The Sciences

What you should know about the new Covid variants

POSTED JUNE 3, 2024

From April 14 through April 27, a Covid variant, labeled KP.2, became the new dominant strain in the United States, accounting for about 25% of the cases in the country. In May, the CDC issued a statement on this new family of  Covid variants.  "The CDC is tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants KP.2 and KP.1.1, sometimes referred to as 'FLiRT,' and working to better understand their potential impact on public health.  Currently, KP.2 is the dominant variant in the United States, but laboratory testing data indicate low levels of SARS-CoV-2 transmission overall at this time. That means that while KP.2 is proportionally the most predominant variant, it is not causing an increase in infections as transmission of SARS-CoV-2 [remains] low."  The severity has also remained low, with no noticeable uptick in hospitalizations and deaths.

Will this change as summer approaches? Health professionals are keeping an eye on a possible summer spike in cases, four-and-a-half years since the beginning of the pandemic.  COVID has caused summer waves in the past, but experts said they are often smaller than winter surges.

The advice for avoiding the FLiRT strains is the same as previous variants. Social distancing, hand washing and masking in public spaces can all prevent the spread of COVID as well as other respiratory viruses.  The FLiRT subvariants are more easily transmitted, and doctors advise that people at higher risk for severe COVID-19 infections take additional precautions. Those include:

-Staying up to date on COVID vaccinations.  Some virologists are recommending a new vaccine if you were infected or vaccinated more than six months ago."

-Avoiding sick people, some of whom might not know if they have COVID or a cold

-Masking up in crowded settings

-Taking Paxlovid (which for many should be easier to get) if infected

The strongest risk factor for severe COVID-19 continues to be age, according to the CDC. People with certain underlying medical conditions — including asthma, cancer, diabetes and serious heart conditions — are also at heightened risk.

In light of the emergence of the new variants, the FDA has postponed its meeting to determine the fall 2024 COVID vaccine from mid-May to early June.  This will give them additional time to see which of the FLiRT variants is becoming the dominant one so they can fine-tune the WHO recommendation to what they anticipate will be most prominent in the fall.

Getting ready for the next pandemic

In April, the World Health Organization issued a report that transforms how the world understands respiratory infections like Covid, influenza and measles.  The change puts fresh emphasis on the need to improve ventilation indoors and stockpile quality face masks before the next airborne disease hits.  The study overturned traditional beliefs on droplet transmission, which caused WHO and the CDC to focus on hand-washing and surface-cleaning at the beginning of the pandemic. Such advice overwhelmed recommendations for N95 masks that filter out most virus-laden particles suspended in the air. Employers denied many health care workers access to N95s, insisting that only those routinely working within feet of Covid patients needed them. More than 3,600 health care workers died in the first year of the pandemic, many due to a lack of protection. [link below]

Sources: Johns Hopkins | Bloomberg School of Public Health, Mayo Clinic News Network, Yahoo.com , usatoday.com, Los Angeles Times (latimes.com), NBCnews.com 

The Metaverse: The Next Stage of Virtual Reality

POSTED MAY 7, 2024

Science fiction and gaming are two of my lifelong passions.  From board games to MMORPG, from sci-fi short stories to mind-boggling epic films, I've loved them in all their guises.  Considered forms of escapism by most people, they have played a significant role in predicting, inspiring, and driving new technologies.  

To name just a few, the helicopter, the cell phone, space satellites, the Internet, and self-driving cars all had their start in a writer's imagination. [link below left]  Way back in 1964, the year of New York's World Fair, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was asked to predict what life would be like in 50 years time.  His predictions for 2014 included automatic coffee makers; mobile phones; vehicles with "robot brains"; widespread teaching of technology skills; the replacement of human workers by automation for routine jobs; and "an experimental fusion power plant or two".  

Then there's the exponential advancement of computer processing power.  Gaming, in its late twentieth and early twenty-first century forms, was a driver in the development of computer hardware.  In 2008, a computer built using processors first used in the PlayStation 3 console and processors designed for desktop computers became the world's fastest supercomputer.  RoadRunner at Los Alamos National Laboratory processed one quadrillion floating point calculations per second (a petaflop),  doubling the speed of the previous recordholder.

For decades, science fiction writers, with their imaginings of holographic projections and "programmable" walls had foreshadowed aspects of virtual reality.  

Then in 1992, Neal Stephenson coined the term "Metaverse" in his cyberpunk novel Snow Crash.  In Snow Crash, the Metaverse is a virtual reality space composed of unique environments, each serving specific purposes such as entertainment, socializing, education, and more. Users escape the bleak physical reality of a dystopian, post-global economic collapse West Coast by immersing themselves in this digital realm.  

Much of what Stephenson envisioned more than 3o years ago has parallels in today's gaming world.  For example, users gain entry to the Metaverse through the use of VR (virtual reality) headsets much like Meta’s Oculus Quest, while customizable avatars like we see in popular MMO (massively multiplayer online game) allow for personal expression.  Large-scale virtual events like concerts and electronic/virtual currency are two other Snow Crash novelties already seen in the gaming world.  In Stephenson's future dystopia, people get paid for uploading documents, videos, etc. into a massive database if others deemed the information useful.

A somewhat different take on the Metaverse comes in Ernest Cline's 2011 Ready Player One, a title taken from the start screen of many of the old multiplayer arcade video games.  In Ready Player One, the Metaverse is known as “the OASIS.” It serves as an escapist and nostalgic virtual world where people use digital avatars to explore and interact. Unlike the dystopian Metaverse in Snow Crash, the OASIS is a benign refuge from reality, offering adventure, entertainment, and a sense of community.

A huge virtual world based on Ready Player One was announced earlier this year. Details on what the Ready Player One metaverse will be are sparse for now, but the company says it expects to launch sometime in 2024.  A company statement reads: “Readyverse Studios is laying the groundwork to bring the promise of the open metaverse depicted in Cline’s ‘Ready Player One’ novel and the blockbuster film adaptation into a tangible reality: a multi-world, multi-IP, interoperable open metaverse experience for mass consumers.” 

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame and Meta has stated his vision for virtual reality and the metaverse with some details:

"Meta’s vision for virtual reality is centered around the concept of the metaverse, a collective virtual shared space created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality. It is a space where people can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users. Meta aims to create a metaverse that offers new ways to connect and share experiences, with a focus on real-world impact, creativity, work, fitness, and education. They envision a world where physical distance doesn’t limit our ability to connect and collaborate, and they are developing technologies like Spatial Anchors, Scene Understanding, and stereoscopic color Passthrough to make this a reality."

Without a doubt more companies will be entering the Metaverse space, and we will have eventually a multiplicity of virtual worlds to choose from.  How far we get and how soon we get there will depend on further development of the user interfaces, advances in AI programming, hardware developments, and consumer buy-in.  

Not all are enthusiastic about the possibilities.  Wired magazine presents a skeptical view of the Metaverse [link below center]:

In the time since Facebook's rebrand as Meta, the concept of “the metaverse” has served as a powerful vehicle for repackaging old tech, overselling the benefits of new tech, and capturing the imagination of speculative investors. A lot of money has also been lost, with little to show for it. Meta itself lost $13.7 billion in 2022, and then spent the first half of 2023 laying off over 10,000 employees...Money pouring into a space doesn't necessarily mean a massive paradigm shift is right around the corner, as everything from 3D TVs to Amazon's delivery drones and Google Glass can attest. The history of tech is littered with the skeletons of failed investments.

But even Wired finds some exciting aspects in the current state:

VR headsets like the Quest 2 are cheaper than ever, and Apple's Vision Pro could be really cool if there's ever a version that costs less than a laptop, tablet, and phone combined. Video games and other virtual worlds are getting easier to build and design. And I think the advances in photogrammetry—the process of creating digital 3D objects out of photos or video—make it an incredibly cool tool for digital artists.

Noting that even Zuckerberg doesn't expect the Metaverse to be completely operational until the end of the decade, Medium.com has a more positive take on the Metaverse.  [link below right] Pointing out that the game industry is a pioneer in imagining what the Metaverse might look like, they give the example of Fortnite's covid-era Travis Scott Concert:

"Fans entered the video game Fortnite as avatars and got up close and personal with rap legend Travis Scott while he performed live.  The best-selling traffic physical event could hold 180.000 people. However, the Fortnite equivalent could hold 11 million. The show was magically done. It was completely immersive. The music star reportedly made $20 million, along with other digital merchandise."

Medium offers that the

"...real prize that a fully developed Metaverse has to offer is an entirely new decentralized digital economy.  A new generation of games is already showing how this will operate. Decentraland, for example, is perhaps the first example of a genuinely decentralised social network in the Metaverse: you can buy, trade, and meet up there."

I'm not a fan of NFT's (non-fungible tokens) and so can't get too excited about this particular "real prize".  But later in the Medium post, the author provides a few more interesting possibilities:

• Online jobs where "individuals are willing to spend time living and earning in virtual environments."

• A changing Zoom/Google Meet/Teams environment where "you can travel from London to Australia to Singapore in a matter of hours by switching rooms in the Metaverse."

• Classrooms in the Metaverse could look drastically different. For example, if you study the Roman Empire and have the opportunity to visit the Roman Empire, your absorption of that information will be considerably higher. Who knows if the future children will attend university or simply jump from one Metaverse to the next? 

So is the Metaverse just going to be the internet on steroids or will it prove to be, pardon the pun, a game changer?  Sometime in the next 5-10 years we should have our answer.

PFAS

POSTED APRIL 18, 2024

Last week, the EPA set drinking water limits for five "forever chemicals" known as PFAS ("per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances").  Called “forever chemicals” because they fail to break down fully in the environment, PFAS have been used since the 1950s to make consumer products nonstick, oil- and water-repellent and resistant to temperature change. 

Some PFAS have been linked to serious health problems such as cancer, obesity, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, decreased fertility, liver damage and hormone disruption.  Exposure to PFAS is also associated with decreased infant and fetal growth as well as decreased antibody response to vaccines in both adults and children, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Water companies will need to filter the five targeted  chemicals down to the low parts per trillion range.  Traditional wastewater treatment technologies, such as coagulation followed by physical separation, aeration, chemical oxidation, UV irradiation, and disinfection, are insufficient for removing PFAS, but other treatment technologies such as granular activated carbon (GAC), ion exchange resins, reverse osmosis (RO), nanofiltration (NF), and advanced oxidation have been identified as potentially effective for removing PFAS from source water.  Which of these techniques will prove most effective is yet to be determined.

Drinking water is the most obvious part of the pro0blem but it's been estimated that drinking water is responsible for just 20% of the persistent presence of these compounds in our bodies, with the most significant exposures coming from food, dust and other sources.  That’s because they have been used for decades in thousands of consumer products, including food packaging designed to prevent grease and water from soaking through food wrappers and beverage cups. The chemicals are also used to make carpeting, clothing and furniture resistant to stains, water and grease damage. Other uses include nonstick cookware, cell phones, commercial aircraft and low-emission vehicles.

How then are we to avoid these chemicals?  The New York Times article linked below has some recommendations including: avoiding non-stick cooking tools, getting a suitable water filter, and avoiding textiles that advertise their waterproof and stainproof qualities but don’t claim to be PFAS-free.

Sources: CNN, Updated review on emerging technologies for PFAS contaminated water treatment - ScienceDirect, NY Times

Virtual Reality: An Update

POSTED MARCH 27, 2024

One of the earliest WITW Sciences posts was "Virtual Reality Tourism" (February 2018).  It was still two years before the pandemic changed how we went about our daily lives.  The pandemic made us search and find ways to interact without being physically present.  As the coronavirus hit, we battened down the hatches, and, online and virtually, we met and worked, shopped and learned.   [sidebar]

There has been much progress in the field of Virtual Reality in the six years since that earlier post, and Virtual Reality continues to expand its usefulness in many areas.  

Sources: insidehighered.com, bbc.com, census.gov, travelmag.com, Tech Virality, nih.gov, Robots.net, and sidebar links

The battle against rising sea levels in the Indian Ocean

POSTED FEBRUARY 28, 2024

In this third and final post on how cities and countries are preparing for the rising waters of global warming, we look at two particularly vulnerable countries bordering the Indian Ocean - the densely populated, low-lying nation of Bangladesh, and the Small Island Developing State (SIDS) of Seychelles.

Bangladesh

Government and local action since then have greatly reduced the death and destruction.  In 2007 Cyclone Sidr, a Category 4 storm like that of 1991, caused 4500 deaths compared to the 138,000 in 1991. In 2017 Cyclone Mora, a Category 1 storm, resulted in just six deaths.  Bangladesh has become a leader in adaptation and risk management strategies and now serves as a model for other nations dealing with the effects of climate change.  

A landmark study , "Change in Cyclone Disaster Vulnerability and Response in Coastal Bangladesh", examined how changes in coastal areas contributed to this outcome.  Advances in three areas were noted: 

Institutional Approaches: The study examined various aspects of disaster risk management, including legal frameworks, administrative arrangements, cyclone preparedness activities, early warning dissemination, construction of shelter centers, and strengthening of coastal embankments. These institutional approaches contributed to improved disaster response.

Socioeconomic Factors: Positive changes were observed in house structures, income levels, education, awareness, individual capacity, and poverty reduction. Reduced dependency on agriculture-based earnings also played a role.

Technological Advancements: The availability of mobile phones, radio, television, and social media platforms enhanced social connectivity. Greater gender equality and empowerment facilitated disaster preparedness, evacuation, and response.  

As flood risks grow even greater, the Bangladesh government and development agencies are working together to adapt to the situation and limit the coming impacts.  Traditional measures to prevent floods have focused on building embankments and polders, and improving drainage. More recently, government policies have supplemented the traditional measures with a "living with floods" approach.  

Among the steps underway:

• Raising and strengthening embankments along its coastline. These embankments act as protective barriers against cyclones, subsidence, and sea level rise.

• Tidal river management - which selectively allows tidal water through polders into low-lying areas called "beels", gradually raising the land with sediment

• The creation of mangrove forests along the coastal belt serves as a natural defense against extreme weather events.  Harnessing ecological resources like the Sundarbans mangrove forests is a useful defense - they already protect more than 1 million people and $1.56 billion worth of property from floods.

• Building sea dykes, cyclone shelters, and coastal plantations to enhance resilience against cyclonic disasters.

• Discouraging settlements in high-risk areas, keeping homes out of flood zones

• Investment in public services, resilient transport connectivity, water management, and waste management in urban areas, especially considering the influx of climate migrants from other areas. 

• Promoting types of housing that can better withstand floods - e.g., climate-resilient housing built above flood levels that can conserve water and energy through techniques like rainwater storage.  

• Designing homes that can keep people safer during  flash floods by creating settlements on elevated ground around a man-made water body that collects rainwater for safe drinking.

