Republican Convention Ignored Climate Threat, But Americans’ Attitudes Are Shifting

Many Americans have experienced climate-fueled disasters in the last four years and want to see federal action

By Scott Waldman, E&E News on August 28, 2020

President Donald Trump looks on after delivering his acceptance speech for the Republican Party nomination for reelection during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC on August 27, 2020. Credit: Brendan Smialowski Getty Images


In four days of speeches lasting more than eight hours at the Republican National Convention, climate change was never mentioned as a threat to the country.

That silence stands apart from the climate alarm bells that have been sounding since Donald Trump accepted his first nomination for president four years ago.

Thousands of Americans have been killed in natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires during Trump’s first term in office. Each of those four years has been among the world’s hottest on record. Leaders of other nations have taken action as the United States ignores the issue.

Even Wall Street has begun to take notice of how climate change could affect economic growth.

None of that was apparent during the convention. Instead, Republican speakers insisted that the real concern was the climate ideas presented by Democrats. Many experts say that if climate change is left unanswered, it could cost trillions of dollars to the U.S. economy. Republicans said the real costs would come from Democratic plans to restrain the use of fossil fuels.

“Biden has promised to abolish the production of American oil, coal, shale and natural gas—laying waste to the economies of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Colorado and New Mexico,” Trump said. “Millions of jobs will be lost, and energy prices will soar.”

(Biden’s plan does not call for a fracking ban).

Those sentiments play well with Trump’s core supporters, but they’re askew from what most voters believe, including younger Republicans, according to polls. They don’t reflect the events that many Americans are either experiencing or seeing online: uncontrolled wildfires in California and the strongest hurricane to hit Louisiana in 160 years.


Even as an unrelinquishing pandemic has killed more than 180,000 people in the United States and kept millions of children across the country from returning to school, climate change remains on the minds of voters, polls show.

Here are five climate themes that have advanced since Trump accepted his first nomination in 2016.

NATURAL DISASTERS

More than 3,000 Americans have died in natural catastrophes during the past four years; most of them were victims of Hurricane Maria in 2017.

The massive Category 5 storm killed an estimated 2,975 people in Puerto Rico and forced thousands to flee the U.S. territory. The devastation continues to have ripple effects three years later. Tens of thousands of people still live under leaky blue tarps. The island’s power supply, never reliable to begin with, has become far worse, and some parts of Puerto Rico were without power for a year.

That was the same year that Hurricane Harvey dumped 60 inches of rain on parts of Houston, becoming the wettest cyclone on record. Tens of thousands of homes were damaged, and about 70 people were killed. Harvey caused more than $100 billion in damage, making it one of the costliest disasters to strike the United States.

Record wildfires have also burned across the West. The 2018 Camp Fire in California was the deadliest; it killed 85 people and destroyed more than 10,000 homes. It was fueled by drought, an outcome of climate change. This week, California continued to battle the second- and third-largest wildfires in state history. Officials have connected the fires to climate change.

“All but three of the Top 20 Largest #Wildfires have occurred since 2000, with 10 of these large and damaging wildfires occurring in the last decade,” the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection tweeted yesterday. “As fire weather continues to become more extreme, California is adjusting to fight these larger and more destructive wildfires.”

HEAT

The Trump years have been some of the hottest since record-keeping began after the Civil War, according to NASA. After a record-warm July, this year may break the all-time annual heat record set in 2016.

That’s a likely outcome, said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. That’s notable because four years ago, the record warmth was fueled by El Niño, a band of warm water covering the tropical Pacific Ocean. That influence is absent this year, Schmidt said, and long-term trends point to rising heat.

“We know that the trend is moving up; on average, every decade is warmer than the last,” he said. “The changes we’re seeing now are so far outside what would be possible in an un-globally-warmed world.”

PUBLIC OPINION

Polling shows that voter concern about climate change has been growing for years and that it has not diminished as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Concern among some voters has spiked during Trump’s tenure. Before the virus, polling showed climate change was the second-most important issue for Democratic primary voters, behind only health care.

