Earth's magnetic field can change 10 times faster than previously thought

A new study reveals that changes in the direction of the Earth's magnetic field may take place 10 times faster than previously thought.

Date:July 6, 2020

Source:University of Leeds

A new study by the University of Leeds and University of California at San Diego reveals that changes in the direction of the Earth's magnetic field may take place 10 times faster than previously thought.

Their study gives new insight into the swirling flow of iron 2800 kilometres below the planet's surface and how it has influenced the movement of the magnetic field during the past hundred thousand years.

Our magnetic field is generated and maintained by a convective flow of molten metal that forms the Earth's outer core. Motion of the liquid iron creates the electric currents that power the field, which not only helps guide navigational systems but also helps shield us from harmful extra terrestrial radiation and hold our atmosphere in place.

The magnetic field is constantly changing. Satellites now provide new means to measure and track its current shifts but the field existed long before the invention of human-made recording devices. To capture the evolution of the field back through geological time scientists analyse the magnetic fields recorded by sediments, lava flows and human-made artefacts. Accurately tracking the signal from Earth's core field is extremely challenging and so the rates of field change estimated by these types of analysis are still debated.

Now, Dr Chris Davies, associate professor at Leeds and Professor Catherine Constable from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, in California have taken a different approach. They combined computer simulations of the field generation process with a recently published reconstruction of time variations in Earth's magnetic field spanning the last 100,000 years

Their study, published in Nature Communications, shows that changes in the direction of Earth's magnetic field reached rates that are up to 10 times larger than the fastest currently reported variations of up to one degree per year.

They demonstrate that these rapid changes are associated with local weakening of the magnetic field. This means these changes have generally occurred around times when the field has reversed polarity or during geomagnetic excursions when the dipole axis -- corresponding to field lines that emerge from one magnetic pole and converge at the other -- moves far from the locations of the North and South geographic poles.

The clearest example of this in their study is a sharp change in the geomagnetic field direction of roughly 2.5 degrees per year 39,000 years ago. This shift was associated with a locally weak field strength, in a confined spatial region just off the west coast of Central America, and followed the global Laschamp excursion -- a short reversal of the Earth's magnetic field roughly 41,000 years ago.

Similar events are identified in computer simulations of the field which can reveal many more details of their physical origin than the limited paleomagnetic reconstruction.

Their detailed analysis indicates that the fastest directional changes are associated with movement of reversed flux patches across the surface of the liquid core. These patches are more prevalent at lower latitudes, suggesting that future searches for rapid changes in direction should focus on these areas.

Dr Davies, from the School of Earth and Environment, said: "We have very incomplete knowledge of our magnetic field prior to 400 years ago. Since these rapid changes represent some of the more extreme behaviour of the liquid core they could give important information about the behaviour of Earth's deep interior."

Professor Constable said: "Understanding whether computer simulations of the magnetic field accurately reflect the physical behaviour of the geomagnetic field as inferred from geological records can be very challenging.

"But in this case we have been able to show excellent agreement in both the rates of change and general location of the most extreme events across a range of computer simulations. Further study of the evolving dynamics in these simulations offers a useful strategy for documenting how such rapid changes occur and whether they are also found during times of stable magnetic polarity like what we are experiencing today."


Journal Reference:
Christopher J. Davies, Catherine G. Constable. Rapid geomagnetic changes inferred from Earth observations and numerical simulations. Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16888-0

Cite This Page:

University of Leeds. "Earth's magnetic field can change 10 times faster than previously thought." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 6 July 2020. .

Trump’s Floor Collapsed When COVID-19 Hit His Base

Conservatives often don’t care about America’s problems—until they are affected by them personally.

by Martin Longman July 6, 2020 POLITICAL ANIMAL

 I have long argued that conservatives’ innate empathy deficit requires them to suffer directly from societal problems and controversies before they will support basic concepts, like the value of the social safety net or the importance of medical research or the morality of same-sex marriage. We’ve seen this play out with the COVID-19 crisis, as the virus first hit urban centers and coastal regions rather than Republican strongholds

Republican governors, with only a few exceptions, did not take the pandemic seriously enough and put too much emphasis on reopening their economies. They are now suffering the consequences, and their constituents are turning on them, and on the president. Gallup shows Trump’s approval rating sinking to 38 percent, and the explanation is based almost entirely on new people being impacted by COVID-19.


Pew Research Center polls show Trump’s approval is slipping fastest in the 500 counties where the number of cases have been more than 28 coronavirus deaths per 100,000 people.

Pew surveyed voters in late March and the same people again in late June, and found 17% of those who approved of the president in March now disapprove.