• Agencies like ActionAid have recruited volunteers who spread early warnings issued by the government to communities.

• Improved predictions for riverbank erosion facilitate prompt evacuation and protection of lives and properties.

Seychelles

The Republic of Seychelles is a "Small Island Developing State" (SIDS).  SIDS will witness some of the most widespread displacement due to global warming.  Climate migration will become necessary for some, and, in a worst-case scenario, entire countries may cease to exist.  The challenges facing these states are many:

• Environmental justice advocates note that SIDS encounter more frequent and intense storms, longer droughts, salinization of freshwater, and habitat loss.  Efforts to address climate change and support SIDS are crucial for their survival and resilience. 

• By 2050, sea-level rise estimates vary from 18-24 cm, with a worst case scenario of 40 cm (1.3 feet).  This could double flooding frequency in much of the Indian Ocean and Tropical Pacific with cyclones remaining a significant driver of flooding.  The rising temperatures will lead to more intense tropical cyclones and storm surges.  

• Some SIDS will also face drought as weather patterns change across the globe. The increased frequency of droughts will cause additional stress on fresh water supplies.

• Terrestrial and marine ecosystems will degrade with endemic species facing extinction risks. Ecosystem degradation, in turn, will negatively affect resources, settlements, food security, health, economies, culture, and migration.

• Severe coral bleaching and declines in coral abundance will occur, especially in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.  Above 1.5°C warming, 70–90% of the world's reef-building corals may be lost.

• Coastal cities and rural communities will face impacts from sea-level rise, heavy precipitation, and tropical cyclones, and climate change will affect settlements, infrastructure, health, water security, and economies.

The climate change threats facing Seychelles are similar to those threatening other SIDS.  These include changes in rainfall patterns leading to flooding and landslides on the one hand and extended periods of drought on the other, increases in sea temperature, changes in acidity and damage to marine ecosystems, increases in storms and storm surges, and sea level rise.  In addition, the Seychelles Islands are sinking, and the archipelago has witnessed a devastating coral die-off.  Some believe the rising sea levels will put most of the archipelago underwater in 50 to 100 years and leave the rest of it uninhabitable.

Seychelles has developed a comprehensive document addressing what steps it is taking to combat climate change.  The Adaptation Contribution of Seychelles’ Updated Nationally Determined Contribution of July 2021 outlines its strategies and actions to enhance climate resilience and adapt to changing conditions.  Specific measures and project examples include:

I...Coastal Adaptation: Addressing the impacts of rising sea levels, erosion, and extreme weather events on coastal communities. 

• The Coastal Wetlands and Climate Change Project integrates blue carbon habitats, specifically seagrass meadows and mangroves, into Seychelles’ Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC).  These coastal ecosystems contribute to both mitigation (by sequestering carbon) and adaptation (by enhancing resilience against climate impacts).

II...Blue Economy Integration: Incorporating coastal wetlands into adaptation efforts.

• Creating Sustainable Wealth: Seychelles aims to generate wealth through sustainable use of marine resources. Initiatives include promoting tourism, fisheries, and marine-based industries while ensuring long-term viability

III...Climate-Resilient Infrastructure: Enhancing infrastructure to withstand climate-related challenges.

• Climate-Resilient Buildings and Facilities: Seychelles is investing in climate-smart infrastructure. This includes constructing buildings and facilities that can withstand extreme weather events, such as cyclones and heavy rainfall. The focus is on designing structures that can endure both current and projected future climate conditions

• Saltwater Intrusion Mitigation: Rising sea levels pose a threat to freshwater sources. Seychelles is implementing strategies to prevent saltwater intrusion into its freshwater aquifers. These efforts involve monitoring groundwater levels, protecting wells, and promoting water conservation practices

IV...Ecosystem-Based Approaches: Leveraging natural ecosystems for adaptation.

• Watershed Rehabilitation: Seychelles recognizes the importance of healthy watersheds in maintaining freshwater availability. By restoring and protecting natural vegetation in watersheds, the country aims to enhance water provisioning services and reduce the risk of water scarcity.

• Coastal Rehabilitation: Coastal ecosystems play a crucial role in buffering against flooding and erosion. Seychelles is engaged in coral reef rehabilitation, mangrove restoration, and other measures to enhance coastal resilience. Mangroves, for instance, act as natural barriers, reducing the impact of storm surges and coastal flooding

V...Capacity Building and Awareness: Strengthening local capacity and promoting climate awareness.

• Individual and Institutional Capacity Enhancement: Seychelles focuses on both individual and institutional levels. Individual: Educational programs, training, and awareness-raising activities are conducted to empower citizens with climate knowledge. Institutional: Organizations and institutions receive support to develop their missions, mandates, and competencies related to climate action.

Facing extreme threats from global warming, both of these developing nations have become models for the rest of the world.  Born of necessity, their commitment stands out.  Both countries contributed very little to the global warming that is our present and future.  Simple justice demands that the developed world help them and other developing nations survive, both financially and by cutting back our greenhouse gas emissions.  Finally, as global warming displaces more and more, we must find the political will and establish the legal structures to protect climate refugees, both the internally displaced and those driven across international borders by sea-level rise, prolonged droughts, and resource scarcity. [link below right]

Sources: Context News, Seychelles’ Updated Nationally Determined Contribution of July 2021, World Bank Climate Portal, Wiley Online Library, IPCC report | United Nations, Wikipedia, Inside Climate News, Brookings

How New Orleans and New York are preparing for the rising sea levels of climate change

POSTED FEBRUARY 7, 2024

In this post, we look at how two US coastal cities, devastated by catastrophic storm surges, are preparing for the rising sea levels due to climate change.

New Orleans is no stranger to severe storms and extreme flooding.  Hurricanes batter the city with regularity.  About half of the city is below sea level with an extensive system of levees holding back the Gulf of Mexico.  When the system is breached, as it was in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, the results are catastrophic.  Katrina destroyed entire neighborhoods, killing more than 1400 people and causing $150 billion in damages.  

When Superstorm Sandy hit the New York Metropolitan area in October 2012, it was a foretaste of what a future of rising sea levels might mean for coastal cities and towns unfamiliar with catastrophic flooding.  In New York City, Sandy resulted in 43 deaths, severe damage to several thousand homes, power outages affecting 2 million residents, 250,000 vehicles destroyed, 20,000 trees damaged or destroyed, flooding of the subway system and tunnels connecting Manhattan to Queens and Brooklyn, and an estimated $19 billion in infrastructure damage.  In nearby New Jersey, coastal towns were devastated by a record-breaking storm surge that killed 38 people, cut power to 2 million, and caused $30 billion in economic damage.  Beaches on the Jersey Shore suffered erosion due to Sandy’s waves and were, on average, 30 to 40 feet narrower after the storm.  Sandy also wreaked havoc on Long Island. In addition to 13 deaths, it destroyed dozens of homes, left most residents without power, breached barrier islands, and incapacitated a sewage treatment plant.  

New Orleans

After Hurricane Katrina, the city’s flood-protection system was bolstered by $15 billion in federal funds, which were used to increase the heights of earthen berms and upgrade floodwalls and floodgates. These defenses held after Hurricane Ida, a category 4 storm, made landfall close to the city in August 2021.

Beyond recovering from Katrina, New Orleans is implementing several strategies to mitigate the impacts of climate change and prevent flooding.  These measures, which for the most part can be applied to any flood-prone region, aim to make New Orleans less vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels, increased flooding, and more frequent and intense storm events.  

Building Resilience: New Orleans is trying to rebuild in a way that makes it more resilient to the effects of climate change, land subsidence, and wetlands loss. This includes flood proofing and flood protection through dikes, berms, pumps, integration of natural landscape features, elevation, more frequent upgrades, or relocation.  Although the improved system withstood a direct hit from a Category 4 hurricane, additional upgrading of the levees to combat the ever-increasing strength of storms and hurricanes may be necessary.

Community Initiatives: Community groups are boosting the city’s storm resilience by planting trees, using rain barrels, and creating bioswales - ditches or channels lined with plants to help filter rainwater.  For many New Orleanians, water management isn’t about billion-dollar levees or century-old pumps. It’s about small, nature-based projects like rain gardens or pavement that allows water to soak in or streets lined with trees. The goal of “nature-based” solutions is to reduce the pressure on pipes and pumps by using landscaping to slow the flow of water.   These installations reduce the burden on the city’s aging, overwhelmed drainage system and can do much toward reducing damage from the routine flooding already plaguing the city and improving the quality of life for the city's residents. [link below left]

Nonstructural Measures: Past experience in New Orleans and other places has shown that "structural" protection measures — levees, floodwalls, pumps, and floodgates — are unable to protect the city from all possible storm surge events. Other measures are needed to reduce the risk of property damage and loss of life from storm surges.  A RAND risk assessment found that "nonstructural" measures, such as incentives for elevating existing or new structures or for relocation to lower-risk areas, revised building codes, and land use restrictions designed to curtail future growth in the floodplain would reduce the risk. Targeting mitigation funds to the lowest-elevation neighborhoods would likely yield the greatest net social benefit. 

Sea Level Rise Mitigation: Sea levels in the New Orleans area are likely to increase by 1 to 4.6 feet (0.3 to 1.4 meters) by 2100. To combat this, efforts are being made to address potential wetland submersion.  Not every low-lying city is surrounded by wetlands as New Orleans is.  These natural features play a significant role in reducing the impact of flooding events. They function as natural sponges that trap and slowly release surface water, rain, snowmelt, groundwater and flood waters. Trees, root mats and other wetland vegetation also slow the speed of flood waters and distribute them more slowly over the floodplain. 

New York City

New York City is spending billions of dollars to protect its infrastructure and raise its shoreline.  

Protecting Infrastructure: After Sandy, the City of New York and private companies have spent more than $30 billion to repair and improve the resiliency of its damaged infrastructure.  Projects were developed to protect subway openings against flooding, replace pumps, and fortify tunnels under the East River.  Plans are also being developed to reduce paved surfaces, plant trees, "daylight" underground streams, create more parks and "green roofs” to reduce stormwater runoff, a major cause of subway flooding.  Con Edison, the main supplier of electricity to the city, hardened its delivery system by raising equipment, building walls, and installing pumps. Crews have also installed submersible transformers and other equipment that can withstand a deluge of salty water and stay in service.

Raising the City's Shoreline: New York also began planning a project to raise and protect its shoreline.  In 2022, one of the first parts of the project, the Asser Levy renovation, was completed.  If a sudden storm caused the East River to start overtopping this barrier, a 79-foot-long floodgate would begin gliding along a track, closing off Asser Levy playground from the floodwaters.  Asser Levy is one piece of the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR),which in turn is one link in the Big U project - a series of flood resilience projects that runs from Asser Levy, near 25th Street, around the southern tip of Manhattan, and up to Battery Park City, along the Hudson River. When finished, the Big U will amount to 5.5 miles of new park space specifically designed to protect over 60,000 residents and billions of dollars in real estate against sea level rise and storm surges. [link below right]

Sources: NJDEP, nyc.gov, amny.com, The Weather Channel, Con Ed website, Rudin Center at NYU, Britannica, Wikipedia, longislandpress.com, NRDC, Reuters, U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit, RAND, epa.gov, Rutgers University

How cities and countries are preparing for rising sea levels

POSTED JANUARY 15, 2024

Cities have developed along waterways and coastlines for millennia.  The ease of transporting goods and the closeness to the abundant food resources of the waters made these locales a natural location for people to congregate in great numbers.  Today, 14 of the world’s 17 largest cities are located along coasts, and two-fifths of cities with populations of 1 million to 10 million people are located near coastlines.  More than 630 million people, approximately ten percent of the world's population, live on a coastline at an elevation of 30 feet or less.   When we include flooding from rivers and streams, the total number of people exposed to at least medium-level flood risk is 1.8 billion.  

With the rising sea levels from global warming, these figures will continue to increase.  What are cities and countries doing to prepare for the inevitable rise in sea levels?  We start a multi-part series with a look at two locales that have been battling the sea for centuries: Venice and the Netherlands.

Preparing for a radically changed planet - Apr 21, 2021 

Venice

The floating city of Venice, one of the most extraordinary cities in the world, was built on 118 islands in the middle of the Venetian Lagoon at the northern end of the Adriatic Sea.  People fled to the Venetian Lagoon from their homes on the mainland when Germanic and other tribes were ravaging the western Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D.  The islands were difficult to reach and easy to defend.  The settlers used the marshy lagoon for protection and found refuge among the poor fishermen living there. As the invasions continued across Italy, more and more refugees joined the first settlers and the need to build a new city grew.  The city of Venice was officially founded on Friday March 25, 421 A.D.  

The settlers soon needed more space and a stronger foundation to live on. They had to find ways to strengthen the islands, drain them, enlarge them and protect the fragile environment. So, they dug hundreds of canals and shored up the banks with wood pilings.  From the beginning, the weight of the city pushed down on the dirt and mud that it was built on, squeezing out water and compacting the soil. This phenomenon, together with the natural movement of high tides, causes periodic flooding in the city (the acqua alta) and a slow "sinking" of the city. Over the past 100 years, the city has sunk about nine inches. 

Now with global warming and rising sea levels, Venice is at  risk of being consumed by the sea. In a worst-case scenario, the city could disappear beneath the waves by 2100. Meanwhile, many of its building are sinking or being damaged by the wakes of boats.  Solutions include wake-minimizing boats, deepening of underwater channels, and, most notably, installing sea-based defensive barriers.

The MOSE – Italian for Moses, and short for Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico, or Experimental Electromechanical Model – consists of 78 mobile gates (which can admit vessels), each 20m (66ft) wide and located at strategic locations to create a "coastal cordon" which has been minimizing major flooding events since its startup in 2020.   Planning began in 1984 but it took nearly four decades and more than $6 billion to build, beset by delays and corruption to such an extent that many Venetians believed it would never work.  Their fears were proved groundless on October 3, 2020, when Venice was hit by an exceptionally high tide.  A tide that was 135 centimeters (53 inches) above normal levels hit Venice. Usually, that would have put half the city underwater, but this time, the city remained dry. It was the first time the MOSE had been raised in adverse weather conditions. 

The system, described in some detail on the webpage linked below, is expected to be fully functional by 2025.

The Netherlands

Threatened by flooding from both the sea and from rivers, the low-lying country of the Netherlands has a long history of keeping the sea from uncontrollably flooding the land.  As early as the 8th century A.D., the Dutch built windmills across their countryside as a means to keep water flowing from the lakes to prevent flooding.   Over the centuries, they have developed a comprehensive flood control system.  Natural sand dunes, constructed dikes, dams, and floodgates provide defense against storm surges from the sea. River dikes prevent flooding from water flowing into the country by the major rivers Rhine and Meuse, while a complicated system of drainage ditches, canals, and pumping stations (historically, windmills) keep the low-lying parts dry for habitation and agriculture.