Now, responding to the virus and restoring the economy top the list. But the public still wants the federal government to address climate change, recent polling shows.

More Americans than ever—about 25%—view climate change as “extremely personally important,” according to a poll released last week by Stanford University, Resources for the Future and ReconMR. That number is twice as large as it was in 2006, said the poll, which surveyed 1,000 adults between May and August.

It also found that 82% of respondents want the federal government to act on climate change. And three-quarters of those surveyed said they had personally experienced the effects of global warming.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has offered a unique opportunity to learn how people feel about climate change when faced with a global crisis,” said Ray Kopp, vice president of research and policy engagement at Resources for the Future.

“The claim that we can’t do anything about climate change without crashing the economy, or that we need to focus only on the pandemic and not do anything on climate right now, simply doesn’t resonate with Americans,” he said.
THE U.S. (AND EVERYONE ELSE)

Since Trump pledged to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement in 2017, world leaders have pressed him to rejoin and to take the issue seriously. Among them are German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron.

Last year, Trump said Prince Charles spent 90 minutes talking to him about climate change, trying to convince him to take stronger action and to once again make the United States a world leader. In response, Trump said he wanted “good climate,” but his administration has continued to roll back environmental safeguards meant to reduce emissions.

In December, Macron said other governments, including China, Russia and the European Union, would lead the world in reducing emissions.

The yearslong process of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement won’t be done until November. Yesterday, Biden tweeted that if he wins the election, he would rejoin the pact on the first day of his presidency.

CLIMATE HITS WALL STREET

This week, it was announced that Exxon Mobil Corp. would be dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index. It’s a significant departure, as Exxon was the longest-tenured company on the Dow, having been listed for almost a century.

It’s also a reflection of how oil companies have taken a financial hit amid growing concerns about climate change and as a result of declining consumption due to the pandemic.

At the same time, some solar and wind companies have grown bigger than their fossil fuel competitors. The same factors that have weakened fossil fuel companies, including more aggressive climate targets, helped drive clean energy technologies.

On Wall Street, business interests are increasingly warning the Federal Reserve and other regulators that climate change could pose a significant risk to the economy.

Earlier this year, 40 investment firms and organizations that handle more than $1 trillion in assets urged Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to take action. They warned him that climate “threats have the potential to compound in ways we don’t yet understand, with disastrous impacts the likes of which we haven’t seen before.”

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Scott Waldman

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Japan's 'flying car' gets off the ground with a person aboard

CGTN

The decades-old dream of zipping around in the sky as simply as driving on highways may be becoming less illusory.

Japan's SkyDrive Inc., among the myriads of "flying car" projects around the world, has carried out a successful though modest test flight with one person aboard.

In a video shown to reporters on Friday, a contraption that looked like a slick motorcycle with propellers lifted 1-2 meters off the ground and hovered in a netted area for four minutes.

Tomohiro Fukuzawa, who heads the SkyDrive effort, said he hopes "the flying car" can be made into a real-life product by 2023, but he acknowledged that making it safe was critical.

"Of the world's more than 100 flying car projects, only a handful have succeeded with a person on board," he told The Associated Press. "I hope many people will want to ride it and feel safe."

The machine so far can fly for just five to 10 minutes but if that can become 30 minutes, it will have more potential, including exports to places like China, Fukuzawa said.

This photo taken at the beginning of August 2020 and released by SkyDrive/CARTIVATOR 2020 shows a test flight of a manned "flying car" at Toyota Test Field in Toyota, central Japan. /AP


Unlike airplanes and helicopters, eVTOL, or "electric vertical takeoff and landing," vehicles offer quick point-to-point personal travel, at least in principle.

They could do away with the hassle of airports and traffic jams and the cost of hiring pilots, they could fly automatically.

Battery sizes, air traffic control and other infrastructure issues are among the many potential challenges to commercializing them.

"Many things have to happen," said Sanjiv Singh, professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, who co-founded Near Earth Autonomy, near Pittsburgh, which is also working on an eVTOL aircraft.

