This palm-sized elephant relative was just sighted for the first time in 50 years

It's related to an elephant, has a long nose, a fur tuft on its tail and big, spectacled eyes.

This is the first-ever photo of a live Somali Sengi, a tiny mammal that was recently rediscovered in Africa.
(Image: © Photo by Steven Heritage, Duke University Lemur Center)

By Yasemin Saplakoglu - Staff Writer 8/18/2020


A teensy animal, with a long nose, a fur tuft on its tail and big, spectacled eyes hadn't been seen in nearly half a century. That is, until a whiff of peanut butter lured the wee mouse-sized mammal out from the rocky, rugged lands of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa.

The recently "rediscovered" mammal, called a Somali sengi (Elephantulus revoilii), is a species of elephant shrew. While elephant shrews are related to elephants, aardvarks and manatees — they're not elephants and they're not shrews.

The Somali sengi has not been seen since 1973. Everything known about the obscure mini mammal came from 39 individual specimens that were collected decades and centuries ago and that are now stored in museums, according to a statement from Global Wildlife Conservation.

In 2019, a group of scientists from the U.S. and Djibouti set out to look for the species after receiving tips that the creatures could be hiding in Djibouti, although the animals had only previously been found in Somalia, according to the statement.

"For us living in Djibouti, and by extension the Horn of Africa, we never considered the sengis to be 'lost,' but this new research does bring the Somali sengi back into the scientific community, which we value," co-author Houssein Rayaleh, a research ecologist and conservationist with the nonprofit organization Association Djibouti Nature, said in the statement. Rayaleh had seen the creature before — and locals had too, correctly identifying it in photos during interviews with the scientists, according to the statement.



This Somali Sengi was spotted way up north, greatly expanding the range of the species. (Image credit: Photo by Houssein Rayaleh, Association Djibouti Nature)

Using information from interviews, analysis of dung piles at candidate sites and assessments of terrain and sheltering potential, the researchers set up 1,259 traps at 12 different locations across the rocky terrain. They lured the animals to the traps by setting out peanut butter, oatmeal and yeast. They caught one of the elusive mammals in the first trap they set.

In total, they found 12 Somali sengis, which they could distinguish from a similar species by the tuft of fur on their tails, according to the statement. "For Djibouti, this is an important story that highlights the great biodiversity of the country and the region and shows that there are opportunities for new science and research here," Rayaleh said.

They found all of sengis by rocky outcrops and relatively sparse vegetation, areas that are typically inhospitable to human activities, meaning the tiny creatures are not likely to experience habitat destruction, according to the statement. Because they found comparable numbers to other sengi taxa and because they now know that the creatures live beyond just Somalia, the authors recommended that the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species change the Somali sengi's current "data deficient" status to "least concern," according to the statement.

"Usually when we rediscover lost species, we find just one or two individuals and have to act quickly to try to prevent their imminent extinction," Robin Moore, one of GWC's Search for Lost Species program leads, said in the statement. "This is a welcome and wonderful rediscovery during a time of turmoil for our planet, and one that fills us with renewed hope for the remaining small mammal species on our most wanted list." (GWC crafted a list of 25 of the most wanted "lost" species.)

The findings were published today (Aug. 18) in the journal PeerJ.

Originally published on Live Science.

NASA INVESTIGATING EARTH'S MYSTERIOUSLY WEAKENING MAGNETIC FIELD AMID CONCERNS OVER SATELLITES AND SPACECRAFT

SpaceX Starlink satellites are pictured in the sky seen from Svendborg on South Funen, Denmark 21 April, 2020( Reuters )

'Dent' or anomaly is small but getting bigger, scientists warn

Andrew Griffin
8/18/2020

Nasa is monitoring a "small but evolving dent" in the Earth's magnetic field that could cause major problems for satellites and spacecraft.

The Earth's magnetic field wraps around our planet, bouncing away charged particles that come to us from the Sun. But there is an unexplained gap in it, where the magnetic field is weak, hovering over South America and the southern Atlantic Ocean.

What's more, the region is spreading and continuing to weaken, leading to fears that the problem could get worse.

Researchers refer to the gap as the "South Atlantic Anomaly, or SAA", and fear that it could cause significant problems for equipment that is used on Earth. Within the anomaly, particles are able to get closer to the surface than usual, meaning that satellites and computers that pass through it could be hit by problems.
That has led Nasa to devote resources to tracking the dent, in an attempt to better understand where it is and what could be causing it.

At the moment, there is no obvious consequence of the SAA for anyone living on Earth. But detailed observations have suggested that it is getting more extreme and that it is expanding to the west, as well as splitting so that there are two points at which the anomaly is least strong.

The Earth's magnetic field – and the changes it undergoes – are happening beneath our feet. Underneath the Earth, in its outer core, metals are churning that create electric currents that then go on to produce the important magnetic field.

Over time, those conditions within the core change, and so does the magnetic field. It is those changes that lead to phenomena such as the SAA.

But the greatest concern about the magnetic fields for the time being is it effects on equipment away from Earth's surface. Ordinarily, the magnetic field keeps the satellites that are around the Earth safe – including inhabited ones like the International Space Station – but the changes mean they lack the protection as they fly through the area covered by the SAA.