Two devastating floods led to two massive projects that further strengthened the Netherlands' ability to avoid flooding.

After a serious flood in 1916, they constructed one massive dike to close off part of the ocean.  The Zuiderzee, an inlet of the North Sea, caused many floods.  So the Dutch built a 20-mile (32km) long dike to close off part of it off.  When it was completed in 1932, it created the largest freshwater lake in Western Europe, called the Ijsselmeer (shown below left in dark blue).

A major flood in 1953 resulted in 1,836 deaths and a lot of property damage, causing the Dutch to overhaul their water management.  Following that disaster, the Delta Works Project was begun.  A huge system of dikes and storm surge barriers created to protect the southwestern part of the Netherlands, the Delta Works is the largest flood protection project in the world.  One piece of this massive system is the Maeslantkering ("Maeslant barrier" in Dutch), a storm surge barrier in South Holland province.  It was constructed from 1991 to 1997.   The barrier responds to water level predictions calculated by a centralized computer system and automatically closes when Rotterdam is threatened by floods. (Shown in the closed position below center).

Enter the increasing threat from the rising waters of global warming.  Even for the "best-prepared country on Earth", the sea level rise looms and plans are being made for worst-case scenarios. [link below right]

For the past decade, the Netherlands has been working to enact plans for flood safety based on a 2014 assessment by the Delta Program that anticipated a sea level rise of up to about 1 m (3.3 ft) by 2100. These measures are expected to give everyone in the Netherlands a basic level of protection until about 2050.   From 2050 onward, things will get more complicated. A recent study by researchers looked at how an increase in the annual rise of sea levels could overtax constructions like storm barriers and pumping stations, shortening their functional life spans and making other approaches necessary. 

The study also looked at the different strategic choices the Netherlands may need to make in the long term. For instance, it might be necessary to retreat from rising waters by moving people, assets, and specific activities to higher ground. Another option is to accommodate the water by elevating buildings on piles and mounds and refocusing agriculture on salt-tolerant crops or fish farming. Yet another idea is to continue fortifying the existing coastline with more dikes, seawalls and dunes, or even to create an entirely new, much higher coastline.

Sources: NPR, Research Gate, PRB, LivItaly, Venice by Venetians, CNN, Wikipedia, Wilderness Classroom, MOSE webpage, BBC Future

Top science stories of 2023

POSTED DECEMBER 27, 2023

It was another banner year for scientific discoveries and advances.  Here are a few of  2023's top science stories.

2023 was a "breakout year" for Artificial Intelligence

Thanks in large part to ChatGPT, 2023 was the year Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) went mainstream.  We've been using AI for a long time and it has helped with solutions in many areas, but this year ChatGPT brought AI to practically everyone.  Michael Wooldridge, a professor of computer science at Oxford University, writes that ChatGPT took off so spectacularly because first, "it is very accessible"  and second, "it finally feels like the AI we were promised...This isn’t the end of the road for AI, not by a long way – but it really is the beginning of something big."

A.I. made its way into courtrooms, music and art.  In the realm of science, this cutting-edge technology is paving the path toward new discoveries and more advanced processing of data.  At the same time, experts warned of the need to regulate the rapidly advancing technology, raising concerns that A.I. could spread misinformation, manipulate humans and alter the job market if it isn’t controlled. 

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (March 16, 2023)

The James Webb Space Telescope expanded our knowledge and challenged our conceptions of the universe

JWST gave us gorgeous images of everything from the planets of the Solar System to galaxies of the early universe.  Its biggest surprise: JWST uncovered so many really big and complex and mature galaxies in the early universe that it upended current cosmological theories about how the universe evolved.  It also gave us a direct view of numerous exoplanets - important because direct imaging gives a unique window into exoplanets’ atmospheres through spectra.  Exoplanet spectra reveal what’s going on in a planet’s atmosphere, even including possible signs of life. (link below left)

Dark matter, dark energy, and the latest from JWST (September 13, 2023)

Gene editing is establishing itself as a cure for sickle cell anemia and other conditions.

Scientists in the UK and US are trailblazing a biotechnology therapy for sickle cell disease, a debilitating and sometimes deadly disease  more likely to afflict black populations. The treatment would be the first of what researchers hope will be many new medical treatments that use CRISPR. The gene-editing technology allows scientists to easily make precise changes in DNA. Researchers are studying CRISPR-based therapies for conditions including muscular dystrophy, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, AIDS and heart disease. (link below right)

The immense promise of gene therapy (April 3, 2023)

It was the hottest year on record.

2023 will go down as the hottest year on record. That record was previously set seven years ago, in 2016.  The effects of climate change are becoming more disastrous with each passing year: wildfires swept through the Greek Isles, Hawaii and Canada; more than 10,000 people died in Libya when a flood swept a city into the sea; Tropical Cyclone Freddy battered communities in east Africa; and drought and heat made some regions uninhabitable. 

Some good news, though: Countries are producing more green energy than ever before; AI forecasts are analyzing weather and climate data at an unprecedented rate; and NASA's SWOT satellite started measuring where all the water is on Earth, helping to prevent future disasters.

Climate change takes center stage in Dubai (December 4, 2023)

We learned that homo sapiens migrated out of Africa earlier than previously thought.

By studying the genomes of African peoples, a research team led by Sarah Tishkoff at the University of Pennsylvania showed that the small amount of Neanderthal DNA in living Africans today had entered the Homo sapiens lineage as early as 250,000 years ago somewhere in Eurasia, meaning that we had left Africa several times, and way earlier than thought.  Previously, scientists had placed the first migration out of Africa at 100,000 years ago.

2022 Nobel Prize Winners: quantum information science, click chemistry, and human origins

Sources: The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, WBUR Radio, Scientific American

Climate change takes center stage in Dubai

POSTED DECEMBER 4, 2023

COP 28, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, is taking place in Dubai from 30 November until 12 December 2023. More than 70,000 delegates are expected to attend the conference, including government representatives from member states of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.  Business leaders, young people, climate scientists, Indigenous Peoples, journalists, and various other experts and stakeholders are also among the participants.  

COP 28 is the annual checkup on how nations are doing against their commitments to hold long-term global temperature rise to 1.5C. This was agreed by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015.  The 1.5C target is crucial to avoid the most damaging impacts of climate change, according to the UN's climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Long-term warming currently stands at about 1.1C or 1.2C compared with pre-industrial times - the period before humans started burning fossil fuels at scale.  However, recent estimates suggest the world is currently on track for about 2.4 C to 2.7 C of warming by 2100.  As a result, the window for keeping the 1.5C limit in reach is "rapidly narrowing", the UN says.

A change of 2-3 degrees C above pre-industrial temperatures would entail a great amount of displacement, damage, and human suffering.  The following list of potential effects is from last year's post on COP 27 (COP 27 begins as the planet hurtles towards the climate change "tipping point", Nov 8, 2022):

• Mountain glaciers and rivers will start to disappear and mountainous regions will see more landslides, as the permafrost that held them together melts away. 

• By 2100, sea levels could rise by a meter, displacing 10% of the world's population. Countries such as the Maldives will be submerged and the Indian subcontinent will be left fighting for survival. 

• People will die in greater numbers as they struggle with the increasing heat.

• The ecosystem will collapse and a third of all life on earth will face extinction. Plant growth will slow, then stop. Plants won't absorb carbon dioxide as well and so begin to emit it - making global warming worse.

• The world's food centers will become barren and, by the turn of the century, one third of the planet will be without fresh water.

• Up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest will be destroyed and warmer soil will kill vegetation and release more carbon.

• Hurricanes will be stronger and cities in Asia, Australia and the south-east of the US will face destruction. Holland will be torn apart by the North Sea.

• Saltwater will creep upstream, poisoning the groundwater and ruining the food supply.

Following a year of record heat and drought, this year's U.N. climate summit will feature a contentious set of issues for countries working to find common ground in tackling climate change, including whether to phase out fossil fuels and how to finance the energy transition in developing countries.  The five major issues:

• "Global stocktake".  With global efforts lagging, countries will try during this "global stocktake" to agree on a plan to get the world on track to meet climate goals, which could include urgent steps towards cutting CO2 emissions or boosting green technology investments.

• The future of fossil fuels. The toughest talks at COP28 may focus on the future role of fossil fuels, and whether countries should commit to start phasing out the use of CO2-emitting coal, oil and gas.  Countries agreed at COP26 to phase down the use of coal, but they have never agreed to quit all fossil fuels 

• Technologies to tackle emissions.  Countries whose economies are dependent on fossil fuels want COP28 to include a focus on nascent technologies designed to capture and store CO2 emissions underground.

Carbon capture: an emerging tool in the climate change kit - Jun 16, 2021 

• Boosting clean energy capacity.  Countries will consider setting goals to triple renewable energy capacity and to double energy savings by 2030 - a proposal made by the European Union, United States and the UAE's COP28 presidency.

• Financing for the costs of climate change. Developing countries will need at least $200 billion every year by 2030 to adapt to worsening climate impacts like coastal sea rise or storms, and they will need funding to help replace polluting energy with clean sources.   At COP28, high-income countries will be tasked with setting up a "loss and damage" fund to help with this. 

In addition, momentum is building for a voluntary pledge from oil and gas companies to cut emissions of the greenhouse gas methane, a limit on emissions from air conditioning and restrictions on private finance for coal plants.

Stay tuned.  We'll update you when COP 28 concludes. ==> See The Fray post COP 28 has ended - now what? - Dec 14 

Below left is a link to a primer on climate change; below right is a link to a BBC post on what you can do to reduce your personal carbon footprint

Sources: BBC - 1, United Nations Climate Change, BBC - 2, Reuters,  Sky News 

The Artemis Program at Touchdown - 2 years

POSTED OCTOBER 29, 2023

Humans have not been back to the Moon for more than fifty years.  When Astronaut Eugene Cernan boarded Apollo 17's lunar lander for the return to Earth in December 1972, he was the last person to walk its surface.  

The Artemis Program is about to change that.  Named for Apollo's sister, Artemis is a NASA-led* initiative to land the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon by 2025 and to establish a sustainable human presence on the lunar surface by the end of the decade.  Longer term it will lay the foundations for the extraction of lunar resources and, eventually, to make crewed missions to Mars and beyond feasible.  In this post, we'll take a look at the Artemis Program's progress to date and a look ahead to its next missions. 

The Return to Space: An Update - December 22, 2021

Why go to Mars? Why, indeed. have a space program? We're going to Mars - Feb 23, 2021 

Artemis III

Artemis III is the third mission of NASA’s Artemis program and is currently planned to be launched in December 2025. The mission aims to put humans on the Moon’s south polar region, which has never been explored before. The mission would see two astronauts land on the surface of the Moon for a stay of about one week.  

The mission will be the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

Two of the spacecraft needed for Artemis III are in the late stages of development: the Gateway and the Human Landing System (HLS).  The Artemis Gateway is a Moon-orbiting space station that is intended to serve as a solar-powered communication hub, science laboratory, and short-term habitation module for government-agency astronauts, as well as a holding area for rovers and other robots  The Human Landing System (HLS) is the spacecraft in NASA’s Artemis program that is expected to land humans on the Moon. The HLS is being designed to convey astronauts from the Lunar Gateway space station in lunar orbit to the lunar surface, sustain them there, and then return them to the Gateway station.

*International partners include, among others, the European Space Agency (ESA), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and Canadian Space Agency (CSA).  NASA has also partnered with several private companies to develop new technologies and capabilities for future lunar exploration, including Blue Origin, Dynetics, and SpaceX.

Sources: Live Science, Royal Museums Greenwich, NASA (various), Wikipedia (various), space.com, 

A matter of taste: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, and...ammonium chloride?

POSTED OCTOBER 11, 2023

Scientists led by researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) have discovered evidence of a sixth basic taste, which if confirmed will join the currently recognized basic tastes of sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. In research published Oct. 10 in Nature Communications, USC Dornsife neuroscientist Emily Liman and her team found that the tongue responds to ammonium chloride, a popular ingredient in some Scandinavian candies, through the same protein receptor that signals sour taste.  In some northern European countries, salt licorice has been a popular candy at least since the early 20th century. The treat counts among its ingredients salmiak salt, or ammonium chloride.  When and if it finally is accepted as a basic taste, I hope they come up with a better name than ammonium chloride - like they did with umami, which means "pleasant savory taste" or "essence of deliciousness" in Japanese. 

Umami was first identified by a Japanese chemist, Kikunae Ikeda, in 1908, who isolated glutamate from seaweed broth and created monosodium glutamate (MSG), a flavor enhancer.  Scientists debated whether umami was a basic taste since Ikeda first proposed its existence.  Finally, in 1985, the term umami was recognized as the scientific term to describe the taste of glutamates and nucleotides.  Many meats, vegetables, and varieties of seafood are sources of umami.  Especially rich in this basic taste are sun-dried tomatoes, miso, anchovies, parmesan cheese, soy sauce and dried shiitake mushrooms. [link below left]

So, if there are only five (or six) basic tastes, how can the average person distinguish about 100,000 distinct flavors? 

A small portion of these distinct flavors comes from various proportions of the basic tastes in a food.  The remaining flavors are distinguished by their basic taste(s), texture, temperature and aroma.  Aroma is an especially powerful determinant.  If you have ever tried to enjoy a meal with a head cold, you know how much your sense of smell* adds to flavor.  

Survivability was the reason Nature evolved our sense of taste in the first place.  Over millions of years, our sense of taste evolved to help us choose which foods to eat. Choosing the wrong food could mean wasted energy, poor nutrition or poisoning from eating something that can do harm to our bodies. According to Current Biology Perspective on Food and Human Taste, humans relied on fruit and other plant-based foods and eventually developed a strong sense for the natural bitter taste in plants and leaves.

As time progressed, we retained these early taste preferences and acquired newer ones. We like the taste of sweet because it signifies a source of sugar, which means energy. We like sour because it is a source of vitamin C. Our bodies don’t produce vitamin C, but it is essential for survival. We like salty because our early plant-source diet did not have enough salt. That’s why animals that don’t eat meat (herbivores) seek out salt licks.  [link below center] Fittingly enough, as the sheer enjoyment of food became more important, umami was recognized as a basic taste.

"Acquiring a taste" for a particular food is a well-known phenomenon.  For example, as they get older, many children that used to gag at anything bitter or overly spicy (e.g., bleu cheese, green olives, wasabi) start to accept, and even actively seek out, those same bold flavors in their diets. This change has nothing to do with maturing taste buds. Rather, it can be explained by the purely psychological phenomenon of acquired taste.

