This tableware made from sugarcane and bamboo breaks down in 60 days

by Cell Press

A woman handling tableware made from bamboos and food industry waste.

Credit: Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University

Scientists have designed a set of "green" tableware made from sugarcane and bamboo that doesn't sacrifice on convenience or functionality and could serve as a potential alternative to plastic cups and other disposable plastic containers. Unlike traditional plastic or biodegradable polymers—which can take as long as 450 years or require high temperatures to degrade—this non-toxic, eco-friendly material only takes 60 days to break down and is clean enough to hold your morning coffee ordinner takeout. This plastic alternative is presented November 12 in the journal Matter.

"To be honest, the first time I came to the US in 2007, I was shocked by the available one-time use plastic containers in the supermarket," says corresponding author Hongli (Julie) Zhu of Northeastern University. "It makes our life easier, but meanwhile, it becomes waste that cannot decompose in the environment." She later saw many more plastic bowls, plates, and utensils thrown into the trash bin at seminars and parties and thought, "Can we use a more sustainable material?"

To find an alternative for plastic-based food containers, Zhu and her colleagues turned to bamboos and one of the largest food-industry waste products: bagasse, also known as sugarcane pulp. Winding together long and thin bamboo fibers with short and thick bagasse fibers to form a tight network, the team molded containers from the two materials that were mechanically stable and biodegradable. The new green tableware is not only strong enough to hold liquids as plastic does and cleaner than biodegradables made from recycled materials that might not be fully de-inked, but also starts decomposing after being in the soil for 30-45 days and completely loses its shape after 60 days.

A cup made from biodegradable materials. Credit: Liu et al

"Making food containers is challenging. It needs more than being biodegradable," said Zhu. "On one side, we need a material that is safe for food; on the other side, the container needs to have good wet mechanical strength and be very clean because the container will be used to take hot coffee, hot lunch."

The researchers added alkyl ketene dimer (AKD), a widely used eco-friendly chemical in the food industry, to increase oil and water resistance of the molded tableware, ensuring the sturdiness of the product when wet. With the addition of this ingredient, the new tableware outperformed commercial biodegradable food containers, such as other bagasse-based tableware and egg cartons, in mechanical strength, grease resistance, and non-toxicity.

The decomposition of the biodegradable tableware over 60 days. Credit: Liu et al

The tableware the researchers developed also comes with another advantage: a significantly smaller carbon footprint. The new product's manufacturing process emits 97% less CO2 than commercially available plastic containers and 65% less CO2 than paper products and biodegradable plastic. The next step for the team is to make the manufacturing process more energy efficient and bring the cost down even more, to compete with plastic. Although the cost of cups made out of the new material ($2,333/ton) is two times lower than that of biodegradable plastic ($4,750/ton), traditional plastic cups are still slightly cheaper ($2,177/ton).

"It is difficult to forbid people to use one-time use containers because it's cheap and convenient," says Zhu. "But I believe one of the good solutions is to use more sustainable materials, to use biodegradable materials to make these one-time use containers."

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More information: Matter, Liu, Luan, and Li et al.: "Biodegradable, Hygienic, and Compostable Tableware from Hybrid Sugarcane and Bamboo Fibers as Plastic Alternative" www.cell.com/matter/fulltext/S2590-2385(20)30558-0 ,  

DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2020.10.004

Journal information: Matter

Provided by Cell Press

A potential game-changer to reverse alcohol intoxication

by University Health Network

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A staggering 3 million deaths occur every year as result from harmful use of alcohol, according to the World Health Organization.

Present in alcoholic drinks, ethanol, normally referred to as 'alcohol', affects every part of the human body. Brain function, circulation and even nail growth are impacted. When a certain level of blood alcohol concentration is reached, the intoxication can damage organs and lead to death.

In a study published today in Scientific Reports, a Nature Research Journal, a team of researchers led by Dr. Joseph Fisher presents a proof of concept of a simple method that could become a game-changer in rescue therapy for severe alcohol intoxication, as well as just "sobering up."

Normally, 90% of the alcohol in the human body is cleared exclusively by the liver at constant rate that can't be increased. Currently there is no other method, short of dialysis, whereby alcohol can be removed from the blood. This leaves as the only options to treat life-threatening alcohol levels supportive measures such as giving oxygen, intravenous fluids, breathing assistance, and treating any heart issues with drugs.

The principle behind UHN team's approach is simply to recruit the lungs to breathe out the alcohol. The harder the breathing, it was reasoned, the more alcohol is eliminated. The team found that indeed, hyperventilation eliminated the alcohol at least three times faster than through the liver alone.

