The infelicitous phrase “international basket case” might better apply to Pakistan today than when it was applied to Bangladesh in the 1970s — Pakistan’s former eastern half. Bangladesh has surpassed Pakistan economically and in quality of life.

There is even talk of Bangladesh graduating to upper middle-income country status. Quite a reversal of fortune as no one talks about Pakistan that way.

Pakistani economists lament that Bangladesh overtook Pakistan in just a couple of decades. Pakistan’s remittance earnings are greater than its stagnating export earnings, and both combined can’t pay for its imports.

The Pakistani economy is in a precarious state and some are calling for Pakistan to suspend payment on its ever-increasing foreign debt, the largest portion held by China at 30%.

An increase in Pakistani tax revenue is good news, but it remains to be seen if Pakistan can improve its tax-to-GDP ratio, which sits among the world’s lowest at 9.5%. Pakistan’s budget deficit is 7.9% of GDP and continues to remain dangerously high despite continual government promises to the IMF that it will put its fiscal house in order.

Successive Pakistani finance ministers have long promised to raise, even double, Pakistan’s tax-to-GDP ratio but have proven unsuccessful after facing determined opposition. Entire sectors of the Pakistani economy — agriculture, retail and real estate development — are essentially untaxed.

For example, OECD countries collect about 2% of GDP in property taxes versus 0.6% in emerging market economies but Pakistan’s figure is a mere 0.1%. By some estimates, 50% of Pakistan’s workforce is in the untaxed economy, accounting for about 35% of GDP.

Money dealers count Pakistani rupees and US dollars at an exchange in Islamabad. Photo: AFP/ Aamir Qureshi

Some good news here is that much of the powerful Pakistani military’s vast business empire is no longer tax-exempt. But the military continues to run some of the country’s largest firms — Pakistan’s largest single public works contractor (the Frontier Works Organization), chemical fertilizer maker (Fauji Fertilizer), urban real estate developers (Defense Housing Authorities) and transportation firm (the National Logistics Cell).

As long as the unholy economic trinity of real estate development, retail business and the sugarcane barons remain outside the tax net, Pakistan will not be able to generate enough fiscal revenue to pay its bills, much less improve its socio-economic welfare indicators.

Pakistan has serious long-term structural economic problems, and the costs for this year’s devastating floods will be in the tens of billions of dollars. Suffering from mammoth floods every 10-12 years, which are becoming worse and more frequent due to climate change, Pakistan is one of the world’s most water-stressed countries.

Rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure will be impossible for a country that is already heavily indebted, desperate for an IMF bailout and begging for financial assistance from the world community. Inflation was high even before the floods hit and is now about 25% and climbing.

Miftah Ismail, who negotiated the US$1.17 billion temporary IMF bailout, was Pakistan’s fourth finance minister in five years. Ismail resigned and was replaced by ex-finance minister Ishaq Dar.

Dar has ruled out a loan default, although he has asked for $27 billion in bilateral-debt rescheduling, presumably to ensure the repayment of sukuk (Islamic bonds) due in December.

Dar is generally held responsible for Pakistan’s economic woes during the Pakistan Muslim League’s (PML) last ruling stint. He is regarded as a crony of the Sharif brothers — Nawaz who served thrice as prime minister, and current prime minister Shahbaz.

Dar fled the country rather than face corruption charges but had his arrest warrants quashed to enable his return. There are also serious corruption charges against both Sharif brothers.

The Pakistan People’s Party is the PML’s long-time opponent but is currently allied with it against ousted prime minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-e-Istiqlal. It also has a serious corruption problem. The former Pakistan president and current party leader Asif Ali Zardari was known as “Mr 10%.”

Asif Ali Zadari is known by some as “Mr. 10%.” Image: Twitter

Pakistan is a corrupt rentier state. The elite depend upon extracting rents, whether from its geostrategic position, massive foreign aid — loans or other assistance — or remittances from Pakistani workers toiling in the Gulf.

Because it is a consumption focussed elite that does not reinvest in the Pakistani economy, there is precious little economic development to show for all this inflow.

The ability of its economy to manufacture and export high-value-added items — essential for sustaining growth in real worker wages and living standards — is lower than comparable countries.

Further complicating the political situation is former prime minister Imran Khan who was removed in a vote of no confidence in April 2022. Still, Khan appears to be gaining in popularity daily and is planning mass rallies to destabilize the current government and force early elections.

General Bajwa, the head of Pakistan’s army and a particular target of Imran Khan’s, has retired, but his replacement, General Asim Munir, is also likely to be in Khan’s cross-hairs. This will further exacerbate political tensions and increase the likelihood of domestic unrest.

Pakistan is a country that is unstable at the best of times. It now confronts a veritable devil’s brew of natural disaster, economic crisis and political instability.

Source

SEOUL – Regardless of how crushingly jam-packed South Korean subway carriages get at rush hour, there is almost inevitably an unoccupied seat in almost every carriage – the one reserved for pregnant women.

It is a forlorn snapshot of what is arguably South Korea’s largest – but largely unaddressed – national challenge: the reluctance to breed and have families.

For years, it was an issue that was agonized over but invisible. Now, however, manpower shortages are becoming visible – even to the most gormless tourist who ventures out into Seoul after hours.

In a city once noted for its nightlife, multiple restaurants now take last orders at 8:00 pm. And those painting the town red had better keep an eye on the clock: Taxi supply has dried up, making it nearly impossible to hail a cab – and hard work even to book one – in the city’s nightlife zones.

But this is just the tip of a vast iceberg. The falling number of productive workers presents a huge demographic challenge for one of the world’s leading and most important manufacturing economies.  

The issue is one of quality as well as quantity. Employers and experts say that the current generation lacks the “economic warrior” mindset of their parents and grandparents, who sacrificed their health and happiness on the altar of work and growth.

With the “Korean Dream” – a career in a blue-chip firm, an apartment in Seoul and a family – increasingly out of reach, today’s youth are shifting their priorities. Poverty has largely been eradicated in South Korea, meaning recent graduates are happy to live with their parents, work in the gig economy and enjoy something their predecessors didn’t: work-life balance.

Historically, “The economy was driven by an excellent pool of HR but in terms of quantity and quality, this is emerging as a bottleneck,” Minister of Employment and Labor Lee Jung-sik told foreign reporters in Seoul on November 29. 

“Hours have to decline gradually, but the overall population is declining so we have to look at the working-age population who are not working – that is, women, young people and the elderly – and induce them into the labor market.”

But it is not just the workforce itself. There are also systemic issues.

“Our systems are not up to date as they date back to the ‘compressed growth’ days,” Lee said, referring to Korea’s surging economic expansion of from the 1960s to the 1990s. He added that his goal is to make the millennial labor market “as attractive as possible.”

The ultra-hard-working Korean of yore has been replaced by a less work-centric generation. Image: A briquette carrier of the 1970s. Photo: Tom Coyner

Dire demographics

Number crunchers digging into South Korea’s demographics are producing shocking metrics.

Our World in Data’s survey, which bases its estimates on UN fertility rates, finds that South Korea’s population peaked in 2020 at 51.84 million. In 2023, that figure slumps slightly to 51.78 million, but, from 2038, it is projected to drop below 50 million.

From then on, the survey’s graph plummets. After 2062, there will be fewer than 40 million living South Koreans; after 2084, their numbers drop to under 30 million. 

Export-centric South Korea is deeply embedded in the global economy but its demographic trends are well out of whack with global population trends. According to Statistics Korea, the world’s population is projected to rise from 7.97 billion in 2022 to 10.3 billion in 2070. By contrast, the population of South Korea is set to drop from 52 million in 2022 to 38 million in 2070.

Moreover, Statistics Korea finds the share of people aged 65 or over worldwide will rise by 9.8% in 2022 to 20.1% in 2070. But the percentage of the aged in South Korea is projected to shoot up over double the global rate, from 17.5% in 2022 to 46.4% in 2070.

A Statista forecast, that breaks down South Korea’s population into children, working-age people and the elderly, makes equally sobering reading. Statisa finds that the number of people today aged 15-64 is roughly four times greater than that of those aged 65 or over, but by 2040, the latter number will be half of the former number. And by 2070, they will be dead equal.

South Korea’s workforce is already in decline. According to Ministry of Employment and Labor stats, the number of working-age Koreans in 2012 was 73.4% of the populace; in 2021 it was 71.7%.; and by 2030, will be just 65.4%.

These multiple data points have huge ramifications for workforce numbers and output. But separately, there is the issue of changing employee attitudes toward work itself.

The disappearing Korean employee

During Korea’s high-growth period, from the mid-1960s to the watershed 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, workers could expect to exit education and enter a job that would last a lifetime. The downside was a lack of lifestyle or leisure options, given the six-day workweek.

Now, mass offshoring by conglomerates and slowing growth in what is now a mature advanced economy have changed the game. The job-for-life is gone and there is intense competition for work at prestige workplaces.

Meanwhile, newly implemented flexible work practices and prioritization of quality of life means fewer and fewer Koreans are defining themselves by their work.

“There are generation gaps in terms of perception of work between old and young,” Lee said. “Things were tough in the past, people were diligent, hard-working and had high loyalty to the workplace, but the MZ generation is different from the older generation.”

In many cases, the system is weighted against youth, who are undeniably more sophisticated, cosmopolitan and creative than their more regimented forebears – and arguably more productive.

“During the growth period, as your tenure increased, your wages increased automatically, along with your seniority,” said the ministry’s Director General of Labor Management Cooperation Policy Kwang Chang-jun. “The older generation get paid more, which is a burden for the company, so they stop recruiting and this means less opportunities for young people.”

It is not just age. In a society still weighted down by conservative social mores, gender is another issue.

“One of the biggest problems is that young people and women are less active than in other countries,” said Director General of Labor Market Policy Chong Kyeong-hun. “We need to induce their participation in the labor market.”

These multiple factors – quantity and quality of labor, and related issues in the eco-system – present headaches for those seeking employees.

“Potential employees seem to be getting pickier: If you don’t have a huge brand it is tough to hire and the young are also really into working for startups,” said one employer who runs a marketing firm in Seoul who requested anonymity in order to speak freely. “Supply and demand has changed, it seems like the pool is drying up. We are not even getting interns now, though we are advertising at universities.”

“It is beyond Korea – there is a shortage of talent everywhere,” said Steve McKinney, a Seoul-based headhunter. “One of the reasons is we have new technologies – the auto industry, for example, is changing completely –  that need new skills and requirements. Where do they come from?”

Even so, he reckons that Korea has a special problem.

“It is becoming more difficult to find the right people and motivate them, so recruitment is harder – there is a talent shortage,” McKinney, who heads his own agency, McKinney Consulting, continued. “Younger people are less willing to work, or to move, or to take a risk.”

For decades, Korean workers were at the mercy of their employers. More recently, employment law has shifted in the opposite direction.

Today’s workforce has “extremely low loyalty, they are very entitled and the legal system really encourages that,” said Brendon Carr, an employment lawyer with the Seoul-based firm HHC Law.

“Korean employment law coddles employees who steal, or who are incapable, are surly or are insubordinate,” he told Asia Times. “It is next to impossible to terminate an employee except for really spectacular Marvel supervillain-level misconduct.”

One side effect of this – and the generous benefit packages that Korean labor laws requires – is the reluctance of many employers to offer new employees full-time positions. Instead, they prefer to hire part-time or contract workers.

Young Koreans take a very different attitude to work-life balance than their parents and grandparents. Photo: Tom Coyner

What is to be done?

Seoul, like similarly demographically-challenged Tokyo, has been scratching its head over how to meet these towering workforce challenges. A multi-faceted research group has been formed and will deliver preliminary findings on December 13.

Some solutions are already being put into practice, not least more automation.

“Korea’s manufacturing industry is world-class and we have the highest automation rate in the world,” Lee said, adding that research is underway on smart factories inhabited by “collaborative robots.”

These smart plants may offer the best of both worlds. “Digitization retains employment and increases productivity,” the minister said.

Easing different classes of workers into the labor market is another focus.

To encourage women to work, the ministry has enacted a one-year parental leave system, which has, over the last three years, been taken up by between 105,000 and 112,000 women annually. Employees with children under eight are also permitted to work shorter hours.

Stronger guidance and inspections are being enforced to ensure that workplaces are not discriminatory, while businesses will, as of next year, be required to disclose the gender ratios of their employees.

In terms of granting Korea’s escalating population of elderly access to work, Seoul is increasing financial support for companies that promote continuous employment past the retirement age of 65. Employment and social welfare centers are also creating employment counseling sections for the elderly.

