Scientists in furious row over 'lab-made Covid' claims

Joe Pinkstone, Sarah Newey - Yesterday - The Telegraph

A study claiming Covid was made in a lab has ignited a furious row, as the researchers behind it have been accused of "fixing" their results by other scientists.



A pre-print study shared widely online purported to have found evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, was the result of human intervention.

While the findings were lauded by some scientists as "the strongest piece of evidence to date" that Covid came from a lab, others have condemned the paper as "confected nonsense".

The authors of the paper claim to have found evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab experiment which cloned a coronavirus, moved around chunks of DNA and rearranged them in a specific order, thus producing the Covid virus.

Alex Washburne, one of the authors, said: "We examined whether SARS-CoV-2 was synthesised in a lab. We studied a common method for synthesising [coronaviruses] in the lab.

"This method was thought to not leave a fingerprint. We found the fingerprint. That fingerprint is in the SARS-CoV-2 genome."



Viscount Matt Ridley, who co-authored a book on the origin of the coronavirus, called the new work a "hugely important study".

"Evidence that strongly suggests SARS-CoV-2 was engineered may have been hiding in plain sight all along," he said.

Prof Francois Balloux, the director of the UCL Genetics Institute, said it was "the strongest piece of evidence to date against a simple scenario of strict zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2".

'Highly misleading'

But prominent academics have rubbished the findings, claiming it was a "self-fulfilling prophecy" and the findings are "highly misleading".

Critics say the signals the authors claim to be evidence of a lab origin are not a smoking gun because these genetic fingerprints are naturally found in many viruses, including the common cold.

Prof Stuart Neil, a professor of virology at King’s College London (KCL), accused the team of "stacking the deck" by cherry-picking their analysis and turning their paper into a "self-fulfilling prophecy".

Related video: International scientific experts warn the world still hasn't dealt with the main cause of the COVID pandemic, animal to human transmission

"It is confected nonsense put out to create a splash of controversy and become a talking point in the US and UK media," he told The Telegraph.

Prof David Robertson, head of viral genomics at the Centre for Virus Research at the University of Glasgow, said paper was "nonsense" and "highly misleading".

'Poppycock dressed up as science'

Prof Kristian Andersen, evolutionary biologist and professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute, called the work "nothing more than poppycock dressed up as science".

"In plain language - this is uninformed nonsense and it’s simply not worth engaging with this b*******," Prof Anderson said.

The academic also said the paper is "so deeply flawed that it wouldn’t pass kindergarten molecular biology".

The pre-print claims to have found telltale signs that the coronavirus was sliced up in a lab and stitched back together again, leaving behind "a very subtle but identifiable fingerprint".

The team believe they have spotted "sticky ends" on the end of DNA fragments that have been moved around using enzymes.

'It makes a caricature of the whole situation'

But Dr David LV Bauer, a group leader at The Francis Crick Institute and expert in RNA virus replication, said this is impossible.

"Imagine that you've seen a train pulling into a station. They are identifying that they see the little couplers linking the carriages together. That’s what they claim to see," he told the Telegraph.

"What they've misunderstood is that the Golden Gate system is like the fancy new trains on the Elizabeth Line which don't have any visible couplers."

The analysis of the paper is also guilty of selective data interpretation, according to Dr Bauer, who says the authors "fixed" various aspects deliberately to only get the results they wanted and the findings will be unlikely to pass through peer-review.

"The result of the analysis has been constrained in such a way that they only ever see an outcome that they want and also there are all the red flags about how they don't understand how this actually works," he told The Telegraph.

"The problem with this kind of stuff is that it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether [Covid] came from a lab, whether it was tracked in or out on somebody's shoe or whether it was engineered. These are perfectly legitimate questions to ask.

"But at the end of the day when you then put out this kind of stuff it just makes a caricature of the whole situation. It makes it really difficult to have any kind of reasonable discourse."

'Tinfoil hat bonkers'

Dr Benjamin Neuman, professor of biology at Texas A&M University, said the study "is the molecular equivalent of phrenology or numerology" and "tinfoil hat bonkers".

"It's about as illuminating an approach as converting the genome to digits, adding up the digits, and comparing that to the 'number of the Beast'," he said.

"The neatest thing is - look at the affiliations. We have someone who works at a gynaecology clinic, a business management efficiency analyst, and an Alzheimer's researcher. As far as I can tell, none of these has ever worked with a virus before now, or studied virology, or been on a virology paper of any kind."

