Two days of torrential rain have flooded Bengaluru, the southern city known as India’s Silicon Valley, forcing tech workers to use boats and hitch rides on tractors to get to the office. Water supplies were disrupted and some residents struggled to evacuate as India’s tech capital joined the roster of places in South Asia inundated during this monsoon season.

More than five inches of rain had fallen on Monday, sending large parts of Bengaluru, also known as Bangalore, under water.

The deluge in Bengaluru, where dozens of multinational companies have office towers, uprooted trees, caused long power cuts and forced businesses to issue work-from-home orders. The downpours continued into Tuesday, and rain was forecast for the next four days, according to the India Meteorological Department.

At least one death has been reported, that of a 23-year-old woman who was electrocuted after her moped skidded on a waterlogged road and she tried to grab an electrical pole for support.

In parts of the city, water services were suspended after pumping stations were flooded. Basavaraj Bommai, the top elected official in Karnataka, of which Bengaluru is the capital, said affected areas would be serviced with water from bore wells or tanker trucks.

Satish D., an entrepreneur who lives in an eastern Bengaluru neighborhood, said that his building was completely marooned on Tuesday and without power, and that residents were running out of food and water.

He said dozens of families in his neighborhood, called Villas, were stranded, with some forced to hire tractors to evacuate after their appeals to local government officials went unanswered.

“Everyone is stranded inside their homes, and tractors can’t go everywhere,” he said. “We need a boat to rescue people, but we don’t have them.”
Vishwanath Srikantaiah, a water conservation expert and urban planner, said the flooding was worse in newer parts of the city built on flat terrain.

The flooding is partially a byproduct of the paving over of marshy areas around Bengaluru’s many lakes that historically absorbed some of the precipitation, and a failure to upgrade a half-a-century-old sewer system clogged with garbage and other debris.

“A million cuts have all added up, and it has then become a perfect storm with the continuous rainfall,” Mr. Srikantaiah said. “Over time, governments have taken small steps, which have been bad decisions.”

He said one solution, which has long been discussed, calls for the government to develop a long-term plan for storm-water management and invest heavily in sewers and drains.

Such a plan would take years to implement, and successive governments have balked at the cost. But on Tuesday, Mr. Bommai, the official, said the state would spend about $225,000 on the more immediate task: draining the water out of the city and clearing debris that is choking its sewage system.

A leader of the state’s political opposition used the disaster to critique the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., for failing to spend on infrastructure.

“Has the B.J.P. government, which boasted of making Bengaluru a world-class city with modern amenities, forgotten that now? Who built poor infrastructure in a world-class city?” the chief of the Congress party in Karnataka, D.K. Shivakumar, wrote on Twitter.

Mr. Bommai, in turn, blamed the Congress-led government that preceded his for permitting development in the city’s flood plains.

The city’s heavy rainfall this week is part of a broader trend of climate havoc across South Asia. Relentless heat in northern India and Pakistan this spring, with temperatures of 100 degrees or higher for days, killed dozens of people, led to flooding from glacial melt in the Himalayas and caused crop failures, contributing to global food shortages.

In northern and northeastern India, monsoons arrived late and receded quickly, while other parts of the country were deluged with unseasonable rainfall. In Pakistan, incessant rain has contributed to flooding that has killed more than 1,300 people and left vast parts of the country under water.

Rising temperatures and erratic monsoons are deepening the challenges of poverty, food security, health and governance across South Asia.

Even in Bengaluru, among the region’s most prosperous cities, people were struggling to cope. Across the city, rainfall at this point of the year was at least double the average of past years.

The 5.2 inches of rain that the city recorded on Monday was the most of any September day in the last eight years.

Shivangi Sharma Sasi, a Bangalore resident, said that after days of heavy rainfall, anxiety was setting in, and that she and others had started to stock up on bottled water.

“There is panic and fear among people,” she said. “And people have started hoarding food items.”

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Why would someone join an institution that removed the option of family life and required them to be celibate? Reproduction, after all, is at the very heart of the evolution that shaped us. Yet many religious institutions around the world require exactly this. The practice has led anthropologists to wonder how celibacy could have evolved in the first place.

Some have suggested that practices that are costly to individuals, such as never having children, can still emerge when people blindly conform to norms that benefit a group—since cooperation is another cornerstone of human evolution. Others have argued that people ultimately create religious (or other) institutions because it serves their own selfish or family interest, and reject those who do not get involved.

Now our new study, published in Royal Society Proceedings B and conducted in Western China, tackles this fundamental question by studying lifelong religious celibacy in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries.

Until recently, it was common for some Tibetan families to send one of their young sons to the local monastery to become a lifelong, celibate monk. Historically, up to one in seven boys became monks. Families typically cited religious motives for having a monk in the family. But were economic and reproductive considerations also involved?

With our collaborators from Lanzhou University in China, we interviewed 530 households in 21 villages in the eastern part of the Tibetan plateau in Gansu province. We reconstructed family genealogies, gathering information about each person’s family history and whether any of their family members were monks.

These villages are inhabited by patriarchal Amdo Tibetans who raise herds of yaks and goats, and farm small plots of land. Wealth is generally passed down the male line in these communities.

We found that men with a brother who was a monk were wealthier, owning more yaks. But there was little or no benefit for sisters of monks. That’s likely because brothers are in competition over parental resources, land, and livestock. As monks cannot own property, by sending one of their sons to the monastery, parents put an end to this fraternal conflict. Firstborn sons generally inherit the parental household, whereas monks are usually second or later-born sons.

Surprisingly, we also found that men with a monk brother had more children than men with non-celibate brothers; and their wives tended to have children at an earlier age. Grandparents with a monk son also had more grandchildren, as their non-celibate sons faced less or no competition with their brothers. The practice of sending a son to the monastery, far from being costly to a parent, is therefore in line with a parent’s reproductive interests.

A mathematical model of celibacy

This hints that celibacy can evolve by natural selection. To find out more about the details of how this happens, we built a mathematical model of the evolution of celibacy, where we studied the consequences of becoming a monk on a man’s evolutionary fitness, that of his brothers and of other members of the village. We modeled both the case where the decision to send a boy to a monastery is made by parents, as seems to be the case in our field study, and where a boy makes his own decision.

Monks remaining single means there are fewer men competing for marriage to women in the village. But while all the men in the village might benefit if one of them becomes a monk, the monk’s decision does not further his own genetic fitness. Therefore, celibacy shouldn’t evolve.

That situation changes, however, if having a brother who is a monk makes men wealthier and therefore more competitive on the marriage market. Religious celibacy can now evolve by natural selection because, while the monk is not having any children, he is helping his brothers to have more. But importantly, if the choice to become a monk is down to the boy himself, it is likely to remain rare – from an individual’s perspective, it isn’t very advantageous.

In the model, we show that celibacy becomes much more common only if it is the parents who decide it should happen. Parents gain fitness from all their children, so they will send one to the monastery as long as there is a benefit for the others. The fact that boys were sent to the monastery at a young age, with much celebration, and faced dishonor if they later abandoned their role, suggests a cultural practice shaped by parental interests.

This model could potentially also clarify the evolution of other kinds of parental favoritism in other cultural contexts—even infanticide. And a similar framework might explain why female celibates (nuns) are rare in patriarchal societies such as Tibet, but might be more common in societies where women are in greater competition with each other—for example, where they have more inheritance rights (such as in parts of Europe).

We are currently developing new research to understand why the frequency of monks and nuns varies in different religions and parts of the world.

It is often suggested that the spread of new ideas—even irrational ones—can result in the creation of new institutions as people conform to a new standard. But it may be that institutions can also be shaped by people’s reproductive and economic decisions.

Source: Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/celibacy-its-surprising-evolutionary-advantages-according-to-new-research/

The study was led by Dr. Maya Weinberg from the laboratory of Prof. Yossi Yovel, Head of the Sagol School of Neuroscience and faculty member of the School of Zoology & Steinhardt Museum of Natural History at Tel Aviv University. The research team reviewed dozens of leading articles and studies in this field, and their conclusions were published in iScience.

The researchers explain that the infamous reputation of the bats is well known among both the scientific community and the public at large. Bats are often accused of being reservoirs of viruses, including COVID-19, and seen as posing a threat to public health. In the present study, Dr. Weinberg sought to show that bats play an important role in exterminating insects, replanting of deforested areas, and pollination of a number of crops.

While there is some evidence that a potential ancestral COVID-19 virus had originated in bats, to date, two years after the pandemic first broke out, we still do not know for sure what the exact origin of the COVID-19 variant is.

Fruit bat at day time. Credit: Yuval Barkai

Dr. Weinberg says that "in general, bats are mistakenly conceived of as reservoirs of many contagious diseases, only due to their being positive serologically positive; in other words, in possession of antibodies, which means that bats have survived the disease and developed an immune response.

After that, they overcame the virus altogether and disengaged from it; hence, they are no longer its carriers. Nevertheless, in many cases, a virus similar to a human pathogen is liable to be found in bats; however, it is not pathogenic to humans, and is not sufficient to use bats as a reservoir."

Dr. Weinberg adds that "in order to examine the overall situation, we conducted a meta-analysis of the literature and checked the finding for over 100 viruses for which bats are considered potential reservoirs; such as Ebola, SARS, and COVID. We found that in a considerable number of cases (48%) this claim was based on the incidence of antibodies or PCR tests, rather than actual isolation of identical viruses. Moreover, many of the reported findings are not convincing."

"The mere isolation of a virus is not enough to see an animal as a reservoir, since a minimum number of index cases is required in which the virus is isolated in order to be considered a reservoir animal, as well as the existence of an established path of transmission. Furthermore, the very detection of a particular virus in bats does not necessarily ensure further infection, and other biological, ecological and anthropogenic conditions must exist in order for such an event to occur."

According to the researchers, evidence is accumulating of the fact that bats are capable of coping with different viruses—including lethal ones—better than humans and most other mammals. After over 100 years of focus on viruses carried by bats, it appears that bats' immune system are characterized by a restrained response during inflammatory processes. Bats have developed an excellent balance between resistance and tolerance: an increased defense response of the host, and immune tolerance through a number of different mechanisms. Moderate inflammatory pathways contribute to immune tolerance with bats and a well-balanced response that prevents the virus from developing.

