Deleting your Twitter account from Twitter Web, Android, and iOS is pretty easy to do. Once you opt to delete your account, it will be placed in a deactivated state for 30 days. If you do not reactivate in that period, your account will be permanently deleted.

After deletion, your username will no longer be associated with your account. While it’ll be easy for you to recreate an account in the future, you’ll still need to earn all of your followers back.

How to delete on Twitter Web

1. Click on the More icon and then click on Settings and privacy from the drop-down menu.
2. From the Your account tab, click on Deactivate your account.
3.  Read the account deactivation information, then click Deactivate.
4. Enter your password when prompted and confirm that you want to proceed by clicking the Deactivate account button.

How to delete on Twitter for iOS

1. Tap the navigation menu icon, then tap Settings and privacy.
2. Tap Your account, then tap Deactivate your account.
3. Read the account deactivation information, then tap Deactivate.
4. Enter your password when prompted and tap Deactivate.
5. Confirm that you want to proceed by tapping Yes, deactivate.

How to delete on Twitter for Android

1. In the top menu, you will either see a navigation menu icon or your profile icon. Tap whichever icon you have, then tap Settings and privacy.
2. Tap Account, then tap Deactivate your account.
3. Read the account deactivation information, then tap Deactivate.
4. Enter your password when prompted and tap Deactivate.
5. Confirm that you want to proceed by tapping Yes, deactivate.

Deleting your Twitter account is most definitely the nuclear option when it comes to responding to recent developments, especially if you actually enjoy using the platform. If you’re more concerned about your privacy, then setting up a service like Semiphemeral may be a better option for you.

Source

An international multidisciplinary team of scientists led by University of New South Wales researchers has created the world’s first complete classification of ecosystems across land, rivers and wetlands, and oceans. The ecological typology will allow for better coordinated and effective protection of biodiversity, which is vital for human well-being.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which has more than 1400 member organizations, including countries, the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management, the PLuS Alliance, which is made up of Arizona State University, King’s College London, and UNSW Sydney, as well as more than 100 expert ecosystem scientists from around the world, were all involved in the extensive collaboration.

The research, which was recently published in Nature, explores the science behind the typology and how it may assist individual nations accomplish goals of global policy. IUCN released the typology’s first public version with UNSW’s assistance in 2020, and the researchers have since updated and improved it.

The research team was led by Professor David Keith with Professor Richard Kingsford from UNSW’s Centre for Ecosystem Science, and Professor Emily Nicholson from Deakin University.

“For the first time, we have a common platform that identifies, defines, and describes the full suite of the whole planet’s ecosystems,” said Professor Keith.

“It may seem rather odd that we haven’t had this before, but historically scientists have forged advances by working somewhat separately in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems. This is the first time that all of this detailed knowledge has been brought together into a single framework taking advantage of common theory across the disciplines.”

The typology allows us to comprehend broad, global trends, such as how humans are changing ecosystems. Ten percent of ecosystems are artificially created and maintained by humans but occupy more than 30 percent of the Earth’s land surface – what is left is home to 94 percent of threatened species on the IUCN Red List.

At a policy level, this is the first time we’ve had this kind of overview, Professor Kingsford said.

“It’s very hard to see the big picture on a jigsaw puzzle until you have all the pieces in place – and that’s what we now have. We have a much more substantial foundation to move ahead with a new era of ecosystem conservation and management policy.”

At a more general level, the overview allows policymakers and industry to plan their initiatives in full context. For governments and non-government organizations (NGOs) working in a range of countries, the overview can inform decisions about how ecosystem protection and restoration efforts can achieve maximum conservation benefit, and where development infrastructure is best placed to minimize impact.

“Efforts on biodiversity conservation have largely centered at the species level because it’s seen to be more tangible,” said Professor Keith. “But a broader focus on both ecosystems and species is more likely to succeed in conserving all plants and animals, as well as the essential services that nature provides people.”

Globally, countries coordinate their efforts under the umbrella of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which is coming up for renewal at the end of 2022. Delegates from 193 countries will meet in December at the 15th Conference of Parties in Montreal, Canada, to agree on the post-2020 agenda for CBD. Preparations for that meeting indicate a stronger emphasis on ecosystem conservation and management in the coming decades.

“The global ecosystem typology will make it possible to account for ongoing ecosystem change, identify threatened ecosystem types, and plan better preventative action and restoration under a renewed agenda for the CBD,” said Professor Nicholson.

This typology marks a breakthrough for sustainable management of the world’s ecosystems, said Dr. Angela Andrade, Chair of IUCN’s Commission on Ecosystem Management and one of the authors.

“It will enable real progress on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and Environmental Accounting, and should help place ecosystems at the forefront of the United Nations’ post-2020 agenda for conserving biological diversity.”

To make that a reality, we need a full set of high-quality maps for all major ecosystem types, Professor Keith said.

“We are already well down that path, but we need help to surmount the considerable challenges by exploiting recent advances in computer and satellite technology, along with global networks of citizen scientists.”

The ecosystem typology

Ecosystems provide homes and vital life support for all plants and animals and supply essential ecosystem services that sustain business, culture, and human well-being. Those services – such as the provision of clean air and water, carbon sequestration, reduced risks of disasters, and outdoor recreational opportunities that sustain mental health – are sometimes regarded as free, but ecosystem degradation incurs costs for tapping alternative resources, disaster relief, reconstruction, and health budgets.

All of the world’s ecosystems show hallmarks of human influence, and many are at acute risk of collapse, with consequences for habitats of species, genetic diversity, ecosystem services, sustainable development, and human wellbeing.

The global ecosystem typology describes the diversity of tropical forests, big rivers, coral reefs, and other ecosystems that have typically been the focus of public attention. But it also includes little-known ecosystems of deep ocean trenches,

seamounts, lakes beneath the ice sheets, and microscopic ecosystems within rocks.

“We don’t think often about what’s in the deep oceans, for example,” said Professor Keith. “There’s a tremendous variety of life down there and it’s organized into a number of different ecosystems. And those ecosystems are beginning to feel the impact of human expansion.

“The deep trenches in the ocean are filling up with microplastics, and we’re starting to look at mining volcanic vents for minerals. We need to make decisions about those kinds of environments, just as we do about coral reefs and rainforests.”

A hierarchical structure

The new typology has a hierarchical structure with six levels. The top-level divides the planet into major realms, including terrestrial, freshwater, marine and subterranean ecosystems. The second and third levels include 25 biomes and 110 ecosystem functional groups, based on the ecological processes that shape different ecosystems and the functions that their key components perform. These functional groups will frame blueprints for sustainable ecosystem management.

The lower levels of the hierarchy are based on finer ecosystem features and enable the integration of existing national classifications. These national ecosystem classifications and maps benefit from detailed scientific observations and considerable investment over many years. They are critical to conservation because many countries have built their environmental governance and regulations around them, as well as their protected area networks. For the first time, a globally agreed typology enables these many different systems to be reconciled across national borders, while supporting their ongoing use in each country.

What are the next steps?

The next major frontier for improved ecosystem management is to establish global maps and monitoring, Professor Keith said.

“Although many of the world’s 110 ecosystem types are already served with high-quality maps updatable with satellite technology, the data for some other types is still rudimentary.

“We can’t plan effectively where to protect ecosystems or how to manage them sustainably unless we have reliable maps for the full range of ecosystem types, and integrate them into decision-making and monitoring systems,” he said.

Source

Neutron stars are the surviving “trash-compacted” cores of massive stars that exploded. Despite weighing more than our Sun, they would fit inside New York City. At this unimaginable density, a single teaspoon of surface material would weigh at least 4 billion tons on Earth.

If that doesn’t make your mind spin, just imagine what happens when two of these condensed cannon balls collide head-on. They ripple the very fabric of time and space in a phenomenon called gravitational waves, which can be measured by detectors on the ground on Earth.

The explosive event, named GW170817, was observed in August 2017. The blast released energy comparable to that of a supernova explosion. It was the first combined detection of gravitational waves and gamma radiation from a neutron star merger.

In the aftermath of the smashup, a blowtorch jet of radiation was ejected at nearly the speed of light, slamming into the material surrounding the obliterated pair. Hubble was on the scene of the explosion just two days after the collision. Astronomers used Hubble to measure the motion of a blob of material the jet slammed into. As the jet rocketed away from the site of the explosion, the blob moved outward like a leaf caught on a stream of water from a garden hose.

The incredible precision, gleaned from Hubble and radio telescopes, needed to measure the blob’s trajectory, was equivalent to measuring the diameter of a 12-inch pizza placed on the Moon as seen from Earth. This was a major watershed in the ongoing investigation of neutron star collisions that keep ringing throughout the universe.

Two neutron stars, the surviving cores of massive stars that exploded, collided sending a ripple through the fabric of time and space in a phenomenon called gravitational waves. In the aftermath, a blowtorch jet of radiation was ejected at nearly the speed of light, slamming into the material surrounding the obliterated pair. Astronomers used Hubble to measure the motion of a blob of material the jet slammed into. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; Lead Producer: Paul Morris

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have made a unique measurement indicating that a jet was blasted across space at speeds faster than 99.97% the speed of light by a titanic collision between two neutron stars.

The explosive event, dubbed GW170817, occurred in August 2017. The blast generated energy comparable to a supernova explosion. It was the first time gravitational waves and gamma rays were detected together from a binary neutron star merger.

This was a significant turning point in the research of these extraordinary collisions. In addition to the discovery of gravitational waves, 70 observatories across the world and in space saw the aftermath of this merger across a large swath of the electromagnetic spectrum. This signaled an important development in the area of Time Domain and Multi-Messenger Astrophysics, which makes use of a number of “messengers” including gravitational waves and light to analyze the progression of the universe through time.

Just two days later, scientists quickly aimed Hubble toward the explosion’s location. The neutron stars collapsed into a black hole, whose strong gravity started to attract matter toward it. This material spun rapidly, generating jets that moved outward from its poles. The roaring jet slammed into and swept up debris from the widening shell of explosion debris. This included a material blob from which a jet emerged.

Even though the event occurred in 2017, it has taken scientists several years to figure out how to analyze the Hubble data as well as data from other telescopes to paint this complete picture.

The Hubble observation was combined with observations from multiple National Science Foundation radio telescopes working together for very long baseline interferometry (VLBI). The radio data were taken 75 days and 230 days after the explosion.

“I’m amazed that Hubble could give us such a precise measurement, which rivals the precision achieved by powerful radio VLBI telescopes spread across the globe,” said Kunal P. Mooley of Caltech in Pasadena, California, lead author of a paper that was recently published in the journal Nature.

The authors used Hubble data together with data from ESA’s (the European Space Agency) Gaia satellite, in addition to VLBI, to achieve extreme precision. “It took months of careful analysis of the data to make this measurement,” said Jay Anderson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

By combining the different observations, they were able to pinpoint the explosion site. The Hubble measurement showed the jet was moving at an apparent velocity of seven times the speed of light. The radio observations show the jet later decelerated to an apparent speed of four times faster than the speed of light.

In reality, nothing can exceed the speed of light, so this “superluminal” motion is an illusion. Because the jet is approaching Earth at nearly the speed of light, the light it emits at a later time has a shorter distance to go. In essence, the jet is chasing its own light. In actuality, more time has passed between the jet’s emission of the light than the observer thinks. This causes the object’s velocity to be overestimated – in this case seemingly exceeding the speed of light.

“Our result indicates that the jet was moving at least at 99.97% the speed of light when it was launched,” said Wenbin Lu of the University of California, Berkeley.

The Hubble measurements, combined with the VLBI measurements, announced in 2018, greatly strengthen the long-presumed connection between neutron star mergers and short-duration gamma-ray bursts. That connection requires a fast-moving jet to emerge, which has now been measured in GW170817.

This work paves the way for more precision studies of neutron star mergers, detected by the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA gravitational wave observatories. With a large enough sample over the coming years, relativistic jet observations might provide another line of inquiry into measuring the universe’s expansion rate, associated with a number known as the Hubble constant.

At present, there is a discrepancy between Hubble constant values as estimated for the early universe and the nearby universe – one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics today. The differing values are based on extremely precise measurements of Type Ia supernovae by Hubble and other observatories, and Cosmic Microwave Background measurements by ESA’s Planck satellite. More views of relativistic jets could add information for astronomers trying to solve the puzzle.