For the young, the government will inaugurate a pilot scheme, opening 10 university job centers next year. An AI-based occupation exploration program will also go online, seeking to marry students with appropriate careers based on their skillsets and individual preferences.  And a public-private partnership to offer students work-experience opportunities will be expanded.

Then there are labor imports. “More foreign workers will be given opportunities to work in Korea with labor market opening,” Lee said.

Korea – like Japan, customarily antagonistic toward immigration – has had some success with related policies.

For over two decades, this middle-class nation’s “Three Ds” (“dangerous, dirty, demeaning”) industrial base – largely comprising small, low-tech manufacturing operations – has been manned by hundreds of thousands of third-world workers imported from nations like Mongolia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Vietnam who toil on five-year visas.

Workers on a factory line in South Korea. Image: Twitter

Moreover, South Korea offers special visa status to “Joseon-jeokk” – i.e. China’s ethnic Korean minority – who have been key players in the service sector.

Now, there is an understanding that the numbers need to rise. In 2023, the government will open the gates to a record 110,000 foreign workers, up significantly from 69,000 this year. Their workplaces will be split between 75,000 in manufacturing,

14,000 in agriculture and 7,000 in fisheries.

Even so, Lee admits that this is not enough.

“Our systems have been focused on unskilled foreign manpower but we need more inflow of skilled labor,” he said. “These problems have to be addressed. We need continued investment into the labor market.”

Source

If you look back at the history of Atlantic hurricanes since the late 1800s, it might seem hurricane frequency is on the rise.

The year 2020 had the most tropical cyclones in the Atlantic, with 31, and 2021 had the third-highest, after 2005. The past decade saw five of the six most destructive Atlantic hurricanes in modern history.

 

Then a year like 2022 comes along, with no major hurricane landfalls until Fiona and Ian struck in late September. The Atlantic hurricane season, which ends November 30, has had eight hurricanes and 14 named storms. It’s a reminder that small sample sizes can be misleading when assessing trends in hurricane behavior. There is so much natural variability in hurricane behavior year to year and even decade to decade that we need to look much further back in time for the real trends to come clear.

 

Fortunately, hurricanes leave behind telltale evidence that goes back millennia.

 

Two thousand years of this evidence indicates that the Atlantic has experienced even stormier periods in the past than we’ve seen in recent years. That’s not good news. It tells coastal oceanographers like me that we may be significantly underestimating the threat hurricanes pose to Caribbean islands and the North American coast in the future.

The natural records hurricanes leave behind

When a hurricane nears land, its winds whip up powerful waves and currents that can sweep coarse sands and gravel into marshes and deep coastal ponds, sinkholes, and lagoons.

 

Under normal conditions, fine sand and organic matter like leaves and seeds fall into these areas and settle to the bottom. So when coarse sand and gravel wash in, a distinct layer is left behind.

 

Imagine cutting through a layer cake—you can see each layer of frosting. Scientists can see the same effect by plunging a long tube into the bottom of these coastal marshes and ponds and pulling up several meters of sediment in what’s known as a sediment core. By studying the layers in sediment, we can see when coarse sand appeared, suggesting an extreme coastal flood from a hurricane.

 

With these sediment cores, we have been able to document evidence of Atlantic hurricane activity over thousands of years.

 

Enlarge / The red dots indicate large sand deposits going back about 1,060 years. The yellow dots are estimated dates from radiocarbon dating of small shells.

Tyler Winkler

 

We now have dozens of chronologies of hurricane activity at different locations—including New England, the Florida Gulf Coast, the Florida Keys, and Belize—that reveal decade- to century-scale patterns in hurricane frequency.

 

Others, including from Atlantic Canada, North Carolina, northwestern Florida, Mississippi, and Puerto Rico, are lower-resolution, meaning it is nearly impossible to discern individual hurricane layers deposited within decades of one another. But they can be highly informative for determining the timing of the most intense hurricanes, which can have significant impacts on coastal ecosystems.

 

It’s the records from the Bahamas, however, with nearly annual resolution, that are crucial for seeing the long-term picture for the Atlantic Basin.

 

Why the Bahamas are so important

 

The Bahamas are exceptionally vulnerable to the impacts of major hurricanes because of their geographic location.

 

In the North Atlantic, 85 percent of all major hurricanes form in what is known as the Main Development Region, off western Africa. Looking just at observed hurricane tracks from the past 170 years, my analysis shows that about 86 percent of major hurricanes that affect the Bahamas also form in that region, suggesting the frequency variability in the Bahamas may be representative of the basin.

 

Enlarge / Atlantic hurricane tracks from 1851 to 2012.

Nilfanion

 

A substantial percentage of North Atlantic storms also pass over or near these islands, so these records appear to reflect changes in overall North Atlantic hurricane frequency through time.

 

By coupling coastal sediment records from the Bahamas with records from sites farther north, we can explore how changes in ocean surface temperatures, ocean currents, global-scale wind patterns, and atmospheric pressure gradients affect regional hurricane frequency.

 

As sea surface temperatures rise, warmer water provides more energy that can fuel more powerful and destructive hurricanes. However, the frequency of hurricanes—how often they form—isn’t necessarily affected in the same way.

 

Enlarge / Hurricane Dorian sat over the Bahamas as a powerful Category 5 storm in 2019.

Laura Dauphin/NASA Earth Observatory

 

The secrets hidden in blue holes

 

Some of the best locations for studying past hurricane activity are large, near-shore sinkholes known as blue holes.

 

Blue holes get their name from their deep blue color. They formed when carbonate rock dissolved to form underwater caves. Eventually, the ceilings collapsed, leaving behind sinkholes. The Bahamas has thousands of blue holes, some as wide as a third of a mile and as deep as a 60-story building.

 

They tend to have deep vertical walls that can trap sediments—including sand transported by strong hurricanes. Fortuitously, deep blue holes often have little oxygen at the bottom, which slows decay, helping to preserve organic matter in the sediment through time.

 

Enlarge / Hine’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas is about 330 feet (100 meters) deep. Seismic imaging shows about 200 feet (60-plus meters) of accumulated sediment.

Pete van Hengstum; Tyler Winkler

 

Cracking open a sediment core

 

When we bring up a sediment core, the coarse sand layers are often evident to the naked eye. But closer examination can tell us much more about these hurricanes of the past.

 

I use X-rays to measure changes in the density of sediment, X-ray fluorescence to examine elemental changes that can reveal if sediment came from land or sea, and sediment textural analysis that examines the grain size.

 

To figure out the age of each layer, we typically use radiocarbon dating. By measuring the amount of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope, in shells or other organic material found at various points in the core, I can create a statistical model that predicts the age of sediments throughout the core.

 

So far, my colleagues and I have published five paleohurricane records with nearly annual detail from blue holes on islands across the Bahamas.

 

Each record shows periods of significant increase in storm frequency lasting decades and sometimes centuries.

 

Enlarge / The red dots show the sites of high-resolution paleohurricane records. The map shows the frequency of hurricanes ranked Category 2 or above from 1850 to 2019.

Tyler Winkler

 

The records vary, showing that a single location might not reflect broader regional trends.

 

For example, Thatchpoint Blue Hole on Great Abaco Island in the northern Bahamas includes evidence of at least 13 hurricanes per century that were Category 2 or above between the years 1500 and 1670. That significantly exceeds the rate of nine per century documented since 1850. During the same period, 1500 to 1670, blue holes at Andros Island, just 186 miles (300 kilometers) south of Abaco, documented the lowest levels of local hurricane activity observed in this region during the past 1,500 years.

Spotting patterns across the Atlantic Basin

Together, however, these records offer a glimpse of broad regional patterns. They’re also giving us new insight into the ways ocean and atmospheric changes can influence hurricane frequency.

 

While rising sea surface temperatures provide more energy that can fuel more powerful and destructive hurricanes, their frequency—how often they form—isn’t necessarily affected in the same way. Some studies have predicted the total number of hurricanes will actually decrease in the future.

 

Enlarge / Comparing paleohurricane records from several locations shows periods of higher frequency. The highlighted periods cover the Little Ice Age, a time of cooler conditions in the North Atlantic from 1300 to 1850, and the Medieval Warm Period, from 900 to 1250.

Tyler Winkler

 

The compiled Bahamian records document substantially higher hurricane frequency in the northern Caribbean during the Little Ice Age, around 1300 to 1850, than in the past 100 years. That was a time when North Atlantic surface ocean temperatures were generally cooler than they are today. But it also coincided with an intensified West African monsoon. The monsoon could have produced more thunderstorms off the western coast of Africa, which act as low-pressure seeds for hurricanes.

 

Steering winds and vertical wind shear likely also affect a region’s hurricane frequency over time. The Little Ice Age active interval observed in most Bahamian records coincides with increased hurricane strikes along the US Eastern Seaboard from 1500 to 1670, but at the same time it was a quieter period in the Gulf of Mexico, central Bahamas, and southern Caribbean.

 

Records from sites farther north tell us more about the climate. That’s because changes in ocean temperature and climate conditions are likely far more important to controlling regional impacts in such areas as the Northeastern US and Atlantic Canada, where cooler climate conditions are often unfavorable for storms.

A warning for the islands

I am currently developing records of coastal storminess in locations including Newfoundland and Mexico. With those records, we can better anticipate the impacts of future climate change on storm activity and coastal flooding.

 

In the Bahamas, meanwhile, sea level rise is putting the islands at increasing risk, so even weaker hurricanes can produce damaging flooding. Given that storms are expected to be more intense, any increase in storm frequency could have devastating impacts.

 

Source

Google and iHeartMedia—the US's biggest radio station operator—are being hit with a false advertising lawsuit for ads they ran about the Pixel 4 (which we found to be overpriced and full of half-working experiments). The FTC and four states say the companies aired "nearly 29,000 deceptive endorsements by radio personalities" during 2019 and 2020, with Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine saying that “Google and iHeartMedia paid influencers to promote products they never used, showing a blatant disrespect for truth-in-advertising rules.” The two companies have settled the lawsuit and will be required to pay $9.4 million in penalties.

Google's ads had on-air personalities give first-hand accounts of how much they liked the Pixel 4, but, to quote the FTC's press release, "the on-air personalities were not provided with Pixel 4s before recording and airing the majority of the ads and therefore did not own or regularly use the phones." Therefore the first-person claims made in the ads, like, “It’s my favorite phone camera out there, especially in low light, thanks to Night Sight Mode,” “I’ve been taking studio-like photos of everything,” and “It’s also great at helping me get stuff done, thanks to the new voice-activated Google Assistant that can handle multiple tasks at once,” can't be true.

It seems like everything would have been fine if these ads weren't in first-person. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey explains: “It is common sense that people put more stock in first-hand experiences. Consumers expect radio advertisements to be truthful and transparent about products, not misleading with fake endorsements. Today’s settlement holds Google and iHeart accountable for this deceptive ad campaign and ensures compliance with state and federal law moving forward.”

A Google spokesperson commented to TechCrunch, saying, "We are pleased to resolve this issue. We take compliance with advertising laws seriously and have processes in place designed to help ensure we follow relevant regulations and industry standards.”

As part of the settlement, Google and iHeartMedia are barred from "misrepresenting that an endorser has owned or used, or about their experience with, certain products." The agreement is subject to a public comment period of 30 days, after which the commission will vote on whether to make the proposed consent orders final.

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THIS WEEK IN Uruguay, scientists, environmentalists, and government representatives—and, of course, lobbyists—are gathering to begin negotiations on a United Nations treaty on plastics. It’s only the start of talks, so we don’t know how they will shape up, but some of the bargaining chips on the table include production limits and phasing out particularly troublesome chemical components. A draft resolution released in March set the tone, acknowledging that “high and rapidly increasing levels of plastic pollution represent a serious environmental problem at a global scale, negatively impacting the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainable development.” 

Which is a bureaucratic way of saying that plastic pollution—both macroplastics like bags and bottles, and microplastics like fibers from synthetic clothing—is a planetary catastrophe of the highest order, and one that’s getting exponentially worse. Humanity is now churning out a trillion pounds of plastic a year, and that’ll double by 2045. Only 9 percent of all the plastic ever produced has been recycled—and currently the United States is recycling just 5 percent of its plastic waste. The rest of it is either chucked into landfills or burned, or escapes into the environment. Wealthy nations also have a nasty habit of exporting their plastic waste to economically developing nations, where the stuff is often burned in open pits, poisoning surrounding communities. Plastics are also a major contributor of carbon emissions—they're made of fossil fuels, after all.