"But you can't just hyperventilate, because in a minute or two you would become light-headed and pass out," explains Dr. Fisher, anesthesiologist and senior scientist at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute (TGHRI).

When hyperventilating—breathing deeper and more rapidly than normal—the body eliminates carbon dioxide from the blood along with the alcohol. The decrease of this gas in the blood is the cause of symptoms such as light-headedness, tingling or numbness on hands and feet, and fainting.

Dr. Fisher and his team used a device that allows the patient to hyperventilate off the alcohol while returning precisely the amount of carbon dioxide to the body to keep it at normal levels in the blood—regardless of the extent of hyperventilation. The equipment is the size of a small briefcase and uses a valve system, some connecting tubes, a mask, and a small tank with compressed carbon dioxide.

"It's very basic, low-tech device that could be made anywhere in the world: no electronics, no computers or filters are required.

"It's almost inexplicable why we didn't try this decades ago," says Dr. Fisher.

This study is the first scientific demonstration that the basic rate of alcohol elimination could be substantially exceeded by using hyperventilation.

This study is a proof of concept performed in the laboratory with volunteers. The authors recommend following up with further validation studies to understand how this technology could be applied in a clinical setting.


Explore further

A poo transplant successfully treated a man who was brewing alcohol in his own gut

More information: Scientific Reports (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-76233-9

Journal information: Scientific Reports

Provided by University Health Network

Cysteine synthesis was a key step in the origin of life: study

by University College London

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

In an important step during the early evolution of life on Earth, the formation of the amino acid cysteine delivered vital catalysts, which enabled the earliest protein molecules to form in water, according to a new study by UCL researchers.

All proteins are built from the same 20 amino acids. One of these, cysteine, was assumed not to have been present at the origin of life. Despite its fundamental importance to all life today, it was unclear how cysteine might have formed on the early Earth.

In a new study, published in Science, UCL scientists have recreated how cysteine was formed at the origins of life. Additionally, they have observed how, once formed, cysteine catalyses the fusion of peptides in water—a fundamental step in the path towards protein enzymes.

The UCL researchers created cysteine using very simple chemistry and chemicals—hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen sulfide—that were likely to be abundant on the early Earth. The route that they have unravelled closely resembles how cysteine is synthesised in living organisms today, and the researchers believe they are historically linked.

The study also found that cysteine residues catalyse peptide synthesis in water by joining together short peptide fragments that the team had previously found in a study published in Nature last year.

Senior author Professor Matthew Powner (UCL Chemistry) said: "Our results show how cysteine may have formed on the early Earth and how it could have played a critical role in the evolution of protein synthesis.

"Once formed, cysteine catalysts behave as 'proto-enzymes' to produce peptides in water. This robust chemistry could have generated peptides long enough to fold into enzyme-like structures, which would be the precursors to the protein enzymes that are fundamental to all living organisms."

Co-lead author and Research Fellow Dr. Saidul Islam (UCL Chemistry) said: "We have shown that nitriles possess the in-built energy required to form peptide bonds in water. This is the simplest way of making peptides that works with all of the 20 amino acids, which makes it all the more incredible.

"It is precisely the sort of simple, yet special, chemistry that was essential to kick-start life several billion years ago. Our study provides further evidence that the molecules of life descended from nitrile chemistry on the early Earth."

Co-lead author Dr. Callum Foden, who completed the work while a Ph.D. student at UCL, said: "The peptide synthesis we discovered is simple, highly selective and uses molecules that were available on the early Earth.

"A single cysteine residue is enough to produce robust catalytic activity. It is remarkable that such small molecules can carry out such an important (bio)chemical reaction, selectively in water, at neutral pH, and in such high yields."

Discussing further implications of their study, Professor Powner said: "We have resolved a long-standing problem for the origin of life by providing a simple solution to catalytic peptide synthesis in water. Importantly, the catalysts are built only from biology's amino acids. Understanding how cysteine could have controlled the formation of Earth's earliest peptides has made the long path from chemistry to a living organism seem a little shorter, and a little less daunting.

"Our study suggests cysteine was first introduced into life's peptides by modification of serine (another of life's amino acids). This now raises important questions about the early evolution and coding of peptide synthesis. Cysteine is widely assumed not to have been present in life's first genetic code, and this fits neatly with our observations. Our results indicate that encoded serine could furnish cysteine peptides, leading to a key role for cysteine in evolution even before it was assigned to life's genetic code."