The shift came almost equally among Democrats and Republicans, men and women, and college graduates and non-graduates. But those who live in counties with a high number of virus cases were 50% more likely to say they no longer approve of Trump.

It was easy for conservative-minded people, regardless of formal party affiliation, to maintain their support for Trump so long as the pandemic seemed far away and someone else’s fault. These are the folks who stubbornly stuck with the president through everything over the last three and a half years. They created the floor in Trump’s approval ratings.

But they are beginning to abandon him now that it’s their hospitals that are filled with coronavirus patients. They can see that things have not turned out the way that Trump or their Republican governors said they would. That’s why Trump’s approval numbers have dropped, and it’s also why Republican internal polling points to a coming rout at the hands of the Democrats.

Amazingly, as Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey report in the Washington Post, the administration seems to believe that their base of supporters will simply “get over it” and “move on” as they become inured to a steady and massive infection rate.

White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day, according to three people familiar with the White House’s thinking, who requested anonymity to reveal internal deliberations. Americans will “live with the virus being a threat,” in the words of one of those people, a senior administration official.

“They’re of the belief that people will get over it or if we stop highlighting it, the base will move on and the public will learn to accept 50,000 to 100,000 new cases a day,” said a former administration official in touch with the campaign.

I’m sure that many conservatives can be convinced to wander back to Trump if they feel less threatened by the virus in the fall. But he’s already done tremendous damage to himself. Conservatives voted for Trump in the hope that he’d ruin other people’s lives, not their own.



Martin Longman is the web editor for the Washington Monthly. See all his writing at ProgressPond.com

A tiny ancient relative of dinosaurs and pterosaurs discovered

New study suggests a miniaturized origin for some of the largest animals ever to live on Earth

ANOTHER AMAZING FIND IN THE MUSEUM STORAGE ROOM 

Date:July 6, 2020

Source:American Museum of Natural History

Dinosaurs and flying pterosaurs may be known for their remarkable size, but a newly described species from Madagascar that lived around 237 million years ago suggests that they originated from extremely small ancestors. The fossil reptile, named Kongonaphon kely, or "tiny bug slayer," would have stood just 10 centimeters (or about 4 inches) tall. The description and analysis of this fossil and its relatives, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help explain the origins of flight in pterosaurs, the presence of "fuzz" on the skin of both pterosaurs and dinosaurs, and other questions about these charismatic animals.


"There's a general perception of dinosaurs as being giants," said Christian Kammerer, a research curator in paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and a former Gerstner Scholar at the American Museum of Natural History. "But this new animal is very close to the divergence of dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and it's shockingly small."

Dinosaurs and pterosaurs both belong to the group Ornithodira. Their origins, however, are poorly known, as few specimens from near the root of this lineage have been found. The fossils of Kongonaphon were discovered in 1998 in Madagascar by a team of researchers led by American Museum of Natural History Frick Curator of Fossil Mammals John Flynn (who worked at The Field Museum at the time) in close collaboration with scientists and students at the University of Antananarivo, and project co-leader Andre Wyss, chair and professor of the University of California-Santa Barbara's Department of Earth Science and an American Museum of Natural History research associate.

"This fossil site in southwestern Madagascar from a poorly known time interval globally has produced some amazing fossils, and this tiny specimen was jumbled in among the hundreds we've collected from the site over the years," Flynn said. "It took some time before we could focus on these bones, but once we did, it was clear we had something unique and worth a closer look. This is a great case for why field discoveries -- combined with modern technology to analyze the fossils recovered -- is still so important."

"Discovery of this tiny relative of dinosaurs and pterosaurs emphasizes the importance of Madagascar's fossil record for improving knowledge of vertebrate history during times that are poorly known in other places," said project co-leader Lovasoa Ranivoharimanana, professor and director of the vertebrate paleontology laboratory at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar. "Over two decades, our collaborative Madagascar-U.S. teams have trained many Malagasy students in paleontological sciences, and discoveries like this helps people in Madagascar and around the world better appreciate the exceptional record of ancient life preserved in the rocks of our country."

Kongonaphon isn't the first small animal known near the root of the ornithodiran family tree, but previously, such specimens were considered "isolated exceptions to the rule," Kammerer noted. In general, the scientific thought was that body size remained similar among the first archosaurs -- the larger reptile group that includes birds, crocodilians, non-avian dinosaurs, and pterosaurs -- and the earliest ornithodirans, before increasing to gigantic proportions in the dinosaur lineage.

"Recent discoveries like Kongonaphon have given us a much better understanding of the early evolution of ornithodirans. Analyzing changes in body size throughout archosaur evolution, we found compelling evidence that it decreased sharply early in the history of the dinosaur-pterosaur lineage," Kammerer said.