Environmentalists and scientists who study pollution agree that the way to fix the plastic problem isn’t with more recycling, or with giant tubes that collect trash floating in the ocean, but by massively cutting its production. But while we don’t know what will eventually make it into the treaty—negotiations are expected to extend into 2024—don’t expect it to end the manufacturing of plastic the way a peace treaty would end a war. Instead, it could nudge humanity toward treating its debilitating addiction to polymers, by for instance targeting single-use plastics. “We're not going to have a world without plastic—that's not in the very foreseeable future,” says Deonie Allen, a plastics scientist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “However, the way we currently use it, that is a choice we can make today.” 

Think of the unmitigated flow of plastic into the environment as a stream. If you want to treat the problem downstream, you remove the waste that’s already in the environment, the way a beach cleanup does. Farther upstream—literally so—you might deploy river barges to intercept plastic before it reaches the ocean. But the farthest upstream you can go is just not producing the plastic in the first place. 

That’s why the treaty needs to include a limit on plastics production, an international team of scientists argued in the journal Science after the draft resolution was published. “What we're really going to be pushing for is for mandatory and obligatory caps on production,” says Jane Patton, campaign manager of plastics and petrochemicals at the Center for International Environmental Law, who’s attending the talks. “We're going to be pushing for changes in the way the plastics are produced, to eliminate toxic chemicals from the production and the supply chain.”

The draft resolution does indeed call for addressing the “full lifecycle” of plastic, meaning from production to disposal. But time will tell how successful negotiators will actually be in getting agreement on a cap. Ideally they’d agree to an internationally binding limit, but it’s also possible that individual countries will end up making their own commitments. 

Even starting with a small cap might lay the groundwork for increasingly hefty limits. Melanie Bergmann, a microplastics researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute who coauthored the piece in Science, says that a decreased plastics supply could finally make recycling more sustainable. “A reduction in the production of new plastics should also increase the price and demand for recycled plastic, so recycling becomes actually economic,” says Bergmann, who is attending the talks. “Because, at the moment, it is cheaper to make plastic from fossil feedstock than from recycled sources.”

Still other scientists are calling for the component chemicals in plastics to be central to the talks, in order to negotiate bans on certain compounds, or particularly toxic polymers. According to one study, of the 10,000-plus different chemicals that have been used in various forms of plastics—like PVC or polystyrene—a quarter are substances of concern, meaning they’re known toxicants, or accumulate and persist in organisms and the environment. Of particular alarm for humans are endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, which are quite common. Even in very low doses, these can cause severe health issues and have been linked to cancers and hormone problems. One study earlier this year linked phthalate chemicals in plastics to 100,000 early deaths a year in the US, and that was a very conservative estimate.

The core of the issue is that plastics companies don’t provide an ingredient list for their products, so it’s up to chemists to essentially reverse engineer the stuff to find out what’s in it. “We don't know what chemicals are in there, and we don't know what changes happen to those chemicals once they get into the environment,” says Steve Allen, a plastics scientist at the Ocean Frontier Institute and coauthor of a new paper in Science arguing for negotiators to consider the chemical composition of plastics. One previous study found that when exposed to sunlight, plastic spits out thousands of new chemical compounds. “So to remove them from the discussion,” Allen adds, “is removing the biggest hazardous part of this material.”

People are constantly exposed to EDCs both because plastics make contact with our water and food (including infant formula warmed in plastic bottles) and because of the other scourge the draft resolution promises to address: microplastics. These tiny particles have thoroughly saturated the oceans and are blowing thousands of miles through the atmosphere: One study estimated that the equivalent of billions of plastic bottles falls out of the sky across the US annually. Indoor air in particular is lousy with the floating particles, because virtually everything around us is made of plastic or is coated with it: carpets, hardwood floors, and even our clothes, of which two-thirds are now made of plastic. With people inhaling hundreds of thousands of these particles a year, and eating and drinking still more, it’s no surprise that scientists are finding microplastics in human lung tissue, blood, placentas, and even babies’ first stools—meaning children are exposed to the particles before they’re even born.

That’s what has changed in the discourse around plastic in recent years, and what will certainly color the negotiations this week. Plastic pollution is no longer this thing that happens to beaches, or to sea turtles, but something that has tainted our own bodies. “Going beyond the understanding of plastic waste as merely a problem of litter, we are starting to see the importance of understanding plastics as materials made of hundreds of harmful chemicals,” says Vito Buonsante, technical and policy adviser at the International Pollutants Elimination Network, who’s attending the talks.

Stopping microplastic pollution, though, will be monumentally difficult, because the plastic industry’s great coup has been injecting its product into every aspect of our lives and civilization. In addition to obvious sources, like the breakdown of bottles into ever-smaller particles, it’s hidden in objects like paint chips, cigarette butts, and the particles that fly off from a car’s tires. (Synthetic rubber is technically plastic.)

Scientists already have evidence that microplastics are harming organisms and ecosystems. In Washington state, the chemical 6PPD from tire microplastics has been killing salmon en masse, when the particles wash off roads and into streams.

A follow-up study found that the chemical does the same to rainbow trout and brook trout. A growing body of other research is showing that microplastics are harming or killing small ocean creatures like crustaceans. And that’s in the doses currently in the environment—the toxicological burden will only get worse if plastics production continues unabated.

The conference, which lasts until Friday, will allow delegates from around 150 countries to set the framework for negotiations, which are expected to last for the next two years. That includes figuring out what exactly would be legally binding in the resulting treaty—for instance, a potential cap on production—and sketching out rules of procedure going forward. 

It’s very early days, so don’t expect documents to be finalized soon. But there’s a dire urgency in getting this treaty moving, not just for human health, but for the health of every organism on this planet. “The scale of the problem is mind-boggling,” says Graham Forbes, Greenpeace’s plastics global project leader, who’s attending the talks. “Plastic is in our blood. It's in fetuses. It's really encroaching on every aspect of human existence. Plastic does have qualities that are useful in certain cases, but we need to reset our relationship to plastic, just full stop.”

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On Tuesday night in China, a rocket as tall as a 20-story building will carry three astronauts toward a rendezvous with the country’s just-completed space station.

The mission, which is called Shenzhou 15, will set a significant milestone for China’s crewed space program. Here’s what you need to know about the flight and why it is significant.

When is the launch and how can I watch it?

The mission will lift off at 11:08 p.m. local time on Tuesday, or 10:08 a.m. Eastern time in the United States. CGTN, China’s state television network, has announced that it will carry the launch live, although television broadcasts from China are often actually delayed by several seconds in case anything goes wrong. The launch should be visible here with commentary in English: https://www.cgtn.com/tv

Alternatively you can watch it in the video player embedded above.

The rocket launch will be a split-screen event for China, the latest in a long series of technological achievements for the country, even as many of its citizens have been angrily lashing out in the streets against stringent pandemic controls.

The rocket launch will be a split-screen event for China, the latest in a long series of technological achievements for the country, even as many of its citizens have been angrily lashing out in the streets against stringent pandemic controls.

A worker on Monday in front of the launch tower where the Shenzhou 15 rocket was being prepared for the launch on Tuesday. The Jiuquan site is a military base long involved in China’s ballistic missile programs.Credit...Keith Bradsher/The New York Times

Who will be launching to space and why are they going?

Three men will be aboard Shenzhou 15: Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming and Zhang Lu. China chose its oldest and most experienced team of astronauts to run the just-completed space station for the next six months. Mr. Fei, the spaceflight commander, first went into space in 2005 and is 57 years old.

“I am very proud and excited to be able to go to space again for my country,” he said.

The first piece of the Tiangong space station, the Tianhe core module, was launched last year. Two uncrewed pieces of the orbital base, Wentian and Mengtian, were launched in separate flights in July and October, each docking with Tianhe, and completing construction of the space station.

The Tianhe core module has had trios of astronauts aboard it for short stints since last year. But the launch on Tuesday represents the beginning of continuous occupancy of the space station, with overlapping stays by two crews of astronauts. The three Shenzhou 15 astronauts will fly up to the space station and spend a week with the astronauts already there from Shenzhou 14 in a coordinated exchange of roles similar to what happens on the International Space Station. The Shenzhou 14 astronauts will then fly back to China while the Shenzhou 15 astronauts will stay aboard Tiangong until next May, when they will be replaced by another team.

Although the initial astronauts are all from China, officials said on Monday that they would welcome astronauts from other countries.

Where is the rocket launching from?

China has four space rocket launch sites around the country. The only one for crewed expeditions is the one being used on Tuesday: the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, in the country’s northwest.

Jiuquan is 150 miles into the Gobi Desert from the nearest city, Jiayuguan in Gansu Province. Construction of the center began in 1958, when it was built for China’s development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Foreigners and even most Chinese citizens are not usually allowed anywhere near the site.

On Monday and Tuesday, journalists for two foreign news organizations were given uncommon access to the launch center. They were two journalists for The New York Times and a photographer from Kyodo News of Japan. Each visitor was required to spend a week first sealed in a quarantine room at a village hotel about 50 miles away and pass daily PCR tests. Foreign journalists paid for their travel, accommodation and quarantine.

The quarantine was part of elaborate precautions to prevent the Covid-19 virus from reaching the space center again. An outbreak last year briefly interrupted work at the site.

What other plans does China have in space?

China currently has robotic rovers on the moon and Mars and a spacecraft studying the sun. And just as the United States is working to return astronauts to the moon with its Artemis program, China has its eye on human spaceflight to the lunar surface.

“It will not take a long time — we can achieve the goal of manned moon landing,” Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China’s crewed space program, said in an interview on Monday at the launch center. China has been developing a lunar lander, he added, without giving a date when it might be used.

Li You contributed research from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.

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China has upgraded its J-15 carrier-based fighters with new domestic jet engines, significantly elevating its combat capabilities while enhancing technological self-reliance.

Last week, Global Times reported that China had tested a J-15 Flying Shark carrier-based fighter equipped with what appears to be indigenously-developed engines. The J-15 previously used Russian AL-31F engines, which while sufficient for the aircraft’s current mission also present technical, operational and political challenges.

Video footage released by CCTV last week shows the J-15 in a land-based facility sporting Liming WS-10 Taihang engines. Defense resource Janes notes that, most likely, the WS-10B version has been installed in the jet.

The engine model has 135 kilonewtons of thrust, significantly more than the 98 kilonewtons generated by the F414-GE-400 used in the Boeing-made F/A-18 Super Hornet.

This upgrade would appear to solve many of the problems in China’s J-15 fleet associated with Russian engines, including regarding maintenance costs.

“The biggest disadvantage of Russian engines is that their service life is relatively short, while Chinese engines have improved their overall performance, especially in terms of lifespan,” Song Zhongping, a former PLA instructor, was quoted saying by South China Morning Post last week.

“The safety and reliability of the engine will directly affect operational capability, especially as the J-15 is a carrier-based jet. As hangar space on an aircraft carrier is limited, frequent engine replacement is very troublesome,” said Fu Qianshao, a retired PLA Air Force equipment specialist, who was also quoted by South China Morning Post.

Before the upgrades, China’s J-15 had limited combat capabilities. As noted by David Cenciotti in The Aviationist, the J-15 has been derisively referred to as “flopping fish” by Chinese media due to its minimal range and weapons payload.

Cenciotti says that flight tests with the J-15 carrying heavy weapons aboard the ski-ramp carrier Liaoning have limited its attack range to just 120 kilometers from the carrier. In addition, while the J-15 can carry 12 tons of weapons, it can’t hold more than 2 tons if loaded with fuel.

Cenciotti also notes that the Liaoning and Shandong aircraft carriers’ ski-ramp configuration makes it extremely difficult to launch aircraft that weigh more than 26 tons unless the plane has more powerful engines.

The Liming WS-10 Taihang engine. Image: Twitter

However, alongside developments such as the electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS) on China’s third aircraft carrier, the Fujian, the engine upgrades may bring the J-15 up to par with its US rivals including the F/A-18 Super Hornet.

China has also upgraded its J-20 stealth fighters with domestic engines, substantially increasing their capability. This April, Asia Times reported that J-20 patrols over the South China Sea were powered by the domestically-produced WS-15 engine, which gives the aircraft supercruise and supermaneuverability to challenge US fighters such as the F-22 and F-35.

The engines’ reputed longer lifespans may also allow China to conduct aerial attrition to a much higher intensity. Asia Times has previously reported on China’s aerial attrition strategy against Japan, which aims to force Tokyo to sustain an operational tempo beyond its capabilities in responding to ever more persistent Chinese incursions.

The new engines can also extend the J-20’s range, enabling it to conduct long-range strikes in complex, defended airspace before retreating to the safety of China’s air defense network.

China has a clear strategic interest in domestically-produced jet engines. As noted by China Signpost, China seeks to avoid overdependence on Russia for its jet engines to close its logistics and supply chain for the critical technology. Russia’s reliance as a supplier could wane as it buys rather than produces more jet engines to modernize its own air force and replace battle losses in Ukraine.