Explore furtherOrigin of life insight: peptides can form without amino acids
More information: "Prebiotic synthesis of cysteine peptides that catalyze peptide ligation in neutral water" Science (2020). science.sciencemag.org/lookup/ … 1126/science.abd5680
Journal information: Nature , Science


Provided by University College London

New study outlines steps higher education should take to prepare a new quantum workforce

by Luke Auburn, Rochester Institute of Technology

An interdisciplinary team of students conduct quantum research in an integrated photonics laboratory. Credit: A. Sue Weisler

A new study outlines ways colleges and universities can update their curricula to prepare the workforce for a new wave of quantum technology jobs. Three researchers, including Rochester Institute of Technology Associate Professor Ben Zwickl, suggested steps that need to be taken in a new paper in Physical Review Physics Education Research after interviewing managers at more than 20 quantum technology companies across the U.S.

The study's authors from University of Colorado Boulder and RIT set out to better understand the types of entry-level positions that exist in these companies and the educational pathways that might lead into those jobs. They found that while the companies still seek employees with traditional STEM degrees, they want the candidates to have a grasp of fundamental concepts in quantum information science and technology.

"For a lot of those roles, there's this idea of being 'quantum aware' that's highly desirable," said Zwickl, a member of RIT's Future Photon Initiative and Center for Advancing STEM Teaching, Learning and Evaluation. "The companies told us that many positions don't need to have deep expertise, but students could really benefit from a one- or two-semester introductory sequence that teaches the foundational concepts, some of the hardware implementations, how the algorithms work, what a qubit is, and things like that. Then a graduate can bring in all the strength of a traditional STEM degree but can speak the language that the company is talking about."

The authors said colleges and universities should offer introductory, multidisciplinary courses with few prerequisites that will allow software engineering, computer science, physics, and other STEM majors to learn the core concepts together. Zwickl said providing quantum education opportunities to students across disciplines will be important because quantum technology has the opportunity to disrupt a wide range of fields.

"It's a growing industry that will produce new sensors, imaging, communication, computing technologies, and more," said Zwickl. "A lot of the technologies are in a research and development phase, but as they start to move toward commercialization and mass production, you will have end-users who are trying to figure out how to apply the technology. They will need technical people on their end that are fluent enough with the ideas that they can make use of it."

Zwickl's participation in the project was supported in part by funding RIT received from the NSF's Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes program. As a co-PI and lead on the education and workforce development for the proposal, he said he is hoping to apply many of the lessons learned from the study to RIT's curriculum. He is in the process of developing two new introductory RIT courses in quantum information and science as well as an interdisciplinary minor in the field.

Explore further

Research network aims to improve learning outcomes for students underrepresented in STEM
More information: Michael F. J. Fox et al. Preparing for the quantum revolution: What is the role of higher education?, Physical Review Physics Education Research (2020). 

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.16.020131

Provided by Rochester Institute of Technology

A cosmic amethyst in a dying star

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UNAM/J. Toalá et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI

On Earth, amethysts can form when gas bubbles in lava cool under the right conditions. In space, a dying star with a mass similar to the Sun is capable of producing a structure on par with the appeal of these beautiful gems.

As stars like the Sun run through their fuel, they cast off their outer layers and the core of the star shrinks. Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have found a bubble of ultra-hot gas at the center of one of these expiring stars, a planetary nebula in our galaxy called IC 4593. At a distance of about 7,800 light years from Earth, IC 4593 is the most distant planetary nebula yet detected with Chandra.

This new image of IC 4593 has X-rays from Chandra in purple, invoking similarities to amethysts found in geodes around the globe. The bubble detected by Chandra is from gas that has been heated to over a million degrees. These high temperatures were likely generated by material that blew away from the shrunken core of the star and crashed into gas that had previously been ejected by the star.

This composite image also contains visible light data from the Hubble Space Telescope (pink and green). The pink regions in the Hubble image are the overlap of emission from cooler gas composed of a combination of nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, while the green emission is mainly from nitrogen.

IC 4593 is what astronomers call a "planetary nebula," a deceptive-sounding name because this class of objects has nothing to do with planets. (The name was given about two centuries ago because they looked like the disk of a planet when viewed through a small telescope.) In fact, a planetary nebula is formed after the interior of a star with about the mass of the Sun contracts and its outer layers expand and cool. In the case of the Sun, its outer layers could extend as far as the orbit of Venus during its red giant phase several billion years in the future.

In addition to the hot gas, this study also finds evidence for point-like X-ray source at the center of IC 4593. This X-ray emission has higher energies than the bubble of hot gas. The point source could be from the star that discarded its outer layers to form the planetary nebula or it could be from a possible companion star in this system.