At the moment, operators are forced to shut down specific components as they pass through the area. That is one of the reasons that tracking the SAA is important to Nasa, since it needs to know exactly where it is so that those changes can be made most accurately.

With better data in the future, Nasa hopes to be able to more accurately predict how the SAA could be changing and therefore what danger it might pose to satellites and the instruments on them. Future missions will better inform those models, Nasa says, and can also be used to better understand the processes in the Earth that are leading to the changes.

‘Oumuamua remains a mystery: study nixes molecular hydrogen ice theory
Brittany A. Roston - Aug 18, 2020, 2:14 pm CDT0
The interstellar space rock dubbed ‘Oumuamua remains a mystery, according to a new study from Harvard University, which found that contrary to past findings, this cigar-shaped object is in fact not made from molecular hydrogen ice. The findings were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, detailing the reasons the molecular hydrogen ice proposal doesn’t fit what scientists know about such objects.

‘Oumuamua was spied in late 2017 and is the first (known) interstellar object to travel into our Solar System. The celestial object is moving incredibly fast, is shaped somewhat like a cigar, and it displays unique properties. What was first thought to be an asteroid, ‘Oumuamua was soon found to behave more like a comet, yet it displays certain properties not associated with either type of object.

Many details about this space object were published in the following months, including that it measures up to 400 meters in length and may be around 10 times longer than it is wide. This would be the most extreme aspect ratio of all known comets and asteroids found in our Solar System, according to NASA. The unusual nature of the object spurred fun speculation that perhaps ‘Oumuamua is an alien probe deliberately sent into our Solar System to gather data.

That is, of course, quite unlikely, but we still don’t have all the answers about ‘Oumuamua. In their new paper, researchers with the Harvard & Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics, as well as the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, explain why the object couldn’t be made from molecular hydrogen ice as proposed in a paper published earlier this year.

The latest study’s lead author Dr. Thiem Hoang explained:

The proposal by Seligman and Laughlin appeared promising because it might explain the extreme elongated shape of ‘Oumuamua as well as the non-gravitational acceleration. However, their theory is based on an assumption that H2 ice could form in dense molecular clouds. If this is true, H2 ice objects could be abundant in the universe, and thus would have far-reaching implications. H2 ice was also proposed to explain dark matter, a mystery of modern astrophysics. We wanted to not only test the assumptions in the theory but also the dark matter proposition.

When ‘Oumuamua was detected in late 2017, it was moving at an incredibly fast speed of 196,000 miles per hour. The researchers express skepticism that a hydrogen iceberg could survive an intense high-speed journey across this distance for the duration of hundreds of millions of years without evaporating rapidly — and whether such an object could form in molecular clouds at all, according to study co-author Dr. Avi Loeb.

The Harvard Professor of Science went on to state that:

The most likely place to make hydrogen icebergs is in the densest environments of the interstellar medium. These are giant molecular clouds [GMCs] … Thermal sublimation by collisional heating in GMCs could destroy molecular hydrogen icebergs of ‘Oumuamua-size before their escape into the interstellar medium.

Of course, it’s only a matter of time before scientists figure out what this object is, particularly if the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory scheduled to go live next year manages to find other similar objects, Loeb says.

Story Timeline
SETI probes mysterious Oumuamua interstellar object for radio signals

‘Oumuamua interstellar object isn't an alien ship, but mysteries remain

New theory could explain 'Oumuamua interstellar object with huge implications

In a first, astronomers spotted a space rock turning into a comet
The process won’t be complete until 2063


Space rocks called centaurs could someday become brilliant comets, like the one shown in this artist’s illustration. Astronomers have spotted a centaur that is expected to become a comet in about four decades. HEATHER ROPER/UNIV. OF ARIZONA

By Lisa Grossman
18/8/2020

Like the mythical half-human, half-horse creatures, centaurs in the solar system are hybrids between asteroids and comets. Now, astronomers have caught one morphing from one type of space rock to the other, potentially giving scientists an unprecedented chance to watch a comet form in real time in the decades to come.

“We have an opportunity here to see the birth of a comet as it starts to become active,” says planetary scientist Kat Volk of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The object, called P/2019 LD2, was discovered by the ATLAS telescope in Hawaii in May. Its orbit suggests that it’s a centaur, a class of rocky and icy objects with unstable orbits. Because of that mixed composition and potential to move around the solar system, astronomers have long suspected that centaurs are a missing link between small icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune and comets that regularly visit the inner solar system (SN: 11/19/94).

These “short-period” comets, which are thought to originate from icy objects in the Kuiper Belt, orbit the sun once a decade or so, and make repeat appearances in Earth’s skies. (Long-period comets, like Halley’s Comet, which visits the inner solar system once a century, probably originate even farther from the sun, in the Oort cloud (SN: 10/25/13).)

All previously found short-period comets were spotted only after they had transitioned into comets (SN: 8/6/14). But LD2 just came in from the Kuiper Belt recently and will become a comet in as little as 43 years, Volk and colleagues report August 10 at arXiv.org.

“It’s weird to think that this object should be becoming a comet when I’m retiring,” Volk says.