As China drives to become a leading exporter of jet fighters, its clients will likely want products that are not dependent on any other foreign supplier for maintenance and technical support, Signpost notes. It also notes that China’s jet fighter sales may start to undercut Russia’s, leading to the latter possibly blocking jet engine sales to China to protect its market share.

Signpost claims China has had bad experiences with Russian aftermarket support for its jet engines, including expensive and delayed spare part deliveries and manuals that are available only in the Russian language or non-existent.

Until now, China has struggled to produce jet engines, which has significantly hampered the capabilities of its top-tier fighters. A 2020 report by the China Aerospace Institute (CASI) notes that China’s aerospace industry suffers from inadequate basic research and a lack of sophisticated design and manufacturing tools. China’s aerospace industry has thus failed to keep up with changes in China’s strategic environment, the CASI report said.

Moreover, China also faces institutional bottlenecks in its indigenous jet engine program. In a September 2021 article in The National Interest, Robert Farley and J Tyler Lovell note that China’s long reliance on borrowing or copying foreign jet engine designs, lack of access to trade secrets and insufficient domestic industrial ecology have all conspired against indigenous jet engine production.

China’s J-20 fighters fly in formation at an air show. Image: China Daily

Farley and Lovell note that China’s attempts to reverse-engineer Russian jet engines in the 1990s and 2000s resulted in underpowered units with short lifespans. They also note that Russia has refused to sell China stand-alone advanced ALS-117 engines due to the latter’s unauthorized copying of its equipment. They claim that China can’t study the ALS-117 without breaking it, ultimately forcing it to rely on its domestic base to produce jet engines. 

CASI notes that jet engines are a key focus in China’s Military-Civilian Fusion (MCF) strategy, which aims to accelerate the development of critical technologies by coordinating military and civilian industries with research institutions.

Apart from MCF, China is also leveraging its growing indigenous expertise to overcome jet engine production problems. For example, Sina News recently reported that Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers have developed a titanium alloy for jet engine blades that offers increased lifespan, decreased weight and reduced operating costs.

All told, China appears finally to have the resources, technology and personnel necessary to compete with Russia and the West in jet engine production.

Source

NEW YORK – What if they had a tech war and nobody came? This updated version of a meme from the 1960s Vietnam War protests may well apply to America’s most drastic trade restrictions against a rival since the Cold War.

The world’s top player in semiconductor technology, Holland’s ASML, has opposed high-profile US demands to stop selling its machines to China, and there’s no indication the Dutch government is ready to yield to Washington. Indeed some media reports have interpreted a statement by the Dutch trade minister as a rejection.

ASML makes the world’s best lithography machines, and has sold nearly 200 Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) units to Chinese chip manufacturers. Its most advanced Extreme Ultraviolet equipment, needed to make chips with transistor widths of six nanometers or less, uses enough American intellectual property to allow Washington to block its sale to China.

But the older DUV technology, used to make 16-nanometer chips and – with some constraints – seven-nanometer chips, isn’t subject to US restrictions.

The Dutch likely will continue to sell it to China despite American demands to stop. Chinese companies aver that they can work around American restrictions. Meanwhile, South Korean chip producers are selling their newest chips to China; and America’s beleaguered semiconductor equipment manufacturers are devising ways to get under the US Commerce Department’s new rules, announced October 6.

“It is important that we defend our own interests — our national safety, but also our economic interests,” Trade Minister Liesje Schreinemacher said November 23 at the Dutch parliament.

Liesje Schreinemacher. Photo: YouTube

Senior US officials will travel to the Netherlands later this month to lobby the Dutch on China, but there are indications that the Dutch government has already made its decision.

Japanese companies including Tokyo Electron, Canon and Nikon also sell equipment to China. The Japanese government hasn’t given a straight answer to Washington’s demands to stop shipments to China, which buys about 20% of Japan’s chipmaking machines.

But Japan’s Establishment is “sick and tired of the decoupling with China imposed by the US,” Nikkei Asia chief editor Shigesaburo Okumara reported from the Trilateral Commission meeting in Tokyo last weekend. The Trilateral Commission has distilled elite corporate and diplomatic opinion in the fifty years of its existence. Nikkei’s Okumara wrote:

Many of the participants seemed sick and tired of the decoupling with China imposed by the US under the name of “democracy versus autocracy” dualism. Some of them worried about the arbitrary and unpredictable nature of trade sanctions and their implementation by the US.

 

It’s not simply anti-Americanism. In fact, most of the participants had attended higher education in the US, and they really have strong attachment to such American values as liberty and justice.

 

Still, their anxiety over the confrontation between the two strongest hegemonic nations is serious, and they firmly believe that their arguments and views should be heard by their American and European counterparts. Multiple members stressed that Chinese participation was indispensable if the commission is to deal effectively with global issues.

 

Only Taiwan’s TMSC and South Korea’s Samsung can produce the densely-packed, energy-efficient chips with extremely small transistors of less than seven nanometers’ gate width.

After some last-minute scrambling, the Commerce Department gave the Koreans a one-year reprieve on restrictions on China. Samsung is making the most of it, promising to deliver three-nanometer chips to China’s Baidu among other customers.

Samsung is the world’s number two chipmaker after TSMC and the leader in memory chips. Samsung will make “artificial intelligence chips used in cloud data centers for Baidu,” Korea Economic Daily reported November 23.

Baidu, one of China’s top technology firms, told investors November 22 that it isn’t worried about US restrictions in any event.

Baidu’s AI Cloud chief Dou Shen said on a November 22 earnings call, “A large portion of our AI Cloud business and even wider AI business does not rely too much on the highly advanced chips. And secondly, you know, for the part of our businesses that need advanced chips, we have already stocked enough in hand, actually, to support our business in the near term.”

Chinese tech giant Baidu last year released a prototype ‘robocar’ (interior shown) and rebranded its robotaxi app, underscoring its ambitions in autonomous driving. Credit: Courtesy, Baidu.

Shen added, “When we look at it at a mid-to-longer term, we actually have our own developed AI chip, so named Kunlun. Actually, we already started to use the Kunlun chip to support some large-scale AI-computing tasks internally. We also use Kunlun to serve external customers already. So, because we have a full stack of AI capabilities from chips to AI frameworks to foundation models and then to application software, so we can achieve much higher efficiency as we optimize the AI tasks from end to end.”

The Baidu executive concluded, “Chips sales restriction should have a limited impact on our business operations in the near term. Instead, we think it creates some good market opportunities for the Chinese chip companies. And our Kunlun AI chips and our AI business will eventually benefit from these opportunities.”

Another Chinese tech giant specializing in digital infrastructure for enterprise maintains that industrial, logistics and mining applications of 4th Industrial Revolution technologies don’t need the most advanced chips.

An American semiconductor industry expert told Asia Times, “The US government is run by people who have no idea how the industry works. You don’t need five-nanometer chips for industrial applications. A 5G handset has to process a lot of data and uses a lot of power, so the new chips are important. But what counts in an industrial process isn’t the speed of the chip as much as the quality of the software and the systems design.”

US manufacturers meanwhile are designing chips for sale to China that squeak in under the Commerce Department’s designated threshold. Nvidia on November 7 announced that it would sell an AI processor to China with the same functionality as its state-of-the-art processors but a reduced clock speed.

A Boston Consulting Group study done this year estimated that a complete ban on semiconductor sales to chip would cost US producers 37% of their revenues.

The Commerce Department’s October 6 rules were pushed through without consulting the industry, to prevent corporate lobbyists from mitigating them. But the industry has considerable resources to deploy. An industry expert told Asia Times that the major firms would find more loopholes like Nvidia’s to continue trading with China.

Source

Twitter is investigating why some staff in Europe have not received their November salaries in a timely manner amid sweeping cuts and layoffs across the company since Elon Musk’s takeover.

Twitter staff in the UK received an email just before 1 pm London time on November 25 telling them their pay date would be November 28. Alongside the email, sent from the EMEA Payroll Team, staff received their usual monthly payslips. However, staff in the UK and Germany appear not to have been paid on time.

“It has come to our attention that some of you may not have received your November 2022 salary yet in your bank account,” an email sent to current and former staff reads. “The payments have gone through our Twitter bank account, and as usual, with no change to the process.”

The email says this “might be a delay in Interbank settlement” but adds the company is “actively investing [sic] with our bank and will keep you posted.”

Four independent sources in the UK and Germany told Ars Technica that they had not received payment on the morning their salaries were due.

The sources included current and former staff—the latter of whom should still be paid per the terms of their release from the company.

Usually, Twitter staff are paid on the 28th of every month. If the day falls on a Monday, staff typically see their salary as a pending payment on Friday, with the cash hitting their accounts by midnight on Saturday.

Twitter has already been criticized by former staff for not paying their expenses on time. Former Twitter employees who incurred expenses while still working for the company are owed thousands in expenses that are gathering debt on their personal bank accounts. Much of Twitter's payroll staff resigned in mid-November after Musk's work-long-hours-or-quit ultimatum.

While staff in the UK and Germany have not been paid, those in the Netherlands and Ireland have been—suggesting that the problem is one of staffing and operations, rather than a systematic refusal to pay workers. “The company is just not run well,” said one former UK staff member affected.

One former Twitter employee shared screenshots of their bank accounts showing their salary not being paid had pushed them into an overdraft. The former staff member is also owed expenses from the company incurred while they worked there.

“First you are told you are out, but we are going to try to save your job,” the former employee said. “Then you get told you will be paid so you can’t start work or get paid for jobs, otherwise you’re fired. Now it’s payday, and direct debits are starting to be taken from a virtually empty account.

“I feel ashamed I trusted the words of the senior staff who now all got their money and are happily enjoying it, while the rest of us suffer like this. That is one very harsh way to push people to quit rather than wait for their severance packages.”

By midday UK time, some staff members reported they were being paid with a payment reference atypical of how Twitter would usually pay their salaries—though one former employee estimated around 80 percent of workers had not been paid by around 1 pm UK time, based on conversations held in a Slack group containing former and current employees.

One former staff member shared a screenshot with Ars showing a payment had been made, then reversed, this morning. Another ex-Twitter employee said that “at least 20 people” had to make calls to their mortgage providers because of a lack of funds because their salary did not arrive in time.

As of 6 pm UK time, some staff in the UK still had not been paid, according to those with access to the group. Some received an email suggesting that receiving banks were undergoing anti-fraud checks.

Others reported that payments were coming from different banks that Twitter would not usually use to pay salaries—in contradiction of Twitter’s earlier claims to staff that “as usual, with no change to the process.”

Twitter did not respond to a request to comment on this story. It is unclear whether it has any communications staffers still employed after layoffs.

Source

CYBERSECURITY STARTUP CORELLIUM offered or sold its software to spyware and hacking-tool creators in multiple repressive countries, a WIRED investigation revealed this week. A previously unreported 507-page document, believed to have been prepared by Apple, details how Corellium offered a trial of its products to the controversial spyware firm NSO Group, to a cybersecurity company with ties to the UAE government, and to a firm in China that also has government links. In response,

Corellium, which makes phone-virtualization software that can help find security bugs in iOS and Android, published a blog post detailing how it now vets potential customers.

As millions of people across the US celebrated Thanksgiving and attended parades, we looked at the US shortage of bomb-sniffing dogs. Experts say the pandemic has led to a drop in the supply of dogs in the country—85 to 90 percent of them come from overseas—and that the lack of trainer animals is fueling national security concerns.

In other national security news, US lawmakers are calling for stricter rules on autonomous vehicles (AVs), which are able to gather reams of real-time data about their environment. China is a chief concern. In a letter shared exclusively with WIRED, Republican congressman August Pfluger said, “AV technology has opened the door for a foreign nation to spy on American soil, as Chinese companies potentially transfer critical data to the People’s Republic of China.”

We also looked at how hidden data stored in PDF files helped researchers reveal names that had been redacted. Court filings, national security files, and responses to Freedom of Information Act requests have all exposed such information in this way.

And we heard the cautionary tale of how one person lost $17,000 in crypto—and how you can avoid the same fate. 

Finally, we published part five of the series “The Hunt for the Dark Web’s Biggest Kingpin,” which chronicles the downfall of AlphaBay, the world’s largest dark-web marketplace. In this installment, investigators in Thailand swoop in on AlphaBay’s mastermind, Alexandre Cazes, and discover he had a fortune topping $20 million. 

But wait, there’s more! Each week, we highlight news we didn’t cover in-depth ourselves. Click on the headlines below to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Apple’s privacy policy for analytics services on its devices, which gather data about how you use its products, claims the information collected isn’t used to identify you. However, a new analysis of the tools, reported by Gizmodo, claims a permanent ID number within the service is “tied to your full name, phone number, birth date, email address and more.” This ID number is sent to Apple alongside the analytics data about how you use your device, researchers from the software company Mysk told the publication. 