A paper describing these results appears in the April 2020 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online. The authors are Jesús A. Toalá (Instituto de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica (IRyA) in Michoacan, Mexico); M. A. Guerrero (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Granada, Spain); L. Bianchi (The Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland); Y.-H. Chu (Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica (ASIAA) in Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China); and O. De Marco (Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia).



Explore further Stars and skulls: New ESO image reveals eerie nebula

More information: Chandra observations of the planetary nebula IC 4593, arXiv:2004.04542 [astro-ph.SR] arxiv.org/abs/2004.04542


J A Toalá et al. Chandra observations of the planetary nebula IC 4593, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2020). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa1024

Journal information: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

‘I Cannot Talk, I Can Only Paint’: The War Artist Who Broke Boundaries

Mary Riter Hamilton was first commissioned by BC amputees to capture the First World War. Her work reveals her courage.

Irene Gammel 11 Nov 2020 | The Conversation Canada

Irene Gammel is a professor and director at the MLC Research Centre and Gallery at Ryerson University. This article first appeared in the Conversation Canada.

Gun Emplacements, Farbus Wood, Vimy Ridge, by Mary Riter Hamilton, 1919, oil on woven paper. Image via the Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-147, Copy negative C-101321.

“I cannot talk, I can only paint.”

This is how Canadian battlefield painter Mary Riter Hamilton (1867-1954) summarized her urgent response to witnessing the large-scale destruction of the First World War.

The 51-year-old artist began painting the devastated regions of Northern France and Flanders in late April 1919 and continued until November 1921. During this period, she often rushed from one battlefield to the next to paint the scenes in oil before the war detritus was cleared or the dead were buried.

Hamilton first sought work with the Canadian War Memorials Fund in 1917, and again in 1918 as an official artist, but was rejected because she was a woman. After this, she embraced alternate means to gain permission and financial support for her expedition.

Fuelling her unprecedented expedition through the trenches of the Vimy Ridge, the Somme and the ruins of Ypres was her patriotic desire to create a memorial in paintings for her country.

My forthcoming book, I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Painter Mary Riter Hamilton, features her letters and the first exhaustive account of her vast, under-explored oeuvre and her powerful visual rhetoric as a battlefield artist.

As a witness of mass graves and human remains, Hamilton responded with a painting style that made viewers see and feel her deeply felt and ultimately traumatic encounters, rendered in vivid colours, spontaneous brushstrokes and tumultuous landscapes.

Clearing the Battlefields in Flanders, by Mary Riter Hamilton, 1921, oil on cardboard, 26.3 × 35.0 cm. Image via the Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-142, Copy negative c-104244.

Hamilton transgressed the rules of both gender and art in her day. She first embraced her artistic vocation after her husband’s sudden death when she was 26.

In early 1919, she was commissioned by the war amputees club of British Columbia, who paid for Hamilton’s trip overseas, and likely for two shipments of her paintings back to Vancouver. The club reproduced her paintings in colour in their magazine but discontinued their support after one year. Hamilton continued while using up her personal resources and relying on sporadic support from a female patron in Victoria, B.C.

When Hamilton left Canada, she was at the height of a brilliant career, at that time much more recognized than painter Emily Carr.

Artists with the Canadian War Memorials Fund made brief sketching trips to battlefields and then prepared polished and monumental paintings in their London and Paris studios. As art historian Laura Brandon has shown, artists such as Arthur Lismer and Frederick Varley used photographs, which they combined with their own experience to compose war paintings as amalgamated scenes.

Mary Riter Hamilton in fur stole, in a rare photograph, circa early 1920s. Image via the Ronald T. Riter Collection.

The most famous of these Canadian War Memorial-commissioned paintings, Richard Jack’s The Second Battle of Ypres, reconstructed dramatic combat by using unrealistic 19th-century war art conventions, although the artist had visited the battlefield after the fight.

Hamilton, by contrast, transgressed official war painting norms to pioneer her own visceral style that blurred boundaries between documentary realism and esthetic urgency. Many of her works exhibit a haunting blankness, recalling the missing soldiers. She also painted individual soldiers’ marked graves, as well as mass graves where entire regiments had perished. In so doing, she insisted on remembering and mourning each individual loss.

She painted on small canvases or pieces of plywood or paper while trekking through collapsing trenches and swamps en route to remote areas. Her work can be seen as a part of what political theorist Michal Givoni has identified as a 20th-century shift towards mobilizing acts of witnessing as a vocation by showing difficult truths in public.

Among the handful of women who painted the First World War, Hamilton stands out for the magnitude of her work, the length of her stay in the battlefields and her empathic esthetic achievements.

