‘Incredible’ giant fossilised penguin found by New Zealand schoolchildren is previously unknown species

Thirty million-year-old remains were found during field trip in 2006

Harry Cockburn
Environment Correspondent

An artist’s impression of the Kawhia giant penguin
(Simone Giovanardi)


The “incredible” fossilised remains of an unusual long-legged giant penguin, first found by schoolchildren in New Zealand, belonged to a previously unknown species, researchers have said.

In 2006, the group of schoolchildren, who were taking part in an organised fossil hunting field trip, discovered the giant set of fossilised penguin bones in Kawhia Harbour, in the Waikato region of New Zealand’s North Island.

The fossils were recovered from the sandstone rock soon afterwards and donated to the Waikato Museum in 2017.

New analysis of the bones, using 3D scanning, enabled the research team, from Massey University in New Zealand and Bruce Museum in Connecticut, to produce a 3D-printed replica of the skeleton, and found the penguin would have stood at around 1.4 metres tall.

In comparison, the tallest penguin species alive today, the emperor, stands at 1.2 metres.

Dr Daniel Thomas, a senior lecturer in Zoology from Massey’s School of Natural and Computational Sciences, said the fossil is between 27.3 and 34.6 million years old and is from a time when much of the Waikato was underwater.

Penguins have a fossil record reaching almost as far back as the age of the dinosaurs, and the most ancient of these penguins have been discovered in New Zealand.

Fossil penguins from Zealandia – the largely submerged continent from which New Zealand now rises above the waves – are mostly known from Otago, in the southeast of the South Island, and Canterbury, in the northeast of the South Island, although important discoveries have recently been made in Taranaki and Waikato, both on the North Island.

The bird’s longer than usual legs influenced how fast it could swim and how deep it could dive, the researchers said
(Simone Giovanardi)

“The penguin is similar to the kairuku giant penguins first described in Otago but has much longer legs, which the researchers used to name the penguin waewaeroa – Te reo Māori for “long legs”, Dr Thomas said.

“These longer legs would have made the penguin much taller than other kairuku while it was walking on land, perhaps around 1.4 metres tall, and may have influenced how fast it could swim or how deep it could dive,” he said.

“It’s been a real privilege to contribute to the story of this incredible penguin. We know how important this fossil is to so many people.”

Mike Safey, president of the Hamilton Junior Naturalist Club, which organised the original field trip, said it is something the children involved will remember for the rest of their lives.

“It was a rare privilege for the kids in our club to have the opportunity to discover and rescue this enormous fossil penguin. We always encourage young people to explore and enjoy the great outdoors. There’s plenty of cool stuff out there just waiting to be discovered.”

Steffan Safey, who was there for both the discovery and rescue missions, said: “It’s sort of surreal to know that a discovery we made as kids so many years ago is contributing to academia today. And it’s a new species, even!

“The existence of giant penguins in New Zealand is scarcely known, so it’s really great to know that the community is continuing to study and learn more about them. Clearly the day spent cutting it out of the sandstone was well spent.”

Dr Esther Dale, a plant ecologist who now lives in Switzerland, was also there.

She said: “It’s thrilling enough to be involved with the discovery of such a large and relatively complete fossil, let alone a new species. I’m excited to see what we can learn from it about the evolution of penguins and life in New Zealand.”

Taly Matthews, a long-time member of the Hamilton Junior Naturalist Club, and who works for the Department of Conservation in Taranaki, said: "Finding any fossil is pretty exciting when you think about how much time has passed while this animal remained hidden away, encased in rock. Finding a giant penguin fossil though is on another level. As more giant penguin fossils are discovered we get to fill in more gaps in the story. It’s very exciting."

Dr Thomas added: “The fossil penguin reminds us that we share Zealandia with incredible animal lineages that reach deep into time, and this sharing gives us an important guardianship role. The way the fossil penguin was discovered, by children out discovering nature, reminds us of the importance of encouraging future generations to become kaitiaki [guardians].”

The research is published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Fossil reveals bird with long, flashy tail feathers that lived 120 million years ago

By Ashley Strickland, CNN 8 hrs ago

Scientists have uncovered the fossil of a bird that lived 120 million years ago, and it definitely had flair, including unusually long tail feathers. These flashy feathers probably didn't help the bird achieve aerodynamic flight, but they might have helped him find a mate, according to new research.

© Gao Wei/The Field Museum Yuanchuavis was a blue jay-sized bird that lived 120 million years ago.

The fossil was discovered in the Jehol Biota -- an ecosystem dating back 133 to 120 million years ago -- in northeastern China, and the deposits there have been a treasure trove of fossil discoveries, including examples of ancient flight. The researchers dubbed the species Yuanchuavis after Yuanchu, a mythological Chinese bird.