Scientists Trace Earliest Cases of COVID-19 to Market in Wuhan, China

Jul 26, 2022

An international team of 18 researchers, including Stephen Goldstein, PhD, University of Utah Health, have determined that the earliest cases of COVID-19 in humans arose at a wholesale fish market in Wuhan China in December, 2019. Goldstein explains and answers questions about the study.

 

How the pandemic has impacted the economy and society 

| COVID-19 Special

Jul 9, 2022

DW News

COVID is a threat to many people's livelihoods. We meet a German fire artist who relocated to Spain to find work. Plus: What can we learn from Portugal's experience with the omicron subvariant BA.5? And South Africa’s homeless numbers have soared.

 

Complexity of Pandemics N°1 – Securing Human, Animal and Planetary Health

Streamed live on Jul 5, 2022

World Health Organization (WHO)

Complexity of Pandemics is the speaker series of the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. It takes place quarterly and seeks to highlight the complex multidisciplinary landscape of preventing, predicting, preparing for, and responding to epidemics and pandemics. 

This first session of the speaker series – Complexity of Pandemics N°1 – Securing Human, Animal and Planetary Health – was broadcast live from Berlin, Germany on 5 July 2022.

 Visit the WHO Pandemic Hub online: 

WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence:

https://pandemichub.who.int/ 

“Complexity of Pandemics” speaker series:

https://pandemichub.who.int/speaker-s... 

Information on this event

https://pandemichub.who.int/events/it...

When women teach Torah, sparks fly

Religion News Service - Yesterday 12:38 p.m.

(RNS) — I will never forget the day I fell in love.

It happened in the library of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where I was studying to become a rabbi.

And, no, it was not with a woman.

My love object was actually a body of sacred literature. It was midrash — the searching-out (drash) of biblical texts in order to reveal their deeper meanings.

Jews use the term in various ways:
It is a process — “midrash.”
It is an individual teaching — “a midrash.”
It is also a body of sacred literature — “the midrash.”

Midrash contains ancient sermonic material, anecdotes and verse-by-verse explanation of the biblical text. It uses the verse and, often, just one word as its departure point, while enlisting other biblical verses as part of the story-telling tapestry.

Midrash opened a whole new world to me.

Yes, I was familiar with the stories and teachings of the Torah.

But, no one had ever told me that there was more — that the ancient rabbis had received the biblical text and had engaged in an act of what James Kugel called “narrative expansion” in order to respond to a problem in the text, usually an unanswered question.

As literary analysts have noticed, biblical text is terse. It does not like to give details. Therefore, midrash jumps into the textual gap: Who is a certain person? What does a certain word mean? Where is a certain place? Why did a certain thing happen the way it did?

After all, how do we read sacred text? Like a lover reads a love letter or a text message or listens to a voice mail. It is akin to obsession: What did she mean by that? What did he mean by: “See you this weekend, probably?” What does “probably” mean?

The midrashic process even finds its way into American folklore. George Washington was honest, they say. Great, let’s invent a story about how he admitted to his father he chopped down the cherry tree in order to add a narrative to his honesty.

(Fascinating to note: a parallel in the legend of how young Abraham broke his father’s idols and then owned up to it. Both are stories about the founders of their nations.)

The midrashic process finds its way into secular literature. It is all about filling in the gaps in a prior story. When playwright Tom Stoppard wondered about two minor characters in Shakespeare’s play, “Hamlet,” and the terse declaration of their demise, he wrote the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. When John Gardner wondered: What would the Anglo-Saxon epic “Beowulf” be like if we heard it from the point of view of the monster? he wrote Grendel.

You might even say the process continues in popular culture. The idea of the television spinoff — taking a minor character in a story and building a whole new narrative around them? Sort of like midrash. “All in the Family” begot “Maude” and “The Jeffersons” and “Archie Bunker’s Place.” The creation of back stories and origin stories? Midrash.

And, in music: Leonard Cohen’s immortal song “Hallelujah” was a midrash on the biblical stories of King David and Samson. Likewise, his song “Who By Fire” is a midrash on the Unetaneh Tokef prayer on the Days of Awe.

But, mostly, midrashim are stories about stories in the Torah.

The age of midrash began in the days of the ancient sages, in the first centuries of the Common Era, and never actually stopped.

And, yes, mostly, those stories were written by men, based on stories men had written generations before that.

That is, until now.

I am holding in my hands a book that is nothing short of a treasure: “Dirshuni: Contemporary Women’s Midrash,” edited by Tamar Biala, a brilliant educator, and translated by her husband, Yehudah Mirsky, and educator Ilana Kurshan.