Dr. Weinberg adds that "the comprehensive study we've conducted raises serious doubts regarding the possibility of bats being the origin of the COVID-19 outbreak. The findings give rise to the opposite perspective, according to which we must study in-depth the immunological anti-viral capabilities of bats, and thus obtain new and effective means of coping in humanity's struggle against contagious disease, aging and cancer."

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Wentian launched in July and joined up with the Tianhe module of China’s new space station. Its original complement of eight experiments included one that attempted to grow rice in microgravity.

Rice typically grows to 3-4 ft over four months, and the stalks on Wentian have not been able to complete their entire maturation cycle since the experiment started in July. However, they seem to be on track compared to their Earth-bound counterparts.

Rice growing on the space Tiangong space station.
Credit – CGTN

There were actually two types of rice launched as part of the experiment. A tall shoot variety reached almost 30 centimeters in the first month of growth, and a dwarf variety reached around 5 cm. Both of these growth amounts are on par for these particular rice varieties on Earth.

Rice isn’t the only thing in the experiment, though. Scientists added Arabidopsis thaliana. It’s a common flowering plant typically used to study genetic mutations, which can be especially helpful when carrying out an experiment in space.

Rice and mutation studies both have a long history in spaceflight. The Apollo 11 astronauts ate freeze-dried chicken and rice during their journey to the moon. And any space-based farming effort will surely include rice. So this is a step in the right direction.

Arabidopsis thaliana growing on the Tiangong space station.
Credit – Chinese Academy of Sciences

This also isn’t the first time China has sent rice into space. Some hitched a ride on the Chang’e 5 in November of 2020 on its ride around the moon. Other crops have ridden with other Chinese spacecraft as well. These studies focused on improving the yield of these crops, as rice that is expected to the radiation environment of space have higher yields once planted back on Earth. This burgeoning industry has seen more than 200 types of crops modified in this way, and experiments are continuing.

This isn’t the first time rice has been successfully grown in space. A team of students from Indonesia tested the effects of growing rice in microgravity on the ISS back in 2016.

For now, the experiment continues apace, and the scientists running it hope to get seeds that they can bring back to Earth to study if there were any significant differences having been grown in microgravity. Assuming there isn’t, these experiments could point to a bright future in space for one of the world’s most important crops.

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NASA has funded technology that helps to relieve symptoms of menopause.

The London-based Fifty One Apparel used the agency's Outlast material to create apparel with temperature-regulating properties.

In Houston, Texas, Johnson Space Center, NASA was looking for methods to improve insulation in spacesuit gloves in the 1980s.

Johnson entered a Small Business Innovation Research contract with the Triangle Research and Development Corporation to explore the use of phase-change materials.

The materials maintain a steady temperature as they change phase from solid to liquid.

Triangle could demonstrate the effectiveness of a temperature-stabilizing fabric insert for a spacesuit glove by embedding phase-change materials into microcapsules inside the material.

Gateway Technologies – which was later known as Outlast Technologies – acquired exclusive patent rights from Triangle and began marketing the material under the name Outlast.

The founder of Fifty One Apparel, a textile marketer named Louise Nicholson, noticed that there didn’t seem to be any brands using the tech for menopause.

The company products include tops, bottoms and nightwear, as well as accessories.

PRODUCTION - 28 February 2022, Berlin: ILLUSTRATION - On a smartphone screen, the word menopause is written in the search box of the app Instagram. Photo: Fabian Sommer/dpa ((Photo by Fabian Sommer/picture alliance via Getty Images))

According to the National Institutes of Health, 1.3 million Americans begin experiencing symptoms of menopause each year.

Menopause, which can last for years, is usually characterized by feelings of intense heat known as hot flashes.

It is a point in time 12 months after a woman's last period.

It occurs when a woman’s ovary stops producing the hormones estrogen and progesterone.

The change often occurs between the ages of 45 and 55.

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The horrific moment, caught on camera, occurred Sunday around 9:15 p.m. on the Dussehra fairgrounds in the city of Mohali.

A video of the accident shows the high-rise spinning ride slowly ascending a column. The swing remains at the top for a moment before free-falling about 50 feet. The swing slams into the ground, causing several people to fly out of their seats. Screams are audible as the scene unfolds in front of horrified fair attendees.

Good Samaritans helped load the injured riders into police vans as there were no ambulances on the fairgrounds, local outlet NDTV reported. At least 16 people were injured and taken to a civil hospital in Mohali, according to the outlet.

An eyewitness told the Hindustan Times that fairground bouncers threatened those who tried to help and fair organizers "fled the scene."

The attraction was supposed to close on August 31 but was recently extended until September 11.

The cause of the malfunction remains unclear at this time. Police have launched an investigation, saying they will "hold an inquiry and strict action will be taken against the guilty."

Mohali is located in the state of Punjab, about 160 miles north of New Delhi.

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Today is the 45th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1, one of humanity’s iconic twin emissaries to the cosmos. (Its sibling, Voyager 2, launched a couple of weeks earlier.) Now in the dark, far reaches of interstellar space—more than 10 billion miles from home, where our sun looks like any other bright star—the pair are still doing science. They carry with them the Golden Records, bearing the sounds and symbols of Earth, should some extraterrestrial ever rendezvous with one of the spacecraft and become curious about its distant sender.

“I’ve been following the arc of Voyager over my career,” says Linda Spilker, Voyager’s deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who started at the agency in 1977, the year the probes launched. “I’m amazed at how long both of these spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, have been able to keep going and return unique science about new places that no spacecraft has visited before. And now they’ve become interstellar travelers. How cool is that?”

The two car-sized probes, each with a 12-foot antenna mounted on top, had one primary task: to visit the gas giants in our own solar system. After their launches, the Voyagers’ paths diverged, but they both took advantage of a rare planetary lineup, snapping groundbreaking photos as they flew by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and revealed tantalizing details about the planets’ moons. By the end of 1989, they’d completed that mission. In 1990, Voyager 1 capped it by turning around and taking a poignant image of our own world, which astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan dubbed the Pale Blue Dot.  

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, has lived out their lives,” Sagan wrote. The image of the Earth from a cosmic perspective—a mere “mote of dust suspended in a moonbeam,” as he put it—became nearly as memorable as the Earthrise photo taken by an Apollo 8 astronaut showing the planet as seen from the moon.

The two probes, which run on nuclear-powered systems called radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), kept flying. Our solar system has no clear boundary, but in the 2000s they crossed the “termination shock,” where solar wind particles abruptly slow below the speed of sound due to pressure from the gas and magnetic fields in interstellar space. Then in the 2010s, they breached the heliopause, the boundary between the solar wind and the interstellar wind. 

With four instruments operating on Voyager 1 and five aboard Voyager 2, they now have a new job: measuring the magnetic field strength, the density of the plasma, and the energy and direction of charged particles in the environment they’re traveling through. “The purpose of the interstellar mission is to measure the sun’s effects as we go further and further from Earth. We’re trying to find out how the sun’s heliosphere interacts with interstellar space,” says Suzanne Dodd, project manager of the Voyager interstellar mission at JPL. Voyager 1 is currently 14.6 billion miles from home, and Voyager 2 is 12.1 billion miles away, but for perspective, the nearest star is some 25 trillion miles away. (NASA maintains a tracker of their journeys.) It’s a remarkable coda for their mission, decades after the probes completed their main goals. 

But they’ve always had a secondary task: conveying a message to any aliens from beyond the solar system who might one day peek inside a craft. Each one carries a Golden Record, which looks like vinyl but is made of metal. A team of scientists and artists, including Sagan and Frank Drake, who died last Friday, packed music, nature sounds, messages, photos, and more on each record—and they included players and instructions, should anyone find them. The ambitious project seeks to tell a story about humanity, what humans aspire to, and our world. It includes the music of Bach and Chuck Berry, and images of families, homes, and scientific advances. “The purpose of the record was to try to answer questions that we would have,” says Jon Lomberg, a scientific artist and the designer for the Golden Records team. “What were the beings like who sent it? What do they look like? What do they act like? What was their world like? So it’s really a self-portrait.”

Unlike the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, the records are not designed to be a prelude to first contact. In fact, the Golden Records might be found millions of years from now, perhaps when human civilizations no longer exist. “It’s more like finding a fossil,” says Lomberg. “You can’t talk to the dinosaurs. This is a relic—our obituary in a way, the memento that we were once here.”

The Voyager probes were preceded by the Pioneer missions, which carried small metal plaques with symbolic messages. (The pair of Pioneers left the solar system in the 1980s and ’90s, but they’re no longer functioning.) But no space mission since has incorporated a similar record of humanity—though NASA’s New Horizons, for example, which flew by Pluto in 2015, offered another chance. That was a missed opportunity, Lomberg says, although it might still be possible to send a digital message to the spacecraft’s computer. That would be durable, but it would not last as long as the Golden Records.

The Voyagers have had a tangible influence on space exploration ever since. Their success inspired NASA and other agencies to revisit the outer planets, especially Jupiter and Saturn, and their myriad moons. These subsequent missions include Galileo, Juno, Cassini, and the European Space Agency’s Huygens lander, plus new probes in the works, such as the Europa Clipper, Dragonfly, ESA’s JUICE, and potential voyages to Uranus and Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

The Voyagers influenced pop culture too. The first Star Trek movie in 1979 included an alien spacecraft called “V’ger,” which was actually an altered fictional “Voyager 6.” Voyager and the Golden Records have turned up in TV shows like Saturday Night Live, The West Wing, and—of course—The X-Files. The composer Dario Marianelli even wrote a Voyager-inspired violin concerto.

The pair of spacecraft have lasted far longer than anyone imagined—and, Dodd says, the instruments are working and the data is still great. But they’re showing signs of age. In May, she and her team encountered a glitch in Voyager 1’s telemetry data, which would normally provide information to scientists back home about what the probe’s instruments are doing and whether they’re working properly. The data had been coming back garbled. Addressing the issue was complicated by the vast distance involved, since messages to and from Voyager 1 now take nearly 22 hours. 

Then last week, the team figured out what was wrong. Apparently, the attitude control system had suddenly started sending the telemetry data through the wrong computer, which was no longer working properly. They resolved the problem by routing the data back to the correct computer. “The spacecraft is healthy, it’s happy. It’s returning science data just beautifully,” Spilker says.