The bird was likely comparable in size to a modern blue jay. However, its tail reached more than 150% the length of its body. The study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

"We've never seen this combination of different kinds of tail feathers before in a fossil bird," said Jingmai O'Connor, study author and a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, in a statement. O'Connor is the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum's Negaunee Integrative Research Center.

"It had a fan of short feathers at the base and then two extremely long plumes," O'Connor said. "The long feathers were dominated by the central spine, called the rachis, and then plumed at the end. The combination of a short tail fan with two long feathers is called a pintail, we see it in some modern birds like sunbirds and quetzals."

Yuanchuavis likely flew similarly to a quetzal, a forest-dwelling bird that doesn't have the most exceptional flight capabilities, O'Connor said. The pintail feathers were large enough to create significant drag, despite the fact that they were lightweight.

Short tails are associated with birds that live in harsh environments, where they depend on their ability to fly as a survival skill, like seabirds. The more elaborate tails are often found on birds living in forests.

"This new discovery vividly demonstrates how the interplay between natural and sexual selections shaped birds' tails from their earliest history," said Wang Min, study author and researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in a statement. "Yuanchuavis is the first documented occurrence of a pintail in Enantiornithes, the most successful group of Mesozoic birds."

Scientists recognized two different tail structures from other enantiornithines that are combined in Yuanchuavis.

"The tail fan is aerodynamically functional, whereas the elongated central paired plumes are used for display, which together reflect the interplay between natural selection and sexual selection," Wang said.

Animals not only adapt to survive but to help their particular species persist. In this case, Yuanchuavis developed tail feathers that hindered its flying abilities and made it more noticeable to predators. The discovery highlights just how important sexual selection is during evolution, O'Connor said.

"Scientists call a trait like a big fancy tail an 'honest signal,' because it is detrimental, so if an animal with it is able to survive with that handicap, that's a sign that it's really fit," O'Connor said. "A female bird would look at a male with goofily burdensome tail feathers and think, 'Dang, if he's able to survive even with such a ridiculous tail, he must have really good genes.'"

Elaborately plumed birds tend to be males. They're so focused on maintaining their feathers that they don't make especially good caregivers to offspring. Flashy feathers would also draw predators toward nests. But the more plain females stick with their chicks and take care of them.

Despite the fact that enantiornithines initially thrived, they did not survive the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. It's most likely due to the fact that they lived in forests, which burned after the asteroid struck, or because they had not adapted to grow quickly.

"Understanding why living birds are the most successful group of vertebrates on land today is an extremely important evolutionary question, because whatever it was that allowed them to be so successful probably also allowed them to survive a giant meteor hitting the planet when all other birds and dinosaurs went extinct," O'Connor said.

Fossils don't always reveal the ways that sexual selection shapes a species.

"The well-preserved tail feathers in this new fossil bird provide great new information about how sexual selection has shaped the avian tail from their earliest stage," Wang said.

"The complexity we see in Yuanchuavis's feathers is related to one of the reasons we hypothesize why living birds are so incredibly diverse, because they can separate themselves into different species just by differences in plumage and differences in song," O'Connor said. "It's amazing that Yuanchuavis lets us hypothesize that that kind of plumage complexity may already have been present in the Early Cretaceous."



a hand holding a bird: Modern sunbirds also have long tail feathers.

3 SLIDES © Jason Weckstein/The Field Museum

Native American Tribe Calls $2M Sale of Ancient Cave 'Heartbreaking'

A Missouri cave with Native American artwork that dates back more than 1,000 years was sold at auction for $2.2 million this week.

According to the auction listing, the cave was an "ancient hallowed site for sacred rituals, astronomical studies, oral tradition, vision quests" and contained more than 290 prehistoric glyphs, "making it the largest collection of indigenous people's polychrome paintings in Missouri" and one of the most significant archaeological sites in North America.

© YouTube/FOX 2 St. Louis The ancient site, known as the Picture Cave, was used for sacred rituals for hundreds of years.

The site, known as Picture Cave, is located about 60 miles west of St. Louis. The $2.2 million sale, to private owners who requested to be unnamed, also includes 43 acres of hilly land surrounding the cave.

Leaders of the Great Plains Native American tribe, who attempted to purchase the land to "protect and preserve our most sacred site," shared with The Associated Press that the sale was "truly heartbreaking."

"Our ancestors lived in this area for 1300 years," the tribe said in a statement. "This was our land. We have hundreds of thousands of our ancestors buried throughout Missouri and Illinois, including Picture Cave."

Previously, the land was owned by a St. Louis family who used it mostly for hunting.

