Female Japan Olympics minister shuffle after Mori’s sexist kerfuffle
World’s oldest DNA sequenced from steppe mammoths
Japanese Olympics Minister Seiko Hashimoto, a woman who has competed in seven Olympic Games, intends to accept the job of head of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee, Kyodo news agency said on Thursday, after the previous leader quit due to sexist remarks.
Yoshiro Mori resigned as president of the committee last week after saying women talk too much, a fresh blow to the Games, already marred by an unprecedented delay of a year due to the coronavirus pandemic and strong public opposition.
NHK public television later said Hashimoto had conveyed her intention to accept but did not give further details.
At the start of a Tokyo 2020 board meeting on Thursday, Vice President Toshiaki Endo said Mori’s remarks had been inappropriate and a new president should be selected as quickly as possible.
“With only five months to go, his resignation inflicted indescribable damage to the preparation process for the Olympic Games,” Endo said.
“I hope that we can form a consensus on a good candidate to become the next president at this meeting.”
Criteria for a new leader include a deep understanding of gender equality and diversity, and the ability to attain those values during the Games, organizers have said.
Born days before Japan hosted the 1964 summer Games, Hashimoto took part in four Winter Olympics as a speed skater and three Summer Olympics as a cyclist.
A lawmaker in Japan’s ruling party, Hashimoto, 56, has served as the Olympics minister, doubling as minister for women’s empowerment, since 2019.
Hashimoto told reporters late on Wednesday she had nothing to say.
Teeth from mammoths buried in the Siberian permafrost for more than a million years have yielded the world’s oldest DNA ever sequenced, according to a study published on Wednesday, shining the genetic searchlight into the deep past.
Researchers said the three specimens, one roughly 800,000 years old and two over a million years old, provide important insights into the giant Ice Age mammals, including the ancient heritage of the woolly mammoth.
The genomes far exceed the oldest previously sequenced DNA – a horse dating between 780,000 to 560,000 years ago.
“This DNA is incredibly old. The samples are a thousand times older than Viking remains, and even predate the existence of humans and Neanderthals,” said Love Dalen, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, senior author of the study published in Nature. The mammoths were originally discovered in the 1970s in Siberia and held at the
Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
Researchers first dated the specimens geologically, with comparisons to other species, like small rodents, known to be unique to particular time periods and found in the same sedimentary layers.
This suggested that two of the mammals were ancient steppe mammoths more than a million years old.
The youngest of the trio is one of the earliest woolly mammoths yet found.
They also extracted genetic data from tiny samples of powder from each mammoth tooth,” essentially like a pinch of salt you would put on your dinner plate,” Dalen told a press briefing.
While it had degraded into very small fragments, scientists were able to sequence tens of millions of chemical base pairs, which make up the strands of DNA, and conduct age estimates from genetic information.