"If they cost 10 million U.S. dollars, no one is going to buy them. If they fly for five minutes, no one is going to buy them. If they fall out of the sky every so often, no one is going to buy them," Singh said in a telephone interview.

The SkyDrive project began humbly as a volunteer project called Cartivator in 2012, with funding by top Japanese companies including automaker Toyota Motor Corp., electronics company Panasonic Corp. and video-game developer Bandai Namco.

(Cover image via CFP)
Source(s): AP

Bacteria Could Survive Travel Between Earth And Mars When Forming Aggregates
Press Release - Source: Frontiers in Microbiology
Posted August 26, 2020 11:33 PM

The bacterial exposure experiment took place from 2015 to 2018 using the Exposed Facility located on the exterior of Kibo, the Japanese Experimental Module of the International Space Station. CREDIT JAXA/NASA

Imagine microscopic life-forms, such as bacteria, transported through space, and landing on another planet. The bacteria finding suitable conditions for its survival could then start multiplying again, sparking life at the other side of the universe.

This theory, called "panspermia", support the possibility that microbes may migrate between planets and distribute life in the universe. Long controversial, this theory implies that bacteria would survive the long journey in outer space, resisting to space vacuum, temperature fluctuations, and space radiations.

"The origin of life on Earth is the biggest mystery of human beings. Scientists can have totally different points of view on the matter. Some think that life is very rare and happened only once in the Universe, while others think that life can happen on every suitable planet. If panspermia is possible, life must exist much more often than we previously thought," says Dr. Akihiko Yamagishi, a Professor at Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences and principal investigator of the space mission Tanpopo.

In 2018, Dr. Yamagishi and his team tested the presence of microbes in the atmosphere. Using an aircraft and scientific balloons, the researchers, found Deinococcal bacteria floating 12 km above the earth. But while Deinococcus are known to form large colonies (easily larger than one millimeter) and be resistant to environmental hazards like UV radiation, could they resist long enough in space to support the possibility of panspermia?

To answer this question, Dr. Yamagishi and the Tanpopo team, tested the survival of the radioresistant bacteria Deinococcus in space. The study, now published in Frontiers in Microbiology, shows that thick aggregates can provide sufficient protection for the survival of bacteria during several years in the harsh space environment.

Dr. Yamagishi and his team came to this conclusion by placing dried Deinococcus aggregates in exposure panels outside of the International Space Station (ISS). The samples of different thicknesses were exposed to space environment for one, two, or three years and then tested for their survival.

After three years, the researchers found that all aggregates superior to 0.5 mm partially survived to space conditions. Observations suggest that while the bacteria at the surface of the aggregate died, it created a protective layer for the bacteria beneath ensuring the survival of the colony. Using the survival data at one, two, and three years of exposure, the researchers estimated that a pellet thicker than 0.5 mm would have survived between 15 and 45 years on the ISS. The design of the experiment allowed the researcher to extrapolate and predict that a colony of 1 mm of diameter could potentially survive up to 8 years in outer space conditions.

"The results suggest that radioresistant Deinococcus could survive during the travel from Earth to Mars and vice versa, which is several months or years in the shortest orbit," says Dr. Yamagishi.

This work provides, to date, the best estimate of bacterial survival in space. And, while previous experiments prove that bacteria could survive in space for a long period when benefitting from the shielding of rock (i.e. lithopanspermia), this is the first long-term space study raising the possibility that bacteria could survive in space in the form of aggregates, raising the new concept of "massapanspermia". Yet, while we are one step closer to prove panspermia possible, the microbe transfer also depends on other processes such as ejection and landing, during which the survival of bacteria still needs to be assessed.

DNA Damage and Survival Time Course of Deinococcal Cell Pellets During 3 Years of Exposure to Outer Space, Frontiers in Microbiology

Meteorite Study Suggests Earth May Have Been Wet Since It Formed

Press Release - Source: Washington University

Posted August 27, 2020 

An approximately 10-centimetre long piece of the Sahara 97096 meteorite, one of the enstatite chondrites studied. Water concentrations of around 0.5% by mass were measured in it, and part of the hydrogen was found to be located in the chondrules (the white spheres visible in the photograph). Sample belonging to the French National Museum of Natural History (Paris). CREDIT © Christine Fieni / Laurette Piani

A new study finds that Earth's water may have come from materials that were present in the inner solar system at the time the planet formed -- instead of far-reaching comets or asteroids delivering such water. The findings published Aug. 28 in Science suggest that Earth may have always been wet.

