Masks block 99.9% of large COVID-linked droplets: study

by Marlowe Hood 
DECEMBER 23, 2020

Large respiratory droplets are thought to be the main driver of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Illustration by Banksy

Face masks reduce the risk of spreading large COVID-linked droplets when speaking or coughing by up to 99.9 percent, according to a lab experiment with mechanical mannequins and human subjects, researchers said Wednesday.

A woman standing two meters (yards) from a coughing man without a mask will be exposed to 10,000 times more such droplets than if he were wearing one, even if he is only 50 centimeters away, they reported in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

"There is no more doubt whatsoever that face masks can dramatically reduce the dispersion of potentially virus-laden droplets," senior author Ignazio Maria Viola, an expert in applied fluid dynamics at the University of Edinburgh's School of Engineering, told AFP.

Large respiratory droplets—which act like projectiles before being pulled toward the ground by gravity—are thought to be the main driver of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, he noted.

Smaller ones, sometimes called aerosol droplets, can remain suspended in the air for longer periods.

"We continuously exhale a whole range of droplets, from micro-scale to millimeter-scale," Maria Viola said by phone.

"Some of the droplets will drop faster than others" depending on temperature, humidity and especially air speed, he said.

The study focused on particles larger than 170 microns in diameter—roughly two to four times the width of a human hair.

Aerosol particles, which tend to follow currents in the air, are generally described as smaller than 20 or 30 microns.

Intermediate size droplets can behave either way, the study found.

Universal mask wearing

"If you wear a mask, you are mitigating the virus transmission by an order of magnitude—10 times less," Maria Viola said.

"In our study, for the larger droplets we measure, we're talking about 99.9 percent less."

According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle, Washington, 55,000 lives could be saved in the United States over the next four months if a policy of universal mask use were adopted.

The Institute's modellers—who accurately predicted in mid-July that COVID-19 deaths in the US would top 224,000 by November 1—project 561,000 deaths on current trends by April 1, 2021.

Universal mask-wearing would reduce the global death toll by 400,000 over the same period, from 2.9 million to 2.5 million, they calculate. To date, the virus has claimed about 1.7 million lives.

Earlier this month, the World Health Organization (WHO) updated its COVID-19 guidance on masks to recommend they be worn indoors in the presence of other people if ventilation is inadequate.

The guidelines apply especially in areas of known or suspected community transmission.

Masks serve primarily to reduce the emissions of virus-laden droplets by people when they cough, sneeze, sing, talk or simply breathe, but they can also help prevent the inhalation of droplets by the person wearing them.

"Cloth masks not only effectively block most large droplets—20-30 microns and larger—but they can also block the exhalation of fine droplets and particles, also often referred to as aerosols," according to the CDC.

Explore further  Masks not enough to stop COVID-19's spread without distancing: study

More information: Lucia Bandiera et al. Face coverings and respiratory tract droplet dispersion, Royal Society Open Science (2020). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.201663

Journal information: Royal Society Open Science

Changes caused by worsening wildfires in California forests will last centuries

by Joseph Serna

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The single-engine Cessna was buzzing 1,000 feet above a Northern California burn scar as University of California, Berkeley scientist Scott Stephens shifted excitedly in his seat and peered out the window for a better view.

Down below, heavy machinery kicked up clouds of dust as commercial loggers attempted to salvage whatever timber they could, while a vast canopy of green, gold and brown rolled beneath the aircraft. Occasionally, this brilliant autumn quilt would be marred by with burn patches.

"That's fantastic, just fantastic," Stephens exclaimed. "It's a real mosaic!"

But as the flight continued, the fall colors gave way to a desolate sea of gray and black. Trees now looked like charred toothpicks jutting from an ash pile.

That was the path, Stephens explained, that the North Complex fire took on Sept. 8 into Berry Creek, a rural Butte County hamlet some nine miles north of Oroville dam.

As California takes stock of its worst wildfire season on record, experts say that increasingly large and devastating fires have already altered the state's iconic forests for centuries to come. Exacerbated by a warming climate and decades of aggressive fire suppression efforts—which left large areas of wilderness overgrown—these fires will continue to alter the landscape and, in some cases, will leave it more susceptible to wildfire than ever before, they say. In other cases, the flames were likely to restore patches of wildland to their original state.

California's diverse ecosystem— its lush coastal mountain ranges in the north; its flat, fertile valleys down its middle; and its snow-capped spine of the Sierra casting a rain shadow over the sere Mojave desert—have evolved over eons. That evolution has not stopped however, and today it's being influenced greatly by drought, fire and increasing temperatures, experts say.

During the summer, hundreds of fire-adapted Sequoias were destroyed in the Sierra along with conifers, with rangers speculating many of the trees may never return. In Big Basin Redwoods State Park west of San Jose, ecologists wonder about the long-term prospects for the forest behemoths as the cool, foggy environment they thrive in warms and dries.

In the Los Padres National Forest, years of repeated fires have already changed the vegetation covering the hillsides, increasing the fire risks for residents around them.

And now, after the North Complex fire, the area around Berry Creek can be added to that list, said Ryan Bauer, who leads the hazardous fuels and prescribed fire program for the Plumas National Forest.

"This was to the point that as you drive through that forest, there aren't even large logs left on the ground, it pretty much cleaned up the surface fuels and left a big bed of ash with sticks sticking out of it," Bauer said. "It'll repair itself, nature is strikingly resilient, but it's certainly not going to come back a forest."