Source

Volcanic eruptions are dangerous, but unfortunately, they are also difficult to predict. Now, a team of scientists at the University of Tokyo has discovered that the ratio of atoms in specific gases released from volcanic fumaroles (gaps in the Earth’s surface) can provide an indicator of what is happening to the magma deep below. It works quite similarly to taking a blood test to check your health. This can indicate when things might be “heating up” volcanically.

Specifically, changes in the ratio of argon-40 and helium-3 can indicate how frothy the magma is, which signals the risk of different types of eruptions. Understanding which ratios of which gases indicate a certain type of magma activity is a big step.

Next, the researchers hope to construct a 24/7 volcanic activity monitoring and early warning system by developing portable equipment which can provide on-site, real-time measurements.

Thanks to its geothermally active location, the town of Kusatsu, Gunma Prefecture (in the background of this image), is one of Japan’s most popular onsen (hot springs) destinations. The acidic and vibrant turquoise Yugama crater lake, however, is definitely not suitable for swimming. Credit: Tomoya Obase

 

Does the thought of standing on a volcano make you quiver with excitement, or fear? For many people, living in the shadow of a volcano is part of daily life. Japan has 111 active volcanoes and an average of 15 volcanic “events,” including eruptions, every year. However, these events — which can be deadly — are notoriously difficult to predict.

Mount Ontake, Japan’s second-highest volcano and a famous tourist spot, unexpectedly erupted in 2014, sadly killing 58 people and leaving five missing. Although earthquake activity is typically an early warning sign, some eruptions (including the one at Ontake) can occur without clear earthquake signals. Therefore, disaster mitigators, such as the Japan Meteorological Agency, would benefit from other reliable ways to forewarn residents of the next potential disaster.

Fumaroles are holes and cracks in the Earth’s surface (the crust), which release gas and steam and often occur around volcanoes. The ejected gas is made up of a mix of chemicals. Its composition can provide us with insight into what is happening below the Earth’s crust in the mantle, where magma (molten rock) forms and pushes upwards, eventually erupting as lava. Researchers already know that the ratio of isotopes (atoms from an element with the same chemical properties but different mass) of certain gases can indicate hidden magma activity.

“We knew that the helium isotope ratio occasionally changes from a low value, similar to the helium found in the Earth’s crust, to a high value, like that in the Earth’s mantle, when the activity of magma increases. This was based on an observation of the helium isotope ratio of cold spring gas in El Hierro Island, in the Canary Islands (in the Atlantic Ocean off the northwestern coast of Africa), where an eruption occurred in 2011,” explained Professor Hirochika Sumino from the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology. “But we didn’t know why we had more mantle-derived helium during magmatic unrest.”

Hirochika Sumino (dark green jacket), Tomoya Obase (blue jacket) and Hiroshi Shinohara (orange jacket) collect gas samples from fumaroles in Tateyama Jigokudani (“Hell Valley”) geothermal area, in Toyama Prefecture, Japan. Collecting gas samples from fumaroles is dangerous due to the toxic gas and hot steam, so a gas mask, goggles, helmet, and gloves are required. But Sumino says the results of this study show that the insight obtained from the samples is well worth the challenge. Credit: Yuki Hibiya

To gain further insight, Sumino and the research team decided to monitor gases from six fumaroles around the active Kusatsu-Shirane volcano, which lies about 150 kilometers (90 miles) northwest of Tokyo in Gunma Prefecture. The team collected samples every few months for seven years between 2014 and 2021. After collection, they took the samples back to the lab and analyzed them using state-of-the-art equipment called a noble gas mass spectrometer. This enabled them to precisely measure isotopic compositions, including that of ultratrace (tiny but important) isotopes, such as helium-3, which is typically more abundant in the mantle compared to the crust or air.

“We succeeded in detecting changes in the magma-derived argon-40/helium-3 ratio, related to magmatic unrest. Using computer models, we revealed that the ratio reflects how much the magma underground is foaming, making bubbles of volcanic gases which separate from the liquid magma,” explained Sumino. “How much magma foams controls how much magmatic gas is provided to the hydrothermal system beneath a volcano and how buoyant the magma is. The former is related to a risk of phreatic eruption, in which an increase in water pressure in the hydrothermal system causes the eruption. The latter would increase the rate of magma ascent, resulting in a magmatic eruption.

This map shows the location of the fumaroles which the team sampled. Also shown is the location of the most recent, unexpected, and deadly eruption in January 2018, which killed one person and injured 11. Credit: Tomoya Obase

 

“When you compare a volcano with a human body, the conventional geophysical methods represented by observations of earthquakes and crustal deformation are similar to listening to the chest and taking body size measurements. In these cases, it is difficult to know what health problem causes some noise in your chest or a sudden increase in your weight, without a detailed medical check. On the other hand, analyzing the chemical and isotope composition of elements in fumarolic gases is like a breath or blood test. This means we are looking at actual material directly derived from magma to know precisely what is going on with the magma.”

For now, gas samples have to be collected out in the field and brought back to the lab for analysis, which is a challenging and time-consuming process. However, Sumino has experience in improving noble gas mass spectrometers and hopes to develop a new tool that would enable them to perform the same analysis, but in real-time and out in the field.

“We want to be able to detect changes in magma activity as soon as possible,” said Sumino. “Now we are developing a portable mass spectrometer for on-site, real-time monitoring of noble gas isotope ratios from fumarolic gases. Our next step is to establish a noble gas analysis protocol with this new instrument, to make it a reality that all active volcanoes — at least those which have the potential to cause disaster to local residents — are monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Source

According to Iowa State Psychology Professor Shana Carpenter, combining two strategies—spacing and retrieval practice—is the key to success, whether you’re attempting to pass an exam or take up a new pastime.

Carpenter is the lead author of a study that reviewed more than a century’s worth of learning research which was recently published in Nature Reviews Psychology.

“The benefits of spacing and retrieval practice have been confirmed over and over in studies in labs, classrooms, and workplaces, but the reason why we’re showcasing this research is because these two techniques haven’t fully caught on. If they were utilized all the time, we’d see drastic increases in learning,” said Carpenter.

Carpenter and her co-authors describe spacing as a method for learning in incremental amounts over time in their research. It’s the opposite of studying the night before a test. In one study, medical students who got repeated training in surgery over three weeks outperformed those who received the same training all at once in terms of performance on exams two weeks and a year later.

Psychology Professor Shana Carpenter works with Cassidy Whitehead (left) and Kaelyn Nichols, two seniors majoring in psychology at Iowa State. Credit: Shana Carpenter/Iowa State University

 

There isn’t a set rule on how much time should pass between practice sessions, according to Carpenter. However, research indicates that going over the information again after forgetting part of it (but not all) is beneficial.

Retrieval practice is an approach that involves remembering past learning. It can come in a variety of formats, such as flashcards, practice exams, and open-ended writing prompts, and it helps students in identifying their knowledge gaps. The authors of the article stress that those who check their responses for errors or get immediate feedback learn even better. 

More than 200 studies show people generally retain more information for longer periods of time with retrieval practice compared to strategies that do not involve retrieval (e.g., re-reading a textbook.)

The authors argue people who combine spacing and retrieval practice have the best chance of remembering information.

“Forgetting is a very natural thing; you can’t stop forgetting even if you try, but you can slow down forgetting by using retrieval practice and spacing,” said Carpenter.

Highlighters and illusions of learning

Carpenter says false beliefs about learning are part of the reason retrieval practice and spacing aren’t used more widely.

“Probably the number one misconception is that learning has to feel easy in order to be working, and that’s just not true at all. You’ll learn more durably and more effectively if you persist and get through those challenges than if it had felt easy the whole time,” said Carpenter.

Simply highlighting or re-reading a textbook feels easier than writing responses to practice essay questions. But without the knowledge check that comes with trying to retrieve learned information, there’s a greater risk of being lulled into what the authors call an “illusion of learning.”

Carpenter acknowledges many people do not like making mistakes or realizing they don’t understand the material as well as they thought. It may dredge up insecurities, a fear of failing or some other emotion they want to avoid. But there’s a good chance they’ll eventually have to confront what they don’t know when the stakes are higher, like during an exam or presentation at work.

Bringing it into the classroom

Carpenter says she uses digital tools (e.g., online practice quizzes, and clicker questions) to incorporate retrieval practice and spacing into her university courses, but there are other ways to bring these strategies into the classroom.

She gives the example of an elementary school math teacher whose techniques were highlighted at a recent conference. A few days after a lesson on fractions, the teacher asked her students to share whatever they could remember about fractions. It was an open-ended and communal activity.

“The more they talked, the more they started to remember, and those kids were excited to talk about fractions,” said Carpenter.

She shares another story of a middle school teacher who routinely projects practice questions from previous lessons on a screen. The students jot down responses on note cards and then check their answers on their own or discuss them as a group.

Carpenter emphasizes the teachers in both examples did not grade the activities. Rather, they provided low- and no-stakes practice opportunities to help students learn and recognize mistakes as an important part of that process, which benefits students beyond the classroom.

“Learning how to learn is going to ensure that anywhere you go after the formal education years, you’re going to know how to learn something and be successful,” she said.

Source

Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis, affecting more than 32 million adults in the U.S. and more than 500 million people worldwide. It occurs most frequently in the hands, hips and knees. In people with osteoarthritis, the cartilage that cushions the joint gradually wears away. Arthritis is often accompanied by inflammation, or swelling, of the joint, which can be painful.

Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are commonly prescribed for osteoarthritis pain and inflammation. But little is known of the long-term effects of these drugs on disease progression.

"To date, no curative therapy has been approved to cure or reduce the progression of knee osteoarthritis," said the study's lead author, Johanna Luitjens, postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the University of California, San Francisco. "NSAIDs are frequently used to treat pain, but it is still an open discussion of how NSAID use influences outcomes for osteoarthritis patients. In particular, the impact of NSAIDs on synovitis, or the inflammation of the membrane lining the joint, has never been analyzed using MRI-based structural biomarkers."

Dr. Luitjens and colleagues set out to analyze the association between NSAID use and synovitis in patients with osteoarthritis of the knee and to assess how treatment with NSAIDs affects joint structure over time.

"Synovitis mediates development and progression of osteoarthritis and may be a therapeutic target," Dr. Luitjens said. "Therefore, the goal of our study was to analyze whether NSAID treatment influences the development or progression of synovitis and to investigate whether cartilage imaging biomarkers, which reflect changes in osteoarthritis, are impacted by NSAID treatment."

For the study, 277 participants from the Osteoarthritis Initiative cohort with moderate to severe osteoarthritis and sustained NSAID treatment for at least one year between baseline and four-year follow-up were included in the study and compared with a group of 793 control participants who were not treated with NSAIDs. All participants underwent 3T MRI of the knee initially and after four years. Images were scored for biomarkers of inflammation.

Cartilage thickness, composition and other MRI measurements served as noninvasive biomarkers for evaluating arthritis progression.

The results showed no long-term benefit of NSAID use. Joint inflammation and cartilage quality were worse at baseline in the participants taking NSAIDs, compared to the control group, and worsened at four-year follow-up.

"In this large group of participants, we were able to show that there were no protective mechanisms from NSAIDs in reducing inflammation or slowing down progression of osteoarthritis of the knee joint," Dr. Luitjens said. "The use of NSAIDs for their anti-inflammatory function has been frequently propagated in patients with osteoarthritis in recent years and should be revisited, since a positive impact on joint inflammation could not be demonstrated."

According to Dr. Luitjens, there are several possible reasons why NSAID use increases synovitis.

"On the one hand, the anti-inflammatory effect that normally comes from NSAIDs may not effectively prevent synovitis, with progressive degenerative change resulting in worsening of synovitis over time," she said. "On the other hand, patients who have synovitis and are taking pain-relieving medications may be physically more active due to pain relief, which could potentially lead to worsening of synovitis, although we adjusted for physical activity in our model."

Dr. Luitjens noted that prospective, randomized studies should be performed in the future to provide conclusive evidence of the anti-inflammatory impact of NSAIDs.

Co-authors are Charles McCulloch, Ph.D., Thomas Link, M.D., Ph.D., Felix Gassert, M.D., Gabby Joseph, Ph.D., and John Lynch, Ph.D.

