Sunday, May 14

The first launch in the coming week takes place at 5:03 a.m. UTC on Sunday morning. SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 56 second-generation Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. They’re equipped with anti-reflective coatings to help astronomers. This mission, which launches from Cape Canaveral in Florida, has been delayed from April, May 8 and May 12. Hopefully, it gets a break and manages to launch successfully on Sunday. To watch the launch, just head over to SpaceX’s website where you should find a live stream around the time of the event.

Monday, May 15

On Monday, we’ll have the launch of CAS Space’s Kinetica 1 rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre. It’s the second time the rocket has flown and will be carrying the Fucheng 1 and Luojia 2-01 satellites into orbit. The Kinetica 1 rocket is allegedly based on the DF-31 missile but was adapted by CAS Space to launch satellites.

Thursday, May 18

The third mission of the week is another one from SpaceX. From Cape Canaveral again, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying even more Starlink satellites, but only 21 this time. This mission takes off at 4:26 a.m. UTC and should be streamed on SpaceX’s website as well at the time.

Friday, May 19

The final launch will see a SpaceX Falcon 9 carry several satellites for Iridium and OneWeb. Five satellites for the Iridium NEXT mobile communications constellation will be launched alongside 15 first-generation and one second-generation OneWeb satellites. This mission will take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at an unspecified time. It should be available to watch on the SpaceX website.

Recap

The first launch this week was the Long March-7 Y7 carrying the Tianzhou-6 cargo spacecraft which headed to China’s Heavenly Palace space station.

Later that day, Tianzhou-6 successfully docked with the Heavenly Palace.

Finally, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket on the same day carrying 51 Starlink satellites.

That’s all for this week, be sure to check in next time.

TWIRL 114: Here are all the SpaceX launches coming up this week, and more

Researchers at the University of Connecticut Center on Aging have found that older adults with depression age faster than their peers. This accelerated biological aging is associated with poor physical and brain health, though the severity of depression itself appears unrelated. Accelerated aging is linked to worse cardiovascular health, higher blood pressure, high cholesterol, multiple medical problems, and decreased cognitive performance. The study’s findings open up opportunities for preventive strategies to reduce disability associated with depression in older adults and slow down biological aging. Researchers are now exploring therapies to reduce senescent cells and personalized treatments based on specific patterns of aging-associated proteins.

Older adults with depression are actually aging faster than their peers, University of Connecticut Center on Aging researchers report.

“These patients show evidence of accelerated biological aging, and poor physical and brain health,” which are the main drivers of this association, says Breno Diniz, a UConn School of Medicine geriatric psychiatrist and author of the study, which was recently published in the journal Nature Mental Health.

Diniz and colleagues from several other institutions looked at 426 people with late-in-life depression. They measured the levels of proteins associated with aging in each person’s blood. When a cell gets old, it begins to function differently, less efficiently, than a “young” cell. It often produces proteins that promote inflammation or other unhealthy conditions, and those proteins can be measured in the blood. Diniz and the other researchers compared the levels of these proteins with measures of the participants’ physical health, medical problems, brain function, and the severity of their depression.

To their surprise, the severity of a person’s depression seemed unrelated to their level of accelerated aging. However, they did find that accelerated aging was associated with worse cardiovascular health overall. People with higher levels of aging-associated proteins were more likely to have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and multiple medical problems. The accelerated aging was also associated with worse performance on tests of brain health such as working memory and other cognitive skills.

“Those two findings open up opportunities for preventive strategies to reduce the disability associated with major depression in older adults, and to prevent their acceleration of biological aging,” Diniz, of the UConn Center on Aging, says.

The researchers are now looking at whether therapies to reduce the number of aged, “senescent” cells in a person’s body can improve late-in-life depression. They are also looking at specific sources and patterns of proteins associated with aging, to see if this might lead to personalized treatments in the future.

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RIKEN researchers discovered that an early mutation (D614G) in the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have contributed to its rapid spread by altering the spike protein’s shape, improving the virus’s ability to adapt to human hosts. The finding could help inform the development of next-generation vaccines and antiviral drugs.

The rapid spread of COVID-19 may have been partly due to changes in the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus wrought by an early mutation in its genome, a detailed analysis by RIKEN researchers suggests. The finding could help inform the development of next-generation vaccines and antiviral drugs.

Alpha, Delta, Omicron, and other variants of concern have been making news throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. But the most significant mutation may have occurred in the early days of the pandemic, and it might have enabled the virus to spread so rapidly.

Yuji Sugita of the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) and Hisham Dokainish, who was at R-CCS at the time of the study, investigated the effect of mutations on viral structure. They did this by simulating the atomic positions of molecules found in different forms of the virus’s important spike protein—a tool coronaviruses use to bind and enter human cells.

They found that the substitution of a single amino acid altered this protein’s shape, helping SARS-CoV-2 to adapt to human hosts. This finding demonstrates how even tiny mutations—swapping a single amino acid in this case—can greatly affect protein dynamics.

To understand why the mutation proved so advantageous to the virus, the pair ran detailed simulations of the protein’s structure and stability. Their analysis—done using the RIKEN Fugaku supercomputer, one of the fastest in the world—revealed how the mutation (known as D614G) breaks an ionic bond with a second subunit of the Spike protein. It also changes the shape of a nearby loop structure, which alters the orientation of the entire protein, locking it into a form that makes it easier for the virus to enter cells (Fig. 1).

“A single and local change in an interaction within the molecule caused by a single mutation could affect the global structure of the spike protein,” explains Sugita, who is additionally affiliated with the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research. The resulting mutant proved better at replicating and transmitting between human hosts, and the D614Glineage quickly outcompeted its ancestral lineages and spread across the globe. It remains a fixture of every dominant variant that has followed.

Sugita’s team is now performing similar investigations of adaptive viral mutations that arose later in the course of the pandemic, including those found in the Omicron variant.

“Information obtained from our molecular dynamics simulations should help increase the opportunities for us to find effective drugs and other medicines,” he says.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted the unnecessary use of antimicrobial chemicals linked to health problems, antimicrobial resistance, and environmental harm, warn more than two dozen scientists in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology. Their critical review details how quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs) are increasingly marketed and used in home, healthcare, education, and workplace settings despite the availability of safer alternatives and in some cases limited evidence of reduced disease transmission.

“Disinfectant wipes containing QACs are often used on children’s school desks, hospital exam tables, and in homes where they remain on these surfaces and in the air,” said Courtney Carignan, a co-author and assistant professor at Michigan State University. “Our review of the science suggests disinfecting with these chemicals in many cases is unhelpful or even harmful. We recommend regular cleaning with soap and water and disinfecting only as needed with safer products.”

Human studies have found associations between QACs and asthma, dermatitis, and inflammation. Laboratory animal studies also raise concerns about potential links to infertility, birth defects, and more. Further, there has been evidence dating back to the 1950s that QACs contribute to antimicrobial resistance, making certain bacteria species resistant both to QACs themselves and to critical antibiotics.

“It’s ironic that the chemicals we’re deploying in vain for one health crisis are actually fueling another,” said Erica Hartmann, a co-author and professor at Northwestern University. “Antimicrobial resistance was already contributing to millions of deaths per year before the pandemic. Overzealous disinfection, especially with products containing QACs, threaten to make it worse.”

QACs are increasingly used in disinfectant solutions, wipes, hand sanitizers, sprays, and foggers, and are also being incorporated into personal care products, textiles, paints, medical instruments, and more. Since the pandemic, levels of these chemicals in the environment and our bodies have increased in parallel. 

One of the most common QACs is benzalkonium chloride, but others can be identified on ingredient labels with names that end in “ammonium chloride” or similar. However, disclosure and regulation of QACs varies widely. For example, pesticide labels are required to list QACs but paint labels are not. Most QACs are not regulated at all, nor are they comprehensively screened for health hazards. 

The scientists recommend eliminating uses of QACs that are either unnecessary or where their effectiveness has not been demonstrated. For example, disinfection with QACs often has no benefit over cleaning with plain soap and water. Other recommendations include requiring full disclosure of QACs in all products and closely monitoring their levels in people and the environment. 

“Drastically reducing many uses of QACs won’t spread COVID-19,” said Carol Kwiatkowski, a co-author and scientist at the Green Science Policy Institute. “In fact, it will make our homes, classrooms, offices, and other shared spaces healthier.”

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Mars has some of the most impressive volcanoes in the Solar System. ESA’s Mars Express has now imaged the pitted, fissured flank of the planet’s second-tallest: Ascraeus Mons.

This image comprises observations from Mars Express’ High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC).

Ascraeus Mons is the northernmost and tallest of three prominent volcanoes found in the Tharsis region of Mars, a volcanic plateau in Mars’ western hemisphere. It measures a towering 18 km (11 miles) in height but its slopes are gentle, with an average incline of 7 degrees. This slow climb is reflected in the volcano’s huge base diameter of 480 km (300 miles), giving it a footprint roughly the size of Romania on Earth.

This color-coded topographic image shows the southern flanks of Ascraeus Mons, the second-tallest volcano on Mars. It is based on a digital terrain model of the region, from which the topography of the landscape can be derived. Lower parts of the surface are shown in blues and purples, while higher altitude regions show up in whites and reds, as indicated on the scale to the top right. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

 

Ascraeus Mons is surpassed in height only by Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano not only on Mars but in the entire Solar System.

Like ink into water

The image shows the lower southern flank of Ascraeus Mons. There is a dramatic difference in elevation from one side to the other, with the left (southern) side of the frame sitting about 10 km lower than the right (northern) side. The volcano’s peak is found to the right (north) of the frame, as seen most clearly in the wider context map of the region.

This image shows the region surrounding the Martian volcanoes Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsia Mons. The area outlined by the larger white box indicates the area imaged by ESA’s Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera on January 15, 2023, during orbit 24045. The smaller inset white box shows the particular region highlighted by the new images from Mars Express. Credit: NASA/MGS/MOLA Science Team

 

Many similarly dramatic features – collectively named Ascraeus Chasmata, encompassing an enormous patch of collapsed terrain over 70 km (44 miles) across – are visible across the frame: lava flows and tubes, chains of craters, channel-like rilles, and large fissures spanning tens of km in length.

All of different age and origin, these features knit together to form a scene resembling trails of ink dispersing artfully in water, or a plant’s beautifully complex root system as it digs down into soil.  

This annotated image from ESA’s Mars Express shows the southern flanks of Ascraeus Mons, the second-tallest volcano on Mars. Several key features are labeled across the frame, including lava flows, chains of craters, channel-like rilles, and large fissures, all resembling irregular depressions and grooves in the tan-colored surface. These are collectively named Ascraeus Chasmata, and encompass an enormous patch of collapsed terrain over 70 km across. It is a ‘true color’ image, reflecting what would be seen by the human eye if looking at this region of Mars. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Lurking below ground

To the right side of the frame lie numerous wrinkled lava flows. This crinkled ground then encounters chains of ‘pit craters’: features where strings of circular or near-circular depressions have combined and coalesced to form troughs. We see these on Earth too, with a notable example being the dramatic Cenotes found on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. The pit crater troughs and chains shown here have also grouped together to form an especially large and eye-catching collapse area.

This oblique perspective view shows the southern flanks of Ascraeus Mons, the second-tallest volcano on Mars. Deep, irregular fissures in the martian surface can be seen snaking towards the camera. These are part of a group of features collectively named Ascraeus Chasmata, which encompasses an enormous patch of collapsed terrain over 70 km across. The part shown here formed as strings of circular or near-circular depressions combined and coalesced to form troughs, causing the ground to collapse – a bit like forming a sinkhole. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

 

These chains and troughs likely form where hidden voids lie below the surface, causing the ground to become unstable and collapse – a bit like a sinkhole. The subsurface voids are thought to be created as the surface layer of a lava flow rapidly cools and hardens; the lava flow beneath then ceases and ebbs away over time, leaving tube-shaped pockets of space lurking several meters below ground. 

The ground to the left of the pit crater chains is marked by so-called ‘sinuous rilles’: smaller, snaking channels without rims that are often found at the flanks of volcanoes. It is still unclear how these form, but their creation may involve flows of lava, ash, or water – or a combination of the three.