Even if Dodd, Spilker, and their colleagues can keep resolving these kinds of technical issues, however, the spacecraft have a more enduring problem: their power supplies. Their RTG systems provide power by converting heat from the radioactive decay of plutonium-238 into electricity. But after 45 years, the fuel is now generating 4 watts less per year. Dodd and her team have turned off any systems and instruments not involved in the interstellar mission—and in 2019, they started turning off heaters in some of the instruments that are still running. That added a couple of years to the spacecrafts’ lifespans.

Nevertheless, the Voyager probes might only have a few years, or perhaps a decade, left in them. Eventually, their dwindling power won’t be sufficient to run their instruments. “At that point, the Voyagers will become our silent ambassadors,” Spilker says.

As they hurtle at 35,000 miles per hour into the unknown with their powered-down machines, they will still carry humanity’s message in a bottle. “The Golden Record, a piece of human civilization, a piece of technology with a 1970s stamp on it—that is going to persevere. It’s not degrading. It’s going to last for billions of years. It’s going to outlast the planet that it came from. That’s mind-blowing kind of stuff,” says Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and the author of a book on the Voyager mission’s 40th anniversary.

Bell speculates that it might not be aliens, but our own descendants, who ultimately spot the far-flung spacecraft. “My prediction is that the message really is going to be for us. We’re going to be the ones who go find it—in the far future, when it becomes easy to travel and be tourists and see the Voyagers,” he says. “We’ll be thinking: Wasn’t that one of the most amazing things we did as a species in the 20th century?”

Voyager 1 and 2, Humanity’s Interstellar Envoys, Soldier On at 45

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Scientists had previously theorized that extremely high pressure and temperatures turn hydrogen and carbon into solid diamonds thousands of kilometers below the surface of the ice giants.

Now new research, published in Science Advances, inserted oxygen into the mix, finding that "diamond rain" could be more common than thought.
Ice giants like Neptune and Uranus are thought to be the most common form of planet outside our Solar System, which means diamond rain could be occurring across the Universe.

Dominik Kraus, a physicist at Germany's HZDR research lab and one of the study's authors, said that diamond precipitation was quite different to rain on Earth.

Under the surface of the planets is believed to be a "hot, dense liquid", where the diamonds form and slowly sink down to the rocky, potentially Earth-size cores more than 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) below, he said.

There fallen diamonds could form vast layers that span "hundreds of kilometers or even more", Kraus told AFP.

While these diamonds might not be shiny and cut like a "a nice gem on a ring", he said they were formed via similar forces as on Earth.

Aiming to replicate the process, the research team found the necessary mix of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in a readily available source – PET plastic, which is used for everyday food packaging and bottles.

Kraus said that while the researchers used very clean PET plastic, "in principle the experiment should work with Coca-Cola bottles".

The team then turned a high-powered optical laser on the plastic at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California.

"Very, very short X-ray flashes of incredible brightness" allowed them to watch the process of nanodiamonds – tiny diamonds too small to see with the naked eye – as they formed, Kraus said.

"The oxygen that is present in large amounts on those planets really helps suck away the hydrogen atoms from the carbon, so it's actually easier for those diamonds to form," he added.

New way to make nanodiamonds?

The experiment could point towards a new way to produce nanodiamonds, which have a wide and increasing range of applications including drug delivery, medical sensors, non-invasive surgery, and quantum electronics.

"The way nanodiamonds are currently made is by taking a bunch of carbon or diamond and blowing it up with explosives," said SLAC scientist and study co-author Benjamin Ofori-Okai.

"Laser production could offer a cleaner and more easily controlled method to produce nanodiamonds," he added.

The diamond rain research remains hypothetical because little is known about Uranus and Neptune, the most distant planets in our Solar System.

Only one spacecraft – NASA's Voyager 2 in the 1980s – has flown past the two ice giants, and the data it sent back is still being used in research.

But a NASA group has outlined a potential new mission to the planets, possibly launching next decade.

"That would be fantastic," Kraus said.

He said he is greatly looking forward to more data – even if it takes a decade or two.

© Agence France-Presse

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India has plans to design and build a new reusable rocket for the global market that would significantly cut the cost of launching satellites, a top government official said on Monday. “…all of us want launches to be much cheaper than what we do today,” Secretary in the Department of Space and Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) S Somanath said.

Addressing the seventh ‘Bengaluru Space Expo 2022’ and later talking to reporters, he noted that at present it takes about USD 10,000 to USD 15,000 to put a one-kg payload into orbit.

“We have to bring it down to USD 5,000 or even USD 1,000 per kg. Only way to do that is to make the rocket reusable. Today in India we don’t have reusable technology yet in launch vehicles (rockets),” Somanath said. “So, the idea is the next rocket that we are going to build after GSLV Mk III should be a reusable rocket,” he added at the inaugural session of the international conference and exhibition.

ISRO, Somanath said, has been working on various technologies, including the one demonstrated with Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (IAD), last week. “We will have to have a retro-propulsion to land it (rocket back on earth)”.

Combining these technologies, ISRO would like to design and build a new rocket which will be reusable, in partnership with industry, startups and its commercial arm NewSpace India Limited (NSIL).

“This is the idea and we are working on that idea. That idea cannot be ISRO’s alone. It has to be an industry’s idea. So, we will have to work with them in designing a new rocket, not only designing it, engineering it, manufacturing it and launching it as a commercial product and operating it in a commercial manner,” he said.

“So, it’s a big shift from what we do today,” he pointed out. “I would like to see this (proposal) taking shape in the next few months.” “We would like to see such a rocket, a rocket which will be competitive-enough, a rocket that will be cost-conscious, production-friendly which will be built in India but operated globally for the services of the space sector. This should happen in the next few years so that we can retire all those operating launch vehicles (in India) at appropriate time,” he said.

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A laser blast produces miniature diamonds from plain-old plastic. That’s right, the same kind used in soda bottles.

When squeezed to about a million times Earth’s atmospheric pressure and heated to thousands of degrees Celsius, polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, forms nanodiamonds, physicist Dominik Kraus and colleagues report September 2 in Science Advances.

Ice giant planets, such as Neptune and Uranus, have similar temperatures, pressures and combinations of chemical elements as the materials in the study, suggesting that diamonds may rain down in those planets’ interiors. What’s more, the researchers say, the new technique could be used to manufacture nanodiamonds for use in quantum devices and other applications.

In the new study, researchers trained lasers on samples of plastic. Each laser blast sent a shock wave careening through the plastic, amping up the pressure and temperature within. Probing the material with bursts of X-rays revealed that nanodiamonds had formed.

Previous studies had created diamonds by compressing compounds of hydrogen and carbon. But PET, which is commonly used in food and drink packaging, contains not just hydrogen and carbon but also oxygen. That makes it a better match to the composition of ice giant planets like Neptune and Uranus. The oxygen seems to assist the diamond formation, says Kraus, of the University of Rostock in Germany. “The oxygen sucks out the hydrogen,” he says, leaving behind carbon which can then form diamond.

Nanodiamonds are commonly produced using explosives, Kraus says, a process not easy to control. The new technique could create nanodiamonds that are more easily tailored for particular uses, such as quantum devices made using diamond with defects where, for example, nitrogen atoms replace some of the carbon atoms (SN: 7/6/18).

“The idea is quite cool. You take water bottle plastic; you zap it with a laser to make diamond. How practical it is, I don’t know,” says physicist Marius Millot of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who was not involved with the new study. How easily the diamonds could be recovered is unclear, he says. But, “it’s pretty neat to think about the idea.”

Source

Those were just a few of the events that contributed to the Northern Hemisphere’s land areas experiencing their second-warmest June and third-warmest July on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But temperatures that make big news today may seem ho-hum—even relatively cool—within a couple of decades, as the continued burning of fossil fuels pushes baseline temperatures ever higher. Heat waves are also becoming longer and more frequent. Not every summer will be hotter than the one just before it, of course, but global warming means that the heat records set today will eventually fall down the charts. As U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said during the July launch of Heat.gov, a government website for heat information, “The reality is, given the scientific predictions, this summer—with its oppressive and widespread heat waves—is likely to be one of the coolest summers of the rest of our lives.”

In a world without human-caused climate change, we would expect to see records set fairly randomly, following the whims of our planet’s natural variations in climate. But global warming has effectively loaded the dice, with record heat outpacing record cold. This imbalance is starkly evident in the famous “warming stripes” graphics created by climate scientist Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in England. These graphics render each year’s average temperature as a shade of red or blue, depending on how much above or below the long-term average it is. The version below shows summer temperatures going back to the mid-19th century for the land areas of the Northern Hemisphere, relative to the average for 1971–2000. Though there is the odd pink or orange year scattered throughout the record, the pileup of deep red bars in recent decades immediately jumps out. Even 1998—which at the time was far and away the hottest summer (and year) on record because of an exceptionally strong El Niño event—has been far surpassed. Similarly, the 1990s were supplanted as the hottest decade by the 2000s, which were then replaced by the 2010s. The 2020s will eventually follow suit.

Credit: Ed Hawkins; Source: Met Office, U.K.

Natural variation of course still plays a role from year to year and month to month. For example, July 2021 was the warmest July on record for land in the Northern Hemisphere, whereas this July came in third place. Such variations become more pronounced the more locally one looks. A relatively small area such as the U.K. can still have summers with normal temperatures in any given year. “For an individual, wherever you live, there will be colder summers than this going forward,” Hawkins says. For example, in England, which bore the brunt of this past July’s heat wave in Europe, plenty of recent summers have seen temperatures at or below the long-term average. And several hot summers from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s still rank among England’s hottest—including the standout summer of 1976, which is still a touchstone in the country’s collective memory. (That summer saw prolonged heat and drought, the latter of which also helps to increase temperatures.)

But “even if there’s a few colder years after this, it doesn’t mean climate change has gone away,” says Vikki Thompson, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol in England. The influence of climate change is still clear: average summer temperatures in England have steadily increased over recent decades, as they have everywhere. This can be seen in an analysis of past, present and projected future average summer temperatures for cities across the U.S. in the graphic below. Chicago’s average summer temperature, for instance, was 71 degrees F in the late 20th century; today it averages about 73 degrees F. In one of the higher-emissions scenarios of the future, it could average 77 degrees F. (These averages include both daytime and nighttime temperatures.)

