Taking Stock: Brains vs bots

Our North African ghost cousins | Brains vs bots | A deadly antibiotic gap | Bird flu spreading in U.S. dairy cows | Kenya's climate change plan is turning heads | Farmer-herder conflicts in Nigeria

May 09, 2025

Global agreement on a pandemic preparedness plan came against all the odds. Now all parties must follow good intentions with concrete actions.
The draft treaty represents the first time the world has agreed the bare bones of a plan focused on prevention of, preparedness for, and response to a pandemic. It took more than 3 years and 13 formal rounds of meetings to negotiate. . . .

‘. . . The text agreed in Geneva [on 16 April] is not as strongly worded as some health-equity proponents would have liked. But it lays the groundwork for measures that could save lives when the next pandemic strikes—ensuring that vaccines quickly get to those that need them most and increasing the sharing of knowledge about pathogens, as well as of vaccines, drugs and how to make them. . . .

‘At one point, the talks were stuck because lower-income countries wanted guarantees of improved access to drugs and vaccines in a future pandemic, whereas higher-income countries were concerned that demands to share intellectual property and products could stifle the very innovation needed during a pandemic. Compromise was reached on the understanding that the transfer of technology would be voluntary and on “mutually agreed” terms.

‘One part of the treaty that countries will now work out in detail is known as Pathogen Access and Benefits Sharing (PABS). This grants pharmaceutical companies access to scientific data, such as pathogen samples and genomic sequences, in return for more-equitable sharing of drugs, vaccines and diagnostics during a pandemic.

‘Countries have agreed the outlines for how sharing will work—including the proviso that, during a pandemic, at least 20% of the vaccines, drugs and diagnostics produced by participating manufacturers will be made available to the WHO, which will distribute them according to need. . . .

‘Unlike COVAX, the unsuccessful attempt to share vaccines more equitably during the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic accord will be legally binding. The text must be agreed by the world’s health ministers at the World Health Assembly in Geneva later this month. After that, to become international law, at least 60 countries must incorporate it into their own national laws, a process called ratification. . . .’

nature.com | @Nature

Lost Green Saharans: Ancient DNA unearths a new race from a verdant North African interlude—Razib Khan

These 7000-year-old humans are neither Eurasian nor sub-Saharan African

‘Remember how simple our story used to be? Twenty-five years ago, our line was that the fateful lineage leading to us, the anatomically modern populations who dominate the planet today, began with a big bang about 200,000 years ago. A single massive wave . . . swept away all competing branches of humanity . . . .

‘A small group of expansionist East African modern humans left the ancestral continent 50,000 years ago, and exterminated all of our cousins, from the Neanderthals in Europe to assorted other hominin populations (these latter at the time unnamed) in East Asia. By 2010, it became clear that the extermination had not been complete; non-Africans carried Neanderthal heritage from an admixture event early in the out-of-Africa migration timeline, likely in West Asia. More surprisingly, we also harbored Denisovan ancestry, traces of an eastern human species that was discovered solely by genomics. And the surprises kept coming. In 2014, geneticists scanning patterns of relatedness across ancient and modern humans realized there had been a branch of non-Africans who never mixed with Neanderthals, and whose heritage many West Asian populations carry. This heritage was also brought to Europe and South Asia during the agricultural revolution’s demographic expansions starting 10,000 years ago. We termed this population “Basal Eurasians,” for their early split from other non-Africans, over 50,000 years ago.

‘But, like all other non-Africans, Basal Eurasian genes attest that that group too is a product of the “great bottleneck,” a period of thousands of years when the ancestral breeding population of all humans except sub-Saharan Africans collapsed to the scale of just some 1,000 individuals, give or take. . . .

‘Recently, that story has received a significant plot twist. Early modern humanity was a bigger family than we thought. Over 50,000 years ago, the ancestors of today’s humans were divided not just between sub-Saharan Africans and proto-Eurasians, but into at least three broad categories, because now paleogeneticists have uncovered a lost branch of humanity that long occupied northern Africa, separate and distinct from the sub-Saharan populations to their south, and the Eurasians to their east. These were the Ancient North Africans (ANA) . . . .

‘An April 2nd, 2025 paper in Nature introduces us to an additional population that also skipped the great bottleneck, and also were not sub-Saharan Africans. The paper, “Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara”, reveals ancestral North African lineage. . . .

