

Although he frequented sites like 4chan known to be on the fringes, he also spent considerable time on mainstream sites, according to his own record, especially YouTube, where he found graphic scenes from police cameras and videos describing gun tips and tricks.

As the day of the attack neared, the accused teenager watched more YouTube videos of mass shootings and police officers engaged in gunfights.

Much of the images and text that the young man has in his extensive writings, which included a 180-page ''manifesto,'' have circulated for years online. Often, they reached some of the world's most popular sites, including Reddit and Twitter.

His path to radicalization, illustrated in these documents, reveals the limits of the efforts by the companies such as Twitter and Google to moderate posts, images and videos that promote extremism and violence.

Enough of that content remains that it can open a pipeline for users to find more extreme websites only a click or two away.

''It's quite prolific on the Internet,'' said Erk K.Ward, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. '' It's not just going to fall in your lap; you have to start looking for it. But once you start looking for it, the problem is that it starts to rain down on a person in abundance.''

The attack in Buffalo has renewed focus on the role that social media and other websites to play in the acts of violent extremism, with criticism coming from the public as well as government officials.

The New York State attorney general, Letitia James, has announced an investigation into the role the social media played in the shootings.

Facebook pointed to its rules and policies that prohibit hateful content. In a statement, a spokeswoman said the platform detects over 96 percent of content tied to hate organizations before its reported.

Twitter declined to comment. Some of the social media posts on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit that The New York Times identified through reverse image searches were deleted; some of the accounts that shared the images were suspended.

The man charged in the killings, Payton Gendron, 18, detailed his attack on Discord, a chat app that emerged from the video game world in 2015, and streamed it live on Twitch, which Amazon owns. The company managed to take down his video within two minutes, but many of the sources of disinformation he cited remain online even now.

His paper trail provides a chilling glimpse into how he prepared a deadly assault online, culling tips on weaponry and tactics and finding inspiration in fellow racists and previous attacks that he largely mimicked with his own.

Altogether the content formed a twisted and racist view of reality. The gunman considered the ideas to be an alternative to mainstream views.

''How does one prevent a shooter like me you ask?'' he wrote on Discord in April, more than a month before the shooting. ''The only way is to prevent them from learning the truth.''

His writings map in detail the websites that motivated him. Much of the information he cobbled together in his writings involved links or images he had cherry-picked to match is racist views, reflecting the kind of online life he lived.

At the center of the shootings, like others before it, was a false conviction that an international Jewish conspiracy intend to supplant white voters with immigrants who will gradually take over political power in America.

Hatred online expands from the fringe sites. And despite tech firm's efforts, violent ideas are frequently only a click or two away.

The Publishing continues. The World Students Society thanks authors Stephen Lee Myers and Stuart A Thompson.

SCIENCE OCTOPUS SCHEMES

Short-Lived Motherhood

The trigger that makes an octopus mom self-destruct.

Most octopus species live for one year. But the death of octopus mothers after they reproduce have long been a scientific spectacle. Why exactly octopus mothers engage in a form of self-harm that leads to death just after they reproduce remains something of a mystery.

But a new study uses the California two-spot octopus as a model to help explain the physiology of this strange behaviour.

Scientists have known that reproductive behaviour in the octopus, including death, is controlled by its two-optic glands, which function like the pituitary in vertebrates, secreting hormones and other products that control various bodily processes.

If both glands are surgically removed, the female abandons her brood, begins eating again, grows and has an extended life span.

The new study describes specific chemical pathways produced by the optic glands that govern this reproductive behaviour.

One pathway, they found, generates pregnenolone and progesterone, which is unsurprising, because these substances are produced by many other animals to support reproduction.

Another produces precursors of bile acids that promote absorption of dietary fats, and a third makes 7-dehydrocholesterol, or 7-DHC, which is generated in many vertebrates as well. 

In humans, it has various functions, including roles in the production of cholesterol and vitamin D. But elevated levels of 7-DHC are toxic, and are linked with certain disorders.

In octopuses, researchers suspect that 7-DHC may be the essential factor in triggering the self-harming behaviour that leads to death. [Nicholas Bakalar]