These tissue defects, the study authors say, are "far more serious and extensive than has been previously reported" and include heart defects, which have not been described before in animal studies of microplastics.

Under the focused gaze of fluorescent microscopes, biologist Meiru Wang of Leiden University in the Netherlands and colleagues watched injected samples of nanometer-scale glowing plastic particles cross the embryonic gut wall and circulate into multiple organs of the chick embryos.

"We used a high concentration of polystyrene particles, that would normally not be present in an organism. But it shows what nanoplastics can do in extreme cases on very young [chicken] embryos," Wang explains.

Nanoplastics are a fraction smaller than microplastics; both are typically produced when synthetic clothes shed plastic microfibers or larger plastics break down into ever smaller pieces under the glare of UV rays or mechanical weathering.

Past animal studies have tried to investigate the potential health risks of polystyrene microplastics, finding biochemical signs of potentially toxic effects as they accumulate in the livers, kidneys, and guts of laboratory mice.

While results like those only hint at what might be happening in humans, we have good reason to be concerned. Our dependency on cheaply made plastic goods and synthetic materials is polluting our oceans and air with microscopic shards of plastic polymers making their way into our bodies and out the other side.

Studies have found microplastics lodged deep in human lungs, circulating in our blood, and entering the placenta – the vital organ that shields unborn babies from pathogens and other potentially hazardous materials lurking in the mother's blood.

But the possible effects of microplastics on the early development of cells and tissues that go on to form organs and bodies are largely unknown. Most studies of that kind have been in aquatic organisms, such as zebrafish.

In these latest lab experiments, the polystyrene nanoplastics (25 nanometers in size) seemed to get stuck on stem cells called neural crest cells, stopping them from migrating into place where they would normally form important tissues and organs.

In all vertebrates, neural crest cells give rise to parts of the heart, arteries, facial structures, and nervous system.

Flecks of nanoplastics (in green) attached to cell (stained blue). (Meiru Wang and Gerda Lamers)

A quarter of the chick embryos had one or two abnormally small eyes, while others showed facial deformities, thinning heart muscles, and slow heart rates.

Neural tube defects were also noted, which occur when the neural folds that form the early brain and spinal cord fail to meet and close properly. This all links back to those neural crest cells, the researchers suspect.

"Neural crest cells are sticky, so nano-particles can adhere to them and thereby disrupt organs that depend on these cells for their development," says Leiden University developmental biologist Michael Richardson.

Chick embryos injected with polystyrene nanoplastics (PS-NP) show neural tube defects (arrows; far right panel) compared to untreated controls with full formed neural tubes (left column). (Wang et al., Environment International, 2023)

Bear in mind the concentrations of nanoplastics used in this study were far above levels that humans have possibly been exposed to, and were injected in an artificial manner.

That said, the way nanoplastics appear to latch on to neural crest cells could be worrisome even in scenarios of low-level exposures, the researchers write. And they did find evidence that the defects became more widespread as nanoplastic concentrations increased.

More research is warranted, given the omnipresent threat microplastics pose in the environment. Studies like this one are only just beginning to sketch out the potential health impacts of 'plastic dust' on animals, as manufacturers churn out more of the stuff.

Nearly 360 million metric tonnes of plastic was produced in 2018, a number expected to double by 2025.

"These results are a matter of concern given the large and growing burden of nanoplastics in the environment," Wang and colleagues conclude.

"Even if society stops now with all plastic pollution, the weathered nanoplastic debris levels from existing plastics in the environment will still increase."

The research has been published in Environment International.

Source

President George W Bush and his administration put forward a variety of reasons to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In the months before the US invasion, Bush said the looming conflict was about eradicating terrorism and seizing weapons of mass destruction – but also because of a “freedom deficit” in the Middle East, a reference to the perceived lag in participatory government in the region.

Many of these arguments would emerge as poorly grounded, given later events.

In 2004, then Secretary of State Colin Powell reflected on the weak rationale behind the main arguments for the invasion: that there were weapons of mass destruction. He acknowledged that “it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases deliberately misleading.”

In fact, Iraq did not have a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, as Powell and others had alleged at the time.

But the Bush administration’s rhetoric of building a more free, open and democratic Middle East persisted after the weapons of mass destruction claim had proven false, and has been harder to evaluate – at least in the short term. Bush assured the American public in 2003 that, “A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.”

He focused on this theme during the ground invasion, in which a coalition force of nearly 100,000 American and other allied troops rapidly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution,” Bush said in November 2003. He also said that the US would be pursuing a “forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.”

Twenty years on, it is worth considering how this “forward strategy” has played out both in Iraq and across the Middle East. In 2003, there was indeed, as Bush noted, a “freedom deficit” in the Middle East, where repressive authoritarian regimes dominated the region.

Yet, in spite of tremendous upheaval in the Middle East over the past two decades, many authoritarian regimes remain deeply entrenched.

Iraqis demonstrate to show support for Saddam Hussein in February 2003 in Baghdad, Iraq. Photo: Oleg Nikishin / Getty Images / The Conversation

Measuring the ‘Freedom Gap’

Political science scholars like myself try to measure the democratic or authoritarian character of governments in a variety of ways.

The non-profit group Freedom House evaluates countries in terms of democratic institutions and whether they have free and fair elections, as well as people’s civil rights and liberties, such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and a free press. Freedom House rates each country and its level of democracy on a scale from 2 to 14, from “mostly free” to “least free.”

One way to think about the level of democracy in the region is to focus on the 23 countries and governments that form the Arab League, a regional organization that spans North Africa, the Red Sea coast and the Middle East. In 2003, the average Freedom House score for an Arab League member was 11.45 – far more authoritarian than the global average of 6.75 at the time.

Put another way, the Freedom House report in 2003 classified a little over 46% of all countries as “free,” but no country in the Arab League met that threshold.

While some Arab countries, like Saudi Arabia, were ruled by monarchies around this time, others, like Libya, were ruled by dictators.

The nearly 30-year-long regime of Hussein in Iraq fit this second pattern. Hussein was part of a 1968 coup led by the Ba’ath political party, a group that wanted all Arab countries to form one unified nation – but also became known for human rights violations. The Ba’ath Party relied upon Iraq’s oil wealth and repressive tactics against civilians to maintain power.

The fall of Hussein’s regime in April 2003 produced a nominally more democratic Iraq. But after fighting a series of sectarian insurgencies in Iraq over an eight-year period, the US ultimately left behind a weak and deeply divided government.

A newsstand sells papers reporting the capture of Saddam Hussein, former leader of Iraq, by US forces in 2003. Photo: Graeme Robertson / Getty Images / The Conversation

Post-invasion Iraq

The US 2003 invasion succeeded in ousting a brutal regime – but establishing a healthy and thriving new democracy proved more challenging.

Rivalry between Iraq’s three main groups – the Sunni and Shiite Muslims as well as the Kurds, the largest ethnic minority in the country – paralyzed early attempts at political reorganization.

While Iraq today has a constitution, a parliament and holds regular elections, the country struggles both with popular legitimacy and with practical aspects of governance, such as providing basic education for children.

Indeed, in 2023, Freedom House continues to score Iraq as “Not Free” in its measure of democracy.

Since the US military withdrawal in 2011, Iraq has lurched from one political crisis to another. From 2014 to 2017, large portions of western Iraq were controlled by the extremist militant Islamic State group.

In 2018 and 2019, rampant government corruption led to a string of anti-government protests, which sparked a violent crackdown by the government.

The protests prompted early parliamentary elections in November 2021, but the government has not yet been able to create a coalition government representing all competing political groups.

While Iraq’s most recent crisis avoided descending into civil war, the militarized nature of Iraqi political parties poses an ongoing risk of electoral violence.

An Iraqi man pushes a cart in Mosul after the government retook control from the Islamic State in 2017. Photo: Ahmad Al-Rubaye /AFP via Getty Images / The Conversation

The post-invasion Middle East

While Iraq continues to face deep political challenges, it is worth considering the U.S. efforts at regional democracy promotion more fully.

In 2014, widespread protest movements associated with the Arab Spring toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya. In other countries, such as Morocco and Jordan, monarchs were able to offer concessions to people and remain in control by delaying public spending cuts, for example, and replacing government ministers.

Yet sustaining stable democracies has proved challenging even where the Arab Spring seemed to succeed in changing political regimes. In Egypt, the military has reasserted itself and the country has slid steadily back to authoritarianism. In Yemen, the political vaccum created by the protests marked the start of a devastating civil war.

The average Freedom House democracy score for members of the Arab League is today 11.45 — the same as it was on the eve of the Iraq invasion.

It is hard to know if US efforts at democracy promotion accelerated or delayed political change in the Middle East. It is hard to know if a different approach might have yielded better results.

Yet, the data – at least as social scientists measure such things – strongly suggests that the vision of an Iraq as an inspiration for a democratic transformation of the Middle East has not come to pass.

Source

TODAY THE UN’S Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is releasing what may become a pivotal document of human progress—or lack thereof, if we don’t heed its warnings. It’s a “synthesis” report, summarizing the findings from the six previous IPCC reports that laid out the science of climate change, like how the food system spews greenhouse gas emissions and how the oceans and polar regions are transforming. The report is a full-throated call for the massive—yet doable—changes our species must enact to limit the damage that comes with each fraction of a degree of warming. It’s a temporary adieu of sorts, as the next climate report from the IPCC won’t land for at least another five years.

“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the report notes. “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.” 

The more warming occurs, the harder it will be to mitigate it—to preserve human health, agriculture, and the natural world. Some effects, like the collapse of ecosystems, will be irreversible. “The Synthesis Report underlines how important it is to not only accelerate climate action, but to do it in a way that helps everyone in the world, not just those in the wealthiest countries and regions,” said report coauthor Christopher Trisos, director of the Climate Risk Lab at the African Climate and Development Initiative, in a statement. 

The science of climate change is “unequivocal,” the report stresses: We’ve already warmed the planet by 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels—spawning fiercer wildfires, heat waves, droughts, and storms, which are killing people and destabilizing ecosystems. But just how much the planet will keep warming, and how quickly, depends on a full deck of wild cards, such as future economic development and poorly understood feedback loops like permafrost thawing and carbon release. Scientists also don’t have a good handle on the global influence of the aerosols produced by burning fossil fuels, which tend to cool the atmosphere—if we decarbonize (and we must), we might actually lose some of that air conditioning. 

Still, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re going to blow past the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. To avoid that fate, we’d have to cut emissions in half by 2030. In fact, emissions are increasing, the report notes. “By now, even the most optimistic among scientists think that that train has left,” says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who was a lead author on a previous IPCC report but wasn’t involved in the new synthesis. “We may be able to return to 1.5, but we would need a miracle to be able to stay below 1.5.” 