When the Osage Nation learned that the family was interested in selling the land, they tried to work out an arrangement to buy the site directly, according to CNN. They worked in partnership with the Conservation Fund and the US Fish and Wildlife Service but could not come to terms on a price.

The land was valued between $420,000 and $450,000 by real estate appraisers. But when the family presented the land to the auction house, they were told it would likely bring in anywhere from $1 million to $3 million.

However, regardless of the buyer, the cave should remain well preserved. It is illegal under Missouri law to damage a human burial site like the Picture Cave or to profit from any cultural items located there.



Cailey Rizzo is a contributing writer for Travel + Leisure, currently based in Brooklyn. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, or at caileyrizzo.com.

British Airways operates carbon-neutral flight using recycled cooking oil

BY CELINE CASTRONUOVO - 09/16/21 

© Getty Images


British Airways operated its first-ever carbon-neutral flight powered by recycled cooking oil this week, a major step in the airline’s goal to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The plane traveled from London Heathrow to Glasgow Airport on Tuesday and was powered directly by sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) provided by British multinational gas giant BP, according to a British Airways press release.

The flight’s SAF was blended at 35 percent with traditional jet fuel “in accordance with technical aviation specifications,” according to British Airways.

The aircraft, an Airbus A320neo, burns 20 percent less fuel, resulting in 20 percent less carbon dioxide emissions, and is 50 percent quieter when compared to its earlier version.

The company said the flight path replicated a flight British Airways operated to Edinburgh in 2010 in order “to show how far the aviation industry has progressed in its efforts to decarbonise over the last decade.”

“This flight offered a practical demonstration of the progress we’re making in our carbon reduction journey,” British Airways Chairman and CEO Sean Doyle said in a statement. “By working together with our industry partners we’ve delivered a 62% improvement in emissions reductions compared to a decade ago.”

“This marks real progress in our efforts to decarbonise and shows our determination to continue innovating, working with Governments and industry and accelerating the adoption of new low carbon solutions to get us closer still to the Perfect Flight of the future,” he added.

By 2050, British Airways hopes to achieve net zero carbon emissions, meaning that any of its activities release a net zero amount of carbon into the atmosphere.

Other airlines across the globe have made similar environmental commitments — trade organization Airlines for America announced earlier this year that it would work “across the aviation industry and with government leaders in a positive partnership to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.”

According to a March press release, the organization hopes to make SAF commercially viable, with 2 billion gallons available to U.S. airlines by 2030.

O'Toole vow to never challenge provincial laws 'dangerous' for basic rights: expert



OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole has vowed to "never challenge" provincial laws, a sweeping statement that carries potential implications in areas ranging from abortion access to secession rights, markinga sharp break from the Liberal tack as the federal election campaign enters its endgame.

Building on his pledge to stay out of provincial bailiwicks, O'Toole made the promise last week in the context of a question around a Quebec law banning religious symbols for certain state employees. He reiterated it in the past few days as he accused Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau of "picking fights" with premiers.

"I would never challenge a law passed by the National Assembly of Quebec, Queen's Park or here in Toronto or by any provincial assembly," O'Toole said last Friday.

"I have a very clear commitment to respect provincial jurisdiction and respect the decisions of the democratically elected provincial assemblies across this country," he added Sunday.

Vancouver-based lawyer Michael Feder says the pledge never to go toe to toe with a premier amounts to a "truly remarkable" stance that could encroach on Canadians' rights and allow legislatures to ride roughshod over federal turf, including the Canada Health Act or interprovincial trade and transport.

"One can imagine Quebec purporting to ban transportation of crude oil by rail, for example, or B.C.," he said.

"It's not unimaginable that Quebec under its current leadership might purport to pass legislation governing conditions for secession. And if those conditions were at odds with what the Supreme Court of Canada has previously said … that seems to me to be an extremely ripe subject for litigation."

The question is far from hypothetical.

O'Toole has already promised to steer clear of a challenge to Quebec's Bill 21, which bars some civil servants in positions of authority from wearing turbans, kippas, hijabs and other religious garb.

Trudeau said Sunday the federal government has not "ruled out" federal intervention in a court challenge to the legislation.

The Liberal leader also made a campaign pledge to adopt a more explicit legal obligation for provinces to provide access to abortion services. The statement earlier this month came as New Brunswick continues to prohibit funding for abortions outside of three approved hospitals in Moncton and Bathurst.

O'Toole, who constantly repeats his personal pro-choice stance on the campaign trail, has nonetheless said he would leave it up to the province to sort out provision and funding of abortion procedures.

"This potentially opens up the whole abortion issue that he's desperately trying to avoid," said Errol Mendes, a law professor at the University of Ottawa.