In 2019, she and colleagues showed that there’s a region of space just beyond Jupiter that they call the “Gateway”. In this area, small planetary objects hang out while warming up and transitioning from outer solar system ice balls to inner solar system comets with their long tails. It’s like a comet incubator, says planetary scientist Gal Sarid of the SETI Institute, who is based in Rockville, Md.

After hearing about LD2, Volk, Sarid and their colleagues simulated thousands of possible trajectories to see where the object had been and where it is going. LD2’s orbit probably took it near Saturn around 1850, and it entered its current orbit past Jupiter after a close encounter with the gas giant in 2017, the team found. The object will leave its present orbit and move in toward the sun in 2063, where heat from the sun will probably sublimate LD2’s volatile elements, giving it a bright cometary tail, the researchers say.

“This will be the first ever comet that we know its history, because we’ve seen it before being a comet,” Sarid says.

The fact that LD2 is fairly new to the inner reaches of the solar system suggests that it’s made of relatively pristine material that has been in the back of the solar system’s freezer for billions of years, unaltered by heat from the sun. That would make it a time capsule of the early solar system. Studying its composition could help planetary scientists learn what the first planets were made of.

The orbital analysis looks “very reasonable,” says Henry Hsieh, a planetary astronomer with the Planetary Science Institute who is based in Honolulu and was not involved in the study. But studying just one transition object is not enough to open the solar system time capsule.

“What we really need to do is study many of these,” he says. “Study this one first, and then study more of them, and figure out whether this object is an outlier or whether we see a consistent picture.” Future sky surveys, like the ones planned using the future Vera Rubin Observatory (SN: 1/10/20), should discover more balls of ice shifting into comets.

Sarid and colleagues think LD2 could be a good target for a spacecraft to visit. NASA has considered sending spacecraft to centaurs, although no missions have been selected for development yet. But considering that LD2 will become a comet in just a few decades, scientists don’t have much time to plan, build and launch a mission to visit it. “The windows are closing,” Sarid says. “We really need to be doing this now.”

CITATIONS

J.K. Steckloff. P/2019 LD2 (ATLAS): An active centaur in imminent transition to the Jupiter family. arXiv:2008.02943. Posted August 10, 2020.

G. Sarid et al. 29P/Schwassmann–Wachmann 1, a centaur in the Gateway to the Jupiter-family comets. The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Published September 23, 2019. Doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab3fb3.




About Lisa Grossman
Lisa Grossman is the astronomy writer. She has a degree in astronomy from Cornell University and a graduate certificate in science writing from University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives near Boston.

Inside the Grueling Battle to Declassify Homosexuality as a Mental Illness
HISTORY LESSON
Story Center Films

The documentary ‘CURED’ chronicles the fight to remove homosexuality from the DSM. But it overlooks the contributions of Black and brown voices—and censors some activists’ racism.

Cassie Da Costa

Entertainment Writer
Published Aug. 18, 2020 4

Any ‘Gay and Lesbian History’ college course will dive into closeted white suburban gay male representations. In fact, this group of men, sneaking around in mid-century America, have received a fair bit of Hollywood attention in recent years. There was fashion designer Tom Ford’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s haunting novel A Single Man, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Oscar vehicle The Imitation Game, and Luca Guadagnino’s take on André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name. Todd Haynes’s excellent Far From Heaven refocused the lens from a cheating closeted suburban husband to the wife’s own relationship with a Black man who works as her gardener, while Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country look at white male closeted culture in the context of working-class masculinity.

Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer’s new documentary CURED looks at the white suburban gay through the lens of activism. The film chronicles the drive by lesbian and gay activists, especially Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny, to get homosexuality removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The story itself is a vital one to know, because it marks one of the first major drives toward a rights-oriented LGBTQ+ movement. Notably, those fighting to have homosexuality removed from the DSM were mostly middle and upper class cis white gays and lesbians—people with college educations, good jobs, perhaps even nuclear families who were fighting to live openly as gay while taking part in polite society.

The Black Teen Slaughtered by a White Mob in Brooklyn
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
Cassie Da Costa


The Fearless Journalist Targeted by a Murderous Dictator
THE GOOD FIGHT
Cassie Da Costa


CURED features one Black lesbian from a working-class background, Reverend Magora Kennedy, who married to avoid being sent to Utica State Hospital where she would’ve received electroshock therapy as treatment for her homosexuality. After having five children, she left her husband and began to live openly as a lesbian. She attended talk shows and panels with Gittings, the spokeswoman of the movement, and several other white lesbians. She also was present at the Stonewall Riots, and the film provides a brief glance toward those events, which were the first major spark of the gay liberation movement headed up by Black and brown trans women as well as sex workers, street kids, disabled people, and the kind of queers who were not seeking assimilation into the dominant social order, but rather the freedom to live as themselves without being harmed by the state. I don’t believe there is a simple hierarchy between these sets of desires, but they do not smoothly intersect, and have continually been at odds. For example, Larry Kramer’s bravely flagrant ACT UP movement during the HIV/AIDs epidemic spurned the status quo while the more recent gay marriage movement prioritized inclusion into an enshrined social system over, perhaps, the kind of reimagining of family that could protect homeless LGBTQ+ youth.