Dirshuni (“interpret me!” — a command we playfully imagine biblical texts crying out to their readers). It is a collection of midrashim written by Israeli women. There were two previous volumes in Hebrew, the second of which I own, the first of which I have sought in vain in Jerusalem bookstores and appears to be out of print. The Hebrew of the essays echoes the original language of rabbinic Hebrew, the birth language of midrash itself. It is an homage, in the true sense of the word.

In the introduction to this new volume, Tamar Kadari defines “midrash” as “an exercise in creativity, with an element of play and pleasure in which sweep and imagination are conjoined.”

She got that right. The essays in this book — text and commentary — are journeys into the depth of the Jewish imagination. They flow from women’s experiences of sacred literature, everyday life and the Divine itself. In that sense, they testify to the act of ongoing revelation.

Some appetizers for what will be a great meal:

What would creation look like from a woman’s perspective? Ancient midrashim state that God had created, and then destroyed, earlier worlds because they were inadequate. Tamar Biala plays with this. She wonders if God’s pain and disappointment at those failed creations might have replicated the disappointment and heartache of miscarriage — that God miscarries, “as it were” (a key phrase in midrash). “And God saw all Her worlds falling at Her feet, and She said to Herself: I will just let my heart fall along with them … What did She think at that moment, when She could no longer bear to look on those worlds?”

We find the addition of women’s voices wherein they had been previously absent — Sarah at the binding of Isaac; Dinah’s perception of what happened when the Canaanite prince, Shechem, raped her (noting, as I did in my own rabbinical ordination thesis on the rape, that in 1,500 years of sacred literature, Dinah has remained absolutely silent). For Rivkah Lubitch, Dinah’s silence was born of trauma: “Two women were raped, and their silence resounded from one end of the world to the other. Dinah and Tamar, the sister of Amnon…” (from the story of David, II Samuel 13 — as Phyllis Trible put it, a text of terror).

Women’s midrashim expand on previously under-explored characters — for example, Bityah, the daughter of Pharaoh who rescues and adopts Moses. Gili Savan connects her rescue of Moses with the words of Isaiah 58, suggesting the societal obligations of the Jewish people toward the poor derived from Bityah’s righteous acts toward Moses.

 Brilliant!

These midrashim give names to the previously unnamed — for example, giving the tragic daughter of Jephthah the name Tanot, based on a little quirk in the original biblical text.

And, yes: As it happened in classical midrash, our authors engage in punning and word play that would be worthy of Will Shortz playing with puzzles on Sunday morning on NPR. Thus, in the story of the binding of Isaac, Abraham does not choveish et chamoro, “saddle his donkey.” Rather, the patriarch koveish et rachamav, “subdues his compassion,” in order to bring Isaac to the sacrifice.

“Dirshuni” is powerful, playful, joyful and sometimes painful. Its words and insights will be making many “guest appearances” in my sermons and teaching in the coming year.

One last thing: “Dirshuni” is a powerful testimony to two remarkable forces in the Jewish world.

First: the enduring and growing presence of women who are teaching sacred text. I hesitate to leave anyone out of this list of women with whom I have studied, for fear of omitting a friend and/or teacher. Just at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem: Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, who is probably the most prolific teacher of biblical texts in our time; Judith Klitsner, Rachel Korazim, Melilah Hellner-Eshed, Elana Stein Hain, Ruth Calderon, Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum, etc., etc., etc. Each one of them has formed my understanding of text, in a profound way.

Second: I want to emphasize that “Dirshuni” consists of the voices of Israeli women. Let us not fail to adequately appreciate this. For this is nothing less than a revolution — not only for Israeli women, but also for Israel itself. Of all the many reasons I love Israel and am a Zionist, there can be no doubt, the intellectual and spiritual output of the Jewish State fulfills the dreams of the early Zionists — that the Land would become Ground Zero for Jewish cultural and intellectual renewal and that a new Torah would go forth from Zion.

Which it does. Which it has.

Get a copy of “Dirshuni.” As we begin a new cycle of Torah for the year, it should be at your side — for your own learning and teaching. It will yield numerous insights.

With a solemn caveat: Don’t lend it out.

You might never see it again.

Edmonton's Rainbow Refuge a safe haven for LGBTQ+ newcomers

Adrienne Lamb, Rick Bremness - Yesterday

Basel Abou Hamrah still remembers seeing the rainbow flags at the front desk when he arrived at the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers.

"This is a safe space for us," says Abou Hamrah, a Syrian refugee who lived in secret until he fled the country in 2015.