This "miniaturization" event indicates that the dinosaur and pterosaur lineages originated from extremely small ancestors yielding important implications for their paleobiology. For instance, wear on the teeth of Kongonaphon suggests it ate insects. A shift to insectivory, which is associated with small body size, may have helped early ornithodirans survive by occupying a niche different from their mostly meat-eating contemporaneous relatives.

The work also suggests that fuzzy skin coverings ranging from simple filaments to feathers, known on both the dinosaur and pterosaur sides of the ornithodiran tree, may have originated for thermoregulation in this small-bodied common ancestor. That's because heat retention in small bodies is difficult, and the mid-late Triassic was a time of climatic extremes, inferred to have sharp shifts in temperature between hot days and cold nights.

Sterling Nesbitt, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech and a Museum research associate and expert in ornithodiran anatomy, phylogeny, and histological age analyses, is also an author on this study.

This study was supported, in part, by the National Geographic Society, a Gerstner Scholars Fellowship from the Gerstner Family Foundation and the Richard Gilder Graduate School, the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, and a Meeker Family Fellowship from the Field Museum, with additional support from the Ministry of Energy and Mines of Madagascar, the World Wide Fund for Nature (Madagascar), University of Antananarivo, and MICET/ICTE (Madagascar).

Related Multimedia:
Life restoration of Kongonaphon kely

Journal Reference:
Christian F. Kammerer, Sterling J. Nesbitt, John J. Flynn, Lovasoa Ranivoharimanana, André R. Wyss. A tiny ornithodiran archosaur from the Triassic of Madagascar and the role of miniaturization in dinosaur and pterosaur ancestry. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020; 201916631 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1916631117


Cite This Page:
American Museum of Natural History. "A tiny ancient relative of dinosaurs and pterosaurs discovered: New study suggests a miniaturized origin for some of the largest animals ever to live on Earth." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 6 July 2020. .

Fossil jawbone from Alaska is a rare case of a juvenile Arctic dromaeosaurid dinosaur

This fossil is a clue to the history of how dinosaurs dispersed between continents, showing some dinosaurs likely nested in the far north

Date:July 8, 2020 Source:PLOS

Summary:A small piece of fossil jawbone from Alaska represents a rare example of juvenile dromaeosaurid dinosaur remains from the Arctic, according to a new study.Share:

A small piece of fossil jawbone from Alaska represents a rare example of juvenile dromaeosaurid dinosaur remains from the Arctic, according to a study published July 8, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza of the Imperial College London, UK, and co-authors Anthony R. Fiorillo, Ronald S. Tykoski, Paul J. McCarthy, Peter P. Flaig, and Dori L. Contreras.

Dromaeosaurids are a group of predatory dinosaurs closely related to birds, whose members include well-known species such as Deinonychus and Velociraptor. These dinosaurs lived all over the world, but their bones are often small and delicate and rarely preserve well in the fossil record, complicating efforts to understand the paths they took as they dispersed between continents.

The Prince Creek Formation of northern Alaska preserves the largest collection of polar dinosaur fossils in the world, dating to about 70 million years ago, but the only dromaeosaurid remains found so far have been isolated teeth. The jaw fossil described in this study is a mere 14mm long and preserves only the tip of the lower jaw, but it is the first known non-dental dromaeosaurid fossil from the Arctic. Statistical analysis indicates this bone belongs to a close relative of the North American Saurornitholestes.

North American dromaeosaurids are thought to trace their origins to Asia, and Alaska would have been a key region for the dispersal of their ancestors. This new fossil is a tantalizing clue toward understanding what kinds of dromaeosaurs inhabited this crucial region. Furthermore, the early developmental stage of the bone suggests this individual was still young and was likely born nearby; in contrast to previous suggestions that this part of Alaska was exclusively a migratory pathway for many dinosaurs, this is strong evidence that some dinosaurs were nesting here. The authors suggest that future findings may allow a more complete understanding of these mysterious Arctic dromaeosaurids.

Chiarenza summarizes: "There are places where dinosaur fossils are so common that a scrap of bone, in most cases, cannot really add anything scientifically informative anymore: this is not the case with this Alaskan specimen. Even with such an incomplete jaw fragment, our team was not only able to work out the evolutionary relationships of this dinosaur, but also to picture something more on the biology of these animals, ultimately gaining more information on this Ancient Arctic ecosystem." Fiorillo adds: "Years ago when dinosaurs were first found in the far north, the idea challenged what we think we know about dinosaurs. For some time afterwards, there was a great debate as to whether or not those Arctic dinosaurs migrated or lived in the north year round. All of those arguments were somewhat speculative in nature. This study of a predatory dinosaur jaw from a baby provides the first physical proof that at least some dinosaurs not only lived in the far north, but they thrived there. One might even say, our study shows that the ancient north was a great place to raise a family and now we have to figure out why."