The findings appear to contradict the company’s privacy promises. Apple did not answer Gizmodo’s questions on the report. In recent years, Apple has pushed a pro-privacy stance, using it as an advantage over competitors, and it has run ads saying the data on people’s iPhones stays on their devices. However, experts have increasingly questioned some of Apple’s practices. (At the same time, Apple has been growing its advertising business.) In separate research published earlier in November, Mysk researchers claimed that Apple collects detailed information on people using its products through its own apps, even when they turn tracking off.

In June, the UK government approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States. While Assange waits on an appeal in the case, the website he created is falling apart. At one point, WikiLeaks hosted more than 10 million leaked documents. However, according to an analysis by the Daily Dot, fewer than 3,000 of the files are now available. Aside from the drop-in documents, the website also has technical issues: It is frequently inaccessible, people have problems searching its content, and parts of its navigation have vanished. 

Meta’s Pixel, formerly known as the Facebook Pixel, is a snippet of code that websites can install to track their visitors. The tool is useful for advertisers. Millions of websites use the tracking tool, and the data is sent back to Meta. This week, The Markup revealed that major US tax websites are using the Pixel and sending financial information to Meta. Some of the data transferred includes names, email addresses, income information, and tax filing status. Some tax websites stopped using Meta’s Pixel following the report. A spokesperson for Meta, Dale Hogan, said that advertisers “should not send sensitive information” about people through its tools. 

And finally, in a major blow to scammers, an international police operation took down the iSpoof website, which let people disguise their phone numbers and show fake caller IDs when making phone calls. It’s estimated that people using iSpoof were contacting up to 20 people every minute of the day as they used false identities to try and trick people into handing over their money. One person was tricked out of £3 million ($3.6 million), reports say. The website now shows a notice saying it has been seized by the FBI and United States Secret Service. In total, 142 people were arrested in the operation, including the alleged administrator of the website, who was arrested in the UK. Police from the UK, US, Ukraine, France, Germany, and five other countries were involved. 

Source

 

The Atlantic hurricane season officially ends on Wednesday, bringing to a close the six-month period when the vast majority of tropical activity occurs in the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Sea.

 

Prior to the season, forecasters generally expected a busier-than-normal season. However, six months later, overall activity this year has come in slightly below normal. One of the more scientifically rigorous measurements of seasonal activity—based on the length and intensity of storms—is accumulated cyclone energy. This year's value, 95, is about three-quarters of the normal value of 126.

 

That bland statistic belies the fact that this was an odd season. After three weak early-season storms, the Atlantic basin produced zero named storms between July 3 and August 31. This was the first time since 1941 that the Atlantic had no named storm activity during this period. Then, a light came on. Four hurricanes formed in September, along with three more in November. This brought seasonal activity to near-normal levels.

 

"This season was really bizarre," said Phil Klotzbach, one of the world's foremost seasonal hurricane forecasters. "I’m giving a talk to the American Meteorological Society on Tuesday about the season, and I’m referring to it as the most abnormal 'normal' season on record."

What happened

So what caused this? It's a question that Klotzbach and his research team at Colorado State University have been investigating since the anomalously quiet August. The season's sputtering start was all the more surprising because this is a La Niña year, a pattern that typically leads to lower-than-average wind shear across the Atlantic. This favors increased tropical activity.

 

In August, however, wind shear was higher than average in the region of the Atlantic Ocean where tropical systems commonly form. These crosswinds at varying altitudes disrupt the circulation of rotating storms, such as tropical storms and hurricanes. Another big factor this August was the incursion of dry air from the mid-latitudes. Dry air, of course, saps the thunderstorms that are essential to forming a tropical cyclone.

 

The shear and dry air appear to have had their origins in the mid-latitudes, the area between 30 degrees and 60 degrees north of the equator. And this higher wind shear and increased amount of dry air may have been transported southward into the tropical Atlantic Ocean due to a phenomenon called "wave breaking," Klotzbach told Ars.

 

"I think a lot of the shear and dry air had mid-latitude origins and was associated with vigorous wave breaking," he said. "Wave breaking is associated with upper-level low-pressure systems that have anomalous upper-level westerlies on their southern periphery. These upper-level westerlies increase vertical wind shear. Also, mid-latitude air is typically drier than tropical air, stifling thunderstorm development and effectively choking African easterly waves."

 

Klotzbach said he has been working with Jhordanne Jones, who graduated from his research group last year and got her Ph.D. studying the predictability of mid-latitude wave breaking. The goal is to better understand the predictability of this phenomenon and incorporate it into seasonal forecasting.

 

"The predictors that she found did hint at some increased potential for wave breaking this year, but not as much as was anticipated," Klotzbach said. "We’ll certainly be spending more time looking at prediction of wave breaking for our forecasts in the future."

Blowing up

After the quiescent period in August, the Atlantic tropics came alive in September, beginning with the formation of Tropical Storm Danielle on September 1. Five additional storms followed in the next three weeks, with Hurricane Ian being the strongest of them. With maximum sustained winds of 150 mph at landfall along the southwestern coast of Florida, Ian is tied with five other hurricanes for the fifth strongest continental US hurricane landfall on record.

 

Another surprise came in November when the late-season Hurricane Nicole formed. It eventually made landfall along the southeast coast of Florida as a Category 1 hurricane.

 

Both of these storms—Ian and Nicole—proved disruptive for NASA and its Artemis I program. Ian's fury forced the space agency to roll the Space Launch System rocket and its Orion spacecraft back into the Vehicle Assembly Building to protect it from the storm in September. Less than two months later, facing another hurricane, NASA opted to remain at the launch pad.

 

It proved a smart decision, as less than a week later, the Artemis I rocket had safely launched Orion toward the Moon.

 

We’ve reached the end of a bizarre Atlantic hurricane season

Rolls-Royce tests hydrogen-fueled aircraft engine in aviation world first

American EVs reduced gasoline consumption by just 0.54% in 2021

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of investors just had billions picked from their collective e-pockets. Yet, crypto remains the untouchable queen in the antiquated marble halls of the US Capitol.

Sure, a handful of lawmakers are waving—or at least limply holding—red flags after cryptocurrency exchange FTX imploded earlier this month. Even as hundreds of millions of dollars worth of happiness, retirements, and even basic health care were erased in the blink of a bro’s cunning eye, Congress is cool, calm, and collectively, well, daft. 

It’s not really an issue I know a whole lot about,” says Bernie Sanders, the independent US senator from Vermont who plays a Democrat every four years.

“I don’t really understand the technology,” says US senator Josh Hawley, a tech-forward Missouri Republican.

House Democratic leaders seem to be on the same (if antiquated) page. Asked about plans to address the volatile cryptocurrency world following the collapse of FTX, US representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), the current chair of the House Democratic Caucus and (presumed) future leader of House Democrats, demures. “Well, I think, that’s an issue that, I presume, will be taken up by the Financial Services Committee,” he says.

Talking with lawmakers, it seems Congress continues to wrestle with the definition of what “money” is, even as most of us have moved far past the nation’s representatives and keep asking when we’re going to get our money—digital or otherwise—back. And despite the current crypto collapse, according to Jeffries and many other powerful party leaders, there’s time to kill.

“There are a whole host of issues that, I think, we are planning on working through, and I can imagine that the situation related to the cryptocurrency industry will be one of them moving forward,” Jeffries adds. 

According to US senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming), the rise of cryptocurrencies—and the dangers that come with them—caught Congress by surprise.

“I think that a lot of members of Congress have assumed that the digital asset industry could be on the back burner because it’s immature,” Lummis says. “It’s growing faster than people recognize. And now with Elon Musk announcing that he might use Twitter as a payment platform, I mean, this industry is much more mature than people realize. It’s time. It’s time to regulate. It’s time to put sideboards on this.”

Lummis isn’t merely a Republican. She’s Wyoming—a state that aims to be the “crypto capital” of the US. She was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus. Like the caucus itself, she moved toward MAGA in recent years, but her libertarian streaks remain pronounced—and crypto’s the best thing since sliced bars of gold for the laissez-faire Lummises of the world.

As anti-regulation as Lummis is, she’s been out in front calling for constraints—“regulations,” even, though that’s still considered a four-letter word in most Republican circles. She wants bumpers, at the very least.

“There will still be companies that deal in digital assets that will fail even after they’re regulated, but at least we’ll have consumer protections and reporting—and the most important thing there is segregating the customers’ assets from the financial institution’s assets,” Lummis says. “What happened with FTX is they were lending out customer’s assets.”

This summer, the libertarian Lummis teamed up with liberal US senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) to drop the Responsible Financial Innovation Act, which promises “a complete regulatory framework for digital assets.”

It seeks, for instance, to draw a line between securities and commodities, giving the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) more power to regulate cryptocurrencies. It also would establish an advisory committee to help lawmakers and regulators streamline this ever-evolving and perpetually confusing new world of digital currency.

“The industry wants regulation because they want to be able to separate out the wheat from the chaff,” Gillibrand says. “They want to be able to make sure those who are fraudulent are not allowed to participate in the market.”

In recent decades, Congress has dithered and failed to pass a comprehensive law protecting Americans’ digital assets—including our private secrets, like, say, our reproductive decisions—even as both parties have called for upending America’s digital norms. The Senate only recently learned that the most popular apps—from Facebook to YouTube—survive on ad money. Some members of Congress—I’m lookin’ at you, Chuck Schumer—still use flip phones. That’s likely why this is no crypto Congress, even as anti-regulatory forces abound from Bernie Sanders’ right to Donald Trump’s left.

“It’s a very volatile marketplace,” says US senator Rand Paul. “I think most people investing in it know that.” The Kentucky Republican, bearish on government regulation, is one of the few US lawmakers who’s truly in the crypto weeds.

“I’m still fascinated by some things that have not yet happened there that might. I think someday there might be a role for stable coin—where there’s an actual backing to the coin—to maybe compete with credit cards and be another form of exchange of transaction,” Paul adds. “The government doesn’t do a very good job regulating anything; it usually makes it worse.”

While some lawmakers are all in on crypto, others are dubious.

“Crypto fortunes are smoke and mirrors. Built on a lot of corruption and insider dealing,” US senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) says. “We’ve needed regulation for a very long time, but Congress has been frozen in acting.”

To Warren, what’s needed is “comprehensive legislation that is not written by the authorities themselves. It is important that the regulators have the tools they need to keep not just this kind of problem from happening, the one that’s just happened in FTX, but other kinds of fraud and deception.”

For US senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), the issue is white and Black. “Crypto is something where Blacks are overrepresented, people without college degrees are overrepresented,” Booker says. The Democrat comes at it from a consumer standpoint, even as Lummis does as well. But New Jersey is no Wyoming. Ultimately, though, location doesn’t matter. Anyone anywhere can invest in crypto—even as anyone anywhere can lose everything in crypto. That’s impossible with American banks, which is why these lawmakers are demanding a minimum.

“We need to have a base,” Lummis says. “There has to be a floor, and then, as time goes on, if things get over-regulated and we’re sacrificing innovation because of it, we can cross that bridge when we come to it.”

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If you search for any Chinese city on Twitter using official Chinese characters (e.g., 广州 for the city of Guangzhou), for instance, you'll be inundated with endless tweets from bot accounts showing pornographic and escort services content, making it impossible to get relevant results.

According to a report by a China-focused data analyst, the significant spike in nuisance tweets on the microblogging platform has been happening for the past three days.

Because the discussions of nationwide protests are strictly censored on Chinese social media platforms, protestors have turned to foreign platforms like Twitter and Telegram for communication. These platforms are banned in the country, however, so people have resorted to using VPNs (which are also hard to come by).

The bot content, which is suspected to be from the Chinese government, makes it harder for people to see news in the country and Chinese citizens to stage protests.

Just a few days ago, China's Zhengzhou district witnessed a violent clash between hundreds of Foxconn workers and the police on Tuesday night as a result of delayed bonuses and concerns over the spread of COVID-19.

A Twitter employee told The Washington Post that the company was aware of the problem and was working to resolve it. However, it remains to be seen how the company can effectively tackle the malicious behavior, as its new CEO Elon Musk fired the company's Trust & Safety team.

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First-time visitors to Yosemite Valley stare in astonishment at El Capitan’s sheer granite wall and Half Dome’s cleanly sliced face, understanding, perhaps vaguely, that it must have taken rain and glaciers a long time to cut and shape that scene. But how long did it take?