The North Complex fire began on Aug. 17 as separate fires that moved toward one another uneventfully until the morning of Sept. 8 when they merged and jumped a scenic river and sped out of the national forest and into rural Butte County. By the time the fire was fully contained Dec. 3, it had burned 318,935 acres, killed 16 people and damaged or destroyed 2,455 buildings, many of them homes.

The roar of such fires has been compared to a jet engine, or oncoming freight train. Bauer said those comparisons don't quite fit.

"I think of it more as an avalanche of fire," he said. "It's not just rolling down the hill, it's compounding itself and making itself worse and more powerful as it goes, starting more fires and then this cloud of embers ahead of it lighting additional fires."

In the early and late parts of the fire, it burned moderately and slowly mostly to the north and east, creating that "mosaic" of three- to five-acre patches of char that Stephens was so excited about.

The California spotted owl appreciates the variety of a quasi-burned forest, where it can prey on small animals that are drawn to the new vegetation for food, Stephens said. Fully developed trees like mosaic burns too, because they reduce competition for resources and burn away dead and dying ground litter that flames climb to reach the treetops.

But that type of burn was only about 25% of the fire's entire footprint, officials said.

Most of the North Complex fire—like the other large blazes that have blackened more than 4 million acres in California this year—burned too much area too intensely to be seen as an overall benefit for California's larger forest ecology, he said.

"The problem is it's not small patches of forest, it's large continuous patches that have burned under high severity, completely out of scale with what is desired," Stephens said.

The first vegetation to return to the extremely burned areas will be grass and invasive shrub species like French broom and Scotch broom, which, despite their bright yellow flowers, are a threat to nearby residents because of how hot they burn and how close they grow together, making them a potential link to a wildfire transforming into an urban conflagration.

"You're not going to want to leave it around," said David Derby, forester for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection's Butte unit. "That's what we're having around Paradise. It's kind of green and pretty, but it is thick and flammable and it's scary if it catches on fire."

With time, some oak trees will regrow from their root systems, Derby said, but huge areas of conifers will not, as they rely on their foliage and cones to propagate and the fire was too intense for any of it to survive. The area was so thick with conifers only because of a century of fire-suppression anyway, so burning an entire stand of them and giving oaks a leg up could actually restore the area to its pre-human settlement appearance, Derby said.

"It could be hundreds of years in some places," Derby said. "You'll have a big opening and things will start seeding from the edges and eventually it will fill in."

In the near term, there are lessons from both the North Complex fire and Paradise in 2018 that could be applied to the lands around Berry Creek and Feather Falls, among other areas, to ensure that if and when fire returns, it's less severe, experts say.

Along the edges of the fire's impressive Sept. 8 run, what the fire didn't destroy was proof that the fuel treatments—including removing dead fuel from the ground and trimming the lower third of tall trees—slowed the fire and saved homes, officials said.

In Quincy, the Plumas County seat, years of work by federal foresters and the local fire safe council made fighting the fire there possible, Bauer said.

"If those treatments hadn't been completed, we would've lost a number of homes," Bauer said. "None of them worked 100%, but with the combination of several of them, we were able to stop the fire spread in there."

Berry Creek residents had been scrambling to accomplish similar projects since the Camp fire but were unable to find the support. Wind-driven fires are virtually impossible to stop because of their speed and unpredictability, firefighters say, but they can pose less of a threat to a community if a healthy, well-managed forest slows their approach.

That was a lesson learned the hard way in Paradise, which had been visited by fire only 10 years earlier.

The Camp fire exploded, in part, because logs and dead trees from the 2008 Humboldt fire were left to dry and rot where they died and fell, providing a jackpot of fuel to sustain a fire as it burns through the quick-burning shrubs and grass that are first to return, officials said.

Foresters should make sure as many trees around these rural communities are salvaged as possible, Bauer and Derby said, with that responsibility falling to various federal, state and local agencies depending on the location.

"Even with the major increase in wildfires that climate change models are predicting for us, there is a way that we can see forests persist in California into the future," Bauer said. "It tells me we know how to fix the problem, and we have the tools. It's just the scale is so staggeringly large ... we'll just see if we can be effective at the scale we want to be effective at if we want to stay in California's forests."


Explore further  Better weather won't keep California from grim fire landmark

(c)2020 the Los Angeles Times
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Capturing 40 years of climate change for an endangered

 Montana prairie

by Public Library of Science

DECEMBER 23, 2020

The intermountain bunchgrass prairie at the National Bison Range, 

Montana, USA at one of the study areas. Credit: Gary Belovsky

Over 40 years of monitoring, an endangered bunchgrass prairie became hotter, drier and more susceptible to fire annually—but dramatic seasonal changes (not annual climate trends) seem to be driving the biggest changes in plant production, composition, and summer senescence. Gary Belovsky and Jennifer Slade of The University of Notre Dame, Indiana, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on December 23.

Intermountain bunchgrass prairie is one of North America's most endangered ecosystems, now covering less than 1 percent of the area it once did. Over the past century, bunchgrass prairies have become warmer and drier, and human-driven climate change is expected to continue that trend, with potential impacts on bunchgrass ecosystems. However, bunchgrass is often overlooked in studies of grasslands.

To better understand the effects of climate change on bunchgrass prairies, Belovsky and Slade studied the National Bison Range, a bunchgrass prairie in Montana, for 40 years. They made repeated observations of plant growth and production, abundances of different plant species, and availability of nitrogen (an important nutrient for plants), generating a comprehensive timeline of ecosystem changes.