People can acquire tastes at any age, and not much research has been done into when these preferences tend to evolve. Anecdotally, at least, adolescence seems to be a critical time. At this point in life, people are very susceptible to peer influence, which may be one of the biggest factors driving acquired taste.   Another factor is exposure.  If someone is exposed to something repeatedly—whether it’s a food, a song, a place, or a group of people—they may start to like it simply because it’s familiar.  A third factor that determines if someone will grow to love a taste is conditioning. Acquired tastes like spicy, bitter, and sour are rarely the sole component of a dish. They’re typically paired with flavors humans are more inclined to like, such as sweet and fatty.  Once associated with a pleasant dish, the pungent or bitter particular food becomes more acceptable. [link below right]

As for ammonium chloride's future "taste" name, who knows what imaginative sobriquet it will be given three-quarters of a century from now?  How about barnens-förtjusning (Swedish for children's delight)? Salt-og-sur (Norwegian for salty and sour)? Yeah, pretty lame.

*Based on their tests, a team of researchers led by Dr. Andreas Keller of Rockefeller University calculated that humans can discriminate more than 1 trillion scents.   Odors almost always represent mixtures of many different components in various ratios. The scent of a rose, for example, is made up of a mix of 275 components, with only a few contributing to the smell we perceive.

Sources: Food Insight, Wikipedia, Science Daily, Real Simple, Mental Floss

Dark matter, dark energy, and the latest from JWST

POSTED SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

Ever since scientists proposed them to explain certain surprising observations, dark matter and dark energy have disrupted our understanding of the nature of the universe.   In recent decades we have learned, for example  that dark matter makes up about 85% of all the matter in the universe, meaning that we can see only 15% of the matter in the universe.  Also, scientists have estimated that dark matter and dark energy combined comprise a whopping 95% of the total mass and energy of the universe and that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rather than ever decreasing rate.

So what are these mysterious phenomena, how were they discovered, and how do they effect the evolving universe?

Dark matter is a type of matter that does not interact with light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation, making it invisible to telescopes and other instruments that detect light.  The concept of dark matter was first proposed by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1933, who noticed that the mass of visible matter in the Coma galaxy cluster was not enough to account for the gravitational forces that held it together. However, it wasn’t until the 1970s that astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford provided strong evidence for the existence of dark matter by studying the rotation curves of galaxies*.   

Dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy that is thought to permeate all of space and accelerate the expansion of the universe by counteracting gravity.  The discovery of dark energy is more recent than the discovery of dark matter.  In 1998, two independent teams of astronomers studying distant supernovae discovered that the expansion of the universe was accelerating, rather than slowing down as expected due to gravity. This discovery led to the realization that another form of energy - dark energy - must exist and be responsible for this acceleration.  

Despite decades of research, dark matter and dark energy remain largely unknown.  A few of the questions still to be answered:

What is dark matter? Scientists have yet to identify the exact nature of dark matter, which is believed to make up about 26%- 27% of the universe’s mass and energy. Some theories suggest that it could be made up of undiscovered particles, while others propose that it could be a manifestation of gravity on a cosmic scale.

How can we detect dark matter? Despite its prevalence in the universe, dark matter has never been directly detected. Scientists are currently using a variety of methods to try to detect it, including looking for evidence of its gravitational effects on visible matter and searching for hypothetical particles called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs).

What is dark energy? Dark energy is an even more mysterious force than dark matter, accounting for roughly 68%-69% of the universe’s mass and energy  It is believed to be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe, but scientists are still trying to understand its nature and properties.

How do dark matter and dark energy interact? While they are both believed to play important roles in shaping the universe, scientists are still trying to understand how dark matter and dark energy interact with each other.

What is the ultimate fate of the universe? The answer to this question depends largely on the nature of dark matter and dark energy. If dark energy continues to accelerate the expansion of the universe, it could eventually lead to a “Big Rip,” in which everything in the universe is torn apart. Alternatively, if dark matter is found to be unstable or decaying, it could lead to a “Big Crunch,” in which the universe collapses back in on itself.

Study of images from the James Webb Space Telescope may help answer these questions.  One recent line of inquiry is on the fundamental nature of dark matter.  The linked article below describes some of this exciting work:

• An extreme star system, a pair of supergiant stars that, in their heyday, a full 10 billion years ago, outshone nearly everything else in their galaxy.  Nicknamed Mothra after after a kaiju monster inspired by silk moths, the monster stars’ light seems to reveal a very different class of object floating between it and Earth: an otherwise invisible clod of dark matter that he and his colleagues calculated weighs between 10,000 and 2.5 million times the mass of the sun.  If such an object really exists, it could help physicists narrow down their theories about dark matter and maybe, just maybe, solve the mystery of the universe’s unexplained mass.

• Dark matter halos may surround every galaxy.  In the words of one astrophysicist,  “a big, fuzzy, extended, watermelon-shaped structure that’s much larger than the galaxy itself.” For our own Milky Way, astronomers estimate that this diffuse, dark cocoon — termed a halo — weighs roughly a trillion solar masses and is more than 10 times wider than the galaxy’s spiral disk of stars. 

• Models of how the universe evolved its current structure — a cosmic web, woven by pearlescent strings of galaxies — predict that dark matter particles, whatever they are, gathered into small, gravitationally bound clumps during the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.  Many of those clumps merged and eventually pulled in visible matter. Those grew into the seeds of galaxies. But some of the smallest dark halos that didn’t merge should still exist as remnants of structure formation in the early universe.

• The leading suspects in the dark matter mystery: "cold" dark matter (sluggish, heavy particles such as WIMPs), “warm” dark matter (lighter dark matter particles whisked through the early cosmos faster), fuzzy dark matter (just a whisper of a dark matter particle — perhaps 1028 times lighter than an electron) and why a new, smallest-known dark halo (like the purported one between Earth and Mothra) may rule out the cooler candidates.

Related post: Cosmic mysteries: the search for dark matter and dark energy  

Note:*A rotation curve is a plot of the orbital speeds of visible stars in a galaxy versus their distance from that galaxy's center.

Sources: NASA, Britannica, Harvard Center for Astrophysics, National Geographic, Wikipedia, Illustration is from  Chandra X-Ray Observatory, Live Science

Wildfires

POSTED AUGUST 22, 2023

Globally, wildfires' frequency and severity have drastically increased in recent decades.  The recent Maui wildfires are among the most deadly in this increasingly common scenario.  

Earlier this year, wildfires in Canada blanketed much of eastern North America in a a haze of hazardous particles, resulting in air quality alerts across the U.S. from Minnesota to South Carolina.  The Canadian wildfires are still raging with half of the population in the Northwest Territories  already displaced and about 30,000 people under orders to evacuate their homes in western Canada's British Columbia.  

Meanwhile in the continental US, wildfires have flared across the Pacific Northwest as a heat wave grips the region.  As of Sunday, 93 wildfires have burned 626,755 acres in 16 states. More than 14,400 wildland firefighters and support personnel are assigned to incidents across the United States with six new large fires were reported recently: two in Mississippi, and California, Idaho, Montana and Washington each had one. 

According to the World Economic Forum, summer wildfire seasons are already 40 to 80 days longer on average than they were 30 years ago. Annual droughts are more pronounced, making it easier for fuels to dry out and fires to ignite and spread. Extreme weather events, marked by dry fuels, lightning storms and strong winds, are also increasingly common and provide essential ingredients for rapid fire growth.

Given that the main driver for the increased severity and frequency of wildfires is anthropogenic climate change, these conditions will be with us for the foreseeable future.  Climate change and land-use change are projected to make wildfires more frequent and intense, with a global increase of extreme fires of up to 30 per cent by the end of 2050 and 50 per cent by the end of the century.  Besides the obvious, like don't be careless with campfires, local medium-term solutions need to be found and implemented as soon as possible.  

Hawaii (extracted from Nature)

The three main ingredients of a wildfire are a fuel, dryness and an ignition source. Hawaii’s key fuel is grass, which proliferated in former agricultural areas as the economy shifted from ranching and sugar and pineapple cultivation to tourism. When dry grasses burn, they can carry fire to forested areas, which tend to become grasslands after the fire, in a self-perpetuating cycle.

What could be done to guard against future disasters? The 2021 Maui County report recommended that, among other actions, the island emphasize the prevention of ignition through public education and tackling the grasses that serve as fuel for many Hawaiian fires. It called for an “aggressive plan to replace these hazardous fuel sources with native plants to reduce combustible fuel while increasing water retention”.  But native Hawaiian dryland plants are not necessarily more fire resistant, says Katie Kamelamela, an ethnoecologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. What matters is how much dry fuel is on land and how it is arranged. Grazing can reduce fuel loads. Bare areas, wet vegetation as found on active farms, or even fish ponds can help stop or slow fires.

Interest is increasing among many Native Hawaiians and Hawaiian residents in reinvesting in traditional forms of agriculture and aquaculture. Groups such as ‘Ao‘ao O Nā Loko I‘a O Maui (the Maui Fishpond Association) and Kipahulu Ohana are trying to revitalize traditional food production, which would create a landscape that is much less flammable than the untended grasslands and shrublands that currently cover 24% of the state’s total land area.

Canada (NPR Vermont)

Canada has seen a record number of wildfires this year — contributing to choking smoke in parts of the U.S. — with more than 5,700 fires burning more than 137,000 square kilometers (53,000 square miles) from one end of Canada to the other, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.

Canada is the world's second largest country and half of its area is forest.  Most of the country is sparsely populated, and Canada must prioritize which fires they fight.  The No. 1 priority is human life and safety.  Other protected values are communities, infrastructure, natural resources, and environmental values. Evacuations are currently underway in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories as firefighters take on the wildfires.  

It's part of a natural cycle for Canada's boreal forests to burn. But the fires can attain dangerous intensity, particularly in current conditions.  They burn with "crown fire behavior"* Driven by strong winds, they can spread out 50 meters a minute, 70 meters a minute — 20 or 30 kilometers a day. In those perilous locations far from communities, it's not considered worth the risk to send firefighters into the flames' path.  

Protecting ourselves during wildfire air quality alerts

So the smoke from most of the current fires will continue to drift south and east until the wildfire season is over.  The fine particulate matter and pollutants carried by this smoke pose severe health risks to populations in affected regions. The health consequences linked to exposure to wildfire smoke include respiratory issues and cardiovascular problems.  We can mitigate these effects by following the CDC Guidelines in the link below.   One interesting point: most comfort or dust masks (those available in hardware stores, for example) do not protect against wildfire smoke, and the CDC advises using an "N95" mask.  If properly worn, an N95 mask "will offer some protection."

https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/wildfires/smoke.html

*Fire that burns in the crowns of trees and shrubs. Usually ignited by a surface fire. Crown fires are common in coniferous forests and chaparral-type shrublands  

Sources: World Economic Forum, ACE (Action for the Climate Emergency), CBS News, National Interagency Fire Center, Nature, CDC, World Meteorological Organization

"First light": JWST reveals yet another mystery of the early universe

POSTED AUGUST 15, 2023

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to amaze us with information about the early universe.  Launched in December 2021, JWST's awe-inspiring first images were released in July 2022.  Since then, it has captured the first clear evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system, delivered the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe so far, discovered thousands of new galaxies more distant and ancient than any previously documented, and and provided never-before-seen details in a region of space known as Pandora’s Cluster.  Webb’s view of Pandora displays three already massive clusters of galaxies coming together to form a megacluster.* 

Awe: the James Webb Space Telescope's first images - July 18, 2022

In recent months, astronomers have been studying a set of enigmatic objects, nicknamed by astronomers as “hidden little monsters” and “little red dots.” Whatever you call them, the data were clear: When JWST stares at young galaxies — which appear as mere red specks in the darkness — it sees a surprising number with cyclones churning in their centers. The most straightforward explanation for the tornado-hearted galaxies is that large black holes the mass of  millions of suns are whipping the gas clouds of the young galaxies into a frenzy. That finding is both expected and perplexing. It is expected because JWST was built, in part, to find the ancient objects. It is perplexing because few astronomers expected JWST to find so many young, hungry black holes.  The findings may rewrite established theories of stars, galaxies and more. (Quanta Magazine and link below)

Note: * The combined mass of the galaxy clusters creates a powerful gravitational lens, a natural magnification effect of gravity, allowing JWST to observe much more distant galaxies in the early universe by using the cluster like a magnifying glass.(NASA)

JWST, memory, and global warming

POSTED MAY 21, 2023

Recent news and research give us insights into possible life elsewhere in the solar system, how memories shift our perception of the world and another warning that global warming is happening faster then predicted.

Nature reports that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sent back images of a giant water plume spewing from Enceladus, a moon of Saturn.  The huge watery cloud could carry the ingredients for life farther into space than previously known.  Enceladus is one of the few ‘ocean worlds’ in the Solar System, making it one of the best places to look for extraterrestrial life. The salty ocean that lies beneath Enceladus’s outer covering of ice is a possible haven for living organisms, which could be sustained by the energy from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.  JWST’s findings provide additional incentive for a possible NASA mission to Enceladus to search for signs of life there.  [link below left]

Our memories guide us through the world, tune our attention and shape what we learn later in life.  Quanta Magazine summarizes a new report that sheds light on how memories alter our perceptions of future events and the attention we give them.  Working with snails, researchers examined how established memories made the animals more likely to form new long-term memories of related future events that they might otherwise have ignored. Although snails are fairly simple creatures, the new insight brings scientists a step closer to understanding the neural basis of energy-intensive long-term memory in higher-order animals like humans. [link below center]

Cosmos relays the new warning on global warming from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).  The prospect of a strong El Niño event and increased greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere has prompted the World Meteorological Organization to up the likelihood of the world exceeding one of the Paris Climate Agreement’s climate thresholds*.  The WMO now says there’s a 66% chance average global temperature will be 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels at some point in the next five years.  WMO secretary-general, Professor Petteri Taalas says that the organization "is sounding the alarm that we will breach the 1.5°C level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency" with "far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment.” [link below right]

Note: *The Paris Climate Agreement signed in 2015 preferred to keep global temperatures beneath the 1.5°C mark, while setting a firmer 2°C target before the end of the century. The world’s current carbon mitigation efforts are likely insufficient to prevent the latter temperature increase being exceeded.

The Day After Tomorrow revisited

POSTED MAY 5, 2023

The ice sheets near our poles are melting more rapidly than had been previously thought. In the early to mid 1990s, the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica were losing on average about 116 billion tons of ice per year. But, in recent years, that annual loss has more than tripled to 410 billion tons of ice. As all that ice ends up in the oceans, it's driving sea level rise to an even greater extent.