Researchers from the Centre de Recherches Petrographiques et Geochimiques (CRPG, CNRS/Universite de Lorraine) in Nancy, France, including one who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, determined that a type of meteorite called an enstatite chondrite contains sufficient hydrogen to deliver at least three times the amount of water contained in the Earth's oceans, and probably much more.
Enstatite chondrites are entirely composed of material from the inner solar system -- essentially the same stuff that made up the Earth originally.
"Our discovery shows that the Earth's building blocks might have significantly contributed to the Earth's water," said lead author Laurette Piani, a researcher at CPRG. "Hydrogen-bearing material was present in the inner solar system at the time of the rocky planet formation, even though the temperatures were too high for water to condense."

The findings from this study are surprising because the Earth's building blocks are often presumed to be dry. They come from inner zones of the solar system where temperatures would have been too high for water to condense and come together with other solids during planet formation.

The meteorites provide a clue that water didn't have to come from far away.

"The most interesting part of the discovery for me is that enstatite chondrites, which were believed to be almost 'dry,' contain an unexpectedly high abundance of water," said Lionel Vacher, a postdoctoral researcher in physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Vacher prepared some of the enstatite chondrites in this study for water analysis while he was completing his PhD at Universite de Lorraine. At Washington University, Vacher is working on understanding the composition of water in other types of meteorites.

Enstatite chondrites are rare, making up only about 2 percent of known meteorites in collections.

But their isotopic similarity to Earth make them particularly compelling. Enstatite chondrites have similar oxygen, titanium and calcium isotopes as Earth, and this study showed that their hydrogen and nitrogen isotopes are similar to Earth's, too. In the study of extraterrestrial materials, the abundances of an element's isotopes are used as a distinctive signature to identify where that element originated.

"If enstatite chondrites were effectively the building blocks of our planet -- as strongly suggested by their similar isotopic compositions -- this result implies that these types of chondrites supplied enough water to Earth to explain the origin of Earth's water, which is amazing!" Vacher said.

The paper also proposes that a large amount of the atmospheric nitrogen -- the most abundant component of the Earth's atmosphere -- could have come from the enstatite chondrites.

"Only a few pristine enstatite chondrites exist: ones that were not altered on their asteroid nor on Earth," Piani said. "In our study we have carefully selected the enstatite chondrite meteorites and applied a special analytical procedure to avoid being biased by the input of terrestrial water."

Coupling two analytical techniques -- conventional mass spectrometry and secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) -- allowed researchers to precisely measure the content and composition of the small amounts of water in the meteorites.

Prior to this study, "it was commonly assumed that these chondrites formed close to the sun," Piani said. "Enstatite chondrites were thus commonly considered 'dry,' and this frequently reasserted assumption has probably prevented any exhaustive analyses to be done for hydrogen."

###

This work was possible thanks to the national museum collections of meteorites, including those at Field Museum (Chicago, USA), the French National Museum of Natural History (Paris, France), the Japanese National Institute for Polar Research (Tokyo, Japan), the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, USA), Natural History Museum (Vienna, Austria) and the CEREGE meteoritic collection (Aix en Provence, France).

Astrobiology

“The Water Paradox” –Present from Earth’s Birth in a Forbidding Region of the Solar System

 Aug 28, 2020 in Discovery, Evolution, Science


If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water, underscoring the fact that Earth is the only planet known to have liquid water on its surface –a fundamental characteristic when it comes to explaining the emergence of life. “We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one,” said scientist and explorer, Jacques Cousteau. Which raises a fascinating question: was Earth’s water always present in the rocks that made up our planet, despite its formation in a region of the Solar System where temperatures were too high for water to condense and clump together with other solids as ice? Or, as some scientists have suggested, delivered later by asteroids and comets that bombarded the Earth?