Over the course of the study, annual temperatures rose and precipitation declined in the prairie, making it more susceptible to fire. Surprisingly, the researchers found that annual aboveground primary production—the amount of plant material produced every year—rose by 110 percent, associated with increased precipitation and cooler temperatures during the important growth period of late May through June. However, this was associated with a change in plant composition, with a 108 percent increase in invasive species, more drought-tolerant species being favored overall, and declines in dicot non-grass plants (decreasing by 65 percent) over the 40-year study period.

The researchers also found that other ecosystem changes followed seasonal climate trends, instead of annual trends. For instance, summer temperatures were higher than might be expected from annual trends, boosting summer senescence— the yearly "browning" of green plant material.

These findings highlight the importance of considering local and seasonal changes when forecasting the effects of climate change on a given ecosystem. The authors report that intermountain bunchgrass prairie could be morphing into a different type of grassland that may be previously unknown.

Dr. Belovsky adds: "Forecasting climate change effects on plant production based on expected average annual increased temperature and decreased precipitation may not be appropriate, because seasonal climate changes may be more important and may not follow average annual expectations."

Explore further

Elevated carbon dioxide suppresses dominant plant species in a mixed-grass prairie

More information: Belovsky GE, Slade JB (2020) Climate change and primary production: Forty years in a bunchgrass prairie. PLoS ONE 15(12): e0243496. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243496

Journal information: PLoS ONE

Provided by Public Library of Science

Trump EPA overhaul of lead pipe regulations allows toxic plumbing to stay in the ground in Chicago, other cities

by Michael Hawthorne DECEMBER 23, 2020

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Chicago has more lead water pipes than any other American city, yet federal regulations unveiled this week by the Trump administration likely won't require anything new to prevent homeowners and renters from ingesting the brain-damaging metal.

Physicians and scientists say that unless water drawn from household faucets is properly filtered, the only way to keep the lead out in older cities like Chicago is by replacing pipes connecting homes and small apartment buildings to municipal water supplies.

Trump appointees rejected the expert advice, choosing instead to tinker with regulations adopted three decades ago that are widely seen as inadequate.

Andrew Wheeler, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator, called the changes a dramatic improvement of what is known as the Lead and Copper Rule. But the fine print of the new regulations show the Trump EPA effectively delayed lead pipe replacements for up to three decades and, in some cases, allowed cities to keep toxic pipes in the ground indefinitely.

"They nibbled around the edges but did not fundamentally fix the problem," said Erik Olson, an attorney with the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council who unsuccessfully sued for changes in federal regulations during the 1990s. "That's really disappointing and amounts to a missed opportunity."

Ingesting tiny concentrations of lead can permanently damage the developing brains of children and contribute to heart disease, kidney failure and other health problems later in life. In 2018, researchers estimated more than 400,000 deaths a year in the U.S. are linked to lead exposure.

Both the EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded years ago there is no safe level of exposure to lead. More recently, EPA scientists and academic researchers have discovered the toxic metal can leach into drinking water if faucets haven't been used for a few hours or if service lines have been jostled by street work.

The new regulations deprive the EPA of a bigger stick to force Chicago and other cities to begin tackling the lingering threat to public health, which became the subject of national attention after high levels of lead began flowing out of household taps in Flint, Michigan.

Flint highlighted the disastrous consequences of failing to properly maintain a public water system. Chicago is the top example of a broader problem facing scores of U.S. cities that spent more than a century installing lead pipes to deliver drinking water.

Until Mayor Lori Lightfoot took office, Chicago leaders denied they had a problem, even though the city required new homes to be hooked up to lead service lines until the day Congress banned them in 1986.

In September, Lightfoot aides announced the city would begin replacing toxic pipes next year. Initial work will be modest compared with the scope of the dangers; only 750 of the roughly 400,000 lead service lines connecting homes to street mains are expected to be dug up in 2021, according to slides prepared by the Chicago Department of Water Management.

There still is no federal standard for the amount of lead allowable in tap water from individual homes. Even under the Trump EPA regulations, utilities are considered to be in compliance as long as 90% of the homes tested have lead levels below 15 parts per billion, a standard that isn't based on scientific evidence of dangers posed by the toxic metal.

The new rules add another threshold that requires utilities to begin drafting plans for service line replacements if lead levels in 90 per of homes sampled exceed 10 ppb. Utilities also will be required to provide results more promptly to homes that exceed the EPA's new "trigger level."

Wheeler said the revamped rule, which has been in the works since 2010, "uses science and best practices to correct shortcomings of the previous rule."

"This historic action strengthens every aspect of the Lead and Copper Rule and will help accelerate reductions of lead in drinking water and better protect our children and communities," Wheeler said during an online news conference.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has documented lasting cognition problems in children exposed to lead concentrations of just 5 ppb.

Another shortcoming of the Trump rules: The administration retained the previous requirement that only 50 samples need to be collected every three years in Chicago and other big cities. The Tribune reported in 2016 that most of the homes sampled in Chicago are owned by water department employees or retirees living on the Far Northwest and Far Southwest sides, where cases of lead poisoning are rare.

Only two of the federally required samples drawn in Chicago during 2018 exceeded the Trump EPA's new threshold of 10 ppb, according to state records.

By contrast, results from the city's free testing kits show nearly 1,300 homes across Chicago had lead levels exceeding 10 ppb last year. Lead-contaminated water has been found in at least one home in all 77 community areas since the water department began offering the testing kit in 2016.