‘The Nature paper genotypes three individuals from 7,000 years ago in the deep Sahara, in southwest Libya. . . . Of the three individuals found in the Takarkori rock shelter in the Green Sahara paper, one furnished truly high-quality DNA yielding over 800,000 markers, and reflects 90% descent from a distinct North African ghost lineage that was neither Eurasian nor sub-Saharan African.

Named TKK, this individual’s results make clear and indisputable that a lost race of our species once called the Sahara home.

‘TKK and her lineage flourishing some 7,000 years ago in what is today deep in the heart of the world’s largest desert, are only comprehensible given the Sahara’s climatic fluctuations over the last few hundred thousand years. When TKK lived, the Sahara was not a desert across most of its range. The huge stretch of territory in Africa’s northern third from the Atlantic to the Red Sea was undergoing . . . [a] wet period, between the end of the Ice Age 11,500 years ago, and 3000 BC, for these crucial millennia, most of the Sahara was not desert. It was instead a mix of woodlands, savanna and scrubland, with only a modest precursor of today’s vast desert along its eastern edge. . . . The Eemian interglacial, dating to 110,000 years ago, may have been even more humid than the latest Green Sahara, thereby propelling human populations from the African core northward toward the Mediterranean. . . .

razibkhan.com | @razibkhan

AI Is Nothing like a brain, and that’s OK—Yasemin Saplakoglu

The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.

‘In 1943, a pair of neuroscientists were trying to describe how the human nervous system works when they accidentally laid the foundation for artificial intelligence. . . . “They were actually, in a sense, describing the very first artificial neural network,” said Tomaso Poggio(opens a new tab) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is one of the founders of computational neuroscience. . . .

‘But there is a problem: The initial McCulloch and Pitts framework is “complete rubbish,” said the science historian Matthew Cobb . . . .“Nervous systems aren’t wired up like that at all.”. . .

‘Artificial neural networks are “huge simplifications,” said Leo Kozachkov . . . . “When you look at a picture of a real biological neuron, it’s this wicked complicated thing.” . . .

‘[The brain] is the most complex piece of active matter in the known universe,’ said Christof Koch . . . .
The brain’s neuronal diversity and networked complexity is lost in artificial neural networks. But computational neuroscientists—experts on both brains and computers—say that’s OK. . . .
With AI, “we are in the process not of re-creating human biology,” said Thomas Naselaris . . ., but “of discovering new routes to intelligence.” And in doing so, the hope is that we’ll understand more of our own. . . .

‘“Neurons are so much more than just nodes: They’re living cells … with DNA and organelles and specialized structures,” said Mac Shine . . . .

A thick neuron, like a tree, is enmeshed in the wiry axons of thousands of other neurons.

Thousands of axons (blue) connect to a single neuron (white); two cells meet at junctions known as synapses (green) (image credit: Lichtman Lab at Harvard University & Google Research. Renderings by D. Berger of Harvard University).

‘In your brain, 86 billion neurons chitchat with one another in complex networks. They communicate by tossing molecules called neurotransmitters into the spaces between cells and catching them with arms called dendrites. These molecules can shut down a neuron or spur it to activate, which triggers a sharp burst of electricity that flows down its long tail (axon). That then triggers branches (axon terminals) on the other end of the cell to send a new wave of molecules to the next neurons in the network.

‘No two neurons look alike; they’re completely different,” Shine said. Some excite other neurons; some inhibit them. . . . They send different neurotransmitters to encode different messages . . . .

[The brain] is the most complex piece of active matter in the known universe. Even the simplest brains in the animal kingdom feature this complexity. . . . That’s analog, not binary.

‘In contrast, artificial neurons are “caricatures of biological neurons,” Poggio said. The perceptron’s neurons, for example, take in information, analyze it and output a final answer—1 or 0. In that sense, like a biological neuron, they fire or they don’t. But that’s about as far as the similarities go.

‘The perceptron was ‘the first time, a machine—made not of tissue but of wires and circuits—displayed an ability that only biology had claimed before. Its ability to learn was itself inspired by neuroscience. In 1949, the psychologist Donald Hebb had pointed out that neural pathways in the brain are strengthened when they’re used and weakened when they’re not, an idea often summarized as “neurons that fire together, wire together.” In other words, the brain learns, in large part, by adjusting the connections between its neurons. . . .