In the journal Science, scientists from the Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques in Nancy (CNRS/Université de Lorraine) contribute to this debate by showing that most of the water present on the Earth today has probably been there right from the very beginning.

Three Times the Amount of Water in Earth’s Oceans

However, the amount of water present in the rocks that made up the Earth had never been accurately estimated. The scientists focused on meteorites with a composition similar to that of the Earth, called enstatite chondrites, and more specifically on a small number of these that underwent little heating over the course of their lifetime and thus still exhibit a primitive composition.

Using two complementary techniques, they measured their content in hydrogen and determined precisely where part of this was located. Their results show that the Earth’s primitive rocks probably contained enough water to provide at least three times the amount of water in the Earth’s oceans, and possibly much more.

Hydrogen Composition –Case Closed

To cap the argument, the hydrogen in these meteorites has the same isotopic composition as that of the water stored in the Earth’s mantle, while the isotopic composition of the oceans is consistent with a mixture containing 95% of water from the enstatite chondrites and a mere 5% of water delivered by comets or water-rich asteroids.

The Daily Galaxy, Jake Burba, via Science and CNR

MINING LUNAR ICE COULD IRREVOCABLY DAMAGE THE MOON’S ENVIRONMENT

AUGUST 21ST 20__DAN ROBITZSKI__FILED UNDER: OFF WORLD

No Touching

As NASA and other space agencies move toward their goal of setting up shop on the Moon, questions remain about how scientists and settlers will actually survive once they get there.

Experts have floated the idea that ice on the Moon’s poles could be harvested for drinking water. But now, NASA argues that the scientific potential of the polar ice is potentially too great to jeopardize, Space.com reports, as harvesting some of the ice would run the risk of contaminating the rest.
Off Limits

Last month, NASA released a new directive of guidelines designed to protect any world explored by a crewed or robotic mission. As Space.com reports, the directive declares that polar ice regions have tremendous value from a scientific perspective and ought to be protected.


In short: Keep off, lest you muck up future attempts to analyze the ice.
Delicate Balance

The directive only applies to NASA, so other space agencies or private companies like SpaceX could still chip away at the Moon’s ice. But doing so could also wipe away major opportunities to unravel the Moon’s mysterious past — or to hunt for signs of life.

“Some parts of the moon are very fragile, especially the lunar atmosphere and the coldest parts of the lunar poles,” University of Hawaii at Manoa planetary scientist Paul Lucey told Space.com. “Extensive human activity may permanently alter these environments, leading to a loss of the science they can provide.”


READ MORE: Cold as (lunar) ice: Protecting the moon’s polar regions from contamination [Space.com]

More on lunar ice: Study: There’s Way More Water on the Moon Than We Thought

Can the Moon be a person? As lunar mining looms, a change of perspective could protect Earth’s ancient companion  

August 26, 2020 11.39pm EDT

Everyone is planning to return to the Moon. At least 10 missions by half a dozen nations are scheduled before the end of 2021, and that’s only the beginning.

Even though there are international treaties governing outer space, ambiguity remains about how individuals, nations and corporations can use lunar resources.

In all of this, the Moon is seen as an inert object with no value in its own right.

But should we treat this celestial object, which has been part of the culture of every hominin for millions of years, as just another resource?

The Moon Village Association public forum on August 18 debated whether the Moon should have legal personhood.
Why we should think about legal personhood

In April 2020, US president Donald Trump signed an Executive Order on the use of “off-Earth resources” which made clear his government’s stance towards mining on the Moon and other celestial bodies:

Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space.

Lunar resources include helium-3 (a possible clean energy source), rare earth elements (used in electronics) and water ice. Located in shadowed craters at the poles, water ice could be used to make fuel for lunar industries and to take the next step on to Mars.

As a thought experiment in how we might regulate lunar exploitation, some have asked whether the Moon should be granted legal personhood, which would give it the right to enter into contracts, own property, and sue other persons.