Did it all start 50 million years ago, when the granite that the valley cuts through was first exposed to the elements? Was it 30 million years ago when canyons in the southern Sierra Nevada started to form? Did the valley only begin to form when the Sierra tilted toward the west around 5 million years ago or did glaciers that formed in a cooling climate 2 to 3 million years ago account for the majority of its formation?

Geologists from the University of California, Berkeley, used a new rock analysis technique to get a more precise answer, concluding that most of Yosemite Valley’s astonishing depth was cut 10 million years ago, and most likely even more recently – within the last 5 million years. This reduces the oldest estimates by about 40 million years.

They found that rivers initially carved a shallow valley that already existed, and recently both rivers and ice contributed.

Tenaya Canyon (center) and part of Yosemite Valley (foreground) as seen from Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park. Tenaya Creek likely started to scour this granite canyon below Half Dome (center right) about 5 to 10 million years ago, with glaciers arriving about 2.5 million years ago to sculpt the classic glacial valley outlines. Credit: Greg Stock/National Park Service

 

While the scientists are unable to be more precise, the new estimate is the first to be based on an experimental study of the granite rocks in and near Yosemite, rather than on inferences based on what was going on elsewhere in the Sierra Nevada.

“Yosemite Valley is one of the most famous topographic features on the planet,” said glaciologist Kurt Cuffey, UC Berkeley professor of geography and of earth and planetary science. “And of course, if you go to Yosemite Park and read the signage, they will give you numbers for when it became a deep canyon. But up until this project, every single claim about how old this valley is when it formed a deep canyon, was just based on assumptions and speculation.”

Yosemite National Park geologist Greg Stock admits that the story told about the origin of the park’s iconic granite topography has been a little vague, because geologists still do not agree about what has happened since the Sierra’s signature granite formed underground between about 80 and 100 million years ago, up to 10 kilometers (6 miles) under a mountain range that looked a lot different than it does today.

“We know that the Sierra was a high mountain range 100 million years ago when the granite was forming at depth. It was a chain of volcanoes that might have looked a bit like the Andes Mountains in South America,” Stock said. “The question really is whether the elevation has just been coming down through erosion since that time or whether it came down some and then was uplifted again more recently. At this point, based on studies I’ve done for most of my career and supported by this study, I see a lot of evidence for recent uplift happening sometime in the last 5 million years.”

That uplift, which happened at the same time that earthquake faulting in the eastern Sierra Nevada created an escarpment several kilometers high, steepened the western slopes and rivers, causing them to incise valleys more quickly.

Cuffey, UC Berkeley geochemist David Shuster and their colleagues, including Stock, recently published the findings in the journal Geological Society of America Bulletin.

Rock cooldown

Shuster, a professor of earth and planetary science, developed a technique 15 years ago that he thought at the time might shed light on the origins of the valley, something that has fascinated both him and Cuffey since they first saw Yosemite as kids. Shuster, a California native, has visited it since early childhood. Cuffey, from central Pennsylvania, made his first trip to the park at the age of 15.

Much of what they remember learning is that the valley was carved by glaciers, giving short shrift to what happened before Ice Age glaciers arrived in the Pleistocene some 2.5 million years ago.

“What I learned from the signage in the valley when I was a kid wasn’t quite right, given what the scientific literature said at the time. Nevertheless, the topography has been interpreted to be significantly modified by ice,” Shuster said. “How to quantify that with geochronological tools, rather than just make up a story about it based on geomorphology, is one thing we were trying to do here.”

Shuster’s technique, called helium-4/helium-3 thermochronometry, reconstructs the temperature history of a sample of rock based on the spatial distribution of natural helium-4 in minerals, which is measured by comparison to an artificially-produced uniform distribution of helium-3. Because temperature increases with depth underground, the temperature history can tell when a rock was uncovered as the landscape eroded.

“The temperature of the rock is a function of the surface lowering down into it,” Shuster said. “It’s very analogous to removing a down comforter — the rock beneath it progressively gets colder. This progression through time with the rock cooling is what we get from the geochemistry and thermochronometry.”

The expectation is that granite bedrock exposed on the broad uplands of the Sierra should show a long history of cool surface temperatures since they’ve been exposed for tens of millions of years longer than bedrock more recently exposed on the floor of Tenaya Canyon, which feeds into Yosemite Valley from the northeast.

The experiments, conducted at the Berkeley Geochronology Center, indicated that, while rock from the uplands has been close to the surface for about 50 million years, bedrock at the bottom of Tenaya Canyon has been exposed much more recently.

The temperature history of the rock obtained from the bottom of Tenaya Canyon — from an exposed area of bedrock at the base of Half Dome — indicates that it was more than a kilometer underground 10 million years ago, and most likely only 5 million years ago. This means that a kilometer of rock was eroded away since that time.

“This upland surface that people are familiar with from parts of the Tioga Road and Tuolumne Meadows — that’s a very old landscape,” said Cuffey, who is the Martin Distinguished Chair in Ocean, Earth and Climate Science. “The question is: What about the deep canyon? Is that also very old, or is it relatively young? And what we found in our study, our big contribution, is that it’s fairly young. The best guess for the timing is in the last 3 to 4 million years, but maybe as far back as 10 million years for the start of the rapid incision.”

Bedrock studies

The geologists collected samples of granite bedrock from nearby highlands and the bottom of Tenaya Canyon, but not from the bedrock bottom of Yosemite Valley itself, which lies buried under about 500 meters (1/3 mile) of sediment that today forms the valley floor. But since the two formed at the same time, one can infer the timing of the formation of Yosemite Valley from the time of the scouring of Tenaya Canyon.

“The brief history of Yosemite Valley would be that there was some kind of valley in place for tens of millions of years — a river-carved canyon associated with the ancient Sierra Nevada. And then, in the last 5 million years or so, renewed uplift of the range through westward tilting caused rivers to steepen and deepen the canyons that they were in,” Stock said. “So, that probably carved out more of Yosemite Valley and may have started forming Tenaya Canyon. And then in the last 2 to 3 million years, as the climate cooled and glaciers came down through Tenaya Canyon and into Yosemite Valley, they further sculpted the rock, deepening those valleys. And in the case of Yosemite Valley, widening it out considerably. So, there’s some component of an old Yosemite Valley. But I think this recent work shows that much more of that topography is younger, rather than older.”

Stock, who has held the position of park geologist for 17 years and is the park’s first geologist, said the new study will revise how the park tells the geological history of Yosemite Valley.

“The timing of this new study is perfect in the sense that, over the next several years, we’re hoping to completely redo the Geology Hut displays at Glacier Point. I’m very excited to include these new results in those displays,” he said. “It’s a perfect place to tell that story because there’s a view straight up Tenaya Canyon.”

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According to a new study of children in Ethiopia, school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic have “severely ruptured” the social and emotional development of some of the world’s poorest children, as well as their academic progress.

• Primary school pupils were less confident talking to others and found it harder to make friends after the pandemic.
• Two interlinked studies, involving 8,000 primary pupils altogether, indicate children lost at least a third of a year in learning during lockdown.

New evidence shows that school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic have “severely ruptured” the social and emotional development of some of the world’s poorest children, as well as their academic progress.

In a study of over 2,000 primary school pupils in Ethiopia, researchers found that key aspects of children’s social and emotional development, such as their ability to make friends, not only stalled during the school closures, but probably deteriorated.

Children who, prior to the pandemic, felt confident talking to others or got on well with peers were less likely to do so by 2021. Those who were already disadvantaged educationally – girls, the very poorest, and those from rural areas – seem to have been particularly badly affected.

Both this research and a second, linked study of around 6,000 grade 1 and 4 primary school children, also found evidence of slowed academic progress. Children lost the equivalent of at least one-third of an academic year in learning during lockdown – an estimate researchers describe as “conservative.” This appears to have widened an already significant attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and the rest, and there is some evidence that this may be linked to the drop in social skills.

Both studies were by academics from the University of Cambridge, UK and Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.

Children who, prior to the pandemic, felt confident talking to others or got on well with peers were less likely to do so by 2021. Those who were already disadvantaged educationally – girls, the very poorest, and those from rural areas – seem to have been particularly badly affected.

 

Professor Pauline Rose, Director of the Research in Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, said: “COVID is having a long-term impact on children everywhere, but especially in lower-income countries. Education aid and government funding must focus on supporting both the academic and socio-emotional recovery of the most disadvantaged children first.”

Professor Tassew Woldehanna, President of Addis Ababa University, said: “These severe ruptures to children’s developmental and learning trajectories underline how much we need to think about the impact on social, and not just academic skills. Catch-up education must address the two together.”

Both studies used data from the Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) program in Ethiopia to compare primary education before the pandemic, in the academic year 2018/19, with the situation in 2020/21.

In the first study, researchers compared the numeracy test scores of 2,700 Grade 4 pupils in June 2019 with their scores shortly after they returned to school, in January 2021. They also measured dropout rates. In addition, pupils completed the Children’s Self Report Social Skills scale, which asked how much they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “I feel confident talking to others,” “I make friends easily,” and “If I hurt someone, I say sorry.”

The second study measured relative progress during the pandemic using the numeracy scores of two separate cohorts of Grade 1 and Grade 4 pupils. The first of these cohorts was from the pre-pandemic year; the other from 2020/21.

The results suggest pupils made some academic progress during the closures, but at a slower-than-expected rate. The average foundational numeracy score of Grade 1 pupils in 2020/21 was 15 points behind the 2018/19 cohort; by the end of the year that gap had widened to 19 points. Similarly, Grade 4 students started 2020/21 10 points behind their predecessor cohort, and were 12 points adrift by the end. That difference amounted to roughly one-third of a year’s progress. Similar patterns emerged from the study of children’s numeracy scores before and after the closures.

Poorer children, and those from rural backgrounds, consistently performed worse academically. Dropout rates revealed similar issues: of the 2,700 children assessed in 2019 and 2021, more than one in 10 (11.3%) dropped out of school during the closures. These were disproportionately girls, or lower-achieving pupils, who tended to be from less wealthy or rural families.

All pupils’ social skills declined during the closure period, regardless of gender or location. Fewer children agreed in 2021 with statements such as “Other people like me” or “I make friends easily”. The decline in positive responses differed by demographic, and was sharpest among those from rural settings. This may be because children from remote parts of the country experienced greater isolation during lockdown.

The most striking evidence of a rupture in socio-emotional development was the lack of a predictive association between the 2019 and 2021 results. Pupils who felt confident talking to others before the pandemic, for example, had often changed their minds two years later.

Researchers suggest that the negative impact on social and emotional development may be linked to the slowdown in academic attainment. Children who did better academically in 2021 tended to report stronger social skills. This association is not necessarily causal, but there is evidence that academic attainment improves children’s self-confidence and esteem, and that prosocial behaviors positively influence academic outcomes. It is therefore possible that during the school closures this potential reinforcement was reversed.

Both reports echo previous research which suggests that lower-income countries such as Ethiopia need to invest in targeted programs for girls, those from rural backgrounds, and the very poorest, if they are to prevent these children from being left behind. Alongside in-school catch-up programs, action may be required to support those who are out of school. Ghana’s successful Complementary Basic Education initiative provides one model.

In addition, the researchers urge education policy actors to integrate support for  social skills into both catch-up education and planning for future closures. “Social and emotional skills should be an explicit goal of the curriculum and other guidance,”

Rose said. “Schools may also want to think about after-school clubs, safe spaces for girls, and ensuring that primary-age children stay with the same group of friends during the day. Initiatives like these will go some way towards rebuilding the prosocial skills the pandemic has eroded.”

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For decades, a family of crystals has stumped physicists with its baffling ability to superconduct—that is, carry an electric current without any resistance—at far warmer temperatures than other materials.

Now, an experiment years in the making has directly visualized superconductivity on the atomic scale in one of these crystals, finally revealing the cause of the phenomenon to nearly everyone’s satisfaction. Electrons appear to nudge each other into a frictionless flow in a manner first suggested by a venerable theory nearly as old as the mystery itself.

“This evidence is really beautiful and direct,” said Subir Sachdev, a physicist at Harvard University who builds theories of the crystals, known as cuprates, and was not involved in the experiment.

“I’ve worked on this problem for 25 years, and I hope I have solved it,” said J. C. Séamus Davis, who led the new experiment at the University of Oxford. “I’m absolutely thrilled.”

The new measurement matches a prediction based on the theory, which attributes cuprate superconductivity to a quantum phenomenon called superexchange. “I’m amazed by the quantitative agreement,” said André-Marie Tremblay, a physicist at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada and the leader of the group that made the prediction last year.

The research advances the perennial ambition of the field: to take cuprate superconductivity and strengthen its underlying mechanism, in order to design world-changing materials capable of superconducting electricity at even higher temperatures. Room-temperature superconductivity would bring perfect efficiency to everyday electronics, power lines and more, although the objective remains a distant one.