Negative emissions techniques, like sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, could reduce warming. Indeed, the new report says these technologies will be necessary to bring temperatures down from an “overshoot.” Yet they are not yet proven at anywhere near the scale needed to make a dent in atmospheric carbon.

Today, the plummeting price of renewables is helping humanity decarbonize: Wind energy prices dropped by 55 percent in the 2010s, the new report notes, while solar power and lithium ion batteries got 85 percent cheaper—much cheaper than researchers had anticipated. Lower prices have allowed for the proliferation of solar panels, reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Scientists are scrambling to figure out where to put them all, like on rooftop gardens and croplands, over canals, or floating on reservoirs.

The report “makes it clear that the world has made some progress on climate change—there is some good news,” says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Stripe and the nonprofit Berkeley Earth, who wasn’t involved in the synthesis. “At the same time, there’s such a big gap between where we are right now—and even where countries have committed to be by 2030—and what is needed to meet our most ambitious climate targets.”

The future is uncertain. When scientists model climate change, they imagine different scenarios in which humanity reduces emissions, keeps them steady, or increases them. These models spit out a range of figures for potential warming. Not long ago, scientists were estimating that an increase of 4 or 5 degrees could be possible, given emissions trajectories. But modeling last year by Hausfather and his colleagues found that if countries stick to their reduction pledges, we could keep warming under 2 degrees. “We can be cautiously optimistic about the direction of these trends, and also realize that technology’s not going to save us all by itself,” says Hausfather. “Without stronger policies to propel these adoptions, we’re not going to meet our targets.”

The new IPCC report lands in the middle of those ranges—it warns that unless policymakers get a lot more ambitious about reductions, we could be heading toward a rise of around 3 degrees by the year 2100. Given the severity of the environmental damage we’re already seeing at 1.1 degrees of warming, it would be an unfathomable escalation.

Hausfather sees hope that we might head this future off. Last year, the United States passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which allocates hundreds of billions of dollars toward juicing the green economy and incentivizing people to climate-proof their homes.

The invasion of Ukraine has forced Europe to wean itself off of Russian gas and adopt more clean technologies like heat pumps. “What China is doing with electric vehicles is huge,” says Hausfather, referring to the country’s rapid adoption of EVs. And as the price of renewable energy falls, he continues, “solving this is probably going to be a lot cheaper than we thought it was a decade ago.”

The food system, though, is going to be trickier to decarbonize. A study published earlier this month estimated that the industry alone could add a degree Celsius of warming by 2100. But it also pointed to powerful levers that can be pulled to control emissions: Three quarters of that warming would come from methane-heavy industries like dairy and livestock production (cows burp a lot) and rice cultivation (bacteria that emit the gas grow in flooded rice fields). Methane is 80 times more potent than CO2, but disappears from the atmosphere in 10 years rather than centuries. Changes like driving down demand for beef or developing feed additives to keep cows from belching could all help reduce warming quickly.

Decarbonization comes with other benefits, the report notes, known as multisolving. Adding a green space to a city, for instance, absorbs carbon, cools the air, mitigates flooding, improves mental health, and may let residents grow more of their own food, increasing food security while reducing shipping emissions. Switching from gasoline cars to EVs reduces both carbon dioxide and air pollution. “So suddenly, this transition to net zero is a major, major win for public health around the world,” says Elizabeth Sawin, founder and director of the Multisolving Institute, which focuses on climate solutions.

The final installment in this IPCC series lands at a moment when humanity is reaching a crossroads: business as usual, or accelerating the green revolution. “If we act now,” said IPCC chair Hoesung Lee in a statement, “we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.”

Source

The long-term trend for sea ice in the south is still flat, while the global trend points downward.

In February 2023, sea ice around Antarctica reached the lowest extent ever observed since the start of the satellite record in 1979. But despite several recent years of low extents, the long-term trend for sea ice in southern polar waters is essentially flat; it is the declines in sea ice at the other pole—in the Arctic—that are pushing the global sea ice trend downward.

Sea ice around Antarctica reached its lowest extent on February 21, 2023, at 1.79 million square kilometers (691,000 square miles). That’s 130,000 square kilometers (50,000 square miles) below the previous record-low reached on February 25, 2022—a difference that equates to an area about the size of New York state. It marks the second time that scientists observed the ice shrinking below 2 million square kilometers.

Chart of the daily Antarctic sea ice extent in millions of square kilometers.

 

The map above shows the ice extent on the day of its record low. To determine extent, scientists project satellite observations of sea ice onto a grid and then add up the total area of each cell that is at least 15 percent ice-covered. The yellow outline shows the median sea ice extent for February from 1981–2010. A median is the middle value; that is, half of the extents were larger than the yellow line and half were smaller.

Amid year-to-year variability, sea ice trends in the Antarctic prior to 2016 were generally headed slightly upward in all months. Since then, several years hit new record lows, including 2017, 2022, and now 2023.

“There is some discussion about the Antarctic sea ice undergoing a regime-shift since 2016 toward a generally lower extent, and that maybe this could be a response to global warming; that is, the warming signal is starting to be seen in the Antarctic sea ice above the year-to-year variability,” said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). “But it is hard to say at this point if it is a real shift and response to warming, or just a temporal multi-year variation.”

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Source

A new study recently published in Science reveals that the Amazon rainforest has been damaged to a much greater extent than previously thought, with over a third of the remaining forest impacted by human activity.

A study led by a team of 35 international scientists from institutions such as Brazil’s University of Campinas, the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, the National Institute for Space Research, and the UK’s Lancaster University reveals that up to 38% of the remaining Amazon forest – equivalent to ten times the size of the UK – has been impacted by human disturbance. This results in carbon emissions comparable to or greater than those from deforestation.

Photo taken in 2015 of a burning forest in Belterra, in the Brazilian Amazon. While the flames cannot be seen, the smoke coming out of the forest is clear. Credit: Adam Ronan/Rede Amazônia Sustentável

 

The work is the result of the AIMES (Analysis, Integration, and Modelling of the Earth System) project, linked to the Future Earth international initiative, which brings together scientists and researchers who study sustainability.

The findings are the result of an analytical review of previously published scientific data, based on satellite imagery and a synthesis of published data outlining changes in the Amazon region between 2001 and 2018. The authors define the concept of degradation as transient or long-term changes in forest conditions caused by humans.

Photo taken in 2019, four years after a fire affected this forest fragment, which has been previously also affected by multiple anthropogenic disturbances, including selective logging, edge effects, and fires. Photo taken in Belterra, in the Brazilian Amazon. Credit: Marizilda Cruppe/Rede Amazônia Sustentável

 

Degradation is different from deforestation, where the forest is removed altogether and a new land use, such as agriculture, is established in its place. Although highly degraded forests can lose almost all of the trees, the land use itself does not change.

The authors evaluate four key disturbances driving forest degradation: forest fire, edge effects (changes that occur in forests adjacent to deforested areas), selective logging (such as illegal logging), and extreme drought. Different forest areas can be affected by one or more of these disturbances.

Photo taken in 2019, four years after a fire affected this forest fragment, which has been previously also affected by multiple anthropogenic disturbances, including selective logging, edge effects, and fires. Photo taken in Belterra, in the Brazilian Amazon. Credit: Marizilda Cruppe/Rede Amazônia Sustentável

 

“Despite uncertainty about the total effect of these disturbances, it is clear that their cumulative effect can be as important as deforestation for carbon emissions and biodiversity loss,” said Jos Barlow, a Professor of conservation science at Lancaster University in the UK and co-author of the paper.

The scientists assess that the degradation of the Amazon also has significant socioeconomic impacts, which should be further investigated in the future.

Extended summary figure of the article. Credit: Alex Argozino/Studio Argozino/Science magazine

 

“Degradation benefits the few, but places important burdens on many,” says Dr. Rachel Carmenta, a co-author based at the University of East Anglia, in the UK. “Few people profit from the degradation processes, yet many lose out across all dimensions of human well-being – including health, nutrition, and the place attachments held for the forest landscapes where they live. Furthermore, many of these burdens are hidden at present; recognizing them will help enable better governance with social justice at the center.”

Photo taken in 2015 of a burning forest in Belterra, in the Brazilian Amazon. In this photo, the fire line is clear, as well as the smoke of the burning forest. Credit: Adam Ronan/Rede Amazônia Sustentável

 

In a projection made by the team for 2050, the four degradation factors will continue to be major sources of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, regardless of the growth or suppression of deforestation of the forest.

“Even in an optimistic scenario, when there is no more deforestation, the effects of climate change will see degradation of the forest continue, leading to further carbon emissions,” says Dr. David Lapola, leader of the study and researcher at the Centre for Meteorological and Climatic Research Applied to Agriculture at Unicamp. However, “preventing the advance of deforestation remains vital, and could also allow more attention to be directed to other drivers of forest degradation.”

Photo taken in 2018, three years after a fire affected this logged forest that was also affected by edge effects. Photo taken in Belterra, in the Brazilian Amazon. Credit: Erika Berenguer

 

The authors propose creating a monitoring system for forest degradation, as well as prevention and curbing of illegal logging and controlling the use of fire. One suggestion is the concept of “smart forests” which, like the idea of “smart cities”, would use different types of technologies and sensors to collect useful data in order to improve the quality of the environment.

“Public and private actions and policies to curb deforestation will not necessarily address degradation as well,” says Dr. Lapola. “It is necessary to invest in innovative strategies.”

Source

IT’S BEEN SIX months since the Nord Stream gas pipelines were ruptured by a series of explosions, leaking tons of methane into the environment and igniting an international whodunit. Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and an unnamed pro-Ukrainian group have all been accused of planting explosives on the Baltic Sea pipelines in recent months. But half a year since the sabotage took place, the mystery remains unsolved.

Digital sleuths are stepping in to help provide clarity around bombshell claims about who was behind the attacks. Open source intelligence (OSINT) researchers are using public sources of data in their efforts to verify or debunk the snippets of information published about the Nord Stream explosions. They’re providing a glimpse of clarity to an incident that’s shrouded by secrecy and international politics.

Since early February, multiple media reports have claimed to provide new information about who could have attacked the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines on September 26. However, the reports have largely been based on anonymous sources, including unnamed intelligence officials and leaks from government investigations into the attacks.

First, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published claims that the US was behind attacks in a post on Substack. This was followed by reports in The New York Times and German publication Die Zeit claiming a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible. (European leaders have previously speculated Russia could be behind the attacks, and Russia has blamed the United Kingdom.) No country has claimed responsibility for the blasts so far, and official investigations are ongoing.