‘[N]euroscience research didn’t slow; it accelerated. The following decades revealed how different parts of the human brain . . . work . . . . The brain is made up of many such networks, taking in and processing flows of information, interacting with one another in feedback loops and constantly shifting connections. These networks make it a superb multitasker, performing a dazzling array of functions across its 100 trillion connections. . . .

Crucially, an artificial neural network is not made of physical connections like neurons in the brain. . . . It’s “basically just linear algebra” . . . .

‘In the 1990s, computer scientists finally deepened neural networks to three layers. But it wasn’t until the 2010s, when computer scientists learned to structure their algorithms to run faster calculations simultaneously on smaller chips, that neural networks deepened to dozens and hundreds of layers.

‘These advances led to today’s powerful neural networks, which can surpass the human brain in certain tasks. They can be trained on billions of images or words that would be impossible for a human to analyze in a lifetime. They beat human world champions in games such as chess and Go. They can predict the structure of almost any known protein in the world with a high degree of accuracy. They can write a short story about McDonald’s in the style of Jane Austen.

However, . . . the algorithms don’t really “know” things the way we do . . . . “They do not understand anything.” They learn mainly by recognizing patterns in their training data; to do that, they typically need to be trained by an immense amount of it.
Meanwhile, even the simplest nervous systems in the animal kingdom have knowledge. “A maggot knows things about the outside world in a way that no computer does,” Cobb said. . . .

‘Artificial neural networks are simpler and not as dynamic . . . [and] they have “no way to reason” like a human brain does . . . .

‘Already, AI is influencing and, in some cases, accelerating the study of biology. Researchers can train neural networks on biological data . . . use AI to study the brain itself. . . . “We are now moving on to a place where we can actually take advantage of these models to learn something new about the brain” . . . .

Where the brain was once a model for artificial neural networks, now neural networks are models for the brain. . . .

QuantaMagazine.org | @QuantaMagazine | @yasemin_sap

+ AI scientists are producing new theories of how the brain learns
’The challenge for neuroscientists is how to test them: of research into artificial neural networks have earned Geoffrey Hinton the moniker of the Godfather of artificial intelligence (AI). Work by his group at the University of Toronto laid the foundations for today’s headline-grabbing AI models, including ChatGPT and LaMDA. These can write coherent (if uninspiring) prose, diagnose illnesses from medical scans and navigate self-driving cars. But for Dr Hinton, creating better models was never the end goal. His hope was that by developing artificial neural networks that could learn to solve complex problems, light might be shed on how the brain’s neural networks do the same.

‘Brains learn by being subtly rewired: some connections between neurons, known as synapses, are strengthened, while others must be weakened. But because the brain has billions of neurons, of which millions could be involved in any single task, scientists have puzzled over how it knows which synapses to tweak and by how much. Dr Hinton popularised a clever mathematical algorithm known as backpropagation to solve this problem in artificial neural networks. But it was long thought to be too unwieldy to have evolved in the human brain. Now, as AI models are beginning to look increasingly human-like in their abilities, scientists are questioning whether the brain might do something similar after all. . . .’—The Economist

Study: In low-income countries, few patients with highly resistant infections get the antibiotics they need—Chris Dall

New research suggests only a fraction of multidrug-resistant bacterial infections in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are being treated with the right antibiotics.

‘In a modeling study published this week in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, researchers estimated that of the nearly 1.5 million people in eight LMICs who had carbapenem-resistant gram-negative (CRGN) bacterial infections in 2019, fewer than 7% were treated appropriately. The authors of the study say the findings highlight an issue that's being increasingly raised by global health officials and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) experts.

‘"For years, the dominant narrative has been that antibiotics are being overused, but the stark reality is that many people with highly drug-resistant infections in low- and middle-income countries are not getting access to the antibiotics they need," senior study author Jennifer Cohn, MD, Global Access Director for the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP), said in a press release. . . .

‘The authors say lack of access to healthcare facilities in the eight countries and inadequate diagnostics to guide appropriate treatment are likely playing a role in these treatment gaps. But the findings also indicate that patients in these and other LMICs simply cannot get the antibiotics needed to properly treat multidrug-resistant bacteria.