Of particular concern is the so-called "Doomsday Glacier" in Antarctica.  The Thwaites Glacier, an ice formation the size of Florida, holds a colossal amount of ice, enough to gradually raise sea levels by over two feet, though its collapse in a heating climate could unleash many more feet from neighboring glaciers. The Antarctic glacier has destabilized, retreating back nearly nine miles since the 1990s.

But as disastrous as this rise in sea level would be, the melting ice sheets could have an even more serious impact - a new global Ice Age.

The 2004 disaster film The Day After Tomorrow presented a doomsday scenario resulting from the increased atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.  In the film, a shutdown of the ocean "conveyor belt" results in a new Ice Age.  The story may be fiction but there is hard science behind it. (See insert "How this could happen" below)  

Scientists have long feared that global warming could cause a breakdown of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic. But new research finds a greater risk lies in Antarctica’s waters, where melting could disrupt currents in the next few decades, with profound impacts on global climate.  

The new analysis by Australian and American researchers, using more detailed modeling of the oceans, predicts that the long-feared turn-off of the circulation will likely occur in the Southern Ocean, as billions of tons of ice melt on the land mass of Antarctica. Rather than being more than a century away, as models predict for the North Atlantic, it could happen within the next three decades.

About 250 trillion tons of salty water sinks in this way around Antarctica each year, subsequently spreading north along the ocean floor into the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans. Similar volumes spread south from Greenland. The process is known as deep-water formation or ocean overturning, and it has continued largely unchanged for thousands of years.  As the world warms, less ice is forming in the oceans at the poles each year. At the same time, more ice on the nearby great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland is melting and releasing fresh water into the ocean.

As a result, surface water in the Southern Ocean and around Greenland is already becoming less salty, less dense, and so less able to sink. Since the 1990s, measurements taken from ships have shown that the water on the ocean floor, below 13,000 feet in depth, has warmed and freshened, with the trend strongest in the Southern Ocean.

The groundbreaking modeling study published by Australian and American researchers at the end of March includes,  for the first time, a detailed assessment of the likely impact of melting ice. It predicts a 42 percent decline in deep-water formation in the Southern Ocean by 2050. This is more than twice the 19 percent they predict for an equivalent event in the North Atlantic.

And after 2050, their model predicts that things will get even worse. Deep-water formation “looks headed towards collapse this century,” the coordinator of the study, Matthew England of the University of New South Wales, told Yale Environment 360. “And once collapsed, it would most likely stay collapsed until Antarctic melting stopped. At current projections that could be centuries away.”

Besides the potential for a new Ice Age and rising sea levels, the researchers point out other serious effects of disrupting deep-water formation:

- Instead of bringing the nutrients that sustain marine life back to the surface, the waters of the deep ocean would accumulate nutrients and become stagnant, while the supply of nutrients to sustain marine life at the surface would be drastically reduced.

- A shutdown would also accelerate global warming.  The deep-water formation sites are conduits where carbon dioxide is brought down to the ocean abyss, where it is locked away safely from the atmosphere for centuries and currently helps slow down global warming. This mechanism is set to be weakened.

-Disrupting deep-water formation in the Southern Ocean would change global climate patterns in other ways that are currently hard to predict. It might shift tropical rainfall systems, says England, and perhaps make the Southern Hemisphere, as a whole, drier and the Northern Hemisphere wetter.

Given that it will be difficult to do anything about the collapse once it begins, it is imperative that we begin to take action now to reduce the impact.  Among these actions:

• Protect and/or relocate critical infrastructure in low-lying areas.

• Develop cold-resistant and drought-resistant crops

• Increase the portion of farm-raised seafood 

• Provide financial aid for SIDS (Small Island Developing States) and develop a global climate refugee program for thoise that must flee their homes

Below are an explanation of the science behind the concerns, the trailer from The Day After Tomorrow, and Yale School of the Environment's post on the recent research.

Notes: 

*The Younger Dryas, which occurred circa 12,900 to 11,700 years ago, was a return to glacial conditions which temporarily reversed the gradual climatic warming 

Sources: Yale Environment 360, PBS, Mashable, 

The immense promise of gene therapy

POSTED APRIL 3, 2023

The development of CRISPR/Cas-9 gene-editing technology is one of the most important scientific advances of the 21st century.  This technology allows researchers to modify genes in days rather than weeks or months.  CRISPR/Cas-9 has the potential to cure or prevent genetic diseases, produce hardier, more nutritious crops, eliminate malaria with a mosquito "gene drive", and develop effective new antibiotics and antivirals.  The discoverers, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. [link below]

US gene-editing trials have been underway for four years and gene therapies, in which normal genes are transplanted into cells in place of missing or defective ones to correct genetic disorders, are in various stages of clinical trials.  Besides gene editing, the manipulation of human genomes can also be used to create customized drugs.  The FDA approved the first-ever gene therapy drug, Kymriah, in 2017.  The medication uses a patient’s own white blood cells to treat acute lymphatic leukemia. Yescarta, another gene therapy approved in the same year, has provided at least partial remission for 72 percent of patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in clinical trials.

U.S. gene-editing trials underway - Sep 28, 2019

Experts predict a steady pace of growth going forward as more companies move into late-stage manufacturing after promising outcomes in oncology, regenerative medicine, and rare diseases. Despite challenges related to capacity and the ability to scale production, FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb expects the agency to confer 10 to 20 gene- and cell-therapy related approvals each year through 2025 as biotech continues to fast-track new projects.

Recent research in gene therapy has promising news for kidney disease, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (thickened heart muscle), deafness, and a painful and debilitating skin condition called epidermolysis bullosa. 

"Cell and gene therapy for kidney disease"  Kidney disease is a leading cause of mortality around the globe.  The authors note that 30% of kidney disease cases are inherited and thus this area is a good candidate for gene therapy.  Genetic studies in mice have revealed the potential of gene therapy for kidney disease.  At this time, the main hurdle to cell and gene therapy development for kidney disease is the delivery of therapeutic material to the kidney.

"Genome editing prevents hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in mice"  Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a disease in which the heart muscle becomes thickened (hypertrophied). The thickened heart muscle can make it harder for the heart to pump blood. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy often goes undiagnosed because many people with the disease have few, if any, symptoms. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a disease in which the heart muscle becomes thickened (hypertrophied). The thickened heart muscle can make it harder for the heart to pump blood. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy often goes undiagnosed because many people with the disease have few, if any, symptoms. HCM increases the risk of heart failure, stroke, and sudden cardiac arrest.  

A recent study published in the journal Nature Medicine demonstrated the possibility of finding single-dose genetic therapies to correct the genetic abnormality and thus prevent the development of HCM. Further development and translation of this approach to correct most human pathogenic variants could cure HCM and other genetic cardiomyopathies. 

"CRISPR-mediated RNA base editing: a promising strategy to rescue deafness"  Many mutations of the human Myo6 gene lead to sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL), and there is no effective treatment for this common type of deafness.   Since genetic factors contribute to approximately half of the congenital SNHL cases, gene therapy is potentially important means to inhibit the disease progression and improve the symptoms.  A recent study published in Science Translational Medicine reported the successful use of a  base editor to correct the mutant gene and rescue the auditory function of  this hearing disease.

"Healing gel: in study, gene therapy heals open wounds in patients with blistering skin disease"  A rare, inherited disorder in which blisters form on the skin and the moist inner lining of some organs and body cavities, dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa has no cure.  Treatments are generally limited to keeping the wounds clean and bandaged, managing pain and preventing further injury. In severe cases, even the friction of clothing can cause blisters.  A gene therapy gel developed at Stanford Medicine is in a late-stage trial that shows dramatic progress in patients' wound healing.  The senior author of the paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine reports that results are promising: “We saw no inflammation, significant side effects or immune neutralization of the drug, even with repeated administration of the gel over the six months of the trial period.”

Sources: 9 Biotechnology Trends Developing in 2023 (northeastern.edu), Stanford Medicine, Nature - 1, Medical/Life Sciences News, Nature -2

Advances in Artificial Intelligence

POSTED MARCH 16, 2023

Artificial Intelligence is, according to Gaurav Tewari at Forbes, "the biggest paradigm shift we've ever seen."  A.I. is already impacting many areas of our lives as well as numerous business and technology sectors.  From coding and writing to health care to marketing, sales, finance and HR to predicting and assessing loan risks, AI is changing the way we live and work.  While some fret about a dystopian future, others, such as Tewari, see it as "a potent amplifier of human potential."  Tewari adds that A.I. is "evolving much faster than prior [paradign] shifts" - such as the cloud, mobile phones and the internet.  Learning how to make the most of it will improve our lives and give companies that adapt it a competitive advantage.

Some recent advances in this rapidly evolving field:

-AlphaFold, an AI system that descended from AlphaGo, a deep learning model trained to beat human beings at the board game Go. AlphaFold recently led to a revolutionary discovery in molecular biology.  Using a deep neural network* to predict the 3-D structures of proteins, AlphaFold predicted the structure of more than 200 million proteins, which is almost all that are currently known to exist. AlphaFold’s capabilities will allow medical researchers to develop countless new drugs and vaccines.

-DALL-E and DALL-E2, the AIs that can create pictures from language prompts. DALL-E 2 is exponentially more powerful than its predecessor and "has the potential to revolutionize the world of digital art."  Tewari: "Think about it—if you are a digital artist, illustrator or graphic designer, how much would your career change if you could use an app to create a realistic-looking image within seconds?"

-ChatGPT, DALL-E’s “sibling”. While DALL-E creates new images, ChatGPT creates text and code. These texts can be newspaper articles, students’ essays, speeches, scientific papers and more. Again, it does so from a written prompt provided by the users. If ChatGPT improves efficiency and if it is used in the right way, it will become a hugely important tool.

-The AI development company DeepMind created an algorithm which codes very well. The system, AlphaCode can beat 72% of human coders in average competitions and recently solved about 30% of the coding problems in a highly complex coding competition against humans. And these are the early days.  AlphaCode will keep on learning.

-Gato, which is described as a generalist agent by inventors DeepMind, is an important development in the field. While currently powerful algorithms do one or two things exceedingly well, Gato can do many. This includes playing Atari, titling images, chatting with users, stacking blocks using a robotic arm and more.   

Trends to watch in 2023 include advances in natural language processing, generative AI  (performing creative tasks based on instructions), and cloud-based AI systems.  The software development company Full Scales explains these trends and others in the link below.

Note: *A neural network is a method in artificial intelligence that teaches computers to process data in a way that is inspired by the human brain. It is a type of machine learning process, called deep learning, that uses interconnected nodes in a layered structure that resembles the human brain.

Sources: Forbes, Freethink, AWS

Recent findings confirm the need for urgent action on global warming 

POSTED FEBRUARY 20, 2023

Research papers on climate change published over the past several weeks and reported by Science Daily provide us with even more incentive to get our global house in order.  Among the findings:

• Scientists identified 27 global warming accelerators known as amplifying feedback loops, including some that the researchers say may not be fully accounted for in climate models.  "Many of the feedback loops we examined significantly increase warming because of their connection to greenhouse gas emissions," said a study co-leader.  These feedback loops shorten the time until we reach climate change tipping points beyond which severe irreversible damage occurs.

• Recently, Europe has seen an increase in floods and droughts.  A study of the European climate over the past 400 years indicated that the multi-year 2015-2018 summer drought event was highly unusual in its intensity and unprecedented for large parts of central and western Europe. This suggests that the European summer droughts during the last years are potentially being influenced by anthropogenic warming,

• 56 million years ago, the Earth experienced one of the largest and most rapid climate warming events in its history: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which has similarities to current and future warming. This episode saw global temperatures rise by 5-8°C.  A study found that the period was marked by an increase in the seasonality of rainfalls, which led to the movement of large quantities of clay into the ocean, making it uninhabitable for certain living species. This scenario could be repeated today. (Can you say "Sixth Extinction"?)

• An expedition team on board RV Polarstern operating in Antarctica recently reported virtually ice-free conditions in its current research area, the Bellingshausen Sea. This means that there is currently less sea ice in the Antarctic than at any time in the forty years since the beginning of satellite observation.*  This intense melting is due to unusually high air temperatures to the west and east of the Antarctic Peninsula, which were about 1.5 °C above the long-term average, and also to the current state of an Antarctic weather phenomenon called the the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) .  Besides promoting sea-ice retreat, these conditions also intensify the melting of ice shelves, an essential aspect for future global sea-level rise.  BBC News discusses Antarctica's intense sea-ice melting in the link below.

Global warming has already begun to affect our world in numerous ways.  There is still time to implement actions to mitigate the worst that could happen.  But it will take the political resolve of all the nations, particularly the developed ones, if we are to avoid the worst.  

COP 27 begins as the planet hurtles towards the climate change "tipping point"  - November 8, 2022

Preparing for a radically changed planet - Apr 21, 2021 

*Historical records also reflect the tremendous changes. For example, in the Antarctic summer 125 years ago, the Belgian research vessel Belgica was trapped in the massive pack ice for more than a year -- in exactly the same region where the Polarstern can now operate in completely ice-free waters. 

These drones are making the world a safer and better place

POSTED FEBRUARY 3, 2023

Commercial drones have been around since 2010.  A hobbyist can pick up one of reasonable quality for prices ranging from $100 to $400.  Besides their entertaining use as a successor to remote control toy cars and airplanes, drones (or, more formally, "unmanned aerial vehicles"), have found a host of uses in business (package delivery, aerial photography, real estate advertisement), agriculture (monitor crop health, detect insects and other pests, identify areas in need of irrigation, weather forecasts) and disaster management (for example, drones with infrared cameras can spot heat signature of trapped victims or fires).  

Drones are also being used for humanitarian purposes and global development.  The Borgen Project, a nonprofit that is addressing global poverty and hunger and working towards ending them, describes five such beneficial uses of drones [link below].

1. Transporting Medicine and Medical Equipment. Often faster than helicopters and other traditional methods, drones are ideal for carrying blood, vaccines and small pieces of medical equipment.  South Africa, Ghana, Vanuatu, and Norway are some of the countries already doing this.

2. Assessing Disaster Areas. Drones are a relatively fast and inexpensive way to obtain images of natural disasters so that emergency responders are aware of the situation and well-equipped to act accordingly. They were used by the International Organization for Migration to assess the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in Haiti.   In addition to the advantage of their speed, drone images are clearer than satellite images and drones are able to fly below the cloud cover, enabling them to capture images that a satellite might miss due to cloud obstruction.

3. Fighting Wildfires. California has used drones to assist firefighters from the sky. Fighting fire aerially is not a new concept, but in the past planes and helicopters have been manned by a crew. Unmanned aircraft are safer for firefighters, can operate for long stretches of time, and are not limited by conditions as much as helicopters and planes are.