Each of the recent reports has provided little hard evidence to show what may actually have happened, while helping to fuel speculation. Jacob Kaarsbo, a senior analyst at Think Tank Europa, who previously worked in Danish intelligence for 15 years, says the claims have been “remarkable” but also “speculative” in nature. “In my mind, they don’t really alter the picture,” Kaarsbo says, adding the attacks look highly complex and would likely be “very hard to pull off without it being a state actor or at least with state sponsorship.”

In the absence of official information, OSINT researchers have been trying to plug the gaps by examining the claims of the new reports with public data. OSINT analysis is a powerful way to determine how an event may have unfolded. For instance, flight- and ship-tracking data can reveal movements around the world, satellite images show Earth in near real-time, while small clues in the backgrounds of photos and videos can reveal where they were taken. The techniques have uncovered Russian assassins, spotted North Korea evading international trading sanctions, identified potential war criminals, and documented pollution.

For the Nord Stream blasts, there was little OSINT available. Researchers identified “dark ships” in the area. But underwater, there are obviously limited data sources that can be tapped into—cameras and sensors don’t monitor every inch of the pipelines.

“OSINT probably won’t break this case open, but it can be used to verify or strengthen other hypotheses,” says Oliver Alexander, an analyst who focuses on OSINT and has been closely looking at the Nord Stream blasts. “I do think that it’s more of a verification tool.”

Alexander and others have been examining the claims made so far. The New York Times and Die Zeit both published stories on March 7 claiming a Ukrainian group was behind the sabotage. (Ukraine has denied any involvement.) Die Zeit published more details, claiming German investigators searched a yacht rented from a company based in Poland, knew where the yacht sailed from, and that six people were involved in the operation, including two divers. All of them used forged passports, the publication reported.

The details were enough for OSINT researchers to start tracking down which yacht could have been used. Alexander, as well as contributors to the open-source investigative outlet Bellingcat, started following the breadcrumbs, narrowing down potential vessels. A follow-up report soon named the boat under suspicion as the Andromeda, a 15-meter-long yacht. Webcam footage from the harbor where it is believed the Andromeda was docked shows the movement of a boat around the time reported by the publications. (The Andromeda is reportedly too small to be required to use ship-tracking systems.) Years-old videos and photos of the boat have surfaced. The sleuthing adds public details to the reports.

Similarly, OSINT has been used to debunk Hersh’s story claiming the United States was behind the explosions. (Hersh has defended his article, while US officials have said it was false.) Alexander has used, among other things, ship-tracking data to show Norwegian ships were “accounted for” and not in a “position to have placed the explosives on the Nord Stream pipeline, as claimed by Hersh.” Another detailed article from Norwegian journalists has similarly poured cold water on Hersh’s claims, partly using satellite data.

The sabotage was always likely to be controversial and surrounded by rumors: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has heated global tensions and put pressure on diplomats around the world. There has been a whirlwind of disinformation around the blasts, further muddying the waters. Mary Blankenship, a disinformation researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has analyzed online conversations around the war, says the “high uncertainty and high stakes” of the incident help to fuel the spread of disinformation. 

“This is an issue that exploits existing worries, tensions, and grievances within European audiences,” Blankenship says. Initially, the earliest disinformation on Twitter about the explosions came from conspiracy theorists, Blankenship says, who shared a pre-war statement from US president Joe Biden, where he said there would be an “end” to Nord Stream 2 if Russia invaded Ukraine. Since then, Russia and China have taken to sharing unproven theories about the sabotage, the researcher says.

“Disinformation actors, but also official representatives of the [Russian] regime, stepped up their efforts on every news story that was published on this—however contradictory about the origins of the blast—be it a blog post by Seymour Hersh or a New York Times article,” says Peter Stano, an EU spokesperson, adding most disinformation narratives have circled around the idea that “the US is to blame.” The EU’s disinformation monitoring project, EUvsDisinfo, has flagged more than 150 pieces of disinformation linked to the Nord Stream explosions, including those building on Hersh’s story. “EUvsDisinfo experts also found that Moscow considers the recent materials in German-language media a hoax,” Stano says.

While OSINT is helping to provide bits of extra detail on the claims about the Nord Stream attacks, it is likely that reports debunking dubious claims reach fewer people than disinformation or claims that are hard to verify. “It does not nearly get the same level of engagement,” Blankenship says. “You can have a book’s worth of evidence for it, and they would still find a way to discount it.”

And while OSINT research can answer some questions, it has its limits and can also raise new ones. Kaarsbo, the former Danish intelligence official, and other experts have pointed out that the Andromeda is a relatively small yacht, and it may have been unable to carry the amount of explosives needed to blow the pipelines. “The Andromeda is quite likely a piece of the puzzle, but I don’t think it’s a bigger piece of the puzzle that everyone makes it out to be,” Alexander says. “I think there are a lot of the big pieces missing.” Detailed sonar imagery of the damaged pipes would help people to understand what happened underwater, Alexander adds.

Ultimately, there is still very little hard public evidence—either from governments or publicly available online—about who may have been behind the attacks. Behind closed doors, intelligence agencies likely have more data and theories on the potential culprits.

However, investigators in Sweden and Denmark refused to comment on their progress, while Germany’s Office of the Federal Prosecutor confirmed it had searched a yacht and is continuing to examine for explosives. German officials have also said there could be a chance of a “false flag” operation to smear Ukraine. And when the countries complete their investigations, there’s no guarantee they will publish their findings or evidence to back them up. The mystery continues.

Source

The SpaceX steamroller has shifted into a higher gear this year

Twenty years ago, the United States invaded Iraq, with then-president George W Bush describing it as a necessary act “to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”

A few weeks later, Bush boasted that the war was a success because US troops had ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and routed his army. Bush landed on an American aircraft carrier and wore a Tom Cruise-style, Top Gun Air US Force outfit – thus orchestrating the most grandiose photo op in US history.

“The tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free,” he announced as he spoke beneath a broad banner that proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished.”

It didn’t take long for the “Accomplished” boast to fall apart. Before Bush left office, he mounted a “surge” of troops to battle Islamic and Saddam-remnant insurgents. Chaos continued almost uninterrupted.

Much US commentary since the invasion has focused on the blunders, false premises and the subsequent inability to stabilize a country riven by civil conflict and corruption as well as subject to outside meddling from arch-enemy Iran. In effect, much of the critique is the political science equivalence of naval gazing.

A share of attention is paid, though perhaps not enough, to possibly negative regional impacts. Almost none, at least initially, of the attention focused on the important effects on important outsiders, namely Russia and China. Those omissions should count as further blunders.

Take the case of Saudi Arabia, which from the start categorically refused participation. “We do not accept that this war should threaten Iraq’s unity or sovereignty,” a top official said.

Saudi Arabia did permit US warplanes to use Saudi air bases, but relations had changed: Saudi Arabia slowly but surely increased its links with China and Russia, the latter of which is an associate member of OPEC.

“The Saudis have emphasized in recent years that they seek to avoid entanglement in what is referred to in the US as ‘great power competition’,” said Gerald Feierstein, a former US ambassador to Yemen. “Their interests, the Saudis have made clear, have focused on maintaining strong relations with their main security partner, the US; their number one economic partner, China; and their key partner in OPEC+, Russia.”

Then there’s Russia and China. The Iraq War drastically altered their views toward the United States and the changes are now dramatically playing out in the field of international affairs.

During the 1990-91 Gulf War, when the US spearheaded the ouster of Iraqi invasion forces from Kuwait, Russian President Vladimir Putin aided the Americans by easing the passage of military overflights over Russia.

It was a maneuver designed both to show his backing for the “war on terror,” and to ease Western criticism of Russia’s harsh war against separatists in Chechnya.

An Iraqi soldier walks at the Qayyarah air base where US-led troops in 2017 had helped Iraqis plan out the fight against the Islamic State in nearby Mosul in northern Iraq. Photo: AFP / Ahmad Al-Rubaye

Putin perceived the Iraq War that began in 2003 as a breach of international law and an attack on a government with which Moscow had maintained relations and commercial dealings.

Moreover, Putin was seeking to rein in America’s unilateral tendencies. He had opposed President Bill Clinton’s air war against Slavic Serbia in favor of secessionist Kosovo.

In March 2003, he called for a halt to the Iraq War. “If we allow the law of the fist to replace international law, by which the strong are always right and has the right to do anything. One of the basic principles of international law will be called into question – the principle of the inalienable sovereignty of countries,” he said.

Putin has since aggressively protected diplomatically, politically and militarily those he identifies as friends – notably the government of Syria headed by Bashar al-Assad. Russia provided aerial bombing power to cripple insurgencies, helping Assad’s ground forces and Lebanese allies to drive them into northwest Syria.

In effect, Putin filled a vacuum left in part by the US. Strong military support was eased after the US, burned in Iraq, was unwilling to fully support even secular insurgents.

In addition, Iran’s willingness to supply drones to Russia for use in bombarding Ukraine is the latest display of Moscow’s new assertiveness.

Meanwhile, China’s opportunities for economic influence in the Middle East were bolstered by US ineptitude in Iraq. The region became a part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) plans, unveiled in 2013. By 2020, China had become a major importer of Middle East oil.

Observers also noted that China, once focused on its own near-abroad and centered on economic issues, has moved to center stage in global diplomacy. Its help in brokering renewed diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran is a stunning example—the Saudis were once fast allies of the US.

Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat (center), in Beijing on March 10, 2023, with counterparts Musaad bin Mohammed Al Aiban of Saudi Arabia and Ali Shamkhani of Iran. Image: China Daily

So, too, is Beijing’s formula for ending the war in Ukraine by promoting a ceasefire and peace talks.

George W Bush’s war planners had their eyes on organizing a new Middle East. They did not consider that the reading of the Iraq War and its general ineptitude would be viewed as an opening for new foreign political and military activities by two competitors.

“The Iraq War ended an era of Western hubris about the theory and practice of democracy promotion,” wrote Louise Fawcett, an international relations professor at Oxford University. “For both Russia and China, therefore, the Iraq War helped to erode the myth of Western omnipotence and open the Middle East as a competitive space for economic and strategic opportunity.”

The narrow focus and false expectations helped to form these new geopolitical realities, as did the deceptions used by the Bush administration to promote the war.

The expressed reason for the invasion was the need to stop Iraq from using and/or developing weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical and biological. Despite the insistence of Bush and his officials that such programs existed, none was found.

The US administration and its intelligence agents also insisted Saddam Hussein had a hand in the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington. But history shows he didn’t.