“This is extraordinarily dangerous, if he really meant what he said (on court challenges)."

Areas of past federal-provincial legal wrangling range from securities regulation to reproductive technologies to the colour of margarine.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Canada ended a years-long battle between Ottawa and three provinces over the federal carbon price when it ruled that a national price on pollution is constitutional.

“There’s nothing untoward or anything about those sorts of cases," Feder said.

However, Lori Turnbull, director of the School of Public Administration at Dalhousie University, notes that it's often provinces that challenge Ottawa rather than the other way around.

She said O'Toole's pledge amounts to a political signal telegraphing a more decentralized approach reminiscent of former prime minister Stephen Harper.

"It strikes me more as a value statement than an operational statement," Turnbull said, pointing to O'Toole's no-strings-attached pledge for $60-billion in health transfers over a decade. "It isn't for the federal government to challenge provincial laws."

That's particularly true on issues directly tied to alleged violations of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, she said. It's typically up to affected individuals or groups to launch a legal challenge.

"But if there's an area where the federal government has pronounced that it is incredibly important, they will immediately apply as an intervener," Mendes said, warning that otherwise the country could start down a path of "provincial fiefdoms."

Harper had his limits too. In 2013 he filed a legal intervention in a challenge to Quebec's Bill 99, which sought to cement the right of unilateral secession.

In 1998, Ottawa successfully intervened in a case where the top court ordered Alberta to legally protect its residents from discrimination based on sexual orientation.

"Does he really want to be a head waiter to the provinces?" Mendes asked about O'Toole, alluding to former prime minister Pierre Trudeau's derisive characterization of his Progressive Conservative opponent Joe Clark.

Culinary comparisons aside, O'Toole's "federation of partnership" — a phrase he's returned to frequently in the lead-up to election day on Sept. 20 — echoes Clark's description of Canada as a "community of communities," a vision that saw the provinces taking on greater authority under a more passive gaze from Parliament.

While Trudeau has called out O'Toole on New Brunswick abortion services, the parties have proven reluctant to pounce on the top Tory's hands-off approach to provincial legislatures, with Bill 21 and other sensitive Quebec topics leaving leaders wary of ham-fisted pronouncements that could drive away voters ahead of Canada's 44th election.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2021.

Christopher Reynolds, The Canadian Press

Erin O’Toole: Not today Jason Kenney, not today

Marie-Danielle Smith - 
Maclean's

SEPT 16,2021



New Brunswick. Four days before the federal election. Erin O’Toole is trying to make an announcement about securing the future. His hopes are dashed. Nobody wants to talk about securing futures. Nobody wants to talk about New Brunswick. They only want to talk about the premier of Alberta, who has announced new lockdown and vaccine passport measures to curb a mounting disaster in the province.

O’Toole stares into the camera, steeled to push ahead. Jason Kenney won’t take this day away from him. No. The words “Alberta” and “Jason” and “Kenney” will not come out of his mouth. Not today. Not when he’s this close to securing the future. Nothing will stop him now.

This is roughly how the press conference ensues:

Reporter: Any response to Jason Kenney’s announcement and how he’s done with the pandemic?

O’Toole: Justin Trudeau did a very bad job with the pandemic.

Reporter: Sure, so, in contrast, you said the other day that Kenney had done a very good job. But even Kenney now disagrees with that. Do you stand by your statement?

O’Toole: Here’s what I stand by. I stand by Canadians. I’ve always stood by Canadians. Liberals don’t do that. They just call expensive elections.

Reporter: But what you said the other day…

O’Toole: My answer is clear. I’d stand by Canadians. Trudeau is bad. Provinces are good. New Brunswick, by the way, is a province.

Reporter: Who handled the pandemic better? Justin Trudeau or Jason Kenney?

O’Toole: I’ll tell you who didn’t handle it well. And that’s Trudeau. He handled it badly.

Reporter: Did Kenney handle it badly?

O’Toole: I’ll tell you one thing. Trudeau is spending $600 million on an election.

Reporter: But, like, between the two of them?

O’Toole: I would respect, and work with, every single province. Such as New Brunswick. New Brunswick is the province I am in today.

Reporter: Alberta and the Delta variant—thoughts?

O’Toole: If I were Prime Minister, I would work with the provinces. If I were Prime Minister, the Delta variant wouldn’t even be here.

Reporter: …Okay, what would you have done differently to keep the Delta variant out of the country?

O’Toole: I’d have stopped the flights. And guess what. I’d have worked with the provinces.

Reporter: But back to Jason Kenney…

O’Toole: Trudeau won’t work with every single province like I will. I’ll be a wingman for every single one. A wingman, that’s me. Did I mention I was in the air force?