Today, we have witnessed disturbing images of mass graves during the COVID-19 pandemic in the same time that our society is reckoning with what it means to make ethical choices as we confront connections between systemic inequities, violence and historical trauma. How we think about and understand Hamilton’s courageous, determined and perilous engagement of mass death is more important than ever.

In Memorial for the Second Canadian Division in a Mine Crater Near Neuville St. Vaast, Hamilton visualizes the shocking decimation of an entire regiment with an alarmingly deep hole, whose cutaway view gives viewers a startling, open perspective

.

Memorial for the Second Canadian Division in a Mine Crater near Neuville St. Vaast, by Mary Riter Hamilton, circa 1920, oil on canvas. Image via the Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-69, Copy negative C-105221.


Also concerned with survivors, she recorded scenes of reconstruction, as in Cloth Hall, Ypres — Market Day. This showed grieving family members at a distance and depicted signs of hope and new life.

Cloth Hall, Ypres — Market Day, by Mary Riter Hamilton, 1920, oil on wove paper. Image via Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-162, Copy negative C-104371.

On her expedition, Hamilton overnighted in war-torn Nissen huts erected for military shelter and storage or other makeshift shelters. By 1920, her war studios included a bombed-out attic in Arras, France. She often ground her colours on the battlefield. She lived in extreme poverty, often starving and putting her life in danger.

Art historians Robert Amos and Ash Prakash have begun to document Hamilton’s important pre-war contributions to Canadian impressionism.

Beginning in 1989, historian Angela Davis, with art historian Sarah McKinnon, curated exhibitions of Hamilton’s battlefield work, and scholars have begun to honour her legacy. In recent years, the War Amps produced a video about Hamilton.

For Remembrance Day this year, Canada Post has dedicated a stamp to Hamilton’s memory, featuring her 1919 painting Trenches on the Somme, in which scarlet poppies grow along white chalk walls of the trench. The painting exhibits her trademark style, which often puts the viewer inside a trench.

Trenches on the Somme, by Mary Riter Hamilton, 1919, oil on commercial board. Image via the Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-38, Copy negative C-104747.

Hamilton brought home more than 320 battlefield works painted in oil, or drawn in pencil, charcoal or pastel, along with etchings. She donated 227 to the Dominion Archives (today Library and Archives Canada).

In 1922, Hamilton was awarded one of France’s highest honours, the Ordre des Palmes académiques.

Hamilton’s life and legacy leaves us much to reflect on today. As an artist who embraced witnessing as a vocation, she broke barriers and insisted upon artistically rendering what she saw with candour. Her perception and embodied art practice also left a unique record of the physical and moral devastation of war, both in her art and in her own life.

As a woman artist travelling through battlefields, she experienced mobility, articulated a vision of empathy and contributed to a public record of the war. Yet how she engaged with her craft and what she saw took a toll on her health and ultimately curtailed her career as a painter. She suffered from post-traumatic stress and a major mental breakdown and other health problems following her expedition. War painting would mark her for life.

Hamilton summed up her achievement with understatement: “Yes, it was like living in a graveyard... but I felt this was a duty that someone must do, and I thought I would try to do it.”

Painstaking race against time to uncover Viking ship's secrets


Issued on: 13/11/2020 - 

Archaeologists hunt for clues in an excavated Viking burial ship in Norway 

Margrethe K. H. Havgar AFP

Halden (Norway) (AFP)

Inch by inch, they gently pick through the soil in search of thousand-year-old relics. Racing against onsetting mould yet painstakingly meticulous, archaeologists in Norway are exhuming a rare Viking ship grave in hopes of uncovering the secrets within.

Who is buried here? Under which ritual? What is left of the burial offerings? And what can they tell us about the society that lived here?

Now reduced to tiny fragments almost indistinguishable from the turf that covers it, the 20-metre (65-foot) wooden longship raises a slew of questions.

The team of archaeologists is rushing to solve at least some of the mystery before the structure is entirely ravaged by microscopic fungi.

It's an exhilarating task: there hasn't been a Viking ship to dig up in more than a century.

The last was in 1904 when the Oseberg longship was excavated, not far away on the other side of the Oslo Fjord, in which the remains of two women were discovered among the finds.

"We have very few burial ships," says the head of the dig, Camilla Cecilie Wenn of the University of Oslo's Museum of Cultural History.

"I'm incredibly lucky, few archaeologists get such an opportunity in their career."

Under a giant grey and white tent placed in the middle of ancient burial grounds near the southeastern town of Halden, a dozen workers in high visibility vests kneel or lie on the ground, examining the earth.

Buried underground, the contours of the longship were detected in 2018 by geological radar equipment, as experts searched the known Viking site.