The accusations were “full of garbage,” said Robert E Kelly, an associate fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). He was part of a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency tasked with investigating the assertion that Iraq had nuclear weapons.

“Politics, compliance and groupthink prevailed,” Kelly wrote in an essay published by SIPRI on March 9. “The result of all this was a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and fueled years of instability in Iraq and around the region.”

In 1918, a US Senator purportedly said that “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” 

If it’s any consolation—though surely not to the people of Ukraine—Putin has offered his own brand of verbal deceptions: that the Ukrainians are all Nazis and terrorists, that the country is not really a nation-state but properly part of Russia and that there is no actual war, just a “special military operation.”

Source

7-Eleven starts its own EV charging network, 7Charge

The Blob – not the carnivorous ameboid alien antagonist from a schlocky 1950s sci-fi, but something much worse – made headlines between 2013 and 2016 as a massively devastating marine heatwave in the northeastern Pacific. As the waters off the western coast of the US warmed, ecosystems were upended, coral reefs were bleached en masse, and over a million birds turned up dead across the whole of North America.

Now, new research suggests that may have just been the tip of the … well, whatever the opposite of an iceberg is. Not only have scientists at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found evidence of marine heatwaves at the bottom of the ocean, but it seems these deeper versions pack a more concerning punch than their previously recorded cousins like The Blob: they last longer, can cause more drastic heating, and sometimes occur with little or no evidence of warming at the surface.

“It can be happening without [fisheries] managers realizing it until the impacts start to show,” said Dillon Amaya, a research scientist with NOAA's Physical Science Laboratory and lead author of the new paper, in a statement on the results. 

Those impacts have the potential to be catastrophic – both for marine ecosystems and, by extension, the industries that rely on them. While the world’s oceans may not be what springs to mind when we consider the worst-affected victims of global warming, they’re in fact responsible for absorbing about 90 percent of the excess heat generated by man-made carbon emissions. 

As such, it’s warming faster than the planet average, increasing in temperature by about 1.5°C (2.7°F) over the past century – with marine heatwaves becoming around 50 percent more frequent in the last decade alone. 

And with financial losses just due to The Blob totaling close to $200 million by some estimates, it’s no wonder that there’s been extensive interest in monitoring marine heatwaves over the past few years – simple ecological concern notwithstanding – but this is the first time that scientists have managed to delve so deep.

That’s partly because monitoring marine temperatures close to the surface is just so, well, easy. Not only are there established and straightforward methods of analyses for the data collected at the surface, but there’s also a whole lot more data to begin with: there are a wealth of high-quality observations taken by satellites, ships, and buoys.

But equally, monitoring the bottom of the ocean is notably difficult. Due to that lack of data, the researchers had to use a technique called “reanalysis” for the study – a method that involves taking whatever observational data is available, and using computer models to sort of “fill in the blanks” where information is absent. 

It’s an approach that’s been around for a long time, but it’s only very recently that reanalysis techniques and technology have become powerful enough to carry out the kind of assessment we’re seeing now. “Researchers have been investigating marine heat waves at the sea surface for over a decade now,” said Amaya, “[but] this is the first time we've been able to really dive deeper and assess how these extreme events unfold along shallow seafloors.”

And with the floodgates open, it’s imperative to maintain this deep-sea monitoring, the team say. Increased temperatures at the bottom of the ocean have been linked to a whole host of ecological problems – ranging from the expansion of invasive species like lionfish to the collapse of longstanding native populations like the lobsters of southern New England – and with these new data collection methods, the researchers hope to develop real-time monitoring capabilities that can alert marine resource managers to deep ocean conditions.

“We know that early recognition of marine heat waves is needed for proactive management of the coastal ocean,” co-author Michael Jacox, a research oceanographer who splits his time between NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center and the Physical Sciences Laboratory, commented. 

“Now it's clear that we need to pay closer attention to the ocean bottom, where some of the most valuable species live and can experience heat waves quite different from those on the surface.”

Source

The climate crisis is getting deeper and deeper – but humanity still has a number of options left on the table, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released today. 

The report can be summed up very simply: the planet is facing big trouble, but solutions are still available. 

"If you want us to sort of very colloquially summarise the thing, and I borrow the words of a very senior colleague in the IPCC, and say that we are up the proverbial creek, but we do have a paddle. That's really the key message from the report,” Professor Frank Jotzo, Head of Energy at the Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions at The Australian National University and member of the IPCC Synthesis Report core writing team, said in a statement. 

The IPCC is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations that regularly reviews and spreads information about the latest science of human-caused climate change.

Released on Monday, March 20, 2023, the latest IPCC synthesis report pulls together the findings of six reports released by the IPCC since 2015. Its main aim is to give policymakers and the public an even more concise picture of the crisis at hand – and the approaches that could potentially fix the problem. 

The report states that the burning of fossil fuels and unsustainable energy and land use have led to global warming of 1.1°C (2°F) above pre-industrial levels. In 2018, the IPCC highlighted the need to keep the warming of global average temperatures to 1.5°C (2.7°F), as well as the huge challenges involved in doing so.

The latest findings suggest that the impacts of the climate crisis are already being seen, and we’re currently not doing nearly enough to keep within this 1.5°C (2.7°F) target. 

People gather to rescue the affected people from flooded area on August 17, 2018, in Pathanamthitta, Kerala, India. Image credit: AJP/Shutterstock.com

While many of the findings have been heard time and time again, the report stresses how a number of “feasible and effective options” to adapt to climate change and significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

However, this really is the last decade we have to act. Emissions need to decrease now, and will need to be cut by almost half by 2030 if warming above 1.5°C (2.7°F) is to be avoided.

“The latest IPCC report triggers many alarm bells that we cannot afford to ignore,” explained Professor Mark Howden, Director of the Institute for Climate, Energy, & Disaster Solutions at The Australian National University, Vice-Chair of IPCC working group II, and review editor for the IPCC Synthesis Report in a statement. “It makes it crystal clear that climate change has rapidly altered the atmosphere, oceans, land, and ice-covered areas. This has generated more severe extreme weather events and widespread negative impacts on lives, livelihoods, and natural systems.”

“More change is likely. For example, in almost all emission scenarios global warming reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius in the first half of the 2030s. The choices we take now will have consequences in coming decades and potentially for thousands of years,” he added.

Climate change is already driving extreme weather, such as the wildfires seen in California over the past few years. Image credit: arboursabroad/Shutterstock.com

Another point that’s been given more emphasis in the latest report is the need to recognize that the climate crisis is already hitting the world’s most vulnerable regions especially hard, even though these parts of the world have historically contributed least to the problem. 

At the COP27 climate conference in November 2022, there was heated debate around “loss and damage", which is the idea that richer nations should pay poorer nations to help them deal with the mounting damage linked to global warming.  The new report underlines that climate justice for vulnerable communities must remain central to the way the world deals with this crisis. 

“Climate justice is crucial because those who have contributed least to climate change are being disproportionately affected,” said Aditi Mukherji, one of the 93 authors of this Synthesis Report, the closing chapter of the Panel’s sixth assessment, in a press release.

“Almost half of the world’s population lives in regions that are highly vulnerable to climate change. In the last decade, deaths from floods, droughts and storms were 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions,“ she added. 

Source

Depending on where you are, it’s the equinox today or tomorrow, but what does that really mean? It’s easy to define the solstices; they represent the longest day or night of the year depending on your hemisphere. On the other hand, the definition of the equinoxes is that the equator is pointed directly towards the Sun. That has much less relevance to people who live anywhere else, leading to common definitions that seem universal, but actually contain multiple errors.

Is the equinox equal day and night?

Even the name equinox is inaccurate, coming as it does from the Latin for “equal night”. This leads to common references to the equinoxes being when there is an equal amount of day and night all over the world. One reason this is wrong is obvious to anyone who stops to think about it (hint: the poles), but as Space.com points out, there are also problems with the definition that require more knowledge to notice. 

The first problem with the name is it assumes everything that isn’t day is night, ignoring twilight. Sunlight is scattered off particles in the upper atmosphere, which can be illuminated well before the Sun rises and after it sets. The quantity of extra light varies by location – twilight is much shorter in the tropics than in temperate regions – even if you ignore clouds. However, if you want a full 12 hours of night, you must wait a long way into winter.

Even if your definition of night includes twilight it still won’t equal the amount of daylight at the equinox because the Sun is not a point source. Before the midpoint of our local star rises and after it has set, there’s still a powerful light source covering up to a quarter of a degree of the sky shining on us all.

When the Sun looks like this, it's actually below the horizon and you can only see it because of refraction. Image credit: nadia_if/Shutterstock.com

Once again, the Sun sets a lot more slowly at high latitudes, so no universal number covers how much extra time we get where part of the Sun is above the horizon. The minimum figure – at the equator on the equinox – is two minutes, but at the poles there are well over 24 hours of just a part of the Sun being visible.

Altitude can complicate matters too. Mountain tops stay illuminated a little longer than plains, extending the day that little bit further.

Even if you’re in a small boat on the ocean, the Earth has one more trick to play to give you some precious moments of light. That’s because the atmosphere refracts light as well as scattering it, bending it so the Sun appears to be just above the horizon when it is in fact slightly below. The day when the Sun is visible for exactly 12 hours is called the equilux, and it varies depending on your latitude.

When is the spring equinox?

There are plenty of online tools to help you discover the combined size of these effects where you live. These will show you how much extra daylight you get where you live beyond 12 hours. To use tools like this precisely, you also need to note which day the equinox falls on where you live. The year not being precisely 365 days long, the timing of the equinoxes and solstices move around slightly, and this year it falls at 9:24 pm UTC on March 20 for Europe and the US, and on March 21 for Australia, Asia, and Africa.

When it comes to how much of a bonus twilight provides, however, you need to decide which twilight you care about – astronomical, nautical, and civil twilights all have different definitions and lengths.

An earlier version of this article was published in September 2022. 

Source

In Judge C. R. Magney State Park, Minnesota, there is an unusual feature known as the Devil's Kettle, where the Brule River splits in two around a large rock. While the bulk of the water goes over a waterfall and continues downstream, a significant amount of it travels down into a hole and then.... sort of disappears.

For decades, we didn't actually know where this water went, but not for lack of trying. Visitors to the park have reportedly thrown objects into the river, ranging from ping pong balls and GPS trackers to (according to local rumor) a car, in order to try and find the objects when they reemerge. However, after the objects were dropped into the hole, they did not come back out.

Theories had it that the water separated from the main River Brule, traveled by underground tunnels and emerged somewhere in Lake Superior, or elsewhere.

"I've heard locals describe the possibility that this water splits at the waterfall and some of it flows into Canada," park manager Peter Mott told MPR News in 2017. "I've actually heard people suggest that it may flow somehow back into the Mississippi River."

