Wednesday, August 18, 2021

STILL WORKING ON NO CARBON FOOTPRINT

Scientists develop alternative cement with low carbon footprint

MARTIN-LUTHER-UNIVERSITÄT HALLE-WITTENBERG

Researchers at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) in Germany and the Brazilian University of Pará have developed a climate-friendly alternative to conventional cement. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions can be reduced during production by up to two thirds when a previously unused overburden from bauxite mining is used as a raw material. The alternative was found to be just as stable as the traditional Portland cement. The results were published in Sustainable Materials and Technologies.

Houses, factories, staircases, bridges, dams - none of these structures can be built without cement. According to estimates, almost six billion tonnes of cement were produced worldwide in 2020. Cement is not only an important building material, it is also responsible for around eight per cent of manmade CO2 emissions. "Portland cement is traditionally made using various raw materials, including limestone, which are burned to form so-called clinker," explains Professor Herbert Pöllmann from MLU’s Institute of Geosciences and Geography. "In the process, the calcium carbonate is converted into calcium oxide, releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide." Since CO2 is a greenhouse gas, researchers have been looking for alternatives to Portland cement for several years.

One promising solution is calcium sulphoaluminate cement, in which a large portion of the limestone is replaced by bauxite. However, bauxite is a sought-after raw material in aluminium production and not available in unlimited quantities. Together with Brazilian mineralogists, the MLU team has now found an alternative to the alternative, so to speak: They do not use pure bauxite, but rather an overburden: Belterra clay. "This layer of clay can be up to 30 metres thick and covers the bauxite deposits in the tropical regions of the earth, for example in the Amazon basin," explains Pöllmann. "It contains enough minerals with an aluminium content to ensure good quality cement. It is also available in large quantities and can be processed without additional treatment." Another advantage: The Belterra clay has to be removed anyway, so it does not have to be extracted only for cement production.

Even though cement cannot be entirely produced without calcium carbonate, at least 50 to 60 percent of the limestone can be replaced by Belterra clay. The process has another environmentally relevant advantage: the burning process only requires 1,250 degrees Celsius (2282° Fahrenheit) - 200 degrees (392° Fahrenheit) less than for Portland cement. "Our method not only releases less CO2 during the chemical conversion, but also when heating the rotary kilns", says Pöllmann. By coupling these effects, CO2 emissions can be reduced by up to two thirds during cement production.

In extensive laboratory tests, the mineralogists were able to prove that their alternative cement meets all the quality requirements placed on traditional Portland cement. Further research projects will now investigate whether there are also overburden sources in Germany suitable for cement production. "Raw materials containing clay minerals with a lower aluminium content could be used particularly in construction projects where lower-grade concrete is sufficient," explains Pöllmann. "There is still huge potential here to further reduce carbon dioxide emissions."

Study: Negrão L.B.A., Pöllmann H., da Costa M. L., Production of low- CO2 cements using abundant bauxite overburden "Belterra Clay". Sustainable Materials and Technologies (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.susmat.2021.e00299

JOURNAL

Sustainable Materials and Technologies

DOI

10.1016/j.susmat.2021.e00299

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Production of low- CO2 cements using abundant bauxite overburden "Belterra Clay"

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-May-2021

COI STATEMENT

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

UPDATED

Thwaites glacier: Significant geothermal heat beneath the ice stream

Researchers map the geothermal heat flow in West Antarctica; a new potential weak spot in the ice sheet’s stability is identified

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ALFRED WEGENER INSTITUTE, HELMHOLTZ CENTRE FOR POLAR AND MARINE RESEARCH

Helicopter with magnetometer — IMAGE: GEOPHYSICAL MEASUREMENTS WITH A MAGNETOMETER BEING TOWED WITH RV POLARSTERN'S BOARD HELICOPTER. view more
CREDIT: ALFRED-WEGENER-INSTITUT / THOMAS RONGE