4. Tracking Mosquitoes That Spread Disease.  Mosquitos are a frequent carrier of malaria in Peru. In a 2019 study published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, drones in Amazonian Peru were able to identify bodies of water containing mosquito larvae. With this knowledge, scientists can intervene in these sites to control the mosquito population in an effort to curb malaria transmission.

5. Bringing Internet Access To Remote Areas. Although Facebook's Aquila Project was shut down in 2018,  the idea of drones being used to connect people in remote areas to the internet remains a compelling one. Airbus is reportedly working on a similar project, the Zephyr S, which includes the capabilities of providing internet access.

The year's top science stories

POSTED DECEMBER 20, 2022

My personal votes for 2022's top science stories.

8. World's oldest DNA found (PBS NOVA)

On December 7, scientists announced the remarkable discovery of the oldest DNA to date. The DNA, retrieved from the sediment cores at the northern edge of Greenland, is a whopping 2 million years old. It reveals stunning information about the plants and animals that once inhabited the Arctic, which was once a lush, green landscape. The finding, experts say, could not only revolutionize paleontology, opening new windows onto ancient worlds, but also help us better understand how species adapted to a warming world in the past. 

7. Tonga volcano erupts: "the largest explosion of any kind in the last 140 years" (PBS NOVA)

Just off the island nation of Tonga in the South Pacific, a mostly underwater volcano called Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai erupted on January 15.  Its eruption was one of the most powerful on record and the largest explosion of any kind in the last 140 years. Its roar was heard nearly 6,000 miles away in Alaska, and the eruption triggered tsunamis that reached Tonga, nearby Fiji, and far-off locations like Japan, Russia, Peru, and the United States. The volcano’s unique position may help explain why this particular eruption created such a violent shockwave. But the full implications of the explosion for future volcanic events are still being studied. 

6.  In facilities around the world, breakthrough experiments bring the promise of nearly limitless clean energy closer. (Smithsonian Magazine, BBC, NPR, South China Morning Post)

Jan 15 - China's "artificial sun" project has sustained a nuclear fusion reaction for more than 17 minutes. In the latest experiment, superheated plasma reached 126 million degrees Fahrenheit—that's roughly five times hotter than the sun and the highest temperature ever achieved in a fusion reactor.

Feb 9 - The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen.  If nuclear fusion can be successfully recreated on Earth it holds out the potential of virtually unlimited supplies of low-carbon, low-radiation energy.  The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds (11 megawatts of power).

Oct 21 - China’s “artificial sun” generated a plasma current of more than 1 million amperes, or 1 mega-amp, the official Science and Technology Daily reported – a current strong enough to meet some of the key conditions needed to produce a working reactor.  Generating 1 mega-amp of power is also an important step because it meets two key conditions for a working reactor: meeting the required density for the atomic collision that produces the reaction and providing enough time for the reaction to occur.

Dec 5 - Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy have reached a breakthrough in nuclear fusion.  For the first time ever in a laboratory, researchers were able to generate more energy from fusion reactions than they used to start the process. The total power out was around 150% of the power that was put in by 192 laser beams.

The increasingly encouraging pursuit of limitless clean energy: a nuclear fusion update - Oct 19, 2021

5. WHO declares a global health emergency as widespread Mpox outbreak reaches non-endemic countries.  (WHO, Reuters)

Since early May 2022, cases of Mpox (previously referred to as monkeypox) have been reported from countries where the disease is not endemic, and continue to be reported in several endemic countries. Around 100 countries where mpox is not endemic have reported outbreaks of the viral disease, which the World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency. As of December 12, Confirmed cases had reached 82,621 globally, with the majority of them reported in non-endemic countries.  Most confirmed cases with travel history reported travel to countries in Europe and North America, rather than West or Central Africa where the mpox virus is endemic. This is the first time that many mpox cases and clusters have been reported concurrently in non-endemic and endemic countries in widely disparate geographical areas.

4. DART mission deflects an asteroid in a test of planetary defense  (Scimex)

NASA successfully deflected an asteroid called Dimorphos in September.  The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission was designed to show that an asteroid can be knocked off course by smashing a spacecraft into it, should one ever be headed our way. Following the impact 11 million kilometres from Earth, NASA astronomers saw the orbit of Dimorphos change by 25 times more than the minimum the scientists had hoped for, making the mission a resounding success.  Asteroids may have played a part in the emergence of life in the early solar system - they have been found to contain water and amino acids - the building blocks of life.

Can we stop a killer asteroid from hitting Earth? - May 20,2021

1. Global warming continues its relentless march, but renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles may be starting to slow the pace. (Yale Climate Connections, Best of Life Online, UN Climate Action, PBS NOVA, Scimex, IEA, Clean Technica)

Climate disasters are fueling widespread and devastating disruptions with historic levels of rain, heat, drought, fires and storms impacting almost every corner of the world. 

• At least 29 "billion-dollar" weather disasters have rocked the planet so far in 2022 totaling more than $120 billion, said insurance broker Aon in the first three-quarters of this year. 

•  Europe faced its worst drought in 500 years, and the drought was accompanied by scorching heatwaves that killed more than 16,000 people.  

• A climate catastrophe in Pakistan claimed the lives of more than 1,700 people and displaced tens of millions.  

• Floods and storms in southern Africa during the first half of 2022 killed hundreds of people and severely disrupted economic activity. 

• Millions in the Horn of Africa are starving due to an epic drought. 

• A severe drought battered China’s food and energy production, causing rolling blackouts and water and power rationing. 

• Here at home, climate change is unleashing “far-reaching and worsening” calamities in every region of the United States, and the economic and human toll will only increase unless humans move faster to slow the planet’s warming.  TIn a world that has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, the situation in the United States is even more extreme. Since 1970, the continental United States has experienced 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, well above the average for the planet.

Besides these climate disasters, other more subtle events are demonstrating the relentless march of climate change in our Anthropocene Era. The Greenland ice sheet, the second largest in the world, is disappearing faster than scientists previously believed; the koala has been listed as an endangered species; and dropping water levels caused by the world-wide droughts revealed dinosaur tracks, Nazi warships, human remains and more.

It could have been worse.  Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuel combustion are expected to grow by just under 1% this year with a strong expansion of renewables and electric vehicles preventing a much sharper rise.  Solar PV and wind are leading an increase in global renewable electricity generation in 2022 of more than 700 terawatt-hours (TWh), the largest annual rise on record. Global plugin vehicle registrations were up 55% in October 2022 compared to October 2021, reaching 932,000 units, the second best result ever. That was only behind the record 1,040,000 registrations of the previous month of September. 

Midway through the Artemis I mission

POSTED NOVEMEBR 29, 2022

Following four cancelled launch attempts due to engine issues and tropical storms, Artemis I successfully launched from the Kennedy Space Centre on Wednesday November 16. It is now halfway through its mission, which ends in splashdown in the Pacific Ocean near California on December 11.  While the uncrewed Artemis I mission won’t land on the lunar surface, the trip itself will be the farthest a vehicle designed for human astronauts has ever traveled into space. 

On Friday afternoon (Nov. 25), the capsule reached the moon. Orion performed an 88-second engine burn Friday at 4:52 p.m. EST  that successfully inserted the spacecraft into a distant retrograde orbit* (DRO) around the moon as planned.  The DRO takes Orion about 40,000 miles (64,000 km) beyond the moon at its most distant point. As it travels that path, the capsule will set a new record, getting farther from Earth than any previous human-rated spacecraft. 

NASA's Artemis Program began in December 2017 as the reorganization and continuation of efforts to revitalize the U.S. space program that have been ongoing since 2009.  Its stated short-term goal is landing the first woman on the Moon.  (Artemis is, after all, Apollo's twin sister.)  Mid-term objectives include establishing an international expedition team and a sustainable human presence on the Moon. Long-term objectives are laying the foundations for the extraction of lunar resources, and eventually, make crewed missions to Mars and beyond feasible. 

Artemis I is the first of the three missions of the Artemis Program.  The uncrewed mission is the first test flight of the agency's new Space Launch System megarocket and the Orion spacecraft.  Onboard are three high-tech manikins — that’s the term for human models used in scientific research — filled with sensors that will test how the human body responds to space travel and also test NASA's latest space suit.  [Link below right]

Artemis II is the second scheduled mission of NASA's Artemis program, and the first scheduled crewed mission of NASA's Orion spacecraft, currently planned to be launched by the Space Launch System (SLS) in May 2024. The crewed Orion spacecraft will perform a lunar flyby test and return to Earth. This would be the first crewed spacecraft to travel beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Artemis III is the third scheduled flight of the Artemis program. Its mission is to put humans on the moon around 2025, assuming that previous missions of the Artemis program go to plan.  Like the uncrewed Artemis I and crewed Artemis II, this mission aims to launch the gigantic Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and Orion spacecraft. For landing on the moon, the crew will use SpaceX's Starship, a system that the California company is developing right now for crewed human missions.  While crew selection is some years in the future, Artemis III is planned to place the first woman and person of color on the moon.

For more on the Artemis Program, Royal Museum's Greenwich has an excellent introduction in the link below left.

Related Posts

An update on NASA's Artemis Program and James Webb Space Telescope - September 7, 2022

The New Space Race - February 16, 2022

The Return to Space: An Update - December 22, 2021

Going to Mars - Feb 23, 2021

We Are Going Back to the Moon - September 30, 2020

Note: *A distant retrograde orbit (DRO) is a spacecraft orbit around the Moon that is highly stable because of its interactions with two Lagrange points of the planet–moon system.  Lagrange points are positions in space where objects tend to "stay put".

Sources: Vox, Space.com - 1, Wikipedia, Space.com - 2, Space.com - 3, NASA, 

COP 27 begins as the planet hurtles towards the climate change "tipping point"

POSTED NOVEMBER 8, 2022

This week, COP 27 , the 27th annual United Nations Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, began in the Egyptian coastal city of Sharm el-Sheikh.  Heads of State, ministers, and negotiators, along with climate activists, mayors, civil society representatives and CEOs are meeting to make commitments to actions critical for tackling the climate change crisis.

The yearly UN climate conferences, the COPs, are a stewardship mechanism for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was established in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and entered into force in 1994.  Its mission is to stabilize “greenhouse gas emissions at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” As the urgency of fighting climate change became more and more apparent, increasingly tighter targets on greenhouse gas emissions were enacted, with the Berlin Mandate of 1995 being replaced by the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and then the Paris Agreement in 2015.

The Paris Agreement sets a target of 1.5 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial temperatures.  Environmental scientists consider this the "tipping point" for global warming.  If global average temperatures rise above this level, the effects will be serious, synergistically re-enforcing, and irreversible.  

30 years after Rio and 7 years after Paris, how are we doing?

COP 27 takes place against a backdrop of global crises.  The ripple effects of COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have sent food and energy prices soaring to record highs, while climate disasters are fueling widespread and devastating disruptions with historic levels of rain, heat, drought, fires and storms impacting almost every corner of the world.

• A climate catastrophe in Pakistan claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people and displaced tens of millions. 

• Floods and storms in southern Africa during the first half of 2022 killed hundreds of people and severely disrupted economic activity.

• Millions in the Horn of Africa are starving due to an epic drought. 

• A severe drought battered China’s food and energy production, causing rolling blackouts and water and power rationing.  

• Europe faced its worst drought in 500 years, and the drought was accompanied by scorching heatwaves.

• According to a new federal report released November 7, climate change is unleashing “far-reaching and worsening” calamities in every region of the United States, and the economic and human toll will only increase unless humans move faster to slow the planet’s warming.  The draft report also finds that in a world that has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, the situation in the United States is even more extreme. Since 1970, the authors state, the continental United States has experienced 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, well above the average for the planet.

Greenhouse gas emissions are rising rather than falling.  We are headed towards a temperature rise twice the Paris target.

The key to keeping global temperatures below the tipping point is a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.  In 2018, United Nations climate scientists warned that if the world wants to keep global average temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — one of the targets of the Paris climate agreement — humanity would have to cut its emissions roughly in half by 2030.  A United Nations report released in October found that, rather than moving towards this target, the world is on track to increase emissions by 10.6 percent compared to 2010 levels, and that’s if countries actually meet their current commitments. That could lead global average temperatures to rise as high as 2.9 degrees Celsius, or 5.22 degrees Fahrenheit. 

The graphs below illustrate the correspondence between greenhouse gas emissions (left) and global temperature rise (right).

What would a world with a greater than 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature rise look like?

If the world temperature rises by two degrees:

• Mountain glaciers and rivers will start to disappear and mountainous regions will see more landslides, as the permafrost that held them together melts away. 

• By 2100, sea levels could rise by a meter, displacing 10% of the world's population. Countries such as the Maldives will be submerged and the Indian subcontinent will be left fighting for survival. 

• People will die in greater numbers as they struggle with the increasing heat.

• The ecosystem will collapse and a third of all life on earth will face extinction. Plant growth will slow, then stop. Plants won't absorb carbon dioxide as well and so begin to emit it - making global warming worse.

• The world's food centers will become barren and, by the turn of the century, one third of the planet will be without fresh water.

If the world's temperature rises by two to three degrees, in addition to the above:

• Up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest will be destroyed and warmer soil will kill vegetation and release more carbon.

• Hurricanes will be stronger and cities in Asia, Australia and the south-east of the US will face destruction. Holland will be torn apart by the North Sea.

• Saltwater will creep upstream, poisoning the groundwater and ruining the food supply.

Below is an approximation of what the world would look like if global temperature rises by 4 degrees Celsius. (Big Think)

What can COP 27 accomplish?

According to the World Resources Institute, a successful COP 27 must complete six key tasks:

1) Create a financing mechanism for addressing loss and damage, particularly those impacts from climate change that are so severe communities are simply unable to adapt to them. 

2) Scale up support for adaptation. At last year's COP26 in Glasgow, developed countries agreed to at least double finance for adaptation from 2019 levels by 2025, which equates to roughly $40 billion per year.

It is unlikely that the nations of the world will stop global temperature rise before it hits 1.5 degrees Celsius.  $40 billion/year for adaptation to what promises to be a radically changed planet is far from enough. We need to invest in massive infrastructure changes to prevent even more expensive disruption and loss, protection of coastal communities, and adaptation of innovtive engineering solutions.  $40 billion/year is far from enough.  

Preparing for a radically changed planet - Apr 21, 2021

Carbon capture: an emerging tool in the climate change kit - Jun 16, 2021

3) Strengthen national emissions-reduction targets.   So far, only 23 countries have come forward with new or updated NDCs since COP26. 

4) Assure that the $100 billion per year climate finance commitment made in 2009 to developing countries to support their climate action. by developed countries will be met and move forward on new commitments. 

5) Advance the Global Stocktake to set the pace for climate action. The Paris Agreement established a Global Stocktake, a process conducted every five years to assess collective progress toward the Agreement’s long-term goals. 