Provided by Radiological Society of North America

Source

Tesla recalls over 321,000 vehicles due to taillight software issue

Evacuation planners rarely considered the needs of carless and vulnerable populations before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. These vulnerable populations include low-income, elderly, or young individuals with specific needs or tourists without a car while on vacation. In the aftermath of the storm, transportation planners called for a new focus on evacuation planning to meet the specific needs of these people.

So what has America learned since Hurricane Katrina? Not enough, according to a first-of-its-kind study by Florida Atlantic University (FAU), which reveals only marginal improvements have been with respect to evacuation planning in America’s 50 largest cities. A lack of preparedness, specifically to evacuate people with no access to cars and vulnerable populations, was found by researchers.

Red = Weak (0-3 points) Yellow = Moderate (4-7 points) Green/Olive = Strong (8-10 points) Gray = N/A (Cities without publicly accessible evacuation plans). Credit: Florida Atlantic University

 

The study is based on data extracted from plans, collected and analyzed from the years after Hurricane Katrina and then more recently during the mid-20 teens (prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic). Researchers also introduce an Evacuation Preparedness Rating of five dimensions identified as best practices in evacuation planning for vulnerable populations: special needs registries; specialized transportation plans for individuals with specific needs; pick-up location plan; multimodal evacuation plan; and pedestrian evacuation plan.

The 50 cities were scored based on the Composite Evacuation Preparedness Rating System that includes four designations: weak, 0–4 points; moderate, 5–7 points; strong, 8–10 points; and N/A, plans that were not reviewed.  

Published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, the results of the study, showed that only seven cities had strong plans, including Charlotte, North Carolina; Cleveland, Ohio; Jacksonville, Florida; Miami, Florida; New Orleans,

Louisiana; New York, New York; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The researchers note that these plans should be utilized as a model for other cities. Twenty cities achieved a moderate rating, six cities had a weak rating and 17 plans were not available or do not exist. Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis are among the cities with plans not found.

Availability of plans for 50 of the largest cities in the U.S. Credit: Florida Atlantic University

 

“While it is promising that more cities are developing evacuation plans, overall, it remains disheartening that not every city was able to learn the lessons of not being prepared, especially for carless and vulnerable populations, as showcased to the nation during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005,” said John L. Renne, Ph.D., senior author and professor and director, Center for Urban & Environmental Solutions (CUES) in FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science, who conducted the study with co-author Estefania Mayorga, a graduate of the master’s program in Urban and Regional Planning at FAU who assisted Renne on this project as part of her graduate research assistantship as a student.

The overall goal of this study was to develop a way to compare plans, across cities and over time, to work toward standardizing an approach for evaluating evacuation plans for carless and vulnerable populations across the U.S.

The Evacuation Preparedness Rating System served as a tool to allow consistent and uniform rating to test for minimum standards in all cities across the nation. Moreover, the tracking of plans over time illuminates which cities are improving and allows for a national snapshot that creates more accountability to highlight which cities are prepared and which are not. 

“In answer to the question we posed in our paper, ‘what has America learned since Hurricane Katrina?’ – the answer based on our findings is clearly: NOT ENOUGH,” said Renne. “Many cities that have strong plans, including Jacksonville, Miami, New Orleans, and New York are coastal cities that have experienced strong hurricanes in the past. This study lends support to the theory that cities do not develop strong evacuation plans, ones that accommodate the needs of all people, unless they have already experienced a major disaster or are under a threat.” 

Source

Published recently, AIMS’ Annual Summary Report on Coral Reef Condition for 2021/22 shows another year of increased coral cover across much of the Reef.

In the 87 representative reefs surveyed between August 2021 and May 2022 under the AIMS Long-Term Monitoring Program (LTMP), average hard coral cover in the region north of Cooktown, Queensland, Australia increased to 36% (from 27% in 2021) and to 33% in the central Great Barrier Reef (from 26% in 2021).

However, average coral cover in the southern region (from Proserpine to Gladstone) decreased from 38% in 2021 to 34%.

The northern and central Great Barrier Reef have recorded their highest amount of coral cover since the Australian Institute of Marine Science began monitoring 36 years ago. Credit: Australian Institute of Marine Science

 

AIMS CEO Dr. Paul Hardisty said the results in the north and central regions were a sign the Reef could still recover, but the loss of coral cover in the southern region showed how dynamic the Reef was.

“A third of the gain in coral cover we recorded in the south in 2020/21 was lost last year due to ongoing crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks,” he said.

“This shows how vulnerable the Reef is to the continued acute and severe disturbances that are occurring more often, and are longer-lasting.”

Dr. Hardisty said the increased frequency of mass coral bleaching events was “uncharted territory” for the Reef, with this year’s bleaching event the fourth in seven years and the first to occur during a La Niña.

“In our 36 years of monitoring the condition of the Great Barrier Reef we have not seen bleaching events so close together,” he said.

“Every summer the Reef is at risk of temperature stress, bleaching, and potentially mortality and our understanding of how the ecosystem responds to that is still developing.

“The 2020 and 2022 bleaching events, while extensive, didn’t reach the intensity of the 2016 and 2017 events and, as a result, we have seen less mortality. These latest results demonstrate the Reef can still recover in periods free of intense disturbances.”

Manta-tow survey underwater, Great Barrier Reef. Credit: AIMS

 

AIMS monitoring program team leader Dr. Mike Emslie said the 2022 results built on the increases in coral cover reported for 2021, with most of the increase continuing to be driven by fast-growing Acropora corals.

“These corals are particularly vulnerable to wave damage, like that generated by strong winds and tropical cyclones,” he said.

“They are also highly susceptible to coral bleaching, when water temperatures reach elevated levels, and are the preferred prey for crown-of-thorns starfish. This means that large increases in hard coral cover can quickly be negated by disturbances on reefs where Acropora corals predominate.”

Manta-tow survey aerial, Middle Banks Reef, Great Barrier Reef. Credit: AIMS

 

Dr. Emslie said climate change was driving increasingly frequent and longer-lasting marine heatwaves.

“The peak of the most recent bleaching event in March occurred when the accumulated heat stress caused widespread bleaching but not extensive mortality,” he said.

“The increasing frequency of warming ocean temperatures and the extent of mass bleaching events highlights the critical threat climate change poses to all reefs, particularly while crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks and tropical cyclones are also occurring. Future disturbance can reverse the observed recovery in a short amount of time.”

Background

The 36-year-long dataset of AIMS’ Long-Term Monitoring Program (LTMP) is the largest, longest, and most comprehensive information source on the health of the Great Barrier Reef. It helps determine long-term trends in the condition of coral communities across the Reef.

Percent hard coral cover describes the proportion of the reef that is covered in living hard coral. In 2021-22, most reefs surveyed had between 10 and 50 percent.  

Bleaching is a coral’s response to stressful conditions such as heat. During bleaching, the coral animal loses its symbiotic algae and pigments, causing it to turn white and potentially die. Although corals can survive a bleaching event, they are under more stress.

Source

In Japanese folk traditions, they symbolize departing souls or silent, ardent love. Some Indigenous cultures in the Peruvian Andes view them as the eyes of ghosts. And across various Western cultures, fireflies, glowworms, and other bioluminescent beetles have been linked to a dazzling and at times contradictory array of metaphoric associations: “childhood, crop, doom, elves, fear, habitat change, idyll, love, luck, mortality, prostitution, solstice, stars, and fleetingness of words and cognition,” as one 2016 review noted.

Physicists revere fireflies for reasons that might seem every bit as mystical: Of the roughly 2,200 species scattered around the world, a handful have the documented ability to flash in synchrony. In Malaysia and Thailand, firefly-studded mangrove trees can blink on beat as if strung up with Christmas lights; every summer in Appalachia, waves of eerie concordance ripple across fields and forests. The light shows lure firefly mates and crowds of human sightseers, but they have also helped spark some of the most fundamental attempts to explain synchronization, the alchemy by which elaborate coordination emerges from even very simple individual parts.

Orit Peleg remembers when she first encountered the mystery of synchronous fireflies as an undergraduate studying physics and computer science. The fireflies were presented as an example of how simple systems achieve synchrony in Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, a textbook by the mathematician Steven Strogatz that her class was using. Peleg had never even seen a firefly, as they are uncommon in Israel, where she grew up.

“It’s just so beautiful that it somehow stuck in my head for many, many years,” she said. But by the time Peleg began her own lab, applying computational approaches to biology at the University of Colorado and at the Santa Fe Institute, she had learned that, although fireflies had inspired a lot of math, quantitative data describing what the insects were actually doing was scant.

Orit Peleg (left), a computational biologist at the University of Colorado, and Raphaël Sarfati, a postdoctoral fellow in her laboratory, developed a more sophisticated system for capturing high-resolution data about the flashing of fireflies in the wild.

 Photographs: Glenn Asakawa/Quanta Magazine

She set out to fix that. Over the past two years, a series of papers from Peleg’s group has opened a fire hose of real-world data about synchrony in multiple firefly species at multiple study sites, and at a much higher resolution than previous modelers or biologists had managed. “Pretty astonishing” is how the mathematical biologist Bard Ermentrout at the University of Pittsburgh described the team’s results to Quanta. “I was blown away,” said Andrew Moiseff, a biologist at the University of Connecticut.

These papers establish that real firefly swarms depart from the mathematical idealizations that flitted through journals and textbooks for decades. Nearly every model for firefly synchrony ever concocted, for example, assumes that each firefly maintains its own internal metronome. A preprint that Peleg’s group posted in March, however, showed that in at least one species, individual fireflies have no intrinsic rhythm, and it posited that a collective beat emerges only from the spooky synergy of many lightning bugs gathered together. An even more recent preprint, first uploaded in May and updated last week, documented a rare type of synchrony that mathematicians call a chimera state, which has almost never been observed in the real world outside of contrived experiments.

Firefly biologists hope the new methods will reshape the science and conservation of fireflies. Mathematicians devising theories of synchrony like the ones that Strogatz described in his textbook, meanwhile, have operated without much experimental feedback from messy real-world synchronizers. “That’s the big breakthrough,” said Strogatz, a professor of mathematics at Cornell University. “Now we can start closing the loop.”

The Elusive Proof of Synchrony

Reports of fireflies flaring in unison in Southeast Asia filtered back to Western scientific discourse for centuries. Thousands of fireflies, called kelip-kelip in Malaysia—their name is a sort of visual onomatopoeia for their twinkling—can settle on riverside trees. “Their light blazes and is extinguished by a common sympathy,” a British diplomat touring Thailand wrote in 1857. “At one moment every leaf and branch appears decorated with diamond-like fire.”

Not everyone accepted these reports. “For such a thing to occur among insects is certainly contrary to all natural laws,” one letter to the journal Science complained in 1917, arguing that the apparent effect was instead caused by the viewer’s involuntary blinking. Yet by the 1960s, visiting firefly researchers confirmed through quantitative analysis what local boatmen in mangrove swamps had long known.

A similar scenario played out in the 1990s, when a Tennessee naturalist named Lynn Faust read the confident published assertion of a scientist named Jon Copeland that there were no synchronous fireflies in North America. Faust knew then that what she had been watching for decades in the nearby woods was something remarkable.

Faust invited Copeland and Moiseff, his collaborator, to see a species in the Great Smoky Mountains called Photinus carolinus. Clouds of the male fireflies fill forests and clearings, floating at about human height. Instead of blinking in tight coordination, these fireflies emit a burst of quick flashes within a few seconds, then go quiet for several times that long before loosing another burst. (Imagine a crowd of paparazzi waiting for celebrities to appear at regular intervals, snapping a salvo of photos at each appearance, and then twiddling their thumbs in the downtime.)

Copeland and Moiseff’s experiments showed that isolated P. carolinus fireflies really did try to flash on beat with a neighboring firefly—or a blinking LED—in a nearby jar. The team also set up high-sensitivity video cameras at the edges of fields and forest clearings to record flashes. Copeland went through the footage frame by frame, counting how many fireflies were illuminated at each moment. Statistical analysis of this painstakingly gathered data proved that all the fireflies within the cameras’ view at a scene really did emit flash bursts at regular, correlated intervals.