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: Climate Central

This steadily rising baseline means that when heat waves do hit, they are worse than they would have been in the absence of climate change. An analysis of this past July’s U.K. heat wave, conducted by scientists at the World Weather Attribution consortium, found that in the absence of climate change, temperatures during such an event would have topped out around 96.8 degrees F (36 degrees C). In another decade or two, a similar event would likely see even higher temperatures than were recorded this summer.

Even heat waves that don’t set daily temperature records can be made worse by climate change. Though the southern U.S. is used to hot summers, several prolonged heat events this year had highs above 100 degrees F across large areas for days at a time. Because of this, Texas recorded its hottest April–July on record and saw the average maximum temperature for July top 100 degrees F for the first time. “There were no, say, 10-day periods that are off-the-charts huge, but it’s just been relentless,” says NOAA climate scientist Derek Arndt. A recent Washington Post analysis of data from the nonprofit First Street Foundation found that long stretches of hot weather will become more frequent and last longer across the U.S., particularly in the South. Nearly half of all Americans now experience at least three consecutive days that are 100 degrees F or hotter each year, and that will increase to two thirds in the coming decades. Some parts of the South could see 70 such consecutive days.

And daytime temperatures are not the only consideration. Overnight lows have been rising far faster than daytime highs, as can be seen in the contiguous U.S. in the graphic below. Health-wise, night is when the body would usually get a break from the summer heat—so as overnight lows rise, that recovery period becomes less available. “You can’t cool down, so you’re starting the next day at that high level,” Thompson says. This can take a big toll on both physical and mental health.

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: Climate at a Glance: National Time Series, National Centers for Environmental Information, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The capacity of populations to cope with ever increasing and more frequent heat extremes is a key concern of the current climate emergency. Several places that are famous for cooler summers, such as the U.K. and the U.S. Pacific Northwest, have not built the infrastructure to cope with extreme heat.

Many homes in these and other areas lack air-conditioning—which many may not be able to readily afford. Such constraints make it more likely that people will experience the ill health effects of heat. Even in areas accustomed to hot weather, such as Texas, prolonged extreme heat can ramp up air conditioner use and strain the power grid.

Exactly how hot our future summers are, and how miserable we get on hot nights, is, to some degree, in our own hands. The more we curtail fossil-fuel burning now, the more we can constrain the global temperature rise that is fueling ever hotter summers. But even if we bring greenhouse gas emissions under control, we will still have to live in a hotter climate than we did in the past. That reality means helping people adapt, whether through building or retrofitting infrastructure to withstand heat, subsidizing air-conditioning or simply making sure that people have ample warning of extreme heat—and that they know how to avoid its ill health effects. “It’s our choices that make a difference,” Hawkins says.

Source

The National Medical Products Administration gave the go-ahead for the vaccine for emergency use as a booster, the company said in a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Sunday.

Following the announcement, company shares surged 14 percent on Monday morning before closing 7.1 percent higher than their opening value.

The needle-free vaccine—which can be stored and administered more easily than intramuscular jabs—will be given through a nebuliser, the company said.

"The approval will have a positive impact on the company's performance if the vaccine is subsequently purchased and used by relevant government agencies," the statement added.

The company did not offer details on when the adenovirus-vectored vaccine will be made available for public use.

There is no publicly available verified or peer-reviewed data on the efficacy of the new vaccine.

Scientists in several countries including Cuba, Canada and the United States are also trialing inhalable COVID-19 vaccines.

China has so far approved eight other locally manufactured injectable vaccines since 2020.

But the country's drug administrator is yet to greenlight any foreign vaccines, including mRNA shots produced by Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna that have better efficacy rates compared to other types of vaccines.

China is the only major economy sticking to a zero-COVID policy, disrupting travel and businesses.

Officials across the country are now under pressure to curb local virus flare-ups ahead of a key political meeting next month.

The southern tech hub of Shenzhen, with more than 18 million residents, imposed a weekend lockdown in most parts of the city on Saturday, while more than 21 million people in the southwestern metropolis of Chengdu are undergoing mass testing from Monday through Wednesday.

China has administered over 3.4 billion COVID shots, the National Health Commission said Monday without offering details on the percentage of the population vaccinated.

Source

Gregg Semenza is “one of today’s preeminent researchers on the molecular mechanisms of oxygen regulation,” the work for which he shared the 2019 Nobel, according to Hopkins. But even before that, the pseudonymous Claire Francis began pointing out potential image duplications and other manipulations in Semenza’s work on PubPeer, as described in October 2020 by Leonid Schneider.

The four papers retracted yesterday are:

•  Hypoxia-inducible factors mediate coordinated RhoA-ROCK1 expression and signaling in breast cancer cells
•  Mutual antagonism between hypoxia-inducible factors 1α and 2α regulates oxygen sensing and cardio-respiratory homeostasis
•  Anthracycline chemotherapy inhibits HIF-1 transcriptional activity and tumor-induced mobilization of circulating angiogenic cells
•  Hypoxia-inducible factors are required for chemotherapy resistance of breast cancer stem cells

A representative notice:

We are retracting this article due to concerns with Figure 5. In Figure 5A, there is a concern that the first and second lanes of the HIF-2α panel show the same data, and that the first and second lanes of the HIF-1α panel show the same data, despite all being labeled as unique data. In Figure 5D, there is a concern that the second and third lanes of the HIF-1β panel show the same data despite being labeled as unique data. We believe that the overall conclusions of the paper remain valid, but we are retracting the work due to these underlying concerns about the figure. Confirmatory experimentation has now been performed and the results can be found in a preprint article posted on bioRxiv, ‘Homeostatic responses to hypoxia by the carotid body and adrenal medulla are based on mutual antagonism between HIF-1α and HIF-2α’ (https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.11.499380). We apologize for the inconvenience.

Together, the papers have been cited more than 750 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. From 1998 until 2013, Semenza was principal investigator on NIH grants totaling more than $9 million.

“Francis” tells Retraction Watch:

 I saw problematic Gregg Semenza publications before his Nobel Prize.

 I recognised his name when he got his Nobel Prize and went back for a second look.

 Had I got him wrong?

 No, there were more problematic publications.

One of Semenza’s co-authors on one of the papers is Denis Wirtz, the vice provost for research at Hopkins.

Semenza, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, is hardly the only Nobel Prize winner to later retract papers. We describe four such cases in a 2019 column for STAT, and Frances Arnold did the same in 2020. Daniel Kahneman walked back some claims, although he did not retract a paper per se.

It is also not Semenza’s first retraction. In 2011, a paper he co-authored with Naoki Mori – a name familiar to Retraction Watch readers – was retracted.

Source

Monday, September 5

SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 51 Starlink satellites at 2:09 a.m. UTC on Monday from Cape Canaveral. The launch will also be carrying Spaceflight’s Sherpa LTC-2 space tug, which will be carrying Boeing’s Varuna demo mission. The Varuna demo will test a V-band comms system for Boeing own constellation of broadband satellites – though, smaller than SpaceX’s constellation at just 147 satellites. You can tune into the launch of SpaceX’s website.

Also on Monday, we could see the launch of NASA’s Space Launch System carrying the Artemis I mission. We’ve discussed this at length in TWIRL 80, and you can keep up-to-date with what’s going on in this article.

Tuesday, September 6

Next, Arianespace is planning to launch an Ariane 5 ECA+ rocket in a mission labelled VA258. The payload will be the Eutelsat Konnect VHTS comms satellite. It will provide fixed broadband and in-flight connectivity services across Europe. It was built by Thales Alenia Space and is owned by Eutelsat. It’s unclear what time it will take off, but it will launch from French Guyana.

Wednesday, September 7

On Wednesday, China will launch a Long March 2D rocket carrying three Yaogan-35 satellites to space. They are remote sensing satellites and will be used for scientific experiments, land and resources surveys, agriculture, and disaster prevention and mitigation. The launch is due at 4:00 a.m. UTC from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center.

Saturday, September 10

On the weekend, SpaceX will be sending up another group of Starlink satellites with the BlueWalker 3 satellite for AST SpaceMobile. The satellite will connect to smartphones and other devices to deliver broadband speeds. It’s a 1.5 tonne satellite and has a 64-square-meter phased array antenna that will unfold to begin providing connectivity. This mission is due to take off at 11:51 p.m. and will be viewable on SpaceX’s website.

Sunday, September 11

The final launch, set to take off from 10:00 pm UTC, is Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket, which will be performing its second flight. It will be carrying the Carbonite 4 satellite as well as the GENESIS-G, GENESIS-J, QUBIK 3-6, and Sapling 1 satellites. The Carbonite 4 satellite will test some Earth observation sensors.

Recap

The first launch we got last week was SpaceX’s Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites to space.

The second and final launch was a Long March 4C carrying Yaogan-33-02, a remote sensing satellite that will conduct “scientific experiments, land resources surveys, crop yield estimation, and disaster prevention and relief”.

That’s all we have this week, be sure to check in next week.

TWIRL 81: Plenty of satellite launches this week amid Artemis I uncertainty

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—America's space agency on Saturday sought to launch a rocket largely cobbled together from the space shuttle, which itself was designed and built more than four decades ago.

As the space shuttle often was delayed due to technical problems, it therefore comes as scant surprise that the debut launch of NASA's Space Launch System rocket scrubbed a few hours before its launch window opened. The showstopper was an 8-inch diameter line carrying liquid hydrogen into the rocket. It sprang a persistent leak at the inlet, known as a quick-disconnect, leading on board the vehicle.

Valiantly, the launch team at Kennedy Space Center tried three different times to stanch the leak, all to no avail. Finally at 11:17 am ET, hours behind on their timeline to fuel the rocket, launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson called a halt.

What comes next depends on what engineers and technicians find on Monday when they inspect the vehicle at the launch pad. If the launch team decides it can replace the quick-disconnect hardware at the pad, it may be an option to perform a partial fueling test to determine the integrity of the fix. This may allow NASA to keep the vehicle on the pad ahead of the next launch. Alternatively, the engineers may decide the repairs are best performed inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, and roll the rocket back inside.