Journal Reference:
Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, Anthony R. Fiorillo, Ronald S. Tykoski, Paul J. McCarthy, Peter P. Flaig, Dori L. Contreras. The first juvenile dromaeosaurid (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from Arctic Alaska. PLOS ONE, 2020; 15 (7): e0235078 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0235078

PLOS. "Fossil jawbone from Alaska is a rare case of a juvenile Arctic dromaeosaurid dinosaur: This fossil is a clue to the history of how dinosaurs dispersed between continents, showing some dinosaurs likely nested in the far north." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 8 July 2020. .

Stress testing 'coral in a box'

Summary:Coral death is impacting oceans worldwide as a consequence of climate change. The concern is that corals cannot keep pace with the rate of ocean warming. In particular, because a temperature increase of only one degree Celsius can make the difference between healthy and dying coral reefs. Some corals, however, are more resistant to increasing temperatures. In order to effectively protect coral reef habitats, it is important to identify which corals and reef sites are more resistant and thus have a greater chance of survival.

Date:July 8, 2020

Source:University of Konstanz

Coral death is impacting oceans worldwide as a consequence of climate change. The concern is that corals cannot keep pace with the rate of ocean warming. In particular, because a temperature increase of only one degree Celsius can make the difference between healthy and dying coral reefs. Some corals, however, are more resistant to increasing temperatures. In order to effectively protect coral reef habitats, it is important to identify which corals and reef sites are more resistant and thus have a greater chance of survival.

For this purpose, the research team led by Konstanz biologist Professor Christian Voolstra developed a rapid stress test to assess coral thermotolerance. The "Coral Bleaching Automated Stress System" (CBASS) makes it possible to assess coral thermotolerance on site and within a single day -- much faster than current experimental procedures that typically take several weeks to months in a laboratory. A description of the test and a demonstration of its utility to resolve thermotolerance differences between close-by reef sites was published as an online early article on 21 June 2020 in the journal Global Change Biology.

The test system is highly mobile, can be deployed on boats, and is straightforward to use: Corals are placed in test boxes at the location where they were collected and then subjected to thermal exposures at different temperatures -- a type of stress test for the corals. Using a standardized procedure, researchers can then record the results and compare how different corals react to the same set of temperature exposures.

"We focused on building the test boxes with materials that are available in almost any hardware store or shop selling aquarium equipment. We want these test boxes to be used widely and this is why we made all instructions for setting up the tests as well as our results and evaluation methods freely available," Professor Christian Voolstra states in reference to the online archive: https://github.com/reefgenomics/CBASSvsCLASSIC

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Konstanz. Original written by Jürgen Graf. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:
Christian R. Voolstra, Carol Buitrago‐López, Gabriela Perna, Anny Cárdenas, Benjamin C. C. Hume, Nils Rädecker, Daniel J. Barshis. Standardized short‐term acute heat stress assays resolve historical differences in coral thermotolerance across microhabitat reef sites. Global Change Biology, 2020; DOI: 10.1111/gcb.15148

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University of Konstanz. "Stress testing 'coral in a box'." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 8 July 2020. .

The Merits of Medicare for All Have Been Proven by This Pandemic

  by SONALI KOLHATKAR

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

A pandemic is not the time to be having discussions about how to design a national health care system. The fact that the United States, which has 4 percent of the world’s population, leads the world with 25 percent of all coronavirus infections, indicates at a glance that something about our nation’s health care is irredeemably broken. In just a few months, more than 40 million Americans became unemployed in a country where a majority are expected to obtain health care through employer-provided insurance. Even the New York Times has pointed out that, “Nothing illuminates the problems with an employer-based health care system quite like massive unemployment in the middle of a highly contagious and potentially deadly disease outbreak.”

The Times has hardly been a champion of the nationalized health care system that progressive activists have demanded for years. The unimaginably large (and growing) death toll from COVID-19 should not be, as the paper’s editorial board member Jeneen Interlandi says, “an opportunity to look at health care reform with fresh eyes—and to maybe, finally, rebuild the nation’s health care system in a way that works for all Americans.” We, as a nation, should have figured this out a long time ago.

As Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, pointed out at a recent Senate hearing, left unchecked the coronavirus could spread to 100,000 people per day. Republican Senator Rand Paul was not happy with this grim assessment, instead demanding that the scientist instead offer up “more optimism” to the American people about the disease. But that is precisely how opponents of a single-payer health care system have painted our deeply flawed employer-based system for many years—with a veneer of positivity that was never matched by reality.

As FiveThirtyEight points out in examining pre-pandemic surveys of health care, “Americans tend to have a much rosier view of the health care they personally receive than the health care system in general or the cost of health care.” This should come as no surprise given the massive amount of propaganda that health insurers have paid for to convince people that the current system is good enough. However, no amount of optimism is going to help us survive the current COVID-19 crisis. There is no rosy way to view tens of thousands of dead Americans—especially in contrast with other nations that have managed to control the outbreak. In the words of one New Zealand health expert, “It really does feel like the U.S. has given up.”

In Arizona, one of the new hotspots of the disease, health care providers have taken to rationing health care—in a manner reminiscent of many developing nations or socialist regimes that the United States has criticized in the past. One report explained that Arizona’s rationing plan, “would see patients rated on a scoring system to determine who should be prioritized based on the severity of their condition.” In Houston, Texas, which is considered another COVID-19 epicenter, pediatricians are now taking on adult patients as hospital beds fill up to capacity.

There is little to no information about how the nation’s uninsured are expected to pay for COVID-19 treatments if they are hospitalized. Contrast that with a nation like the UK where there’s no question about any other entity besides the National Health Service (NHS) picking up the tab for any and all patients. During the current crisis, the UK government has even recruited all private hospitals to bolster the NHS’s capacity, forcing them to place lives over profits. Imagine the United States ever taking such a step to prioritize the health care of Americans!

The Wall Street Journal, aghast that a free-market system of the type that it has relentlessly promoted has not worked in the realm of health care, declared in an op-ed, “Rationing Care Is a Surrender to Death.” But op-ed writer Allen C. Guelzo, a fellow of the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, had no answers beyond standard capitalism pablum saying vaguely that we need to, “Improvise, innovate, imagine.”

It’s not just our health care in the form of treatments and hospitalizations that is showing itself to be wholly inadequate in the face of a pandemic. The pharmaceutical industry, which has also preyed upon Americans for far too long, is charging outrageous prices for drugs that taxpayers paid to help them develop. Amidst the worst medical crisis in modern history, the drug manufacturer Gilead has set the price for remdesivir—a drug that has shown modest success in COVID-19 treatment—at a whopping $3,120 per patient. Infuriatingly, that same company, which made good use of U.S. tax dollars in its research and development, is licensing the drug to generic manufacturers outside the U.S. to produce remdesivir at a substantially lower cost to non-American patients.

The shocking extent of the coronavirus crisis in the United States is explained in large part by a libertarian economic approach. It is the same sort of approach that successive administrations have taken in addressing our health care needs and can be boiled down to the adage, “survival of the fittest.” Rather than imposing rules and regulations to protect Americans through a nationalized health care system and an aggressive cost-control mechanism for lifesaving drugs, Americans have been left at the mercy of their employers, health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and private hospitals. Similarly, instead of taking a strong federal approach to controlling the spread of the coronavirus as other nations have successfully done, the Trump administration has washed its hands of any responsibility for the virus’ spread. An absence of strong federal guidelines on how people need to protect themselves has resulted in a culture war of comical proportions where Fox News-fed Republicans claim that rules requiring protective face masks are akin to “practicing the devil’s laws.”

Such hyperbolic language is reminiscent of the hysteria over so-called “death panels” in the early years of the Obama administration. That phrase was used to cast the most modest of government regulations of our health care system as a scenario where dispassionate committees of technocrats would decide who gets to live or die. Never mind that such a description was a more apt one for our existing system of care where corporate executives decide which treatments to pay for and which to forego.

Just as progressives were right more than a decade ago that a single-payer or Medicare for All system was best poised to meet our health care needs, that same rallying cry for such a universal and free health care plan remains more relevant and appropriate than ever. Even the New York Times agrees, admitting perhaps a bit reluctantly that, “A single-payer system in which one entity (usually the federal government) covers every citizen regardless of age or employment status, could work.” But is it too late?

Had the nation gone down a different path in 2008 or anytime in the decade following it, we would have been better poised to take on the current crisis. There is little comfort to be had in being right on the issue of health care under our current grim circumstances.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

More articles by:SONALI KOLHATKAR

Sonali Kolhatkar is a columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. 

Sanders, Khanna Say SCOTUS Ruling on Contraceptives Just One More Reason to Demand Medicare for All

"This wouldn't even be an issue if healthcare wasn't tied to employment."