This looked unlikely, as underwater tunnels tend not to form easily in the hard rock found in the area. So where is the water, and the various objects thrown into it, going?

In 2016, a team from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources decided to examine the water flow of the river before the split, and after the main waterfall, to see if any water was being lost. Above the Devil's Kettle, the water was flowing at 3.48 cubic meters per second (123 cubic feet per second). And below the waterfall, it was flowing at 3.43 cubic meters per second (121 cubic feet per second).

"In the world of stream gauging, those two numbers are essentially the same and are within the tolerances of the equipment," mapping hydrologist Jeff Green, who was part of the research team, explained in a statement. "The readings show no loss of water below the kettle, so it confirms the water is resurging in the stream below it."

As for the missing objects, there is a simple explanation: they're getting shredded in much the way you'd expect if you lob them down something named the Devil's Kettle.

"The plunge pool below the kettle is an unbelievably powerful system of recirculating currents, capable of disintegrating material and holding it under water until it resurfaces at some point downstream," Calvin Alexander from the University of Minnesota, who was also part of the project, added.

The team believe that the water rejoins the rest of the river almost immediately after the waterfall, though it's not yet known where exactly this happens.

Source

Earlier this week, the United Kingdom announced that it had restricted TikTok from all government devices. It covers ministers' and civil servants' mobile phones. The Cabinet Office minister Oliver Dowden announced the bans "with immediate effect." Now, New Zealand has also joined the growing list of countries keeping TikTok away from government devices, announced by the parliament.

The Guardian reported that an email regarding New Zealand's TikTok ban was received a couple of days ago. "The Service has determined that the risks are not acceptable in the current New Zealand parliament environment. The decision to block the TikTok application has been made based on our own analysis and following discussion with our colleagues across government and internationally," the email reads.

The Guardian also added that multiple members of New Zealand MP use the application to post political videos. A spokesperson for the Act party said the party's TikTok account "is run from a personal phone free of parliamentary information. We have been taking this precaution for some time."

The list keeps getting longer

New Zealand is not the first country to keep TikTok away from government devices. Starting with the United States, Canada, and the European Commission, the United Kingdom has also issued similar restrictions.

The reason behind all these bans is the possibility of China collecting user data recorded by TikTok. All the countries are concerned that China could store sensitive data, surrounded by security threats. Also, it might be manipulating the algorithm to push pro-China content. On the other hand, TikTok has denied all the accusations and said the Chinese government couldn't access user data and algorithms. Added that the government hasn't asked for it, and also TikTok would refuse any future requests.

Recently, the tension between the United States and China has been gradually adding up, with both countries taking precautions against each other. First, the US shot China's surveillance balloon and sped up its investigations on TikTok, allowing the Biden administration to ban the app within its borders. Moreover, the US government demanded ByteDance to divest from TikTok over national security concerns.

If you want to dig deeper into TikTok accusations, we suggest you take a look at the "Do cybersecurity allegations against TikTok hold up?" article.

Source

According to a report by Reuters, Huawei's founder announced that 13,000 parts were replaced in the products since the U.S. supply chain ban. Moreover, the company had to redesign 4,000 circuit boards for its products over the course of three years.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University transcripted his speech in February.

Reuters says that the founder Ren stated Huawei invested $23.8 billion in research and development in 2022, and added, "as our profitability improves, we'll continue to increase R&D spending."

The U.S. export controls banned Huawei from reaching many technologies, including its supply of chips from U.S. companies as well as resources to create its own chips and commission partners to produce them.

Huawei

U.S. sanctions hit Huawei in many aspects

Huawei was on the road to become the world's largest smartphone manufacturer. However, the United States government, in a way, prevented it from reaching its goal. The Chinese company is now unable to reach the U.S. supply chain to boost its devices with some of the latest technologies.

The company was even excluded from the Google Android user list and had to develop its own operating system. One year after that, the U.S. Commerce Department announced a new export rule that banned the shipping of cutting-edge silicones to Huawei.

Last year, the Biden administration also banned the sale of any Huawei products within the country.

According to Ren, Huawei has built its own enterprise resource planning system, MetaERP. It will launch next month, in April, and will help the company with finance, core business functions, supply chain, and manufacturing operations.

Huawei also has no intentions to launch a rival to ChatGPT, which is the latest trend in the technology world. However, it is looking to become the "underlying computing platform" of AI. Huawei wants to supply the world with enough computing power to help grow the AI business.

The company is still leading the Chinese smartphone market but accusations and proofs signal that it will be away from the western market for a little longer.

Source

North Sea cod are getting smaller—can we reverse that?

No need for more scare stories about the looming automation of the future. Artists, designers, photographers, authors, actors and musicians see little humour left in jokes about AI programs that will one day do their job for less money. That dark dawn is here, they say.

Vast amounts of imaginative output, work made by people in the kind of jobs once assumed to be protected from the threat of technology, have already been captured from the web, to be adapted, merged and anonymised by algorithms for commercial use. But just as GPT-4, the enhanced version of the AI generative text engine, was proudly unveiled last week, artists, writers and regulators have started to fight back in earnest.

“Picture libraries are being scraped for content and huge datasets being amassed right now,” says Isabelle Doran, head of the Association of Photographers. “So if we want to ensure the appreciation of human creativity, we need new ways of tracing content and the protection of smarter laws.”

Collective campaigns, lawsuits, international rules and IT hacks are all being deployed at speed on behalf of the creative industries in an effort, if not to win the battle, at least to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”, in the words of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

Poetry may still be a hard nut for AI to crack convincingly, but among the first to face a genuine threat to their livelihoods are photographers and designers. Generative software can produce images at the touch of the button, while sites like the popular NightCafe make “original”, data-derived artwork in response to a few simple verbal prompts. The first line of defence is a growing movement of visual artists and image agencies who are now “opting out” of allowing their work to be farmed by AI software, a process called “data training”. Thousands have posted “Do Not AI” signs on their social media accounts and web galleries as a result.

A software-generated approximation of Nick Cave’s lyrics notably drew the performer’s wrath earlier this year. He called it “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human”. Not a great review. Meanwhile, AI innovations such as Jukebox are also threatening musicians and composers.

And digital voice-cloning technology is putting real narrators and actors out of regular work. In February, a Texas veteran audiobook narrator called Gary Furlong noticed Apple had been given the right to “use audiobook files for machine learning training and models” in one of his contracts. But the union SAG-AFTRA took up his case. The agency involved, Findaway Voices, now owned by Spotify, has since agreed to call a temporary halt and points to a “revoke” clause in its contracts. But this year Apple brought out its first books narrated by algorithms, a service Google has been offering for two years.

The creeping inevitability of this fresh challenge to artists seems unfair, even to spectators. As the award-winning British author Susie Alegre, a recent victim of AI plagiarism, asks: “Do we really need to find other ways to do things that people enjoy doing anyway? Things that give us a sense of achievement, like writing a poem? Why not replace the things that we don’t enjoy doing?”

Not a fan of AI: singer-songwriter Nick Cave. Photograph: Simona Chioccia/Shutterstock

Alegre, a human rights lawyer and writer based in London, argues that the value of authentic thinking has already been undermined: “If the world is going to put its faith in AI, what’s the point? Pay rates for original work have been massively diminished. This is automated intellectual asset-stripping.”

The truth is that AI incursions into the creative world are just the headline-grabbers. It is fun, after all, to read about a song or an award-winning piece of art dreamed up by computer. Accounts of software innovation in the field of insurance underwriting are less compelling. All the same, scientific efforts to simulate the imagination have always been at the forefront of the push for better AI, precisely because it is so difficult to do.

Could software really produce paintings that entrance or stories that engage? So far the answer to both, happily, is “no”. Tone and appropriate emotional register remain hard to fake.

Yet the prospect of valid creative careers is at stake. ChatGPT is just one of the latest AI products, alongside Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing, to have shaken up copyright legislation. Artists and writers who are losing out to AI tend to talk sorrowfully of programmes that “spew rubbish” and “spout out nonsense”, and of a sense of “violation”. This moment of creative jeopardy has arrived with the huge amount of data now available on the web for covert harvesting rather than due to any malevolent push. But its victims are alarmed.

Analysis of the burgeoning problem in February found that the work of designers and illustrators is most vulnerable. Software programs such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL.E 2 are creating images in seconds, all culled from a databank of styles and colour palettes. One platform, ArtStation, was reportedly so overwhelmed by anti-AI memes that it requested the labelling of AI artwork.

At the Association of Photographers, Doran has mounted a survey to gauge the scale of the attack. “We have clear evidence that image datasets, which form the basis of these commercial AI generative image content programs, consist of millions of images from public-facing websites taken without permission or payment,” she says. Using the site Have I Been Trained which has access to the Stable Diffusion dataset, her “shocked” members have identified their own images and are mourning the reduction of the worth of their intellectual property.

The opt-out movement is spreading, with tens of millions of artworks and images excluded in the last few weeks. But following the trail is tricky as images are used by clients in altered forms and opt-out clauses can be hard to find. Many photographers are also reporting that their “style” is being mimicked to produce cheaper work. “As these programs are devised to ‘machine learn’, at what point can they generate with ease the style of an established professional photographer and displace the need for their human creativity?” says Doran.

For Alegre, who last month discovered paragraphs of her prize-winning book Freedom to Think were being offered up, uncredited by ChatGPT, there are hidden dangers to simply opting out: “It means you are completely written out of the story, and for a woman that is problematic.”

Alegre’s work is already being misattributed to male authors by AI, so removing it from the equation would compound the error. Databanks can only reflect what they have access to.

“ChatGPT said I did not exist, although it quoted my work. Apart from the damage to my ego, I do exist on the internet, so it felt like a violation,” she says.

“Later it came up with a pretty accurate synopsis of my book, but said the author was some random bloke. And, funnily enough, my book is about the way misinformation twists our worldview. AI content really is about as reliable as checking your horoscope.” She would like to see AI development funding diverted to the search for new legal protections.

Fans of AI may well promise it can help us to better understand the future beyond our intellectual limitations. But for plagiarised artists and writers, it now seems the best hope is that it will teach humans yet again that we should doubt and check everything we see and read.

Source

I am two weeks into my journey of improving holistic health via the means of meditation when my neighbour texts me to say she spotted me through my window, and am I OK because I “looked a bit dead”. These are not the glowing Gwyneth Paltrow vibes I was aiming for. But I had headphones in, I tell her. People can die with headphones in, she says.

At least it meant I had remained still for a length of time. After the latest remarkable study connecting meditation to improved gut health – itself a marker for overall positive health outcomes – I am attempting enlightenment of both the mind and bowels.