Due to the orbital dynamics of the Artemis I mission to fly an uncrewed Orion spacecraft to the Moon, NASA will next have an opportunity to launch from September 19 to October 4. However, making that window would necessitate fixing the rocket at the pad, and then getting a waiver from the US Space Force, which operates the launch range along the Florida coast.

At issue is the flight termination system, which is powered independently of the rocket, with batteries rated for 25 days. NASA would need to extend that battery rating to about 40 days. The space agency is expected to have those discussions with range officials soon.

If the rocket is rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, which would be necessary to service the flight termination system or perform more than cursory work at the launch pad, NASA has another Artemis I launch opportunity from October 17 to October 31.

A tiny, tiny element

The space shuttle was an extremely complex vehicle, mingling the use of solid-rocket boosters—which are something akin to very, very powerful firecrackers—along with exquisitely built main engines powered by the combustion of liquid hydrogen propellant and liquid oxygen to serve as an oxidizer.

Over its lifetime, due to this complexity, the shuttle on average scrubbed nearly once every launch attempt. Some shuttle flights scrubbed as many as five times before finally lifting off. For launch controllers, it never really got a whole lot easier to manage the space shuttle's complex fueling process, and hydrogen was frequently a culprit.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it is also the lightest. It takes 600 sextillion hydrogen atoms to reach the mass of a single gram. Because it is so tiny, hydrogen can squeeze through the smallest of gaps. This is not so great a problem at ambient temperatures and pressures, but at super-chilled temperatures and high pressures, hydrogen easily oozes out of any available opening.

To keep a rocket's fuel tanks topped off, propellant lines leading from ground-based systems must remain attached to the booster until the very moment of launch. In the final second, the "quick-disconnects" at the end of these lines break away from the rocket. The difficulty is that, in order to be fail-safes in disconnecting from the rocket, this equipment cannot be bolted together tightly enough to entirely preclude the passage of hydrogen atoms—it is extremely difficult to seal these connections under high pressure, and low temperatures.

NASA, therefore, has a tolerance for a small amount of hydrogen leakage. Anything above a 4 percent concentration of hydrogen in the purge area near the quick disconnect, however, is considered a flammability hazard. "We were seeing in excess of that by two or three times that," said Mike Sarafin, NASA's Artemis I Mission Manager, said of Saturday's hydrogen leak. "It was pretty clear we weren’t going to be able to work our way through it. Every time we saw a leak, it pretty quickly exceeded our flammability limits."

Twice, launch controllers stopped the flow of hydrogen into the vehicle, in hopes that the quick-disconnect would warm a little bit. They hoped that, when they restarted slowly flowing cryogenic hydrogen on board the rocket, the quick-disconnect would find a tighter fit with the booster. It did not. Another time they tried applying a significant amount of pressure to re-seat the quick disconnect.

NASA officials are still assessing the cause of the leak, but they believe it may have been due to an errant valve being opened. This occurred during the process of chilling down the rocket prior to loading liquid hydrogen. Amid a sequence of about a dozen commands being sent to the rocket, a command was sent to a wrong valve to open. This was rectified within 3 or 4 seconds, Sarafin said. However, during this time, the hydrogen line that would develop a problematic quick-disconnect was briefly over-pressurized.

Deferring to the experts

So why does NASA use liquid hydrogen as a fuel for its rockets, if it is so difficult to work with, and there are easier to handle alternatives such as methane or kerosene? One reason is that hydrogen is a very efficient fuel, meaning that it provides better "gas mileage" when used in rocket engines. However, the real answer is that Congress mandated that NASA continue to use space shuttle main engines as part of the SLS rocket program.

In 2010, when Congress wrote the authorization bill for NASA that led to creation of the Space Launch System, it directed the agency to "utilize existing contracts, investments, workforce, industrial base, and capabilities from the Space Shuttle and Orion and Ares 1 projects, including ... existing United States propulsion systems, including liquid fuel engines, external tank or tank related capability, and solid rocket motor engines."

During a news conference on Saturday, Ars asked NASA Administrator Bill Nelson whether it was the right decision for NASA to continue working with hydrogen after the agency's experience with the space shuttle. In 2010, Nelson was a US Senator from Florida, and ringleader of the space authorization bill alongside US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas. "We deferred to the experts," Nelson said.

By this Nelson meant that the Senate worked alongside some officials at NASA, and within industry, to design the SLS rocket. These industry officials, who would continue to win lucrative contracts from NASA for their work on shuttle-related hardware, were only too happy to support the new rocket design.

Among the idea's opponents was Lori Garver, who served as NASA's deputy administrator at the time. She said the decision to use space shuttle components for the agency's next generation rocket seemed like a terrible idea, given the challenges of working with hydrogen demonstrated over the previous three decades.

"They took finicky, expensive programs that couldn't fly very often, stacked them together differently, and said now, all of a sudden, it's going to be cheap and easy," she told Ars in August. "Yeah, we've flown them before, but they've proven to be problematic and challenging. This is one of the things that boggled my mind. What about it was going to change? I attribute it to this sort of group think, the contractors and the self-licking ice cream cone."

Now, NASA faces the challenge of managing this finicky hardware through more inspections and tests after so many already. The rocket's core stage, manufactured by Boeing, was shipped from its factory in Louisiana more than two and a half years ago. It underwent nearly a year of testing in Mississippi before arriving at Kennedy Space Center in April 2021. Since then, NASA and its contractors have been assembling the complete rocket and testing it on the launch pad.

Effectively, Saturday's "launch" attempt was the sixth time NASA has tried to completely fuel the first and second stages of the rocket, and then get deep into the countdown. To date, it has not succeeded with any of these fueling tests, known as wet dress rehearsals. On Saturday, the core stage's massive liquid hydrogen tank, with a capacity of more than 500,000 gallons, was only 11 percent full when the scrub was called.

Perhaps the seventh time will be a charm.

Source: Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/years-after-shuttle-nasa-rediscovers-the-perils-of-liquid-hydrogen/

If you’re an environmentally aware meat-eater, you probably carry at least a little guilt to the dinner table. The meat on our plates comes at a significant environmental cost through deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and air and water pollution—an uncomfortable reality, given the world’s urgent need to deal with climate change.

That’s a big reason there’s such a buzz today around a newcomer to supermarket shelves and burger-joint menus: products that look like real meat but are made entirely without animal ingredients. Unlike the bean- or grain-based veggie burgers of past decades, these “plant-based meats,” the best known of which are Impossible Burger and  Beyond Meat, are marketed heavily toward traditional meat-eaters. They claim to replicate the taste and texture of real ground meat at a fraction of the environmental cost.

 

If these newfangled meat alternatives can fill a large part of our demand for meat—and if they’re as green as they claim, which is not easy to verify independently—they might offer carnivores a way to reduce the environmental impact of their dining choices without giving up their favorite recipes.

 

That could be a game-changer, some think. “People have been educated a long time on the harms of animal agriculture, yet the percentage of vegans and vegetarians generally remains low,” says Elliot Swartz, a scientist with the Good Food Institute, an international nonprofit organization that supports the development of alternatives to meat. “Rather than forcing people to make behavior changes, we think it will be more effective to substitute products into their diets where they don’t have to make a behavior switch.”

 

There’s no question that today’s meat industry is bad for the planet. Livestock account for about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions both directly (from methane burped out by cattle and other grazing animals and released by manure from feedlots and pig and chicken barns) and indirectly (largely from fossil fuels used to grow feed crops). Indeed, if the globe’s cattle were a country, their greenhouse gas emissions alone would rank second in the world, trailing only China.

 

Worse yet, the United Nations projects that global demand for meat will swell by 15 percent by 2031 as the world’s increasing—and increasingly affluent—population seeks more meat on their plates. That means more methane emissions and expansion of pastureland and cropland into formerly forested areas such as the Amazon—deforestation that threatens biodiversity and contributes further to emissions.

 

Global demand for meat continues to rise with little sign of slowing. Much of the increase comes from middle-income countries, where consumers use their increasing wealth to put more meat on their plates.

 

Not all kinds of meat animals contribute equally to the problem, however. Grazing animals such as cattle, sheep, and goats have a far larger greenhouse gas footprint than non-grazers such as pigs and chickens. In large part that’s because only the former burp methane, which happens as gut microbes digest the cellulose in grasses and other forage.

 

Pigs and chickens are also much more efficient at converting feed into edible flesh: Chickens need less than two pounds of feed, and pigs need roughly three to five pounds, to put on a pound of body weight. (The rest goes to the energy costs of daily life: circulating blood, moving around, keeping warm, fighting germs, and the like.) Compare that to the six to 10 pounds of feed per pound of cow.

 

As a result, the greenhouse gas emissions of beef cattle per pound of meat are more than six times those of pigs and nearly nine times those of chicken. (Paradoxically, grass-fed cattle—often thought of as a greener alternative to feedlot beef—are actually bigger climate sinners, because grass-fed animals mature more slowly and thus spend more months burping methane.)

 

Building fake meat

 

Plant-based meats aim to improve on that dismal environmental performance. Stanford University biochemist Pat Brown, for example, founded Impossible Foods after asking himself what single step he could take to make the biggest difference environmentally. His answer: Replace meat.

 

Researchers trawled through the scientific literature to find every available study measuring the greenhouse-gas footprint of meats and meat alternatives. Beef is by far the most emissions-heavy option, while plant-based meats and plant foods generally are linked to much lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions for production of a given quantity of protein. In the chart, (n) refers to the number of studies for each category of protein.

 

To do that, Impossible and its competitors basically deconstruct meat into its component parts, then build an equivalent product from plant-based ingredients. The manufacturers start with plant protein—mostly soy for Impossible, pea for Beyond, and potato, oat, or equivalent proteins for others—and add carefully selected ingredients to simulate meat-like qualities. Most include coconut oil for its resemblance to the mouthfeel of animal fats, and yeast extract or other flavorings to add meaty flavors. Impossible even adds a plant-derived version of heme, a protein found in animal blood, to yield an even more meat-like appearance and flavor.