Explore further EPA proposes rewrite of rules on lead contamination in water

©2020 the Chicago Tribune
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

THIRD WORLD USA

Pandemic sends US single mothers into poverty

When the coronavirus pandemic shuttered restaurants in California, Aleida Ramirez lost her job as a waitress, plunging her—along with many other single mothers—into a vicious cycle of poverty, unpaid bills and reliance on food banks.

The pandemic has been particularly hard on women who work in the service sector, which has been crippled by the economic crisis.

And more than 12 million Americans who are unemployed or without income face losing their benefits the day after Christmas, when the aid package passed by Congress in the spring expires—barring a deal in high-stakes talks this weekend.

Ramirez had to quit her second job as a delivery driver for food service Instacart in order to take care of her 11-year-old daughter and her 21-year-old nephew, who has autism, when her husband was arrested in July for domestic violence.

Since October, she has not paid rent on her apartment in a housing complex in Concord, northeast of San Francisco.

"I was like, 'I can't—I have to choose what do I cover: is it food or rent?'" she said.

To support her household, she received meal tickets from her daughter's school, as well as vouchers from a local church that she can redeem at a corner store.

In order to pay for internet service—an essential tool for her daughter's remote classes—Ramirez counts on her nephew's salary from a part-time job at McDonald's. She also regularly skips meals.

Ramirez said she felt "guilty" for her situation: "I felt that I was being like a bad mom, I was irresponsible."

But then she realized she wasn't alone. Ramirez got together with neighbors and they organized to negotiate with landlords.

"This is all of us in the same boat, many of us single moms," she said.

Depression

On the other side of the country, in Washington, Maria Lara is worried she will soon be evicted from her shabby apartment after falling far behind on her rent. A nationwide moratorium on evictions is set to end after Christmas.

Lara, who is Salvadoran and has a young daughter, worked as a hotel housekeeper before the pandemic. She found work as a laborer on construction sites but only works "two, three days, sometimes four, every two weeks."

Her building, meantime, is infested with mice that get stuck in sticky traps.

"We live with (the mice) because when we tell the owner that it smells bad, that there are animals, they say they will come to fumigate—they say they came, but they don't come," said Lara.

Further north, in New York, Marisol Gonzales lost her job in the spring when the pandemic struck Corona—the neighborhood in the city's Queens borough where she lived—and then her apartment, which cost her $2,200 per month, in October.

The 47-year-old massage therapist from El Salvador found a room in a shared apartment; she lives there with her 20-year-old daughter. Small jobs allow her to pay for the room ($850), the electric bills and her subway card. She goes once a month to a food bank.

But for the past month, she has faced an even heavier toll from the pandemic: her daughter was hospitalized for depression. A student, she couldn't stand the confinement and gradually withdrew into herself until she stopped her studies.

"I pray to God that she will recover soon so that she can return home," said Gonzales.


Explore further  The coronavirus pandemic is making the US housing crisis even worse

© 2020 AFP

Remarkable new species of snake found hidden in a biodiversity collection

by University of Kansas

Jeff Weinell, a KU graduate research assistant at the Biodiversity Institute, is lead author of a paper describing Waray Dwarf Burrowing Snake as both a new genus and a new species, in the peer-reviewed journal Copeia. Credit: University of Kansas

To be fair, the newly described Waray Dwarf Burrowing Snake (Levitonius mirus) is pretty great at hiding.

In its native habitat, Samar and Leyte islands in the Philippines, the snake spends most of its time burrowing underground, usually surfacing only after heavy rains in much the same way earthworms tend to wash up on suburban sidewalks after a downpour.

So, it may not be shocking that when examples of the Waray Dwarf Burrowing Snake were collected in 2006 and 2007, they were misidentified in the field—nobody had seen them before. The specimens spent years preserved in the collections of the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum, overlooked by researchers who were unaware they possessed an entirely new genus of snake, even after further examples were found in 2014.

But that changed once Jeff Weinell, a KU graduate research assistant at the Biodiversity Institute, took a closer look at the specimens' genetics using molecular analysis, then sent them to collaborators at the University of Florida for CT scanning. Now, he's the lead author on a paper describing the snake as both a new genus, and a new species, in the peer-reviewed journal Copeia.

"I was initially interested in studying the group of snakes that I thought it belonged to—or that other people thought it belonged to," Weinell said. "This is when I first started my Ph.D. at KU. I was interested in collecting data on a lot of different snakes and finding out what I actually wanted to research. I knew this other group of small, burrowing snakes called Pseudorabdion—there are quite a few species in the Philippines—and I was interested in understanding the relationships among those snakes. So, I made a list of all the specimens we had in the museum of that group, and I started sequencing DNA for the tissues that were available."

As soon as Weinell got the molecular data back, he realized the sample from the subterranean snake didn't fall within Pseudorabdion. But pinpointing where the snake should be classified wasn't a simple task: The Philippine archipelago is an exceptionally biodiverse region that includes at least 112 species of land snakes from 41 genera and 12 families.

The Waray Dwarf Burrowing Snake was collected on the Philippine islands of Samar and Leyte. Credit: Weinell, et al.

"It was supposed to be closely related, but it was actually related to this entirely different family of snakes," he said. "That led me to look at it in more detail, and I realized that there were actually some features that were quite different from what it was initially identified as."