When the first test digs revealed the ship's advanced state of decomposition, the decision was taken to quickly excavate it.

- Viking VIP -

So far, only parts of the keel have been dug out in reasonable condition.

Analyses of the pieces have determined that the ship was probably raised on land around the ninth century, placed in a pit and buried under a mound of earth as a final resting place.

But for whom? "If you're buried with a ship, then it's clear you were a VIP in your lifetime," Wenn says.

A king? A queen? A Viking nobleman, known as a jarl? The answer may lie in the bones or objects yet to be found -- weapons, jewels, vessels, tools, etc -- that are typical in graves from the Viking Age, from the mid-eighth to mid-11th centuries.

The site has however been disturbed several times, accelerating the ship's disintegration and reducing the chance of finding relics.

At the end of the 19th century, the burial mound was razed to make space for farmland, entirely destroying the upper part of the hull and damaging what is believed to have been the funeral chamber.

It's also possible that the grave may have been plundered long before that, by other Vikings keen to get their hands on some of the precious burial offerings and to symbolically assert their power and legitimacy.

- Animal bones -

So far the archaeologists' bounty is pretty meagre: lots of iron rivets used for the boat's assembly, most heavily corroded over time, as well as a few bones.

"These bones are too big to be human," says field assistant Karine Fure Andreassen, as she leans over a large, orange-tinged bone.

"This is not a Viking chief we're looking at unfortunately, it's probably a horse or cattle."

"It's a sign of power. You were so rich that an animal could be sacrificed to be put in your grave," she explains.

Beside the tent, Jan Berge looks like he's panning for gold. He's sifting soil and spraying it with water in hopes of finding a little nugget from the past.

"Make an exceptional find? I doubt it," admits the archaeologist. "The most precious items have probably already been taken. And anything made of iron or organic material has eroded over time or completely disappeared."

But Berge, whose big bushy beard gives him the air of a Viking, is not easily discouraged.

"I'm not here for a treasure hunt," he says. "What interests me is finding out what happened here, how the funeral was carried out, how to interpret the actions of the time."

© 2020 AFP

Glamourous and worldly: Five things to know about Vikings

Issued on: 13/11/2020

People dressed as Vikings throw flaming torches into their reconstructed longboat at a festival in the Shetland Islands ANDY BUCHANAN AFP

Halden (Norway) (AFP)

In popular culture they're depicted as ruthless warriors who pillaged and plundered. That reputation is not totally undeserved, but is only part of the picture. Here are five things to know about Vikings.

Where does their name come from?

Like many things about them, the etymology of the word "viking" is uncertain.

In Old Norse, an old Scandinavian language, the word appears as "vikingr", which designates a person, while "viking" designates a practice.

"The Scandinavians never spoke of themselves as Vikings, as an identity for anybody Scandinavian. The word rather meant an activity, to go raiding, or a person who was doing that," explains Jan Bill, a professor of Viking archaeology and curator of Oslo's Viking Ship Museum.

"But today, practice is to use 'Viking' to describe anybody Scandinavian from the Viking period," he adds, referring to the period from around the mid-eighth to mid-11th centuries.

Exposed to cannabis and Buddha

Apart from their pillaging, the Vikings were big tradesmen who forged a vast network of contacts from the Caspian Sea to Greenland.

It has been debated for years, but it is very likely that .

Some objects recovered from ship graves -- three such ships are on display in very good condition at the Oslo museum -- bear witness to the rich and varied nature of their contacts.

is a small leather bag containing , found on one of the two women buried with the longship dug up at Oseberg.

"The seeds may have been for recreational or medicinal purposes, or to grow hemp plants whose fibres were used for textiles and rope," says Jan Bill.

Other finds at various Viking sites include textiles and beads from the Orient, as well as coins from the Arab world -- often broken into pieces as the Vikings didn't use them for currency but rather for their weight in silver and other precious metals.

dating back to this period was also found on the Swedish island of Helgo.

'Drakkar' or not 'drakkar'?

The word "drakkar" is sometimes purported to be a Viking-era word for a longship, which occasionally featured an ornamental dragon on the bow.

But some historians insist that the term is as recent as the 19th century, inspired by the modern Swedish word for dragon, "drake" in singular and "drakar" in plural.

That word is similar, but not exactly the same, as the word used in Old Norse.

"There are actually seven instances of ships being called 'dreki', or 'drekar' in plural, in poems from the Viking Age," says Jan Bill.

"It was not a technical term, though, rather poetic."

Historians do however agree that light longships, powered by oars and/or sails, were known for their speed and flexibility, capable of crossing oceans and, thanks to their shallow draught, sailing upriver.