  

by

Julia Conley, staff writer

Medicare for All advocates on Wednesday noted that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to allow employers to refuse to cover contraceptives presented a clear argument in favor of a universal healthcare system under which employment would not be tied to healthcare. (Photo: NNU/flickr/cc)

Healthcare advocates Wednesday charged that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on birth control access is just the latest evidence that the federal government must expand Medicare coverage to all Americans, eliminating the for-profit system in which employment is tied to people's ability to obtain medical care.

Shortly after the 7-2 ruling in Trump vs. Pennsylvania declared the Trump administration was correct to exempt employers from having to cover birth control for employees on religious or moral grounds, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) pointed out how such rulings make clear that under the current for-profit healthcare system, medical decisions will never simply be between a patient and doctor.

"Patients' ability to get contraception shouldn't be up to employers. It should be a decision between patients and their doctors," tweeted Sanders, whose Medicare for All Act of 2019 has 14 co-sponsors in the Senate. "Healthcare—including birth control—is a right, not an employee benefit."

Sanders' outrage over the ruling echoed that of national reproductive rights groups such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood, but those organizations did not suggest fundamentally reforming the healthcare system by covering everyone in the U.S. under the existing Medicare system and taking women's healthcare decisions out of the hands of their employers.

"We must fight Trump's rollback of these rights by passing Medicare for All," said Sanders.

Patients’ ability to get contraception shouldn’t be up to employers. It should be a decision between patients and their doctors.

Health care—including birth control—is a right, not an employee benefit.

We must fight Trump’s rollback of these rights by passing Medicare for All. https://t.co/xYIthLjUTU

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) July 8, 2020

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) wrote later in the day that "this wouldn't even be an issue if healthcare wasn't tied to employment."

Employers shouldn't be able to use their religion to deny birth control coverage under the ACA.

This wouldn't even be an issue if health care wasn't tied to employment.

With Medicare for All, contraceptives would be free regardless of where you work.https://t.co/vUKlRoxsqk

— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) July 8, 2020

The ruling was the latest example for Medicare for All advocates to point to as they decry the dangerous risks inherent in the current for-profit health insurance system.

The Economic Policy Institute estimated in May that since the coronavirus pandemic began in the U.S., 16.2 million Americans have lost the health coverage they had access to through their employers, as the unemployment crisis caused by the public health emergency has left more than 32 million without work. EPI and others have recommended since the pandemic began that Medicare and Medicaid be expanded to cope with the economic effects. 

Progressive congressional candidates Christopher Hale, who is running in Tennessee, and Beth Doglio, who is running in Washington, also wrote on social media that women's access to birth control should not be up to one's employer.

If you're understandably upset with the Supreme Court ruling that employers with religious objections can be exempt from the ACA's birth control mandate, you should support Medicare-for-all.

Both Planned Parenthood and the Catholic Church support it. https://t.co/07QUot7rMT

— Christopher J. Hale (@chrisjollyhale) July 8, 2020

Birth control is essential healthcare and we need to expand access, not restrict it. This is another prime example of why we need Medicare for All — the healthcare services you receive should not be left up to your employer! https://t.co/wpVJKLeNbf

— Beth Doglio (@BethDoglio) July 8, 2020

In 2014, after the Supreme Court first ruled that employers can refuse to cover contraceptives in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby, Hale wrote at Time magazine that the decision revealed "that Obamacare—for all the good it's done in increasing access to quality and affordable healthcare—is a messy law." 

"It asks employees to be at the whim of its employers' objectives and mission for what healthcare benefits they receive," Hale wrote. "This isn't sustainable. A person's access to quality healthcare shouldn't depend on who their boss is."

Medicare for All would represent "freedom" to Americans, wrote Justice Democrats co-founder and radio host Kyle Kulinski, while the for-profit employment-based system is "tyranny."

Single-payer medicare for all = freedom. Our current private, for-profit employer based health insurance racket = tyranny. Your boss can get in between you and your doctor because *they* believe in religious fundamentalism. Pathetic. https://t.co/uyY4tZaE2E

— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) July 8, 2020

"Do you know what would be great? If employers and insurance companies weren't involved in birth control or healthcare at all," tweeted Holly Stallcup, executive director of Rise, a faith-based women's organization in Texas. "If all medically related decisions really were between doctor and patient. Medicare for All would be happy to help."

Killing Koalas: the Promise of Extinction Down Under

by BINOY KAMPMARK

The British conservationist Gerald Durrell once remarked that the koala was “the most boring of animals”. Its brain size, proportionally the smallest of any mammal, evolved to cope with its slow metabolism. But the spectacle of these singed, toasted animals was a terrifyingly cruel one to behold. As good stretches of Australia burned over the last bushfire season, the sheer scale and intensity of this otherwise regular occurrence suggested something beyond remedy. Fires bring with them bold destruction and vigorous promise. What is taken can be renewed.