Working with Rafe Brown, professor of ecology & evolutionary biology and curator-in-charge of the KU Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum, Weinell took a closer look at the snake's morphology, paying special attention to the scales on the body, which can be used to differentiate species.

He then sent one of the specimens to the University of Florida for CT scanning to get a more precise look at the internal anatomy of the mysterious Philippine snake. The CT images turned out to be surprising.

"The snake has among the fewest number of vertebrae of any snake species in the world, which is likely the result of miniaturization and an adaptation for spending most of its life underground," Weinell said.

Finally, the KU graduate research assistant and his colleagues were able to determine the Waray Dwarf Burrowing Snake mirus was a new "miniaturized genus" and species of snake. Now, for the first time, Weinell has had the chance to bestow the snake with its scientific name, Levitonius mirus.

"It's actually named for Alan Leviton, who is a researcher at the California Academy of Sciences, and he had spent decades basically studying snakes in the Philippines in the '60s, '70s, '80s and then all the way up to now," Weinell said. "So, that's sort of an honorific genus name for him. Then, 'mirus' is Latin for unexpected. That's referencing the unexpected nature of this discovery—getting the DNA sequences back and then wondering what was going on."

Three example specimens of Waray Dwarf Burrowing Snake

 (Levitonius mirus). Credit: Weinell, et al.

In addition to Brown, Weinell's co-authors on the new paper are Daniel Paluh of the University of Florida and Cameron Siler of the University of Oklahoma. Brown said the description of Levitonius mirus highlights the value of preserving collections of biodiversity in research institutions and universities.

"In this case, the trained 'expert field biologists' misidentified specimens—and we did so repeatedly, over years—failing to recognize the significance of our finds, which were preserved and assumed to be somewhat unremarkable, nondescript juveniles of common snakes," Brown said. "This happens a lot in the real world of biodiversity discovery. It was only much later, when the next generation of scientists came along and had the time and access to accumulated numbers of specimens, and when the right people, like Jeff, who asked the right questions and who had the right tools and expertise, like Dan, came along and took a fresh look, that we were able to identify this snake correctly. It's a good thing we have biodiversity repositories and take our specimen-care oaths seriously."

According to Marites Bonachita-Sanguila, a biologist at the Biodiversity Informatics and Research Center at Father Saturnino Urios University, located in the southern Philippines, the snake discovery "tells us that there is still so much more to learn about reptile biodiversity of the southern Philippines by focusing intently on species-preferred microhabitats."

"The pioneering Philippine herpetological work of Walter Brown and Angel Alcala from the 1960s to the 1990s taught biologists the important lesson of focusing on species' very specific microhabitat preferences," Bonachita-Sanguila said. "Even so, biologists have really missed many important species occurrences, such as this, because .... well, simply because we did not know basic clues about where to find them. In the case of this discovery, the information that biologists lacked was that we should dig for them when we survey forests. So simple. How did we miss that? All this time, we were literally walking on top of them as we surveyed the forests of Samar and Leyte. Next time, bring a shovel."

She added that habitat loss as a result of human-mediated land use (such as conversion of forested habitats for agriculture to produce food for people) is a prevailing issue in Philippine society today.

"This new information, and what we will learn more in future studies of this remarkable little creature, would inform planning for conservation action, in the strong need for initiatives to conserve Philippine endemic species—even ones we seldom get to see," Bonachita-Sanguila said. "We need effective land-use management strategies, not only for the conservation of celebrated Philippine species like eagles and tarsiers, but for lesser-known, inconspicuous species and their very specific habitats—in this case, forest-floor soil, because it's the only home they have."


Explore further The discovery of five new species of vine snakes in India

More information: Copeia (2020). DOI: 10.1643/CH2020110

Journal information: Copeia


Provided by University of Kansas

Ancient DNA retells story of Caribbean's first people, with a few plot twists

by Natalie Van Hoose, Florida Museum of Natural History 

DECEMBER 23, 2020

Archaeological research and ancient DNA technology can work hand in hand to illuminate past history. This vessel, made between AD 1200-1500 in present-day Dominican Republic, shows a frog figure, associated with the goddess of fertility in Taino culture. 

Credit: Kristen Grace/Florida Museum

The history of the Caribbean's original islanders comes into sharper focus in a new Nature study that combines decades of archaeological work with advancements in genetic technology.

An international team led by Harvard Medical School's David Reich analyzed the genomes of 263 individuals in the largest study of ancient human DNA in the Americas to date. The genetics trace two major migratory waves in the Caribbean by two distinct groups, thousands of years apart, revealing an archipelago settled by highly mobile people, with distant relatives often living on different islands.

Reich's lab also developed a new genetic technique for estimating past population size, showing the number of people living in the Caribbean when Europeans arrived was far smaller than previously thought—likely in the tens of thousands, rather than the million or more reported by Columbus and his successors.

For archaeologist William Keegan, whose work in the Caribbean spans more than 40 years, ancient DNA offers a powerful new tool to help resolve longstanding debates, confirm hypotheses and spotlight remaining mysteries.

This "moves our understanding of the Caribbean forward dramatically in one fell swoop," said Keegan, curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History and co-senior author of the study. "The methods David's team developed helped address questions I didn't even know we could address."

Archaeologists often rely on the remnants of domestic life—pottery, tools, bone and shell discards—to piece together the past. Now, technological breakthroughs in the study of ancient DNA are shedding new light on the movement of animals and humans, particularly in the Caribbean where each island can be a unique microcosm of life.