This oblique perspective view shows the southern flanks of Ascraeus Mons, the second-tallest volcano on Mars. A number of weaving depressions can be seen from this perspective; these are fissures and ‘coalesced pit crater troughs’, features where strings of circular or near-circular depressions have combined and coalesced to form troughs. They are part of a group of features – including lava flows and channel-like rilles – collectively named Ascraeus Chasmata, which encompasses an enormous patch of collapsed terrain over 70 km across. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

 

The leftmost part of the image is dominated by large fissures of up to 40 km (25 miles) long. Branching out from these fissures are channels that weave and braid together (‘braided channels’), isolating chunks of martian terrain to form ‘islands’ and terraces.

These are likely to have formed by water – perhaps as snow and ice built up on the flanks of Ascraeus Mons before later melting away.

Exploring Mars

Mars Express has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2003, imaging Mars’ surface, mapping its minerals, identifying the composition and circulation of its tenuous atmosphere, probing beneath its crust, and exploring how various phenomena interact in the martian environment.

This stereoscopic image shows the southern flanks of Ascraeus Mons, the second-tallest volcano on Mars. It was generated from data captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA’s Mars Express orbiter on January 15, 2023, during orbit 24045. The anaglyph, derived from data acquired by the nadir channel and one stereo channel of the HRSC, offers a three-dimensional view when viewed using red-green or red-blue glasses. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

 

The orbiter’s HRSC, responsible for these new images, has revealed much about Mars’ diverse surface features, with images showing everything from the mighty Valles Marineris canyon system, deep fractures and water-carved valleys to impact craters, tectonic faults, river channels, and ancient lava pools. Many Mars Express images feature the Red Planet’s immense volcanoes, of which Ascraeus Mons is a fascinating example.

The mission’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) was developed and is operated by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR).

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Are you sitting comfortably? Should you be? In the past few years, you have probably read at least one headline claiming that sitting is “the new smoking”. While fundamentally that is not true – leaving aside that it’s a lot easier to live without cigarettes than without seats – it’s fair to say that our love affair with the chair does come with a few downsides.

So, how much sitting is OK, how often should you go for a little walk – and do gym balls do anything? Spoiler: you might want to be standing for this one.

First up: the idea that sitting might be bad isn’t just 21st-century scaremongering. One of the first studies to suggest a link between illness and sitting was conducted in the 1950s, when researchers found that doubledecker bus drivers were twice as likely to have heart attacks as their conductor colleagues. Since then, dozens of studies have found links between sitting and a variety of ailments, with a 2013 analysis of studies concluding: “Higher amounts of daily total sitting time are associated with greater risk of all-cause mortality.”

The problems caused by excessive sitting can be broken into two broad categories: postural problems and cardio-metabolic ones. You can mitigate the first to some extent by doing targeted stretches and mobility work (such as slow, controlled lunges or squats), or just sitting in more joint-friendly positions. The second? Not so much.

When you sit for long enough, you effectively switch off some of your body’s largest muscles

“You might be very active, but that doesn’t entirely protect you from being sedentary,” says Kelly Mackintosh, a professor of physical activity and health at Swansea University. “I could go for an hour-long run with the dog every morning and meet the government guidelines for physical activity, but then sit down or do sedentary activities for the rest of the day – which would mean that I’d be classed as sedentary, in terms of risk.”

In terms of postural problems and pain, sitting for prolonged periods can cause your muscles and tendons to stiffen, leading to patellofemoral pain syndrome – also known misleadingly as “runner’s knee” – and lower back pain. One recent study found an association between extended sitting and problems with hip extension, which might lead to other forms of musculoskeletal pain. Long-term workplace sitting is also associated with neck pain.

As for the other stuff? It’s not completely understood why sitting seems to be associated with a range of health conditions, but the most plausible explanation is that it puts your body into standby. When you do it for long enough, your metabolism slows, circulation is constricted and your ability to deal with glucose is compromised. You are effectively switching off some of your body’s largest muscles, with results that can range from increased waist size to diabetes risk.

So, what should you be doing? Sitting on a gym ball doesn’t really help; in fact, it might have negative consequences. One paper that compared balls with office chairs concluded that “prolonged sitting on a stability ball does not greatly alter the manner in which an individual sits, yet it appears to increase the level of discomfort”, while another found associations between sitting on a ball and “spinal shrinkage”.

Addressing your posture is more effective. At work, keeping your screen at eye level and your feet flat on the floor is a good start, allowing you to keep your spine and hips in less painful positions. The easiest way to make a significant difference, though, is to get up every 15, 30 or 60 minutes.

“There are a lot of studies investigating this,” says Mackintosh. “The optimal ‘breakup’ time remains to be identified, but, essentially, even if you have the same overall volume of ‘sitting time’, but break it up with bouts of standing, this is much better for various aspects of your health. Even standing once every 60 minutes helps.”

Best of all, of course, is standing for a while once you are up. “A key question is what employers can do to support positive behaviours and minimise sedentary behaviour,” says Mackintosh. “But if that’s not happening, or you’re working from home, ask yourself: is there something you’re doing that doesn’t require you to sit down? Could you read your emails standing up? Could you do business calls standing, or go for a walk while you think?”

Were you standing comfortably while you read this? Maybe you should have been.

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But not all forest conversations are audible – nor do they all include animals.

In a new study, scientists in Japan found intriguing hints that rain may prompt some fungi to communicate using underground electrical signals.

The researchers focused on small, tan mushrooms known as bicoloured deceivers (Laccaria bicolor), which they found growing on the floor of a secondary mixed forest at the Kawatabi Field Science Center of Tohoku University in Japan.

L. bicolor is an ectomycorrhizal fungus that forms symbiotic relationships with certain plants, including many large trees like oaks and pines. It boosts their supply of water and nutrients in exchange for carbohydrates.

Previous research even suggests L. bicolor may help some trees indirectly feed on animals, luring insect relatives called springtails and killing them possibly with a toxin, sharing the animal's nitrogen with their host trees.

While some mycorrhizal fungi penetrate the cell walls of their host plants, ectomycorrhizal fungi like L. bicolor instead build subterranean "sheaths" around the exterior of a tree's roots.

These sheaths are made of hyphae, the rootlike filaments that fuel the growth of a fungus. When the hyphae of mycorrhizal fungi link underground they form interconnected systems known as mycorrhizal networks. Such underground networks have been proposed as acting as a kind of "wood-wide web," where entire forests communicate via chemical signals down tree roots and mycorrhizal fungi.

While mycorrhizal networks are real, there is too little evidence to know if they reach the scale and complexity often attributed to wood-wide webs. Many popular accounts of this phenomenon are overstated, some scientists say.

Nonetheless, this study adds to a growing body of research that delves into the details of these relationships, revealing fascinating details about how they work.

Previous studies have shown fungi produce variations in electrical potentials seemingly in response to changes in their environment, with clues suggesting these signals serve as a form of communication.

A 2022 study, for example, found patterns of nerve-like electrical activity in some fungi that seem comparable to the structure of human speech. The study identified up to 50 different "words," or groups of spikes in electrical activity, generated by fungal networks.

Earlier research has also found that plants can send secret electrical signals underground, possibly even without help from mycorrhizal fungi.

While spikes of electric potential have been seen in fungi before, sometimes in response to water or other stimuli, most studies have focused on limited types of fungi grown on artificial media or collected from the field under laboratory conditions, the authors of the new study note.

In the new study, researchers attached electrodes to a cluster of six L. bicolor mushrooms they found growing on the side of a forest trail.

The mushrooms were located near a jolcham oak (Quercus serrata) and a loose-flower hornbeam (Carpinus laxiflora), both potential symbiotic tree species for L. bicolor.

Mushrooms of Laccaria bicolor, or the bicolored deceiver. (Dick Culbert/Flickr/CC BY-2.0)

The researchers monitored the mushrooms' electrical potential, measured in millivolts (mV), for about two days in late September and early October 2021. The study site was initially sunny and dry, having received little rain in the previous twelve days, they report.

That changed on October 1, however, when Typhoon Mindulle brought 32 millimeters of rain. One to two hours after the rainfall, the mushrooms began showing new signs of activity.

"In the beginning, the mushrooms exhibited less electrical potential, and we boiled this down to the lack of precipitation," says microbial ecologist Yu Fukasawa of Tohoku University. "However, the electrical potential began to fluctuate after raining, sometimes going over 100 mV."

This fluctuation correlated with changes in both precipitation and temperature, according to Fukusawa and his colleagues, whose analysis suggests the electrical signal after rainfall showed evidence of signal transport among mushrooms.

This signal transport was especially strong between mushrooms located closer to one another on the forest floor, the researchers report, and demonstrated directionality.

While the new study is far from definitive, it adds another intriguing piece to the puzzle of what role fungi play in the often-overlooked ecosystems hidden underneath forest floors.

"Our results confirm the need for further studies on fungal electrical potentials under a true ecological context," Fukasawa says.

The study was published in Fungal Ecology.

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One chemical reaction that plays a role here is the three-step linking (ligation) of two RNA strands at their respective opposite ends. This reaction is triggered by specialized enzymes called RNA ligases and is present in all forms of life, from viruses to fungi and plants. In vertebrates, including humans, such RNA ligases had yet to be identified.

An interdisciplinary research team from Konstanz has now discovered the first human RNA ligase of this type, the protein C12orf29. At the cellular level, the study results, published in Nature Communications, suggest a protective function of the enzyme against cellular stress.

Antioxidant defense system of our cells

"We noticed C12orf29 during extensive studies of human lung carcinoma and kidney cells that we performed in search of proteins with a specific chemical signature and for which we used new chemical tools. It caught our attention because until then it was not understood what the protein's functions were," Marx says.

The researchers therefore developed and used various protocols to purify and predict the structure of the unexplored protein and performed experiments to track down its chemical function. They were thus able to prove what was initially only a reasonable suspicion: C12orf29 links RNA strands using adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

The researchers were able to show in detail that this process follows a characteristic, three-step reaction pattern known from other RNA ligases of other life forms. To learn more about the function of C12orf29 at the cellular level, the researchers went one step further after elucidating the chemical mechanism.

"We used the CRISPR/Cas gene scissors to generate a line of human kidney cells in which the gene encoding C12orf29 was knocked out. We were then able to compare these knockout (KO) cells with 'normal' kidney cells under varying experimental conditions," Marx explains.

In particular, when treating the cells with menadione, a K vitamin, clear differences were observed between KO cells and the wild-type cells with functional RNA ligase: Comparatively low concentrations of menadione were sufficient to damage KO cells. In contrast, the wild-type cells were only damaged at significantly higher concentrations.

Since menadione is known to cause oxidative stress, the researchers concluded from this result that C12orf29 protects against oxidative cellular stress. "We assume that a previously hidden human RNA repair mechanism underlies this biological function of C12orf29. We now need to examine this mechanism in further studies," Marx says.

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Russia is speeding up the construction of a corridor in its Far East region in a bid to export more grain to Inner Mongolia in Northeast China.

On Wednesday, the same day the Ukraine military said it had driven Russian infantry back from some positions around Bakhmut, the Kremlin said that it will boost its grain exports to China via the New Land Grain Corridor.

Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed the cabinet and the central bank to work out an intergovernmental agreement to boost grain exports to China by October 1, Russia’s national day, Russian news agency TASS reported.

Chinese state media said that, after tariffs, quotas and logistic problems are solved, China will import more wheat and barley from Russia and reduce its reliance on grain imported from western countries including Australia, the US, Canada and France.

Commentators said that, while Russia and China can work together to overcome western sanctions, at the same time the development will further push the decoupling of the global economy into United States-West and China-Russia spheres.

A decade-long project 

The idea of building the New Land Grain Corridor, which will connect China with the Eurasian Union countries, was first proposed by Beijing in 2012. It gained support from Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2016. 

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin see eye-to-eye ,in various strategic realms. Photo: WikiCommons

The construction of Grain Terminal Zabaikalsk (GTZ), a railway transshipment facility at Russia’s border with Inner Mongolia, commenced in July 2020. Most of the Russian grain sold to China is still being shipped from the Black Sea.

As of April last year, the terminal had been 75% completed, according to Russian media. 

Russian Vice-Prime Minister Yuri Trutnev said on March 16 this year over 700 billion rubles (US$9 billion) had been invested last year in the Far East and 140 enterprises had been established. He said the amount of the contracted investments in the Zabaikalsk Territory will exceed 316 billion rubles. Of that eventual total, the amount already invested comes to 143 billion, he said.

