The exhibition uses historical artifacts from the museum’s collection and a variety of loaning institutions to tell the story of colonial measurements. Maps, scales, surveyors’ tools, rulers and specimen jars make up just a few of the objects on display.

All tell a tale of Europeans’ attempts to make sense of race, geography and the novel plants and landscapes they discovered on their travels — and hint at ways settlers used those measurements to master the world around them.

The human urge to quantify and compare is well documented in the exhibition, which looks both at scientific tools and complex systems of measurement in a variety of contexts. Ultimately, the exhibit suggests, the biases and beliefs of the person conducting the measurement are as important as the measurements themselves.

“Often, it is measurements that help us explain or grasp the world around us, but measures, contrary to what we believe have not always been standardized, nor are they objective,” Gabriela Soto Laveaga, guest curator of the exhibition and a professor of the history of science at Harvard, says in a news release. “What and how we measure reflects what we value in our society.”

“Maybe he was trying to scare the birds away so he could enjoy the view to himself,” Lang, 27, who lives in Atlanta, said, adding that it had been “the trip of a lifetime.”

Marshall Mosher, who helped run the paragliding event, said he had flown over the pyramids several times but it was the first sighting of a dog at the summit, hundreds of feet from the ground.

He had frequently seen stray canines sunning themselves closer to the base of the structure, the Pyramid of Khafre. “If I was a Cairo street dog, I’d want to climb the pyramids, too,” he said.

Social media users fell in love with the adventurous animal, as videos of it accumulated more than a million views. The moment was captured by participants in an event run by air sports tour company Sky One Egypt, in which powered paragliding pilots fly over the country’s landmarks.

“Dog: ‘Well, that’s off the bucket list,’” one YouTube commenter joked. Instagram users speculated that it could have been the ancient god Anubis, a guide to the underworld with a canine head.

Another person wrote on X that they were “getting unreasonably emotional” at the thought of the dog climbing “a landmark full of history and prestige, completely unaware of any of it … just to bark at birds. … Animals are such simple but profound creatures.”

Afterward, another tour company filmed a dog that looked similar to the first descending from the pyramid. By the time the original team completed a second flight over the pyramids on Tuesday, the dog was no longer visible.

Lang said it was “surreal” to see the video go viral, with people from all over the world contacting him. “I think it resonates because it’s just a feel-good story — a dog, happy, barking at birds, enjoying the view,” he said.

The study, published Thursday in the British Ecological Society journal, assessed penguin breeding in artificial nests and in natural nests at eight major colonies across South Africa.

However, the researchers had also hoped their study would establish one artificial nest design that would suit all colonies — but found this wasn’t the case.

“Nature is never simple,” lead researcher Lorien Pichegru, from South Africa’s Nelson Mandela University, said in an interview, explaining that while fiberglass nests worked well in some cases, the devices became too hot and were “cooking” some of the penguin eggs in certain colonies with no shade or vegetation like Bird Island.

On Bird Island, where there are no mammal predators, cement nests “worked the best, being open on both sides allowing for air flow and natural cooling, but would provide poor protection against predators,” she explained.

Wooden boxes were the best performing nests on Robben Island, while ceramic nests had the highest egg and chick survival at Boulders Beach, the study added.

Pichegru noted that the results showed each penguin colony faced different threats due to their varying environments.

“The conclusions were colony specific,” she said. “Every colony manager must now find the right nests for their colony.”

South Africa turned to artificial nests to boost breeding some 30 years ago as numbers of the penguins rapidly declined. Pichegru said that researchers redesigned some of the devices around four years ago — in the hope they would yield better results than ever before.

And why do conservationists use artificial nests in the first place?

Natural African penguin nests were historically created using burrows dug into accumulated bird droppings known as guano, Pichegru said. However, the nests were largely removed by humans in the 1800s and 1900s due to the practice of harvesting guano, which was used for fertilizer.

As a result, the penguins were — and still are — forced to breed in open nests without protection from the sun. During heat waves as they seek to cool down at sea, the penguins leave eggs and chicks unattended, making them vulnerable to predators like kelp gulls.

“There’s so few left and there’s so little guano left there’s not enough for penguins to breed in those natural areas,” Pichegru said, adding that if there was more guano and more natural penguins nests, these would likely boost penguin breeding efforts more than the artificial devices.