Abou Hamrah says he came from a culture where LGBTQ+ people are a topic that no one discusses. It was like "living in a horror movie every day," he says.

"There is no freedom, you can not be who you are, you can go to jail because of who you are, so I left."

The Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers was established in 1980 as a hub for language, employment and immigration services.

At the centre, Abou Hamrah found help learning English and a job as a settlement practitioner. He went on to establish the Rainbow Refuge program, supporting newcomers and refugees.

Rainbow Refuge provides housing and mental health support, in addition to immigration and settlement services.

It also runs a weekly support group, funded with help from the Pride Centre of Edmonton. That group has grown from seven people to now more than 150, including individuals from more than 48 countries.

The Rainbow Refuge program has been recognized internationally. Abou Hamrah presented as part of the Canadian delegations at the United Nations in Geneva this summer.

He notes that about 70 countries around the world have laws criminalizing LGBTQ+ community members, ranging from jail time to the death penalty.

Before the Rainbow Refuge program, about 50 to 60 per cent of LGBTQ+ refugee claims were accepted. As of 2021, about 97 per cent of LGBTQ+ refugee claims in Edmonton are accepted.


Sara Buczynski getting ready for a meeting at the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers.© Rick Bremness/CBC

That's a point of pride for Sara Buczynski, settlement practitioner with the Rainbow Refuge Program who works with Abou Hamrah on LGBTQ+ outreach at the centre for newcomers.

"I love my job," Buczynski says. "When I started at EMCN I decided I would be more out in my work."

She says she enjoys "trying to help people settle in Edmonton and navigate their new home and [making] Edmonton a comfortable and welcoming place for them."

Before the program there was isolation, now there is a strong and thriving network of people supporting one another and "it makes me really happy when people can be themselves and be safe here," Buczynski says

She says the next step is stable, ongoing funding, including public and private donations, for the work they do with an eye to growing the program.



Some of the signs of support at the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers.© Adrienne Lamb/CBC

Employers are getting more selective and taking longer to hire, headhunter Robert Half says

Tomi Kilgore - 

EARNINGS RESULTS

Robert Half International Inc.’s stock tumbled to a 20-month low Friday after the headhunter missed third-quarter profit and revenue expectations and provided a downbeat outlook, saying its clients are getting pickier and taking their time to hire people.

The results and guidance prompted J.P. Morgan analyst Andrew Steinerman to back away from his longtime bullish stance on the staffing-services company, noting that “rising recessionary risks” are skewing the risk-versus-reward balance more to the downside.

The stock sank as much as 18.1% intraday before paring losses to close Friday down 8.6% at $73.01, the lowest closing price since Feb. 10, 2021.

Chief Executive Keith Waddell said on the post-earnings conference call with analysts that while labor markets remain tight and the company’s clients continue to hire, they’re doing so at a more conservative pace as the economic outlook becomes increasingly uncertain.

“Although the sales cycle has lengthened, many clients are becoming more selective and requesting to see more candidates for their open positions,” Waddell said, according to a FactSet transcript. “They’re adding more steps to their hiring processes and prioritizing on-site or local hybrid candidates who take longer to hire.”

He added that many candidates continue to prefer remote and hybrid working models, “a structural shift that’s expected to remain.”

Late Thursday, the company reported third-quarter net income that slipped to $166.2 million, or $1.53 a share, from $170.9 million, or $1.53 a share, in the same period a year ago. (Earnings per share were unchanged even as net income fell, because the number of shares outstanding was reduced to 108.6 million from 111.5 million.) That missed the FactSet consensus for earnings per share of $1.62, marking the first EPS miss in three and a half years.

Revenue grew 7.1% to $1.83 billion but was below the FactSet consensus of $1.92 billion. This was the second straight quarter that revenue missed expectations.

Talent shortages persist in the U.S. as job openings and quit rates remain at elevated levels, but they are “modestly off their highs,” CEO Waddell said.

On the post-earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Michael Buckley provided fourth-quarter guidance ranges for EPS of $1.31 to $1.41 and for revenue of $1.695 billion to $1.775 billion. Both were below the FactSet consensus as of the end of September for EPS of $1.54 and for revenue of $1.88 billion.

J.P. Morgan’s Steinerman cut his rating on Robert Half to neutral after being at overweight for at least the past three years, saying that “rising recession risks” skew the risk-versus-reward balance more to the downside. He also lowered his stock-price target to $76 from $89.