Reporter: Jason Kenney. Ja-son Ken-ney. Is this mic on?

O’Toole: Did I mention the $600 million? So many taxpayer dollars—600 million of them! You could, you know, work with the provinces using that kind of money! Provinces like New Brunswick!

Reporter: If I ask you about Alberta one more time, are you really going to stand there and tell me, yet again, that you’re going to work with the provinces? Is that really what you’re going to say? Is that—can you even hear me?

O’Toole: Here’s one thing you can take right to the bank. I’ll work with the provinces. You can bet your hard-earned taxpayer money on that.

RELATED: What Jason Kenney’s ‘mission accomplished’ moment has reaped for Alberta

Alberta paid almost $100,000 to protect chief medical officer following 'threat assessment'

© Provided by National Post

Alberta's chief medical officer of health Dr. Deena Hinshaw provides an update on the province's response to the fourth wave of the COVID-19 in Edmonton, Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2021. 

Photo by David Bloom

EDMONTON — The Alberta government spent nearly $100,000 on private security for Dr. Deena Hinshaw, the province’s chief medical officer of health, after anti-lockdown protests heated up during the third wave.

The figures, disclosed under Alberta’s rules for sole-source contracts, show that Price Langevin & Associates, a private security firm, was hired between May 25 and July 2 to “provide private security to the Chief Medical Officer of Health.”

No further details about the contract — one valued at $72,000, the other at $22,800 — are given, but security threats against politicians and public health officials have been an issue throughout the pandemic, across many jurisdictions, most prominently in the United States.

“Following a threat assessment in May, it was determined that Dr. Hinshaw required security services,” said Amanda Krumins, the assistant communications director with Alberta Health, in an email. “Given the timeline and need to have this in place in a timely manner, the decision was made to contract a private security firm.”

Krumins declined to answer a number of follow-up questions, including whether or not there was a precipitating incident, whether or not Hinshaw also received protection from Alberta Sheriffs, who guard the premier, and whether or not she is currently receiving protection.

“For security reasons, we cannot share any more information at this time,” Krumins said.

Hinshaw, according to a profile by the University of Alberta, has two children in elementary school.

“My husband is working from home, so he has taken on household chores and the kids, and my mother, who lives with us part-time, has also been an amazing support through all of this,” Hinshaw told Folio in May 2020.

Price Langevin & Associates didn’t respond to the National Post’s request for comment, nor did Hinshaw’s office. The office of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney declined to comment.

Neil LeMay, a senior security adviser with Global Enterprise Security Risk Management, and the former deputy chief sheriff with Alberta Sheriffs and Security Operations with the government of Alberta, said threat assessments would have looked at threats and assessed their probability or likelihood of actually happening.

“A threat assessment would look at … the motivation, the capability of the person to carry out that threat,” LeMay said.

Security teams, LeMay said, look for two sorts of people when it comes to assessing threats: hunters and howlers.

“The howlers, they’re easy to spot. They’re the ones that are standing out in front of the hospitals waving signs and might go back to their computer and make some sort of threat on a tweet or an email chain, or something like that,” LeMay said. “The more dangerous one, of course, is the hunters — those that feel aggrieved by some action of government and they sort of keep a low profile and carry out their deeds.”

Around the one-year mark of the pandemic, the protests and objections to public-health measures increased considerably. When restrictions eased, many who supported more stringent measures also began to blame Hinshaw, accusing her of having blood on her hands, or of being a shill for the United Conservative government.

In mid-April, hundreds of people appeared at the legislature for an anti-lockdown rally.

“Generally, that wouldn’t trigger a threat assessment — just a regular, peaceful protest, or a little bit of a rambunctious protest, even — it would have to be something more specific where somebody actually made some sort of threat or to do harm,” LeMay said. “If it’s a pretty direct threat, then of course the police can take action, but a lot of these threats are pretty vague.”

At the protests, some people chanted “lock her up” in reference to Hinshaw, and at least one sign promised Hinshaw, Kenney and Health Minister Tyler Shandro that “we are coming for you.” Kenney condemned the people behind the chants, and the statements and actions of “unhinged conspiracy theorists.”

“It’s particularly offensive to threaten a committed public servant like Dr. Hinshaw, a consummate professional who has offered the best possible health advice,” Kenney tweeted on April 12. “I call on those responsible to stop the threats & law breaking, which is a disservice to their own cause.”



While the Alberta government has not commented on how frequently officials have been targeted, threats and harassment have been reported by other governments since the first few months of the pandemic.

