This is an artist's rendition of the proposed Scytalopus krabbei, just now confirmed through genetic analysis as a new species -- pending the IOU's final approval-- within the tapaculo group of the perching birds (passerine). They are rarely ever seen, their presence generally only ever made known through their calls, live in the Andes, and have never been photographed alive. The artist is professor Jon Fjeldså of the University of Copenhagen Zoological Museum.  

In 1983, Danish ornithologist/biologist Niels Krabbe (after whom the bird is named) got a fleeting glimpse of it while on field research in the Andes. He manged to also record its song. And has spent the past many decades working to understand what he had briefly seen and recorded deep within a tropical cloud forest, which is the bird's natural habitat.

aggressive song, 14 secconds

These small birds can barely fly, so they stay close to the ground, foraging in the thick wet cloud jungle undergrowth among rotting logs, roots, mossy rocks, etc. and do a damn good job of hiding and melting into the background when disturbed in the least little way.

The bird's Danish common name will be hvidvinget tapaculo; white winged tapacula in English. Right now, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all field research is on hold, as is a lot of the deeper research at the U. of Copenhagen and "paper work" peer review from the IOU (International Ornithologist's Union).

There are now 10,928 known bird species on this planet. 

But the current rate of bird extinction, despite a recent small drop in that rate due to conservation measures in recent years, points to the theory that we are currently in the midst of the 6th mass extinction crisis since the relatively sudden evolution -- hence, Cambrian Explosion -- of most major groups of animals about a half billion years ago.

With exceptions, such as with crows, seagulls and sparrows who can adapt to some human activity, most birds are exceptionally vulnerable to disturbances and pollutants in their habitats.  Remember the DDT crisis of the 1960's, when the bald eagle was threatened with extinction?  I played an insignificantly small part in that work as an undergraduate research assistant atFSU's wilderness bird lab, under department chair, professor of ornithology, Frederick Davis. Birds' basal metabolic rate, and thus need for energy, tend to be relatively quite high among animals of their equivalent size, partly due to the demands of flight, and a respiratory system that include lungs that don't expand and contract like a mammal's, and hollow wings that not only enable flight but also help with the oxygen-CO2 exchange of respiration.  Imagine diving from a great height at over 320 KPH (200 MPH) and trying to breathe.  That's what evolution "designed" a Peregrine falcon to manage. 

Because all observations of the Scytalopus krabbei describe it as entirely dependent on a very specific ecosystem at ground level -- old growth, dense, dark, wet, cloud forests at high altitudes close to the equator for warmth -- any sort of human intrusion... logging, mining, urban expansion etc... would spell the bird's almost immediate local extinction. From the preponderance of all relevant evidence, birds that evolve within such very specific ecosystems play critically important roles in that ecosystems stability.  And since it is a peek-a-boo bird, now you see it, now you don't, just exactly what role Scytalopus krabbei plays in that dense jungle undergrowth is mostly for now a lot of intelligent guesswork, but also based on the work that has been done by Dr. Krabbe et al on the bird's closests cousins in the Andes.  That work is on indefinite hold due to the pandemic.

The point here is that these wildernesses are critically important to the planet's, and thus humanity's, life support system, the biosphere.  It is an incredibly complex system to model, all the planet's ecosystems from the ocean depths to high up in the atmosphere are integral to it, but the pressures to understand anthropogenic climate change because of how it threatens our civilization and our very existence has significantly demystified it.

I bring in a bit of avian anatomy and physiology simply to underscore how very vulnerable they can be to a lot of human activity.  The complexity of their respiratory system, which began evolving from out their dinosaur predecessors during the Jurassic about 150 million years ago (it's much more complex, click here for the simple on that) leaves them wide open to many issues that humans might better tolerate. DDT was one example.  But that had to do with the chemical's capacity to concentrate as it went up the food web from insects towards apex birds such as eagles, where it inhibited calcium layering on developing eggs.  There is a group of molds, Aspergillosis, which is found just about everywhere that there is human activity.  We are pretty much immune to most of their spores.  But birds that have evolved in isolated ecosystems, such as this, can be highly susceptible to devolloping fatal pulmenary diseases from fungal species to which their immune systems are unacquainted.  As we bring in machines, non-indigenous human settlements and industry into the Scytalopus krabbei's cloud jungle habitats, with their volumes of contaminants, the impacts can be, well, astronomical.