‘New data on global antibiotic consumption released earlier this week by the World Health Organization (WHO) underscore the problem. The data show that eight countries in 2022—six LMICs and two low-income—reported no consumption of Reserve antibiotics, a category developed by the WHO to describe last-resort antibiotics for multidrug-resistant infections. . . .’

‘The irony of AMR is that it's fueled by overuse of antibiotics,’ WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, PhD, said at the meeting. ‘And yet more people die from lack of access to antibiotics.’

cidrap.umn.edu | @CIDRAP | @cvdall

Emergence and interstate spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1) in dairy cattle in the United States—Science (h/t Helga Recke)

‘Editor’s summary
’High-pathogenicity avian influenza subtype H5N1 is now present throughout the US, and possibly beyond. More cattle infections elevate the risk of the virus evolving the capacity to transmit between humans, potentially with high fatality rates. Nguyen et al. show that from a single transmission event from a wild bird to dairy cattle in December 2023, there has been cattle-to-poultry, cattle-to-peridomestic bird, and cattle-to-other mammal transmission. The movement of asymptomatic dairy cattle has facilitated the rapid dissemination of H5N1 from Texas across the US. Evolution within cattle, assessed using deep-sequencing data, has detected low-frequency sequence variants that had previously been associated with mammalian adaptation and transmission efficiency.’—Caroline Ash

Conclusion
’. . . A single wild bird-to-cattle transmission event of HPAI H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b occurred in late 2023. The spillover was likely preceded by a reassortment event in wild bird populations followed by the movement of cattle that spread HPAI within the US dairy herd. Molecular markers that may lead to changes in transmission efficiency and phenotype were detected at low frequencies. Continued transmission of H5N1 HPAI within dairy cattle increases the risk for infection and subsequent spread of the virus to humans and other host populations.’

science.org | @ScienceMagazine |

Yes we Kenya—Michael Igoe

‘. . . Kenya . . . on Friday released its nationally determined contribution, or NDC—the national climate change plan that all countries are required to submit ahead of this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Brazil.

‘Kenya’s NDC is turning some heads, with some hoping it could be “a blueprint for other African nations balancing climate resilience with development priorities.”

‘It commits to 100% renewable electricity generation by 2035, greenhouse gas emissions reductions of 35%, and it takes a “whole-of-government” and “whole-of-society” approach. That means “integrating climate action into all areas of decision-making, from transportation to waste management to cooking and jobs,” according to my colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz.

‘“It's a document from a nation where climate impacts are already measurable in GDP points lost annually,” says Nripanka Das, a sustainability and renewable energy expert.’

Read: Kenya’s climate commitment sets standard before COP30

How to stop Nigeria’s worsening farmer-pastoralist violence—Sarli Sardou Nana

A new Ministry of Livestock has been hailed as a key step in addressing worsening farmer-herder conflicts. The reality is more complicated.

This story was originally published by The New Humanitarian.

‘President Bola Tinubu has big dreams for Nigeria’s new Federal Ministry of Livestock Development. In a speech announcing the ministry, Tinubu shared his hope that it would “enable Nigeria to finally take advantage of livestock farming” and overcome “this adversity that has plagued us”.

The adversity he is alluding to is farmer-herder conflict: the violent disputes between farmers and pastoralists over land and land access that are estimated to have killed 2,600 people in 2021 alone.

‘Created last year, the Ministry of Livestock is tasked with mending relations between pastoralists and farmers, as well as with improving agricultural productivity, strengthening value chains, and identifying export opportunities.

‘It has already been busy: announcing plans to tighten regulations on animal imports; digitising grazing routes to better map and monitor livestock movements; and developing schemes to enhance Nigeria’s leather industry, which used to be a major source of export revenue. The ministry has also been carrying out “stakeholder engagement” as part of its focus on “peacebuilding, security, and social cohesion” between pastoralist and farming communities.

‘But there has also been opposition to the new ministry in certain quarters—opposition that exposes the simmering tensions that divide opinion in Nigeria over the future of pastoralism.

Shortly after the ministry was announced, some prominent politicians and ethno-religious activists were quick to criticise it. The general argument was that the ministry will favour pastoralists—typically seen as Muslim and northern—over the concerns of predominantly Christian and southern-based farmers.

‘. . . This opposition is particularly strong in Nigeria’s Middle Belt states. This densely populated region is, in general, opposed to pastoralist transhumance—known as open grazing—in which cattle travel and graze outside designated ranches, and where the clashes over land and access to fodder and water have been the most intense. . . .