While the heat and humidity of the tropics can quickly break down organic matter, the human body contains a lockbox of genetic material: a small, unusually dense part of the bone protecting the inner ear. Primarily using this structure, researchers extracted and analyzed DNA from 174 people who lived in the Caribbean and Venezuela between 400 and 3,100 years ago, combining the data with 89 previously sequenced individuals.

The team, which includes Caribbean-based scholars, received permission to carry out the genetic analysis from local governments and cultural institutions that acted as caretakers for the human remains. The authors also engaged representatives of Caribbean Indigenous communities in a discussion of their findings.

The genetic evidence offers new insights into the peopling of the Caribbean. The islands' first inhabitants, a group of stone tool-users, boated to Cuba about 6,000 years ago, gradually expanding eastward to other islands during the region's Archaic Age. Where they came from remains unclear—while they are more closely related to Central and South Americans than to North Americans, their genetics do not match any particular Indigenous group. However, similar artifacts found in Belize and Cuba may suggest a Central American origin, Keegan said.

About 2,500-3,000 years ago, farmers and potters related to the Arawak-speakers of northeast South America established a second pathway into the Caribbean. Using the fingers of South America's Orinoco River Basin like highways, they travelled from the interior to coastal Venezuela and pushed north into the Caribbean Sea, settling Puerto Rico and eventually moving westward. Their arrival ushered in the region's Ceramic Age, marked by agriculture and the widespread production and use of pottery.

Over time, nearly all genetic traces of Archaic Age people vanished, except for a holdout community in western Cuba that persisted as late as European arrival. Intermarriage between the two groups was rare, with only three individuals in the study showing mixed ancestry.

Many present-day Cubans, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans are the descendants of Ceramic Age people, as well as European immigrants and enslaved Africans. But researchers noted only marginal evidence of Archaic Age ancestry in modern individuals.

Some archaeologists pointed to dramatic shifts in Caribbean pottery styles as evidence of new migrations. But genetics show all of the styles were created by one group of people over time. These effigy vessels belong to the Saladoid pottery type, ornate and difficult to shape. 

Credit: Corinne Hofman and Menno Hoogland

"That's a big mystery," Keegan said. "For Cuba, it's especially curious that we don't see more Archaic ancestry."

During the Ceramic Age, Caribbean pottery underwent at least five marked shifts in style over 2,000 years. Ornate red pottery decorated with white painted designs gave way to simple, buff-colored vessels, while other pots were punctuated with tiny dots and incisions or bore sculpted animal faces that likely doubled as handles. Some archaeologists pointed to these transitions as evidence for new migrations to the islands. But DNA tells a different story, suggesting all of the styles were developed by descendants of the people who arrived in the Caribbean 2,500-3,000 years ago, though they may have interacted with and took inspiration from outsiders.

"That was a question we might not have known to ask had we not had an archaeological expert on our team," said co-first author Kendra Sirak, a postdoctoral fellow in the Reich Lab. "We document this remarkable genetic continuity across changes in ceramic style. We talk about 'pots vs. people,' and to our knowledge, it's just pots."

Highlighting the region's interconnectivity, a study of male X chromosomes uncovered 19 pairs of "genetic cousins" living on different islands—people who share the same amount of DNA as biological cousins but may be separated by generations. In the most striking example, one man was buried in the Bahamas while his relative was laid to rest about 600 miles away in the Dominican Republic.

"Showing relationships across different islands is really an amazing step forward," said Keegan, who added that shifting winds and currents can make passage between islands difficult. "I was really surprised to see these cousin pairings between islands."

Uncovering such a high proportion of genetic cousins in a sample of fewer than 100 men is another indicator that the region's total population size was small, said Reich, professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard.

"When you sample two modern individuals, you don't often find that they're close relatives," he said. "Here, we're finding relatives all over the place."

A technique developed by study co-author Harald Ringbauer, a postdoctoral fellow in the Reich Lab, used shared segments of DNA to estimate past population size, a method that could also be applied to future studies of ancient people. Ringbauer's technique showed about 10,000 to 50,000 people were living on two of the Caribbean's largest islands, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, shortly before European arrival. This falls far short of the million inhabitants Columbus described to his patrons, likely to impress them, Keegan said.

Later, 16th-century historian Bartolomé de las Casas claimed the region had been home to 3 million people before being decimated by European enslavement and disease. While this, too, was an exaggeration, the number of people who died as a result of colonization remains an atrocity, Reich said.

"This was a systematic program of cultural erasure. The fact that the number was not 1 million or millions of people, but rather tens of thousands, does not make that erasure any less significant," he said.

For Keegan, collaborating with geneticists gave him the ability to prove some hypotheses he had argued for years—while upending others.

"At this point, I don't care if I'm wrong or right," he said. "It's just exciting to have a firmer basis for reevaluating how we look at the past in the Caribbean. One of the most significant outcomes of this study is that it demonstrates just how important culture is in understanding human societies. Genes may be discrete, measurable units, but the human genome is culturally created."

Explore further

Study puts the 'Carib' in 'Caribbean,' boosting credibility of Columbus' cannibal claims

More information: A genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean, Nature (2020). 

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-03053-2 , www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03053-2

Journal information: Nature

Provided by Florida Museum of Natural History

The long history of how Jesus came to resemble a white European

Painting depicting transfiguration of Jesus, a story in the New Testament when Jesus becomes radiant upon a mountain. Artist Raphael /Collections Hallwyl Museum, CC BY-SA

The portrayal of Jesus as a white, European man has come under renewed scrutiny during this period of introspection over the legacy of racism in society.