“It is possible that RHI’s trough earnings in a recession in this environment may be higher than in prior recessions due to unusual tightness in the labor market,” Steinerman wrote in a note to clients. “That said, it is too early to tell whether we could see less decline in temporary help in the current set up as the [Federal Reserve] is still on a path of raising interest rates.”

He believes the best time to buy staffing stocks is in the midst of a recession, “and a recession has not begun yet, as far as we can tell.”

Robert Half’s stock has plunged 34.5% year to date, while the S&P 500 index has shed 21.3%.

A CAPITALI$T TOOL THROWN AWAY

‘I’m so hurt right now’: Bank of America employee devastated after being laid off with no warning, says employees are ‘easily disposable’

Jack Alban - Yesterday 

Provided by Daily Dot

IT worker and TikToker Antrell (@TechByAntrell) ignited a litany of comments from folks who were suddenly laid off by their employers after sharing he was fired with no warning.

In his viral clip, Antrell says that he wasn't given a solid reasoning as to why he was let go from his job in the first place, but suspects the fact that he was a new hire had something to do with it.

"Guys, I'm so hurt right now. I see this happen all the time I just didn't think it would happen to me but I just got laid off," he starts in the clip. "And I'm unemployed and I'm so hurt. I get it, I get it. A lot of people are being affected right now but like I didn't think this would happen to me and I actually really liked this job. I only been there like five months I actually really liked this job and I was actually really happy there, and now I'm unemployed. I don't know how to feel I don't know how to respond I'm really sad."

TikTokers who wanted to know more context about the circumstances surrounding Antrell's layoff asked him what happened, and he obliged with a third clip about his firing.

"So, for context, I was an IT project manager at Bank of America," Antrell says in the clip and went on to say that he was laid off "with no warning" and that it was a "same day layoff" which could explain the devastation on his face in his original clip.

To make matters worse, he adds that he wasn't really given "much understanding" as to why he was being laid off in the first place. He did address concerns in the comments section, noting that his job performance nor his TikTok account played a part in him losing his job.

He believes that his age played a factor, as younger employees in the IT industry are "easily disposable because everyone else is much, much older than you and they don't take you seriously from the beginning anyway."

Antrell continues that he migrated from another company around four months prior to go work at Bank of America, and when a round of layoffs occurred, since he was the newest hire, he was one of the first to go up on the chopping block.

He then went on to say that although he was "was very, very sad about it at first," he said that he ended up feeling a lot better about it and chalked it up "something that was supposed to happen as part of [his] journey" and thanked everyone for their sympathetic words in response to his first TikTok.

Viewers who saw his original post offered a slew of responses. Some shared their own layoff stories, while others encouraged him not to get too down and out about it, saying other opportunities will be available in his career.

"A person isnt defined by their job. Dont forget that," one user encouraged.

"Have a self day babe ! You are not your job apply for unemployment and spend this time focusing on the next step," another shared.

"Thank you for showing us the not so asthetic part of tech! This is why I follow you bc you are so transparent! This is only temporary," one viewer wrote.

Another user empathized with Antrell, sharing they themselves were laid off twice in the past. "After the second time it purged any loyalty I’d ever have with a company," they wrote.

SHRM predicted at the end of 2022 that there would be a dearth of IT worker shortages and if their analysis proved true throughout the year, Antrell should presumably find potential opportunities, depending on the metrics of the market he's looking for work in.

The Daily Dot has reached out to Antrell via email for further comment

Hackers to release Iranian nuclear program material if Tehran does not free political prisoners

The Black Reward hacking group has claimed to have infiltrated the archives of Iran's Atomic Energy Production and Development Company (NPPD) and announced that they will release sensitive information about the Islamic republic's nuclear program on Sunday if the authorities in Tehran do not release all political prisoners and detainees in the wave of protests over the death in custody of young Mahsa Amini.


Archive - Natanz Nuclear Power Plant in Iran - 

"Twenty-four difficult and important hours have just begun for the Islamic Republic as of this moment," the group announced early Saturday on its Twitter account alongside blurred images of documents allegedly taken from the company's confidential archives, according to the pan-Arab Al Arabiya network.

If the authorities do not release the prisoners, the group announces that it will disclose information on the "careless nuclear project of the mullahs' regime". Iranian officials, they add, "are well aware of the impact that the disclosure of this hacked data will have", according to the statement published by the Iran International portal, which is linked by the Iranian authorities to opposition groups.

The Iranian authorities have not yet commented on this ultimatum or confirmed any computer operation against the company's archives.