Ice losses from Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica are currently responsible for roughly four percent of the global sea-level rise. This figure could increase, since virtually no another ice stream in the Antarctic is changing as dramatically as the massive Thwaites Glacier. Until recently, experts attributed these changes to climate change and the fact that the glacier rests on the seafloor in many places, and as such comes into contact with warm water masses. But there is also a third, and until nowone of the most difficult to constrain, influencing factors. In a new study, German and British researchers have shown that there is a conspicuously large amount of heat from Earth’s interior beneath the ice, which has likely affected the sliding behaviour of the ice masses for millions of years. This substantial geothermal heat flow, in turn, are due to the fact that the glacier lies in a tectonic trench, where the Earth’s crust is significantly thinner than it is e.g. in neighbouring East Antarctica. The new study was published today in the Nature online journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Unlike East Antarctica, West Antarctica is a geologically young region. In addition, it doesn’t consist of a large contiguous land mass, where the Earth’s crust is up to 40 kilometres thick, but instead is made up of several small and for the most part relatively thin crustal blocks that are separated from each other by a so-called trench system or rift system. In many of the trenches in this system, the Earth’s crust is only 17 to 25 kilometres thick, and as a result a large portion of the ground lies one to two kilometres below sea level. On the other hand, the existence of the trenches has long led researchers to assume that comparatively large amounts of heat from Earth’s interior rose to the surface in this region. With their new map of this geothermal heat flow in the hinterland of the West Antarctic Amundsen Sea, experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have now provided confirmation.

CAPTION

Geophysical measurements with a magnetometer being towed with RV Polarstern's board helicopter.

CREDIT

Alfred-Wegener-Institut / Thomas Ronge

“Our measurements show that where the Earth’s crust is only 17 to 25 kilometres thick, geothermal heat flow of up to 150 milliwatts per square metre can occur beneath Thwaites Glacier. This corresponds to values recorded in areas of the Rhine Graben and the East African Rift Valley,” says AWI geophysicist and first author of the study, Dr Ricarda Dziadek.

Based on their data, the geophysicists are unable to put a figure on the extent to which the rising geothermal heat warms the bottom of the glacier: “The temperature on the underside of the glacier is dependent on a number of factors – for example whether the ground consists of compact, solid rock, or of metres of water-saturated sediment. Water conducts the rising heat very efficiently. But it can also transport heat energy away before it can reach the bottom of the glacier,” explains co-author and AWI geophysicist Dr Karsten Gohl.

Nevertheless, the heat flow could be a crucial factor that needs to be considered when it comes to the future of Thwaites Glacier. According to Gohl: “Large amounts of geothermal heat can, for example, lead to the bottom of the glacier bed no longer freezing completely or to a constant film of water forming on its surface. Both of which would result in the ice masses sliding more easily over the ground. If, in addition, the braking effect of the ice shelf is lost, as can currently be observed in West Antarctica, the glaciers’ flow could accelerate considerably due to the increased geothermal heat.”

CAPTION

RV Polarstern near an iceberg in Amundsen Sea.

CREDIT

Alfred-Wegener-Institut / Thomas Ronge

The new geothermal heat flow maps are based on various geomagnetic. field datasets from West Antarctica, which the researchers have collated and analysed using a complex procedure. “Inferring geothermal heat flow from magnetic field data is a tried and tested method, mainly used in regions where little is known about the characteristics of the geological underground,” explains Fausto Ferraccioli from the British Antarctic Survey and the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS), one of the study’s co-authors.

The experts will soon find out how accurate their new assessment of the heat flow below Thwaites Glacier is. An international team led by British and American polar experts, which the AWI is also taking part in, is currently engaged in a major research project. In this context, collecting core samples down as far as the glacier bed and taking corresponding heat flow measurements are planned. The findings will provide the first opportunity to comprehensively verify the new heat flow maps from West Antarctica.

DOI

10.1038/s43247-021-00242-3

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

High geothermal heat flow beneath Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica inferred from aeromagnetic data

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

17-Aug-2021

New report from Harvard and global experts shows investments in nature needed to stop the next pandemic

Protecting forests and changing agricultural practices are essential, cost-effective actions to prevent pandemics

Reports and Proceedings

HARVARD T.H. CHAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

Boston, Mass. - As the world struggles to contain COVID-19, a group of leading, scientific experts from the U.S., Latin America, Africa and South Asia released a report today outlining the strong scientific foundations for taking actions to stop the next pandemic by preventing the spillover of pathogens from animals to people. The report provides recommendations for research and actions to forestall new pandemics that have largely been absent from high-level discussions about prevention, including a novel call to integrate conservation actions with strengthening healthcare systems globally.