Two decades later, when Peleg and her postdoc, the physicist Raphaël Sarfati, set out to collect firefly data, better technology was available. They designed a system of two GoPro cameras placed a few feet apart. Because the cameras took 360-degree video, they could capture the dynamics of a firefly swarm from within, not just from the side. Instead of counting flashes by hand, Sarfati devised processing algorithms that could triangulate on firefly flashes caught by both cameras and then record not just when each blink happened but where it occurred in three-dimensional space.

Sarfati first brought this system into the field in Tennessee in June 2019 for the P. carolinus fireflies that Faust had made famous. It was his first time seeing the spectacle with his own eyes. He had imagined something like the tight scenes of firefly synchrony from Asia, but the Tennessee bursts were messier, with bursts of up to eight quick flashes over about four seconds repeated roughly every 12 seconds. Yet that messiness was exciting: As a physicist, he felt that a system with wild fluctuations could prove far more informative than one that behaved perfectly. “It was complex, it was confusing in a sense, but also beautiful,” he said.

Random but Sympathetic Flashers

In her undergraduate brush with synchronizing fireflies, Peleg first learned to understand them through a model formalized by the Japanese physicist Yoshiki Kuramoto, building on earlier work by the theoretical biologist Art Winfree. This is the ur-model of synchrony, the granddaddy of mathematical schemes that explain how synchrony can arise, often inexorably, in anything from groups of pacemaker cells in human hearts to alternating currents.

At their most basic, models of synchronous systems need to describe two processes. One is the inner dynamics of an isolated individual—in this case a lone firefly in a jar, governed by a physiological or behavioral rule that determines when it flashes. The second is what mathematicians call coupling, the way the flash of one firefly influences its neighbors. With fortuitous combinations of these two parts, a cacophony of different agents can quickly pull itself into a neat chorus.

In a Kuramoto-esque description, each individual firefly is treated as an oscillator with an intrinsic preferred rhythm. Picture fireflies as having a hidden pendulum swinging steadily inside them; imagine a bug flashes every time its pendulum sweeps through the bottom of its arc. Suppose also that seeing a neighboring flash yanks a firefly’s pace-setting pendulum a little bit forward or back. Even if the fireflies start off out of sync with each other, or their preferred internal rhythms vary individually, a collective governed by these rules will often converge on a coordinated flash pattern.

Several variations on this general scheme have emerged over the years, each tweaking the rules of internal dynamics and coupling. In 1990, Strogatz and his colleague Rennie Mirollo of Boston College proved that a very simple set of firefly-like oscillators would almost always synchronize if you interconnected them, no matter how many individuals you included. The next year, Ermentrout described how groups of Pteroptyx malaccae fireflies in Southeast Asia could synchronize by speeding up or slowing down their internal frequencies. As recently as 2018, a group led by Gonzalo Marcelo Ramírez-Ávila of the Higher University of San Andrés in Bolivia devised a more complicated scheme in which fireflies switched back and forth between a “charging” state and a “discharging” state during which they flashed.

But when Peleg and Sarfati’s cameras began capturing three-dimensional data from the burst-then-wait Photinus carolinus fireflies in the Great Smokies in 2019, their analyses revealed new patterns.

One was the confirmation of something that Faust and other firefly naturalists had long reported: A burst of flashes would often start in one place and then cascade through the forest at about half a meter per second. The contagious ripples suggested that the coupling of fireflies was neither global (with the entire swarm connected) nor purely local (with each firefly caring only about close neighbors). Instead, the fireflies seemed to pay attention to other fireflies at a mix of distance scales. This could be because the fireflies can see only the flashes that occur within an unbroken sightline, Sarfati said; in the forests, vegetation often gets in the way.

P. carolinus fireflies also seem to flout a core premise of Kuramoto-flavored models: Unlike the Southeast Asian fireflies that do each flash with an intrinsic periodicity, the Tennessee fireflies do not. When Peleg and Sarfati released a single P. carolinus firefly in a tent, it emitted bursts of flashes randomly instead of following any strict rhythm. Sometimes it waited just a few seconds, other times a few minutes. “That already takes you out of the universe of all existing models,” Strogatz said.

But once the team dumped in 15 or more fireflies, the entire tent lighted up with collective flash bursts spaced about a dozen seconds apart. The synchrony and the group periodicity were purely emergent products of the fireflies hanging out together. To determine how this could happen, the Peleg group reached out to the physicist Srividya Iyer-Biswas of Purdue University and the Santa Fe Institute for help. Overnight, Iyer-Biswas’ doctoral student Kunaal Joshi analyzed their field data and developed a new model for emergent periodicity, which the scientists uploaded as a draft paper to the biorxiv.org preprint server last spring.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

Imagine an isolated firefly that has just emitted a burst of flashes, and consider the following rules. If you sequester it now, it will wait a random interval before flashing again. There is, however, a minimum wait time that the insect needs for recharging its light organs. This firefly is also susceptible to peer pressure: If it sees another firefly starting to flash, it will flash too, as long as it physically can.

Now picture a whole field of fireflies in the quiet darkness immediately following a burst. Each one picks a random wait time longer than the charging period. Whoever flashes first, though, inspires all the others to jump in immediately. This entire process repeats each time the field goes dark. As the number of fireflies increases, it becomes increasingly likely that at least one will randomly choose to flash again as soon as it’s biologically possible, and that will set off the rest. As a result, the time between bursts shortens toward the minimum wait time. Any scientists gawking at this scene will see what looks like a steady group rhythm of light rolling into darkness, then darkness erupting with light.

A second preprint from the Peleg group unearthed another exotic pattern. In Congaree National Park in South Carolina, Peleg noticed something odd when her team trained their equipment on the synchronizing firefly Photuris frontalis. “I remember seeing out of the corner of my eye that there is this little firefly that is really not on beat. But he is still punctual,” she said.

The team’s analysis showed that while a main chorus of the fireflies flashed in rhythm, stubborn outliers refused to play along. They shared the same space and flashed with their own period, but they were out of phase with the surrounding symphony. Sometimes the outliers seemed to synchronize with each other; sometimes they just flashed asynchronously. Peleg’s group describes this as a chimera state, a form of synchrony first noted by Kuramoto and his postdoc Dorjsuren Battogtokh in 2001 and explored by Strogatz and the mathematician Daniel Abrams of Northwestern University in 2004 in a mathematically idealized form. A few reports from neuroscientists claim to have seen this kind of chimera synchrony in the activity of brain cells under certain experimental conditions, but otherwise it has not been observed in nature until now.

It’s not clear why nature would favor the evolution of this hodgepodge state of synchronization rather than a more uniform one. But even basic synchrony has always posed an evolutionary mystery: How does blending in help any individual male stand out to a potential mate? Peleg suggested that studies looking at the behavioral patterns of female fireflies and not just the males might be informative. Her group has begun to do that with the P. carolinus fireflies but not yet with the chimera-prone P. frontalis species.

Lightning-Bug Computer Science

For modelers, the race is on to encapsulate the observed firefly patterns in new and improved frameworks. Ermentrout has a paper under review that offers a different mathematical description of Photinus carolinus: Suppose that instead of waiting a purely random amount of time beyond the compulsory minimum for recharging, the bugs are just noisy, irregular oscillators? The fireflies might then start to act like neatly periodic flashers only when gathered together. In computer simulations, this model also matches the Peleg group’s data. “Even though we didn’t program it in, things like the waves emerge,” Ermentrout said.

Peleg and Sarfati’s inexpensive camera-and-algorithm system may greatly help to advance—and democratize—firefly research, biologists say. Fireflies are difficult to study in the wild because telling species apart by their flashes is hard for all but the most dedicated researchers and hardcore hobbyists. This makes measuring the range and abundance of firefly populations challenging even while fears mount that many lightning bug species are on the road to extinction. The new setup can make it easier to collect, analyze, and share firefly-flashing data.

In 2021, Sarfati used the system to confirm a report from Arizona that the local species Photinus knulli can synchronize when enough of the fireflies gather together. This year Peleg’s laboratory sent 10 copies of the camera system to firefly researchers all over the U.S. They’re now taking in data from the light shows that were produced this summer by eight species. With an eye toward boosting conservation efforts, a group of machine learning researchers within the Peleg lab are trying to train an algorithm to identify species from the flash patterns in the recorded footage.

Idealized models of fireflies inspired mathematical theory for decades; Peleg hopes the more nuanced truths now emerging will be similarly consequential.

Moiseff shares that hope. Fireflies “have been doing computer science well before we even existed,” he said. Learning how they synchronize could lead to a better grasp of self-organizing behaviors in other living things too.

Editor’s note: Steven Strogatz is the host of Quanta’s Joy of Why podcast and a member of Quanta’s advisory board.

A New Explanation for How Fireflies Flash in Sync

(May require free registration to view)

 

As with every World Cup, at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar the players will be using a new ball. The last thing competitors want is for the most important piece of equipment in the most important tournament in the world’s most popular sport to behave in unexpected ways, so a lot of work goes into making sure that every new World Cup ball feels familiar to players.

 

I am a physics professor at the University of Lynchburg who studies the physics of sports. Despite controversies over corruption and human rights issues surrounding this year’s World Cup, there is still beauty in the science and skill of soccer. As part of my research, every four years I do an analysis of the new World Cup ball to see what went into creating the centerpiece of the world’s most beautiful game.

The physics of drag

Between shots on goal, free kicks, and long passes, many important moments of a soccer game happen when the ball is in the air. So one of the most important characteristics of a soccer ball is how it travels through air.

 

As a ball moves through air, a thin layer of mostly still air called the boundary layer surrounds some part of the ball. At low speeds this boundary layer will only cover the front half of the ball before the flowing air peels away from the surface. In this case, the wake of air behind the ball is somewhat regular and is called laminar flow.

 

When a ball is moving quickly, though, the boundary layer wraps much farther around the ball. When the flow of air does eventually separate from the ball’s surface, it does so in a series of chaotic swirls. This process is called turbulent flow.

 

When calculating how much force moving air imparts on a moving object—called drag—physicists use a term called the drag coefficient. For a given speed, the higher the drag coefficient is, the more drag an object feels.

 

It turns out that a soccer ball’s drag coefficient is approximately 2.5 times larger for laminar flow than for turbulent flow. Though it may seem counterintuitive, roughening a ball’s surface delays the separation of the boundary layer and keeps a ball in turbulent flow longer. This fact of physics—that rougher balls feel less drag—is the reason dimpled golf balls fly much farther than they would if the balls were smooth.

 

When it comes to making a good soccer ball, the speed at which the airflow transitions from turbulent to laminar is critical. This is because when that transition occurs, a ball begins to slow down dramatically. If laminar flow starts at too high a speed, the ball begins to slow down much more quickly than a ball that maintains turbulent flow for longer.

Evolution of the World Cup ball

Adidas has supplied balls for the World Cup since 1970. Through 2002, each ball was made with the iconic 32-panel construction. The 20 hexagonal and 12 pentagonal panels were traditionally made of leather and stitched together.

 

A new era began with the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The 2006 ball, called the Teamgesit, consisted of 14 smooth, synthetic panels that were thermally bonded together instead of stitched. The tighter, glued seal kept water out of the interior of the ball on rainy and humid days.

 

Making a ball out of new materials, with new techniques and with a smaller number of panels, changes how the ball flies through the air. Over the past three World Cups, Adidas tried to balance the panel number, seam properties, and surface texture to create balls with just the right aerodynamics.

 

The eight-panel Jabulani ball in the 2010 South Africa World Cup had textured panels to make up for shorter seams and a fewer number of panels. Despite Adidas’ efforts, the Jabulani was a controversial ball, with many players complaining that it decelerated abruptly. When my colleagues and I analyzed the ball in a wind tunnel, we found that the Jabulani was too smooth overall and so had a higher drag coefficient than the 2006 Teamgesit ball.

 

The smoother Jabulani ball from the 2010 South Africa World Cup received a lot of criticism for being slow in the air.

Picture Alliance via Getty Images

 

The World Cup balls for Brazil in 2014 – the Brazuca – and Russia in 2018 – the Telstar 18 – both had six oddly shaped panels. Though they had slightly different surface textures, they had generally the same overall surface roughness and, therefore, similar aerodynamic properties. Players generally liked the Brazuca and Telstar 18, but some complained about the tendency of the Telstar 18 to pop easily.