 

All this requires significant processing, notes William Aimutis, a food protein chemist at North Carolina State University, who wrote about plant-based proteins in the 2022  Annual Review of Food Science and Technology. Soybeans, for example, are typically first milled into flour, and then the oils are removed. The proteins are isolated and concentrated, then pasteurized and spray-dried to yield the relatively pure protein for the final formulation. Every step consumes energy, which raises the question: With all this processing, are these meat alternatives really greener than what they seek to replace?

 

To answer that question, environmental scientists conduct what’s known as a life cycle analysis. This involves taking each ingredient in the final product—soy protein, coconut oil, heme, and so forth—and tracing it back to its origin, logging all the environmental costs involved. In the case of soy protein, for example, the life cycle analysis would include the fossil fuels, water, and land needed to grow the soybeans, including fossil fuel emissions from the fertilizer, pesticides, and transportation to the processing plant. Then it would add the energy and water consumed in milling, defatting, protein extraction, and drying.

 

Similar calculations would apply to all the other ingredients and to the final process of assembly and packaging. Put it all together, and you end up with an estimate of the total environmental footprint of the product.

 

Plant-based meats are highly processed products in which proteins, fats, starches, thickeners, flavoring agents and other ingredients are mixed and formed into foods that resemble traditional meat products such as burgers, hot dogs and chicken nuggets.

 

Unfortunately, not all those numbers are readily available. For many products, especially unique ones like the new generation of plant-based meats, product details are secrets closely held by the companies involved. “They will know how much energy they use and where they get their fat and protein from, but they will not disclose that to the general public,” says Ricardo San Martin, a chemical engineer who codirects the Alternative Meats Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. As a result,

most life cycle analyses of plant-based meat products have been commissioned by the companies themselves, including both Beyond and Impossible. Outsiders have little way of independently verifying them.

 

Even so, those analyses suggest that plant-based meats offer clear environmental advantages over their animal-based equivalents. Impossible’s burger, for example, causes just 11 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that would come from an equivalent amount of beef burger, according to a study the company commissioned from the sustainability consulting firm Quantis. Beyond’s life cycle analysis, conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan, found their burger’s greenhouse gas emissions were 10 percent of those of real beef.

 

Indeed, when independent researchers at Johns Hopkins University decided to get the best estimates they could by combing through the published literature, they found that in the 11 life cycle analyses they turned up, the average greenhouse gas footprint from plant-based meats was just 7 percent of beef for an equivalent amount of protein. The plant-based products were also more climate-friendly than pork or chicken — although less strikingly so, with greenhouse gas emissions just 57 percent and 37 percent, respectively, of those for the actual meats.

 

Similarly, the Hopkins team found that producing plant-based meats used less water: 23 percent that of beef, 11 percent that of pork, and 24 percent that of chicken for the same amount of protein. There were big savings, too, for land, with the plant-based products using 2 percent that of beef, 18 percent that of pork, and 23 percent that of chicken for a given amount of protein. The saving of land is important because, if plant-based meats end up claiming a significant market share, the surplus land could be allowed to revert to forest or other natural vegetation; these store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and contribute to biodiversity conservation. Other studies show that plant-based milks offer similar environmental benefits over cow’s milk.

 

Researchers compared the amount of land needed to produce a given amount of protein for meat, plant-based meat and plant foods. Once again, beef towers above the rest, largely because grazing animals need a lot of land to forage. Plant foods are shown to require more land than plant-based meats, but this difference is not meaningful because the estimates for plant foods include crops grown in low-yielding countries, while plant-based meats rely on ingredients grown under high-yield conditions.

 

A caution on cultivation methods

 

Of course, how green plant-based meats actually are depends on the farming practices that underlie them. (The same is true for meat itself—the greenhouse gas emissions generated by a pound of beef can vary more than tenfold from the most efficient producers to the least.) Plant-based ingredients such as palm oil grown in plantations that used to be rainforests, or heavily irrigated crops grown in arid regions, cause much more damage than more sustainably raised crops. And cultivation of soybeans, an important ingredient for some plant-based meats, is a major contributor to Amazon deforestation.

 

However, for most ingredients it seems likely that even poorly produced plant-based meats are better, environmentally, than meat from well-raised livestock. Plant-based meats need much less soy than would be fed to actual livestock, notes Matin Qaim, an agricultural economist at the University of Bonn, Germany, who wrote about meat and sustainability in the 2022 Annual Review of Resource Economics. “The reason we’re seeing deforestation in the Amazon,” he explains, “is because the demand for food and feed is growing. When we move away from meat and more toward plant-based diets, we need less area in total, and the soybeans don’t necessarily have to grow in the Amazon.”

 

But green as they are, plant-based meats have a few hurdles to clear before they can hope to replace meat. For one thing, plant-based meats currently cost an average of 43 percent more than the products they hope to replace, according to the Good Food Institute. That helps to explain why plant-based meats account for less than 1 percent of meat sales in the US. Advocates are optimistic that the price will come down as the market develops, but it hasn’t happened yet. And achieving those economies of scale will take a lot of work: Even growing to a mere 6 percent of the market will require a $27 billion investment in new facilities, says Swartz.

Steak hasn’t yet been well done

In addition, all of today’s plant-based meats seek to replace ground-meat products like burgers and chicken nuggets. Whole-muscle meats like steak or chicken breast have a more complex, fibrous structure that the alt-meat companies have not yet managed to mimic outside the lab.

 

Part of the problem is that most plant proteins are globular in shape, while real muscle proteins tend to form long fibers. To form a textured meat-like product, scientists essentially have to turn golf balls into string, says David Julian McClements, a food scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an editor of the Annual Review of Food Science and Technology. There are ways to do that, often involving high-pressure extrusion or other complex technology, but so far no one has a whole-muscle product ready for market. (A fungal product, sold for decades in some countries as Quorn, is naturally fibrous, but its sales have never taken off in the US. Other companies are also working on meat substitutes based on fungal proteins.)

 

The environmental impact of the two leading plant-based burgers, from Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, is much less than a comparable beef burger, according to detailed studies commissioned by the two companies. Other experts note that these studies are difficult to verify independently because they rely on proprietary information from the companies.

 

McClements is experimenting with another approach to make plant-based bacon: creating separate plant-based analogs of muscle and fat, then 3D-printing the distinctive marbling of the bacon. “I think we’ve got all the elements to put it together,” he says.

 

Some critics also note that a shift toward plant-based meat may reinforce the industrialization of global food systems in an undesirable way. Most alternative meat products are formulated in factories, and their demand for plant proteins and other ingredients favors Big Agriculture, with its well-documented problems of monoculture, pesticide use, soil erosion, and water pollution from fertilizer runoff. Plant-based meats will reduce the impact of these unsustainable farming practices, but they won’t eliminate them unless current farming practices change substantially.

 

Of course, all the to-do about alternative meats overlooks another dietary option, one with the lowest environmental footprint of all: Simply eat less meat and more beans, grains, and vegetables. The additional processing involved in plant-based meats means that they generate 4.6 times more greenhouse gas than beans, and seven times more than peas, per unit of protein, according to the Hopkins researchers. Even traditional, minimally processed plant protein such as tofu beats plant-based meats when it comes to greenhouse gas. Moreover, most people in wealthy countries eat far more protein than they need, so they can simply cut back on their protein consumption without seeking out a replacement.

 

But that option may not appeal to the meat-eating majority today, which makes alternative meats a useful stopgap. “Would I prefer that people were eating beans and grains and tofu, and lots of fruits and vegetables? Yes,” says Bonnie Liebman, director of nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy organization supporting healthy eating.

 

“But there are a lot of people who enjoy the taste of meat and are probably not going to be won over by tofu. If you can win them over with Beyond Meat, and that helps reduce climate change, I’m all for it.”

 

Plant-based milks

 

Along the murky bottom of the Amazon River, serpentine fish called electric eels scour the gloom for unwary frogs or other small prey. When one swims by, the fish unleash two 600-volt pulses of electricity to stun or kill it. This high-voltage hunting tactic is distinctive, but a handful of other fish species also use electricity: They generate and sense weaker voltages when navigating through muddy, slow-moving waters and when communicating with others of their species through gentle shocks akin to morse code.

Normally, when several species share an ability as unusual as generating electricity, it’s because they’re closely related. But the electric fish in the rivers of South America and Africa span six distinct taxonomic groups, and there are three other marine lineages of electric fish beyond them. Even Charles Darwin mused on both the novelty of their electrical abilities and the strange taxonomic and geographic distribution of them in On the Origin of Species, writing, “It is impossible to conceive by what steps these wondrous organs have been produced”—not just once, but repeatedly.

A recent paper published in Science Advances helps to unravel this evolutionary mystery. “We’re really just following up on Darwin, as most biologists do,” said Harold Zakon, an integrative biologist at the University of Texas, Austin and co-senior author of the study. By piecing together genomic clues, his team in Texas and colleagues at Michigan State University uncovered how a number of strikingly similar electric organs arose in electric fish lineages separated by roughly 120 million years of evolution and 1,600 miles of ocean. As it turns out, there’s more than one way to evolve an electric organ, but nature does have some favorite tricks to fall back on.

The South American and African fish that Zakon’s group studies get their zap from specialized electric organs extending along much of their body. Modified muscle cells called electrocytes in the organs create sodium ion gradients. When sodium-gate proteins in the membranes of the electrocytes open, this produces a burst of current. “It’s about the simplest signal you could imagine,” said Zakon.

In muscle, these electric signals flow through and between cells to help them contract for movements, but in the electric organs the voltage is directed outward. The strength of each shock depends on how many electrocytes fire at once. Most electric fish only fire a few at a time, but because electric eels pack an unusually high number of electric cells, they can unleash voltages powerful enough to kill small prey.

In the new work, Zakon, his former research technician Sarah LaPotin (now a doctoral candidate at the University of Utah) and his other colleagues reconstructed a key aspect of the evolution of these electric organs by tracing the fishes’ genomic history.

It began between 320 million and 400 million years ago, when the ancestor of all fish classified as teleosts survived a rare genetic accident that duplicated its entire genome. Whole-genome duplications are often deadly for vertebrates. But because they create redundant copies of everything in the genome, duplications can also open up previously untapped genetic possibilities. “Suddenly, you have the capacity to make a whole new pathway, instead of just one new gene,” said Gavin Conant, a systems biologist at North Carolina State University who was not involved in the study.