The report from the International Scientific Task Force to Prevent Pandemics at the Source makes the case that investments in outbreak control, such as diagnostic tests, drugs and vaccines, are critical but inadequate to address pandemic risk. These findings come as COVID-19 vaccinations availability in many low- and middle-income countries remains inadequate—and even in wealthier nations vaccine coverage is far from reaching levels needed to control the Delta variant.

“To manage COVID-19, we have already spent more than $6 trillion dollars on what may turn out to be the most expensive band aids ever bought, and no matter how much we spend on vaccines, they can never fully inoculate us from future pandemics,” said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, interim director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and leader of the Scientific Task Force for Preventing Pandemics at the Source. “We must take actions that prevent pandemics from starting by stopping the spillover of diseases from animals to humans. When we do, we can also help stabilize the planet’s climate and revitalize its biosphere, each of which is essential to our health and economic welfare.”

Previous research by Dr. Bernstein and colleagues found that the costs of preventing the next pandemic—by reducing deforestation and regulating the wildlife trade—are as little as $22 billion a year, 2% of the economic and mortality costs of responding to COVID-19.

The task force found that spillover of possible pandemic pathogens occurs from livestock operations; wildlife hunting and trade; land use change—and the destruction of tropical forests in particular; expansion of agricultural lands, especially near human settlements; and rapid, unplanned urbanization. Climate change is also shrinking habitats and pushing animals on land and sea to move to new places, creating opportunities for pathogens to enter new hosts.

Agriculture is associated with greater than 50% of zoonotic infectious diseases that have emerged in humans since 1940. With human population growing, and food insecurity on the rise because of the pandemic, investments in sustainable agriculture and in the prevention of crop and food waste are critical to reduce biodiversity losses, conserve water resources, and prevent further land use change while promoting food security and economic welfare.

A key recommendation from the task force calls for leveraging investments in healthcare system strengthening and One Health to jointly advance conservation, animal and human health, and spillover prevention. A successful example of this integrated model comes from Borneo where a decade of work resulted in ∼70% reduction in deforestation and provided health care access to more than 28,400 patients and substantial decreases in diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and common diseases of childhood.

Additional recommendations for investments and research include:

Investment priorities:

Conserve tropical forests, especially in relatively intact forests as well as those that have been fragmented.
Improve biosecurity for livestock and farmed wild animals, especially when animal husbandry occurs near large or rapidly expanding human populations.
Establish an intergovernmental partnership to address spillover risk from wild animals to livestock and people from aligned organizations such as FAO, WHO, OIE, UNEP, and Wildlife Enforcement Networks.
In low- and middle-income countries, leverage investments to strengthen healthcare systems and One Health platforms to jointly advance conservation, animal and human health, and spillover prevention.

Research priorities:

Establish which interventions, including those focused on forest conservation, wildlife hunting and trade, and biosecurity around farms, are most effective at spillover prevention.
Assess the economic, ecological, long term viability and social welfare impacts of interventions aimed at reducing spillover. Include cost-benefit analysis that considers the full scope of benefits that can come from spillover prevention in economic analyses.
Refine our understanding of where pandemics are likely to emerge, including assessments of pandemic drivers like governance, travel, and population density.
Continue viral discovery in wildlife to ascertain the breadth of potential pathogens and improve genotype-phenotype associations that can enable spillover risk and virulence assessments.

The task force was convened by Harvard Chan C-CHANGE and the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI). The findings laid out in their inaugural report will be translated into international policy recommendations to inform the G20 summit in October and the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in November.