The World Cup ball has the aerodynamics of a champion

Word got out last night that Twitter could shut down imminently on account of owner Elon Musk telling workers to love it or leave it (ie, to go “extremely hardcore” with no change in pay or go). Turns out some are leaving – “some,” as in thousands. It’s enough to make you wonder about the whole billionaire worship thing, Helaine wrote.

“I’m not denying that some billionaires are brilliant entrepreneurs,” Helaine wrote in the Post. “But they are way less special than they are frequently told. (Some are just heirs, or lucky Powerball winners.)"

She continued:

As our men of business become more prominent and wealthier, they enter a feedback loop. Sycophants flatter instead of challenging them. This impacts their ability to hear criticism. And that leaves them more likely to cling to toadies who feed their now inflated self-image. All too often, the end result is ever larger mistakes and more ethically dubious behavior.

Of course, Helaine is right. Billionaires are human. To err is human. To err spectacularly, and destructively, is billionaire-level human.

That’s why there’s more at stake than a “peculiarly American form of worship,” as Helaine calls it. There’s more at stake than even the collapse of America’s premier public forum. We’re witnessing a democratic abomination injure democratic politics, because democratic politics is the only thing that can keep him in check.

Musk deserves ridicule, true, but he deserves more democratic contempt. Why? Because of his contempt for democratic politics.

Destroying Twitter proves it.

Musk was born into wealth in his native South Africa. The dead granted him power and privilege that he neither earned nor deserved. The day he accepted his inheritance was, moreover, the day he participated in the deprivation of other people’s political equality, which they are entitled to for the fact of being born.

Musk became a billionaire in these United States. To become a billionaire is to commit political crimes that would be otherwise impossible without a federal government of, by and for the people permitting them to happen or at least looking away while they do.

Musk then harnessed that power and privilege to shape and mold the very same federal government that initially allowed the political crimes that animate his power and privilege. To be the world’s richest man – to exist as such alone – is to profane not only political equality but the republican principle of equal treatment under law.

He is, therefore, a democratic abomination.

But that’s not all.

For all its flaws, which are many, Twitter remains the premiere public forum in America. That’s because its nature is democratic. It puts downward pressure on the orders of (white, patriarchal) power established long before Elon Musk was born but from which he still benefits. Twitter is, in other words, democratic politics in action.

As such, Twitter has played a huge role in democratizing virtually every part of society that previously had been shielded and defended by those with the most to lose from democratic politics. These parts included politics, journalism, sports, religion, business, you name it. Elites who otherwise would not have faced accountability did in part because Twitter is a public forum where the people can be heard.

Sure, Twitter can be chaotic. It can really feel like it’s everything everywhere all at once. But ultimately, Twitter gave voice to people who rarely have a voice – look up “Black Twitter” – and it flattened the (white, patriarchal) orders of power that have shaped, influenced and dominated every human society since humans stood upright.

Twitter can be democratic politics at worst – for instance, an angry mob in search of victims. But it can be democratic politics at its best – freedom of speech for the weak and powerless, accountability for the rich and powerful, and a valuable indicator of the public mood.

Good or bad, Twitter is politics from the ground up.

That’s why Musk hates it.

There are many theories as to why Elon Musk bought Twitter for billions more than it’s worth. The simplest answer is that he really believes Twitter is used as a weapon to silence unpopular points of view – and that someone (a hero!) had to do something about it.

In other words, Musk appears captive to the accusation, popular among elite white men, that these days you can’t say boo without offending someone, and that this fact is a violation of free speech.

While there are many exceptions to the rule, the rule is still pretty clear to an honest reader of the First Amendment. Twitter is not a weapon to silence people. It is, however, a source of counterspeech. It’s a place in which people who never before had a say have a say.

Pre-Twitter, elite white men could say boo while safe in the knowledge that anyone who had a platform high enough to criticize them looked just like them. Post-Twitter, not so much. Then suddenly anyone off the street could read them the riot act.

For Elon Musk and his ilk, it’s not the silencing that’s the problem. The problem is a matter of who’s doing the silencing. Pre-Twitter, elite white men could say virtually anything. They could shut up points of view they didn’t like. Democratic politics was a nuisance but it didn’t threaten their rank, nor did it call on them to answer to it.

Post-Twitter, they’re being held responsible – and they’re being held responsible by people – Black, LGBT-plus and women, for God’s sake – who have no right to hold them responsible. Worse of all, they can’t do anything to shut them up. For the powerful to be made powerless is a grievous injury. It’s enough to make you want to buy Twitter.

Then kill it.

It may be too soon to say Twitter has gone to ground. But whatever form it takes, it will likely be, in Musk’s view, a restoration of the “natural order of things” by which political elites can do and say whatever they want and the rest of us just have to put up with it.

That’s why rethinking the myth of billionaire greatness – that “peculiarly American form of worship” – isn’t enough. Musk is making choices, which are informed by politics, the kind of politics that not only has contempt for democracy but wants the people to shut up.

It’s not enough to say stop worshiping them.

We need to hold them in contempt, too.

Source

“In light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform,” Johnathan Vigliotti, CBS News national correspondent, said in a report about the latest chaos at the company on “CBS Evening News” Friday.

A statement with nearly identical wording was shared Friday by the Twitter account of KPIX, the CBS-owned station in San Francisco.

@KPIXtv tweeted: In light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News Bay Area is pausing its activity on the social media site as we continue to monitor the platform.

According to Variety, the most recent post on @CBSNews is a retweet of a segment shared at 3:38 p.m. ET about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of a special council to oversee investigations into Donald Trump. On @CBSEveningNews, the most recent tweet is a story about a dog that “turned itself in to police after getting lost during a walk,” which was posted at 5 p.m. ET. @CBSMornings last posted at 3:30 p.m. ET, linking to an article about users speculating about “whether Twitter will live or die”.

Rolling Stone reported that while CBS Los Angeles, CBS Chicago, CBS Dallas and CBS New York didn’t tweet the statement, none of those affiliates have tweeted anything over the past 20 hours. CBS’ main Twitter account also hasn’t posted anything since Thursday.

According to Rolling Stone, the Twitter accounts for shows like CBS Evening News, CBS Mornings, and CBS News itself also stopped tweeting since midday Friday, and many of their correspondents – including Vigliotti, Scott MacFarlane, and Vladimir Duthiers – have refrained from tweeting since the statement was put out.

The Hill reported that the statement that CBS News tweeted came after Twitter employees resigned en mass on Thursday night, in response to Musk’s ultimatum to either get on board with a “hardcore” work environment or leave.

This is the first time I’ve heard of a news organization choosing to stop posting information on Twitter due to “the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution”. It is unclear to me exactly why they made that decision, but it could potentially be due to the chaos that Elon Musk’s decision making has brought to Twitter.

I wonder if other news sites will also stop posting on Twitter? If so, that could potentially result in lack of news sources available on Twitter. We could be going back to seeking out the news websites instead of their Twitter accounts – like we did before Twitter existed.

Source

Like the monster miraculously resuscitated to terrorize the heroes in a horror-movie sequel, Donald Trump is back.

No, I’m not talking about his November 15 announcement of his third campaign for president of the United States. Instead I have in mind something far more important: Twitter.

On the evening of November 17, Elon Musk—the richest man in the world and Twitter’s new owner—posted a poll asking users of the site whether he should “Reinstate former President Trump,” who was banned from the platform after his instigation of the insurrection on January 6. Musk’s followers voted in favor, though there’s no guarantee that the poll wasn’t manipulated by the same bots that Musk has spent the past several months railing against. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted, and Trump’s account was magicked back into existence.

This entire incident is terrifically stupid. The story revolves around the whims of two wealthy and self-involved men who enjoy nothing more than public attention. It is an enormous waste of everyone’s time, and I resent having to think about it.

During Trump’s 22-month “permanent suspension” from Twitter, the account was obscured from anyone who tried to look for it: Typing @realDonaldTrump into Twitter produced a blank gray screen that simply announced, “Account suspended.” Now, however, Trump’s old tweets are back, preserved like the citizens of Pompeii frozen amid the ashes of Mount Vesuvius. His most recent tweet dates to January 8, 2021, the day he was banned: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” If you want a reminder of what led Twitter to block him from its platform due to “the risk of further incitement of violence,” you can scroll through the former president’s other tweets from the day of the insurrection. (But not his tweets egging on the Capitol rioters’ rage against Vice President Mike Pence or calling the insurrectionists “great patriots”—he deleted those posts before the account’s deactivation.)

Musk, though, is clearly unconcerned about the risk of future violence. His decision, the childishness of its implementation aside, isn’t particularly surprising. In May, while Musk was still locked in a legal battle over his attempt to back out of purchasing Twitter, he called the site’s decision to ban Trump “foolish in the extreme” and suggested that he would reinstate the former president.

When Musk announced his decision, some Twitter users, predictably, freaked out. A number of people announced that they would be leaving the platform. Doom and gloom proliferated. Representative Liz Cheney of the January 6 committee posted a tweet of her own suggesting that Twitter users might be interested in watching the committee’s hearing documenting how Trump’s tweets contributed to the violence of the insurrection.

One person, though, has been notably quiet: Trump himself. He has not yet tweeted—and his contractual obligations to Truth Social, the platform created to act as Trump’s alternative online home during his Twitter ban, may actually limit what he can post to his newly revived account. In public remarks after Musk issued his poll, Trump said he didn’t “see any reason” to return to Twitter: “Truth Social has taken the place for a lot of people, and I don’t see them going back onto Twitter.”

That said, Truth Social is a far smaller platform than Twitter: Trump’s following there (4.6 million) is dwarfed by his following on Twitter (88 million). And Trump is not known for honoring his word. His return wouldn’t be surprising. A world with Trump back on Twitter, once more campaigning for office and newly able to broadcast his hatreds and destabilizing whims, is likely riskier than a world with Trump banned from Twitter. In a time of rising political violence, handing a megaphone back to this man is a dangerous thing.

But as David A. Graham wrote in The Atlantic when Musk first took over Twitter, there is no guarantee that the former president will be able to recapture the magic. The political situation has shifted. Most saliently, Trump is, well, no longer president. The unique power of his tweets always lay in the fact that he could reorient the direction of the U.S. government with his words alone. That power is no longer his—which is exactly the truth he attempted to undo when he sicced rioters on Congress on January 6.

There are a million lenses through which to understand Trump’s potential return to Twitter. Consider the ramifications for social-media platforms alone. What will happen to Trump’s suspended Facebook account? What might Trump’s sojourn at Truth Social show researchers about the impact of “deplatforming”—the banishing of toxic users from a social-media website? Truth Social runs on Mastodon, the decentralized social-media network that many Twitter users are now treating as a life raft. If Trump stays on Truth Social, and onetime Twitter aficionados flee to Mastodon, what could that signal about the growth of smaller, less-centralized networks as a possible future for social media?

Ultimately, though, I find something absurd and even insulting about having to consider these questions at all. You are reading this, and I am writing it, because a very rich man who desperately wants people to pay attention to him posted an easily rigged poll on the website he’d just bought for $44 billion. The answers to many of the questions I have just posed will depend on the fancies of another rich man who desperately wants people to pay attention to him. There’s an indignity to having one’s attention jerked around this way.

Demanding that people simply ignore these bumbling titans is too simplistic: Their flailing has a tendency to wreck the world that the rest of us live in. But we can at least be more discerning in what kind of attention we pay them, and why. Throughout the Trump administration, journalists struggled to provide the public with crucial information without simply amplifying Trump’s absurdities or giving him the attention he so craved.

The press was not entirely successful, but recent news coverage of Trump’s 2024 run suggests that journalists have learned some lessons. In their stories on Trump’s presidential announcement, for example, The Washington Post and NPR chose not to focus on his latest provocations, instead highlighting Trump’s role in the insurrection and the threat he poses to democracy.

If Trump rejoins Twitter, the press must hold on to this approach rather than reverting to the breathless, substance-free coverage that often took hold during Trump’s time in office. And because journalists learned the hard way how—and how not—to cover Trump, they should apply some of those lessons to the public discussion about Musk as well. He cannot, unfortunately, be tuned out entirely. (I can attest to this: I muted Musk on Twitter in a fit of pique more than a year ago, but it turns out that all this does nowadays is make it extremely difficult to follow what’s happening on the platform.) But we can refuse to allow him to entirely reshape the scope of our attention.