The anti-Hagar

The famous American comic strip depicts a heavy red-bearded Viking with a horned helmet and shaggy tunic.

But according to experts, the Vikings were more glamourous than that.

"Their clothing was very colourful. They loved jewellery and bling," says archaeologist Camilla Cecilie Wenn of the University of Oslo's Museum of Cultural History.

"Far from the drab style in which they're portrayed, they spent a lot of time on their appearance. They washed and brushed their hair and beards regularly," she says.

And the horned helmet? "A modern invention from the Romantic period," Jan Bill says dismissively.

"None of the few helmets found from the Viking Age, or the preceding centuries, have horns."

The "mistake" is attributed to costume designer Carl Emil Doepler, who in 1876 added horns to the warriors' helmets in a performance of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle opera, inspired by Nordic mythology.

Clinking to toast?

Urban legend also attributes the modern act of clinking drinking glasses to the Vikings.

They purportedly clinked their mugs so violently that some of their beer or mead would slosh into the other person's mug, thereby ensuring that their drink wasn't poisoned.

But there's no evidence to support that theory.

And contrary to popular belief, Vikings did not drink out of their enemies' skulls either.

Bangladeshi star's comeback after Islamist death threats

Issued on: 13/11/2020 

For years Sufi singer Rita Dewan captivated millions of followers in Bangladesh with her haunting ballads, but nowadays she lives in fear each performance will be her last 

Munir Uz zaman AFP


DOHAR (Bangladesh) (AFP)

For years Sufi singer Rita Dewan captivated millions of followers in Bangladesh with her haunting ballads.

Today, she lives in fear each performance will be her last.

Accused of defaming Islam and targeted by religious radicals -- a growing force in the Muslim majority country -- she spent months in hiding to escape death threats.

Rarely going out in daylight, she and her family fled to rural shanties and often went without food whilst living underground.

"YouTube is flooded with videos of Mullahs calling for my beheading," she tells AFP in tears. "I was too afraid to go to the toilet even. In rural areas they are mainly outside. I felt like [extremists] would find me and decapitate me."

Sufi Islam is considered deviant by conservative Muslim groups who oppose its mystical interpretation of the Koran.

The movement still has tens of millions of followers worldwide, but in Bangladesh the rise of hardliners has meant numbers are dropping.

In recent years, some two dozen Sufis have been killed by extremists in the South Asian country, some hacked to death.

Sufism has a long tradition in art and academia ranging from the poet Rumi to mathematician Omar Khayyam to modern Pakistani star Rahet Ali Khan.

But Sufis beliefs are increasingly under attack as un-Islamic and conservatives want to introduce strict blasphemy laws in Bangladesh, with the death penalty for offenders.

- Agony and ecstasy -

Dewan has been under pressure since a Youtube clip she appeared in went viral, attracting a storm of criticism.

In it she makes comments about Islam in a singing duel against another artist, who plays a God.

Conservatives have filed at least four cases against Dewan accusing her of damaging religious sentiments and defaming Islam, a charge currently punishable by life in jail.

She insists the clip was taken out of context and shows just a few minutes of an eight-hour performance.

The star apologised but it was too late to stop the threats.

"Some Mullahs have used their sermons to brand me a coward prostitute and told people to kill me if they can find me," she explains.

The star is to make a first appearance in court on Sunday but decided to come out of hiding to perform an eight-hour show for fans at a famed Sufi shrine.

The 38-year-old said her "ecstasy" at being able to perform again was tempered by terror after seeing two men in the crowd she feared were fundamentalists who might harm her.

They left after two songs, but experts say such intimidatory tactics are not unusual.

Saymon Zakaria, a Bangladeshi researcher on traditional music said Sufi art is now under threat from those who want a hardline Islam imposed in the country.

"The situation is very critical," Zakaria told AFP .

- 'Harrowing time' -

Rights researcher Rezaur Rahman Lenin said the cases against Dewan were part of a pattern to "censor artistic works".

"Artists and their performance are barred, and artists and academics detained and judicially harassed and persecuted on the grounds of insulting or hurting religious feelings," he said.

Male Sufi singer Shariat Sarker spent more than six months in jail this year after being accused of defaming Islam and is now in hiding because of death threats.

Dewan has already missed more than 60 shows because of police concerns about safety and security and says that as a result she has lost thousands of dollars in earnings.

"All of a sudden we became poor. My husband and my daughter are part of my team. All members of my troupe suffered. It's a harrowing time."

The star, who left school at the age of nine to train as a singer and regularly performed to vast crowds, is unsure how she can carry on.

Despite her recent show many shrines are still reluctant to work with her.