CURED does not differentiate gay rights from gay liberation or provide a robust context for how homophobia functioned at the time in a country also ridden with racism, classism, and ableism. And this move—to vacuum-seal the fight to remove homosexuality from the DSM—unfortunately does a disservice to the film’s message because it denies the activists involved the opportunity to make the case for why assimilation was so collectively, and not individually, crucial to them and others at the time.


Several of the psychiatrists in the American Psychiatric Association (APA) that presided over the DSM at the time were gay. In fact, there was a secret society of gay psychiatrists within the APA, some of whom were in leadership. Of course, the extreme majority of the APA were white men, and in CURED, there are merely glimpses of anyone else within the institution. As you can imagine, homophobia was not the only prejudice entrenched within psychiatry as an institution in the U.S.—blackness, specifically, was pathologized, as was being a woman; addiction was seen as a moral failing, and genuinely mentally-ill patients were often looked down upon by the doctors treating them.

John E. Fryer testifying before the American Psychiatric Association in 1972
Story Center Films

The closeted gay doctor John E. Fryer, who famously testified to the APA about homosexuality’s inclusion in the DSM while wearing a Halloween-appropriate mask disguise, wrote in his journal afterwards, “...I have identified with a force which is akin to my selfhood. I am not Black, I am not alcoholic, I am not really addicted. I am homosexual...” (emphasis mine). That second sentence is omitted from the reading Fryer’s still-living friend performs for the camera, and in an image of the journal, it is grayed out. I had to pause the documentary and take a screenshot in order to make sense of what was glossed over.

Why was it so important for Fryer to say, to himself, in his diary, that he was not Black? And in the same space of thought in which he declared he was not an alcoholic or otherwise addicted?

Why was it so important for Fryer to say, to himself, in his diary, that he was not Black? And in the same space of thought in which he declared he was not an alcoholic or otherwise addicted?


We know that, at that time (and in many ways still today), major institutions believed blackness itself was a form of deviance, as was alcoholism and drug use. It seems that Fryer was trying to say that, unlike Black people or alcoholics or drug users, I am not deviant—I am merely a gay man. And perhaps Sammon and Singer thought that examining this prejudice would be inconvenient to the triumphant tone of the film and uncomfortable for the interviewees to address. But this bigotry, even within the gay-rights movement, is not a distraction but a major point. A key argument against focusing on acquiring rights within a deeply compromised system—rather than working to liberate each other from it—is that those who receive the full benefits of those rights will be the ones already positioned to dominate once those rights are acquired; the good fortune will not simply trickle down. What good is it to a Black gay man if his psychiatrist doesn’t see his homosexuality as deviant but believes in race science? What good is it to a lesbian seeking treatment for bipolar disorder if the classification in the DSM is based exclusively on cis male subjects?

Removing homosexuality from the DSM has certainly made it more possible for gay people to stay out of mental institutions on the basis of their sexuality and paved the way to the anti-discrimination laws that make it difficult for employers to prejudicially fire gay and trans employees with impunity. But this reform movement was not a revolution as CURED implies—nothing fundamental about the social and political order that makes such discrimination so life-threatening has changed. Right now, the Trump administration is angling to wipe away many of these rights in the name of “religious freedom”—if they manage it alongside an election win, a more radical approach would likely be the only way forward, at least in this lifetime. Perhaps, then, in the accounting of things, Stonewall—and the Black and brown activists who helped lead the charge—will not serve as a mere footnote.

Covid-19 situation in Africa exceeds Ebola, WHO alerts

Havana, Aug 18 (Prensa Latina) The present situation in Africa due to the Covid-19 pandemic is worse than that of the Ebola outbreak (2014 – 2016), the World Health Organization (WHO) warned.

In the usual morning press briefing by the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) to update Cuba´s epidemiological situation, it was known about WHO´s concern on Covid-19.

'Covid-19 already kills more people than Ebola. The new coronavirus has claimed 11,959 lives compared to the 11,308 that resulted in the worst Ebola outbreak between 2014 and 2016,' Dr. Francisco Duran, National Director of Epidemiology of MINSAP said, when referring to WHO´s data.

The 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was the largest and most complex since the virus was discovered in 1976, with the highest case and death tolls recorded in those years.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has infected more than 500,000 people in Africa so far this year.

In April, the WHO noted that the Democratic Republic of the Congo was in the final phase of the fight against Ebola outbreak, declared on August 1, 2018, while also dealt with a measles outbreak and the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Up to August 17, a total of 21,689,832 people from 185 countries has been infected with the new coronavirus and 770,273 have died.

Dr. Duran explained that the Americas is the current epicenter of the pandemic, since over 53% of cases reported worldwide are from this territory.

rly/pll/mem/rbp

PRENSA LATINA

Spain records the highest peak of Covid-19 cases in Europe

Madrid, Aug 18 (Prensa Latina) Spain has recorded in the last 14 days the highest peak of Covid-19 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in Europe, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control reported on Tuesday.

According to the data released today by that European Union entity, the Spanish rate is 132.2 infections per 100,000 inhabitants, that is to say, one case per 1,000 people in the last two weeks.