“The present harassment of health officials for proposing or taking steps to protect communities from COVID-19 is extraordinary in its scope and nature, use of social media, and danger to the ongoing pandemic response,” says an August 2020 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

On Wednesday, a day after a new round of restrictions were announced in Alberta, including a vaccine passport system, social media was alight with fears of coming government tyranny, with commenters on some Facebook pages discussing how to overthrow the government.

“This newest ‘state of emergency’ declared by Kenney and Hinshaw is an act of Treason, making these mandates completely invalid,” says a post from Calgary Freedom Central, which bills itself as an independent news page on Facebook. “It’s time to rise up Alberta and take back control of our province (peacefully, as always).”

With additional reporting by the Calgary Herald

WAIT,WHAT?!

'A huge gap:' Employees of businesses requiring proof of vaccine from customers won't need to be immunized under Alberta's new COVID-19 measures

Dustin Cook - 

Edmonton Journal

Employees of businesses who adopt Alberta's new restriction exemption program won't be required to be immunized. The City of Edmonton is reporting a confirmed vaccination rate of 72 per cent for its employees.

Employees of businesses opting into Alberta’s new vaccine passport system won’t need to have gotten the jab.

The restriction exemption program set to come into effect Sept. 20 will allow businesses to operate without restrictions, other than mandatory masking, if they require customers to provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours. Proof of one dose will be accepted until Oct. 25 and then full vaccination will be required, Premier Jason Kenney said in introducing the new measures Wednesday evening.

But the vaccination requirement won’t extend to employees of these businesses, which Downtown Business Association executive director Puneeta McBryan said is “a huge gap” in the measures announced yesterday to combat the fourth wave of the virus. Responding to the announcement, McBryan said small businesses need support and direction from the province and this decision from the province could give them pause in implementing their own mandate for employees.

“It’s an eyebrow raiser, for sure, and I think it’s something the province is going to have to address because many large employers Downtown have chosen to require disclosure or a mandatory vaccination, but small businesses have a way harder time with that,” she said in an interview with Postmedia. “Small business owners are probably going to be far more reluctant on their own accord to require all staff to be vaccinated, even if they want to do the right thing, they might just not be feeling supported in doing that right now.”
City of Edmonton response

The City of Edmonton has yet to make a decision on whether it will implement the proof-of-vaccination system to access city facilities and amenities such as recreation centres as of Monday, but Mayor Don Iveson said more details are expected soon. Reacting to the new measures Thursday, Iveson said he supports implementing the vaccine passport system and he believes the city is tracking in that direction, but the final decision is under the authority of the city manager.

If the city chooses not to go that route, indoor recreation facilities will be limited to one-third capacity and attendees must be with household members only, or two close contacts for those who live alone. Fitness and recreation activities would be limited with indoor group classes and sporting events not permitted. St. Albert city council decided Thursday morning to follow the vaccine requirements for access to its facilities.

The vaccine program, if adopted, wouldn’t apply to city employees and data released Thursday highlights a confirmed vaccination rate of 72 per cent. But 14 per cent of the city’s 12,299 employees didn’t disclose their vaccination status.

Iveson said this result is “concerning” because it’s not enough to ensure safety for all workers. He said he supports a mandate, but city officials are still working on confirming next steps.

“I think it would need to be a lot higher for the city to have confidence that we’re achieving a shared ring of immunity within our workplaces and so the data that has been collected will factor into the city’s ultimate decisions around mandating vaccination,” he said.

Mandatory work from home

Although businesses will have some adjusting to do with the new restrictions in place, McBryan said the most troublesome measure is the mandatory work-from-home order which will again take people away from the core just as business was starting to flourish with thousands of people returning to the office.

“All of our Downtown businesses who have just hung on through the last 19 months, they just finally had some consistent traffic to keep them going and now if everyone goes back home, we’re right back to being a pretty empty Downtown,” she said.

McBryan said she hopes the province will consider an exemption for businesses who already have a mandatory vaccination program in place.

 

Plants evolved complexity in two bursts -- with a 250-million-year hiatus

Peer-Reviewed Publication

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: AN AFRICAN LILY (AGAPANTHUS AFRICANUS) FLOWER IS BROKEN INTO COMPONENT PARTS. ACCORDING TO A NEW CLASSIFICATION OF PLANT COMPLEXITY, AN AFRICAN LILY HAS 12 TYPES OF PARTS IN ITS REPRODUCTIVE STRUCTURE, SOME OF WHICH ARE ON THE SEED OR INSIDE THE OVARY AND NOT PICTURED HERE. IN COMPARISON, A TYPICAL FERN HAS ONE TYPE OF REPRODUCTIVE PART. (PHOTO CREDIT: ANDREW LESLIE) view more 

CREDIT: ANDREW LESLIE

A Stanford-led study reveals that rather than evolving gradually over hundreds of millions of years, land plants underwent major diversification in two dramatic bursts, 250 million years apart. The first occurred early in plant history, giving rise to the development of seeds, and the second took place during the diversification of flowering plants. 