The court case makes Dewan fear for her own future but she remains defiant that the art will endure.

"No matter how powerful these Mullahs are this Sufi music tradition will live on in this country. Mullahs have called these songs haram -- prohibited in Islam -- but nowhere in the Koran is it said that music is haram," she insists.

"I am sure this music tradition will live on forever. It has been going on for centuries. People love it. It is pure joy. And Sufis will live here. It was the Sufis who brought Islam here centuries ago, not the hardliners. Bangladesh is the land of Sufis."

sa/tw/lto

Taslima Nasreen: Relentless rebel reveling in polemics

Issued on: 13/11/2020 - 

Banished from her homeland with a bounty on her head, author Taslima Nasreen has been forced to live in exile for more than a quarter of a century -- but she refuses to bow to the religious fundamentalists that want her dead Sajjad HUSSAIN AFP/File

New Delhi (AFP)

Banished from her homeland with a bounty on her head, author Taslima Nasreen has been forced to live in exile for more than a quarter of a century -- but she refuses to bow to the religious fundamentalists that want her dead.

The fiery 58-year-old Bangladeshi, whose bestsellers include "A French Lover" and "Shodh" -- Getting Even -- warns the recent rise of conservative Islam and its dogmas threatens the modern world.

"In Muslim countries, fundamentalist organisations are getting more powerful -- be it Al Shabaab, Al Qaeda or Boko Haram," Nasreen tells AFP from her home in New Delhi where she has been living in exile since 2011.

"Even if you look at Europe, many Islamist fundamentalists are demanding sharia -- Islamic law -- in the name of multiculturalism."

This month tens of thousands took to the streets in Bangladesh and around the Muslim world protesting against France after President Emmanuel Macron said the nation would never renounce its laws permitting blasphemous caricatures.

Tensions have been high since a teacher was killed after showing his class an image of the Prophet Mohammed. Islam forbids such depictions.

Nasreen, who is an atheist, says she agrees with some of France's approach -- such as its controversial ban on Islamic full face veils in public.

"I agree with the ban. Face veils are very dangerous. You need to see who is sitting next to you, [they] could be a killer."

It is a debate she knows firsthand -- Bangladesh's Muslim hardliners were enraged by her decision to ditch the traditional Muslim dress including the burkha.

- Enraged fanatics -

Nasreen, a qualified doctor, rose to prominence in the 1980s with a series of articles condemning the religious and sexual oppression of women in some Asian countries.

Her subject matter became increasingly controversial -- she wrote about repressive Islamic practices and women's sexual desires, drawing the ire of radicals.

Enraged fanatics attacked bookstores selling her work in Dhaka in 1992 and the following year a 'fatwa' or an Islamic decree was issued against her in reaction to her novel "Lajja" (Shame) which depicts the persecution of a Hindu family by Muslims.

With a bounty on her head, Nasreen was forced to flee the country and spent the next few years in hiding -- first seeking sanctuary in Europe and then the United States before finally finding long term refuge in India.

She says Bangladesh has been transformed by hardliners, adding that other once moderate nations are at risk -- pointing to Turkey's shift from secularism as a recent example of dramatic societal shift.

"Whoever is critical of Islamic dogmas, they get killed or put behind bars," she explains.

Although India has been largely welcoming of the polemicist, Nasreen concedes religious intolerance has also been rising in what is the world's largest democracy.

"India was more liberal before. I liked India for that. But that has changed... now it is quite difficult, criticism is not tolerated easily.

"But not all people are extremists. If India was that bad I could not have lived here."

- 'They will kill me' -

She was vocal about female sexuality and rape culture long before the #MeToo movement hit the headlines.

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have come under scrutiny in recent years because of the prevalence of violent sexual attacks and the low conviction rates for such crimes.

"Men have to understand rape is not sex," she insists, recalling how she was sexually assaulted by a famous poet, who she thought was a friend.

The award-winning author, who sometimes goes by Taslima Nasrin, has written more than 40 books, which have been translated in some 30 languages.

One of the bright spots for her was when her memoir, 'My Girlhood', set against the backdrop of Bangladesh's Liberation War in 1971, was republished this year and earned rave reviews in international publications.

But Nasreen, who has a Swedish passport, knows she may never be able to return to her country of birth.

"I begged and begged when my father was on his death bed (in 2002) but they didn't allow me to see him for one last time. They have illegally prevented me from going back to my own country for 26 years.

"The current (Bangladeshi) government patronises fanatic Islamist organisations. Mosques and madrassas people have become so powerful. They will kill me but I will fight for my right to go back."

© 2020 AFP