Karen Ovsepian, chief executive of the GTZ, said total capital investments under the New Land Grain Corridor program will amount to 500 billion rubles. He said the GTZ, with a transshipment capacity of up to 8 million tons a year, will boost trade between Russia and China and also enable the Far East to drive the development of the Siberian and Ural regions. 

When Xi on March 21 signed a joint statement with Putin to deepen comprehensive partnerships and strategic cooperation between China and Russia, he also met Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin to discuss the New Land Grain Corridor. 

The Russian government will “consider concluding an intergovernmental agreement between Russia and China” by October 1 and will “increase grain production in the Far Eastern, Ural and Siberian federal districts, as well as the volume of its export to the market of China,” TASS reported.

The agreement will allow Russia to export more wheat and barley, in which it has advantages both in price and quality, Zhang Hong, an associate research fellow at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.

“As for the land corridor, trains running through ports such as Manzhouli and Suifenhe could transport grain from Russia,” Zhang said, adding that the agricultural trade between China and Russia “is not very big” now.

Unrestricted imports

China’s General Administration of Customs announced on February 24 last year that it would allow unrestricted imports of Russian wheat into China. Scott Morrison, then prime minister of Australia, criticized Beijing for supporting Russia, which was launching a full-scale attack on Ukraine on the same day. 

In 2021, China imported 2.74 million tons or US$860 million of Australian wheat, accounting for about 28% of the grain’s total import both by volume and value, according to Research and Markets, an industry data provider. It also imported wheat from eight other countries, including the US, Canada and France. 

In the same year, China imported $2.88 billion of barley, mainly from France ($901 million), Canada ($861 million), Ukraine ($619 million), Argentina ($432 million), and Russia ($20.8 million), according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC). It also imported soybeans from Brazil ($27.2 billion), US ($14.3 billion), Argentina ($1.78 billion), Canada ($345 million) and Russia ($297 million). 

Black Sea Grain Initiative

A Fujian-based writer says in an article published Friday that Russia wants to speed up the New Land Grain Corridor project as it cannot sell its agricultural products with the Black Sea Grain Initiative.

A Black Sea Grain Initiative shipment at sea. Image: UNCTAD

“Although both Ukraine and Russia signed the Black Sea Grain Initiative last July, Russia has so far faced big difficulty in exporting its grains amid western sanctions,” he says. “No insurer can provide service to Russia’s grain carriers while Russian exporters cannot settle their transaction without SWIFT.”

For the sake of the world’s needs, Russia has extended the Black Sea grain deal twice, in November and March, he says. But if the deal ends after May 18, Russia must find a new way to sell its grain and China is now its best choice, he says.

A Hebei-based columnist on Thursday published an article titled “Russia finally wakes up, Putin opens Far East barn for mutual benefits of China and Russia.”

The writer adds: “Due to sanctions, Russia has been kicked out from the western markets and must look at the East, particularly China, the biggest consumption market in the world.” 

He says Moscow has previously been worried that it will lose the Far East over the long run if the region’s population is diluted by Chinese. But now, he says, Russia is facing a severe challenge in the Ukrainian crisis and has to boost Far East development for the Chinese market.

He adds that, as China is also seeking a way to grow its economy to compete with the US, it will be a win-win situation if both China and Russia can work together and overcome the West’s sanctions and containment.

“With the rapid change of the international situation in recent years, the stability of China’s overseas grain supply chain has been affected,” he says. “The risk of China importing grain from South and North American countries will be effectively mitigated by the increase in Russian grain exports to China.”

According to the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, China will only be able to self-supply 65% of its food consumption in 2035, compared with about 76% at present. The country will still have to import 83% of soybeans it needs by 2035. 

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This is the third and final installment of a three-part series. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

The landmark successes of the EAST tokamak are propelling China into the leading position worldwide in the field of magnetic fusion.

The reactor’s advanced design, the excellence and creativity demonstrated by the EAST team and the practical orientation to solving concrete scientific and engineering problems of fusion give us reason to expect more breakthroughs in the near future.   

As for now, the EAST research program appears to be determined primarily by the needs of the ITER project, in which China is an active participant. ITER, however, is a very, very slow elephant, which is practically certain to be overtaken by faster, cheaper and more sophisticated devices.

By the time it finally goes into operation, ITER will almost certainly be technologically obsolete. A masterpiece of high-tech engineering, but with a total cost variously estimated at between US$22 and $65 billion, ITER will still only be an experimental device.

If all goes well, the follow-on project of a tokamak-based prototype fusion power plant – the “DEMO” – is projected to go online in 2050. Assuming the DEMO proves to be viable, commercial plants would follow.

From my point of view, this perspective is intolerably long and costly, and would make magnetic confinement fusion virtually irrelevant to solving the world’s energy problems in the foreseeable future.

The ITER nuclear fusion project is costly and potentially behind the nuclear times. Image: Facebook

As mentioned above, China is presently working on its own large fusion power-generating tokamak, the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR). At first glance, the philosophy of CFETR appears to be similar to that of the ITER. But that might not be completely true, nor are significant changes ruled out. 

Interesting, from my standpoint, would be the option of utilizing the CFETR as the core of a hybrid fusion-fission reactor, in which neutrons from the fusion reactions would be used to drive fission reactions in a subcritical blanket. Studies are already being made on this possibility.

In fact, fusion-fission hybrid reactors have already been the subject of extensive research in China for many years. A major advantage of such a system lies in the fact that the fusion reactor part no longer must produce a net energy surplus; the energy required for maintaining the fusion reactions would be compensated many times over by that released by the fission reactions.

Thereby the requirements for the fusion system are drastically reduced, relative to a “pure” fusion power plant. Hybrid reactors would thus provide a much nearer-term option than the ITER–DEMO scenario.

(It should be noted that, in addition to tokamaks, many other types of fusion devices might serve as the neutron sources for hybrid reactors.)

On the other hand, it is conceivable that results from China’s EAST and other experimental devices in various countries might improve the viability of the ITER and shorten the time to achieving ignition and net thermal output.

Despite being a very slow elephant and consuming a great amount of resources, ITER at the very least constitutes a platform for large-scale international cooperation on fusion science and technology, and building up a corresponding industrial base. It would not make sense to halt participation in this project.

At the same time, however, it would be wise to look toward other options for realizing fusion via the tokamak route.

I have written earlier for Asia Times about compact high-field tokamaks which utilize many times stronger magnetic fields and will benefit greatly from the emergence of high-temperature superconductors, which were not available when the ITERs magnet system was designed. Another example is the high-field spherical tokamak.

EAST operates with very different plasma parameters, but many of its results, as well as the technological accomplishments embodied in its design, are doubtless relevant to high-field devices.   

In my view, the history of efforts to realize fusion using tokamaks has been shaped by an important methodological issue: the attitude taken to nonlinear self-organizing processes in magnetically-confined plasmas. That includes, among other things, their ability to concentrate energy and to structure themselves in a highly inhomogeneous manner.

I think it is fair to say that, starting from the initial calculations carried out by A D Sakharov in 1950-51, the development of tokamaks has tended to overlook or ignore self-organizing phenomena, orienting instead to the vision of achieving an essentially uniform, featureless, quiescent plasma.

The history of high-density pulsed systems, especially plasma focus and related devices, has taken a different course. [See my article on the plasma focus here].

Dense plasma focus. Photo: LPP Fusion

Of course, at the time the tokamak was born, nonlinear self-organizing processes were much less well-known and understood than they are today.  Only gradually has their essential role in both the successes and the failures of tokamak devices been realized.

It would make sense, instead of struggling against the plasma’s natural self-organizing tendencies, to make friends with them and learn how to exploit them in order to make viable fusion power a reality in the coming period.

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Hammer remembers feeling terrified. “It was one of those moments where you’re like, ‘Oh my God, it’s my turn.’” It took a minute to grasp that the noise was not a gunshot, but a burst balloon.

Jen Panos is a mother of three in California. She finds herself noting what her kids are wearing to school. If there is a shooting, she thinks, she needs to be able to identify their bodies. “I walk myself through it: What am I going to do if this comes for us?” she said.

 Kat Vargas and her husband, a firefighter, live in Texas. They too have a plan for what to do in the event of a shooting: Vargas would cover their youngest, while her husband would shield their middle son. Their eldest, who is 9, might have to run.

Last weekend, Vargas’s husband was one of the first responders to the attack on a mall in Allen, Tex., that killed eight people. Vargas can’t talk about the shooting without crying, but she is not surprised. “It’s surreal, not shocking,” she said.

Hypervigilance. Numbness. Anxiety. Exhaustion. As the country confronts a fresh string of mass killings — in a mall, in a home, at a bank, a birthday party, a school — the unrelenting violence is exacting a psychological toll.

Dellandra Musa reassures her son Elijiah, on Wednesday at the makeshift memorial in Allen, Tex.

© Jeffrey McWhorter for The Washington Post

Experts say that even people far away from the scene of such events can experience increased stress and anxiety. At the same time, the frequency of mass killings means that in some cases, they are losing their capacity to stun and horrify.

This year alone, the country has witnessed 22 mass killings by gunfire, according to a database maintained by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University that includes incidents where four or more people were killed, not including the shooter. That represents a marked increase from 2022: At this time last year, there had been eight such events.

While mass killings draw the media spotlight, they are a small fraction of the country’s gun deaths, which include tens of thousands of homicides and suicides each year. Researchers at Boston University concluded that over the course of an American’s lifetime, the likelihood of knowing someone killed or injured by gunfire is nearly 100 percent.

A mourner prays at the makeshift memorial at Nashville's Covenant School on Monday, a day after the shooting there.

© Johnnie Izquierdo/for The Washington Post

The burden comes atop an already acute sense of emotional exhaustion after a years-long period marked by a deadly pandemic, climate-related disasters and a belated racial reckoning, said Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor of psychology at the University of California Irvine who studies trauma.

“There’s a broader context here of many years of stress and anxiety and uncontrollable events that have felt really almost too much to bear,” she said.

Silver’s research has shown how media exposure can transmit the psychological impact of traumatic events well beyond their immediate area. One study found that after the 2013 Boston marathon bombing, people who immersed themselves in media coverage of the attack experienced more acute stress than people in Boston.

 “When you’re at an event, there is a beginning, middle and end,” Silver said. But when you’re absorbed in the coverage, “you’re seeing a loop over and over again of the tragedy.”

Meghan Alessi, a project manager in Louisville, knows how that feels. When she was 20, she was at a premiere of the movie “The Dark Knight Rises” the same day a shooter opened fire during a showing of the film in Aurora, Colo., killing 12. She became fixated on the coverage, grieving over the victims, learning about their families and trying to find ways to protect herself in future.

In more recent years, however, she has found herself tuning out the coverage of shootings. It’s a form of self-preservation, she said. The prevalence of such incidents “just leads you to become numb to it,” said Alessi, 30. “It’s such a normal thing at this point that everyone moves on, whether you’re ready to or not.”

When Alessi learned about a mass killing last month at a bank in downtown Louisville, near where her fiance works, she felt panic, followed by a sense of helplessness. At a concert last weekend in Atlanta, Alessi said, she wondered for the first time what she would do if a shooter attacked the event.

Psychologists who study how people respond to tragedies say that feeling powerless can lead to emotional numbness. “If you pay attention and you’re upset and you feel you can’t do anything about it, well, it makes sense to turn it off,” said Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. “Otherwise, you’re in a constant state of agitation and anger.”

 Slovic’s research has shown, paradoxically, that the larger the number of victims of a tragedy, the harder it is for people to care. It’s a phenomenon he calls the “deadly arithmetic of compassion.” What’s more, when a problem is presented as something that impacts millions, Slovic’s research has shown that people are less likely to respond because it makes them feel ineffective and discouraged.

“We have more ability to help than we realize, but we get demotivated by thinking we can’t fix this problem,” said Slovic. “But anything we can do matters … even partial solutions can save whole lives.”

Hammer, the college student who felt panicked at the party, says he is so pessimistic about the country’s willingness to change that he has considered moving somewhere with less gun violence. He grew up doing lockdown drills in school. He was in fourth or fifth grade when he realized they weren’t a fun exercise in hiding.

A man writes a message on a wooden heart during a memorial at Monterey Park City Hall in Monterey Park, Calif., on Tuesday to honor those killed and injured when a gunman opened fire inside a dance studio. (Philip Cheung for The Washington Post)

 Now 20 and a student at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., Hammer doesn’t watch the news, but gun violence finds him anyway.