For journalists, that means thinking more critically about how to cover Musk, perhaps widening the aperture to consider not just the man himself but the larger forces that made his Twitter takeover possible, and the effects of his actions on the broader world. For the average Twitter user, that might simply mean not panicking too much about Musk’s decision to reinstate Trump just yet. There will be plenty of time to do that if, and when, Twitter’s most notorious poster reopens the bird app. And if it does come to that, you can always find me on Mastodon.

Source

Elon Musk reinstated Donald Trump’s account on Twitter on Saturday, reversing a ban that has kept the former president off the social media site since a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was poised to certify Joe Biden’s election victory.

Musk made the announcement in the evening after holding a poll that asked Twitter users to click “yes” or “no” on whether Trump’s account should be restored. The “yes” vote won, with 51.8%. Previously, Musk had said Twitter would establish new procedures and a “content moderation council” before making decisions to restore suspended accounts.

“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted, using a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God.”

Shortly afterward Trump’s account, which had earlier appeared as suspended, reappeared on the platform complete with his former tweets, more than 59,000 of them. His followers were gone, at least initially, but he quickly began regaining them. There were no new tweets from the account as of late Saturday, however.

Musk restored the account less than a month after the Tesla CEO took control of Twitter and four days after Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential race.

It is not clear whether Trump would actually return to Twitter. An irrepressible tweeter before he was banned, Trump has said in the past that he would not rejoin even if his account was reinstated. He has been relying on his own, much smaller social media site, Truth Social, which he launched after being blocked from Twitter.

‘A lot of problems at Twitter’

And on Saturday, during a video speech to a Republican Jewish group meeting in Las Vegas, Trump said that he was aware of Musk’s poll but that he saw “a lot of problems at Twitter.”

“I hear we’re getting a big vote to also go back on Twitter. I don’t see it because I don’t see any reason for it,” Trump said. “It may make it, it may not make it,” he added, apparently referring to Twitter’s recent internal upheavals.

The prospect of restoring Trump’s presence to the platform follows Musk’s purchase last month of Twitter — an acquisition that has fanned widespread concern that the billionaire owner will allow purveyors of lies and misinformation to flourish on the site. Musk has frequently expressed his belief that Twitter had become too restrictive of freewheeling speech.

His efforts to reshape the site have been both swift and chaotic. Musk has fired many of the company’s 7,500 full-time workers and an untold number of contractors who are responsible for content moderation and other crucial responsibilities. His demand that remaining employees pledge to “extremely hardcore” work triggered a wave of resignations, including hundreds of software engineers.

Users have reported seeing increased spam and scams on their feeds and in their direct messages, among other glitches, in the aftermath of the mass layoffs and worker exodus. Some programmers who were fired or resigned this week warned that Twitter may soon fray so badly it could actually crash.

Musk’s online survey, posted on his own Twitter account, drew more than 15 million votes in the 24 hours in which it ran.

Musk conceded that the results were hardly scientific. “Bot & troll armies might be running out of steam soon,” he tweeted Saturday morning. “Some interesting lessons to clean up future polls.”

It’s not the first time he’s used Twitter polling to make business decisions. Last year he sold millions of shares of his Tesla stock after asking his followers whether he should.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York responded to Musk’s poll on Trump by tweeting video of the Jan. 6 insurrection. She tweeted Friday that when Trump was last on Twitter, it “was used to incite an insurrection, multiple people died, the Vice President of the United States was nearly assassinated, and hundreds were injured but I guess that’s not enough for you to answer the question. Twitter poll it is.”

Trump lost his access to Twitter two days after his supporters stormed the Capitol, soon after the former president had exhorted them to “fight like hell.” Twitter dropped his account after Trump wrote a pair of tweets that the company said cast further doubts on the legitimacy of the presidential election and raised risks for the Biden presidential inauguration.

After the Jan. 6 attack, Trump was also kicked off Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by Meta Platforms, and Snapchat. His ability to post videos to his YouTube channel was also suspended. Facebook is set to reconsider Trump’s suspension in January.

Throughout his tenure as president, Trump’s use of social media posed a significant challenge to major social media platforms that sought to balance the public’s interest in hearing from public officials with worries about misinformation, bigotry, harassment and incitement of violence.

But in a speech at an auto conference in May, Musk asserted that Twitter’s ban of Trump was a “morally bad decision” and “foolish in the extreme.”

Earlier this month, Musk, who completed the $44 billion takeover of Twitter in late October, declared that the company wouldn’t let anyone who had been kicked off the site return until Twitter had established procedures on how to do so, including forming a “content moderation council.”

On Friday, Musk tweeted that the suspended Twitter accounts for the comedian Kathy Griffin, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and the conservative Christian news satire website Babylon Bee had been reinstated. He added that a decision on Trump had not yet been made. He also responded “no” when someone on Twitter asked him to reinstate the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ account.

In a tweet Friday, the Tesla CEO described the company’s new content policy as “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.”

He explained that a tweet deemed to be “negative” or to include “hate” would be allowed on the site but would be visible only to users who specifically searched for it. Such tweets also would be “demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter,” Musk said.

Source

Smart watches have accelerometers that measure the direction of your movement and allow the software to figure out if you’re walking or running. They have GPS to work out how far you travel, which helps establish your stride length. They have altimeters that figure out if you’re climbing up or down.

Some smart watches also measure your pulse or detect irregular heartbeats. Your heart causes your blood vessels to dilate and contract every time it pushes blood. Using a process called photoplethysmography, green LEDs on the watch shine light through your skin and measure the reflection from the changing amounts of red blood cells within your wrist.

Source

The move follows a Twitter poll ran by Elon Musk that asked users whether to reinstate Trump's account—the majority of 15 million respondents answered affirmatively.

Free speech or King Elon's free rein

Many are shocked to see the @realDonaldTrump account back on Twitter while others are cheering "welcome back," as Twitter restores Donald Trump's account along with its data and followers as they were pre-"permanent suspension."

Twitter's 180 degree turn comes after roughly 52% of all respondents voted to bring back Trump's presence to Twitterverse, in a poll started by the platform's CEO Elon Musk:

Musk polled Tweeters on whether Trump's suspension should be lifted (BleepingComputer)

 

15,000,000 votes gushed in at the rate of about 1 million votes every hour.

"The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei," tweeted Musk today.

Like the 2016 U.S. Presidential election itself, the controversial decision has left Twitter polarized.

In January 2021, Twitter had permanently suspended Trump's account citing concerns that his tweets may cause further violence in the United States amid the Capitol riots.

Trump's Twitter account suspended in 2021 (BleepingComputer)

 

Back then, Twitter had given several reasons before booting Trump off of the platform for good. These reasons included:

• President Trump's statement that he will not be attending the Inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate and is seen as him disavowing his previous claim made via two Tweets (1, 2) by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Dan Scavino, that there would be an "orderly transition" on January 20th.
   
• The second Tweet may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending. 
   
• The use of the words "American Patriots" to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.
   
• The mention of his supporters having a "GIANT VOICE long into the future" and that "They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!" is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an "orderly transition" and instead that he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election. 
   
• Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021. 

Trump indifferent

As to whether Trump will actually be using Twitter to engage with his followers, it does not seem so.

At the Republican Jewish Coalition's annual leadership meeting held this weekend, Trump responded to a panelist with:

"[Elon] did put up a poll and I hear it's very overwhelming, very strong," but that he prefers to stick to the Trump-owned "Truth Social" platform that is doing "phenomenally well" in terms of engagement, touts the former president.

"I don't see any reason for it," responded Trump on his plans to returning to Twitter, mainly citing "a lot of problems you see on Twitter," including "negative" engagements and presence of a lot of bots.

Simultaneously, Mastodon has seen an explosive growth with millions flocking to the social media alternative amid ongoing tensions at Twitter.

Today's decision is the latest among a series of Twitter shakeups following Musk's takeover, including sudden leadership changes, mass resignations, Twitter Blue paid verification system which has led to abuse by crypto scammers and phishing actors.

Unsurprisingly, in King Elon's world, hardly anything seems permanent.

Source

Waymo is all set to begin its fully autonomous cab services in San Francisco. The Alphabet-owned company finally got its Driverless Pilot permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) which allows it to pick passengers up without a driver behind the wheel.

Although the permit allows Waymo to provide rides in its autonomous vehicles, it does not allow it to charge its passengers for the same. Waymo can provide rides throughout San Francisco, Daly City, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain Views, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale.

The autonomous car company first started testing rides in San Francisco earlier this year with employees and the company's "Trusted Tester" program members.

What's next for Waymo is getting a Driverless Deployment permit from CPUC which will allow it to charge for its autonomous services in the region. The CPUC has already issued its first-ever Driverless Deployment permit to Cruise which allows it to charge collect fairs but not offer shared rides between passengers from different parties.

Even though autonomous cab hailing services from Waymo are new to San Francisco, the company has been operating in the Phoenix metropolitan area since 2017. Last week, the company announced that it's operating fully autonomous services in Downtown Phoenix as well.

Source: CPUC (via Engadget)

Waymo gets CPUC approval to start its autonomous cab services in San Francisco

Monday, November 21

• The first launch we have this week is from SpaceX. At 2:57 a.m. UTC, the company, will launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral carrying the Eurtelsat 10B communications satellite. Once in orbit, the satellite will provide maritime and in-flight broadband, data, and video connectivity to customers in the Americas, the Atlantic Ocean, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The launch should be available to watch through SpaceX’s website.

Tuesday, November 22

• The second launch this week will also be conducted by SpaceX. At 8:54 p.m. UTC, a Falcon 9 will take off from Florida carrying a Dragon 2 spacecraft, which will take operational cargo to the International Space Station. Aboard the Dragon 2 will be two ISS Roll Out Solar Array (iROSA) for the ISS Power Augmentation (IPA) programme. This mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract. This mission will also feature on the SpaceX website.

Thursday, November 24

• At 1:50 p.m. UTC, China will launch a Long March 2D rocket carrying three Yaogan 36 satellites. These remote sensing satellites will perform many jobs including science experiments, land and resource surveys, agricultural production estimates, and disaster prevention and mitigation. Unlike the SpaceX launches, it’s unlikely this one will be broadcasted live, so check next week’s Recap section for a video of the launch.

Friday, November 25

• The first launch today is Arianespace’s Vega C rocket, which is carrying Pleiades Neo 5 and 6, Earth observation satellites. There will also be an OQ Technology nano satellite catching a ride to space too. The two Pleiades satellites were made by Airbus Defence & Space and are capable of taking picture with a 30 cm ground resolution. They will use laser communication to transmit data. This mission is due to take off at 1:47 a.m. UTC from French Guyana.
• The second launch of the day will be ExPace’s Kuaizhou 1A rocket. It’ll take off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 6:00 a.m. UTC with an unknown payload.

Saturday, November 26

• China is set to launch its second Long March rocket on the weekend, this time it will be the Long March 2F/G. It will be carrying the Shenzhou 15 spacecraft to the Chinese Space Station with a crew of three, who are yet to be named. The spacecraft will feature an upgraded guidance, navigation, and control system (GNC) to meet new demands. It’s not clear what time the mission will launch, but it’ll take off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.
• The final launch of the week comes from India. The South Asian nation will launch a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) carrying the Earth Observation Satellite 6 (EOS 6). The satellite will perform ocean observation, gathering data such as ocean colour, sea surface temperature, and wind vector data. Several secondary payloads will launch on this rocket as well. The mission is due to launch from Sriharikota at 8:00 a.m. UTC.

Recap

• On November 15 at 1:38 a.m. UTC, China launched a Long March 4C carrying the third Yaogan 34 remote sensing satellite from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.

• A day later, we got the launch we’ve all been waiting for, NASA’s Artemis I mission. The Space Launch System sent an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a trip to the Moon.

• On the same day, a Ceres 1 rocket launched five Jilin 1 Gaofen 03D satellites into orbit.

• Possibly the most dramatic launch of the week came from India when the country launched a VIKRAM-S suborbital rocket. Check out the video below.

Be sure to check back next week for more rocket launches!

TWIRL 92: Shenzhou 15 mission will take an unknown crew to the other space station

Researchers build a working camera out of atomically thin semiconductors

That security dilemma was on full display at the 11th International Defense Exhibition and Seminar (IDEAS) in Karachi, where seven Chinese defense companies showcased an array of advanced weapons to delegates from more than 50 countries and regions.