That matter of renewal has been brought into question. Environmental degradation, anthropogenic meddling and all around beastliness to country, has made Australia a titan of destructiveness. In terms of mammals, its rate of extinction is grimly impressive, making it the leader in an inglorious pack. As John Woinarski noted in 2018, “Over the last two hundred years at least 34 Australian mammal species and 29 birds have become extinct.”

A New South Wales Parliamentary committee has brought more bad tidings to further blot the copybook. Published on June 30, 2020, Koala populations and the habitat in New South Wales suggests that the animal, in the absence of government intervention, is doomed to extinction by 2050. The culprits of depredation have not changed, and the report reads like a doomsday call.

The list of findings would make bruising reading to even the most stone-hearted property developer. The casualties for this particular marsupial during the course of the recent bushfires is said to be 5,000. A warning is issued that the current estimated number of 36,000 koalas in New South Wales following the 2019-2020 bushfires “is outdated and unreliable”. Continuous logging of NSW native forests “has had cumulative impacts on koalas over many years because it has reduced the maturity, size and availability of preferred feed and roost trees.” Climate change had also compounded “the severity and impact of other threats, such as drought and bushfires, on koala populations.” Firmer interventions by the state government were needed to address population declines.

Existing policies on koala protection were also found to be deficient. The NSW Koala Strategy fell “short of the NSW Chief Scientist’s recommendation of a whole-of-government koala strategy with the objective of stabilising and then increasing koala numbers.” It did not “prioritise and resource the urgent need to protect koala habitat across all tenures.” A question mark remained on the issue of translocation as a viable strategy of coping with species preservation.

The committee makes 42 recommendations, some of them eminently sensible. But sensibility requires action; and action demands will. Such will, it was noted by committee members, does not seem present at the government level. Cate Faehrmann, the committee chair and member of the Greens, was exasperated in her foreword, claiming frustration at hearing “from government witnesses that the policies and laws in place to protect koalas and their habitat are adequate.”

Saving such a species can only commence in earnest at the council, local government level. One recommendation insists on giving the reins to community groups by means of additional funding and support “so that they can plant trees and regenerate bushland along koala and wildlife corridors and explore mechanisms to protect these corridors in-perpetuity.” More funding is suggested for local councils to develop conservation programs and “conducting mapping […] for comprehensive koala plans of management.”

Other recommendations will irk industry, including the recommendation that the NSW government visit the destructive impacts of logging “in all public native (non-plantation) forests in the context of enabling koala habitat to be identified and protected”. The logging and deforestation lobbies will be particularly worried about recommendation 41, which suggests the creation of the Great Koala National Park, an idea first put forth by the National Parks Association of NSW in 2015. That association can hardly be accused of lacking money sense: establishing such a park, they suggest, “could become a globally significant tourist attraction.” (This would hardly help in arresting pervasive environmental fragmentation.) 175,000 hectares of public state forests would be added to the existing protected complement, creating a total of 315,000 hectares reserve.

This is of little comfort to such opponents of the scheme as the Australian Workers’ Union of NSW, an organisation not exactly known for its green tendencies. The committee report duly notes the union’s view that the park would result in a “catastrophic destruction of regional economies and jobs”. Assistant Secretary Paul Noack even went so far as to dismiss the effectiveness of such a venture. Forget parks, he suggested; focus on creating “koala protection areas”.

Noack need not be too bothered. Inquiries of this sort always risk succumbing to reductive strategies and severe trimming. Then comes the matter of vacuous symbolism. The koala draws the attention of the camera and the publicity minded bureaucrat, only to vanish from the policy discussion. As the Australia Koala Foundation’s chief executive Deborah Tabart has remarked, “the koala has many powerful enemies”.

In September 2011, an Australian Senate inquiry named The Koala – saving our national icon covered similar ground the NSW parliamentary report does. Good habitat mapping and the identification of “a standardised set of methodologies in estimating koala populations” were recommended; a national koala monitoring and evaluation program was suggested. But the report lacks bite and desperation. Committee members, for instance, remarked on “the complexity of this multifaceted issue”, often political code for inertia. Koala populations might have been in sharp decline in the Mulga Lands of Queensland, but were healthy on Kangaroo Island in South Australia.

Such tentative observations did little to discourage the devastating land clearing that continues its remorseless march in Queensland and NSW. Regional forest arrangements made over the last two decades have also been found to be woefully inadequate in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and Victoria.