Last year, there was a shooting at nearby Bridgewater College that left two dead. A few weeks ago, there was a shooting at the apartment complex next to where Hammer lives. Two more people dead, in the kind of gun violence so common that it doesn’t make headlines beyond local outlets.

To help pay for college, Hammer works part-time at Walmart. Each month, he said, employees are required to watch a training video on what to do in the event of an active shooter. In November, a gunman killed six fellow employees at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Va.

Hammer says he feels both numb and much more aware of his surroundings, always alert to the potential for violence. “I’m so exhausted wondering if I’m next,” he said.

Jocelyn R. Smith Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro who studies gun violence and racial trauma, said the nation is now “wrestling with things that communities of color have been tasked with navigating for centuries.”

Trisha Mathews on Nov. 25, 2022, signs a personal message for one of the victims of the Walmart mass killing in Chesapeake, Va.

© Mike Caudill for The Washington Post

“If gun violence is a threat to your daily life, there is no place you go that you’re not taking stock of safety,” Smith Lee said. The whole country is now being forced to weigh risks that are familiar to communities that have been disproportionately impacted by fatal shootings, she said. And the toll of frequent tragic events, overwhelming to many, “can be uniquely burdensome for people of color.”

 Panos, the mother of three, says she and her husband adjusted their behavior years ago. They live in Upland, Calif., east of Los Angeles, and when they go to a restaurant, one of them faces each door to observe who is entering. They have told their children that if anything bad happens at school, they should run away bent over, protecting their upper bodies.

Panos, 45, can feel herself shutting down when news of another mass killing emerges. “If I allow myself to spiral into the anxiety, the fear, the rage, the frustration, I cease to be useful,” she said. Her brother used to live in the Dallas suburb where Saturday’s attack took place. Her parents have shopped at that mall. “You keep thinking, it is getting closer and closer to being my turn,” she said.

 Ron Acierno is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and director of its center on trauma and resilience. He said he sees in his daily work the ways that people are growing more numb to mass killings. “They say things like, ‘Which school shooting was that again?’” Acierno said.

Desensitization is an understandable response, he said. But it doesn’t make us safer, unlike powerful emotions that can “drive you to act,” Acierno said.

“Horror is an appropriate response to a kid being shot in a mall, in a school, at home. It’s a horrible thing that you should feel horrible about until you’ve done something to make the situation better,” he said.

 For Vargas, the mother in Texas, that moment of awful clarity came in 2019 when a shooter killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso. At the time, she and her husband had two boys. As they lay in bed that night, they began talking about who was going to cover which child if there was a shooting.

“Something just broke,” said Vargas, 31. She told her husband, “This is not rational. We cannot live this way.”

Vargas began volunteering with Moms Demand Action, a group dedicated to reforming gun laws to reduce violence. She began voting for Democrats instead of Republicans.

Last year, her husband took part in a multiday active shooter simulation drill. When he came home, he sat on their sofa and cried, she said. We are training not to prevent shootings, he told her, but to arrive to dead bodies and treat those lucky enough to live. On May 6, he responded in real life.

Vargas thought about the parents who died trying to shield children from a hail of bullets in two mass killings in Texas in recent days. Her voice shook with sorrow and rage.

“This is hell,” she said. “Enough is enough.”

People visit a makeshift memorial near Club Q on Monday in Colorado Springs. On Saturday evening, a 22-year-old gunman entered the LGBTQ nightclub and opened fire, killing five people and injuring 25 others before being stopped by club patrons. © Scott Olson/Getty Images

Justine McDaniel contributed to this report.

Source

Guam’s missile defenses are slated for a massive upgrade, hardening US military facilities housed on the strategic Pacific island against potential Chinese and North Korean attacks.

The Pentagon is taking the initial steps to provide Guam with a persistent missile defense system that gives 360-degree coverage against Chinese and North Korean missile threats, USNI News reported.

The USNI report mentions that Guam will receive a version of the road-mobile AN/TPY-6 four-sided phased array radar for integrated air and missile defense, tied to a disaggregated Aegis Ashore on the periphery.

US Missile Defense Agency director Vice Admiral Jon Hill said before the Senate Armed Forces Committee that environmental assessments for additional missile defense sites are underway, the report said. The facilities will be designed to provide a layered defense against simultaneous cruise, ballistic, maneuvering and hypersonic attack, Hill said according to the same USNI report.

Joseph Trevithick notes in a July 2021 article for The Warzone that it may be possible to build some portions of the Aegis Ashore system as an extension to the sprawling Anderson Air Force Base. Trevithick also mentions that building an underground facility at Guam’s southern end is possible, with interceptor missiles being fired from apertures in the mountainsides.

The planned Aegis Ashore facility will complement other missile defense assets already positioned on Guam, including the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) and Aegis-equipped nearby warships.

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald fires a Harpoon missile during a live-fire drill in the waters near Guam. Photo: AFP / US Navy

However, the multitude of systems may present challenges, analysts say.

Chris Gordon notes in a March 2023 article for Air & Space Forces Magazine that Guam faces a perfect air and missile defense problem, noting that integrating disjointed missile defense systems may not be effective against adversaries deploying an array of advanced weapons such as drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and hypersonic weapons to exploit the gaps in Guam’s defenses.

Harry Harris notes in a July 2021 article for Breaking Defense that Guam’s missile defense is problematic since unlinked systems combined with fixed sensor-to-shooter combinations promise failure at first contact with an enemy armed with advanced missiles.

Furthermore, Harris notes that the sheer number of missiles fired in a saturation attack demands enormous sensor integration across various domains, including cyber and space, to defeat hypersonic threats.

He also says that Aegis Ashore has limited capabilities against low-flying cruise missiles, although an upgraded version has an advanced command and control system to bring other platforms into the fight.

China and North Korea field so-called “Guam killer” missiles such as the DF-26, China’s first ballistic missile with a 4,000-kilometer range to hit Guam, and North Korea’s Hwasong 14 and 15, both of which have a 4,500-kilometer range when fired at a normal trajectory.

Apart from targeting Guam with ballistic missiles, China may now be able to put Guam within hypersonic strike range of its naval and air forces.

The Warzone reported last month that China’s Shandong carrier battlegroup sailed within 600 to 700 kilometers of Guam, potentially threatening US forces with air and ship-launched hypersonic missile attacks.

Aside from threatening Guam, the Shandong battlegroup’s deployment may have aimed to demonstrate China’s ability to flank Taiwan from the south and cut off US forces deployed in the Philippines from resupply and reinforcement from Guam.

Asia Times reported in October 2022 that China may now be able to deploy hypersonic weapons on its carrier-based aircraft and now deploys the ship-based YJ-21 hypersonic missile aboard its Type 055 cruisers. The weapons can threaten US forces stationed in Guam and Aegis-armed warships operating in the island’s surrounding waters.

Asia Times reported in November 2022 that China has also fielded the CM-401 air-launched hypersonic missile, which is designed to be fired from H6-K strategic bombers.

China has made a not-so-subtle threat against US forces in Guam, releasing a video in September 2020 showing an H6-K bomber launching a missile at an enemy base modeled on Guam’s Anderson Air Base.

China’s YJ-21 hypersonic missile in a test launch. Image: Video Screengrab

Given those threats, the US is taking steps to shore up Guam’s defenses aside from the Aegis Ashore facility plan. Asia Times noted in August 2022 that the US has started the integration of Guam’s disjointed missile defenses consisting of the US Army Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) missile batteries and US Navy’s Aegis-equipped warships into a common Joint Track Management Capabilities bridge.

While additional Aegis warships such as the Ticonderoga cruisers can be diverted to reinforce Guam’s defenses, it could be a strategic stretch as they are also needed for anti-submarine missions or carrier escorts.

Moreover, the technology aboard those aging warships may be behind the times when faced with China’s and North Korea’s latest missile and hypersonic threats. They can still serve as ad-hoc missile defense command centers and floating testbeds for new missile defense systems.

Positioning missile defense radars is difficult in Guam. The island’s small size and the size and power of such radars pose an explosive hazard risk, given the possibility of electric discharge next to ordnance stored nearby. The powerful radars may also generate signal emissions that could interfere with civilian aviation.

Guam’s high strategic value is such that all US operations in the Pacific are premised on the island’s bases. A B Abrams notes in an August 2022 article for The Diplomat that while Guam was considered near-unassailable during the Cold War, improvements in Chinese and North Korean missile capabilities may have changed Guam’s invincible status as a haven for US forces in the Pacific.

Abrams notes that while effective defense against hypersonic threats may still be some time away, near-term improvements to air and missile defense technology can improve Guam’s chances against the conventional missiles that make up the bulk of China and North Korea’s arsenals.

Parallel with toughening Guam’s missile defenses, Abrams also says that the US must reduce its extreme reliance on Guam by dispersing its assets more widely in the Pacific.

Source

Google has agreed to an $8 million settlement with Texas over deceptive ads promoting its Pixel 4 smartphone, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced today.

At issue was Google's trustworthiness as an advertiser after the tech giant "hired radio DJs to record and broadcast detailed testimonials about their personal experiences with the Pixel 4," but then "refused to provide the DJs with a phone for them to use," Paxton said.

The tech giant had previously settled claims from the Federal Trade Commission and six other states for approximately $9 million, and Paxton seemed proud that his "settlement recovers $8 million for the State of Texas alone."

Google did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment, but a company spokesperson previously told TechCrunch that “we take compliance with advertising laws seriously and have processes in place designed to help ensure we follow relevant regulations and industry standards.” [Update: Google spokesperson José Castañeda repeated Google's prior statement to Ars, saying, “We are pleased to resolve this issue.”]

Paxton said that "if Google is going to advertise in Texas, their statements better be true." He decided to take action to hold Google "accountable for lying to Texans for financial gain," saying that large companies should not expect "special treatment under the law."

“Texas will do whatever it takes to protect our citizens and our state economy from corporations’ false and misleading advertisements,” Paxton said.

It's not the first time that Texas has clashed with Google. In 2020, Texas joined other states in filing a complaint against Google for allegedly "illegally maintaining monopolies in Internet search and search advertising services" in 2020. That complaint is ongoing, with Google this week filing a memo asking the court to deny states' request to review select Google employees' communications with its attorneys.

More recently, in 2022, Texas sued Google, "alleging that the tech giant has unlawfully captured and used the biometric data of millions of Texans without properly obtaining their informed consent to do so," according to a press release. At that time,

Paxton compared Google to a "modern Eye of Sauron."

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THIS STORY ORIGINALLY appeared on Hakai and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Dead fish were everywhere, speckling the beach near town and extending onto the surrounding coastline. The sheer magnitude of the October 2021 die-off, when hundreds, possibly thousands, of herring washed up, is what sticks in the minds of the residents of Kotzebue, Alaska. Fish were “literally all over the beaches,” says Bob Schaeffer, a fisherman and elder from the Qikiqtaġruŋmiut tribe.

Despite the dramatic deaths, there was no apparent culprit. “We have no idea what caused it,” says Alex Whiting, the environmental program director for the Native Village of Kotzebue. He wonders if the die-off was a symptom of a problem he’s had his eye on for the past 15 years: blooms of toxic cyanobacteria, sometimes called blue-green algae, that have become increasingly noticeable in the waters around this remote Alaska town.

Kotzebue sits about 40 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, on Alaska’s western coastline. Before the Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue had his name attached to the place in the 1800s, the region was called Qikiqtaġruk, meaning “place that is almost an island.” One side of the 2-kilometer-long settlement is bordered by Kotzebue Sound, an offshoot of the Chukchi Sea, and the other by a lagoon. Planes, boats, and four-wheelers are the main modes of transportation. The only road out of town simply loops around the lagoon before heading back in.

In the middle of town, the Alaska Commercial Company sells food that’s popular in the lower 48—from cereal to apples to two-bite brownies—but the ocean is the real grocery store for many people in town. Alaska Natives, who make up about three-quarters of Kotzebue’s population, pull hundreds of kilograms of food out of the sea every year.

“We’re ocean people,” Schaeffer tells me. The two of us are crammed into the tiny cabin of Schaeffer’s fishing boat in the just-light hours of a drizzly September 2022 morning. We’re motoring toward a water-monitoring device that’s been moored in Kotzebue Sound all summer. On the bow, Ajit Subramaniam, a microbial oceanographer from Columbia University, New York, Whiting, and Schaeffer’s son Vince have their noses tucked into upturned collars to shield against the cold rain. We’re all there to collect a summer’s worth of information about cyanobacteria that might be poisoning the fish Schaeffer and many others depend on.