The cumulative incidence of Spain exceeds that of Luxembourg (98.6), Malta (98.2), Romania (88.5) and Belgium (60.8), according to the EU agency headquartered in Sweden, whose figures are provided by each country.

In the rest of the member States of the community bloc and the United Kingdom, the Covid-19 incidence is below 50 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.

Spain's Ministry of Health attributes the peak of Covid-19 cases during the month of July and, especially, so far in August, to the testing strategy deployed across the country, where only from August 7 to 13, experts have carried out over 480,000 PCR tests.

Spaniards hold anti-mask protest in Madrid as Covid-19 cases rise

August 17, 2020 By Agence France-Presse

A man smokes a cigarette with his eyes covered by a face mask as he takes part in a protest against the use of protective masks during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in Madrid, Spain August 16, 2020. © REUTERS/Juan Medina

Chanting “freedom”, hundreds of people rallied Sunday in Madrid to protest against the mandatory use of facemasks and other restrictions imposed by the Spanish government to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

A crowd of clapping and cheering people gathered beneath an enormous yellow and red Spanish flag that stands in the Plaza Colon in the centre of the city in response to calls on social media.

Protesters held up home-made placards featuring slogans that included “The virus does not exist”, “Masks kill” and “We are not afraid”.

The demonstration drew a variety of attendees, including conspiracy theorists, libertarians and opponents of vaccination.
Pilar Martin, a 58-year-old housewife from the northeastern city of Zaragoza, said she had come to Madrid for the rally because she believed governments around the world were exaggerating the number of infections to curb people’s freedoms.

“They are forcing us to use a mask, they want us to stay home practically locked up. It’s obvious that they are continuously tricking us with talk of outbreaks. It’s all a lie,” she told AFP at the rally.

A number of participants cited a slickly edited documentary dubbed “Plandemic” which has been removed from several social media platforms including YouTube and Facebook because it was found to have false claims, such as that wearing masks can cause harm or that vaccines have “killed millions”.

Many protesters did not wear a mask even though it is required by law in public across Spain, which has seen a surge in new infections since it lifted its three-month lockdown measures on June 21.

Mask-wearing was initially imposed in early May as a requirement for those using public transport, and was later expanded in a country where the virus has killed nearly 29,000 people.

The protest comes two days after the government announced new restrictions to curb the spread of the virus, including the closure of discos and a ban on smoking in public areas when it is not possible to keep at least two metres from other people.

(AFP)

SCIENCE SEZ
There’s little evidence showing which police reforms work

Rapid research is needed to find out what efforts are most effective

#DISARM   #DEMILITARIZE 
#DEFUND #DISBAND

Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, after a white police officer restrained the unarmed Black man by kneeling on his neck, activists around the country, like these in New York City, have called on civic leaders to defund the police.
DAVID GROSSMAN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

By Sujata Gupta

JULY 9, 2020 AT 8:00 AM

When criminologist Robin Engel suddenly found herself leading the effort to reform a police department under fire after a white police officer killed an unarmed Black man in July 2015, she looked for some kind of road map to follow. Instead, she found herself in poorly charted territory.

A professor at the University of Cincinnati, Engel had been called on frequently to help police departments around the country manage their response to acts of police violence. This time, the call came from close to home. Campus Officer Ray Tensing, 25, had shot and killed 43-year-old musician Samuel DuBose during an off-campus traffic stop.

Engel recommended that the university hire a high-ranking official to oversee the police department and its immediate response to the crisis, and initiate longer term, comprehensive reforms to prevent future incidents.

Within days, Engel had become that official, reporting directly to the university president and outranking the university’s police chief, despite lacking police experience herself.

She sought input from various community stakeholders, many of whom had been rankled by her appointment to lead the police division. She also turned to her best-known tool — research. She began probing for studies to guide her on the sorts of reforms she could institute, ones with proven track records of changing police behavior in the field. Her search was unfruitful.

“I thought most certainly we would have an evidence base that I could follow,” Engel says. “I was incredibly disappointed at the lack of evidence that was available. I was really disappointed in my own field.”

Among her efforts, Engel scoured the literature for so-called de-escalation programs with a history of success at defusing violence. Her review of that body of work, appearing in January 2020 in Criminology & Public Policy, found 64 de-escalation programs in the United States and elsewhere — but mostly administered to nurses and psychologists. She found no programs that had been tested among police officers. Just three studies showed cause and effect and included randomized control groups, and those showed that such programs led to minimal individual and organizational improvements.

In a February 2020 review in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Engel and colleagues discuss de-escalation trainings and four other reforms that tend to capture the public’s attention following fatal police-civilian encounters: body-worn cameras, implicit bias training (meant to reduce decisions and actions that arise from unconscious stereotypes) (SN: 10/26/15), early intervention systems that identify problematic officers before a crisis and civilian oversight of the police.