As protesters called for the removal of Confederate statues in the U.S., activist Shaun King went further, suggesting that murals and artwork depicting “white Jesus” should “come down.”

His concerns about the depiction of Christ and how it is used to uphold notions of white supremacy are not isolated. Prominent scholars and the archbishop of Canterbury have called to reconsider Jesus’ portrayal as a white man.

As a European Renaissance art historian, I study the evolving image of Jesus Christ from A.D. 1350 to 1600. Some of the best-known depictions of Christ, from Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” to Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel, were produced during this period.

But the all-time most-reproduced image of Jesus comes from another period. It is Warner Sallman’s light-eyed, light-haired “Head of Christ” from 1940. Sallman, a former commercial artist who created art for advertising campaigns, successfully marketed this picture worldwide

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Sallman’s ‘Head of Christ’

Through Sallman’s partnerships with two Christian publishing companies, one Protestant and one Catholic, the Head of Christ came to be included on everything from prayer cards to stained glass, faux oil paintings, calendars, hymnals and night lights.

Sallman’s painting culminates a long tradition of white Europeans creating and disseminating pictures of Christ made in their own image.
In search of the holy face

The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee, a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime, and while the Old Testament Kings Saul and David are explicitly called tall and handsome in the Bible, there is little indication of Jesus’ appearance in the Old or New Testaments.  

  

‘The Good Shepherd.’ Joseph Wilpert

Even these texts are contradictory: The Old Testament prophet Isaiah reads that the coming savior “had no beauty or majesty,” while the Book of Psalms claims he was “fairer than the children of men,” the word “fair” referring to physical beauty.

The earliest images of Jesus Christ emerged in the first through third centuries A.D., amidst concerns about idolatry. They were less about capturing the actual appearance of Christ than about clarifying his role as a ruler or as a savior.

To clearly indicate these roles, early Christian artists often relied on syncretism, meaning they combined visual formats from other cultures.

Probably the most popular syncretic image is Christ as the Good Shepherd, a beardless, youthful figure based on pagan representations of Orpheus, Hermes and Apollo.

In other common depictions, Christ wears the toga or other attributes of the emperor. The theologian Richard Viladesau argues that the mature bearded Christ, with long hair in the “Syrian” style, combines characteristics of the Greek god Zeus and the Old Testament figure Samson, among others.

Christ as self-portraitist

The first portraits of Christ, in the sense of authoritative likenesses, were believed to be self-portraits: the miraculous “image not made by human hands,” or acheiropoietos.

Acheiropoietos. Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow

This belief originated in the seventh century A.D., based on a legend that Christ healed King Abgar of Edessa in modern-day Urfa, Turkey, through a miraculous image of his face, now known as the Mandylion.

A similar legend adopted by Western Christianity between the 11th and 14th centuries recounts how, before his death by crucifixion, Christ left an impression of his face on the veil of Saint Veronica, an image known as the volto santo, or “Holy Face.”

Christ crowned with thorns.

Artist Antonello da Messina. The Friedsam Collection, Bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931, Metropolitan Museum, New York

These two images, along with other similar relics, have formed the basis of iconic traditions about the “true image” of Christ.

From the perspective of art history, these artifacts reinforced an already standardized image of a bearded Christ with shoulder-length, dark hair.

In the Renaissance, European artists began to combine the icon and the portrait, making Christ in their own likeness. This happened for a variety of reasons, from identifying with the human suffering of Christ to commenting on one’s own creative power.

Albrecht Dürer. Albrecht Dürer/Alte Pinakothek Collections

The 15th-century Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, for example, painted small pictures of the suffering Christ formatted exactly like his portraits of regular people, with the subject positioned between a fictive parapet and a plain black background and signed “Antonello da Messina painted me.”

The 16th-century German artist Albrecht Dürer blurred the line between the holy face and his own image in a famous self-portrait of 1500. In this, he posed frontally like an icon, with his beard and luxuriant shoulder-length hair recalling Christ’s. The “AD” monogram could stand equally for “Albrecht Dürer” or “Anno Domini” – “in the year of our Lord.”
In whose image?

This phenomenon was not restricted to Europe: There are 16th- and 17th-century pictures of Jesus with, for example, Ethiopian and Indian features.

In Europe, however, the image of a light-skinned European Christ began to influence other parts of the world through European trade and colonization.

‘Adoration of the Magi.’ Artist Andrea Mantegna. The J. Paul Getty Museum

The Italian painter Andrea Mantegna’s “Adoration of the Magi” from A.D. 1505 features three distinct magi, who, according to one contemporary tradition, came from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. They present expensive objects of porcelain, agate and brass that would have been prized imports from China and the Persian and Ottoman empires.

But Jesus’ light skin and blues eyes suggest that he is not Middle Eastern but European-born. And the faux-Hebrew script embroidered on Mary’s cuffs and hemline belie a complicated relationship to the Judaism of the Holy Family.

In Mantegna’s Italy, anti-Semitic myths were already prevalent among the majority Christian population, with Jewish people often segregated to their own quarters of major cities.

Artists tried to distance Jesus and his parents from their Jewishness. Even seemingly small attributes like pierced ears – earrings were associated with Jewish women, their removal with a conversion to Christianity – could represent a transition toward the Christianity represented by Jesus.