 

Harold Zakon, an integrative biologist at the University of Texas, Austin, was one of the leaders of the new study of electric fish evolution. “We’re really just following up on Darwin, as most biologists do,” he said.Photograph: Lynne McAnelly/Quanta Magazine

For more recent ancestors of today’s freshwater electric fish, which are teleosts, the duplication meant that they had an extra copy of a gene for an important sodium pump. One copy continued to work in muscle cells; the second acquired mutations that conferred distinctive electrical properties on electrocytes.

But crucially, before any electric organ-specific adaptations could be adopted, that second copy of the gene first had to be deactivated in muscle cells—otherwise, the emerging electrocyte capabilities would have interfered with movement. And when Zakon and his colleagues looked at how the electric fish turned off the gene, they were surprised to discover that different lineages of electric fish did it differently.

In the muscle tissue of the African fish, the sodium-pump gene was still functional, but like a lock with no key, it could not activate without helper molecules that muscle tissue did not make. In most of the South American fish, the pump was just missing from the muscles—the sodium-pump gene was largely inactive because it was missing an essential control element that specifically boosts the expression of the sodium pump in muscle. In one oddball lineage of South American fish, the gene did still function in muscle. It was temporarily inactive in young fish but turned back on when an entirely different set of genes took over control of the sodium channel in the electric organ as the fish matured.

So in a textbook case of convergent evolution, the various lineages of fish independently hit on the strategy of modifying their muscle tissue to create electrical organs, and they even did so by making their sodium pumps work selectively in different tissues. But they diverged in precisely how they regulated the pumps.

Oftentimes, when scientists investigate a case of convergent evolution, the traits turn out to arise by essentially the same mechanism, explained Johann Eberhart, a molecular biologist at the University of Texas, Austin, and one of the new study’s coauthors. “But this was quite different,” he said. “And I think that’s exciting.”

Conant noted that the new findings “sort of mirrored what we’ve seen” in his own group’s research. His lab discovered that while other teleost fish had lost certain duplicate genes for sending signals between nerves and muscles, some electric fish lineages retained them. Without these key genes placing their electric organs under direct voluntary control, electric eels could not have developed their signature potent zap.

Zakon and his colleagues are also intrigued by the potential significance of the control region they found in the sodium pump genes, since it seems to determine precisely which tissues express the protein. The same control region appears in the sodium pumps of humans and other vertebrates. It’s possible that mutations affecting pump activity in our cells might cause or contribute to various health problems such as the muscle weakness condition called myotonia.

The new research touches on only a few of the examples of convergence and divergence on display in electric fish. Some South American lineages produce faint shocks using modified neurons instead of modified muscle cells. Some electric fish in the oceans have evolved more bizarre electrocution strategies; the stargazer, for example, administers shocks from modified muscles in its eyes.

But for Zakon, it’s the convergent solutions that are most helpful in addressing a fundamental puzzle of biology: If you could rewind the course of evolution, would it play back the same way? Seeing a unique innovation is “fascinating,” he said, but “it doesn’t answer the question, ‘Was there only one way to get there?’” The mix of convergence and divergence seen in organ systems like those of the diverse electric fish offers a much richer view of how predictable—and quirky—biology can be.

Electric Fish Genomes Reveal How Evolution Repeats Itself

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The man, Romualdo Macedo Rodrigues, is a fisherman. During a fishing trip in early August that was supposed to last three days, cracks in his boat started filling with water, sinking the vessel off the coast of northern Brazil. He was able to jump inside the floating cooler to stay alive, and a group of fishermen found him 11 days later off the coast of Suriname.

According to Record TV he was treated at a hospital in Suriname and detained by authorities for a few days because he didn’t have proper documentation. Now’s he’s back in Brazil. “I was born again. I thought I wouldn’t be telling this story, but I’m back here,” he added.

“I was desperate. I thought my end was coming. But thanks God, God gave me one more chance,” Rodrigues told Record TV. “I saw it (freezer) wasn’t sinking. I jumped (inside it), it fell to one side and kept normal.”

The fisherman says he doesn’t know how to swim.

“Sharks were surrounding the freezer, but they went away. I thought (I would be attacked). I stayed on the top (of the freezer), I didn’t sleep, I didn’t sleep. I saw the dawn, the dusk, asking God to send someone to rescue me.” Eventually water started to creep inside the freezer, and he says he used his hand to scoop it out. He didn’t have food or water.

“I was thinking about my kids, my wife. Every day I was thinking about my mother, my father, all my family. It gave me strength and hope … but at the moment I thought there was no other way,” he told Record TV.

When the fishermen arrived, he said: “I heard a noise, and there was a boat on top of the freezer. Only they thought there was no one there. Then they slowly pulled over, my vision was already fading, then I said, ‘My God, the boat.’ I raised my arms and asked for help.” Rodrigues was thankful to survive.

“That freezer was God in my life. The only thing I had was the freezer. It was a miracle.”

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NASA has once again scrubbed the debut launch of its Space Launch System (or SLS) rocket after engineers failed to fix a persistent hydrogen leak.

The hydrogen leak was first noticed this morning, soon after the rocket began being fueled with liquid hydrogen. NASA said the leak “developed in the supply side of the 8-inch quick disconnect while attempting to transfer fuel to the rocket.” The team made three troubleshooting attempts, but a leak was detected after each effort to fix the problem. After the third time, engineers recommended that the launch be a ‘no go.’ Soon after, the mission’s launch director, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, decided to scrub the launch attempt.

The SLS is meant to be one of the workhorses of NASA’s Artemis program. For this mission, called Artemis I, it is tasked with launching the uncrewed Orion crew capsule around the Moon. On future missions, NASA will attempt to return astronauts to the lunar surface using SLS, Orion, and additional equipment.

The agency also scrubbed the previous launch attempt of the SLS, which was supposed to happen on August 29th, citing issues with the engine bleed system meant to help the engines get to a proper temperature before takeoff. A hydrogen leak was also detected during that launch attempt.

NASA has another launch window left — from 5:12 PM to 6:42 PM on September 5th — before it faces a major delay. The flight termination system that’s meant to keep the rocket from becoming a dangerous missile if something goes very wrong during launch needs to be re-tested relatively frequently (it’s supposed to be every 20 days, but NASA got that extended to 25 days), and that testing can’t be done on the launch pad.

Given that the rocket rolled out to the launchpad on August 16th, NASA’s time will pretty much be up after September 5th. If the SLS doesn’t launch then, it’ll have to be rolled back to NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building where the termination system can be re-tested. That’ll take time, potentially pushing this launch back to late October at the earliest.

If that launch is successful though, it should pave the way for a mission next year where NASA sends a crew up in the Orion capsule for the first time. They’ll just be flying around the moon, not landing on it — that milestone is planned for 2025, when we’ll hopefully see the first woman walk on the moon.

Additional reporting by Mary Beth Griggs

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The climate crisis is the prime suspect for the devastating scale of flooding in Pakistan, which has killed more than 1,000 people and affected 30 million. But the catastrophe, still unfolding, is most likely the result of a lethal combination of factors, including the vulnerability of poor citizens, steep mountainous slopes in some regions, the unexpected destruction of embankments and dams, and some natural climate variation.

The horrific scale of the floods is not in doubt. “We are witnessing the worst flooding in the history of the country,” said Fahad Saeed, a climate scientist with the Climate Analytics group, who is based in Islamabad.

The obvious cause is the record-breaking rainfall. “Pakistan has never seen an unbroken cycle of monsoon [rains] like this,” said Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate change minister. “Eight weeks of nonstop torrents have left huge swathes of the country underwater. This is a deluge from all sides.” She said the “monster monsoon was wreaking nonstop havoc throughout the country.”

From the beginning of the month, the rainfall was nine times higher than average in Sindh province and five times higher across the whole of Pakistan. Basic physics is the reason rainfall is becoming intense around the world—warmer air holds more moisture.

Scientists are already trying to determine the extent to which global heating is to blame for the rainfall and floods. But analysis of the previous worst flood in 2010 suggests it will be significant. That “superflood” was made more likely by global heating, which drove fiercer rains.

Warmer oceans and heating in the Arctic were implicated in the 2010 superflood, one study found, as these factors affected the jet stream, a high-level wind that circles the planet. The greater meandering of the jet stream led to both the prolonged rain in Pakistan and an extreme heat wave in Russia that year.

And according to a 2021 study global, heating is making the south Asian monsoon more intense and erratic, with each 1 degree Celsius rise in global temperature leading to 5 percent more rain.

Pakistan has suffered regular flooding since 2010, as well as heat waves and wildfires. “Climate change is really affecting us,” said Saeed. “It has become a norm now that every year we kind of face extreme events.”

The current floods would have been expected less than once a century, according to Liz Stephens, an associate professor of climate risks and resilience at the University of Reading, UK, who is part of a global flood forecasting system. “We can see it is very extreme flooding and, in many places, it will be worse than 2010, when the floods killed 1,700 people.”

Two critical factors in the high death toll are flash flooding and the destruction of river embankments, Stephens said. Some of the intense rains have hit places where the water rapidly runs off steep slopes. “Flash flooding is very difficult to provide good warning for and to get people out of harm’s way quickly,” she said.

River embankments have also been destroyed. “You can’t predict when they are going to fail, and people living in an area where they think they’re protected might not expect that they need to evacuate.”

Stephens said: “We’re talking about potentially unprecedented volumes of water—it would have been inconceivable that some parts of these catchments would have been affected. People don’t prepare for risks that they are not familiar with.”

Deforestation could also have increased the speed of rain runoff in places, Stephens said, while Saeed said dams had been destroyed on the Kabul River that runs into the Indus.

A natural climate cycle driven by temperature and wind variations in the Pacific may also have added to the Pakistan floods, said meteorologist Scott Duncan. The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) appears to be in its La Niña phase, as it was in 2010. “La Niña is behaving very strongly in some metrics and is a significant factor for enhancing monsoonal rains, in my opinion,” he said. However, how global heating affects ENSO is not currently well understood.