Engel was unable to identify a single police reform with convincing evidence of resulting behavior change among officers. Even studies on body-worn cameras, which are numerous, had mixed results. Engel cites a March 2019 review of 70 studies in Criminology & Public Policy by a team of researchers led by Cynthia Lum of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., that gauged the link between camera use and a reduction in force. Just 16 of those studies looked directly at whether or not cameras reduced officers’ use of force; of that subset, some show that the cameras work as a deterrent to use of force whereas others reach the opposite conclusion.An officer with the Minneapolis Police Department wears a body camera as part of his gear while responding to a call in 2019. Police departments across the country have started having their officers wear cameras to film their interactions with civilians, but it’s not clear that the devices reduce violent encounters.DIVERSEY/FLICKR (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Why no data?

The dearth of evidence stems from several factors, Engel says, but chief among them is the pressure for police departments to act fast when an instance of police violence captures national attention. Consider that less than two weeks following the death of George Floyd when white police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for several minutes, the majority of city councilors pledged to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department in response to activists’ calls to “defund the police” (SN: 6/5/2020).

Other departments around the country are likewise looking at ways to defund some police services, or reallocate to other agencies functions such as responding to mental health calls or monitoring safety in schools. Previous police brutality incidents have prompted calls for other sorts of reforms. For instance, a 2019 CBS News Survey of 155 police agencies found that almost 70 percent had implicit bias training with over half of those implemented after a white policeman shot and killed Black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014. Some 60 percent of those agencies said they did not have a way to measure the success or failure of such programs.  

A group gathers at a makeshift memorial in Ferguson, Mo., near the site where Black teenager Michael Brown was killed at the hands of a white police officer in August 2014. Brown’s death triggered a wave of police reforms, such as mandatory implicit bias training for police officers.GINO’S PREMIUM IMAGES/ALAMY

“This year it’s defund; what is it going to be next year, five years from now?” says Renée Mitchell, a recently retired police sergeant with a Ph.D. in criminology. She’s also cofounder and president of the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing. Police departments are “flinging out interventions and having no clue about the effects, positive or negative.”

Police research is complicated by the fact that researchers who conduct the sorts of studies needed to evaluate reforms and police officials often have different priorities. Why would a police chief work with an academic who is going to publish papers about the department’s problems that may also receive considerable press attention, asks Erin Kerrison, an empirical legal scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

What’s more, like some other areas of research related to violence (SN: 5/3/16), money for policing research is relatively limited. Consider that the National Institutes of Health invested about $39 billion for medical research in 2019, while the National Institute of Justice awarded far less than 1 percent of that amount — just under $214 million — for research that same year.

Yet researchers and police officials largely agree that rapid response is necessary to meet the demands of the moment. What research does emerge following George Floyd’s death won’t start coming out for two years, Kerrison says. “There will have been a thousand more George Floyds at that point.”
Needing to act

Which is why, back at the University of Cincinnati Police Division, Engel needed to act, evidence or no evidence. So on the de-escalation front, she selected a program run by Washington, D.C.–based Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit police research and policy organization. She was familiar with the organization, and the content — which emphasized training officers to recognize and effectively communicate with civilians behaving erratically and either unarmed or armed with something other than a firearm — looked promising. Engel then used the program to begin building her own evidence to help fill gaps in the field.

Engel treated reforms at her small university police department of 74 sworn officers as pilot projects that she could then test at larger police departments around the country. In February 2019, she and a team of researchers were able to conduct a larger study of the de-escalation program, when the Louisville Metro Police Department in Kentucky used it to train its 1,250 officers  

.  

Protesters demand justice for Samuel DuBose, who was fatally shot by a white University of Cincinnati police officer during an off-campus traffic stop. The incident led to reforms in the university’s police department.JOHN MINCHILLO/ASSOCIATED PRESSEngel randomized the order in which officers in the nine Louisville precincts were trained. That way, officers in each untrained precinct served as a control until they too underwent training. One benefit of this setup, called a “stepped wedge trial,” is that it doesn’t relegate one block of individuals into a control group that goes without training for the duration of the study. Stepped wedge trials have been used in other settings, such as health care and education. Officers were evaluated before and immediately after the training, and again, four to six months after training. Observations will continue for up to 12 months, with the team looking for changes in police behavior, and frequency and severity around the use of force.

Initial results will be out later this summer, says Engel, who is conducting an analogous study of an implicit bias training program. Also piloted at the University of Cincinnati, the program was rolled out at the NYPD, New York City’s police department.
Working together

Engel stepped down from her role overseeing the University of Cincinnati Police Division in January 2019, but the experience changed her thinking about criminology research. Academics tend to be interested in the philosophical, such as why officers use force, she says. But arguably more important are those nitty-gritty questions about how use of force can be mitigated in real life and in real time.

One challenge to understanding what reforms work is convincing police departments to collaborate with researchers, says Kerrison. She and colleagues outlined how academics can enter into ethical relationships with police departments in an August 2019 paper in Police Practice and Research. Crucial to such partnerships are clearly stated goals from the get-go, or airtight memoranda of understanding. That way, all parties agree in advance on the sorts of findings that will be communicated to the public and in what fashion, and everybody commits to helping police operations throughout the study process.

For instance, police departments can mandate that researchers anonymize their community’s identity in publications. Kerrison herself can’t talk about her relationships with police departments she’s working with due to such agreements. “Everybody has got to have skin in the game,” she says.