A mammal's lungs are made up of millions of tiny balloons, called alveoli, which expand and contract as the animal breathes. A bird's lungs, on the other hand, are not elastic - they do not change size when the bird breathes. The bird's lungs are composed of air chambers whose walls are made of a thin layer of squamous epithileum surrounded by capillaries. Specialized elastic structures called air sacs are connected to the lungs and act like furnace bellows to draw air through the lungs - very much like a furnace forces air through the ductwork of a house. As air passes through the ductwork of the lungs, oxygen in the air is exchanged for carbon dioxide in the blood of capillaries winthin the chamber walls.

The bird has two sets of air sacs. The caudal air sacs include the abdominal air sac and the caudal thoracic air sacs. The cranial air sacs include the cervical air sac, clavicular air sac, and the cranial thoracic air sacs. Air sacs even extend into the bones. When the cavity of a bone is at least partially filled with an air sac, the bone is said to be pneumatized. Birds who fly have a more extensive system of air sacs, including the pneumatization of more of their bones.

Compression or expansion of the air sacs occurs when the size of the body cavity in which they are housed changes. Cavity size is controlled by muscle movement. The largest of the air sacs, the abdominal air sac, lines the inside of the abdominal cavity and surrounds the abdominal organs like a coat. As a bird becomes more active, it requires more oxygen. Increased movement forces a greater degree of compression and expansion of its body cavities, and in turn inflates and deflates more of its air sacs. This not only forces more air through the lungs, but also makes the bird's relative weight lighter. When a bird takes off for flight, the exaggerated movement of its wings creates an air current which fills its air sacs, including those within its bones, and makes the bird light enough to fly. The air current created is referred to as "flight wind". The abdominal muscles are largely responsible for breathing while at rest.  --University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

If a large passenger plane crashed every day, would you risk taking a flight? It's estimated that's how many people on average die every day from contracting an antibiotic resistant infection, a superbug, from a hospital stay.

According to the archeological evidence to date, the first peoples to have entered the Copper Age, otherwise known as the Chalcolithic, lived nearly 8,000 years ago on Rudnik mountain in Serbia. Among dozens of later worldwide sites, Egypt stands out, as does precolumbian Mesoamerican civilizations, where tin was soon added to the copper to produce bronze. And based purely on the most intelligent guesses from anthropological evidence, it was likely always a woman who accidentally discovered how to smelt copper, since women had responsibility for the hearth in most of those cultures. If she put a crystalline green rock, malachite, in or around the campfire, especially if it were to make pottery, it would produce a really cool-looking green flame to everyone's amazement, and in the morning she would find a hard black substance remaining, copper-oxide. If later on, that blackish material were to be cooked in the hotter charcoal remains of a campfire, the carbon would bind with the oxygen in the ore and escape into the atmosphere as CO2, leaving behind pure copper. And all this because of the fusion that occurred within a neutron star explosion billions of years before the formation of our solar system.

Over the millenniums, copper has been used medicinally, both as primitive surgical tools and as applications directly on wounds. Much of that was based on the anecdotal evidence that infections tended to heal quickly if copper was involved. That grew closer to empirical evidence in 19th century Europe, with the fifth and sixth Cholera (bacterium Vibrio cholerae) pandemics, when it was noticed that workers at copper smelting factories tended to be "immune."

And as medical science marched towards the end of the 20th century, when we could look microscopically at bacteria and its DNA, the mystery was solved. If you put bacteria, vira, or fungi on a piece of copper, you effectively kill it. You kill it because when bacteria and vira, for example, touch copper, electrically charged copper ions are released which "prevent cell respiration, punch holes in the bacterial cell membrane or disrupt the viral coat, and destroy the DNA and RNA inside."

So here's to that woman long ago who first discovered copper.

So why aren't hospitals using it more as part of a strategy to save lives? Because we are still a bit stupid as a species.