HUGE COLONIES OF algae are nothing new, and they’re often beneficial. In the spring, for example, increased light and nutrient levels cause phytoplankton to bloom, creating a microbial soup that feeds fish and invertebrates. But unlike many forms of algae, cyanobacteria can be dangerous. Some species can produce cyanotoxins that cause liver or neurological damage, and perhaps even cancer, in humans and other animals.

Many communities have fallen foul of cyanobacteria. Although many cyanobacteria can survive in the marine environment, freshwater blooms tend to garner more attention, and their effects can spread to brackish environments when streams and rivers carry them into the sea. In East Africa, for example, blooms in Lake Victoria are blamed for massive fish kills. People can also suffer: in an extreme case in 1996, 26 patients died after receiving treatment at a Brazilian hemodialysis center, and an investigation found cyanotoxins in the clinic’s water supply. More often, people who are exposed experience fevers, headaches, or vomiting.

When phytoplankton blooms decompose, whole ecosystems can take a hit. Rotting cyanobacteria rob the waters of oxygen, suffocating fish and other marine life. In the brackish waters of the Baltic Sea, cyanobacterial blooms contribute to deoxygenation of the deep water and harm the cod industry.

As climate change reshapes the Arctic, nobody knows how—or if—cyanotoxins will affect Alaskan people and wildlife. “I try not to be alarmist,” says Thomas Farrugia, coordinator of the Alaska Harmful Algal Bloom Network, which researches, monitors, and raises awareness of harmful algal blooms around the state. “But it is something that we, I think, are just not quite prepared for right now.” Whiting and Subramaniam want to change that by figuring out why Kotzebue is playing host to cyanobacterial blooms and by creating a rapid response system that could eventually warn locals if their health is at risk.

WHITING’S CYANOBACTERIA STORY started in 2008. One day while riding his bike home from work, he came across an arresting site: Kotzebue Sound had turned chartreuse, a color unlike anything he thought existed in nature. His first thought was: Where’s this paint coming from?

The story of cyanobacteria on this planet goes back about 1.9 billion years, however. As the first organisms to evolve photosynthesis, they’re often credited with bringing oxygen to Earth’s atmosphere, clearing the path for complex life forms such as ourselves.

Over their long history, cyanobacteria have evolved tricks that let them proliferate wildly when shifts in conditions such as nutrient levels or salinity kill off other microbes. “You can think of them as sort of the weedy species,” says Raphael Kudela, a phytoplankton ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Most microbes, for example, need a complex form of nitrogen that is sometimes only available in limited quantities to grow and reproduce, but the predominant cyanobacteria in Kotzebue Sound can use a simple form of nitrogen that’s found in virtually limitless quantities in the air.

Cyanotoxins are likely another tool that help cyanobacteria thrive, but researchers aren’t sure exactly how toxins benefit these microbes. Some scientists think they deter organisms that eat cyanobacteria, such as bigger plankton and fish. Hans Paerl, an aquatic ecologist from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, favors another hypothesis: that toxins shield cyanobacteria from the potentially damaging astringent byproducts of photosynthesis.

Around the time when Kotzebue saw its first bloom, scientists were realizing that climate change would likely increase the frequency of cyanobacterial blooms, and what’s more, that blooms could spread from fresh water—long the focus of research—into adjacent brackish water. Kotzebue Sound’s blooms probably form in a nearby lake before flowing into the sea.

THE LATEST SCIENCE on cyanobacteria, however, had not reached Kotzebue in 2008. Instead, officers from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game tested the chartreuse water for petroleum and its byproducts. The tests came back negative, leaving Whiting stumped. “I had zero idea,” he says. It was biologist Lisa Clough, then from East Carolina University and now with the National Science Foundation, with whom Whiting had previously collaborated, who suggested he consider cyanobacteria. The following year, water sample analysis confirmed she was correct.

In 2017, Subramaniam visited Kotzebue as part of a research team studying sea ice dynamics. When Whiting learned that Subramaniam had a long-standing interest in cyanobacteria, “we just immediately clicked,” Subramaniam says.

The 2021 fish kill redoubled Whiting and Subramaniam’s enthusiasm for understanding how Kotzebue Sound’s microbial ecosystem could affect the town. A pathologist found damage to the dead fish’s gills, which may have been caused by the hard, spiky shells of diatoms (a type of algae), but the cause of the fish kill is still unclear. With so many of the town’s residents depending on fish as one of their food sources, that makes Subramaniam nervous. “If we don’t know what killed the fish, then it’s very difficult to address the question of, Is it safe to consume?” he says.

I watch the latest chapter of their collaboration from a crouched position on the deck of Schaeffer’s precipitously swaying fishing boat. Whiting reassures me that the one-piece flotation suit I’m wearing will save my life if I end up in the water, but I’m not keen to test that theory. Instead, I hold onto the boat with one hand and the phone I’m using to record video with the other while Whiting, Subramaniam, and Vince Schaeffer haul up a white and yellow contraption they moored in the ocean, rocking the boat in the process. Finally, a metal sphere about the diameter of a hula hoop emerges. From it projects a meter-long tube that contains a cyanobacteria sensor.

The sensor allows Whiting and Subramaniam to overcome a limitation that many researchers face: a cyanobacterial bloom is intense but fleeting, so “if you’re not here at the right time,” Subramaniam explains, “you’re not going to see it.” In contrast to the isolated measurements that researchers often rely on, the sensor had taken a reading every 10 minutes from the time it was deployed in June to this chilly September morning. By measuring levels of a fluorescent compound called phycocyanin, which is found only in cyanobacteria, they hope to correlate these species’ abundance with changes in water qualities such as salinity, temperature, and the presence of other forms of plankton.

Researchers are enthusiastic about the work because of its potential to protect the health of Alaskans, and because it could help them understand why blooms occur around the world. “That kind of high resolution is really valuable,” says Malin Olofsson, an aquatic biologist from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, who studies cyanobacteria in the Baltic Sea. By combining phycocyanin measurements with toxin measurements, the scientists hope to provide a more complete picture of the hazards facing Kotzebue, but right now Subramaniam’s priority is to understand which species of cyanobacteria are most common and what’s causing them to bloom.

Farrugia, from the Alaska Harmful Algal Bloom Network, is excited about the possibility of using similar methods in other parts of Alaska to gain an overall view of where and when cyanobacteria are proliferating. Showing that the sensor works in one location “is definitely the first step,” he says.

UNDERSTANDING THE LOCATION and potential source of cyanobacterial blooms is only half the battle; the other question is what to do about them. In the Baltic Sea, where fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture has exacerbated blooms, neighboring countries have put a lot of effort into curtailing that runoff—and with success, Olofsson says. Kotzebue is not in an agricultural area, however, and instead some scientists have hypothesized that thawing permafrost may release nutrients that promote blooms.

There’s not much anyone can do to prevent this, short of reversing the climate crisis. Some chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, show promise as ways to kill cyanobacteria and bring temporary relief from blooms without affecting ecosystems broadly, but so far chemical treatments haven’t provided permanent solutions.

Instead, Whiting is hoping to create a rapid response system so he can notify the town if a bloom is turning water and food toxic. But this will require building up Kotzebue’s research infrastructure. At the moment, Subramaniam prepares samples in the kitchen at the Selawik National Wildlife Refuge’s office, then sends them across the country to researchers, who can take days, sometimes even months, to analyze them. To make the work safer and faster, Whiting and Subramaniam are applying for funding to set up a lab in Kotzebue and possibly hire a technician who can process samples in-house. Getting a lab is “probably the best thing that could happen up here,” says Schaeffer. Subramaniam is hopeful that their efforts will pay off within the next year.

In the meantime, interest in cyanobacterial blooms is also popping up in other regions of Alaska. Emma Pate, the training coordinator and environmental planner for the Norton Sound Health Corporation, started a monitoring program after members of local tribes noticed increased numbers of algae in rivers and streams. In Utqiaġvik, on Alaska’s northern coast, locals have also started sampling for cyanobacteria, Farrugia says.

Whiting sees this work as filling a critical hole in Alaskans’ understanding of water quality. Regulatory agencies have yet to devise systems to protect Alaskans from the potential threat posed by cyanobacteria, so “somebody needs to do something,” he says.

“We can’t all just be bumbling around in the dark waiting for a bunch of people to die.” Perhaps this sense of self-sufficiency, which has let Arctic people thrive on the frozen tundra for millennia, will once again get the job done.

The reporting for this article was partially funded by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing Taylor/Blakeslee Mentored Science Journalism Project Fellowship.

Source

Our industrialized civilization contributes a broad array of pollutants to the environment. A significant source of these pollutants is combustion, which leads to the production of aerosol particles, including black carbon. Although black carbon only forms a small percentage of these particles, its ability to absorb and retain heat, along with its potential to disrupt the heat-reflecting properties of surfaces like snow, makes it a matter of concern. Therefore, understanding how black carbon interacts with sunlight is critical. In a significant development, researchers have recently achieved the most precise measurement of black carbon’s refractive index, which could influence climate models.

There are numerous contributors to climate change, with some like carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion, sulfur dioxide from cement production, and methane emissions from livestock farming being more commonly known. However, black carbon aerosols, also a byproduct of combustion, are less frequently discussed but carry significant importance. Essentially a form of soot, black carbon excels at absorbing sunlight and storing heat, consequently contributing to atmospheric warming.

At the same time, given dark colors are less effective at reflecting light and therefore heat, as black carbon covers lighter surfaces including snow, it reduces the potential of those surfaces to reflect heat back into space.

“Understanding the interaction between black carbon and sunlight is of fundamental importance in climate research,” said Assistant Professor Nobuhiro Moteki from the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of Tokyo. “The most critical property of black carbon in this regard is its refractive index, basically how it redirects and disperses incoming light rays. However, existing measurements of black carbon’s refractive index were inaccurate. My team and I undertook detailed experiments to improve this. With our improved measurements, we now estimate that current climate models may be underestimating the absorption of solar radiation due to black carbon by a significant 16%.”

Transmission electron microscope images of ambient aerosols collected by an aerosol-impactor sampler installed on the research vessel Shinsei Maru. Red arrows indicate individual black carbon aggregates, most of which were mixed with sulfate (green arrows) and/or organic materials (light blue arrows). Credit: 2023 Moteki et al.

 

Previous measurements of the optical properties of black carbon were often confounded by factors such as lack of pure samples, or difficulties in measuring light interactions with particles of differing complex shapes. Moteki and his team improved this situation by capturing the black carbon particles in water, then isolating them with sulfates or other water-soluble chemicals. By isolating the particles, the team was better able to shine light on them and analyze the way they scatter, which gave researchers the data to calculate the value of refractive index.

“We measured the amplitude, or strength, and phase, or step, of the light scattered from black carbon samples isolated in water,” said Moteki. “This allowed us to calculate what is known as the complex refractive index of black carbon. Complex because rather than being a single number, it’s a value that contains two parts, one of which is ‘imaginary’ (concerned with absorption), though its impact is very, very real. Such complex numbers with imaginary components are actually very common in the field of optical science and beyond.”

As the new optical measurements of black carbon imply that current climate models are underestimating its contribution to atmospheric warming, the team hopes that other climate researchers and policymakers can make use of their findings. The method developed by the team to ascertain the complex refractive index of particles can be applied to materials other than black carbon. This allows for the optical identification of unknown particles in the atmosphere, ocean, or ice cores, and the evaluation of optical properties of powdered materials, not just those related to the ongoing problem of climate change.

Source

For the past few decades, scientists have been observing natural ocean fertilization events — episodes when plumes of volcanic ash, glacial flour, wildfire soot, and desert dust blow out onto the sea surface and spur massive blooms of phytoplankton. But beyond these extreme events, there is a steady, long-distance rain of dust particles onto the ocean that promotes phytoplankton growth just about all year and in nearly every basin.

In a new study published May 5 in the journal Science, a team of researchers from Oregon State University, the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and NASA combined satellite observations with an advanced computer model to home in on how mineral dust from land fertilizes the growth of phytoplankton in the ocean. Phytoplankton are microscopic, plant-like organisms that form the center of the marine food web.