Given the challenges with funding and creating such academic-police partnerships, sometimes the clearest path forward may be to train the police officers in how to do science, Mitchell says. At the American Society for Evidence-Based Policing, she and colleagues are launching a four-week training course in 2021 for police officers similar to one already available in the United Kingdom. “Nowhere have our police leaders been taught how to interpret data and how to interpret statistics and how to interpret a research article,” she says. With such training, police departments will be better positioned to collect and evaluate data on their own.

Mitchell likens the model to medicine, where, for example, it would be a breach of ethics for doctors to advise patients with cancer without knowing about relevant evidence-based treatments. “[Policing] should be held to the same standard as the medical field,” she says.

However such research comes about, without it, police responses to crises will default to the quickest solutions, Engel says. “That is a very dangerous position to be in.”

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org


A version of this article appears in the August 15, 2020 issue of Science News.

CITATIONS



R.S. Engel, H.D. McManus and G.T. Isaza. Moving beyond best-practice: Experiences in police reform and a call for evidence to reduce officer-involved shootings. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Vol. 687, February 13, 2019, p. 146. doi: 10.1177/0002716219889328.



R.S. Engel, H.D. McManus and T.D. Herold. Do de-escalation practices work? Criminology & Public Policy. Posted January 31, 2020. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12467.



E.M. Kerrison et al. On creating ethical, productive, and durable research partnerships with police officers and their departments: a case study of the National Justice Database. Police Practice and Research. Vol. 20, August 25, 2019, p. 567. doi: 10.1080/15614263.2019.1657627.



C. Lum et al. Research on body-worn cameras. Criminology & Public Policy. Vol. 18, February 2019, p. 93. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12412.




About Sujata Gupta
Sujata Gupta is the social sciences writer and is based in Burlington, Vt.

Climate change, not hunters, may have killed off woolly rhinos
Ancient DNA indicates the creatures’ numbers stayed mostly constant long after people showed up


Ancient DNA suggests that rising temperatures, not human hunters, wiped out woolly rhinos (illustrated). DANIEL ESKRIDGE/ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES PLUS

By Bruce Bower

AUGUST 13, 2020 AT 11:00 AM

Rather than getting wiped out by Ice Age hunters, woolly rhinos charged to extinction in Siberia around 14,000 years ago when the climate turned warm and wet, a study of ancient DNA suggests.

Numbers of breeding woolly rhinos stayed relatively constant for tens of thousands of years until at least about 18,500 years ago, more than 13,000 years after people first reached northeastern Siberia, scientists report online August 13 in Current Biology. Yet only a few thousand years later, woolly rhinos died out, probably because temperatures had risen enough to reshape arctic habitats.

These findings build on a previous argument, based on dated fossils, that woolly rhino populations across northern Eurasia began to decline between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago, with surviving animals moving progressively eastward and dying out in northeastern Siberia around 14,000 years ago. Reasons for initial population losses are unclear, though there’s little evidence that human hunters killed substantial numbers of woolly rhinos, the researchers say.

Instead, a shift to warm, rainy conditions, which occurred between roughly 14,600 and 12,800 years ago, “likely played a large role in the rapid decline of this cold-adapted species,” says study coauthor Edana Lord, an evolutionary geneticist at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm. During that climate shift, open expanses featuring vegetation that woolly rhinos (Coelodonta antiquitatis) liked to eat were replaced by forests and shrub-dominated tundra. Hunters could have added to woolly rhinos’ woes, but the main extinction distinction goes to climate change, Lord contends.

Researchers have argued for decades about whether climate change or human hunting had a larger effect on worldwide extinctions of large animals such as woolly rhinos and mammoths as the Pleistocene Ice Age approached its end around 11,700 years ago (SN: 11/13/18).

Few examples of ancient DNA have been gleaned from any large Ice Age animals that died out, including woolly rhinos, says evolutionary geneticist Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute in London, who did not participate in the analysis. Based on the new study, he says, “there is no evidence so far of human hunting being a deciding factor in woolly rhino extinction.”

A woolly rhino skull shows the short and the long of this extinct creature’s horns.SERGEY FEDOROV

Lord’s group extracted a complete set of nuclear DNA, which is inherited from both parents, from a roughly 18,530-year-old woolly rhino bone. The researchers also isolated woolly rhino mitochondrial DNA, typically inherited from the mother, from 12 fossil bones, a piece of mummified tissue and a strand of hair. Those samples date from 14,100 to more than 50,000 years ago.

An analysis of molecular alterations in mitochondrial DNA samples indicated that two maternal lineages had split from a common ancestor between about 86,000 and 22,000 years ago. That finding supports a scenario consistent with fossil evidence, the researchers say, in which migrating animals settled in two northeast Asian regions, each with a suitable arctic environment. Mitochondrial DNA couldn’t resolve whether numbers of breeding females increased or remained stable around the time of that split.

Based on a comparison of sections of nuclear DNA that contained gene pairs with either matching or differing molecular compositions, the investigators calculated the approximate size of past breeding populations. Woolly rhino breeding numbers increased gradually starting around 1 million years ago and, by about 152,000 years ago, reached a peak of roughly 21,000 animals.