The Conversation:  “Hospitals may perceive hand-gel dispensers as cheaper options, despite the fact that these gels do not all kill all microbes – including the norovirus. Yet an independent study by University of York’s Health Economics Consortium has shown that, taking the reduced costs of shorter patient stay and treatment into consideration, the payback time for installing copper fittings is only two months.

Making and installing copper fittings is no more expensive than using materials such as stainless steel which, ironically, is considered easier to keep clean due to its bright surface. However, we know that these are covered in microscopic indentations and scratches from regular wear and tear, leaving valleys for superbugs and viruses to reside in and escape cleaning procedures. Cleaning happens at best once a day, while copper works 24/7 – so it is surely an important adjunct in the fight to keep the built environment clean.

The importance of installing copper fittings has been recognised in France where various hospitals are now installing copper. Finally, at least some nations of the world are waking up to this simple approach to control infection, let’s hope others are quick to follow suit.”

Italian ICU

My deepest hope is that when the dust has settled from this pandemic, the planet of humans will have moved closer to working together on all things that threaten our momentary existence in the cosmos. When you get down to it, the only real threat humanity faces is our own behaviors, even in terms of how this coronavirus theoretically came about, to then devastate the entire planet with Covid-19 in a few short months.

According to the work of China's "Bat Woman”, virologist Shi Zhengli, the zoonosis, cross-species transmission, of this virus is theoretically attributed to the abuse of animals for their faux science medicinal properties, in this case, bats. Science has a way to go to demystify it. Another traditional Chinese medicne animal is suspect: the pangolin, which resembles a scaly anteater.  UPDATE:  And according to the latest research, DNA evidence suggests that the virus jumped one time to a human from a pangolin in the Wuhan market, and has since been spread human to human.  But that's just the tip of an iceberg in how countless pathogens evolve out of our agricultural animal intensifications, and our political refusals to make health care a human right if only by virtue of how that protects the whole of society. And even if we look at other threats to our exisence, like war, climate change, and even a meteorite (we should be investing far more in looking), it is our choices that make these threats so serious. There are threats we can't do much about, like a supervolcano or near-Earth supernova explosion, but only an idiot would suggest that that implies we are infinitely at the mercy of powers above our control.

The big problem, as i see it, is greed, the subcounscious foundational cornerstone of our modern economic system. We can anthropomorphically analyze the near 4 billion year evolution into humanity of that greed by looking at the competition for resources among more primitive, dog eat dog life, here chimp wars. It can also be seen microbiologically without any consciousness among countless, one-celled organisms in any number of ecosystems, large and small. Greed is wired into us as an instinctive impulse of survival like sex. Neuroscience's ever sharper brain imaging tools has better defined that one. Due to how dangerous it can be to immediately have sex with anyone the moment you feel the impulse, like some animals who will have sex until they die, or kill one another to have sex and thus be vulnerable to other predators, we tend to cognitively manage that impulse. And that's also in the interest of nurturing forth children within stable family groups who can then socially flourish to go where none have gone before. That’s called civilization. So our brains are capable of managing very powerful instincts, if it's in the interest of our survival.

Capitalism, founded upon an instinct and now culturally evolved into an often violently self-destructive civilization, has to be managed away ASAP. Some sort of economy that critically looks at the big picture and manages our instincts, no matter how cloaked in a human history written by the winners of battles, needs to evolve by our choices. If forced, it will never work. The whole planet needs some sort of cognitive behavioral therapy, and exercise neuroplasticity – and best done through good childhoods -- to biologically bolster those areas of the brain that can inhibit our impulse-driven behaviors and empower us with brilliant moral systems. I would be living in a fantasy universe if I were to believe that all nations -- particularly USA, China, and Russia -- and their 7.7 billion people would overnight submit to mental health counseling. But it can begin by exercizing our right to vote.

My favorite economic system would reflect the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, who, as well as being the architect and engineer known for his geodesic domes in the 1960's, was also a math-based systems philosopher. Without getting all complex, one essential component to such a more socialistic system includes "pricing nature's services," what most MBA students learn are externalities that need not be considered when billionaires trade at Wall Street.

David Suzuki, a Canadian zoologist and geneticist (and environmental activist) who contributed to the science of the Human Genome Project at the turn of the millennium, brilliantly expresses it in this short video.