The most recent research, carried out by the Shanghai Mental Health Centre and published by the British Medical Association, saw researchers collect stool and blood samples from Tibetan monks who practised an ancient form of meditation – and had done for between three and 30 years – and found that compared with non-meditators their “intestinal microbiota composition” was linked to more effective metabolism, immunity function and decreased risk of anxiety and depression. In 2022, a Massachusetts study showed that subjects with a diagnosis of IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) or IBD (inflammatory bowel disease) who enrolled on a course of meditation and yoga also reported a decrease of symptoms.

The human gut contains trillions of interacting microorganisms: bacteria, fungi, archaea cells (similar to bacteria) – and bad stuff such as viruses. The ideal is to have a balanced and healthy microbiome to keep things ticking over nicely. Its makeup is a combination of heritable and environmental, ie there’s a genetic foundation, but the environment also plays a role in shaping the microbiome.

The gut, it is said, is the second brain. Or, more accurately, the enteric nervous system that regulates the gut is the second brain. It’s not news that the gut-brain axis is a thing: the phrase “my stomach dropped” when shocked or anxious exists for a reason; people vomit when nervous.

But an increasing focus on our digestive systems by scientists, doctors, big pharma and wellness influencers suggests the gut has gone mainstream.

Lucie Hayter established The Gut Feeling, a team of psychologists, neuroscientists and dieticians, to help others reach optimum equilibrium via their gut health. She tells me that “our brains and guts talk to each other daylong. When our gut flares up it sends signals back to the brain; and when our brain is stressed and anxious it sends signals back to the gut. This leads to development or worsening of bloating, constipation, diarrhoea or stomach pain.”

I have a particular interest in this subject as, a few years ago, in scenes I can only describe as gutting, mine started playing up. A bout of seemingly innocuous sickness led to long-term symptoms. Cue months of investigative tests for infections with fun names like Helicobacter pylori; ultrasounds; an MRI scan; a CT scan; a colonoscopy (2/10, wouldn’t recommend); stool tests (scooping a bit of my own shit into a small pot then storing it overnight in my fridge, also would not recommend); breath tests.

I learned about probiotics, then prebiotics. I bought expensive liquids and supplements from mail-order companies. I blended so many powders and concocted so many potions I was basically Walter White. Then it turned out that, thanks to damaged nerves and muscles, I had developed something called SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth); the “bad bacteria” were running wild – my microbiome was not in a good place. For me, the cure only came with waiting for my gut to heal.

Alexa Duff is a psychologist with a focus on the gut-brain axis. She tells me that “gut health is so much broader than what you eat: it’s sleep, work-life balance, exercise, being in nature, and time with loved ones. These are the most important first steps.” Duff suggests I start with a simple-to-use meditation app, the market for which is huge. (The Gut Feeling has developed an app that offers a specific programme, but there is currently a waiting list.) I check out one of the most popular, Headspace, but knowing that I will forget to cancel the £50 annual fee should I decide not to continue after a free trial, and finding its user interface overwhelming, I plump for something simpler. I decide on The Mindfulness App because it says it is suitable for anyone over four.

Tibetan monks who practised an ancient form of meditation were found to have more effective metabolism, immunity function and decreased risk of anxiety and depression. Photograph: Kittiyut Phornphibul/EyeEm/Getty Images

The app asks me what I want to improve. Options I’d expect are there: reduce stress, improve focus; but there is also “increase compassion”, which is intriguing. I allow the app to send me notifications at a set time every day to remind me to complete a four-minute session. I choose noon. I put my phone in airplane mode, so as not to be disturbed with WhatsApp messages or screen grabs of other WhatsApp messages.

I am instructed to sit in a “posture that embodies dignity”. I try not to think of the day before when I was scrabbling around the floor of a cafe to reach a socket to charge my laptop. On the one hand, the breathing exercises highlight that, thanks to a deviated septum, one nostril is essentially blocked, but there is no doubt that focusing on the rise and fall of my chest makes me feel more chilled.

I decide that I will measure the effect on my gut health according to how cumbersome I feel. I remember, slightly panicked, how when I was ill I looked and felt as though I had a basketball under my shirt; that I was producing poos that resembled Maltesers (apologies); that I felt sluggish 24/7. After a week of using The Mindfulness App, I do as Hayter and Duff suggest and “check in”.

I am smashing it, according to the Bristol stool chart, which is like a hierarchy of poo shape, texture and colour. I remember Duff saying how important getting out in nature is – the benefits of green and blue spaces are multiple and evidence-based – so I go for walks. I pet dogs. I try to “prioritise sleep”, which I have been attempting to do regardless, having chosen decaf for some time now (although caffeine is actually thought to have a positive effect on the gut, not least because it stimulates its movement).

At this point I have developed something of a rapport with the app’s narrator, although it lessens when she describes my breath as my “friend”.

Occasionally, she gets dry-mouth. My gut continues to behave itself, even when I eat a whole packet of KitKats for supper, thinking I have probably undermined the entire project. Instead, the next day the app tells me that I am doing excellently, and I think of that Kris Jenner meme: “You’re doing amazing, sweetie!” Now comes an option to share my progress on various social media platforms, which I decline.

Soon enough, the app restricts my access to further exercises until I pay for its premium tier. Stymied, I click on a 10-question stress test. “How often have you been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly?” the app asks after thwarting my progress in the name of profit. I choose “very often”, and shake my head. I continue to do the exercises I do have access to. I reread the 2015 surprise bestseller by the German author Giulia Enders, Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ.

In the final week of my experiment, I swallow my tooth or, technically, half a veneer. I don’t know how this will affect the Bristol stool chart. I think about the bacteria in my gut assessing this porcelain interloper. I imagine the veneer washed in acid, bobbing like flotsam in the sea. I head to an emergency dentist and pay such an egregious sum of money for a temporary fix that it threatens to undo every bit of meditative improvement I’ve made. Then I go home and watch ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos on YouTube, in which relaxing sounds associated with, say, haircuts or painting are played. The rhythmic snip of scissors; the soothing swish of a paint brush across a canvas.

In truth, it’s these videos and the walks in the park, the cold-water swimming (with apologies for being a cliche) that I feel make the most difference to how I feel “within myself”. They are my preferred meditative options. Alexa Duff tells me a lot of people also benefit from “Nerva gut-directed hypnotherapy” and, for chronic conditions such as Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis (in which parts of the digestive system are inflamed), she works long-term with people in a therapeutic setting.

There are plenty of physical and dietary interventions proven to help gut problems, from tailored low-FODMAP diets (which cut out certain foods, mostly high in fructose, lactose and monosaccharides) to intense procedures like faecal transplants, but it makes perfect sense to me that mind and body are in sync. After a month of meditating each day, I can’t say that I have noticed a vast improvement in gut health, but I also haven’t had periods where I feel particularly squiffy or leaden – and that has a big positive effect on my mood. If, as Hyter puts it, our guts and brains are constantly talking to each other, it has certainly been a worthwhile conversation.

Source

The Department of Primary Industries in New South Wales state said the fish deaths coincided with a heat wave that put stress on a system that has experienced extreme conditions from wide-scale flooding.

The deaths were likely caused by low oxygen levels as floods recede, a situation made worse by fish needing more oxygen because of the warmer weather, the department said.

Residents of the Outback town of Menindee complained of a terrible smell from the dead fish.

“We’ve just sort of started to clean up, and then this has happened, and that’s sort of you’re walking around in a dried-up mess and then you’re smelling this putrid smell. It’s a terrible smell and horrible to see all those dead fish,” said Jan Dening, a local.

Nature photographer Geoff Looney found huge clusters of dead fish near the main weir in Menindee on Thursday evening.

“The stink was terrible. I nearly had to put a mask on,” Looney said. “I was worried about my own health. That water right in the top comes down to our pumping station for the town. People north of Menindee say there’s cod and perch floating down the river everywhere.”

Mass kills have been reported on the Darling-Baaka River in recent weeks. Tens of thousands of fish were found at the same spot in late February, while there have been several reports of dead fish downstream toward Pooncarie, near the borders of South Australia and Victoria states.

Enormous fish kills occurred on the river at Menindee during severe drought conditions in late 2018 and early 2019, with locals estimating millions of deaths.

Source

A Chinese-led research team has generated powerful electron beams with unprecedented efficiency, a scientific breakthrough that could rewrite Albert Einstein's Nobel Prize winning theory, according to a new paper.

In March 1905, Einstein published a paper explaining the photoelectric effect. When light falls on specific material, electrons might be emitted from its surface. This phenomenon has helped humans understand the quantum nature of light and electrons.

A century passed and the theory became a foundation for many modern technologies that rely on light detection or electron-beam generation. High-energy electron beams have been widely used to analyse crystal structures, treat cancer, kill bacteria and machine alloy.

However, most of the materials that convert photons into electrons, known as photocathodes, were discovered about 60 years ago. All photocathodes a defect: the electrons they generate are dispersed in angle and speed.

By using a new material, He Ruihua, of Westlake University in Hangzhou, in China's eastern Zhejiang province, and his team overcame the defence and acquired concentrated electrons. The finding by researchers in China, Japan and the US could raise the energy level of an acquired electron-beam by at least an order of magnitude.

The team's paper was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature on March 8.

They used strontium titanate (SrTiO3), a quantum material with myriad interesting properties. Electron beams obtained after exciting SrTiO3 generated electron beams with consistency - also called coherence.

"Coherence is important to the beam, it concentrates the flow like a pipe on the tap. Without the pipe, water will spray everywhere when the tap is wide open. Without coherence, electrons will scatter," said Hong Caiyun, an author of the paper.

"With the coherence we acquired, we can increase the beam intensity while the beam could maintain its direction."

The photoemission intensity of SrTiO3 is greatly enhanced.

"This exceptional performance suggests novel physics beyond the well-established theoretical framework for photoemission," Hong said.

The discovery has driven the team to find a new theory to explain the unparalleled coherence.

"We came up with an explanation as a supplement to Einstein's original theoretical framework. It's in another paper which is under review right now," Professor He said.

Co-author Arun Bansil of Northeastern University in the US, hailed the finding in a Phys.org report.

"This is a big deal because there is no mechanism within our existing understanding of photoemission that can produce such an effect. In other words, we don't have any theory for this, currently, so it is a miraculous breakthrough in that sense," Bansil said.

According to Hong, the new theory predicts a host of materials with the same photoemissive properties as SrTiO3.

"SrTiO3 presents the first example of a fundamentally new class of photocathode quantum materials. It opens new prospects for applications that require intense electron beams," she said.