Humans entered northeastern Siberia by around 31,600 years ago (SN: 6/7/19). It’s not known when people first inhabited Siberia year-round, but the new DNA analysis shows that woolly rhinos continued to thrive long after mobile human groups likely knew of the animals’ existence. From around 29,700 to 18,530 years ago, when the animal that yielded nuclear DNA was alive, breeding woolly rhinos numbered about 10,600, the team estimates. Nuclear DNA from woolly rhinos that lived between around 18,000 and 14,000 years ago will be needed to determine when in that brief window of time the population of these animals plummeted.

A range of woolly rhino genes displayed molecular structures that may have helped the animals survive in an arctic environment. One of those genes contributes to cold tolerance. Another gene is involved in the perception of coldness. In a warming environment, Lord suggests, genes tuned to an arctic climate proved a liability.

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org

CITATIONS

E. Lord et al. Pre-extinction demographic stability and genomic signatures of adaptation in the woolly rhinoceros. Current Biology. Published online August 13, 2020. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.046.


About Bruce Bower
Bruce Bower has written about the behavioral sciences for Science News since 1984. He writes about psychology, anthropology, archaeology and mental health issues.

Dust can spread influenza among guinea pigs, raising coronavirus questions

Three out of 12 guinea pigs immune to flu spread the virus via airborne particles


A study in guinea pigs hints that viruses like influenza, and potentially the new coronavirus, can spread via dust from virus-contaminated things like blankets or tissue paper.

DEVMARYA/ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES PLUS


By Erin Garcia de Jesus

Spewing virus-laden droplets may not be the only way animals can spread some viruses through the air. Viruses like influenza might also hitch a ride on dust and other microscopic particles, a study in guinea pigs suggests.

People can transmit respiratory viruses, like the ones that cause flu and COVID-19, just by talking, coughing and sneezing (SN: 4/2/20). Virus-contaminated surfaces, called fomites, can also cause infection when people touch the surface and then their nose or mouth. Now new research suggests that dust particles kicked up from those contaminated surfaces, called aerosolized fomites, may also spread such respiratory viruses.

“Our work suggests that there is a mode of [virus] transmission that is underappreciated” for influenza, says William Ristenpart, a chemical engineer at the University of California, Davis. “It’s not on [scientists’] radar.”
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Though the study, published August 18 in Nature Communications, did not include the new coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2, the finding could have implications for that virus too, Ristenpart says. Researchers are still figuring out all the ways the coronavirus spreads, including debating how much smaller respiratory droplets that remain in the air, called aerosols, might contribute to transmission (SN: 7/7/20). Hantavirus, which causes a deadly respiratory disease, can also be transmitted through kicked up dust that is contaminated with rodent droppings. But that virus doesn’t pass from person-to-person.

In the new study, Ristenpart and his colleagues infected guinea pigs with influenza virus. Two days later, the team found infectious influenza viruses in cages as well as on guinea pig fur, ears and paws. Infected guinea pigs don’t cough or sneeze like people do, so the virus may have spread when the rodents groomed, rubbed their noses or moved around the cage.

The researchers then used a paintbrush to coat virus on animals that had already been infected and were immune. Each virus-covered rodent was put in a cage separate from, but attached to, a cage housing an uninfected companion. The setup ensured that the only way to spread the virus from one animal to another was through the air.

Although the flu-covered immune rodents were not breathing virus into the air, the flu still spread among three of 12 guinea pig pairs. The newly infected animals may have gotten infected from aerosolized fomites in dust kicked up from bedding or fur, the study suggests.

Airborne dust

Some common items people use could be potential vehicles to spread respiratory viruses via aerosolized fomites, or dust kicked up from contaminated surfaces. The graph shows the number of particles emitted per second over time when rubbing together pieces of toilet paper (blue), paper towel (red) and lab wipes (black) to produce dust.
Dust particles emitted from household items over time
  

S. ASADI ET AL/NAT. COMM. 2020

“It’s not that all dust is infectious,” Ristenpart says, but “dust liberated from a virus-laden surface” may be.

In human settings, that dust might come from used tissues, sheets or blankets. Or perhaps from a doctor’s personal protective equipment or a cloth mask. In a preliminary study that has not yet been reviewed by other researchers, Ristenpart and his team found that homemade cotton masks can shed minuscule particles when people breathe, making them a potential source for aerosolized fomites.

It’s unclear what the results might mean for respiratory virus transmission among humans. While it is possible that aerosolized fomites might spread influenza, people would still need to breathe the virus in to get infected, says Julian Tang, a virologist and fluid dynamicist at the University of Leicester in England who was not involved in the work. Dust from guinea pig bedding may be aerosolized much more easily than from a medical professional’s personal protective equipment or bed sheets. So compared with airborne influenza virus — or SARS-CoV-2 — in exhaled breath, “I’m really not convinced that in humans, this aerosolized fomite route will play any [major] role,” Tang says.

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org

CITATIONS

S. Asadi et al. Influenza A virus is transmissible via aerosolized fomites. Nature Communications. Published online August 18, 2020. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-17888-w.


About Erin Garcia de Jesus
Erin I. Garcia de Jesus is a staff writer at Science News. She holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Washington and a master’s in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.