The African penguin population has declined by 90 percent in the last 70 years. “They’re really not doing well,” Pichegru said, adding that it is likely that the status of the penguins will soon be downgraded to “critically endangered.”

Researchers estimate that at present, the country has less than 10,000 breeding pairs left.

Even as the study suggests artificial nests help boost populations, researchers caution that far more needs to be done to save the species.

Poor food availability is driving the species’ decline — the penguins feed on sardines and anchovies and, because they cannot fly, are limited to how far they can hunt for food. “Biologically meaningful fishing exclusion zones around their major colonies are urgently needed,” Pichegru said, adding that other factors contributing to a recent decline in rates include oil spills, underwater noise pollution and climate change.

And the spread of a deadly form of avian influenza has torn through many bird populations around the world, including African penguins.

Pichegru said that throughout the study the researchers were “very hopeful” that the results would show the nests, including their redesigns, were working, and that they were doing “absolutely everything” they can to save the black-and-white-bellied birds.

Aside from monitoring the use of artificial nests, Pichegru said that rehabilitation services are key. She is part of a team that has been collecting abandoned chicks and eggs for about 10 years, hand-rearing the birds in rehabilitation centers and releasing them.

Dino Grandoni contributed to this report.

About the same time, another person, who authorities believed was Ng’s husband, was paddling toward her from the Canadian side.

When agents inspected Ng’s duffel bag, they found it contained socks that were moving around.

Inside were 29 individually wrapped eastern box turtles, a protected species found from Maine to Texas and listed as vulnerable due to the illegal pet trade and other threats, according to the nonprofit Turtle Survival Alliance.

Laws on keeping the species as a pet vary by state, but it is always illegal to transport them abroad without proper permits.

Ng pleaded guilty to one smuggling charge in U.S. District Court in Vermont on Friday. She will be sentenced in December. Her attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Friday.

Ng is a citizen of China who had been living in Canada and entered the United States on a tourist visa, according to officials. She is from Hong Kong, where the turtles would have been eventually sold, officials said after reading her cellphone communications. Turtles with colorful markings are prized in the domestic and foreign pet trade market, the Justice Department said, particularly in China and Hong Kong.

The United States is a leading origin point for the legal and illegal trade in turtles, Jennifer Sevin, director of biological instruction at the University of Richmond, wrote last year on academic news site The Conversation.

At least 24,000 freshwater turtles sourced from the United States were intercepted in the illegal trade between 1998 and 2021, according to a University of Michigan-led analysis published last year.

Last April, a Virginia man admitted capturing wild eastern box turtles and selling them on Facebook. In 2020 a Chinese national was extradited from Malaysia after involvement in what U.S. authorities said was a $2.2 million turtle smuggling scheme. In 2014, a Canadian man even tried to smuggle 51 live turtles out of the United States stuffed inside his pants, prosecutors said.

Ng came to the attention of law enforcement after repeatedly renting an Airbnb near Lake Wallace, an area known for smuggling activity, during the tourist off-season, a Border Patrol agent told the court in an affidavit.

Her husband had also previously rented an Airbnb directly opposite hers on the lake, investigations suggested.

Ng’s cellphone content and rental car GPS data suggested the turtles were obtained in New Jersey.

Ng agreed to pay $3,480 to cover costs of caring for the seized turtles during the case. It was not immediately clear what would happen to them. Turtles confiscated by law enforcement are frequently sent to zoos and aquariums, according to a 2022 report by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff and other experts.

The authors noted agencies had a limited capacity to “house them, screen them for disease, determine their origin and repatriate them back into the wild.”

“It’s a big problem, and it is here to stay,” said Christopher J. L. Murray, senior author on the study and director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Researchers have flagged antimicrobial resistance as a public health concern for decades, but this study — conducted by a large team of researchers as part of the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance Project — is the first to analyze AMR trends around the world and over time. The World Health Organization says the threat of such antimicrobial resistance not only makes common infections harder to treat but makes medical interventions, such as chemotherapy and Caesarean sections, more risky.

The study looked at 520 million datasets, including hospital discharge records, insurance claims and death certificates from 204 countries. Using statistical modeling, the authors found that more than a million deaths related to antimicrobial resistance took place each year between 1990 and 2021. Since then, AMR deaths have only increased and will accelerate, according to the researchers.