The NPPD is directly responsible for studies, construction and safe operation of nuclear power plants and nuclear fuel supply, as well as support and cooperation in the manufacture of tools, instruments, equipment, components and facilities required for nuclear power plants and all related accessories within the country.

'It was a gut punch': Indigenous-led research station in N.W.T. damaged by wildfire

FORT SIMPSON, N.W.T. — A wildfire that almost destroyed an Indigenous-led research station in the Northwest Territories is expected to have far-reaching effects on environmental research and the community.



The Liidlii Kue First Nation says five of nine buildings at the Scotty Creek Research Station, roughly 50 kilometres south of Fort Simpson, N.W.T., burned to the ground last weekend destroying equipment, laboratory space and sleeping accommodations. Other buildings sustained varying degrees of damage, with some needing to be replaced.

"It was a gut punch," Dieter Cazon, manager of lands and resources for the First Nation, said on learning of the damage.

"We're not starting from scratch, but we've been set back a long way," said Bill Quinton, director of the research station and a professor of geography and environmental studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Scotty Creek is one of the busiest research stations in Canada's North and scientists from across Canada and the world travel there to study environmental factors, such as water resources and permafrost thaw. It also hosts on-the-land camps, high school students and community-focused events and activities.

The First Nation, which has been collaborating with researchers since the 1990s, took over leadership of the station in August, making it one of the first Indigenous-led research stations in the world. Cazon said the facility brings together western science and traditional knowledge to address climate change.

"The Dene monitors and guardians at Liidlii Kue First Nation, they love going out there," he said. "It's a great place to work and participate by learning a little bit more about the land in a different way."

Cazon said they are still assessing the fire damage and making plans to rebuild the camp. For safety reasons, he said they likely won't be able to host any work at the site next year.

"We are going to get this fixed. The work that we're doing is too important to just be kind of kicked around and talked about."

Quinton, who helped start the station in 1989, said at least 20 researchers from various universities use the site and over the years he has started many friendships and collaborations through it. He said it was a welcoming place that is important to elders, youth, and people who spend time on the land.

"There's a lot of people that are really heartbroken," he said. "The loss is devastating — there's no question about that — but at this point we have to look at what we have and what can we make of what we have left to rebuild."

Cazon said there will also be impacts on the community. Researchers travelling to the North bring business to hotels, restaurants and charter airlines.

"I'm sure people will feel the hit a bit when those extra dollars aren't coming into the community next year," he said.

Liidlii Kue First Nation criticized the territory's Department of Environment and Natural Resources for failing to attack the wildfire and removing a sprinkler system while the fire was still active.

Wildfire Information Officer Mike Westwick said sprinklers and other structure protection had successfully protected the site from the first pass of the wildfire, but they were removed last Thursday due to issues with freezing.

He said firefighters could not safely attack the fire directly due to extreme winds, which pushed the fire toward the research station.

"We will never recklessly send staff into harm’s way. And with the fire behaviour in the area, that was what we would be doing if we ordered them to directly attack that fire," he wrote in an email.

"We really do feel for everyone affected by the losses at Scotty Creek."

Westwick said late last week a fire crew and helicopter worked to limit damage, but ice on nearby water bodies made picking up water difficult.

"This is simply a sign of the extraordinary season we’re seeing. When we’re fighting fires and protecting structures, it is highly unusual for there to be the threat of freezing temperatures."

This year's wildfire season has been the most severe the territory has seen since the extremes of 2014, with the total area burned surpassing the 10-year average and nearly tripling the five-year average.

A total of 257 fires have blazed across the territory this year, 30 of which are still active, burning a total of roughly 6,866 square kilometres.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 22, 2022.

— by Emily Blake in Yellowknife.

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

The Canadian Press

IT'S FALL, IT'S ALBERTA ,IT'S DROUGHT

‘Too close for comfort’: Some Fort McMurray residents on edge over fire near homes

Chris Chacon - TODAY- GLOBAL NEWS


Some residents in Fort McMurray have been on edge the past few days following a wildfire that has burned close to some homes.


Image of Fort McMurray Fires.© Billy Martin/Global News

"It was 100 feet from the row of houses on McKinlay crescent," Fort McMurray resident Billy Martin said.

"You can see it from your house and that's way too close for comfort," Fort McMurray resident Dave Scantland added

Scantland lives on the north side of Fort McMurray where fire crews and helicopters have been battling a blaze that broke out Tuesday.

Read more:
Fire in Fort McMurray’s Timberlea area ‘being held’: RMWB

“Anybody with property around there, it's making us nervous because you can see the flames," Scantland said.