Among the advanced Chinese weapons on display were Wing Loong drones, CH-series drones, a multi-role drone ship, the Y-9E transport plane, the LY-70 air defense system, VT-4 main battle tank (MBT), SR5 multiple launch rocket system (MLRS), YLC-2E multi-role radar, a command information system, and an electronic warfare defense system, the Communist Party-run Global Times reported.

Pakistan already operates substantial amounts of Chinese military equipment, namely the VT-4 MBT, SH-15 self-propelled howitzer, Type 054 A/P frigates, JF-17 and J-10C fighter jets and the ZDK-03 early warning aircraft, the Global Times report noted.

Spinning those procurements to diplomatic effect, the Global Times report cites an unnamed Pakistani defense official saying that China’s military equipment is “famous internationally” and that defense cooperation between the two sides is exemplary.

An anonymous Chinese military expert, also cited by the state-run Global Times, claimed that China and Pakistan are expected to deepen their defense relations, as Chinese weapons have boosted Pakistan’s national defense as a “system.”

At the same time, China’s arms exports to Pakistan no doubt aim to divert India’s strategic attention from their simmering border disputes in the Himalayas, which in recent years have flared into lethal violence.

Pakistani naval personnel stand guard near a ship carrying containers at the China-invested Gwadar port. Photo: AFP / Aamir Quereshi

Moreover, China may seek to arm Pakistan to better deal with terrorist threats to its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), including the two sides’ US$60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, and piracy threats from the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa.

However, China’s military exports to Pakistan may be of dubious quality. These issues make Pakistan’s aging Western weapons, including its US-made F-16s from the 1980s, still its most potent assets against its longtime rival India.

In a June 2022 article for Geopolitica, Fabbri di Valerio notes that Pakistan’s four earlier Chinese-made Zulfiqar frigates are plagued with faulty electronics, serious engine defects and non-functional weapons, forcing the Pakistani Navy to operate the ships with degraded capabilities.

In addition, this April, The Print reported that Pakistan is facing reliability issues with its China-made tanks, radars and air defense systems, with the tanks failing post-delivery trials and artillery pieces encountering faults in their rammer assembly and breech lock.

Low-grade and unreliable Chinese weaponry has compelled Pakistan to maintain its longstanding defense ties with the US. During the Cold War, Pakistan’s need to counter India and its alignment with the Soviet Union were the main drivers of the US-Pakistan defense relationship.

However, the US suspended arms sales to Pakistan in the 1990s due to nuclear proliferation concerns, and only slightly changed the policy due to counterterrorism cooperation gaining traction after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Now, the US may aim to revive its relatively dormant defense relationship with Pakistan to counter China’s rising influence in South Asia and use Pakistan as a bargaining chip to keep India in line with US interests, including vis-à-vis Russia and the war in Ukraine. 

This September, the US approved a US$450 million upgrade package for Pakistan’s F-16 fleet, an apparent reversal of its longstanding ban on arms sales to the country. The upgrade package includes contractor engineering, technical assistance and logistics services for follow-on support.

The US government has also said that Pakistan’s F-16 fleet will receive engine and hardware modifications and support, classified and unclassified software, and other software support.

The upgrade package, however, does not include new capabilities, weapons or munitions. Instead, it aims to improve Pakistan’s counterterrorism capabilities by upgrading its air-to-ground abilities.

A Pakistani F-16 in flight. Photo: Wikipedia

Despite these claims, India has responded strongly to the US move to upgrade Pakistan’s F-16s. While India likely doesn’t believe that refurbishing Pakistan’s old F-16s alone will significantly shift their military balance of power, India will remain the primary target of Pakistan’s F-16 fleet, The Times of India reports this September.

The US decision to upgrade Pakistan’s F-16s may be an underhanded move to signal its displeasure with India for its continued purchases of Russian oil during the ongoing Ukraine war.

This month, The Hindu reported that Russia had become India’s top oil supplier, which now makes up 22% of India’s energy imports, up from only 0.2% in March 2022. India has boosted its imports of Russian oil from 68,600 barrels per day (BPD) in March, to 835,556 BPD in October.

Yet Pakistan cannot reliably count on the US to keep supplying it with weapons to keep India in line, as India is a member of the US-led Quad alliance, which brings together the US, Japan, Australia and India to counter China’s growing Indo-Pacific power and influence.

Source

Xi has a devoted mass base but alienating so many elites is risky and his support could quickly dissolve if the economy keeps faltering

Bill Overholt was the first person I am aware of to raise the possibility that on any metric – purchasing power parity, whatever – the Chinese economy would come to match in scale the US economy. That was in the very early 1990s, at which point it was generally regarded as a bizarre and unlikely observation.

He proved to be right about that and he has over the years proven to be right about many other things. He brings a unique combination of a business perspective, a political perspective and an economic perspective. His preoccupation for the last year or so has been China’s economic prospects or lack thereof.

Dr Overholt’s remarks:

Let me begin by summarizing my theme: Xi Jinping is not going to enjoy his third term.

Let’s start by looking at China’s long-run economic prospects. There are some very common views on that. The most common view, particularly in the national security community, is that China has demonstrated an exceptional ability to grow and, therefore, even if it slows some, it’s certainly going to continue to grow faster than the United States and eventually will tower over it.

As former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has often pointed out, we Americans tend to exaggerate the present and future prowess of anyone seen as a rival. We did it with the Soviets and we did it with the Japanese. We’re doing it again.

There is an opposite argument that autocracies cannot sustain economic growth and therefore China can’t. Autocracies, we are told, cannot promote officials based on merit, cannot do long-range plans, and in general cannot sustain growth.

This argument is a triumph of modern political economy. It combines conceptual incoherence, two logical fallacies and a regression on an invalid database to come to a false conclusion that we like to hear. It’s not helpful to understanding China.

So, what are the prospects for the Chinese economy? Slow, slow, slow after 2030. I’m not talking here about the current property and Covid slowdown, which has precipitated a stampede of new pessimists. China will cope and partially bounce back – but, later, the real problems begin.

China’s rapid growth has been based largely on three drivers: property, infrastructure and urbanization. By the end of this decade, those drivers will be mostly exhausted. The property bubble is popping and is being managed partly by inflating an infrastructure bubble.

Two worsening drags on the economy exacerbate the problem of exhausted drivers. China will continue to need to service the debts that financed the property and infrastructure bubbles. Above all, an aging population is becoming a huge economic burden and that burden falls on a declining workforce.

A weakened private sector provides 90% of urban employment, 100% of net job creation, over half of all exports and, according to Vice Premier Liu He, 70% of innovation. Under Xi Jinping private sector investment and credit have drastically declined. While the big private companies are taking market share from the big state enterprises, the private sector as a whole is being squeezed.

The big banks cannot do creditworthy lending to local private companies and Xi Jinping’s excessive reform of shadow banking eliminated too many of the institutions that could do such lending.

Internet financial companies like Ant Financial provided a potential solution, but the government feared their control of data and their disintermediation of the banks. So the government has grabbed control of the data and assumes the big state banks can use it efficiently; more likely this will be like a merger of Twitter and Tesla.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s Ant Financial was cause for fear in Xi’s view. Image: Facebook

Xi Jinping is not trying to curtail the private sector but he is trying to strengthen the state sector. This forces one to ask whether China will experience Japanification, which is stagnation that results from domination of the economy by a group of large conglomerates in cahoots with a government that thinks it can drive the economy forward by subsidizing and protecting those companies. China’s companies are much more competitive and dynamic than Japan’s.

However, the Japanese experience does have two ominous implications for China. First, as happened in Japan, Beijing’s industrial policies, designed to achieve dominance in every modern industrial sector, are likely to have some very expensive successes and even more very expensive failures.

Second, as China adopts its own industrial standards different from those of the West, it risks isolating itself the way Japan isolated its cell phone companies and thereby handed the global market to Apple and Samsung.

Services are and will be the dominant sector of China’s economy. Services have exceeded half of the economy since 2015. But the modern services sector – finance, accounting, law, journalism, much of education – has been highly protected. Unlike manufacturing, whose efficiency has been hardened by intense international competition, much of the vital service sector remains stodgy, politicized and corrupt.

Modern financial and legal systems are vital for entrepreneurship and efficiency. For future Chinese growth this is an opportunity as well as a drag, but, except for a slow financial opening, policy is looking inward. It’s a drag.

The breadth of Chinese growth owes much to governmental and Communist Party entrepreneurship. Early in the reform era, the leadership basically sought to turn its vast bureaucracy into Drexel Burnham with Chinese characteristics.

They deprived local government of adequate fiscal resources but allowed them to start businesses. They gave officials at all levels strict goals but pointedly didn’t ask questions about how they achieved those goals. Overnight town and village enterprises employed 110 million people.

Up and down the bureaucracy entrepreneurship flourished. Teachers gave each student half a dozen eggs and taught them how to raise chickens in order to support the school. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism became a consulting firm. Everybody grew, at the cost of universal rule-breaking and risky financial management.

Xi Jinping’s highly politicized crackdown on corruption terminates this era. From the bottom of the bureaucracy to the top, everybody is afraid of being accused of corruption. If you act decisively on anything, a change in the political wind can knock you down permanently. When there are so many rules, and so many political requirements, any decision makes you vulnerable.

In New York City, when the subway workers want to shut the system down in protest, they declare a “work to rule” – an industrial action in which everyone is supposed to observe working rules and hours precisely so as to lower output and efficiency. Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese bureaucracy has gone from Drexel Burnham with Chinese characteristics to a work to rule. This affects everything.

Possibly the least of China’s problems is the activation of party committees in every firm, public and private, as the ultimate arbiters of strategic business decisions. We don’t know how this will work out across China. Likely the outcomes will be different in different regions and different sectors.

We do know that, in many of the large companies in Beijing, the agenda of the party secretary is quite different from that of the CEO. Across China, this rule may mean a little sand in the gears or a lot of sand in the gears, but it is sand in the gears.

Finally, foreign investors are going to be far more careful about what and how much they put in China. Foreign direct investment has proved vital to China’s economic success. When China joined the World Trade Organization its superior openness to foreign automobile companies – an openness unimaginable to Japan and South Korea – saved the American car industry.

Foxconn employees operate on the assembly line at the Foxconn factory in Longhua, Shenzhen, China. Image: AFP

Foreign businesses rushed to China and they defended China against protectionist attacks.

But now, if Huawei or CATL (the battery manufacturer) is given full access to the US and European markets while foreigners are held to a small share of the Chinese market, the Chinese giants will utterly destroy their foreign competition. Not through superior business but through unfair access.

China now needs foreigners less than it once did, but it still needs them. Quite aside from Western national security actions, the resulting determination of foreign businesses to diversify their supply chains will have some negative effect on Chinese growth.

China will have economic wins. It is the world leader in every form of green energy and its exceptional success in reducing the carbon content of its energy use contrasts sharply with the pathetic record of the United States.

China will set the standard for good trains and, given the current US administration’s protectionism, the US will continue to have no Asian-class trains. China’s space program is, and will continue to be, world-class.

Beijing’s focus on digitization and artificial intelligence in industry will generate some gains. I forecast that Biden’s recent semiconductor decisions will circuitously lead China to triumphant success in semiconductors while US protectionism degrades its own semiconductor industry.

But the overall Chinese future will be slow growth. And meanwhile, aside from overall growth, China is also experiencing an unsettling budget transition. At the turn of the century, GDP was growing very fast and government revenues were growing twice as fast. The Chinese economy was monetizing and tax collection was improving. Extraordinary revenue growth created a bull market mentality.

When Xi Jinping first took power, it seemed the Chinese government could do anything and everything – eliminate poverty, fund social services for an aging population, build the world’s greatest infrastructure, grow a military to compete with the US, commit a trillion dollars or more to the Belt and Road Initiative and buy the world’s great ports and its great technology companies.

Now economic growth is slower and revenue growth has to converge with GDP growth. The transition from bull-market mentality to sobriety is difficult. Sobriety hit hard in 2022. The emergent sobriety coincides with a new politics.

What is that new politics? The conventional wisdom is that Xi Jinping is China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and can do just about anything. That’s nonsense.