The research team did not respond, either in its paper or in interviews, to whether high-energy electron beams would be used in weapons.

Professor He said the discovery emerged from their focus on a traditional technology, angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (Arpes). Arpes is widely used to study electron structures in solid materials. It measures the energy and emission angle of photoelectrons.

"In the past few decades, physics and material scientists mainly used Arpes to study the electronic structures related to the optical, electrical and thermal properties. Our team adapted an unconventional configuration of Arpes, and measured another part that's more related to the photoelectric effect," He said.

"During the test we found the unusual photoemission properties of SrTiO3. Previously, quantum oxide materials represented by strontium titanate were mainly studied as substitutes for semiconductors, and are currently used in the fields of electronics and photocatalysis.

"The material will definitely be promising in the field of photocathode in the future."

Source

Nuts lower cholesterol levels and are linked to a lower risk of cardio-vascular disease. By eating nuts, you reduce your risk of suffering or dying from a heart attack, shows a new systematic review and meta-analysis conducted by researchers working at the University of Oslo and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and elsewhere. They reached this conclusion after examining the results of 60 previous studies. Their review was part of the work being carried out on the development of new Nordic dietary guidelines.

"If you eat a handful of nuts every day, that is around 30 grams, you will have a 20 to 25 percent lower risk of suffering from cardiovascular disease. In comparison, adults in the Nordic countries only eat on average around 4 grams of nuts a day. Many do not eat nuts or seeds at all," says Erik Arnesen, research fellow at the University of Oslo and first author of the study.

A few nuts are better than nothing

Arnesen emphasizes that even though scientists say "the more the better," eating just a few nuts is better than none at all. Almonds, pistachios and walnuts appear to be the best for lowering cholesterol, but according to Arnesen there is so far no conclusive evidence for recommending specific kinds of nuts over and above others.

"Nuts have a beneficial effect on cholesterol levels in the blood, which it is important to keep low in order to prevent the build-up of fat in the arteries. This atherosclerosis, as it is called, is one of the greatest risk factors for heart attacks," he explains.

Uncertain whether nuts affect the risk of stroke and diabetes type 2

The researchers were also asked to investigate whether eating nuts reduces the risk of strokes and diabetes type 2 too.

"We are not sure about this. Nuts do not appear to affect blood pressure, which is one of the risk factors behind strokes. We cannot be sure whether nuts are good for blood sugar levels either, which are linked to the risk of diabetes type 2," says Arnesen.

The results of the systematic review and meta-analysis were recently published in the journal Food & Nutrition Research.

Eating nuts can improve cholesterol levels in the population

When it comes to cardiovascular health, the conclusion is that eating nuts is advantageous.

"Even though several studies have indicated as much previously, this is the biggest review so far on cardiovascular health," says Arnesen.

"Thanks to this systematic review and meta-analysis, we can present a more precise estimate of the actual effects. Proving that nuts lower cholesterol levels provides a credible explanation for why there is a connection between eating nuts and the risk of cardiovascular disease."

One of the reasons Arnesen gives for this connection is the composition of fatty acids in nuts.

"Even though nuts cannot be used to treat high cholesterol, we believe that the effect is significant enough to be used as a preventive measure amongst the general population," says the research fellow.

Source

When Sathyamurthy N. was young, his family and fellow villagers from Edayanchavadi, Tamil Nadu, India, would embark a few times a year on a 15-kilometer-long journey to a sacred forest in Keezhputhupattu.

Nostalgia grips the 43-year-old Sathyamurthy as he remembers those trips: food wrapped in cloth and leaves, the elderly riding on bullock carts, and excited children on foot making a beeline eastward in the predawn darkness. The pilgrims, sweating in the morning heat and humidity, would look forward to the cool shade of the forest at the end of their journey. There, densely packed trees meant that the sun barely touched the terracotta soil. These sacred groves are of religious significance to some Hindu groups and include temples dedicated to clan deities revered as protectors of family lineages. This grove, just 1 kilometer shy of the Bay of Bengal, is home to Lord Manjaneeswarar Ayyanar, Sathyamurthy’s clan deity.

Today, the days-long pilgrimages on foot are just a memory for Sathyamurthy. Things have changed in the forest too. The 9-hectare sacred grove—about the size of nine soccer fields—has a barbed wire fence around it, a tarmac road allowing people to drive to the temple’s doorstep, and a public toilet. But parts of the grove have survived these transformations and preserve a rare ecosystem on the rapidly urbanizing coast. Sathyamurthy offers a quick prayer at the temple, then leads me into a dense thicket of ironwood, ebony, and axlewood. Lianas and creeping vines fill the spaces between the thick trunks and twisted branches; it’s hard to tell where one plant ends and another begins. It’s like the sacred grove is closing ranks, but persistent devotees infiltrate the forest in search of small shrines or medicinal plants. Occasional chants, chatter, and the tinkle of brass bells are interspersed with the calls of mynas.

When Sathyamurthy was growing up, he and his fellow villagers called the grove the kovil kaadugal (temple forest), but after he started working at Auroville Botanical Gardens, an arboretum in Tamil Nadu, in 2007, he learned that this forest was part of a threatened ecosystem called the tropical dry evergreen forest.

This forest type is within 30 to 50 kilometers of the Coromandel Coast and can withstand the long, humid, and hot (sometimes over 100 ºF) summers and the deluge of up to 2 meters of rain during the monsoons.

These forests once covered 400 to 500 kilometers of the Coromandel Coast. But as ancient seafaring Tamil and Telugu kingdoms, European colonizers, and modern-day Indians built cities and ports along the coast, the forests vanished. Today, most of this belt has been replaced by development around the approximately 700-kilometer-long East Coast Road that runs from Tamil Nadu’s capital, Chennai, to Ramanathapuram and beyond. It’s also home to almost 34 million people.

While studies in the 1960s and 1980s found that this native forest type was in decline, some tracts remain in around 75 sacred groves near coastal villages, and they could be the key to restoring ecological balance to a vanishing ecosystem.

Botanist Paul Blanchflower, director of the Auroville Botanical Gardens, and forester Glenn Baldwin, a project coordinator at the Auroville Forest Group, are two vocal advocates of the tropical dry evergreen forests. They first heard about these forests while working and living in Auroville, an experimental township started in 1968 by spiritual guru Mirra Alfassa and named for Sri Aurobindo.

When the land for Auroville was granted, it was a barren 50-meter-high plateau with deep gorges. During monsoons, the eroded topsoil would bleed into the Bay of Bengal. The first order of business for the new inhabitants—5,000 people from 124 countries—was to make the Martianesque landscape habitable. Over decades, a motley crew of foresters, ecologists, and conservationists worked on afforestation, soil restoration, and water conservation projects within Auroville. To restore the forest, they planted several drought-resistant foreign species such as acacia from Australia and ironwood from Brazil.

While the trees took hold, Auroville residents, including Blanchflower and Baldwin, grew curious about how the indigenous forest that once flourished on the site must have looked. So, starting 25 years ago, a large team of Auroville-based foresters and botanists began exploring sacred groves, like the one in Keezhputhupattu, just 15 kilometers from Auroville. With the help of locals and armed with a field guide to regional flora, they scoured the coast and identified 85 patches of tropical dry evergreen forest in sacred groves, government-protected forest reserves, and graveyards. It’s remarkable that they found any. Based on work they’ve done to date, Baldwin says only about 0.05 percent of this original forest type remains. Many have argued that there isn’t any tropical dry evergreen forest left at all, he says, “but we beg to differ.”

Trees planted in the early days of Auroville were largely unsuited for the cyclone-prone tropical coast and tended to snap like twigs during high winds, very unlike the sturdy trees and dense forests in the sacred groves.

The native forest offers refuge to bees and other pollinators year-round as its myriad plant species bloom in different seasons, says Blanchflower. They are also a haven for fauna such as red-whiskered bulbuls, mynas, golden jackals, and Indian civets.

What the Auroville team learned about the tropical dry evergreen forests became a blueprint for reforestation programs in the community. The team mapped the tropical dry evergreen forest sites they’d located and documented their biodiversity, then collected seeds and started nurseries all with an eye to restoring the Auroville forest. By 2000, around 45 forests managed by community members in Auroville were propagating close to 200 tropical dry evergreen forest species in their nurseries.

Tree by tree, Auroville’s forest composition started to change, particularly after cyclones destroyed the older foreign species, opening up space for indigenous trees. In 2015–2016, for instance, five years after a major cyclone tore down the forest canopy, Auroville residents planted 15,000 saplings, of which 90 percent were native species.

Today, community-run nurseries supply around 50,000 saplings a year for tree-planting projects in Auroville, and small “forest groups” of local residents plant native species across the almost 500 hectares of green space that includes community-owned and collectively managed forests. The groups have planted more than half a million evergreen saplings of over 200 species.

Ancolie Stoll tends to one such space called Nilatangam, a 7.5-hectare afforestation project started by her European parents when Auroville was first set up.

Nilatangam has tall trees from different parts of the world but few indigenous varieties. It isn’t dense and complex like the forests of the sacred groves. Instead, the trees are neatly spaced, like crops on farmland, with walking paths and plenty of room for plants to naturally reseed.

Stoll works with Blanchflower and Baldwin at the botanical garden and says that, at Nilatangam, she has recently planted more native species belonging to the tropical dry evergreen type. In between the canopy of nonnative trees from her parents’ time, she points to patches where she’s planted such saplings.

Over time, she will plant even more, when there are new species available, she explains. The process is slow, but she hopes to create a proper tropical dry evergreen forest within several years.

Tropical dry evergreen trees dominate the 20-hectare Pitchandikulam Forest and Bioresource Centre and the similarly sized Auroville Botanical Gardens. Baldwin, Blanchflower, and their botanical garden team are working to map the extent and variety of native species within Auroville.

Education is a key goal of the botanical gardens, and this is where Sathyamurthy plays an important role. During field trips to Auroville’s forests and at the sacred groves, he teaches students about the forests’ ecological importance and cultural heritage.

I get a sense of what the students might experience when Sathyamurthy guides me through Keezhputhupattu just after the bountiful rains of the November 2021 monsoons. The scent of wet soil mingles with incense sticks and jasmine garlands as we pass by shrines and flower vendors. Inside the forest, we walk through ankle-deep, doughlike red soil; around us stand stout trees, two to three stories high. Sathyamurthy continues unperturbed, leaving behind footprints from his rubber sandals.