The population of Pakistan is especially at risk from extreme weather driven by the climate emergency, ranked eighth most at risk in the world by the Global Climate Risk Index. “Pakistan is very vulnerable to extremes, and the whiplash from unprecedented heat from March to May this year, followed by a strong monsoon, makes the impact on society and the economy even more severe,” said Duncan. The extreme heat wave suffered earlier in 2022 was made 30 times more likely by global heating, and another heat wave in 2015 was also exacerbated by global heating.

“What you see today is just a trailer of what’s in store for us with poverty, hunger, malnutrition, and disease if we don’t pay heed to climate change,” said development and climate expert Ali Tauqeer Sheikh.

The only silver lining in the current flooding situation is that it may not grow even more catastrophic. “Thankfully, no further significant rainfall is expected over the coming days as the end of the monsoon season nears,” said Nicholas Lee at MetDesk.

However, it is clear that the climate crisis is supercharging the toll of extreme weather across the globe, even with just 1.1 Celsius of global heating to date. Pakistan is the latest country where lives and livelihoods are being lost. “It’s a real planet SOS here,” said Rehman.

Pakistan’s ‘Monster Monsoon’ Shows the Wrath of Climate Change

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These beetles tuck symbiotic bacteria in “back pockets” during metamorphosis

High school teacher Lisa St. Coeur Cormier was strolling with her dog near her home on Canada’s Prince Edward Island when something caught her eye.

She often finds sea glass when she’s walking Sammy, but this day she thought she spotted a branch or tree root poking out of the sand.

“I saw something about two feet long with a strange shape,” said Cormier, 36, who lives in Charlottetown. “When I looked closer, I realized there was a rib cage. And around that, there was a spine and a skull.”

Cormier, who used to be a middle school science teacher, immediately knew it was a fossil. But she never imagined how rare and old, or the excitement that would develop from her discovery that day, Aug. 22.

It turns out the fossil is probably about 300 million years old, possibly from a species that no longer exists, said John Calder, a geologist and paleontologist from Halifax, Nova Scotia. That’s before the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs roamed the earth about 200 million years ago.

“There aren’t very many specimens from this period, so it was an incredible find,” Calder said about the fossil.

A photo of the fossil Cormier found landed on his desk after she took pictures and her family began contacting experts about her discovery.

“Something like this comes along every 50 to 100 years,” said Calder, who wrote a book about the geology of Prince Edward Island. “I thought, ‘My goodness, it needs to be collected right away before more bits wash away.’ ”

Calder estimates that the fossil is from the end of the Carboniferous period and into the Permian period.

“It is likely a reptile or a close relative, but it could also be unknown,” he said.

The fossil had probably recently been exposed to the elements and was in danger of washing away in the tide, he said.

Calder put a plan together, packed up his gear and made a trip to Prince Edward Island on Aug. 26 to carefully dig up the fossil with a Parks Canada crew.

“I was really nervous about the tides and was so glad when they arrived,” Cormier said.

“To think that this fossil might have been here 60 to 100 million years before the arrival of dinosaurs was so exciting that I couldn’t sleep,” she added.
She understood the potential importance of her discovery.

“I kept thinking of all the times I’d taught my science students about fossils,” Cormier said. “And now, here I’d found a significant one.”

Laura MacNeil, a geologist who runs Prehistoric Island Tours, a company that gives tours of fossil sites on the island, also was involved in figuring out what to do with the unusual find.

MacNeil said that, like Calder, she was anxious to get the fossil safely out of the bedrock and into the hands of expert paleontologists.

She said the fossilized skeleton Cormier found is an extraordinarily uncommon discovery on Prince Edward Island.

“I was really excited to think what this could mean for the island,” she said.

After Calder took a close look at the fossil, he and his excavation crew got to work. They were joined by Cormier and MacNeil; Cormier’s husband, Gabriel Cormier; and her father-in-law, Aubrey Cormier, as they delicately dug two feet down to bedrock to put a trench around the skeleton.

“We were racing against time to get it out before sunset,” Calder said. “It took a lot of digging and fine chiseling. Once you start doing that, you’re committed to retrieving it in a short window before the tide comes in.”

More than five hours later, everyone was relieved when the skeleton was gently lifted out in three pieces surrounded by rock, he said.

Parks Canada workers then drove the fossil 36 miles across the island to a makeshift paleontology repository in Greenwich, where it will be stored until it is moved again to a paleontology lab in Nova Scotia for a CT scan.

Calder said they want to see what is inside the rock and get a better idea of how to safely remove the fossil.

“It will be a painstaking challenge to keep everything together because the rock is so soft,” he said. “It is a mud stone as opposed to a sandstone.”

Once the fossil is scanned, it could be sent to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in D.C. or the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, where experts will remove all of the rock surrounding the skeleton and begin studying the specimen, he said.

“It will probably take a year to figure out exactly what this is,” Calder said. “We’re not 100 percent sure that it’s a reptile.”

Calder said the fossilized creature was probably similar in appearance to a Gila monster.

“Ultimately, it will be up to the scientists who publish a paper [about it] to decide what it should be called,” he said.

Cormier said she is excited for that to happen. But first, she can’t wait to tell her students when classes start next week — she now teaches French and history — about what she stumbled upon.

“What are the odds that I would go out for a walk and come across this fossil at the precise moment that it was exposed and nothing was covering it?” she said. “I’m in awe.”

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But one entrant, Jason M. Allen of Pueblo West, Colo., didn’t make his entry with a brush or a lump of clay. He created it with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns lines of text into hyper-realistic graphics.

Mr. Allen’s work, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” took home the blue ribbon in the fair’s contest for emerging digital artists — making it one of the first A.I.-generated pieces to win such a prize, and setting off a fierce backlash from artists who accused him of, essentially, cheating.

Reached by phone on Wednesday, Mr. Allen defended his work. He said that he had made clear that his work — which was submitted under the name “Jason M. Allen via Midjourney” — was created using A.I., and that he hadn’t deceived anyone about its origins.

“I’m not going to apologize for it,” he said. “I won, and I didn’t break any rules.”

A.I.-generated art has been around for years. But tools released this year — with names like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion — have made it possible for rank amateurs to create complex, abstract or photorealistic works simply by typing a few words into a text box.

These apps have made many human artists understandably nervous about their own futures — why would anyone pay for art, they wonder, when they could generate it themselves? They have also generated fierce debates about the ethics of A.I.-generated art, and opposition from people who claim that these apps are essentially a high-tech form of plagiarism.

Mr. Allen, 39, began experimenting with A.I.-generated art this year. He runs a studio, Incarnate Games, which makes tabletop games, and he was curious how the new breed of A.I. image generators would compare with the human artists whose works he commissioned.

This summer, he got invited to a Discord chat server where people were testing Midjourney, which uses a complex process known as “diffusion” to turn text into custom images. Users type a series of words in a message to Midjourney; the bot spits back an image seconds later.

Mr. Allen became obsessed, creating hundreds of images and marveling at how realistic they were. No matter what he typed, Midjourney seemed capable of making it.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said. “I felt like it was demonically inspired — like some otherworldly force was involved.”

Eventually, Mr. Allen got the idea to submit one of his Midjourney creations to the Colorado State Fair, which had a division for “digital art/digitally manipulated photography.” He had a local shop print the image on canvas and submitted it to the judges.

“The fair was coming up,” he said, “and I thought: How wonderful would it be to demonstrate to people how great this art is?”

Several weeks later, while walking the fairground in Pueblo, Mr. Allen saw a blue ribbon hanging next to his piece. He had won the division, along with a $300 prize.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I felt like: this is exactly what I set out to accomplish.”

(Mr. Allen declined to share the exact text prompt he had submitted to Midjourney to create “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial.” But he said the French translation — “Space Opera Theater” — provided a clue.)

After his win, Mr. Allen posted a photo of his prize work to the Midjourney Discord chat. It made its way to Twitter, where it sparked a furious backlash.
“We’re watching the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes,” one Twitter user wrote.

“This is so gross,” another wrote. “I can see how A.I. art can be beneficial, but claiming you’re an artist by generating one? Absolutely not.”

Some artists defended Mr. Allen, saying that using A.I. to create a piece was no different from using Photoshop or other digital image-manipulation tools, and that human creativity is still required to come up with the right prompts to generate an award-winning piece.

Olga Robak, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Agriculture, which oversees the state fair, said Mr. Allen had adequately disclosed Midjourney’s involvement when submitting his piece; the category’s rules allow any “artistic practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process.” The two category judges did not know that Midjourney was an A.I. program, she said, but both subsequently told her that they would have awarded Mr. Allen the top prize even if they had.

Controversy over new art-making technologies is nothing new. Many painters recoiled at the invention of the camera, which they saw as a debasement of human artistry. (Charles Baudelaire, the 19th-century French poet and art critic, called photography “art’s most mor­tal enemy.”) In the 20th century, digital editing tools and computer-assisted design programs were similarly dismissed by purists for requiring too little skill of their human collaborators.

What makes the new breed of A.I. tools different, some critics believe, is not just that they’re capable of producing beautiful works of art with minimal effort. It’s how they work. Apps like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney are built by scraping millions of images from the open web, then teaching algorithms to recognize patterns and relationships in those images and generate new ones in the same style. That means that artists who upload their works to the internet may be unwittingly helping to train their algorithmic competitors.

“What makes this AI different is that it’s explicitly trained on current working artists,” RJ Palmer, a digital artist, tweeted last month. “This thing wants our jobs, its actively anti-artist.”

Even some who are impressed by A.I.-generated art have concerns about how it’s being made. Andy Baio, a technologist and writer, wrote in a recent essay that DALL-E 2, perhaps the buzziest A.I. image generator on the market, was “borderline magic in what it’s capable of conjuring, but raises so many ethical questions, it’s hard to keep track of them all.”

Mr. Allen, the blue-ribbon winner, said he empathized with artists who were scared that A.I. tools would put them out of work. But he said their anger should be directed not at individuals who use DALL-E 2 or Midjourney to make art but at companies that choose to replace human artists with A.I. tools.
“It shouldn’t be an indictment of the technology itself,” he said. “The ethics isn’t in the technology. It’s in the people.”

And he urged artists to overcome their objections to A.I., even if only as a coping strategy.

“This isn’t going to stop,” Mr. Allen said. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”

The post An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy. appeared first on New York Times.

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