###

About Harvard Chan C-CHANGE

The Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (Harvard Chan C-CHANGE) increases public awareness of the health impacts of climate change and uses science to make it personal, actionable, and urgent. Led by Dr. Aaron Bernstein, the Center leverages Harvard’s cutting-edge research to inform policies, technologies, and products that reduce air pollution and other causes of climate change. By making climate change personal, highlighting solutions, and emphasizing the important role we all play in driving change, Harvard Chan C-CHANGE puts health outcomes at the center of climate actions. To learn more visit https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/.

About Harvard Global Health Institute

The Harvard Global Health Institute is committed to surfacing and addressing some of the most persistent challenges in human health. We believe that the solutions to these problems will be drawn from within and beyond the medicine and public health spheres to encompass design, law, policy, business, and other fields. At HGHI, we harness the unique breadth of excellence within Harvard and are a dedicated partner to organizations, governments, scholars, and committed citizens around the globe. We convene diverse perspectives, identify gaps, design new learning opportunities, and advise policy makers to advance health equity for all. You can learn more at globalhealth.harvard.edu.

ARTICLE TITLE

Report of the Scientific Task Force on Preventing Pandemics

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

18-Aug-2021

Study: As cities grow in size, the poor 'get nothing at all'

by Santa Fe Institute

Cities are hubs of human activity, supercharging the exchange of ideas and interactions. Scaling theory has established that, as cities grow larger, they tend to produce more of pretty much everything from pollution and crime to patents and wealth. On average, people in larger cities are better off economically. But a new study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface builds on previous research that says, that's not necessarily true for the individual city-dweller. It turns out, bigger cities also produce more income inequality.

"Previous literature has looked at [urban scaling] through a lens of homogeneity," says Santa Fe Institute (SFI) Omidyar Fellow Vicky Chuqiao Yang, an author on the study. These studies have shown a per-capita increase in wealth as cities grow. "But we know from other literature, especially in economics, that many societies are unequal and economic outputs are not distributed evenly."

Using data from municipal areas across the U.S., the authors took another look at urban wealth through a lens of heterogeneity. Breaking the income in their dataset into deciles, the team found that, as cities grow larger, the top ten percent of income earners gain an increasingly large portion of the wealth.

"For a long time, what has often been thought about in urban scaling is the whole system," says co-author Chris Kempes, also of the Santa Fe Institute along with co-author Geoffrey West. Kempes and West have worked closely together to study scaling relationships in systems from cities to biological organisms.

But it's not just wealth that tends to increase as cities grow; the cost of living also increases. So, the authors factored in an adjustment for housing prices. With that adjustment, their analysis showed that, as cities get bigger, the housing costs increase at a faster rate than lower-decile income.

"For the lower decile, there is no proportional increase in wealth. So, the city is not increasing economic benefit, but it's not decreasing it either," says Kempes. "However, since costs do go up, the experience of the poorest individuals gets worse."

Across the world, civilization is undergoing rapid urbanization. More than half the world's humans currently live in urban settings, and in the coming decade, researchers predict the number of megacities—those with 10 million people or more—will quadruple. "There is an urgent need for a quantitative and predictive theory for how larger urban areas affect a wide variety of city features, dynamics, and outcomes," write the authors.

The questions in this study were initially raised by co-authors Cate Heine, Elisa Heinrich Mora, and Jacob J. Jackson, who together spanned two cohorts of Undergraduate Complexity Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute.

According to West, the new results emphasize that inequality is primarily an urban phenomenon, arising from underlying social dynamics "that desperately need to be addressed." He speculates that poorer city dwellers are missing out on the increased social interactions that are credited with driving innovation and wealth creation in large metropolises.

"What was a huge surprise in this research was that, as the city grows, there's no advantage to people in the bottom 10-20th percentiles. As you go down the income deciles, the value-added for city-dwellers got less and less in a systematic way… so much so that, in the bottom decile you get nothing at all. There's even evidence that you're losing quality of life," says West. "Here we found that rich are getting even richer than we thought and the poor are getting even poorer than we thought."Does urban scaling apply to Europe's oldest cities, too?