6) Convert the Glasgow climate commitments into action.  At COP26, governments, businesses and other stakeholders made pledges — to curb methane emissions, halt and reverse forest loss, align the finance sector with net-zero by 2050, accelerate the phase-out of coal, double 2019 levels of adaptation finance by 2025, scale locally led adaptation, and end international financing for fossil fuels, to name just a few.

The commitments that come out of COP27 may not be enough to halt our rising temperatures, but they are a step in the right direction.  Even more important than making the commitments will be the follow-through by nations around the world.  

A post from September 2021, IPCC's stark warning, has some additional ideas on how we might avert disaster as well as links to suggested actions we can do as individuals to do our part in lessening the climate crisis.

Sources: Vox, Sky News, World Resources Institute, Washington Post, UN Climate Action

2022 Nobel Prize Winners: quantum information science, click chemistry, and human origins

POSTED OCTOBER 21, 2022

This year's winners of the Nobel Prizes for the sciences have given us a process for creating improved pharmaceuticals, a look back to our human origins, and a path to a future of astounding computational capabilities.  

Physics - Quantum Information Science

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”. 

Albert Einstein famously called the quantum entanglement of particles "spooky action at a distance" because it apparently violates the universal law that nothing, not even information, travels faster than the speed of light.  If two particles, such as photons, are entangled, knowing the state of one gives us instantaneous information on the other no matter how far away it is.  

Entangled quantum states hold the potential for new ways of storing, transferring and processing information, and the most important practical application of quantum entanglement is in the field of quantum computing.  Quantum computing will sooner or later lead to a type of computer 158 million times faster than the most sophisticated supercomputer we have in the world today. It is a device so powerful that it could do in four minutes what it would take a traditional supercomputer 10,000 years to accomplish.  

Large global companies like IBM, Alphabet (Google), Intel, Microsoft, Amazon, IonQ are investing enormous resources into the development of quantum computing hardware. Quantum computing has the potential to radically change the world around us by revolutionizing industries such as finance, pharmaceuticals, AI, and automotive - in perhaps as soon as 5 or 10 years.

The Daily Mail has a lively summary of the recipients and their work in the link below.

Chemistry - "Click Chemistry"

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless “for the development of click chemistry and bio-orthogonal chemistry”.  

The magnificent molecular structures found in plants, microorganisms and animals have spurred researchers to try to construct the same molecules artificially. Imitating natural molecules has often also been an important part in the development of pharmaceuticals, because many of them have been inspired by natural substances. However, until the discovery of "click chemistry", creating these molecules in the laboratory involved multiple steps at elevated temperatures and pressures and produced unwanted by-products which then had to be removed.

Click chemistry, as the name suggests, is a way of building molecules like snapping Lego blocks together and can often be accomplished at moderate temperatures and pressures.  Chemical biologists quickly realized that click reactions can be a fantastic way to probe living systems like cells because they produce little to no toxic byproducts and can happen quickly.  The application of click chemistry to living systems, bio-orthogonal chemistry, was pioneered by Carolyn Bertozzi, one of this year's prize recipients.

These techniques have been used in a number of sectors, including delivering treatments that can kill cancer cells without perturbing healthy cells as well as sustainably and quickly producing large amounts of polymers to build materials. 

The University of Buffalo's Heyang (Peter) Zhang explains how click chemistry and bio-orthogonal chemistry are transforming the pharmaceutical and material industries in the link below.

Physiology or Medicine - Human Evolution

Svante Pääbo's work on ancient genomes and human evolution and his contributions to the field of palaeogenomics earned him the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine  “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”.  

Where did we come from?  What makes us "human"?  How do we homo sapiens differ from our ancestors and their closely related counterparts? These questions of our human origins have intrigued scientists and others ever since Darwin proposed his natural selection theory of biological evolution.  

Svante Pääbo accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans. He also made the sensational discovery of a previously unknown hominin, Denisova. Importantly, Pääbo also found that gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens following the migration out of Africa around 70,000 years ago. This ancient flow of genes to present-day humans has physiological relevance today, for example affecting how our immune system reacts to infections. 

The Guardian link below describes the incredibly fast-moving field of palaeogenomics.  Focusing on the similarities and interaction between Neanderthals and homo sapiens, the piece concludes: 

The most profound legacy of Pääbo’s establishment of palaeogenomics is, or should be, humility. Because it turns out that many of the earliest Homo sapiens populations entering Eurasia eventually shared the same fate as the Neanderthals they met and mingled with. Their lineages vanished, culturally but also genetically, leaving behind no descendants among living humans. Perhaps the greatest inheritance they left us is understanding that our story is not one of predestined, exceptional success, but a blend of serendipity and coincidence.  

Sources: Nobel Prize website, Live Science, Linked In, The Guardian, University of Buffalo

The Singularity Is Near

POSTED SEPTEMBER 28, 2022

Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge popularized the concept of the technological Singularity in the 1990's.  He described it this way: "It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown."  

The Singularity is that point in time when all the advances in technology, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI) but also in other technologies such as autonomous nanobots and genetic engineering, will lead to entities with greater than human intelligence.  The term Singularity describes the moment when a civilization changes so much that its rules and technologies are incomprehensible to previous generations.

The American inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil believes The Singularity Is Near.  Currently the Director of Engineering at Google, his 600-plus page tome of that name laid out the path to the Singularity through six stages of evolution.  The heart of his argument is that evolution is the process of creating patterns of increasing order, that each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next, and that the evolution of patterns constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Behind his contention that "the Singularity is near" is the non-linear, exponential rate of change as evolution progresses.

Epoch One: Physics and Chemistry

Atomic structures store and represent discrete information.  A few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, atoms began to form. Chemistry was born a few million years thereafter as atoms came together to create relatively stable structures called molecules.  Carbon was the most important element as its structure allowed it to branch in four directions giving rise to complicated, information-rich three-dimensional structures. As Kurzweil points out, from the very beginning, "the physical laws of our universe are precisely what they need to be for the evolution of increasing levels of order and complexity." 

Kurtzweil is referring to the anthropic principle.  Our universe is a very fine-tuned place.  The constants of nature - those quantities that always have the same value throughout the universe - are so precisely fixed that a miniscule change in any one of them would result in a world very different from what we have now or even no universe at all.  

The anthropic principle: where science, philosophy and theology meet (Jan 9, 2020)

Epoch Two: Biology and DNA

Starting several billion years ago, carbon-based compounds became more and more intricate, self-replicating mechanisms were formed,  and life originated.  Eventually, biological systems evolved a precise mechanism (DNA) to store information describing those systems.  

DNA has been described by some as the ultimate information storage solution.  In 2017, researchers reported that they found a way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks.

Epoch Three: Brains

In the third epoch, DNA-guided evolution produced organisms that could detect information with their own sensory organs and process that information in their own brains and nervous systems.  The third epoch started with the ability of early animals to recognize patterns, which still accounts for the vast majority of the activity in our brains.  Ultimately, our own species evolved the ability to create abstract models of the world we experience, to contemplate the implications of these models, and to redesign the world.

At some point in the evolution of the universe, human consciousness* arose.  Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi considers consciousness to be "all that we experience" - what goes away when we fall asleep and what comes back when we awake.  

Tononi proposes that consciousness is the only thing we can be absolutely sure of.  Neuroscientists searching for the origin of consciousness is better asked from the viewpoint of consciousness:  how should physical structures, including the brain, be organized in order to account for the properties of consciousness?  And those physical structures are precisely organized to account for the properties of consciousness.  It's almost as if the human species evolved in such a way to make a being with consciousness possible, and it is our higher order consciousness that is one of the most important aspects of being human.

Another neuroscientist, Michael Graziano of Princeton University, has a slightly different take on consciousness.  Graziano proposes that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence. 

Giulio Tononi and the baffling nature of consciousness (May 20, 2019)

Epoch Four: Technology

Combining our rational and abstract thinking ability with our opposable thumb, we ushered in the fourth epoch: the evolution of human-created technology.  Starting with simple mechanisms, we went on to develop elaborate automated mechanical machines. Then with sophisticated computational and communication devices, technology became capable of sensing, storing, and evaluating elaborate patterns of information.  Comparing the rate of progress of the biological evolution of intelligence to that of technological evolution, the most advanced mammals have added about one cubic inch of brain matter whereas we have doubled the computational capacity of computers every year or two.  Although this so-called Moore's Law has slowed slightly in recent years, we are still seeing an exponential growth in computing capacity.

Ray Kurzweil summarized this exponential growth in a logarithmic plot in The Singularity Is Near. [below]  Kurzweil offers the following text to accompany the graph:  "Biological evolution and human technology both show continual acceleration, indicated by the shorter time to the next event (two billion years from the origin of life to cells; fourteen years from the PC to the World Wide Web)."

Epoch Five: The Merger of Human Technology with Human Intelligence

Among these technologies, A.I. (artificial intelligence) plays a prominent role in the path to the Singularity.  But other technologies also play major parts - specifically the "GNR" technologies: genetics, nanotechnology and robotics.  Today these four technologies are already transforming our world and the way we live.  Ray Kurzweil's fifth epoch has begun.

Kurzweil wrote The Singularity Is Near in 2005.  In that book, he predicted that by 2029 we would have the software and hardware needed to fully emulate human intelligence thus allowing computers to pass the Turing test**. At the time, most computer experts thought Kurzweil was optimistic but they have gradually come in line with the Turing test pass date.  

He also predicted that "in several decades [by 2045], the Singularity will begin with the fifth epoch.  It will result from the merger of the vast knowledge embedded in our own brains with the vastly greater capacity, speed and knowledge sharing ability of our technology."  He still holds to that date.  One step along the way to the Singularity will occur in the 2030's when Kurzweil predicts we will be able to connect our neocortex*** to a computer, thus achieving the merger of human technology with human intelligence that defines the fifth epoch,

Epoch Six: The Universe Wakes Up

Kurzweil believes that the universe has what he calls an "intelligent destiny."  This intelligent destiny occurs in the sixth epoch in the aftermath of the Singularity when "intelligence, derived from its biological origins in human brains and its technological origins in human ingenuity, will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst." Eventually our civilization will spread out from its origin on Earth and infuse the rest of the universe with its creativity and intelligence.  The " 'dumb' matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence...This is the ultimate destiny of the Singularity and of the universe."

There is a striking similarity between Ray Kurzweil's evolutionary stages leading to the Singularity and and those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French paleontologist and Jesuit priest.  In 1947, Teilhard developed the idea of the Noosphere, a sphere of thought enveloping the Earth. (The word comes from the Greek noos (mind) and sphaira (sphere).)  The Noosphere is the third stage of Earth’s development, after the geosphere (think rocks, water, and air) and the biosphere (all the living things).  The Noosphere can be seen as the rise of a planetary superorganism integrating all geological, biological, human, and technological activities into a new level of planetary functioning.  

*Consciousness is your individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, and environments. Essentially, your consciousness is your awareness of yourself and the world around you. This awareness is subjective and unique to you. (Very Well Mind)

**In 1950, the English computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing proposed what he called "the imitation game".  Since renamed the Turing Test in his honor, it is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human being.  By asking questions of a computing machine and considering its answers, a machine would be deemed to exhibit intelligent behavior if its answers were indistinguishable from those expected of a human.

***The neocortex is a complex brain structure that commands higher functions, such as sensory perception, emotion, and cognition. 

Sources: The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil publ. by Viking Penguin Group, 2005; Science, Ray Kurzweil: Singularity, Superintelligence, and Immortality | Lex Fridman Podcast, Human Energy

An update on NASA's Artemis Program and James Webb Space Telescope

POSTED SEPTEMBER 7, 2022

Artemis I mission delayed 

NASA had to scrub the Artemis I launch twice last week.  A bad sensor caused the first attempt to be halted on Monday.  Then on Saturday, September 3, as crews worked to fuel up the rocket, they repeatedly detected a liquid hydrogen leak that caused them to stop and start the fueling process several times. NASA made three unsuccessful attempts to repair the leak before falling so far behind schedule that Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson ultimately waived off the launch.  After scrubbing the second attempt Saturday, NASA confirms the Artemis I mission won't launch until late September at the earliest.  

Artemis I will be an unmanned test of NASA's SLS (Space Launch System) and Orion crew capsule.  It is the first mission stage of the Artemis Program that will return humans to the moon.  Artemis I mission will place Orion into a lunar orbit, and then return it to Earth.  Its three main objectives:

• Demonstrate that the Orion spacecraft's heat shield can withstand the high speed and high heat it will experience at lunar re-entry conditions. When Orion returns from the moon, it will be traveling about 24,500 miles an hour. The spacecraft will experience temperatures half as hot as the sun outside the heat shield. 

• Demonstrate the operations and flight modes of the rocket and the spacecraft - all of the facilities across all of the mission phases. As part of this objective, NASA is looking for further confidence that Orion, while carrying humans, can tolerate the extreme thermal environment of deep space.

• Retrieve Orion after splashdown. While engineers will receive data throughout the course of the mission, retrieving the crew module after splashdown will provide information to inform future flights. There will be three mannequins aboard the spacecraft that will help NASA understand how the vehicle fared.

Establishing a permanent human presence on the moon (May 10, 2022) 

For more on Artemis program, a link to a ZDNet article is below.

James Webb Space Telescope continues to impress

The awesome first images from the James Webb Space Telescope were just the beginning.  In the weeks since then, NASA has released equally beautiful images of a spiral galaxy 32 million light years away; a cartwheel galaxy resulting from a collision of two galaxies 400 million years ago; and Jupiter, its moons and rings.  The images are not just pretty - they will help astrophysicists learn more about the structure and evolution of galaxies and reveal the processes behind star formation; give us an insight into the fate of our own galaxy's future; and reveal more detail than ever about the planets of our solar system.

Sky at Night takes a look at JWST's latest images in the link below.

Sources: NPR, Florida Today, ZDNet. Sky at Night Magazine

Will the Metaverse hasten the Singularity?

POSTED AUGUST 19, 2022

For better or worse, the day that machine intelligence exceeds that of human intelligence is approaching.  Whether this technological Singularity happens within the next 30 years or much later depends on the advances in computing capabilities and artificial intelligence that will inevitably bring it about.  What role will the Metaverse, the immersive "new internet" now under construction, play in its arrival?

A Lens on the Earliest Eras of the Universe

Four billion light years away, galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 serves as a gravitational lens revealing galaxies and stars formed in the first 500 million years of the universe.  Some of the galaxies we can view above in JWST's first deep view into the cosmos are magnified, and some are stretched or distorted.  "They've been magnified by the gravity of the cluster, just like Einstein said they would," NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby said at the reveal of Webb's first scientific images.