Kevin Ikuta, a lead author on the study and assistant professor of clinical medicine at UCLA, said the projected 39 million deaths over the next quarter-century equates to about three deaths every minute.

Their findings also suggest that the burden is not equally distributed. From 1990 and 2021, children ages five and younger saw a greater than 50 percent decrease in AMR deaths, while seniors ages 70 and older saw an increase of more than 80 percent.

The authors predict that such deaths among children will continue to decline, halving by 2050, but will double among seniors over the same period. The researchers highlight that over the past 3o years, the decrease in deaths related to antimicrobial resistance among youth and increase in such deaths among elders have balanced each other out. However, as the global population ages and becomes more vulnerable to infection, AMR deaths among seniors may soon outpace those in other age groups, drastically increasing the number of AMR deaths to come.

Additionally, an estimated 11.8 million deaths — about 30 percent of the 39 million fatalities forecast — will be in South Asia, the study said. The authors predict that regions in sub-Saharan Africa will also see a large number of AMR deaths.

“Increasingly, we’re seeing that antibiotics are being overused or misused, which just puts more pressure on bacteria to become more resistant as time goes on,” Ikuta said.

As a result, the authors call for antibiotic stewardship to thoughtfully improve access to antibiotics while taming excessive use of the medication.

Ishani Ganguli, a primary care physician and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, relies on thorough evaluations and conversations with her patients to avoid prescribing antibiotics when they are not needed. For example, she has had patients inquire about antibiotics for the common cold — a viral infection that cannot be treated with antibiotics, which are designed to fight bacteria.

“If there is a disconnect and the person I’m sitting with really wants an antibiotic … and I don’t think it’s going to help them in that case, I will more often turn to the ways in which it would hurt them” via side effects like diarrhea and yeast infections, Ganguli said.

Ganguli said her job as a clinician is to inform patients when antibiotics are not appropriate and to offer other treatment options, such as salt water gargles and humidifiers in the case of a cold.

In addition to antibiotic stewardship, the authors advocate for infection prevention strategies, such as increased access to clean water and vaccines, and the development of new antibiotics to reduce the number of deaths caused by AMR.

Implementing solutions to fight AMR will require teamwork, according to Murray.

“You can’t do this piecemeal,” Murray said. “You really need a concerted global effort.”

Then one night, distraught, he called his wife, Maria.

“I don’t know where I am,” he told her. He had driven 15 to 20 miles north of his suburban home outside Manhattan — an area he’d known for years — but suddenly needed his wife to give him directions.

Cancer, respiratory ailments, mental health conditions and musculoskeletal disorders have long been linked to work at the site of the World Trade Center attack, and medical costs for them have been covered by the World Trade Center Health Program since it was established by an act of Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2011.

Only recently, however, have scientists begun to find that cognitive impairment and dementia are also afflicting first responders at rates far higher than in the general population. The revelations are pushing physicians and advocates to be more vocal about lobbying the World Trade Center Health Program, overseen by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to include dementia among illnesses covered.

“I’m hoping they will,” said Benjamin Luft, the director of a program at Stony Brook University that cares for and monitors the health of first responders. “They have a systematic process in which they evaluate the scientific data. We’ve spent a huge amount of time and effort to establish that exposure to the neurotoxins and dust could cause these problems and so should be eligible for coverage.”

Luft was the senior author of a study published this summer involving more than 5,000 first responders who have undergone regular testing for over a decade. Those with the highest exposure to the dust and potentially neurotoxic debris at the World Trade Center, he found, were over 14 times more likely than those with the lowest exposure to be diagnosed with dementia before the age of 65.

Ray Dorsey, a professor of neurology at the University of Rochester, said tiny grains of ordinary dust, called fine particulate matter, can enter the nose and reach the brain to cause damage.

“The nose is the front door to our brain,” Dorsey said. “Dust and chemicals set up shop in the smell area of our brain, then spread to the parts of the brain important for memory.”

Recent studies have found that air pollution from factories, automobiles and forest fires can all increase the risk of dementia. “And you couldn’t get worse air pollution than being at that World Trade Center site,” Dorsey said.

On the morning of 9/11, Beyrer was stationed at a firearms training center in the Bronx. Within minutes of the first plane flying into the World Trade Center, he and other officers set off in a van, arriving before either of the buildings had collapsed.