According to Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo Fire Chief Jody Butz who posted a video online Thursday, he said this is one of five human caused fires this week that started in the region.

"The conditions that we are experiencing are extremely dry at the moment and the foliage has fallen from the trees creating above average wildfire risk in our region," regional municipality of Wood Buffalo fire chief Jody Butz said.

Martin was working nearby when he spotted the flames.

"The winds picked up about two in the afternoon and it got pretty scary for a little bit, especially for the people on Walnut Crescent, McKinlay Crescent Morgan Heights area that is the same row of house that got burned in the 2016 fire," Martin said.

Martin and Scantland both said the site of seeing a fire so close to homes brings back terrifying memories of the wildfire in 2016 that charred much of the region.

"A lot of us are traumatized over it and a lot of us have PTSD when we hear a chopper to regular duties," Scantland said.

"I know of a couple people that packed up and evacuated out of precaution," Martin said.

While crews have been able to contain the fire as of Saturday, cooler temperatures have led to heavy smoke.

"It got really smoky to the point where they actually closed a couple roads down, like no visibility," Martin said.

Martin said conditions are not ideal but thankfully it’s nothing close to the devastation of 2016.

A frightful fire still keeping many residents on high alert.

"We have to look with our own eyes in order to determine the threat," Scantland said.

BBQ

Human 'bog bones' discovered at Stone Age campsite in Germany

Tom Metcalfe - Yesterday

Archaeologists in northern Germany have unearthed 10,000-year-old cremated bones at a Stone Age lakeside campsite that was once used for spearing fish and roasting hazelnuts, major food sources for groups of hunter-gatherers at that time.


Archaeologists think this was a temporary campsite on the shore of an ancient lake that has now silted up; it was used for roasting hazelnuts and for spearing fish, and the bones were probably from someone who died nearby.© ALSH

The site is the earliest known burial in northern Germany, and the discovery marks the first time human remains have been found at Duvensee bog in the Schleswig-Holstein region, where dozens of campsites from the Mesolithic era or Middle Stone Age (roughly between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago) have been found.

Hazelnuts were a big attraction in the area because Mesolithic people could gather and roast them, Harald Lübke, an archaeologist at the Center for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology, an agency of the Schleswig-Holstein State Museums Foundation, told Live Science.

The campsites changed over time, the research shows. "In the beginning, we have only small hazelnut roasting hearths, and in the later sites, they become much bigger" — possibly a consequence of hazel trees becoming more widespread as the environment changed.

Related: Back to the Stone Age: 17 key milestones in Paleolithic life

The burial was found during excavations earlier this month at a site first identified in the late 1980s by archaeologist Klaus Bokelmann and his students, who found worked flints there not during a formal excavation, but during a barbecue at a house on the edge of a nearby village, Lübke said.

"Because the sausages were not ready, Bokelmann told his students that if they found anything [in the bog nearby], then he would give them a bottle of Champagne," he said. "And when they came back, they had a lot of flint artifacts."

Ancient lake

The burial site is near at least six Mesolithic campsites, which would have been on the shores of the ancient lake at Duvensee, Lübke said.

The first sites investigated by Bokelmann in the 1980s were on islands that would have been near the western shore of the lake, which has completely silted up over the last 8,000 years or so, and formed a peat bog, called a "moor" in Germany.

Archaeologists have discovered mats made of bark for sitting on the damp soil, pieces of worked flint, and the remains of many Mesolithic fireplaces for roasting hazelnuts, but they haven't unearthed any burials at the island sites.

"Maybe they didn't bury people on the islands but only at the sites on the lake border, which seem to have had a different kind of function," Lübke said.

Unlike during the later Mesolithic era, when specific areas were set aside for the burial of the dead, at this time it seemed the dead were buried near where they died, he said. Significantly, the body was cremated before its burial at the Duvensee site, like other burials of approximately the same age near Hammelev in southern Denmark, which is about 120 miles (195 kilometers) to the north.

Only pieces of the largest bones were left after the cremation, and it's not clear if they were wrapped in hide or bark before they were buried. In any case, "burning the body seems to be a central part of burial rituals at this time," Lübke said.

Changing landscape

As well as roasting hazelnuts and burning bodies — both of which are activities utilizing fire — Mesolithic people used the lakeside campgrounds for spearing fish, according to the discovery of several bone points crafted for that purpose that were found at the site.