The research uses a novel but simple metric to classify plant complexity based on the arrangement and number of basic parts in their reproductive structures. While scientists have long assumed that plants became more complex with the advent of seeds and flowers, the new findings, published Sept. 17 in Science, offer insight to the timing and magnitude of those changes.

“The most surprising thing is this kind of stasis, this plateau in complexity after the initial evolution of seeds and then the total change that happened when flowering plants started diversifying,” said lead study author Andrew Leslie, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “The reproductive structures look different in all these plants, but they all have about the same number of parts during that stasis.”

An unusual comparison

Flowers are more diverse than every other group of plants, producing colors, smells and shapes that nourish animals and delight the senses. They are also intricate: petals, anthers and pistils interweave in precise arrangements to lure pollinators and trick them into spreading pollen from one flower to another. 

This complexity makes it difficult for scientists to compare flowering plants to plants with simpler reproductivesystems, such as ferns or some conifers. As a result, botanists have long focused on characteristics within family groups and typically study evolution in non-flowering plants separately from their more intricate flowering relatives. 

Leslie and his co-authors overcame these differences by designing a system that classifies the number of different kinds of parts in reproductive structures based on observation alone. Each species was scored according to how many types of parts it has and the degree to which it exhibited clustering of those parts. They categorized about 1,300 land plant species from about 420 million years ago until the present.

“This tells a pretty simple story about plant reproductive evolution in terms of form and function: The more functions the plants have and the more specific they are, the more parts they have,” Leslie said. “It's a useful way of thinking about broad-scale changes encompassing the whole of plant history.”

From shrubs to blooms

When land plants first diversified in the early Devonian about 420 million to 360 million years ago, Earth was a warmer world devoid of trees or terrestrial vertebrate animals. Arachnids like scorpions and mites roamed the land amongst short, patchy plants and the tallest land organism was a 20-foot fungus resembling a tree trunk. After the Devonian, huge changes occurred in the animal kingdom: Land animals evolved to have large body sizes and more varied diets, insects diversified, dinosaurs appeared – but plants didn’t see a major change in reproductive complexity until they developed flowers.

“Insect pollination and animal seed dispersal may have appeared as early as 300 million years ago, but it's not until the last 100 million years that these really intricate interactions with pollinators are driving this super high complexity in flowering plants,” Leslie said. “There was such a long period of time where plants could have interacted with insects in the way that flowering plants do now, but they didn't to the same degree of intricacy.”

In the Late Cretaceous, about 100 to 66 million years ago, Earth more closely resembled the planet we know today – a bit like Yosemite National Park without the flowering trees and bushes. The second burst of complexity was more dramatic than the first, emphasizing the unique nature of flowering plants, according to Leslie. That period gave rise to plants like the passionflower, which can have 20 different types of parts, more than twice the number found in non-flowering plants.

The researchers classified 472 living species, part of which Leslie carried out on and around Stanford’s campus by simply pulling apart local plants and counting their reproductive organs. The analysis includes vascular land plants – everything except mosses and a few early plants that lack supportive tissue for conducting water and minerals.

“One thing we argue in this paper is that this classification simply reflects their functional diversity,” Leslie said. “They basically split up their labor in order to be more efficient at doing what they needed to do.”

###

Study co-authors include Carl Simpson of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and Luke Mander of The Open University.

---

JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.abi6984 

ARTICLE TITLE

Reproductive innovations and pulsed rise in plant complexity

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

17-Sep-2021\

Reproductive complexity in plants did not occur gradually, but in two distinct pulses

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)

Plant reproductive complexity increased in two, widely separated pulses likely driven by important evolutionary innovations, including the origin of seeds and flowers, according to a new study. These findings show that, in contrast to many aspects of animal morphological diversity, which often occurred early in evolutionary history, most complexity in plants occurred much later. The evolution of land plants has been characterized by an increase in the complexity of reproductive structures. The earliest groups produced simple reproductive structures, whereas some later taxa evolved to produce complex and intricate flower structures with many specialized parts and arrangements. However, when and how reproductive complexity arose in plants is poorly understood. Andrew Leslie and colleagues devised a novel approach for analyzing the morphological complexity of reproductive structures in vascular land plants across their evolutionary history. The method divides plant reproductive structures into their basic morphological components – parts like pollen sacs or flower petals, for example – and scores the complexity of a given taxon based on the number of part types and their organization. To analyze changes in plant complexity over time, Leslie et al. applied this method to a dataset of 1,338 living and fossil plants spanning the paleontological record. According to the findings, reproductive complexity in plants did not increase gradually but rather in two distinct pulses, corresponding to key evolutionary innovations in plant reproductive biology and separated by roughly 250 million years of relative stasis. The first pulse occurred in the late Devonian (~375 million years ago), during the initial radiation of vascular plants; it culminated with the appearance of non-flowering seed plants. The second pulse occurred during the mid-Cretaceous (~125 million years), corresponding with the origin and rapid diversification of flowering plants.