“We were the only guys at that time who had the long guns,” he recalled. Told to station himself a couple of blocks away to provide security, he was enveloped in white-out conditions when the first building fell.

“It was terrible,” he said. “It was completely dark with dust.”

After some 48 hours on and around the mound of debris without a mask or any other protective equipment, Beyrer returned home covered in white soot.

“He took a shower and told me to take those clothes, throw them outside, get rid of them,” Maria Beyrer said. “Then he got dressed and went back out. He was there for six months, 12 hours a day.”

Although light face masks were eventually distributed, he said, “they didn’t really help. I guess they were better than nothing.”

Told by Luft that his months of exposure probably played a role in his cognitive symptoms, the Beyrers have made accommodations. She does the driving, for instance, when they’re together.

But whether it was dust alone that increased the risk of dementia in first responders, or harmful chemicals that piggy-backed on the dust, is impossible to disentangle, at least for now, said a co-author of the study led by Luft, which was published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

“We focused on dust in this study because that is what people could see,” said Sean Clouston, the director of research and a professor in the department of family, population and preventive medicine at Stony Brook Medicine. “They knew if they had or had not been exposed to it. But there were fumes from chemicals, jet engine fuel, burning computers, asbestos, heavy metals. There’s a whole bucket of things people were exposed to.”

The longer responders spent on the site, and the less protective gear they wore, the higher their risk of developing early dementia, the study found. Using a metric called “person-years” (by multiplying the number of responders times the amount of time they spent at the site), they found that for those who had the lowest exposure, the incidence rate of dementia was 2.95 per 1,000 person-years. But even those who had “mild” exposure had a greatly increased risk: 12.16 per 1,000 person-years.

The next highest level of exposure, labeled “moderate,” carried only slightly more risk, at 16.53 per 1,000 person-years. Those with “high” exposure, however, had an incidence rate of 30.09 per 1,000 person-years, while responders with “severe” exposure had a rate of 42.37 per 1,000 person-years.

“The fact that they’re showing a dose-response effect makes me more confident in the results,” said Caroline Tanner, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco who was not involved in the study. “It’s usually very hard to know exactly how much exposure people have to fine particulate matter. It’s remarkable that they could measure it and show a higher risk of dementia as the exposure went up. It’s an extremely well-done study.”

An earlier study by Clouston and Luft offered a possible explanation for why exposure to the World Trade Center site would be linked to dementia. In a paper they published last year in the journal Molecular Neurobiology, they reported that the longer responders spent at the site, the more inflammation they had in their hippocampus (the seahorse-shaped brain area that plays a crucial role in memory) and cerebral white matter (the nerve fibers that connect neurons to each other).

The years it has taken for cognitive deficits to develop among responders is one reason that the World Trade Center Health Program, overseen by the CDC, does not cover dementia or milder cognitive disorders.

Anthony Gardner, spokesman for the World Trade Center Health Program, said in a statement that the program’s leaders are aware of the study by Clouston and Luft and are reviewing the findings. In fact, he said, the program partly funded it.

But, he said, the program has a high scientific standard for adding any condition to the list of those covered by the program. “Meeting this standard generally requires consistent findings among several high-quality large studies of persons representing different groups,” he said. “To date, the program has not received a valid petition to add dementia or other cognitive conditions to the list of WTC-related health conditions.”

Benjamin Chevat, the executive director of 911 Health Watch, an independent group that monitors World Trade Center programs and advocates for changes when necessary, said the study of dementia risk will need to be replicated by other researchers to meet the requirements of the federal program.

“It would be great if this condition could be added tomorrow, but regretfully science does not work at the speed we would like,” he said.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that he helped to establish and fund the World Trade Center program so responders and survivors get the care they need. “We pushed for robust research funding for the program and wrote a process that allows for the program to follow the research to add conditions that are supported by scientific evidence,” he said. “I very much support this process and the research running as quickly as possible.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said the study’s finding of a 14-fold increased risk of early-onset dementia is “extremely alarming.”

“It’s essential that the CDC and medical community analyze this further in order to determine whether to add it to the list of conditions covered by the [World Trade Center Health Program],” she said.

Regardless of whether dementia and other cognitive issues are recognized by the program, Tanner said, an important lesson can already be drawn from the study of dementia in World Trade Center responders.