Phytoplankton float near the ocean surface primarily subsisting on sunlight and mineral nutrients that well up from the depths or float out to sea in coastal runoff. But mineral-rich desert dust — borne by strong winds and deposited in the ocean — also plays an important role in the health and abundance of phytoplankton.

According to the new study, dust deposition onto the ocean supports about 4.5% of yearly global export production — a measure of how much of the carbon phytoplankton take up during photosynthesis sinks into the deep ocean. However, this contribution approaches 20% to 40% in some ocean regions at middle and higher latitudes.

Phytoplankton play a large role in Earth’s climate and carbon cycle. Like land plants, they contain chlorophyll and derive energy from sunlight through photosynthesis. They produce oxygen and sequester a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide in the process, potentially on a scale comparable to rainforests. And they are at the bottom of an ocean-wide food pecking order that ranges from tiny zooplankton to fish to whales.

Dust particles can travel thousands of miles before falling into the ocean, where they nourish phytoplankton long distances from the dust source, said study coauthor Lorraine Remer, a research professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “We knew that atmospheric transport of desert dust is part of what makes the ocean ‘click,’ but we didn’t know how to find it,” she said.

Ocean Color Tells a Tale

How do you track ocean biology from 400 miles above the surface of Earth? Follow the green trail of chlorophyll.

Study authors Toby Westberry and Michael Behrenfeld — remote sensing oceanographers at Oregon State University — analyzed 14 years of ocean color measurements collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite from 2003 through 2016. Tracing distinct signatures in ocean color, they were able to determine not only when and where phytoplankton blooms occurred, but also how healthy and abundant they were (based on the concentration of chlorophyll).

This Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) image shows chlorophyll concentrations in the northeastern Pacific Ocean. Chlorophyll is the primary pigment found in phytoplankton—it gives the tiny marine plants their greenish color and they use it for photosynthesis. By precisely measuring the colors of light reflected by the ocean, SeaWiFS allows scientists to measure concentrations of phytoplankton blooms. In this false-color image, reds and yellows show high concentrations while greens, light blues, and dark blues show progressively lower concentrations. Black shows areas of no data due to cloud cover over the ocean. Credit: NASA SeaWiFS Project, Jim Gower, Institute of Ocean Sciences, Sidney BC, the IOS SERIES team, and Bill Crawford and Frank Whitney, Institute of Ocean Sciences, Sidney BC

 

To determine if the phytoplankton were responding to desert dust, the team compared their ocean color findings with output from NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model of dust deposition events for the same time period. These events ranged in intensity from mighty Saharan dust storms to relatively subdued plumes off the U.S. West Coast. They found that even modest amounts of desert dust increased the mass and improved the health of phytoplankton blooms almost everywhere they looked.

Previous studies had focused on large local events — volcanic eruptions, wildfires, extreme dust storms — that spewed huge amounts of organic and mineral particles into the air. In other studies, researchers intentionally stimulated phytoplankton growth by ‘seeding’ seawater with iron, a key but often limited nutrient in the ocean.

“We observed that the phytoplankton response wasn’t just happening in iron-poor areas of the ocean,” said coauthor Hongbin Yu, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “The responses were occurring all over the world. Add a little bit of nutrients and you’ve got something happening in the water.”

The nutritional benefits of desert dust aren’t limited to iron, the scientists said. Dust particles contain other nutrients that plants need, notably phosphorus and nitrogen.

More research is needed as climate change impacts atmospheric patterns, soil moisture, and other factors that influence how dust journeys to the ocean, Remer said.

“For me,” she added, “the most interesting piece of what we accomplished here was bringing oceanographers and atmospheric scientists to the same table.”

Source

Forecast temperatures on Sunday afternoon compared to normal

Fire isn't going away. We're going to be burning for this entire century. We're going through a global regime change and a whole bunch of things are going to catch on fire, and catch on fire again, until something new grows there, something different grows there or nothing grows there," John Vaillant, author of the new book Fire Weather.

It was in 2021 that the world was horrified by a heat dome that pushed temperatures to the highest readings in recorded history in the Pacific Northwest. That heat killed over 1000 people in Oregon, Washington Stae, and British Columbia and multiple billions of the lives of wildlife. Only two years later, another heat dome will envelop roughly the same landmass in North America again, this time in early May. People and wildlife will not die in the numbers they did in 2021, but that is only because this heatwave happens in early May when nighttime temperatures will remain cool, and is not unfolding during the height of summer. Wildfires will break out, however, because these waves of heat desiccate the region's forests turning them into tinder. Canada’s prairie provinces are most at risk.

In California and elsewhere, the snowpack is at risk of rapid melting. Authorities have warned that the flood waters could lead to hypothermia and death if anyone becomes trapped in the flooding.

Along with high pressure comes tons of sunshine. Since temperatures are set to soar through the weekend and beyond, Weather Service offices are warning of water temperatures that can promote hypothermia in a short period, despite the hot air temperature. In addition to being cold, rivers and other tributaries in the broader region are running high and swiftly. Snowmelt is likely to accelerate over the next week, including in the Sierra Nevada of California where record snowfall fell over the winter.

The Canadian archipelago has been one of the last holdouts in the Arctic for multi-year sea ice. The Hudson Bay’s ice will soften and melt. One can only hope that the damage to the ice is minimal.

Accelerating wildfire risk will continuously threaten Canada’s prairie and sub-arctic provinces.

How long will the heatwave in Canada last 10 days to go 20 days? When it become normal it will last forever and dry out our civilization. pic.twitter.com/Ngrlh7aJlj

    — Thomas Reis (@peakaustria) May 9, 2023

From the Guardian:

Florida-based meteorologist Jeffery Berardelli told the Guardian that recent projections show a higher pressure system developing over the Canadian Prairies that is “stronger than anything we have seen” since records started four decades ago.

“A ‘heat dome’ like this is a very rare occurrence in this part of the world this time of year,” he said in an email. “Historically and statistically speaking, it is rarer than a 1-in-1,000-year event.”

Berardelli said the climate of the region was now hotter than previous decades, meaning these rare events will become more likely in the coming years.

Despite the intensity of 2021 heatwave which killed more than 600 people in British Columbia and caused mass die-offs of marine life, the current weather system is unlikely to cause widespread fatalities, given the cooler night-time temperatures.

Still, in some parts of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Washington, Oregon and Idaho, temperatures will probably hit more than 15C over historical norms.

Twenty-nine thousand people were forced to flee their homes in Alberta in recent weeks due to over 412 wildfires. Daily Kos blogger Nonlinear wrote about his experience and other indigenous peoples' anxiety as they fled multiple firestorms in the province. The fires were able to be controlled as cooler weather moved in, but that will change as the same area will endure another round of heat and fires this weekend and beyond.

Portland, Oregon, will top 90 degrees, and Seattle will flirt with 90 degrees, writes the Capital Weather Gang. California's central valley will see 100s.

Warmer than average weather has been ongoing in northern Canada for some time now, but this flex begins in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories of the country Friday, where locations on Hudson Bay were already approaching record daily highs. A large area of readings around 35 degrees (20 Celsius) above average is forecast. By Sunday, temperatures 20 to 25 degrees (10 to 20 Celsius) above average stretch from Ontario to British Columbia and southward along the U.S. West Coast.

A similar zone of heat persists through at least Monday before shrinking and weakening somewhat. Despite moderation, many of the same areas can expect above-average temperatures to continue over at least the next several weeks.

Warmer than average weather has been ongoing in northern Canada for some time now, but this flex begins in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories of the country Friday, where locations on Hudson Bay were already approaching record daily highs. A large area of readings around 35 degrees (20 Celsius) above average is forecast. By Sunday, temperatures 20 to 25 degrees (10 to 20 Celsius) above average stretch from Ontario to British Columbia and southward along the U.S. West Coast.

Widespread temperatures topping 86 to 95 degrees (30 or 35 Celsius) are expected to appear as far north as sub-Arctic locations of northern Alberta. This will threaten temperature records in places such as Fort McMurray, Edmonton and Saskatoon.

Fort McMurray, as you recall, is the tar sands capital of the world, and in 2016 the city and locale burned. The fires will likely trigger PTSD for those that had experienced the firestorm.

Could be another record heat dome moving across the Northwest and Canada. These heat domes are becoming more common in places the models didn't predict would occur for many years. Huge implications for agriculture, forestry & human health. Many in #Canada scrambling for air-con. pic.twitter.com/U3ogviVjLT

    — Peter Dynes (@PGDynes) May 10, 2023

From Phys.org

Dry vegetation, record temperatures and powerful winds: this “perfect storm” of weather phenomena fueled the massive forest fires in western Canada’s Alberta province this year, according to researchers.

The extent of the fires and their appearance so early in the year illustrate the impacts of climate change, scientists say.

“We’ve already had 390,000 hectares (963,710 acres) burned. So it’s already 10 times the typical fire year and we’re really just getting started,” said Danielle Smith, premier of Alberta province where a state of emergency was declared.

snip

 Spring is a risky time for fires in the area, as no snow remains on the ground and it's before plants turn green.

"We end up with very dry undergrowth and trees that are also very flammable, because they have no leaves," said Boulanger, who noted that the conditions in recent weeks "have been very dry."

Alberta’s government is the Texas of Canada.

Alberta is burning. Maybe cutting millions of dollars from wildfire preparedness programs wasn’t such a good idea after all. In this story, Parkland’s E.D. Ricardo Acuña explains how budget cuts are hampering the province’s emergency resources. https://t.co/FN6Y55fKaM

 — Parkland Institute (@ParklandInst) May 12, 2023

Remarkable!! All areas in magenta indicate a record breaking mid-upper level (500mb) ridge by the weekend. This is an immense heat dome maxing out at 4.2 standard deviations (sigma) from the mean. A ridge magnitude on par with June 2021🧵 pic.twitter.com/wobctbjjHR

— Jeff Berardelli (@WeatherProf) May 10, 2023

Underwater heat waves could be reshaping weather around the world.

Underwater heat waves occur when water temperatures in parts of the ocean are well above historical averages. Alone, these events are not uncommon, but the nature of multiple, widespread events across the world's oceans is alarming to scientists.

"April was the warmest ocean average temperature on record, beating out was previously a record in the 2016 El Niño event," Robert Rohde told AccuWeather national reporter Bill Wadell. "So even though we don't have an El Niño yet, all of this put together is adding up to the warmest ocean period we've seen on record."

Rohde is a lead scientist at Berkeley Earth near Oakland, Calif., and has been analyzing the ocean temperature around the world. He added that the warming isn't just in the Pacific Ocean, where El Niño is starting to develop but "all over the place."

When you think you have seen all wait until February 2024 and El Niño is just starting positive Anomalies everywhere! This is another planet my friends be kind. #doomporn pic.twitter.com/aTrr9IlLcd

— Thomas Reis (@peakaustria) May 7, 2023

Source

For their study, the researchers analyzed nitrogen flows in waste in two sub-Saharan cities: Maradi (Niger) and Ouagadougou. The study was a first, and showed that urine was the main source of nitrogen losses. Collecting that urine could provide valuable fertilizer suitable for local agricultural use, and thus serve to make city region food systems more sustainable.

Current urban development trajectories in sub-Saharan Africa are not sustainable. Fast-growing cities constitute nutrient sinks relying on nutrient-poor hinterlands. Those sinks, and the degradation and draining of nutrients in hinterlands, have significant environmental and health impacts. This runs counter to The UN Sustainable Development Goal 11, which aims to "make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable."

To give the authorities a cross-sectoral view of a city's nutrient sink status, the researchers identified and analyzed a range of waste flows. Their approach distinguished four nested spatial levels: the urban area; the potential territorial recycling system; the country and the international level. Based on that analysis, the researchers focused on the origin and fate of those nutrient-containing waste flows.

The method was applied to nitrogen in Maradi and Ouagadougou, to determine whether and to what extent those city regions could progress towards sustainable urban food systems. The fact of focusing on the nitrogen in waste rather than on waste flows themselves enabled a systemic understanding useful to the local authorities.

The study showed that Maradi was a nitrogen sink, albeit at the heart of a still relatively sustainable urban food system. However, it could well evolve towards a situation similar to that of Ouagadougou: a large nitrogen sink with no significant city-hinterland recycling.