Resolving these disagreements is important. Pastoralists across Africa are vital for meeting national food needs. In a report released last year, the ministry’s implementation committee estimated that pastoralism and agro-pastoralists provide over 80% of the country’s meat and 90% of its milk, compared to just 10% from commercial ranches.
Yet their increasing vulnerability to issues from vigilantism to mobility restrictions threatens the long-term sustainability of this critical livelihood system and ancient way of life.

A way forward
’There are a few things Nigeria’s new ministry could do to tackle the root causes of farmer-herder conflict.

‘Firstly, it should focus on supporting pastoralists’ land tenure security.

‘Unlike settled farmers and herders, pastoralists rely on informal, collective ways of sharing land and key resources. These systems are characterised by flexibility, community-driven management, and freedom of movement across wide landscapes.

If the ministry is serious about ending farmer-herder conflict, it needs to foster a new narrative to counter anti-herder bias.
Yet their lack of legal recognition means they are increasingly threatened by the conversion of grazing lands for other purposes, including farming, mining, and conservation projects.
Tanzania offers a compelling example of what can happen when land planning includes transhumance.

‘The Tanzanian government is supporting comprehensive land use planning, which awards pastoralists certificates to access and use shared grazing lands, securing grazing lands for livestock keepers, including pastoralists, and opening up government ranches to pastoralists—with very positive results. These secure rights for pastoralists have not only reduced—and in some places, eliminated—conflict; they are also contributing to more productive grazing lands and land restoration.

‘Nigeria’s grazing reserves, by contrast, haven’t been protected by state governments or provided with the necessary veterinary services.

‘Secondly, if the ministry is serious about ending farmer-herder conflict, it needs to foster a new narrative to counter anti-herder bias. Nigerian media coverage on farmer-herder conflicts tends to be alarmist, biased against pastoralists, inflammatory, and increasingly playing up an unfounded religious divide.

‘Misinformation on social media platforms is rife. . . . In reality, the causes of farmer-herder conflicts are multifaceted and under-researched. Their roots are in everything from insecure land tenure, to weak governance and the lack of effective policing. . . .

Finally, the pastoralist sector needs a lot more investment: to support livestock health through better veterinary care; to offer extension services; to improve markets; and to set up holding stations that can provide feed and water along transhumance routes.

‘A Ministry of Livestock has huge potential to raise the profile of the sector, provide better targeted funding, and develop the policies and legislation that would enable pastoralism to continue alongside crop farming. Its success or failure will hold important lessons for other countries grappling with this critical issue.’

The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.

thenewhumanitarian.org | @newhumanitarian | @SarliNana

Arresting headlines

Exclusive: NIH to end billions of dollars in foreign research grants: Move by US biomedical agency jeopardizes thousands of projects on infectious diseases, cancer and more—Nature

Fridge-free vaccine arrives: Oxford spin-out Stablepharma and the UK’s National Health Service have launched the first human trial of a tetanus-diphtheria booster that stays potent for 18 months at room temperature. The company has identified up to 60 temperature-sensitive vaccines that could potentially use the technology; that matters, given that cold-chain failures waste as much as half of all vaccine doses shipped to low-income regions—Good News newsletter by Bryan Walsh

Tuberculosis vaccine trial sprints ahead: The phase 3 study of M72/AS01E — poised to become the first new adult TB shot in a century — has already met its full 20,000-volunteer target across five countries, a year earlier than planned. If the vaccine matches its phase 2 efficacy of approximately 50 percent, public health experts say it could reduce the toll of a disease that still kills more than a million people annually—Good News newsletter by Bryan Walsh

Long-distance romance and closure from husband's death: Your memories of Skype—BBC

Snake enthusiast survived hundreds of bites. Now his blood is aiding the search for a universal antivenom: Experimental cocktail protects mice against venom from 19 deadly snakes—STAT News

Sheeple: New Zealand has historically retained a remarkably high sheep-to-person ratio, and with a current population of 23.6 million sheep and 5.3 million people, we’re currently talking a healthy 4.5 sheep-to-person ratio. This ratio is, in fact, a steep decrease from 22 sheep per person in 1982, when farming was still the top economic draw. That year, the industry had over 70 million sheep in its care for just 3.2 million people—AP via Numlock News