Read more: Five ethical questions for how we choose to use the Moon

Legal personhood is already extended to many non-human entities: certain rivers, deities in some parts of India, and corporations worldwide. Environmental features can’t speak for themselves, so trustees are appointed to act on their behalf, as is the case for the Whanganui River in New Zealand. One proposal is to apply the New Zealand model to the Moon.
Heritage and memory

As a space archaeologist, I study artefacts and places associated with space exploration in the 20th and 21st centuries. Previously, I worked with Indigenous communities to mitigate damage to heritage sites caused by mining. So I have a keen interest in what mining means for human heritage on the Moon.

Places like Tranquility Base, where humans first landed on the Moon in 1969, could be considered heritage for the entire species. There are more than 100 artefacts left at Tranquility Base, including a television camera, experiment packages, and Buzz Aldrin’s space boots.


The Apollo 11 Landing Module, with the Solar Wind Experiment and TV camera in the background. These artefacts were left on the surface on the Moon in 1969. NASA

Objects like this are full of meaning and memory. But these objects not just made by humans – they also shape human behaviour in their own right. It’s in this context that I want to consider two aspects of lunar personhood: memory and agency.

Can we support the legal concept of personhood for the Moon with actual features of personhood?

Does the Moon remember?

The 17th-century philosopher John Locke argued that memory was a key feature of personhood. It’s now acceptable to attribute memory to environmental features on Earth, like the oceans.

There are many different types of memory, of course – think of memory foam, a space-age spin-off with terrestrial applications.

One reason scientists want to study the Moon is to retrieve the memory of how it formed after separating from Earth billions of years ago.

This memory is encoded in geological features like craters and lava fields, and the regions at the lunar poles where shadows two billion years old preserve precious water ice.

Permanently Shadowed Regions at the lunar South Pole in blue, captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. These unique regions only occur in two other locations in the solar system, Ceres and Mercury. NASA/GFSC

These are like archives storing information about past events. The most recent layer of memory records 60 years of human interventions, sitting lightly on the surface. This belongs to human heritage and memory, but it is now lunar memory too.

Read more: Friday essay: shadows on the Moon - a tale of ephemeral beauty, humans and hubris

Does the Moon have agency?

The international Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) maintains the Planetary Protection Policy. This policy aims to prevent harm to potential life on other planets and moons. The Moon requires little protection because it is considered a dead world.

Recently, social media went wild with a story that self-described TikTok witches had hexed the Moon. More experienced WitchTokkers reacted with fury at their hubris in meddling with powers they didn’t understand.

Despite its apparent irrationality, there was something delightful about this story. It showed how the Moon is thought to interact with human life on its own terms. The “witches” took the Moon seriously as an agent in human affairs.

When humans return to the Moon, they will not find it a dead world. It is a very active landscape shaped by dust, shadows and light.

The Moon reacts to human disturbance by mobilising dust that irritates lungs, breaks down seals and prevents equipment from working. This is neither passive nor hostile – just the Moon being itself.

The Moon as an equal partner

Australian philosopher Val Plumwood would see the Moon as a co-participant in human affairs, rather than formless, dead matter:

When the other’s agency is treated as background or denied, we give the other less credit than it is due. We can easily come to take for granted what they provide for us, and to starve them of the resources they need to survive.

So this leaves me with a question: if the Moon is a legal person, what does it need from us to sustain its memory and agency? How can we achieve what Plumwood calls a “mutual flourishing”?

The answers might lie in our attitudes.

We could abandon the idea that our moral obligations only cover living ecologies. We should consider the Moon as an entity beyond the resources it might hold for humans to use.

In practice, this might mean trustees would determine how much of the water ice deposits or other geological features can be used, or set conditions on activities which alter the qualities of the Moon irreversibly.

The record of human activities we leave on the Moon should reflect respect, as we are contributing to what it remembers. In this sense, the TikTok witches had the right idea.