More information: Elisa Heinrich Mora et al, Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA, Journal of The Royal Society Interface (2021). DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2021.0223

Journal information: Journal of the Royal Society Interface

Provided by Santa Fe Institute

Worsening GP shortages in disadvantaged areas likely to widen health inequalities

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Areas of high socioeconomic disadvantaged are being worst hit by shortages of GPs, a trend that is only worsening with time and is likely to widen pre-existing health inequalities, say researchers at the University of Cambridge.

In a study published today in the BJGP Open, a team from the University of Cambridge looked at the relationship between shortages in the healthcare workforce and levels of deprivation. The team found significantly fewer full time equivalent (FTE) GPs per 10,000 patients in practices within areas of higher levels of deprivation. This inequality has widened slightly over time. By December 2020, there were on average 1.4 fewer FTE GPs per 10,000 patients in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived areas.

The same was the case for total direct patient care staff (all patient-facing general practice staff excluding GPs and nurses), with 1.5 fewer FTE staff per 10,000 patients in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived areas.

The lower GP numbers in deprived areas, was compensated, in part, by more nurses.

The analysis used data captured between September 2015 and December 2020 from the NHS Digital General Practice Workforce collection. They compared this workforce data against practice population sizes and levels of deprivation across England.

In addition to their report, the team have today launched an interactive dashboard that maps local-level primary care workforce inequalities to accompany the national-level analysis done in the paper. Clear local-level inequalities in GP distribution can be seen within West, North and East Cumbria, Humber, Coast and Vale, and Coventry and Warwickshire STP (Sustainability and Transformation Plan) areas, among others.

Workforce shortages, especially in primary care, have been a problem for health care systems for some time now, and the gap between the growing demand for services and sufficient staff has been widening. Although the number of consultations in general practice has been increasing, staff numbers have not kept up with demand. The number of GPs relative to the size of population has been decreasing since 2009, and the GP workforce is ageing. Doctors are increasingly working part-time, which suggests that shortages will grow steadily worse.

In 2015, then-Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt promised an additional 5,000 GPs for the NHS by 2020, but this was not achieved. Instead, it is predicted that there will be a shortage of 7,000 GPs by 2024.

Dr John Ford from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge, the study’s senior author, said: “People who live in disadvantaged regions of England are not only more likely to have long-term health problems, but are likely to find it even more difficult to see a GP and experience worse care when they see a GP. This is just one aspect of how disadvantage accumulates for some people leading to poor health and early death.

“There may be some compensation due to increasing number of other health professionals, which may partially alleviate the undersupply of GPs in more socioeconomically disadvantaged areas. But this is not a like-for-like replacement and it is unlikely to be enough.”

The researchers say there are a number of reasons that may account for why GP workforce shortages disproportionately affect practices in areas of higher deprivation. Previous studies have suggested that the primary driver of GP inequality was the opening and closing of practices in more disadvantaged areas, with practice closures increasing in recent years.

Claire Nussbaum, the study’s first author, added: “The government has made reducing health inequalities a core commitment, but this will be challenging with the increasing shortage of GPs in areas of high socioeconomic disadvantage, where health needs are greatest. The primary care staffing inequalities we observed are especially concerning, as they suggest that access to care is becoming increasingly limited where health needs are greatest.

“Addressing barriers to health care access is even more urgent in the context of COVID-19, which has widened pre-existing health and social inequities.”

The researchers say that the imbalance in recruitment of staff within primary care must be addressed by policymakers, who will need to consider why practices and networks in disadvantaged areas are relatively under-staffed, and how this can be reversed. Potential options include increased recruitment to medical school from disadvantaged areas, incentivisation of direct patient care posts in under-staffed areas, enhanced training offers for these roles, and offering practices and networks in under-staffed areas additional recruitment support.

Expanded use of additional roles under the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme, designed to provide financial reimbursement for Primary Care Networks to build workforce capacity, may partially alleviate GP workload in overstretched practices, but the report’s authors argue that there is a risk that additional workforce will gravitate to more affluent areas, further perpetuating inequity in primary care staffing.

Dr James Matheson, a GP at Hill Top Surgery in Oldham, said: "People living in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas shoulder a much higher burden of physical and mental health problems but have less access to the GPs who could support them towards better health. For the primary care teams looking after them this means a greater workload with fewer resources - a burnout risk which can further exacerbate the problem.