“The big take-home from this paper is that people who used personal protective equipment were protected from the worst effects,” she said. “That should apply to people in any industry where they run the risk of exposure to fine particulate matter. It applies certainly to firefighters. And for those of us who live downwind from a forest fire, maybe we should be asking about public health measures that can protect people when we know the air quality is poor.”

Beyrer’s cognitive symptoms, which have stabilized in the past couple of years, are hardly the only effects he has lived with since serving at Ground Zero. He suffered for years with lung, stomach and sleep problems, and half of his left lung had to be removed because of a noncancerous growth, which doctors told him was probably due to something he breathed in at the site. But despite it all, Maria insists they are among the lucky families who sent a loved one to respond to the World Trade Center attack.

“He still has problems sleeping,” she said. “But we are one of the fortunate ones. We’re able to manage. Whereas people have lost their parents, lost their children.”

As Tom Beyrer sees it, “There are times when it’s not okay. But I did what I had to do. Me and my friends. That was our job.”

The case arose when animal rights activists repeatedly posted comments challenging NIH programs which tested drugs or medical procedures on animals. NIH used keyword filters to automatically block all comments containing words such as “animals,” “cruelty,” “monkeys,” “testing” and “torture.” But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said NIH had not articulated “some sensible basis for distinguishing what [comments] may come in from what must stay out,” and its lack of sensitivity to the context of public comments “reinforces its unreasonableness.”

The ruling issued this week creates more new law in the area of how restrictive government entities can be when running a social media page. But the law could change again if the government appeals the case and the Supreme Court rules differently.

NIH declined to comment on the ruling or say whether it would appeal.

Stephanie Krent, a staff attorney with the Knight First Amendment Institute who argued the case in April, said the ruling was “a major victory and reaffirms that the First Amendment forecloses government officials and public agencies from muzzling criticism on their official social media accounts.” She said the opinion made clear “that officials can’t censor speech just because they disagree with it — and that’s true whether they delete specific comments or rely on digital tools like keyword blocking to do it for them.”

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals filed the suit against NIH in 2021 with Madeline Krasno and Ryan Hartkopf, social media users whose comments had been removed from NIH posts. Krasno told The Washington Post in May that she witnessed animal abuse in a monkey research lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She later began posting online about her experiences, only to find that both Wisconsin and NIH were removing her comments.

“It’s time we had an open conversation about all the animal testing you fund,” Krasno wrote on an NIH Instagram post about covid-19. “What a waste of life and resources.” The comment was deleted because it contained the words “animal” and “testing” from the department’s keyword filters.

With the help of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Krasno sued both Wisconsin and NIH. In both cases, federal district courts ruled against her, including U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell in Washington. Howell said the issue was “at the frontier of courts’ application of the First Amendment to the internet,” and found NIH’s content restrictions to be reasonable. Krasno’s appeal of that decision resulted in Tuesday’s ruling; her appeal against Wisconsin is pending

Both the University of Wisconsin and NIH said they were merely trying to keep their social media feeds from being overrun by repetitive, irrelevant comments. Justice Department attorney Jennifer Utrecht argued to the appeals court in April that there was “a seemingly coordinated campaign to flood [NIH’s] social media pages with off-topic commentary related to animal testing.”

But the appeals court ruling issued Tuesday, written by Judge Bradley N. Garcia and joined by judges Karen LeCraft Henderson and Patricia A. Millett, said NIH had not devised “objective, workable standards” for determining what is “on-topic” and what is “off-topic.”

“To say that comments related to animal testing are categorically off-topic,” Garcia wrote, “when a significant portion of NIH’s posts are about research conducted on animals defies common sense.” The right to praise or criticize governmental agents “lies at the heart of the First Amendment’s protections,” Garcia wrote, “and censoring speech that contains words more likely to be used by animal rights advocates has the potential to distort public discourse of NIH’s work.”

Krasno said she was “very excited” by the ruling, and hoped that it could influence not only the pending Wisconsin case but the behavior of universities nationwide. “These universities using our tax dollars can no longer be filtering out comments they don’t want to see,” Krasno said. “We need to be looking at where our public tax dollars are going, if there are better ways to be using it. That conversation should really be at the forefront, and shouldn’t be filtered out.”

PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo called the ruling a win for transparency, the public, animals and government accountability.

“This landmark decision,” Guillermo said, “reinforces that NIH can no longer ‘distort’ the message to defend its use and funding of cruel, pointless experiments on animals.”