I’ll begin with the context. Leaders’ greatest task throughout modern Chinese history has been to create stability out of chaos. Mao Zedong unified the country and Chinese opinion reveres him for that despite privation, starvation and millions of deaths.

Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong are both loved by the Chinese Communist Party. Photo: Wallpapersafari.com

Into the 1990s, though, Beijing still confronted basic challenges of stability and unity. During that decade, under Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, the government first became capable of vital government functions like controlling the money supply, suppressing inflation, replacing provincial leaders as needed and reassigning military commanders at will. These achievements culminated one of world history’s most difficult tasks.

However, the early 21st century brought retrogression. Under Hu Jintao (2003-2012) ministers often defied the prime minister and private sector leaders often derided the prime minister’s edicts. Local leaders flouted central government directives. Spectacular corruption undermined party legitimacy. Private companies dominated growth, new employment, and innovation, and some were becoming politically assertive.

Demonstrations rose by an order of magnitude and an embarrassed government stopped publishing the statistics. Marxism was becoming a boring class required of resentful students. Party membership was largely opportunistic.

Vice ministers were being sent to Harvard and Oxford and were returning with contaminated thoughts. Reform dynamism vanished. Communist Party leadership seemed to the leaders of that party to be at risk. Faced with this, Hu Jintao, crippled by diabetes and committed to collective leadership, vacillated.

This backsliding reflected a weak party leader and the corrupt family of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. But, more fundamentally, Chinese society had passed a threshold of social complexity. Economic success turned a simple economy into an immensely complex one, and each segment had education, resources, organizational skills, political interests and expanding cosmopolitan connections to the outside world.

This was the point in social development when China’s developmental dictatorship predecessors in South Korea and Taiwan had acknowledged social changes and responded with more market-oriented economics and more market-driven politics. Xi made an opposite choice.

Xi Jinping’s mandate was to resolve the crisis of complexity: ensure order, restore central control, reignite economic reform and save the party. This immense assignment seemed disproportionate to Xi’s limited domestic political base, which peers expected would render him controllable.

Until very late in the selection process, he had a formidable opponent, Bo Xilai, party secretary of Chongqing, whose charisma and similar leadership strategy – anti-corruption campaign, Maoist slogans, populist songs, successful infrastructure development, attentiveness to the rural poor – had cultivated a more extensive popular and elite base than Xi’s.

After Bo fell, much of the party still preferred Li Keqiang, who became prime minister only to be crushed like other rivals.

Despite a narrow political base, Xi did not vacillate. Corruption had to be conquered, potential challengers routed, civil society atomized, government and economy centralized, party control rendered absolute, Marxism reimposed, regrettable history erased, nationalism inflamed and foreign ideas filtered.

The threat was omnipresent: corruption everywhere, civil society and cosmopolitan ideas everywhere, personal vulnerabilities raw. So Xi sought personal control of everything. His multiple titles put him in charge of the party, the government, the military and eight powerful “leading small groups” that manage everything from “comprehensive deepening of reform” to economic and financial management, internet security and informatization, military reform, and national security coordination.

With remarkable efficacy, he banished all potential challengers. He broke established norms such as the two-term limit and the requirement to groom successors. He wrote himself into China’s constitution.

Numerous titles and totally suppressed opposition do not, however, evidence confident, absolute power. Xi is accountable to the Communist Party, whereas Putin’s party is an entourage supporting his accumulation of power and money.

For another perspective, imagine a US conglomerate CEO who appoints himself managing director of every important business unit; he would be perceived as insecure and unskilled at delegation.

In contrast, preeminent leader Deng Xiaoping could have destroyed his ideological opponent Deng Liqun and his market reform opponent Chen Yun, but he had the confidence and wisdom not to do so. Indeed, Deng’s leadership team (the “eight immortals”) comprised immensely powerful figures with conflicting ideas and momentous power scheming.

US President Jimmy Carter, in 1979, receives Deng Xiaoping. Photo: Wikipedia

Likewise, China’s success under Jiang Zemin resulted from Jiang’s wise balancing of personalities as different as reformist Zhu Rongji and conservative Li Peng. The ultimate confident leader of modern Chinese history was Deng Xiaoping in his later years, leading China with one title: honorary chairman of the Chinese Bridge Players Society.

To assert central, and specifically party, authority, to attack corruption, and to acquire the clout to impose his will on the economy, Xi took on every elite group at once. The anti-corruption campaign jailed over 100,000 officials of the party, the government, the military and business, including top generals and the Politburo Standing Committee member managing security.

State enterprise leaders lost half their compensation. Private sector credit and investment collapsed. Giant conglomerates disintegrated. Tech sector executives and investors lost $2 trillion in the recent regulatory crackdown. Clean energy leaders personally lost $140 billion.

Provincial and local leaders have found their jurisdictions in a financial squeeze and their personal incomes slashed. Simultaneously they lost their innovative freedom of action. Central and local officials, formerly notable for their innovative energy, are demoralized, fearful and immobilized.

Wealthy and middle-class parents seek to get their money and children out of the country, forcing Xi to enhance capital controls and restrict officials from having family and property abroad.

The crackdown on companies hurt the bankers and Xi’s reforms decimated the enormously important shadow banking sector. To demolish any potential civil-society resistance, Xi has repressed teachers, tutors, lawyers, journalists, feminists, homosexuals, Christians, Muslims, Falun Gong, NGOs. Many enemies.

Xi’s anti-corruption campaign is enormously popular with the masses. Likewise, his assertion of Chinese global leadership and his blaming of problems on America was as seductive in China as Trump’s similar blaming of Muslims and foreigners was popular in America. Cracking down on what he saw as the spoiled, pampered people of Hong Kong and the separatists and terrorists of Xinjiang also garnered mass support.

The elite honors Xi for saving the Communist Party but is very skeptical about his retrograde economics and politics.

Xi’s political strategy contrasts with that of Turkey’s founding leader, Kemal Ataturk, who, facing many groups that needed reform, sequentially amassed powerful coalitions, then confronted resistant groups one at a time.

Xi has a devoted mass base comprising the overwhelming majority of the population, but alienating so much of the elite is risky and the mass base could start to dissolve if the economy continues to falter.

Xi’s control of propaganda, the security apparatus, the party, and economic management ensure that he can maintain mass support and, for now, suppress overt manifestations of elite discontent. He will almost certainly be able to maintain this stability through his third term. Nonetheless, his actual policies and power are at risk.

Successful pushback limits further crackdown on internet platforms. The umbrella phrase for his social goals, “Common Prosperity,” barely made it into important recent policy documents. The Belt and Road Initiative is downplayed. Propaganda organs intensely spread pro-Russian propaganda, but from May the majority of WeChat users have been pro-Ukraine.

Xi spent so much of his first decade in the top job consolidating power that he had to rush to notch important accomplishments in year ten. But year ten has not been a good year.

Xi’s protectionism deprived Chinese of access to effective vaccines and necessitated lockdowns of hundreds of millions of people. With the lockdowns and bursting property bubble as catalysts, the once-triumphal mood in China changed drastically.

Chinese President Xi Jinping waves to residents who are quarantined at home and sends regards to them at a community in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, March 10, 2020. Photo: Xinhua / Pang Xinglei

For years consensus opinion held that China was rising, the United States declining and that the superior wisdom of technocratic Chinese leaders ensures constant success. The atmosphere resembled the earlier American triumphalism of George W Bush and Dick Cheney – until financial crisis and failing wars imposed American sobriety. Something like the resultant sobriety has now flooded China.

China’s 2013 excitement over a new era of reform, when the market was going to be the primary determinant of the economy, political unity was going to be reinvigorated and corruption was going to be banished, has become grim doubling down on Covid policy, Russia policy, infrastructure overinvestment and propping up the housing market by inflating the infrastructure bubble.

Xi’s signature foreign policy of Belt and Road now has a gastric belt. Xi’s signature domestic goal of “Common Prosperity” would require a property tax, an inheritance tax, highly progressive income taxes and abandonment of hukou household registration controls on internal migration – but resistance is intense. The country has been trying unsuccessfully for 11 years to experiment with a desperately needed property tax.

“Common Prosperity” may be stuck with campaign symbolism – decapitating the wealthy leadership of major private companies, extracting large charitable contributions, nationalizing their data, and hampering their stock market listings – rather than actually reducing inequality.

Notwithstanding a fierce campaign against corruption, Xi’s hierarchical polity and more statist economy will nurture corruption as a wet log nurtures mushrooms.

New policies will have to pass through layer after layer of officials resentful of reduced pay and authority and fearful of taking initiative. Xi will not be a lame duck but he will be a slow duck swimming through mud.

While all Chinese leaders want China to be a rich and powerful global leader, Xi’s domestic and foreign policies are not the inexorable culmination of a decades-long Chinese strategy. Quite the opposite.

His extreme repression is a sharp break from the trend of his reform-era predecessors. His Hong Kong and Xinjiang policies are a sharp break. His economic policies reverse key predecessors’ moves promoting openness, market orientation and diverse competition.

Each post-1949 Chinese leader has remedied his predecessor’s errors. Xi Jinping’s overruling of the by-then traditional change of generations hampers that adaptability but does not eliminate the possibility of change.

Because Xi’s core political policies seek to push back the tides of increasing social diversity and the globalization of knowledge, repression must either relax or worsen, not remain the same, a choice that could divide China’s elite. We could see change five years hence and we could see a mammoth succession struggle.

While confronting some current policies, Western foreign policy leaders need to be prepared for sharply different future Chinas rather than ossifying today’s relationship.

While one can confidently predict the slowing of China’s growth, a slower China does not ensure superior US growth. That would require US stability and competent management. While we can hope for continuation of the US history of resilience, the years of Trump and Biden are sobering.

Source

According to recent research from the University of Gothenburg, the Skaftö wreck picked up goods at Gdańsk, Poland, and was traveling towards Belgium when it sank in the Lysekil archipelago around 1440. Modern cargo analysis tools are now revealing completely new answers on how trade was handled throughout the Middle Ages.

“The analyses we have carried out give us a very detailed picture of the ship’s last journey and also tell us about the geographical origins of its cargo. Much of this is completely new knowledge for us,” says Staffan von Arbin, a maritime archaeologist.

It was previously unknown, for example, that calcium oxide (CaO), often known as quicklime or burnt lime, was exported from Gotland in the 15th century.

Excavation of the Skaftö wreck in 2009. Credit: Staffan von Arbin, Bohusläns museum

 

The Skaftö wreck was discovered at the bottom of the sea at Lysekil, north of Gothenburg, in 2003. However, researchers have only recently been able to conduct examinations of its cargo using new, modern methodologies.

An international study team led by marine archaeologist Staffan von Arbin of the University of Gothenburg has succeeded in tracing the cargo’s origins and likely route of the ship. The research adds to our understanding of the goods traded in the Middle Ages and the trade routes that existed at the time.

The cargo included copper, oak timber, quicklime, tar, bricks, and roof tiles. Previously, the Bohusläns museum collected cargo samples from the ship during underwater archaeological investigations. But it’s only now that analyses of its cargo have been possible using modern analysis methods.

Tobias Skowronek, German Mining Museum, in the process of sampling a copper ingot from the Skaftö wreck. Credit: Staffan von Arbin, University of Gothenburg

 

From Gotland in Sweden

 

With these analyses, the researchers have been able to establish that the copper was mined in two areas in what is currently Slovakia, for example. The analyses also show that the bricks, timber, and probably also the tar originated in Poland, while the quicklime is apparently from Gotland.

According to medieval sources, copper was transported from the Slovakian mining districts in the Carpathian Mountains via river systems down to the coastal town of Gdańsk (Danzig) in Poland. In the Middle Ages, Gdańsk was also the dominant port for exporting Polish oak timber.

“It is therefore very likely that it was in Gdańsk that the ship took on its cargo before it continued on what would be its final voyage.”

Heading for Belgium

The composition of the cargo indicates that the ship was on its way to a western European port when, for unknown reasons, it foundered in the Bohuslän archipelago. Here, too, the research team has drawn conclusions from historical sources.

“We believe that the ship’s final destination was Bruges in Belgium. In the 15th century, this city was a major trading hub. We also know that copper produced in Central Europe was shipped on from there to various Mediterranean ports, including Venice.”

The study presents recent investigations of the composition of the cargo. These results were then compared with other sources from the same period, archaeological as well as historical.

Source