He occasionally stops to enlighten me in Tamil, with a smattering of English, about the medicinal or cultural uses of some of the plants. He shares their scientific names and the Tamil equivalents in rapid succession. An ironwood tree, called kaasan in Tamil, is of particular medicinal value. Women crush the leaves with rice and consume the mixture as an immunity booster for postpartum recovery, he says. The tropical ebony, called karungaali, is used for making musical and agricultural instruments. Its much sought-after twigs are hung on doorways to ward off evil energies. We stop frequently—it seems like Sathyamurthy has a story for every plant, and he hopes his enthusiasm will inspire the students he takes to the forest.

Sathyamurthy feels that students will give sacred groves a chance in their villages. He believes such visits help in forging a relationship between the trees and the students. The students leave the field trips with seeds, saplings, and tips on how to plant native trees on common lands in their own villages.

Educating the next generation on the value of these forests could be the key to their survival, for despite their temples and importance to religious groups, the sacred groves aren’t spared from threats of urbanization, including extraction for biomedical and cultural uses.

Keezhputhupattu, for instance, receives hundreds of thousands of devotees every year, and villagers find it hard to control outsiders’ interactions with the forest. Tourists and herders trespass too.

Outside the grove, Sathyamurthy spots three young men yanking at a tree. They manage to get hold of a large branch. After a protracted tug of war, they tear one limb off the tree. The leaves fall with a loud, exhausted rustle. The men merrily drag away their spoils, presumably to be used for medicinal or cultural purposes.

Sathyamurthy shakes his head in disapproval and says there’s an urgent need to address the threat to the groves. Later, he tells me that a loss of the sacred groves feels like an attack on his community’s way of life.

This is why seed collection, nurseries, tree-planting drives, and awareness about the tropical dry evergreen forests are essential. If everything’s extracted, there’s no chance for the forest to regenerate and “build the bank balance,” Blanchflower points out. Re-creating the natural forest “puts energy back in the bank.”

India’s Sacred Groves Are Resurrecting a Vanishing Forest

(May require free registration to view)

Wednesday, March 22

• The first launch this week will be an Electron rocket from Rocket Lab. The mission will carry two BlackSky satellites into orbit and will be called “The Beat Goes On”. The company is also going to try to recover the first stage of the rocket by having it land in the ocean carried down with the aid of parachutes. The satellites will perform Earth observation with 1m resolution images. You’ll be able to tune in to the launch on Rocket Lab’s website and it’s due to take off at 8:45 a.m. UTC from New Zealand.
• The second launch on Wednesday is Relativity Space’s Terran 1 rocket which will launch on its first test flight. This mission was pushed back from earlier this month after the launch was aborted. As part of the test flight, the rocket will carry a 3D-printed mass simulator. The rocket will also only launch with a nose cone but no fairing. Relativity Space will be streaming the event on YouTube and take off is expected between 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Friday, March 24

• The final launch of the week will be a Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX. It will launch 21 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. These satellites will beam internet back to Earth as part of the Starlink constellation. Luckily, these newer Starlink satellites are covered with anti-reflective coatings so they won’t interfere as much with astronomy. There’s no assigned time for the launch just yet but check SpaceX’s website if you want to watch when it does happen.

Recap

• The first attempted launch last week happened on Sunday. Relativity Space attempted to launch its Terran 1 rocket but had to abort it.

• On Monday, China launched a Long March-2C rocket carrying the Horus-2 satellite. As you can guess from the name, the satellite is Egyptian and will perform remote sensing.

• On Wednesday, SpaceX launched the CRS-27 mission using a Falcon 9 topped with a Dragon spacecraft which docked at the International Space Station carrying cargo for the astronauts aboard the station. The first stage of the Falcon 9 landed back on a drone ship.

• Next up, China launched its Long March-11 rocket carrying the Shiyan-19 satellite which will be used for land resource surveys, urban planning, disaster prevention and mitigation, and more.

• Thursday saw the launch of an Electron rocket from Rocket Lab. In a mission dubbed “Stronger Together”, the company launched two Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites for Capella Space.

• On Friday, China sent up a Long March-3B carrying the Gaofen-13 02 satellite. This will be used for things like land surveys, crop-yield estimation, environmental governance, weather warnings and forecasting, and disaster prevention and mitigation.

• On the same day, SpaceX also launched 52 Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket. It also launched the first stage of the Falcon 9.

• The final launch of the week was another Falcon 9 this time carrying the SES-18 and SES-19 communications satellites from Florida.

That’s all we have this week, check in next time!

TWIRL 106: Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, and SpaceX ready launches

Genetic data links SARS-CoV-2 to raccoon dogs in China market, scientists say

FOR YEARS, THE hacking unit within Russia's GRU military intelligence agency known as Sandworm has carried out some of the worst cyberattacks in history—blackouts, fake ransomware, data-destroying worms—from behind a carefully maintained veil of anonymity. But after half a decade of the spy agency's botched operations, blown cover stories, and international indictments, perhaps it's no surprise that pulling the mask off the man leading that highly destructive hacking group today reveals a familiar face.

The commander of Sandworm, the notorious division of the agency's hacking forces responsible for many of the GRU's most aggressive campaigns of cyberwar and sabotage, is now an official named Evgenii Serebriakov, according to sources from a Western intelligence service who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity. If that name rings a bell, it may be because Serebriakov was indicted, along with six other GRU agents, after being caught in the midst of a close-range cyberespionage operation in the Netherlands in 2018 that targeted the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Hague.

In that foiled operation, Dutch law enforcement didn't just identify and arrest Serebriakov and his team, who were part of a different GRU unit generally known as Fancy Bear or APT28. They also seized Serebriakov’s backpack full of technical equipment, as well as his laptop and other hacking devices in his team’s rental car. As a result, Dutch and US investigators were able to piece together Serebriakov's travels and past operations stretching back years and, given his newer role, now know in unusual detail the career history of a rising GRU official.

According to the intelligence service sources, Serebriakov was placed in charge of Sandworm in the spring of 2022 after serving as deputy commander of APT28, and now holds the rank of colonel. Christo Grozev, the lead Russia-focused investigator for open source intelligence outlet Bellingcat, has also noted Serebriakov's rise: Around 2020, Grozev says, Serebriakov began receiving phone calls from GRU generals who, in the agency's strict hierarchy, only speak to higher-level officials. Grozev, who says he bought the phone data from a Russian black market source, says he also saw the GRU agent's number appear in the phone records of another powerful military unit focused on counterintelligence. "I realized he must be in a command position," says Grozev. "He can't just be a regular hacker anymore."

The fact that Serebriakov appears to have attained that position despite having been previously identified and indicted in the failed Netherlands operation suggests that he must have significant value to the GRU—that he's “apparently too good to dump,” Grozev adds.

Serebriakov's new position leading Sandworm—officially GRU Unit 74455 but also known by the nicknames Voodoo Bear and Iridium—puts him in charge of a group of hackers who are perhaps the world's most prolific practitioners of cyberwar. (They've also dabbled in espionage and disinformation campaigns.) Since 2015, Sandworm has led the Russian government's unprecedented campaign of cyberattacks on Ukraine: It penetrated electric utilities in western Ukraine and Kyiv to cause the first- and second-ever blackouts triggered by hackers and targeted Ukrainian government agencies, banks, and media with countless data-destructive malware operations. In 2017, Sandworm released NotPetya, a piece of self-replicating code that spread to networks worldwide and inflicted a record $10 billion in damage. Sandworm then went on to sabotage the 2018 Winter Olympics in Korea and attack TV broadcasters in the nation of Georgia in 2019, a shocking record of reckless hacking.

With Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine a year ago, the GRU's most aggressive hacking unit, now under Serebriakov's leadership, has refocused its efforts on that country. From its headquarters in a tower in the Moscow suburb of Khimki, it has launched new volleys of data-destroying malware, attempted to cause a third blackout—which the Ukrainian government says it prevented—and bombarded Ukrainian and Polish organizations with a fake ransomware campaign known as Prestige.

Serebriakov's pre-Sandworm hacking career was no less brazen. When he was captured along with the six other GRU agents in the Netherlands in 2018, US prosecutors say, he had in his backpack a Wi-Fi Pineapple, a book-sized device designed to spoof Wi-Fi networks and trick victims into connecting to it instead of the intended Wi-Fi hot spot, then carry out man-in-the-middle attacks that intercept or alter the victim's traffic. Serebriakov's team had also parked a rented car outside the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons building with an antenna for Wi-Fi hacking hidden in the trunk. The team was likely targeting staffers of the OPCW who were investigating Russia's use of the Novichok nerve agent in the GRU's attempted assassination of defector Sergei Skripal.

Serebriakov posing with a Russian athlete at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. PHOTOGRAPH: DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

When investigators examined that confiscated Wi-Fi hacking equipment, they found evidence of a long list of Wi-Fi networks it had connected to previously, essentially mapping out the travels of Serebriakov and his colleagues to carry out previous hacking operations. The hackers, it seemed, had targeted officials at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, from which more than 100 Russian athletes had been banned for performance-enhancing drug use, as well as attendees of a conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, focused on anti-doping efforts in athletics.

Exactly why Dutch authorities released Serebriakov and his fellow spies rather than criminally charge them—or extradite them to the US, where they face an indictment for hacking crimes—has never been explained, and the Dutch MIVD defense intelligence service didn't respond to WIRED's questions about it at the time.

That the figure at the helm of Sandworm today is someone previously identified in that very publicly blown Netherlands operation may demonstrate Serebriakov's value to the GRU: According to the intelligence service sources, he's regarded as having good connections to the security research community and strong technical skills. As for the fiasco of the GRU's Netherlands mission, the intelligence sources say that was blamed on the agents escorting him and his APT28 colleagues, not the hackers themselves.

And in some cases, for the GRU, an indictment only bolsters an agent's reputation for boldness and risk-taking. “For the Kremlin, it may be ‘great, you’ve made a splash, built the myth, bolstered our reputation as these techno-raiders, good on you,’” says Gavin Wilde, a former official at the US National Security Agency and the White House National Security Council who now serves as a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But Serebriakov's reappearance also indicates that relatively few people serve as key players in high-profile state-sponsored hacking operations, says John Hultquist, the head of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Mandiant. Hultquist was part of the group of researchers who initially discovered and named Sandworm, and he has closely tracked the unit for years. “This is someone from a notorious close-access operation, and then he shows up as the leader of another organization we know very well,” says Hultquist, using the term close-access to refer to Serebriakov's short-range Wi-Fi hacking tactics in the Netherlands. “To a certain extent, it demonstrates how small this world is that we’re trying to keep tabs on.”

“The same individuals show up again and again—and I mean the people with the actual hands on the keyboard,” Hultquist adds. “It speaks to the limited number of people in the field. We're still living in a world where talent is apparently limited to the point where we know the adversaries intimately.”

Source