Although of contrasting size, currently around 400,000 and 2,800,000 inhabitants respectively, these two cities evolve in highly similar biophysical, climatic, agricultural and socioeconomic settings. Their respective results may thus be considered an approximate illustration of a development trajectory.

The study provided the first overview of waste-contained nitrogen flows in sub-Saharan cities. Existing reports so far provided only partial, sectoral assessments, focusing either on waste management, on sanitation, or on agriculture, while this study showed that nitrogen losses through sanitation and waste management largely exceeded other waste-contained nitrogen flows in these cities. Urine is therefore the main source of nitrogen loss.

Urine collection initiatives to enable its use as a fertilizer would make urban systems more independent and resilient. This would improve regional food provision and reduce sanitation-induced urban water pollution, making urban systems more sustainable. The researchers consider that addressing the potential for urine recycling would be a worthwhile follow-up to this study.

Source

Anabolic steroids—synthetic hormones that mimic the naturally-occurring sex hormone testosterone—are used to increase muscle mass and boost athletic performance. These performance-enhancing drugs have harmful side effects, for instance in men these include breast growth, hair loss, lower testosterone levels, erectile dysfunction, and an increased risk of heart disease, stroke, and liver or kidney failure. However, not much is known about the effects years after stopping their use.

In one study, the researchers examined 64 healthy men, between the ages of 18 and 50, who did recreational strength training in Denmark. Of these men, 28 were using anabolic steroids, 22 were former steroid users, and 14 had never used these steroids. The researchers assessed how much blood flowed to their heart muscle when resting and exercising, using a Positron Emission Tomography-Computed Tomography (PET-CT) scan with the radioactive tracer Rubidium-82, and found both former and current users had a poor blood flow to the heart.

The findings indicate that former steroid users are more likely to develop heart disease when compared to those who have never used them.

"Previous studies have shown that the heart function almost normalizes after anabolic steroids are discontinued, but our study suggests that former anabolic steroid users are at an increased risk of heart disease years after stopping as cardiac microcirculation—the blood flow through the smallest vessels in the circulatory system—seems persistently impaired," said lead author Dr. Yeliz Bulut. "The previous use of anabolic steroids could be a new risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease."

In another study, Dr. Bulut and colleagues collected questionnaires and blood samples to measure testosterone levels from three groups of men, aged 18–50 years: 89 current anabolic steroid users, 61 former steroid users, and 30 men who had never used steroids before. They found that former users of anabolic steroids report a worse quality of life on their physical and mental health, such as fatigue, social functioning and emotional well-being, despite stopping years earlier. Additionally, the same group had lower testosterone levels compared to those who had never used steroids.

Previous studies have shown that men experience withdrawal symptoms, such as depression and low motivation, and have lower levels of testosterone, immediately after they stop using steroids. "Our study adds to the growing body of literature that an impaired quality of life in previous anabolic steroid users seems to persist years following cessation and could be caused by both withdrawal and/or hypogonadal symptoms due to a sudden drop in testosterone levels in the blood," said Dr. Bulut. "Sadly, a reported worse quality of life could be a reason for former users to start reusing these steroids again."

Both studies included a small number of anabolic steroid users, former users and non-users. Dr. Bulut and her team now plan to recruit more men to the studies to assess both of these links with former steroid abuse on a larger scale. "Our initial findings show that previous anabolic steroid users are likely to develop heart disease and have a decreased quality of life but we need to confirm these results with larger studies and investigate how the risk changes in relation to the years of usage and/ or cessation," said Dr. Bulut. "Steroid side effects among former users seem to persist for a much longer period than we have known until now. We hope our results on these long-term health risks will prevent men from using anabolic androgenic-steroids."

Source

Using brain imaging, researchers saw differences in the neural circuitry that promotes habit formation in people with binge eating disorders, which involves consuming excessive amounts of food in a short time period. The differences were more pronounced in those with more severe disorders. The habitual element of these conditions, the researchers say, could be part of the reason they are so hard to treat.

"A habit is a learned association. Maybe initially the behavior started to achieve a goal, but eventually you've done it so many times that you do the action without thinking about the outcome," said Allan Wang, a medical student at the Stanford School of Medicine and lead author of the study, which was published March 29 in Science Translational Medicine.

"We were interested in whether habit formation in the brain might be involved in a complicated behavior like binge eating," Wang said.

Tracking the habit

Binge eating disorders seem to have the hallmarks of habits. Episodes can be triggered by context, whether external, like the smell of food or an enticing advertisement, or internal, like feelings of sadness or frustration. People with these disorders also report feeling a loss of control over the behavior, which happens in maladaptive habits ranging from nail biting to drug addiction.

It wasn't known, however, whether these disorders stemmed from the neural circuitry of habits.

To find out, the researchers first analyzed MRI scans from the Human Connectome Project, a large-scale venture, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, to map the brain circuits that underlie human behaviors. They focused on a region called the striatum, previously implicated in habits, and a particular part of the striatum called the sensorimotor putamen, which connects to brain regions that govern sensation and movement. Based on these connections, they hypothesized that the sensorimotor putamen would be key to habitual behavior.

Next, the researchers collected fMRI data, which measures brain activity, from 34 people who had been diagnosed with a binge eating disorder and from 22 healthy controls. All the participants were female. They answered questions about the frequency of their binges and whether they were driven by external or internal factors.

Compared with healthy controls, people with binge eating disorders had notable differences in the sensorimotor putamen's neuronal connections with several brain regions—confirming the researchers' hypothesis. They had stronger connections with the motor cortex, which is involved in movement, and the orbitofrontal cortex, involved in evaluating reward value, such as how good a food tastes. They had weaker connections with the anterior cingulate cortex, which regulates self-control.

The extent of the deviations reflected the severity of their disorder, regardless of whether the binges were externally or internally driven.

"Possibly, there's some loss of self-regulation of this behavior," Wang said. "At the same time, there's increased strength of circuits involved in the motor behavior of binge eating."

Breaking bad habits

Further imaging studies revealed that patients with more altered habit circuitry also had less dopamine binding, or sensitivity to dopamine, in these brain regions. That hints at a mechanism underlying these abnormalities: The sensorimotor putamen uses dopamine, a neurotransmitter, to communicate with the cortex, so changes to dopamine sensitivity can alter these connections, Wang said. And decreased dopamine sensitivity can result from prolonged high levels of dopamine during repeated exposure to rewarding stimuli.

"Our findings suggest that the more dopamine exposure these patients have had in the context of binge eating, the more altered their overall habit circuit connectivity is," he said.

It's likely that the habit circuitry is also a factor in addiction and other psychiatric disorders, Wang said. Understanding how neuronal connections go awry in these conditions could guide targeted therapies, such as deep brain stimulation, which uses electric currents applied to the brain to alter neural activity.

"I think there's also some mental benefit for patients in being able to reframe these behaviors as rooted in habit," Wang said. "Eating disorders are not a fault of their personality. They're related to physical changes in the brain."

Whether people with binge eating disorders are more inclined toward other habits, good or bad, is an open question. "But it's interesting to think about," he said.

Source

IBM and its IT infrastructure spinoff Kyndryl were this week taken to court by an axed exec who had put decades of her life into the tech giant.

MaryKathryn Doheny, who served IBM for 23 years as a Certified Client Executive, transitioned to Kyndryl in September 2021 as Director of Global Software when it was carved from Big Blue.

In March this year, Kyndryl subjected her to a "Resource Action" – a euphemism for a layoff in IBM's world.

Doheny, age 64, sued both companies on Thursday for age discrimination, alleging that Kyndryl, though now an independent business, continues to execute IBM's strategy for getting rid of older workers, even down to using Big Blue's severance resources.

In February, 2022, IBM went to unusual lengths to distance itself from ProPublica's 2018 report that it discriminated against employees on the basis of age and from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)'s findings to that effect in 2020.

"Discrimination of any kind is entirely against our culture and who we are at IBM, and there was (and is) no systemic age discrimination at our company," said IBM's Chief Human Resources Officer Nickle LaMoreaux in a public statement posted to the company's website last year.

And yet IBM has been settling many of the age discrimination cases filed against the corporation following the ProPublica report, not to mention gender- and race-discrimination claims.

Doheny's complaint, filed by Boston-based Lichten & Liss-Riordan PC, contends that Kyndryl, as indicated by its use of terms like "Resource Action" and its reliance on IBM severance materials, has carried over IBM's alleged discriminatory layoff practices.

"Unfortunately, Kyndryl has continued IBM’s playbook of age discrimination," the complaint [PDF] says. "It has recently laid off hundreds of employees, a group which appears to have included a disproportionately high number of employees over the age of forty (40)."

Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, whose law firm represents Doheny, spoke to The Register by phone about the complaint.

"We have been taking on IBM for a number of years now for targeting older workers and an attempt to build a younger workforce," said Liss-Riordan. "And we've had cases in court, we've had many cases in arbitration. We uncovered pretty shocking evidence of explicit discriminatory bias by top executives, and one would have thought that after all of this scrutiny, IBM would have put this behind them."

"But unfortunately, we have reason to believe that it is continuing and it appears to be continuing with its new spin-off company Kyndryl."

Targeted

Liss-Riordan said that what's particularly troubling is that Kyndryl has now started a round of layoffs that seems to be replicating what IBM has done, where older workers bear the brunt of the job cuts.

"IBM appears to be trying to distance itself from this and act as though it has nothing to do with this latest round of layoffs because [Kyndryl] is a new company," she said. "But as we put forth in the complaint, IBM's fingerprints are all over this."

The complaint asserts that not only is Kyndryl using IBM terminology like "Resource Action," but it is providing affected employees with the same information resources to do so, right down to the letter.

"The severance package which Kyndryl has offered to laid off employees appears to be based on the severance packages that IBM had offered its laid off employees," the complaint states. "Indeed, they even include the same language, font, and spacing. The resources that Kyndryl has provided electronically to laid off employees were provided on IBM URLs."

And to sign in to the portal associated with those URLs, Doheny is said to have had to provide her IBM employee identification number rather than her Kyndryl number.

Last month, when The Register wrote about layoffs at IBM and Kyndryl, a spokesperson for the spinoff wrote in to take issue with our headline, "IBM, Kyndryl cut jobs even after cutting ties."

Kyndryl's spokesperson said, "You may already be aware that we are a separate company, but the headline could lead someone to think there is a connection between us and IBM. To be sure, our actions have nothing to do with IBM’s."

Kyndryl did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Doheny's complaint. Neither did IBM for that matter.

Liss-Riordan said, "[IBM's] attitude all along has been to deny, which is not unusual for a company accused of wrongdoing."

Strategy

Her firm's litigation efforts also involve a pending argument before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (In Re: IBM Arbitration Agreement, No.

22-1728 (2d Cir.)) on May 22 to challenge IBM's practice of using arbitration agreements to prevent people from pursuing discrimination claims.

IBM has been partially successful in compartmentalizing former employees' complaints by preventing the sharing of evidence, she said.

"When we would obtain this very incriminating evidence, in one case, IBM attempted to block us from using it in another case, claiming that arbitrations were confidential," explained Liss-Riordan. "And we couldn't share evidence across cases."

IBM, she said, has often used arbitration clauses in severance agreements to prevent employee discrimination claims from ever being heard.

"So this is an extremely important question for the Second Circuit to address now: whether a company can use arbitration to take away rights that an employee would have in court," said Liss-Riordan.

"Unfortunately, after all of these years of litigation and the news coming out and the EEOC investigation, which reached the probable cause determination, it's just disappointing to see that IBM is still up to the same tricks.

"So we filed [this complaint on behalf of MaryKathryn Doheny] and we may be seeking a court order to get notice out quickly to laid-off Kyndryl employees who have a very important choice to make because they've been offered a severance agreement. And if they sign the severance agreement, they may be releasing their claims to pursue a discrimination charge." ®

Source

When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report.

“It is just too hard to believe” at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It’s as if “somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic.”

His findings underscore what was widely suspected: Journals are awash in a rising tide of scientific manuscripts from paper mills—secretive businesses that allow researchers to pad their publication records by paying for fake papers or undeserved authorship. “Paper mills have made a fortune by basically attacking a system that has had no idea how to cope with this stuff,” says Dorothy Bishop, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies fraudulent publishing practices. A 2 May announcement from the publisher Hindawi underlined the threat: It shut down four of its journals it found were “heavily compromised” by articles from paper mills.