---

JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.abi6984 

ARTICLE TITLE

Reproductive innovations and pulsed rise in plant complexity

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

17-Sep-2021

Employers are spying on Americans at home with ‘tattleware’. It’s time to track them instead


Jessa Crispin
Thu, September 16, 2021

Photograph: Alamy

The corporate handwringing started at almost the same time as the lockdown orders: “But if all of our workers are at home, where we can’t see them, how can we possibly know that they’re actually working?”

Leave it to the tech creeps to figure out a solution to reassure your boss, miles away, that you are indeed doing what you are being paid to do. Writing in the Guardian, Sandy Milne recently reported on the rise of “bossware” or “tattleware”, essentially spyware that enables managers to monitor their employees working from home. That includes a new program called Sneek, which uses your webcam to take a photo of you about once a minute and makes it available to your supervisor, to prove that you are not away from your desk doing God knows what. You’re not warned in advance, so the photograph that Sneek takes can catch you doing pretty much anything – picking spinach out of your teeth, smelling your own armpit, or any of the other totally normal things human beings do when alone but that no one really wants documented and distributed. It’s a level of invasion that would horrify even the NSA.

There are good reasons for the lack of trust between employer and employee – alas, they are mostly the fault of the employer. Companies took out PPP loans to stay running through the pandemic and then laid off thousands of workers anyway. There is widespread wage theft adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and social media is full of stories of restaurant owners withholding their waitstaffs’ tips.

Yet reading the news might give the impression that it is the workers who are the problem. The New York Times is always so worried about whether remote work is making employees more likely to do something horrific like operate in their own self-interest and leave their jobs for a better opportunity. The Wall Street Journal found some people who were doing two full-time jobs simultaneously, fooling each of their employers into thinking they had their full attention, and made a federal case out of it. The reasonable response to hearing that someone is pulling a double salary without increasing their workload one bit is, “Well, congratulations,” unless you are one of the chronically underemployed, in which case the other possible reaction is, “Save a little of that money for the rest of us, fella.”

Studies on working from home tend to show that people are actually more productive, but employers are still terrified that their time is being wasted. Little concern, of course, is displayed when employers waste their employees’ time, with, say, endless meetings, nonsensical demands, and not-technically-required-but-there-will-be-repercussions-for-not-attending “social” events during non-work hours. And every freelancer knows the pain of the time wasted trying to get paid, submitting multiple invoices, crafting carefully worded “Just checking up on this!” messages, calling and emailing and texting and pleading and sobbing and hiring a private detective to find the person in the accounting department who can finally cut you a check for $137.82 that they have owed you for three months. But ha ha, you have zero power and you are exactly $89.17 away from making your rent this month, so what choice do you have?

Freelancers and gig workers have been on the cutting edge of not being trusted by their contractors for a long time now. Delivery drivers and warehouse workers are tracked relentlessly. White-collar freelancers like designers, writers, copyeditors, transcribers and other office workers are often asked to use “time management programs” that not only track down to the second how long you work on a task but will detect and deduct “lag time” by monitoring whether your keyboard or trackpad is being used, to make sure that the contractor who is probably already underpaying you doesn’t have to pay for the three minutes you went to the bathroom. If anything, this kind of software forces workers to make constant useless gestures toward productivity – banging arrow keys and swirling cursors around just to keep their pay from being docked.

Where are the apps of insubordination? The programs that will type useless things for you while you go eat a burrito in peace, or fool your GPS so you can stop hurriedly for coffee while making it look like you are still on the predetermined route? If anyone needs to be tracked, it’s the accounting departments that approve invoices and issue payments to freelancers and subcontractors; please find out what they’ve been doing with their time instead of writing that check they owe me. (I know you are getting my emails, Valerie!)

There absolutely has been a breach of trust between employer and worker, but it’s not up to us – the underpaid and the stressed-out and the very tired and exploited – to prove we deserve our independence. Employers need to treat their workers as something more than an interference with profit, or a distraction from the stockholders. They owe us a lot. Basic respect is a good place to start, but privacy, better pay, and dignity will take you further.

Jessa Crispin is a Guardian US columnist