Related: Look into the eyes of a Stone Age woman in this incredibly lifelike facial reconstruction

Flint fragments also have been found throughout the area, although flint doesn't occur naturally there, suggesting that Mesolithic people repaired their tools and hunting weapons in this place during the annual hazelnut harvest in the fall, Lübke said.

The Mesolithic sites at Duvensee are about the same age as the Mesolithic site at Star Carr in North Yorkshire in the United Kingdom, and some of the artifacts found there are very similar, Lübke said.

From that time until about 8,000 years ago, the Schleswig-Holstein region and Britain were connected by a now-submerged region called Doggerland, and it's likely that Mesolithic groups would have shared technologies, he said.

The researchers now plan to carry out further excavations at the site of the Mesolithic burial, to determine what other activities took place there.

Ulf Ickerodt, head of Schleswig-Holstein's State Archaeology Department, said the latest find at Duvensee is of global significance.

"It speaks to the long tradition of archaeological research in Schleswig-Holstein in the expiration of moors and wetlands," he told Live Science in an email. "The present find advances itself and the landscape around it to something spectacular."

But he noted that the preservation of organic finds in the Duvensee region is threatened by climatic changes that could result in heavy rain and flooding, or dry periods.

Both types of changes could threaten archaeological features in the area, so archaeologists are working to recover any finds and to develop strategies for better managing the area in the face of a changing climate, Ickerodt said.

Researchers who reverse-engineered Starlink to work as a backup for GPS found a security flaw in the system — using a video of tennis star Rafael Nadal — that could be exploited in Ukraine

ktangalakislippert@insider.com (Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert) - 

SpaceX's Starlink signals have been long seen as a possible alternative to GPS.

In 2020, Elon Musk and SpaceX declined a US Army proposal to develop the tech for that purpose.

Researchers have succeeded in reverse-engineering the signals, MIT Technology Review reported.

After SpaceX declined to continue researching Starlink as a possible military alternative to GPS in 2020, a group of researchers found a way to do it without the help of Elon Musk — or his company that created the constellation of internet satellites.

For the past two years, Professor Todd Humphreys has led a group of researchers at the University of Texas in reverse-engineering signals from the satellite internet constellation with the hope of forming a new navigation system that would operate separately from the Global Positioning System and its European, Russian, and Chinese equivalents, MIT Technology Review reported.

In a non-peer-reviewed study, Humphreys claims the group has created a comprehensive characterization of Starlink's signals without breaking its encryption or accessing any user data coming from satellites.

"The Starlink system signal is a closely guarded secret," Humphreys told MIT Technology Review. "Even in our early discussions, when SpaceX was being more cooperative, they didn't reveal any of the signal structure to us. We had to start from scratch, building basically a little radio telescope to eavesdrop on their signals."

Related video: Elon Musk’s Starlink internet satellite units used by Ukraine face funding issues

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Starting with a Starlink unit programmed to transmit high-definition YouTube videos of Spanish tennis player Rafael Nadal, the group began tracking the satellite's synchronization sequences and detected their patterns of transmission — about four sequences every millisecond. These sequences — repeating patterns of signals beamed down to Earth by the satellite — help receivers coordinate with them, leaving clues to the satellite's distance and velocity.

The earthbound receiver, using the timing of the signals received from the satellite and information publically available about its orbit, can then calculate the distance to the satellite and approximate a location within 30 meters, Humphreys told MIT Technology Review. With tweaking, the geolocating capabilities could become as accurate as GPS', which tends to be accurate to about 16 feet in commercial use.

The discovery, while a potential breakthrough for geolocation services, also revealed a possible security concern about Starlink signals — which are currently key to keeping Ukrainian communication services running as Russia has invaded the country — if used as a navigation system.

"Humphreys has done a big service to the navigation community identifying these sequences," Mark Psiaki, an aerospace professor at Virginia Tech and GPS expert told MIT Technology Review. "But any navigation system working on open-source sequences could definitely be spoofed, because everyone will know how to spot those signals and create fake ones."

Starlink has become such an integral part of wartime communications in Ukraine that recent outages were described as "catastrophic" by officials. Musk tweeted this week Russia is "actively working" to destroy the satellites, but Humphreys' discovery — that the signals are predictable and replicable — highlights the possibility for intentional disruption of Starlink.

"As time goes on and their dependence on Starlink deepens, Ukraine and its allies in the West are coming to appreciate that they have little control over Starlink and know little about it," Humphreys told MIT Technology Review. "But now many millions have a vested interest in Starlink security, including its resilience to jamming. Assessing that security starts with a clear understanding of the signal structure."

SpaceX, Musk, and Humphreys did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.