“If this class of theory is correct,” Davis said, referring to the superexchange theory, “it should be possible to describe synthetic materials with different atoms in different locations” for which the critical temperature is higher.

Two Glues

Physicists have struggled with superconductivity since it was first observed in 1911. The Dutch scientist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and collaborators cooled a mercury wire to about 4 kelvins (that is, 4 degrees above absolute zero) and watched with astonishment as the electrical resistance plummeted to zero. Electrons deftly wended their way through the wire without generating heat when they collided with its atoms—the origin of resistance. It would take “a lifetime of effort,” Davis said, to figure out how.

Building on key experimental insights from the mid-1950s, John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer published their Nobel Prize-winning theory of this conventional form of superconductivity in 1957. “BCS theory,” as it’s known today, holds that vibrations moving through rows of atoms “glue” electrons together. As a negatively charged electron flies between atoms, it draws the positively charged atomic nuclei toward it and sets off a ripple. That ripple pulls in a second electron. Overcoming their fierce electrical repulsion, the two electrons form a “Cooper pair.”

“It is true trickery of nature,” said Jörg Schmalian, a physicist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. “This Cooper pair is not supposed to happen.”

A new experiment led by the condensed matter physicist Séamus Davis at the University of Oxford all but settles the origin of high-temperature superconductivity, a puzzle Davis has worked on for 25 years.Photograph: Domnick Walsh

When electrons couple up, further quantum trickery makes superconductivity unavoidable. Normally, electrons can’t overlap, but Cooper pairs follow a different quantum mechanical rule; they act like particles of light, any number of which can pile onto the head of a pin. Many Cooper pairs come together and merge into a single quantum mechanical state, a “superfluid,” that becomes oblivious to the atoms it passes between.

BCS theory also explained why mercury and most other metallic elements superconduct when cooled close to absolute zero but stop doing so above a few kelvins. Atomic ripples make for the feeblest of glues. Turn up the heat, and it jiggles atoms and washes out the lattice vibrations.

Then in 1986, IBM researchers Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller stumbled onto a stronger electron glue in cuprates: crystals consisting of sheets of copper and oxygen interspersed between layers of other elements. After they observed a cuprate superconducting at 30 kelvins, researchers soon found others that superconduct above 100, and then above 130 kelvins.

The breakthrough launched a widespread effort to understand the tougher glue responsible for this “high-temperature” superconductivity. Perhaps electrons bunched together to create patchy, rippling concentrations of charge. Or maybe they interacted through spin, an intrinsic property of the electron that orients it in a particular direction, like a quantum-size magnet.

The late Philip Anderson, an American Nobel laureate and all-around legend in condensed-matter physics, put forth a theory just months after high-temperature superconductivity was discovered. At the heart of the glue, he argued, lay a previously described quantum phenomenon called superexchange—a force arising from electrons’ ability to hop. When electrons can hop between multiple locations, their position at any one moment becomes uncertain, while their momentum becomes precisely defined. A sharper momentum can be a lower momentum, and therefore a lower-energy state, which particles naturally seek out.

The upshot is that electrons seek situations in which they can hop. An electron prefers to point down when its neighbor points up, for instance, since this distinction allows the two electrons to hop between the same atoms. In this way, superexchange establishes a regular up-down-up-down pattern of electron spins in some materials. It also nudges electrons to stay a certain distance apart. (Too far, and they can’t hop.) It’s this effective attraction that Anderson believed could form strong Cooper pairs.

Experimentalists long struggled to test theories like Anderson’s, since material properties that they could measure, like reflectivity or resistance, offered only crude summaries of the collective behavior of trillions of electrons, not pairs.

“None of the traditional techniques of condensed-matter physics were ever designed to solve a problem like this,” said Davis.

Super-Experiment

Davis, an Irish physicist with labs at Oxford, Cornell University, University College Cork, and the International Max Planck Research School for Chemistry and Physics of Quantum Materials in Dresden, has gradually developed tools to scrutinize cuprates on the atomic level. Earlier experiments gauged the strength of a material’s superconductivity by chilling it until it reached the critical temperature where superconductivity began—with warmer temperatures indicating stronger glue. But over the last decade, Davis’ group has refined a way to prod the glue around individual atoms.

They modified an established technique called scanning tunneling microscopy, which drags a needle across a surface, measuring the current of electrons leaping between the two. By swapping the needle’s normal metallic tip for a superconducting tip and sweeping it across a cuprate, they measured a current of electron pairs rather than individuals. This let them map the density of Cooper pairs surrounding each atom—a direct measure of superconductivity. They published the first image of swarms of Cooper pairs in Nature in 2016.

That same year, an experiment by Chinese physicists provided a major piece of evidence supporting Anderson’s superexchange theory: They showed that the easier it is for electrons to hop between copper and oxygen atoms in a given cuprate, the higher the cuprate’s critical temperature (and thus the stronger its glue). Davis and his colleagues sought to combine the two approaches in a single cuprate crystal to more conclusively reveal the nature of the glue.

The “aha” moment came in a group meeting over Zoom in 2020, he said. The researchers realized that a cuprate called bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide (BSCCO, or “bisko,” for short) had a peculiar feature that made their dream experiment possible. In BSCCO, the layers of copper and oxygen atoms get squeezed into a wavy pattern by the surrounding sheets of atoms. This varies the distances between certain atoms, which in turn affects the energy required to hop. The variation causes headaches for theorists, who like their lattices tidy, but it gave the experimentalists exactly what they needed: a range of hopping energies in one sample.

They used a traditional scanning microscope with a metal tip to stick electrons onto some atoms and pluck them from others, mapping the hopping energies across the cuprate. They then swapped in a cuprate tip to measure the density of Cooper pairs around each atom.

Atom-by-atom scans of a naturally wavy BSCCO crystal point to the origin of superconductivity in cuprates. In zones where electrons require more energy to hop between neighboring atoms (bright pink bands spaced 2.6 nanometers apart, left), the electrons form fewer superconducting Cooper pairs (dark bands, right).Photograph: Wangping Ren and Shane O’Mahony

The two maps lined up. Where electrons struggled to hop, superconductivity was weak. Where hopping was easy, superconductivity was strong. The relationship between hopping energy and Cooper pair density closely matched a sophisticated numerical prediction from 2021 by Tremblay and colleagues, which argued that this relationship should follow from Anderson’s theory.

Superexchange Super Glue

Davis’ finding that hopping energy is linked with superconductivity strength, published in September in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, strongly implies that superexchange is the super glue enabling high-temperature superconductivity.

“It’s a nice piece of work, because it brings a new technique to further show that this idea has legs,” said Ali Yazdani, a physicist at Princeton University who has developed similar techniques to study cuprates and other exotic instances of superconductivity in parallel with Davis’ group.

But Yazdani and other researchers caution that there’s still a chance, however remote, that glue strength and ease of hopping move in lockstep for some other reason, and that the field is falling into the classic correlation-equals-causation trap. For Yazdani, the real way to prove a causal relationship will be to harness superexchange to engineer some flashy new superconductors.

“If it’s finished, let’s increase Tc,” he said, referring to the critical temperature.

Superexchange isn’t a new idea, so plenty of researchers have already thought about how to fortify it, perhaps by further squishing the copper and oxygen lattice or experimenting with other pairs of elements. “There are already predictions on the table,” Tremblay said.

Of course, sketching atomic blueprints and designing materials that do what researchers want isn’t quick or easy. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that even bespoke cuprates will achieve critical temperatures much higher than those of the cuprates we already know. The strength of superexchange could have a hard ceiling, just as atomic vibrations seem to. Some researchers are investigating candidates for entirely different and potentially even stronger types of glue. Others leverage unearthly pressures to shore up the traditional atomic vibrations.

But Davis’ result could energize and focus the efforts of chemists and materials scientists who aim to lift cuprate superconductors to greater heights.

“The creativity of people who design materials is limitless,” Schmalian said. “The more confident we are that a mechanism is right, the more natural it is to invest further into this one.”

The High-Temperature Superconductivity Mystery Is Finally Solved

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He also figured tending to a service that touches so many people would translate to a degree of job security. That belief shattered when Stevens awoke around 3 a.m. earlier this month to an email from Meta management, informing employees that layoffs were coming. After tossing and turning, Stevens, 39, received another missive at around 6 a.m. He was one of more than 11,000 workers who had lost their jobs.

“I’m not excited to be part of such a large, immediate pool of laid-off people who are all looking for tech roles at the same time,” said Stevens, who lives in San Jose, California, with his wife and young child. “That gives me a lot of anxiety.” He believes the industry is in the midst of a cyclical reset and is open to focusing on something “a little smaller” until things pick up again.

After years of exuberant growth and hiring, layoffs have burst the bubble of Big Tech inviolability.

As of Nov. 15, tech companies had announced 31,200 job cuts so far this month, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The human resources consulting firm says that’s the highest monthly total since September 2015, when a restructuring Hewlett-Packard said it would slash thousands of positions. Meta, Twitter and Amazon have all slashed their ranks, or said cuts are coming. HP said it planned to cut as many as 6,000 positions over the next three years.

While tech workers lost their jobs during the early days of the pandemic, the subsequent boom benefited the industry. This time workers are bracing for a more enduring downturn. The accelerating layoffs have rattled a cohort who only months ago felt safe job-hopping in pursuit of better salaries and benefits. Now those who’ve been let go are anxious about re-entering a job market flooded with other recently terminated candidates even as the tech giants slow or freeze recruitment.

“People are going to hire through this, but it’s not going to be quite as much as a candidate market as it was in 2021,” said Peter Walker, head of insights at Carta, a platform that manages equity for startups.

Unlike the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, when many nascent startups collapsed, this downturn has prompted now-mature firms to tighten their belts. When Meta slashed jobs earlier this month, the first major round of layoffs in its history, the company didn’t consult managers about which employees would be let go and left the decisions to the highest-levels of leadership, according to an internal memo. As a result, the company lost some top talent, including people who had been recently promoted and had received stellar performance reviews, according to one recently terminated employee.

Despite the chaotic nature of the layoffs, the worker said he thinks Meta is still not as lean as it needs to be. “If I had to make a bet,” he said, “I think there’s more pain to come.” The company declined to comment.

The job cuts have left some workers struggling to identify safe ground. After joining Meta in January, Zoha Pajouhi, a machine-learning engineer, had a choice between working on the company’s efforts in augmented reality and virtual reality, a top priority for CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and working on recommendation algorithms for the Facebook app. She chose the latter, figuring the company would be unlikely to make cuts to its core business if times got hard. After losing her job earlier this month, Pajouhi, who lives in Kirkland, is second-guessing her decision.

As she ramps up her job search, she’s detecting a chill in the market.

As the tech layoffs accelerate, “we are all in the same boat and also kind of competing with each other,” Pajouhi said.

Recruiters say they see some bright spots in the hiring market. Laura LaBine, chief talent officer at LaBine & Associates, said she has been hearing from companies searching for engineers in biotech and life sciences, as well as analytics and data science.

Just over a week after losing his job as director of business development at artificial intelligence startup Artica, Brandon Moore had several interviews lined up. He’s optimistic that he’ll secure employment soon, but he questions whether the scale of layoffs underway in the Valley is necessary.

“The leaders of these businesses, they’re trying to send a message to the market that they’ll do whatever it takes to control the sliding stock prices that we are seeing,” said Moore, who is 36 and lives in Seattle. “But they hired all of these people for a reason initially, and they are just going to have to rehire.”

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Amid the morning traffic, rows of monkey statues holding trays were lined up outside the compound of the Ancient Three Pagodas, while volunteers prepared food across the road for real monkeys — the symbol of Lopburi province, around 150 kilometers (93 miles) north of Bangkok.

Throngs of macaque monkeys ran around, at times fighting with each other, while the crowds of visitors and locals grew.

As the carefully prepared feast was brought toward the temple, the ravenous creatures began to pounce and were soon devouring the largely vegetarian spread.

While the entertainment value of the festival is high, organizers are quick to point out that it is not just monkey business.

“This monkey feast festival is a successful event that helps promote Lopburi’s tourism among international tourists every year,” said Yongyuth Kitwatanusont, the festival’s founder.

“Previously, there were around 300 monkeys in Lopburi before increasing to nearly 4,000 nowadays. But Lopburi is known as a monkey city, which means monkeys and people can live in harmony.”

Such harmony could be seen in the lack of shyness exhibited by the monkeys, which climbed on to visitors, vehicles and lampposts. At times the curious animals looked beyond the abundant feast and took an interest in other items.

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Several major cities including the capital Beijing and southern trade hub Guangzhou are experiencing outbreaks.