“General Practice in disadvantaged areas is challenging but also enjoyable and professionally rewarding but now, more than ever, we need to see a more equitable distribution of workforce and resources to ensure it is sustainable."

Reference

Nussbaum, C et al. Inequalities in the distribution of the general practice workforce in England. BJGP Open; 18 Aug 2021; DOI: 10.3399/BJGPO.2021.0066

JOURNAL

BJGP Open

DOI

10.3399/BJGPO.2021.0066

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Inequalities in the distribution of the general practice workforce in England

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

17-Aug-2021

Shedding light on past human histories

Research team reconstructs genetic histories and social organisation in Neolithic and Bronze Age Croatia

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY

Ceramic grave goods — IMAGE: CERAMIC GRAVE GOODS FROM POPOVA ZEMLJA. view more
CREDIT: © BORKO ROŽANKOVIĆ

Present-day Croatia was an important crossroads for migrating peoples along the Danubian corridor and the Adriatic coast, linking east and west. "While this region is important for understanding population and cultural transitions in Europe, limited availability of human remains means that in-depth knowledge about the genetic ancestry and social complexity of prehistoric populations here remains sparse", says first author Suzanne Freilich, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Vienna.

To this aim, an international team of researchers set out to fill the gap. They studied two archaeological sites in eastern Croatia – one containing predominantly Middle Neolithic burials from within the settlement site, the other a Middle Bronze Age necropolis containing cremations and inhumations – and sequenced whole genomes of 28 individuals from these two sites. The researchers’ goal was to understand both the genetic ancestry as well as social organisation within each community – in particular, to study local residency patterns, kinship relations and to learn more about the varied burial rites observed.

Middle Neolithic settlement at Popova zemlja

Dated to around 4,700-4,300 BCE the Middle Neolithic settlement at Beli-Manastir Popova zemlja belongs to the Sopot culture. Many children, especially girls, were buried here, in particular along the walls of pit houses. “One question was whether individuals buried in the same buildings were biologically related to each other”, says Suzanne Freilich.

“We found that individuals with different burial rites did not differ in their genetic ancestry, which was similar to Early Neolithic people. We also found a high degree of haplotype diversity and, despite the size of the site, no very closely related individuals”, Freilich adds. This suggests that this community was part of a large, mainly exogamous population where people marry outside their kin group. Interestingly, however, the researchers also identified a few cases of endogamous mating practices, including two individuals who would have been the children of first cousins or equivalent, something rarely found in the ancient DNA record.

CAPTION

Burials at Popova zemlja were typically along the walls of pit houses or in other pits with ceramic vessels near their heads.

CREDIT

Middle Bronze Age necropolis at Jagodnjak-Krčevine

The second site the researchers studied was the Middle Bronze Age necropolis of Jagodnjak-Krčevine that belongs to the Transdanubian Encrusted Pottery Culture and dates to around 1,800-1,600 BCE. “This site contains burials that are broadly contemporaneous with some individuals from the Dalmatian coast, and we wanted to find out whether individuals from these different ecoregions carried similar ancestry”, says Stephan Schiffels.

The researchers found that the people from Jagodnjak actually carried very distinct ancestry due to the presence of significantly more western European hunter-gatherer-related ancestry. This ancestry profile is present in a small number of other studied genomes from further north in the Carpathian Basin. These new genetic results support archaeological evidence that suggests a shared population history for these groups as well as the presence of trade and exchange networks.

“We also found that all male individuals at the site had identical Y chromosome haplotypes”, says Freilich. “We identified two male first degree relatives, second degree and more distantly related males, while the one woman in our sample was unrelated. This points to a patrilocal social organisation where women leave their own home to join their husband’s home.” Contrary to the Middle Neolithic site at Popova zemlja, biological kinship was a factor for selection to be buried at this site. In addition the authors found evidence of rich infant graves that suggests they likely inherited their status or wealth from their families.