Prior to the conflagrations over the course of 2019 and 2020, the Australian Koala Foundation was already spreading the gloomy word that the koala population in Australia stood at 80,000, making them “functionally extinct”. A species considered as such is gazing over the precipice, essentially irrelevant or ineffectual in their ecosystem, incapable of reproducing or simply inbreeding. As Christine Hosking remarked in The Conversation in May 2019, “It’s hard to say exactly how many koalas are still remaining in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory, but they are highly vulnerable to threats including deforestation, disease and the effects of climate change.”

In November 2019, Natasha Daly penned a corrective in the National Geographic, amassing a range of qualifying opinions. There had been “erroneous declarations that the animals have lost most of their habit and are ‘functionally extinct’ making the rounds in headlines and on social media, illustrating just how quickly misinformation can spread in times of crisis.” Chris Johnson, professor of wildlife conservation at the University of Tasmania, wished to dampen such apocalyptic calls. “Koala populations will continue to decline because of lots of interacting reasons, but we’re not at the point where one event can take them out.” Diana Fisher of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Queensland suggested that the species was “threatened in some parts of its range and not in others.”

Such views, in the aftermath of the latest round of lethal bushfires, must come across as a bit hair-splitting. The vulnerability of the species has reached apocalyptic levels and human complacency, along with the usual crippling disregard shown through a lack of enforceable protections, might well prove to be the enemy of this animal.

More articles by:BINOY KAMPMARK

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

#CIVILIZATION 

Naturally perforated shells one of the earliest adornments in the Middle Paleolithic

Simulations and microscopic analysis confirm that ancient shells were hung on strings and painted with ochre

Summary:Ancient humans deliberately collected perforated shells in order to string them together as beads, according to a new study

Date:July 8, 2020

Source:PLOS

Ancient humans deliberately collected perforated shells in order to string them together as beads, according to a study published July 8, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer (Tel Aviv University, Israel), Iris Groman-Yaroslavski (University of Haifa, Israel), and colleagues.

Shells are one of the oldest ways humans have adorned and expressed themselves, with examples of deliberately-collected shell assemblages at human sites dating as far back as 160,000 years ago found across North Africa, South Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Shells from one Mediterranean Paleolithic site, Qafzeh Cave (dated to 120,000 years ago) are all naturally perforated (in contrast to the unperforated shells found at a nearby older site, Misliya Cave), suggesting that these shells were deliberately collected and strung together as beads.

To investigate the possibility of deliberate suspension to create strings of shell beads, Bar-Yosef Mayer and Groman-Yaroslavski collected the same species of perforated clamshells (Glycymeris) and simulated the potential use and wear present on the original shells: first systematically abrading the shells against different materials like leather, sand, and stone to produce a catalogue of wear patterns, then hanging the shells on strings made from wild flax to to identify wear patterns specific to string suspension. They then compared these wear patterns to those of the original Qafzeh Cave shells.

Microscopic analysis of the five best-preserved Qafzeh Cave shells revealed traces consistent with those created in the simulated shells via contact with a string, as well as traces of shell-to-shell contact (indicating the shells hung closely together). Four of the five original shells also revealed traces of an ochre coloring treatment.

Though it's not possible to determine the precise symbolic meaning of the shell bead strand from Qafzeh Cave, the fact that bivalve shells are a frequent hallmark across Paleolithic sites gives a sense of their importance. Additionally, the presence of a string seems to suggest that not only was shell collection important -- the ability to display the shells to others also likely held significance. As one of the earliest instances of perforated objects hung on strings, the Qafzeh Cave shells also bring us closer to understanding the origins of string-making technology probably between 160-120,000 years ago.

Bar-Yosef Mayer adds: "Modern humans collected unperforated cockle shells for symbolic purposes at 160,000 years ago or earlier, and around 120,000 they started collecting perforated shells and wearing them on a string. We conclude that strings, which had many more applications, were invented within this time frame."
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Journal Reference:
Daniella E. Bar-Yosef Mayer, Iris Groman-Yaroslavski, Ofer Bar-Yosef, Israel Hershkovitz, Astrid Kampen-Hasday, Bernard Vandermeersch, Yossi Zaidner, Mina Weinstein-Evron. On holes and strings: Earliest displays of human adornment in the Middle Palaeolithic. PLOS ONE, 2020; 15 (7): e0234924 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0234924

PLOS. "Naturally perforated shells one of the earliest adornments in the Middle Paleolithic: Simulations and microscopic analysis confirm that ancient shells were hung on strings and painted with ochre." 

ScienceDaily.

 ScienceDaily, 8 July 2020.