Wednesday saw 31,527 cases recorded compared with an April peak of 28,000.

The numbers are still tiny for a country of 1.4 billion people and officially just over 5,200 have died since the pandemic began.

That equates to three Covid deaths in every million in China, compared with 3,000 per million in the US and 2,400 per million in the UK, although direct comparisons between countries are difficult.

While China's zero-Covid policy has clearly saved lives, it has also dealt a punishing blow to the economy and ordinary people's lives.

The country slightly relaxed some of those restrictions a few weeks ago.

It cut quarantine for close contacts from seven days in a state facility to five days and three days at home, and stopped recording secondary contacts which allowed many more people to avoid having to quarantine.

Officials have also sought to avoid enforcing blanket lockdowns of the kind endured by the largest city, Shanghai, earlier this year.

But faced with a renewed surge in cases in Beijing, as well as the first deaths from the virus in months, officials have already implemented some restrictions in several districts, with shops, schools and restaurants closed.

The central city of Zhengzhou is also to enforce an effective lockdown for 6 million residents from Friday, officials announced.

It follows violent protests at a vast industrial complex belonging to iPhone manufacturer Foxconn. The firm has apologised for a "technical error" in its payment systems.

< WATCH at the Source Page: Chinese protesters clash with riot police at giant iPhone factory >

Other stories of suffering and desperation have been shared online where they have fuelled public resentment.

Last week, reports that a baby in Zhengzhou died because her medical care was delayed by Covid restrictions prompted a huge outcry.

Among some of the most severe responses to Covid this year:

• In January, in the tourist hub city of Xi'an, population 13 million, some residents were forced out of their homes in a midnight eviction and bussed to quarantine facilities, while disturbing claims surfaced of people unable to get crucial medical attention

• In March, the lockdown announced in Shanghai was meant to last less than a week but its 25 million residents stayed home for two months

• In September, residents in locked down Chengdu found themselves trapped in their apartments during an earthquake. Elsewhere, rescue workers were required to do a Covid test before they could save anyone.

Worn out by the pandemic

The word came suddenly last night that our housing compound would be locked down with all residents confined to their homes.

This is not a surprise in China anymore. At any point, a single infection or being linked to an infection can mean not being allowed out.

Beijing is in the middle of a major Covid outbreak but, even before then, visiting a shopping mall or a building where an infected person had been meant going into home quarantine.

Right now, in the capital's vast Chaoyang district most businesses are closed. In thousands of tower blocks, all residents have been ordered to remain indoors for the next few days initially.

Then consider that this is being replicated in cities right across the country.

In the regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, the lockdowns have gone on for months.

At the beginning of 2023, this country will be heading into its fourth year of this crisis and, whether it is true or not, zero-Covid has a never-ending feeling to it.

People are completely worn out by the pandemic and the government's economy-destroying response to it.

That officials have not explained where the off ramp is, has only added to the uncertainty.

Scientists here can also see that China's vaccination rates are way too low, especially amongst vulnerable groups. What is more, not enough resources have been diverted into expanding medical facilities to cope with a massive influx of patients following any opening-up.

In the short term though, my compound has now told me that, after several rounds of mass testing, we are allowed to leave.

For most residents this will not make much difference though because hardly anything outside is open, including their workplaces.

China is the last major economy still pursuing a Covid eradication process with mass testing and lockdown rules, and virus cases are being recorded in 31 provinces.

Part of the reason is that vaccination levels are lower than in other developed nations, and only half of people aged over 80 have their primary vaccinations.

China has refused to import vaccines despite evidence that its homemade jabs have not proved as effective.

President Xi Jinping argues that strict curbs are needed to protect the country's large elderly population.

Zero-Covid has come to define his rule and the authoritarian bureaucracy at his disposal like almost no other policy.

It projects a veneer of control and stability in the run-up to March when China's equivalent of a parliament will convene to choose Mr Xi as president for a third time.

"Lockdowns prevent Covid outbreaks from spreading," William Hurst, professor of Chinese development at Cambridge University, told BBC News recently. "But they also exert incredibly strict social control."

Source

That's one of the hopes of scientists combing through 12,000 specimens of wheat and its relatives held in the Natural History Museum's archives.

The most promising samples are having their genomes sequenced in a bid to identify the genetic secrets of hardier wheat varieties.

Climate change and pests and diseases are putting the crop under pressure.

The old varieties of wheat are stored in hundreds of old cardboard files, neatly lined up, row upon row, in the museum vaults. Each one contains dried leaves, stems or ears of grain, and sometimes all three, from centuries ago.

They're carefully labelled, many in beautiful copper-plate handwriting, detailing exactly where and when they were found. It all provides useful information.

"The collection spans back to the 1700s, including a specimen that was collected on Captain Cook's first voyage to Australia," says Larissa Welton. She's part of the team digitising the archive so it can be accessed online.

The James Cook sample is a wild wheat plant. It looks spindly and grass-like - quite different from the varieties growing in fields today. But it's these differences that the team is interested in.

"We have specimens that are from before the introduction of various agricultural techniques, so they can tell us something about how wheat was growing wild or before things like artificial fertilisers."

Wheat makes up about a fifth of the total calories consumed around the world

Why is wheat important?

Wheat is one of the most important crops in the world - it’s used for many foods, from bread and pasta, to breakfast cereal and cakes, and is an essential part of our diet.

The war in Ukraine, where a great deal of grain is grown, has put global supply under threat.

But it’s not the only problem: climate change, and the extreme weather it brings, is having an impact, with scientists calculating that a 1C rise in global temperature can cause a reduction of up to 6.4% in the amount we can grow around the world.

Pests and diseases are also causing major challenges, reducing the projected annual yield by about a fifth each year.

Modern wheat crops are struggling. The green revolution in the 1950s and 1960s led to farmers growing the varieties that produced the most grain. But this pursuit of producing the biggest harvests meant that other varieties were put aside - including crops able to cope with extremes - and the diversity of wheat was reduced.

“We want to be able to see whether there are some of the things that we have lost, that we could basically capture and bring back to the modern varieties,” explains Dr Matthew Clark, a geneticist at the Natural History Museum.

And this is important: the world will need more wheat as the population grows - an estimated 60% more by 2050. So scientists need to find wheat varieties that can grow in places where it currently can't be grown - as well as crops that can withstand a changing environment.

“For example, by looking at crops that were able to survive in more marginal areas - places with hot and dry climates - that could help more developing countries increase their food supply,” says Dr Clark.

He explains that this could be done through traditional plant breeding, genetic modification or gene editing, a technique where genes can be very precisely added, removed or replaced.

The John Innes Centre is also looking back through a 100-year-old wheat archive

Scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich are also hunting through old wheat samples.

Their archive, called the Watkins landrace collection, dates back 100 years and contains varieties from all over the world. It's stored at a chilly 4C, so the seeds are still viable, which means they can be planted and grown.

“What we want to do is look for new and useful genetic variation," explains Dr Simon Griffiths as he looks through the collection.

"So disease resistance, stress resistance, increased yield, increased fertiliser-use efficiency.”

The team at John Innes is taking some of the older varieties and cross-breeding them with modern ones - and they’ve had some success.

“There's a very important disease of wheat, which is a global problem, called yellow rust, and that's been increasingly difficult to control,” Dr Griffiths says.

“Within this collection of old wheats, there are new resistances to that disease, which stand up against this disease, and that's being deployed by breeders right now to defend this really important threat to wheat production.”

The team is also interested in finding more nutritious wheat varieties.

"What about what's in the wheat? We know that we can increase the fibre content, the mineral content of wheat," he says.

"There's so much diversity that hasn't been fully exploited yet by modern wheat breeders, and we think we can bring that to them."

The wheat we grow is going to have to change - scientists hope that looking back into our past and rediscovering lost varieties could be the best way to move forward.

Source

It has earned the moniker "bin chicken" for its propensity to scavenge food from anywhere it can - messily raiding garbage and often stealing food right out of people's hands.

But the native bird may have figured out how to overhaul its bad reputation.

It has developed an "ingenious" method of eating one of the only animals Australians hate more - the cane toad, a toxic and pervasive pest.

First introduced to Australia in the 1930s, cane toads have no natural predators in the country and have wrought havoc on native animal populations.

The toad's skin contains venom which it releases when threatened, causing most animals that come into contact with it to die quickly of a heart attack.

Hence Emily Vincent's surprise when members of the community started sending her pictures and videos of ibis "playing" with the amphibians.

Ms Vincent, who runs the invasive species programmes at environment charity Watergum, says the behaviour has been reported up and down Australia's east coast.

"Ibis were flipping the toads about, throwing them in the air, and people just wondered what on earth they were doing," she told the BBC.

"After this they would always either wipe the toads in the wet grass, or they would go down to a water source nearby, and they would rinse the toads out."

She believes it is evidence of a "stress, wash and repeat" method that the birds have developed to rid the toads of their toxins before swallowing them whole.

"It really is quite amusing."

'Clever' birds

It isn't the first time birds have been spotted eating cane toads, Macquarie University Professor Rick Shine told the BBC.

They seem to be less susceptible to the poison than other animals, like snakes, mammals or crocodiles.

Toad expert Rick Shine says he hasn't heard of the behaviour before

But they can still die from too much of it and it tastes "awful", Prof Shine says.

So as the species spread across Australia, birds like hawks and crows rather quickly figured out how to eat around the poison glands on their shoulder.

They would flip the toads on their back and rip out their insides, leaving the glands untouched.

But this is the first time Prof Shine - who has studied toads for 20 years - has heard of birds using a method like this to eat them whole.

"Ibis do get an unfair reputation... [but] this demonstrates that these are clever birds," Ms Vincent says.

"They've actually forced the cane toad to get rid of the toxin itself, they haven't had to mutilate it in any way. The cane toad is doing all the work for them."

Population control

Professor Shine and Ms Vincent both say it is a promising sign that native animals are learning to adapt to the toads, which are now estimated to number over 2 billion.

Some species are slowly recognising the pests are "a very bad choice for lunch" and there are suggestions others are undergoing genetic changes that leave them less susceptible to the poison.

And then there are animals like the ibis that have worked out how to eat toads safely, which could help bring the population back under control.

"They've got an incredible breeding capacity... so with every female cane toad that's removed from the environment, it's the prevention of up to 70,000 new cane toads each year," Ms Vincent says.

As well as poisoning predators, cane toads also dine on small native animals

Most of the heavy lifting is being done by animals that Australia loves to hate - like the ibis, rodents or ants - Prof Shine says.

"All of those animals are actually doing a wonderful job as an unseen army that are reducing the numbers of cane toads every year," Professor Shine says.

"So we really should be grateful for some of these unloved Australians."

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Tuesday, November 29

• The first launch of the week is a Chinese Long March 2F/G rocket carrying Shenzhou 15, which is heading to the Chinese Space Station with three taikonauts aboard. The mission was supposed to launch the week beginning November 21, but it has seemingly been delayed. The new launch time is 3:18 a.m. UTC. It’s not clear if there will be a live stream of the event, but there will definitely be video footage of the event after the fact. Check next week’s recap section if you want to watch.

Wednesday, November 30

• There will be two launches from SpaceX today, the first is a Starlink mission. A Falcon 9 will carry 52 Starlink satellites into a polar low Earth orbit, where they will boost the Starlink satellite internet network. The mission is due to take off at 4:39 a.m. UTC from California and will be available for stream via SpaceX’s website.
• The second SpaceX mission will be launching from the other side of the U.S. in Florida at 8:39 a.m. UTC. A Falcon 9 will launch the Hakuto-R M1 mission, a commercial lunar lander tech demo. The satellite will touch down at Lacus Somniorum as it has ideal landing conditions. The lander will be carrying commercial and governmental payloads, including two rovers. Just like the prior mission, this launch should also be available as a live stream on SpaceX’s website.

Saturday, December 3

• The final launch of the week to take off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. A LandSpace Zhuque ZQ-2 rocket will take off carrying 11 payloads to orbit. The first stage of the rocket will be expendable during this launch, but in future missions, LandSpace will attempt vertical landings of the first stage, much like we see with SpaceX’s Falcon 9. We should get video footage of this launch after the event.

Recap

• With the launch of Artemis I the other week, we received video back as the Orion spacecraft orbited the Moon.

• After completing its orbit, we got some footage of the Earth, quite a bit further off than we’re used to seeing.

• The first launch we got this week was SpaceX’s Falcon 9 carrying the Eutelsat 10B satellite into orbit.

• Next up, an Indian PSLV-XL launched the EOS-06 satellite to orbit along with eight nanosats.

• Finally, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launched the CRS-26 Dragon cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station.

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

TWIRL 93: SpaceX to launch commercial lunar mission consisting of a lander and two rovers