When Galaxies Collide

Webb’s instrumentation captures huge shock waves as one of the galaxies of the Stephan Quintet, NGC 7318B, smashes through the cluster. These regions surrounding the central pair of galaxies are shown in the colors red and gold.

(For more on NASA's Webb Space Telescope, visit the NASA website, https://webb.nasa.gov/)

Sources: Space.com  European Space Agency  Earth.com, Times-Standard, Stanford News, Mashable

Earth Day: Points of Light

POSTED APRIL 22, 2022

Catalyzed by the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, the first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970.  Proposed in 1969 by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day events were organized nationally by a handful of young activists and local volunteers.  The environmental issues that we focus on have changed since that first Earth Day in 1970 - partly because of the great progress we have made in controlling toxic chemicals and reducing pollutant levels in the air and water and partly because of our awareness of new ecological dangers.  

This year's Earth Day theme is “Invest In Our Planet.” Earth Day 2022 is "focused on accelerating solutions to combat our greatest threat, climate change, and to activate everyone – governments, citizens, and businesses – to do their part. Everyone accounted for, and everyone accountable." (Earthday.org)  

As challenging as the long-term health of the planet may seem to be, here are a few "points of light" that give us hope for the future, hope that we can rise to those challenges.

Cool Effect's Amazon Rainforest Preservation Project

Rainforests have been called the lungs of the planet.  Although they cover less than 3% of the planet, they generate 20% of the world's oxygen and are home to more than half of all plant and animal species.  But deforestation and natural disasters are destroying more than 30 million acres of rainforest per year.  A 2017 study published in the journal Science revealed that tropical forests that once served as the Earth’s carbon sinks* now emit more carbon than they absorb, because of deforestation and forest loss caused by humans.  This loss represents 15% of global carbon dioxide emissions that accelerate climate change—more than from all cars in the U.S. and China combined.

A number of organizations are working to reverse this trend and preserve the rainforests - NGOs like the Rainforest Foundation, the Rainforest Alliance, and environmental coalitions like World Rainforest Day.   They advocate for natural climate solutions that could help reverse global emissions and make a positive impact on rainforests.  

The Amazon Rainforest in South America is by far the largest and much of the effort at rainforest preservation is directed there.  One of the groups working there is the California-based Cool Effect, a crowdfunding platform that provides individuals the opportunity to support carbon emissions reductions by funding carbon-reducing projects around the world.  Their Amazon Rainforest Preservation Project preserves more than 100,000 acres "of dense forest in a critical region of the eastern Amazon biome which is an area at high risk of deforestation."  The project will sequester an average of 258,000 metric tons of CO2 annually - the equivalent to the annual emissions from 50,000 to 60,000 automobiles.  In addition, "the project has multiple secondary benefits including full-time jobs for families that live in the project area. This is especially important in a region where there are few job opportunities. The project also provides improved cookstoves to community members which burn fuel for cooking more efficiently and reduce the risk of lung diseases."

The Return of the Western Monarch Butterfly

The beautiful orange-winged monarch is the most recognizable butterfly in North America.  Its epic migrations over thousands of miles are a source of wonder.  Due to threats from development, global climate change and pesticides and herbicides (in particular,  the large-scale use of herbicides that destroy milkweed—the monarch caterpillar’s sole host plant),  the monarch butterfly has been decreasing towards extinction. Over the last 20 years, monarch populations have fallen by more than 80 percent.

The situation of the western monarch is especially dire.  Western monarch populations have declined precipitously since the 1990s, when 3 million to 10 million butterflies migrated annually from the northwestern United States to spend the winter at hundreds of sites along the California coast. In 2020, less than 2,000 monarchs were counted in the entire state.  Butterfly researchers despaired, since the number was well below the level theorized to lead to collapse and extinction. And they rejoiced when, unexpectedly, the species made a dramatic comeback in 2021 with more tan 200,000 sighted.  

It's still a long way from their peak and the causes of the comeback remain a mystery.  But scientists speculate that several factors may have played a role in the recovery.  UC-Davis insect ecologist Louie Yang believes the recovery is due to a “series of fortunate events.” As described by Yang and his colleagues, these events might include survival of the first-generation —those born after the long winter slog and resulting mating frenzy, warm-but-not-too-hot weather, the right amount of rainfall at just the right time, drought periods (when fewer crops are planted and fewer pesticides used), and wildfires that prepared the ground for an extraordinary wildflower season.  Other theories include what biologists call a “negative-density dependent” population when low numbers help its survival, for example because it’s easier to find food and harder for disease to spread between individuals—or for predators to find them.  Finally, they wonder if some number of butterflies from Eastern populations have crossed over the Rockies or come north from Mexico.

Be that as it may, let's enjoy the respite and these beautiful and amazing creatures and begin to formulate plans for their survival.  

Long-term, the answer seems to lie in the restoration or preservation of milkweed and pollinator habitat.  While the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has taken some initial steps toward slowing the monarch decline—including the implementation of the Monarch Butterfly Habitat Development Project—monarchs desperately need more funding to ensure their long-term survival. The requested increased level of funding would cover the cost of restoring one million acres of milkweed and pollinator habitat per year so that the butterfly is resilient to threats from habitat loss, pesticides, severe weather, and climate change.

Saving the Bees

Bees and other pollinators are directly responsible for more than 35% of the food we eat.  Over 90 different varieties of fruits, vegetables and essential crops like alfalfa and hay for our meat and dairy industries depend on them for survival.  

But this important part of the food chain is in danger of disruption.  Since the 20-aughts, bee colonies around the world have been collapsing and many species are edging towards extinction. 

Beekeepers across the United States lost 45.5% of their managed honey bee colonies from April 2020 to April 2021, according to preliminary results of the 15th annual nationwide survey conducted by the nonprofit Bee Informed Partnership (BIP). These losses mark the second highest loss rate the survey has recorded since it began in 2006 (6.1 percentage points higher than the average annual loss rate of 39.4% and 3 times higher what is considered normal loss). 

The current crisis, called the "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD), started when the Varroa mite was first noted in bee colonies in 2006.  Other causes identified since then include pesticides (particularly nicotinoids), pathogens, parasites, poor nutrition, habitat loss, and stress (beehives are often transported many miles to pollinate various crops). 

With so much at stake, various groups are engaging in actions to reverse this trend.  

• The non-profit Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) conducts annual surveys to identify best practices leading to less colony loss.  Among the possible solutions: replace the colony's queen in the summer, pay more attention to the Varroa mite and its elimination, and make beneficial changes in agricultural practices that could affect honey bee health, like changes in spray recommendations.   

• Scientists at four University of California campuses are testing how nutritional supplements may help bees that have been exposed to pesticides and examining how to harness the natural honey bee microbiome against a very common bee gut disease.  The program addresses CCD in three main ways: breeding programs to identify and breed bees that are better able to cope with environmental stress; developing medications and treatments for sick bees; and giving beekeepers tools to better monitor bees’ health.

• The Israeli startup company Beewise has developed a robotic beehive ("BeeHome") that is solar powered and can autonomously care for hives of bees. The home keeps pests away, automatically harvests honey, attends to the bees’ health and can prevent swarming. 

• EcoWatch [link below] has suggestions on how we all can contribute to saving the bees - including how home gardeners can keep a Bee Garden & Hotel. 

The Comeback Kids

An endangered species is one at risk of extinction, of ceasing to exist on the planet.  At most risk are those classified as critically endangered - on the brink of extinction with total numbers ranging from less than 100 to a few thousand.     The World Wildlife Fund currently lists 17 animals as critically endangered.  Among them are some familiar friends like the orangutan along with several species of elephants and rhinos and gorillas.   

But other species have been removed from endangered lists in recent years due to the efforts and diligence of  conservationists and governments working to protect their habitats and wellbeing.   World Atlas [link below] brings us 10 of these success stories.

*A carbon sink is a natural element that absorbs carbon dioxide. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and by the process of photosynthesis release oxygen.  The oceans, too, are  carbon sinks with phytoplankton absorbing about as much carbon as all the plants and trees on land combined.  

Sources: Museum of the City of New York, Client Earth, Rainforest Alliance, Discovery, Amazon Rainforest Preservation | Cool Effect , Urban Bird, PBS NOVA, Science Daily, KNOE, The Robot Report, US Represented, UCSD News

The new space race

POSTED FEBRUARY 16, 2022

The first space race

On October 4, 1957, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics launched Sputnik I into an elliptical low Earth orbit.  Sputnik was the world's first artificial satellite.  Its unanticipated success at the height of the Cold War triggered a "Space Race" with the United States and contributed directly to a new emphasis on science and technology in American schools.  

On January 31, 1958, the United States made its first successful satellite launch, Explorer I, and the race was on. [sidebar below]  

Sputnik planted the seeds for the development of modern satellite navigation and  also inspired a generation of engineers and scientists.  Harrison Storms, the North American designer who was responsible for the X-15 rocket plane, and went on to head the effort to design the Apollo command and service module and Saturn V launch vehicle's second stage, was moved by the launch of Sputnik to think of space as being the next step for America.  Astronauts Alan Shepard (who was the first American in space) and Deke Slayton later wrote of how the sight of Sputnik 1 passing overhead inspired them to their new careers. [1]

Today there are 7,500 satellites orbiting the Earth, and satellites are now part of our daily lives.  Global positioning satellites get us from point a to point b.  Science satellites help prepare for weather events and give us information about the atmosphere and climate.  Communications satellites bring us television, radio, and internet. [sidebar below]

Twelve US astronauts walked on the surface of the Moon during the period of 1969-1972.  While the USSR had several manned lunar flybys, it never landed a cosmonaut there.  No one has been back there since.  That is about to change with both the United States and China planning crewed missions within the next decade. 

How the Silk Road changed Europe and shaped the modern era

POSTED JANUARY 27, 2022

Over the centuries that the Silk Road connected China to Europe, goods, ideas, and inventions made their way from the East.  Adopting and adapting these goods and inventions, Europe changed.  Some of the goods made European life more pleasant, and some of what Europeans learned would help shape the early modern era (~1400 to ~1800).  

Paper, Printing, Gunpowder and the Magnetic Compass

The Silk Road brought world-changing inventions to Europe from China.  Among those with the most impact were paper production and printing techniques -which increased the speed and spread of knowledge; gunpowder - which changed the nature of warfare in Europe; and the magnetic compass - which made possible the Age of Sail and Exploration.

Sources: Master Class, Silk-Road.com, PBS, University of California Press, Wikipedia, Heavenly Tea Leaves blog, Pixart Printing blog, History.com, Literary Hub, Barron's, Open Mind BBVA

The James Webb Space Telescope Launches

POSTED JANUARY 2, 2022

On Christmas Day, the largest, most powerful, and most expensive telescope ever launched into space lifted off from ESA's Europe Spaceport in French Guiana.  NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began a 30 day journey that would take it to a position four times the distance to the moon.  Billed as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb’s mirror is six times larger (and 100 times more powerful) and its instruments are tuned to observe longer wavelengths, in order to detect the light from primitive galaxies and stars 13.5 billion light years away*.  

The process leading up to the launch took two and half decades and an estimated $10 billion dollars to complete.  A successful launch was the first step in making it operational.  The next challenge will be when the mirror is unfolded after JWST reaches its destination.  If all goes well, there's enough fuel to provide 10 years of deep space observations.

Webb's primary mission — to see the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang — determined the unusual and challenging design of the telescope. Instead of a shiny tube, the Webb Telescope looks like a giant honeycomb riding on a silver surfboard. 

One of the reasons for placing the telescope so far into deep space is because the telescope will be using infrared to look at those distant galaxies. If it were too close to the Sun the light from it would cause the telescope to heat up and essentially see itself. With that in mind, a five layer shield was designed to protect the massive telescope. The backside of the shields will be around 200 degrees Fahrenheit, while the cold side where the instrumentation is will be approximately -388 degrees Fahrenheit.  [link below left]

When we view the night sky, we are looking at stars as they were many years ago.  The most distant individual star visible to the unaided eye is a little over 4000 light years away, in the constellation Cassiopeia.  Dim and at the limits of visibility, it is actually a supergiant star over 100,000 times more luminous than our Sun.

If we wish to look further back in time, we need something more than just our eyes.  With binoculars, we can see the Great Cluster as it was 21,000 years ago.  A 4-inch telescope in a suburban back garden can find the Andromeda Galaxy, some 2.4 million light years away. Under a dark sky, the brightest quasar (3C 273 in western part of the constellation Virgo) is visible in a 10-inch reflector telescope as a very dim bluish star. It is 2 billion light years away.  The light that reaches us from 3C 273 left when the Earth was an alien world, a  planet devoid of life, having just suffered the “Great Oxidation Event.”   That's about it for the amateur astronomer.

The major Earth-bound observatories can see much further but it was the Hubble telescope, launched in 1990, that was the time-machine that brought us close to the beginning of the Universe.  In 2018, Hubble uncovered the farthest individual star ever seen.  Harbored in a very distant spiral galaxy, the star, nicknamed "Icarus," is so far away that its light has taken 9 billion years to reach Earth.  It appears to us as it did when the universe was about 30 percent of its current age.  In 2016, Hubble observed the farthest and oldest galaxy ever, providing scientists with a look deep into the history of the universe.  The far-away galaxy, named GN-z11, existed a mere 400 million years after the Big Bang, or about 13.3 - 13.4 billion years ago.

With JWST, scientists expect to see even further and more clearly into the past and learn more about how galaxies form and develop.  Ultimately, they are "looking for the first light that turned on at the very beginning of cosmic time."  Beyond Webb, future telescopes - located on the dark side of the moon and using gravitational waves - may even be able to see into the time before the cosmic dawn that transformed our universe from a dark place to the light place that we live in today. [link below center]

Extra: Originally expected to last 15 years, the beloved Hubble Space Telescope has brought us unimaginably beautiful images from unimaginably distant stars and galaxies over its three decades of observing the skies.  Space.com's "best of Hubble" is below right.

*Scientists estimate that the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago.  The first stars appeared 100 million years after the Big Bang, and galaxies formed nearly a billion years after the Big Bang.

Sources: Space.com, Vox, Sky and Telescope, NASA, Wikipedia, Sky at Night, KQED, 

Preparing for a radically changed planet

POSTED APRIL 21, 2021

The coming decades will see our planet affected more and more by global warming.  Severe weather events will increase in frequency and intensity.  Droughts will last longer, and coastal flooding will force permanent evacuations.  Climate refugees will be added to today's war and hunger refugees...We can prepare now for this radically changed planet.  Engineering solutions and science-based actions are some of the best investments we can make as we adapt.  Protecting infrastructure located near coastal areas from critical damage and protecting coastal communities from flooding are two high priority goals...READ MORE