Sabel’s tool relies on just two indicators—authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and those who list an affiliation with a hospital. It isn’t a perfect solution, because of a high false-positive rate. Other developers of fake-paper detectors, who often reveal little about how their tools work, contend with similar issues.

Still, the detectors raise hopes for gaining the advantage over paper mills, which churn out bogus manuscripts containing text, data, and images partly or wholly plagiarized or fabricated, often massaged by ghost writers. Some papers are endorsed by unrigorous reviewers solicited by the authors. Such manuscripts threaten to corrupt the scientific literature, misleading readers and potentially distorting systematic reviews. The recent advent of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT has amplified the concern.

To fight back, the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), representing 120 publishers, is leading an effort called the Integrity Hub to develop new tools. STM is not revealing much about the detection methods, to avoid tipping off paper mills.

“There is a bit of an arms race,” says Joris van Rossum, the Integrity Hub’s product director. He did say one reliable sign of a fake is referencing many retracted papers; another involves manuscripts and reviews emailed from internet addresses crafted to look like those of legitimate institutions.

Twenty publishers—including the largest, such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley—are helping develop the Integrity Hub tools, and 10 of the publishers are expected to use a paper mill detector the group unveiled in April. STM also expects to pilot a separate tool this year that detects manuscripts simultaneously sent to more than one journal, a practice considered unethical and a sign they may have come from paper mills. Such large-scale cooperation is meant to improve on what publishers were doing individually and to share tools across the publishing industry, van Rossum says.

“It will never be a [fully] automated process,” he says. Rather, the tools are like “a spam filter … you still want to go through your spam filter every week” to check for erroneously flagged legitimate content.

STM hasn’t yet generated figures on accuracy or false-positive rates because the project is too new. But catching as many fakes as possible typically produces more false positives. Sabel’s tool correctly flagged nearly 90% of fraudulent or retracted papers in a test sample. However, it marked up to 44% of genuine papers as fake, so results still need to be confirmed by skilled reviewers. Other paper mill detectors typically have a similar trade-off, says Adam Day, founding director of a startup called Clear Skies who consulted with STM on the Integrity Hub. But without some reliance on automated methods, “You either have to spot check randomly, or you use your own human prejudice to choose what to check. And that’s not generally very fair.”

Scrutinizing suspect papers can be time-consuming: In 2021, Springer Nature’s postpublication review of about 3000 papers suspected of coming from paper mills required up to 10 part- and full-time staffers, said Chris Graf, the company’s director of research integrity, at a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee hearing about paper mills in July 2022. (Springer Nature publishes about 400,000 papers annually.)

Newly updated guidelines for journals issued in April may help ease the workload. They may decide to reject or retract batches of papers suspected of having been produced by a paper mill, even if the evidence is circumstantial, says the nonprofit Committee on Publication Ethics, which is funded by publishers. Its previous guidelines encouraged journals to ask authors of each suspicious paper for more information, which can trigger a lengthy back and forth.

Some outsiders wonder whether journals will make good on promises to crack down. Publishers embracing gold open access—under which journals collect a fee from authors to make their papers immediately free to read when published—have a financial incentive to publish more, not fewer, papers. They have “a huge conflict of interest” regarding paper mills, says Jennifer Byrne of the University of Sydney, who has studied how paper mills have doctored cancer genetics data.

The “publish or perish” pressure that institutions put on scientists is also an obstacle. “We want to think about engaging with institutions on how to take away perhaps some of the [professional] incentives which can have these detrimental effects,” van Rossum says. Such pressures can push clinicians without research experience to turn to paper mills, Sabel adds, which is why hospital affiliations can be a red flag.

Publishers should also welcome help from outsiders to improve the technology supporting paper mill detectors, although this will require transparency about how they work, Byrne says. “When tools are developed behind closed doors, no one can criticize or investigate how they perform,” she says. A more public, broad collaboration would likely strengthen them faster than paper mills could keep up, she adds.

Day sees some hope: Flagging journals suspected of being targeted by paper mills can quickly deter additional fraudulent submissions. He points to his analysis of journals that the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) put on a public list because of suspicions they contained paper mill papers. His company’s Papermill Alarm detector showed that before the CAS list came out, suspicious papers made up the majority of some journals’ content; afterward, the proportion dropped to nearly zero within months (see chart). (Papermill Alarm flags potentially fraudulent papers based on telltale patterns revealed when a paper mill repeatedly submits papers; the company does not publicly disclose what these signs are.)

Journals could drive a similar crash by using automated detectors to flag suspicious manuscripts, nudging paper mills to take them elsewhere, Day says.

Some observers worry paper mill papers will merely migrate to lower impact journals with fewer resources to detect them. But if many journals act collectively, the viability of the entire paper mill industry could shrink.

It’s not necessary to catch every fake paper, Day says. “It’s about having practices which are resistant to their business model.”

Paper mill clampdown

After a 2020 report named journals suspected of containing paper mill papers, an analysis using the Papermill Alarm automated detector found that the number of such papers in one of those journals (which the analysis did not name) declined quickly and sharply. Columns show the number of papers by month.

< View the graphic at the source page. >

(Graphic) D. An-Pham/Science; (Data) Adam Day/Clear Skies

Correction, 10 May, 11:35 a.m.: This article has been updated to correctly describe the false-positive rate generated by the two indicators of fake papers presented in the preprint by Bernhard Sabel and colleagues.

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On a sweltering afternoon in the small Kenyan village of Njoro Mata, a farmer is desperately inspecting the damage caused to her smallholding by elephants.

Kenya's famous giants have been invading Monicah Muthike Moki's land in southern Kenya, overlooked by Mount Kilimanjaro.

The 48-year-old is a single mother of three whose livelihood depends on her hard work growing cassava, maize, bananas, sugarcane and mangos.

Her harvest had been increasing after employing new farming methods introduced with the help of the Kenya Red Cross Society, but in recent months, her precious crops have regularly been destroyed by elephants.

Ms Moki says elephants come every day from the nearby Tsavo national park, one of the world's largest game sanctuaries, home to about 15,000 of the mammals.

According to her, herders have cut the fence to access pastures for their livestock in the park but elephants then cross the other way.

With consecutive years of failed rains, the pastoralists are desperate to feed their animals, while at the same time the elephants have started to roam further afield seeking sustenance.

The animals' new behaviour patterns are driven by Kenya's escalating climate crisis and drought, causing wildlife to conflict with people.

For Ms Moki, the elephant crop-raiding is "very painful" to see.

She says the elephants are "bold" and "not afraid". They can come at any time but usually from around dusk, and they raid in herds, as pairs or sometimes lone elephants with their calves.

The elephants have recently eaten her entire maize, banana and cassava crops.

Ms Moki sleeps in a small cabin close to her fields in case the elephants come

Currently, she should be harvesting five to six 90kg bags of maize she would sell in the local market in the nearby town of Taveta for 6,500 Kenyan shillings ($48; £38).

Without her crops, Ms Moki cannot feed her family or sell her produce to pay the school fees for her 10-year-old daughter.

Farmers in her village also use the bags of maize they harvest as a security deposit or payment of school fees for their children to attend the local primary school. In turn, the schools use maize to serve children meals.

Now children as young as four years old are forced to walk up to 4km (2.5 miles) home from school for lunch before walking the same distance in the opposite direction in the afternoon.

The largest land animals in the world can consume 150kg of food per day, spending three-quarters of their day just eating. Ms Moki explains that they often leave nothing behind.

Elephants also gulp down 100 litres of water a day, so often drink the little water she gets supplied by the local authorities to use on the farm.

Homemade alarm system

It is a vicious cycle that she says is only getting worse.

Ms Moki tries to deter the elephants with bright lights and loud noises and has developed several improvised techniques to prevent them from raiding her crops.

She uses old water and oil bottles around the edge of the farm connected with a wire so if the elephants hit the wires, they rattle and she can get up and respond.

"I climb a ladder, flash my light towards them, and make noise as you cannot approach the elephants," the farmer says.

Ms Moki has created her own alarm system to warn her of approaching animals

Every night she sleeps away from her family alone on the farm, nervously anticipating the rustling of jerrycans or the barking of dogs.

Sadly, her inventive measures do not deter the elephants, but they at least alert her to their presence.

Elephants can be extremely dangerous.

"If an elephant hurts, injures or kills me, my family will suffer," Ms Moki says.

'I outran the elephant'

Her neighbour Jonathan Mulinge, a farmer and father to four young children, says he had a recent near-death experience with an elephant.

He tried to deter one from destroying his crops, but it turned around and charged him.

"The only thing that saved my life was that I was able to outrun the elephant and run into my house," he says.

Mr Mulinge says this is "a conflict between us, the humans and the elephant", in which farmers like him pay the heaviest price.

"You plant your crops so that you can benefit from it, and then the elephants come and destroy it, and the farmers are back to zero."

The community feel powerless and blames the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) for not doing enough to help them. The KWS did not respond to a BBC request for comment.

Ms Moki says the situation is getting more intolerable, and their concerns have not been addressed.

Joram Oranga of the Kenya Red Cross Society says the arid conditions, lack of rainfall and extreme weather patterns caused by climate change drive the conflict between humans and elephants over diminishing water and land resources, which he says will only get "worse" in the future.

For Ms Moki, this conflict is taking a heavy toll on her mental health, compounded by her extreme lack of sleep.

She suffers from anxiety and panic attacks and fears for her children's future if an elephant kills her.

"I am scared because if I am gone," she says, "who will look after them?"

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More evidence emerges that Saturn’s rings are much younger than the planet

While driving back from lunch one day, my wife and I noticed a single car accident on the roadway. Though speculative, it appeared to be related to high speeds on a curved road. My son passed his road test earlier in the week and received his driving permit or license. During a previous lesson with him, I told him “not to let physics win” while he is driving on curves. That statement was made while explaining why it is important to slow down approaching curves. Let’s dig a bit deeper.

Winding Pass Road to Grossglockner, Austrian Alps, County of Carinthia. (Photo by ... [+]GETTY IMAGES

Centripetal force is a staple of any physics class. The DriversEd.com website says, “If an object is moving along a curved path, the direction of its velocity is changing. The force responsible for this change in direction is called centripetal force which means center-seeking force. It is directed toward the center of the curvature.” In the aforementioned conversation with my son, I also mentioned centrifugal force. The website goes on to say, “....If a car is traveling with too much speed from the other direction—in the "outside" lane of a curve—centrifugal force will pull it out to the right and off the roadway.” My son is a sophomore in high school taking accelerated courses but would not take physics for another year or two. I asked if he was familiar with either of these terms. He said, “”I’ve heard of them, but we haven’t had that in class yet.” He is currently enrolled in a chemistry class.

I also mentioned momentum. He knew the term, but did not know the details of it nor how it might apply to his driving and impromptu physics lessons. Most physics textbooks likely describe momentum as the quantification of the force or associated strength of a body in motion. The mathematical representation is mass times velocity. I went on to explain that as he drives his car (of a certain mass), his momentum will depend upon his velocity. As such, it is important to start breaking at a responsible distance when cars are stopped in front of him. While teaching my daughter to drive, I would often tell the kids to drive “scientifically.” Perhaps, my son is starting to resonate with the statement.

During that same lesson, I mentioned hydroplaning to my son. Cars often hydroplane (slide or skid) when roadways are wet. Physics is at play. According to the Safemotorist.com website, “Water pressure in the front of the wheel pushes water under the tire, and the tire is then separated from the road surface by a thin film of water and loses traction.” There are many other manifestations of physics that a young driver should understand:

1. Friction: Brakes work, car tires cling to roadways.
2. Inertia: An object in motion wants to stay in motion, while an object at rest wants to remain at rest.
3. Gravity: Affects speed and breaking on hills or inclined surfaces.

While chatting about some of these concepts with my wife, she posed the question, “Why isn’t physics required before kids take their driving test?” She has a good point. According to Time4Learning.com, most high school students take physics in the 11th grade. Some will even wait until 12th grade. Like my son, many students live in states in which they can acquire a learner’s or regular driver’s permit at age 15 or 16, respectively. These ages come before junior year.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, risk of a vehicle crash is highest among the age group 16–19, particularly boys and newly licensed drivers. While many factors are at play, a working knowledge of physics before driving certainly could not hurt anything. Right?

Eleven teens stand "dead silent" outside the Ohio Statehouse to represent the 11 teens that die each ... [+]COPYRIGHT 2010 AP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.

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