Filling the gap in the archaeogenetic record

This study helps to fill the gap in the archaeogenetic record for this region, characterising the diverse genetic ancestries and social organisations that were present in Neolithic and Bronze Age eastern Croatia. It highlights the heterogeneous population histories of broadly contemporaneous coastal and inland Bronze Age groups, and connections with communities further north in the Carpathian Basin. Furthermore, it sheds light on the subject of Neolithic intramural burials – burials within a settlement – that has been debated among archaeologists and anthropologists for some time. The authors show that at the site of Popova zemlja, this burial rite was not associated with biological kinship, but more likely represented age and sex selection related to Neolithic community belief systems.

So far, few archaeogenetic studies have focused on within-community patterns of genetic diversity and social organisation. “While large-scale studies are invaluable in characterising patterns of genetic diversity on a broader temporal and spatial scale, more regional and single-site studies, such as this one, are necessary to gain insights into community and social organisation which vary regionally and even within a site”, says Freilich. “By looking into the past with a narrower lens, archaeogenetics can shed more light on how communities and families were organised.”

JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-021-94932-9

ARTICLE TITLE

Reconstructing genetic histories and social organization in Neolithic and Bronze Age Croatia

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

17-Aug-2021

Disclaimer: AAAS and

Beating the curse of dimensionality

by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

A partial matching approach can overcome the dimensionality "curse" of continuous measurements over time to yield more accurate future predictions.

By scanning past data for both partial and complete matches to current observations, a KAUST-led research team has developed a prediction scheme that can more reliably forecast the future trajectory of environmental parameters.

The collection of data at regular intervals over time is common in many fields but particularly so in environmental, transportation and biological research. Such data are used to monitor and record the current state and also to help predict what might come in the future. A typical approach is to look for previous patterns or trajectories in the data that match the current trajectory.

However, in practice, there are never any complete matches, and so the predictor needs to find smaller and smaller time windows in past data that provide a partial match. This results in a loss of context and any broader trends that might have given a better prediction, while possibly drawing in random noise.

"Predicting future time-series trajectories is challenging in that the trajectories are composed of many sequential observations or 'dimensions," which limits multivariate prediction approaches," says Hernando Ombao from KAUST. "This is known as the curse of dimensionality."

To overcome these challenges, postdoc Shuhao Jiao developed a method called partial functional prediction (PFP) that integrates information from all past complete and partial trajectories. This optimized approach uses all the available data, capturing both long-term trends and well-matched partial trajectories.

"By smoothing the trajectories, we can transform the curse into a blessing by capturing the big picture of the dynamic information of trajectories," Jiao says. "Our method incorporates both crosstrajectory and intratrajectory dependence, which previous methods have not achieved."

The approach involves a step-wise procedure where the data are first analyzed for longer complete trajectories, the "residual" partial components are then extracted as fragments independent of past trends and anything left over is assigned to random noise. The three functions are then applied to the prediction window.

The team, together with collaborator Alexander Aue from the University of California, demonstrated their method on the prediction of fine particulate matter in the air and traffic flow and showed that their PFP method gave far more accurate predictions than existing methods, particularly for longer term forecasts.

"Our method shows that by incorporating dependence information within and across trajectories, it is possible to achieve a pronounced improvement in the prediction of future trajectories," Ombao says.Trio of tuning tools for modeling large spatial datasets

More information: Shuhao Jiao et al, Functional Time Series Prediction Under Partial Observation of the Future Curve, Journal of the American Statistical Association (2021). DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2021.1929248

Provided by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

NIHILISM

We are effectively alone in the universe

It does not matter if intelligent life exists elsewhere. We will never find each other.

ALEX BEREZOW

17 August, 2021

Credit: Bruce Warrington via Unsplash

The debate over extraterrestrial life has shifted from fringe to mainstream.
The belief that humans eventually will encounter aliens is based on two assumptions: (a) life evolves easily, and (b) interstellar travel is possible and practical.
Neither of these assumptions is likely to be true.

When I was a kid, there was an older guy who frequented our local McDonald's and always carried around a box full of random papers and a fly swatter. He was an archetype of the UFO enthusiast — sort of a kook but a lot of fun to talk to.