This article is based on a presentation at a Moon Village Association public forum organised by the Office of Other Spaces, Catapult UK and the Space Junk Podcast, and supported by Inspiring NSW and the Hunter Innovation and Science Hub.
Author
  

Alice Gorman 
Alice Gorman is a Friend of The Conversation.
Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University
Disclosure statement

Alice Gorman is a member of the Moon Village Association, For All Moonkind, and the Advisory Council of the Space Industry Association of Australia.
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Flinders University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.


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Huge Indonesia mine resumes operations after lockdown protest
Issued on: 29/08/2020 -

More than 1,000 employees had staged a demonstration at the main entrance to the mine HUSYEN ABDILLAH AFP

Timika (Indonesia) (AFP)

Operations have resumed at the world's biggest gold mine in Indonesia, the company that runs it said Saturday, after workers blocked access to the site in protest at being stopped from visiting their families over virus concerns.

The miners at the Grasberg complex in the country's easternmost Papua region reached an agreement with the US-based operator Freeport, which said it would resume bus services for workers to return home.
This week more than 1,000 employees demonstrated at the mine's main entrance over the decision to cancel bus services to the city of Timika in response to fears about the spread of coronavirus infections.

Many workers had been unable to leave the site -- a high-altitude open pit that is also a major copper mine -- for six months.

Freeport spokesman Riza Pratama told AFP Saturday that the roadblock had been removed after a long negotiation period.

Several buses departed from the mine late Friday, carrying some workers who had been granted a leave of absence, said local company spokesman Kerry Yarangga.

These bus services will be run with stringent health protocols including Covid-19 testing, Yarangga said.

In May, Freeport said it would reduce the number of staff at the mine, which employed about 25,000 people, after infections rose in the area.

© 2020 AFP

Digging up graves: an Indonesian community honours its dead
Issued on: 29/08/2020 -

Torajan families unearth deceased relatives and clean their graves in a ritual known as "Manene" Hariandi HAFIZ AFP

Toraja (Indonesia) (AFP)

Families in a mountainous community on Indonesia's Sulawesi island dig up their mummified relatives every three years, clean them and dress them in their favourite clothes to honour their spirits.

The "Manene" ritual is carried out by the Torajan people, either before or after the August harvest, when deceased family members are unearthed and their graves cleaned.

"Sometimes we even have a conversation with them, asking them to wish us health, prosperity and health," Rony Pasang, whose family carried out the tradition on Saturday, told AFP.


Pasang dug up several dead family members including his grandmother and great aunt -- with his children and grandchildren paying respect to the shrivelled, mummified corpses.

The family members in the village of Panggala were unearthed and laid out to dry in the sun, before being dressed.

A feast was also held and a pig slaughtered for the occasion.

The death of a relative involves many intricate ceremonial steps for the Torajan people, who number about a million.

The deceased are mummified through an embalming process that used to involve sour vinegar and tea leaves. These days though families usually inject a formaldehyde solution into the corpse.

After many months, the souls of the dead are freed -- and immortality assured -- with an elaborate multi-day funeral ceremony called Rambu Solo.

A majority of Torajans are Christians but they retain many animist rituals and beliefs.

E-Locust: How apps are helping counter pest infestation in KenyaIssued on: 28/08/2020

By:Julia Sieger

Insects can be a nuisance, but they are also a great source of inspiration for scientists who are looking to push the limits of innovation through a process called biomimicry. In this edition of Tech 24, we take a closer look.

Fears for food security in East Africa are mounting as swarms of locusts gorge themselves on crops. This year's outbreak seems to be the worst in the last 70 years. We tell you how smartphone apps can now help track real time information to better understand the locusts' breeding process.

Plus, from satellite imagery to supercomputers, Dhananjay Khadilkar tells us how scientists are deploying technology to predict the paths of these swarms.

While insects can be a nuisance, they're also proof that nature displays the most powerful and beautiful innovations and that humans still have much to learn. A great example of so-called biomimicry is the research conducted by PhD students at the University of Washington. They were able to create a low-power, low-weight, wireless camera system the size of a coin by mimicking the eyes of beetles. We talk to co-lead author Vikram Iyer about why creating a vision system for small robots is so challenging.