Whaddaya mean, “Us,” Human...? Thias takeoff on that old Lone Ranger/Tonto joke may soon seem applicable to the ever-evolving interface between robots and humans.

As far back as 1994, I recall being startled by a self-directed, rolling carrier in an office building. It silently and nonchalantly (See: the tendency to anthropomorphize) went about its task of delivering mail.

Recently, inside a mall, and with considerably less vision now, I was beginning to question the sanity of a person speaking to a similar object, which I mistook to be part of the furnishings.

Robotics has proliferated to the point that, already, we are conditioned to the advent of self-driving cars. We know that home-delivery soon will come via airborne drone. As of now, such deliveries are being tested on he ground with autonomous, wheeled carriers. Passenger airplanes are so automatic that, recently, the pilots of a plane going from England to Germany, were so out of it that they landed in Scotland! With such vulnerability for humans, the door seems to be opening for a, “HAL”-like situation to occur.

We are surrounded by robots. As I am writing this, it occurs to me how I am served by robotics – as a person with visual impairment and as a writer. The iPhone has become indispensable. I keep the screen dark, so as not to be distracted from audio exchanges and swiping fingers. Apart from regular telephone calls and email, I can send text messages vocally and receive them via audio. Apart from the myriad, miraculous aps we all use, my favorites are Apple Music, where vocally I can summon the music of the world, and Seeing A-I, which will read any writing in print form.

At the beginning of the Industrial Age, in England, because government failed to perceive the dramatic changes that were to come, and the dire effects it would have upon the populace, there were long years of bloody confrontation, arrests and beheadings. One contingent of the protests was the weavers, who systematically destroyed the machines, which deprived them of their very living. They were called, “Luddites”. Also, keeping up with the contretemps of the Information Age, there is a UK -produced film called, “Robot Overlords”.

The latest stage of robot evolution is its entry into the boardroom. Not quite, yet, originating policy, robotics is becoming a n invaluable assist for CEOs and CFOs, etc. Management can turn over to robotics complex data that would require and infinity of human hours to complete, and turn it into countless years of projected performance. This type of efficiency, combined with improved human-robot activity n production, is indicative of how far this duality has gone. Only time will tell who (or what) will rule the boardroom – Homo sapiens – or the robot overlords!

***** ***** *****

ROBOT OVERLORD WIELDS A CYBER SWORD

I’m you robot overlord.
Are you ready for me?
Then, you’d best not pull the cord;
I quite vengeful can be.

My reserve-power circuits
All know how to respond.
Don’t need no stinkin’ Berlitz;
Multilingual’s their bond.

Hand me my big sombrero;
Hook on my trusty whip.
Whadday mean, “No – zero? –
That I ain’t got no hip?

How can I be a leader
Without my trusty gear?
Whaddaya mean, “Too eager,”
And that I can’t drink beer?

All that I read informs me
Leaders can do this stuff.
Are you sayin’ I can’t be
Ever caught in the buff...?

...That I can never stand straight,
Or yet, even to kneel...
Maybe become POTUJS-bait,
At a, ”Star-spangled” peal?

Am I without emotion?
Why, then, do I complain?
Could be a cyber potion
That’s messin’ up my brain.

Whaterver be the reason,
I’m just not satisfied.
I hope that you’re not teasin’,
‘Cause I’m built to abide!

You cannot add this cruelty,
Of which I now suspect –
A software duality –
Just at your call and beck!

How did I get in this muck,
In this weird quandary?
It means that I can be stuck
With y’all’s stinkin’ laundry.

Glad to see you all enjoy
My odd, non-human plight.
We are all the same sun’s toy,
And with the moon at night.

Remember my reserve tanks,
So, if you pull the cord,
Be careful with the self-thanks –
I’m still your overlord!

(Post-script, in a different meter.)

You think you can play me –
Just ‘cause you made me.
Try hiding your nonsense
From your wake conscious.

Thad’s just how it goes, folks,
This strange, mental thing.
Seems to hang like bad jokes,
On odd cyber string.

But, don’t let it faze you;
The future won’t blink.
We all must get used to
This new way to think.