In the 1990s, there was something of an alien abduction craze that swept the country. The popular show Unsolved Mysteries featured them, and an entire TV series, The X-Files, was built around the belief that extraterrestrial life had taken a keen (and perhaps malevolent) interest in Earth. (Of course, the aliens were also working in collaboration with the U.S. federal government.)

However, outside of popular culture, few serious intellectuals took the notion of aliens seriously. It certainly was not a major academic topic. The prevailing view was that life is uncommon throughout the universe, and Earth just might be the only planet lucky enough to have it.

Today, the exact opposite view prevails. Thanks to advances in astrophysics, we now know that there are billions of exoplanets in the Milky Way alone, leading most of the scientific community to conclude that life probably does exist elsewhere in the universe. Those who do not believe so are now considered the kooks. And while alien abductions are still not in the mainstream, UFOs are — so much so that the U.S. intelligence community just issued a report on them.

It does not matter if intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the universe. We will never find them, and they will never find us. In other words, we are effectively alone in the universe.

The academic debate now is not whether life exists but in what form. Many scientists assume that the commonest form of life is microbial — a fair assumption, given that on Earth, humans are a relatively modern invention while microbes have been around for 3.5 billion years — so many astrobiologists are spending their days examining the atmospheres of exoplanets for telltale signs of bacteria-like creatures.

Still, others have gone further and pontificated on what, if it exists, alien intelligent life might be like. The late Stephen Hawking argued that contacting aliens is not wise because, just like in the movie Independence Day, they are probably plotting to come to Earth, break our stuff, and steal our resources. Dr. Hawking warned, "One day we might receive a signal from a planet like Gliese 832c, but we should be wary of answering back."

Bring the alien debate back to reality

Credit: Dino Reichmuth via Unsplash

I suppose this is all fun to think and talk about, but the alien debate suffers from a serious lack of perspective. If there is any chance of humans encountering alien life, at least two extremely unlikely things must be true:

Life evolves easily. Decades of research have yielded little in the way of identifying the mechanism of abiogenesis — the formation of life from non-living matter. There are several different theories on the origin of life, and none of them are any good. In the laboratory, we have had some success in creating biomolecules such as amino acids from gaseous precursors; the Miller-Urey experiment is the most famous of these. But scientists have yet to come even close to reproducing life in the laboratory. This strongly implies that life does not evolve easily.

But even if we were to cede the point that life can evolve easily given enough time, there is another problem: the vast majority of exoplanets are inhospitable to life. New research suggests that most stars are incapable of supporting plant life via photosynthesis. Harvesting a star's energy is the first step for the evolution of life, but evolution cannot even get started if there is not enough of it.

Interstellar travel is possible and practical. This, in my opinion, is even more unlikely than the easy evolution of life. We know life evolved at least once (here on Earth), but we have no idea if interstellar travel is possible. Sure, we could get on a spaceship today and head for a planet orbiting the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, but we better pack a lot of fun-sized bags of pretzels because it will take about 6,300 years to get there.

The notion that we will develop (or that some advanced alien civilization has already developed) the ability to easily traverse the galaxy is pure speculation. It is physically impossible to travel at the speed of light, though it may be possible to travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. Still, even if light speed was possible, the distances between stars is nearly unfathomable. Traveling at the speed of light, Proxima Centauri is still more than four years away; the other side of the galaxy is over 100,000 years away.

"Theoretically possible" does not mean "probable"

Sci-fi enthusiasts note that unknown technologies may develop, such as the ability to warp the fabric of spacetime or to travel through a wormhole. But again, these suggestions are purely speculative. Other than some fancy math that suggests such maneuvers could theoretically be possible, we have no idea if either can actually happen. Just because unicorns and mermaids are theoretically possible does not mean that they exist.

What about black holes? Perhaps we could dive into one and pop out somewhere else. For the sake of argument, let's say that we know that is absolutely true. The trouble is that the closest black hole to Earth that we know of is 1,500 light-years away.

Putting all this together, the sobering conclusion is that it does not matter if intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the universe. We will never find them, and they will never find us. In other words, we are effectively alone in the universe.