Much later, anti-Semitic forces in Europe including the Nazis would attempt to divorce Jesus totally from his Judaism in favor of an Aryan stereotype.
White Jesus abroad

As Europeans colonized increasingly farther-flung lands, they brought a European Jesus with them. Jesuit missionaries established painting schools that taught new converts Christian art in a European mode.

A small altarpiece made in the school of Giovanni Niccolò, the Italian Jesuit who founded the “Seminary of Painters” in Kumamoto, Japan, around 1590, combines a traditional Japanese gilt and mother-of-pearl shrine with a painting of a distinctly white, European Madonna and Child

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Nicolas Correa’s ‘The Mystic Betrothal of Saint Rose of Lima.’ Museo Nacional de Arte

In colonial Latin America – called “New Spain” by European colonists – images of a white Jesus reinforced a caste system where white, Christian Europeans occupied the top tier, while those with darker skin from perceived intermixing with native populations ranked considerably lower.

Artist Nicolas Correa’s 1695 painting of Saint Rose of Lima, the first Catholic saint born in “New Spain,” shows her metaphorical marriage to a blond, light-skinned Christ.
Legacies of likeness

Scholar Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey argue that in the centuries after European colonization of the Americas, the image of a white Christ associated him with the logic of empire and could be used to justify the oppression of Native and African Americans.

In a multiracial but unequal America, there was a disproportionate representation of a white Jesus in the media. It wasn’t only Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ that was depicted widely; a large proportion of actors who have played Jesus on television and film have been white with blue eyes.

Pictures of Jesus historically have served many purposes, from symbolically presenting his power to depicting his actual likeness. But representation matters, and viewers need to understand the complicated history of the images of Christ they consume.

AUTHOR

Anna Swartwood House
Assistant Professor of Art History, University of South Carolina

July 17, 2020 

'Explosion of peace’: Trump administration attempts to lure Indonesia into recognizing Israel with $2bn in aid
23 Dec, 2020 
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President Donald Trump is rushing to ‘Make Israel Great Again’ in his last days in office, dangling as much as $2 billion in aid in front of Indonesia if the majority-Muslim nation just recognizes the country.

The US International Development Finance Corporation has revealed it is willing to throw an extra $1 or $2 billion in aid at Indonesia if the world’s largest Muslim country follows in the footsteps of Morocco and the United Arab Emirates and recognizes Israel diplomatically.

“We’re talking to them about it,” DFC CEO Adam Boehler told local media on Monday, adding that “if they’re ready… we’ll be happy to even support more financially than what we do.” The lure of “one or two more billion dollars” is no doubt a powerful one in a nation which – like many others – is wallowing in recession in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

An Israeli cabinet minister appeared to confirm the negotiations to Reuters on Wednesday, noting that Tel Aviv was working on formalizing relations with “a fifth Muslim country, possibly in Asia.”

However, Indonesia stated last week it would not recognize Israel until Palestinian statehood was granted, and largely-Muslim Malaysia has similarly declared its “firm stance on the Palestinian issue will not change.”

Oman, neighbor to the UAE, has also been suggested as the next Muslim nation that might recognize Israel. However, it has made no public comment on whether it plans to do so. The US has hinted it wants Saudi Arabia to follow in its neighbors’ footsteps as well.

The Trump administration has used financial and diplomatic carrots rather than military sticks to encourage the UAE, Morocco, Sudan, and Bahrain to recognize Israel this year. Sudan was removed from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, while Morocco’s sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara territory was recognized by the US and the UAE got access to coveted F-35 fighter jets.

ALSO ON RT.COM  Trump’s pursuit of Mideast ‘peace legacy’ is driven by bribery and is fueling conflict

The president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner heralded the diplomatic coups in his typically self-congratulatory style, noting that while critics had warned Trump there would be an “explosion in the Middle East” if he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, there had instead been “an explosion of peace.” Over 100 Palestinian civilians have reportedly been killed since the US declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel in 2017, and Israel and Gaza have traded rocket fire and bombs extensively since then.

An Air Force AI controlled a U-2 spy plane for the first time

Shane McGlaun - Dec 23, 2020

The United States military is investigating all sorts of uses of artificial intelligence, including controlling aircraft. On December 15, the United States Air Force allowed an artificial intelligence co-pilot to operate aboard a U-2 spy plane. The test was the first time in history that an AI flew aboard a military aircraft.

The algorithm was developed by the Air Combat Command U-2 Federal Laboratory and was trained to perform a specific in-flight task typically carried out by the pilot. The AI copilot is callsign ARTUµ, a nod to everyone’s favorite robot from Star Wars. The test flight was a reconnaissance mission during a simulated missile strike aimed at Beale Air Force Base. The task given to ARTUµ during the test flight was to search for enemy missile launchers while the pilot searched for aircraft.

The pilot and the AI both shared the U-2’s radar. ARTUµ was in complete control of his part of the mission making final calls on devoting radar to searching for missile launchers or protecting the aircraft. ARTUµ didn’t have access to any other aspects of the aircraft or the aircraft systems.

The AI was designed to allow operators to choose what it won’t do to accept an operational risk. To ensure the AI was safe to operate aboard the aircraft, designers operated ARTUµ in a FedLab cloud to prove it would run the same way aboard the aircraft with no long safety or interference checks required.

ARTUµ essentially represents the first generation of AI aboard military aircraft. The Air Force also notes that it’s also working on algorithmic stealth and countermeasures to defeat AI as other nations are certainly working to develop their own AI for aircraft. It’s unclear what the next steps for the Air Force’s AI will be.