Sunday, November 26, 2023

MODI'S CURSED TUNNEL SNAFU
India flies in new kit as race to free 41 trapped workers enters third week

India's military brought in specialised equipment Sunday as efforts to free 41 trapped workers entered a third week, with digging ongoing in three directions after repeated setbacks to the operation.

Issued on: 26/11/2023 -

Rescuers rest at the site of an under-construction road tunnel that collapsed in Silkyara, in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, on November 24, 2023. © AP

By: NEWS WIRES

The Indian air force said Sunday that they were "responding with alacrity", as they flew in their third load to a rescue operation since the partial collapse of the under-construction Silkyara road tunnel on November 12 in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand.

Rescue officials said they called for a superheated plasma cutter to be brought to the remote mountain location, after engineers driving a metal pipe horizontally through 57 metres (187 feet) of rock and concrete ran into metal girders and construction vehicles buried in the earth.

A giant earth-boring machine snapped just nine metres from breaking through.

The plasma cutting will be used to remove the broken giant earth-boring drill and metal blocking the horizontal route, before digging will continue by hand.
Vertical shaft

Thick metal girders in the rubble are blocking the route, and using conventional oxyacetylene cutters to clear them is tricky from inside the confined pipe, only wide enough for a man to crawl through.

The air force said the "critical" kit came from the country's Defence Research and Development Organisation, the government's defence technology research arm, without giving further details.

Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said Saturday that vertical drilling had begun to dig 89 metres downwards, a risky route above the men in an area that has already suffered a collapse.

Work has also begun from the far side of the road tunnel, a much longer third route estimated to be around 480 metres.

The workers were seen alive for the first time on Tuesday, peering into the lens of an endoscopic camera sent by rescuers down a thin pipe through which air, food, water and electricity are being delivered.

Dhami said the men are in "good spirits", with a basic telephone exchange set up so that families of the trapped men – many of whom are migrant workers from poor families from far across India – could call in to speak to them.

'Difficult operation'

Efforts have been painfully slow, complicated by falling debris and repeated breakdowns of drilling machines.

Hopes that the team was on the verge of a breakthrough on Wednesday were dashed, with a government statement warning of the "challenging Himalayan terrain".

Indrajeet Kumar told the Times of India he "feels like crying" when he speaks to his brother Vishwajeet, who is among the trapped workers, who questioned why they were still stuck after reports that they "would be out soon".

Syed Ata Hasnain, a senior rescue official and retired general, called on Saturday for "patience".

"A very difficult operation is going on," he told reporters.

"When you do something with mountains, you cannot predict anything," he added. "This situation is exactly like war."

(AFP)

FRACKING

New research reveals industry used 160 million pounds of ‘secret chemicals’ over past decade: ‘May just be the tip of the iceberg’

Doric Sam
Sat, November 25, 2023

New research revealed that oil and gas producers in Pennsylvania used “some 160 million pounds” of secret chemicals in more than 5,000 gas wells over the past decade, according to Inside Climate News. To make matters worse, the chemicals may have contained per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are described as “a toxic and pervasive class of chemicals.”

What’s happening?

Oil and gas producers are typically required to disclose the chemicals they use to state regulators in a database called FracFocus. However, Inside Climate News reported that state law allows producers to avoid disclosing them “if doing so would put their operations at a competitive disadvantage.”

Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) is an activist group that recently co-published a compilation of studies on the dangers of hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas from 2012 to 2022. According to Inside Climate News, the report revealed that during the study period, at least one type of PFAS was used in eight Pennsylvania wells by two oil and gas producers.

“Eight wells may just be the tip of the iceberg because we also found that there were 160 million pounds of trade-secret chemicals injected into thousands of unconventional gas wells over the same period,” Dusty Horwitt, who wrote the report for PSR, told Inside Climate News.

Why is this concerning?

PFAS are considered “forever chemicals” because they don’t decompose in the environment and have the potential to accumulate in blood if ingested. Inside Climate News noted PFAS “are linked to serious illnesses including some cancers, low birth weights, ulcerative colitis, reduced receptiveness to vaccines and elevated cholesterol.”

“Accumulation of certain PFAS has also been shown through blood tests to occur in humans and animals,” according to the Food & Drug Administration. “While the science surrounding potential health effects of bioaccumulation is developing, exposure to some types of PFAS have been associated with serious health effects.”

A study by the U.S. Geological Survey and Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection done in May of this year discovered that streams near small rural towns that are surrounded by oil and gas development may contain “low levels” of PFAS contamination.

The report from PSR stated that the possibility of PFAS contamination in Pennsylvania groundwater and other states where the fracking industry is active could pose a threat to public health.

“Should only a fraction of the unidentified chemicals used in Pennsylvania’s unconventional gas wells be PFAS, they could pose a significant threat to human health,” the report said.

What’s being done about it?

According to Inside Climate News, multiple states, including Pennsylvania, have been increasingly imposing limits on the presence of PFAS in drinking water in the wake of mounting evidence of the chemicals’ threats to public health.

Horwitt said the intention of the PSR report is to raise concerns that the oil and gas industry’s use of PFAS may be more pervasive beyond the eight wells in Pennsylvania.

“With this current report, we want to empower residents and government officials in Pennsylvania to understand both the limited scope of what we know about PFAS use in the state’s oil and gas wells and the potentially much larger scope of PFAS use that is hidden by the state’s lax chemical disclosure rules,” Horwitt said.

The report suggested that Pennsylvania can follow the example set by Colorado, where the use of PFAS by oil and gas producers is banned, and the public disclosure of all chemicals used in fracking is required.

ALBERTA SEPARATISM
Alberta to invoke controversial law to resist Canada's energy policy

LOOKING SOUTH
Reuters
Sat, November 25, 2023

FILE PHOTO: Alberta's Premier Danielle Smith makes a keynote speech at the LNG 2023 energy conference in Vancouver

TORONTO (Reuters) - The premier of Alberta, Canada's main oil-producing province, on Saturday said her government intends to move an act on Monday to shield provincial power companies from proposed federal clean electricity regulations.

Speaking at a morning radio program on Saturday, Premier Danielle Smith, who says the plans of the federal government to cut greenhouse gas emissions will wreck the energy industry, said she was driven to act by frustration with the federal government.

Alberta has long been at odds with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government over energy policy.

Last month, in a victory for Alberta, Canada's Supreme Court dealt a blow to Trudeau's government by ruling that federal law assessing how major projects such as coal mines and oil sands plants impact the environment is largely unconstitutional.

"We have been trying to work collaboratively with them on aligning their targets with our targets," Smith said on Saturday said on the radio program "Your Province. Your Premier."

"We will not put our operators at risk of going to jail if they do not achieve the targets that have been set, which we believe are unachievable," Smith said. "We have to have a reliable grid. We have to have an affordable grid, and we're going to make sure that we defend our constitutional jurisdiction to do that."

The office of Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault was not immediately available for comment.

The resolution will be brought forward for debate and approval in the legislature on Monday, Smith said.

The Trudeau government's clean electricity regulations are designed to create a net-zero emissions power grid by 2035 by putting limits on when and how emitting power sources, such as Alberta's natural gas-burning plants, can be used starting in 2035.

The Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act would give the province a legislative framework to defend its jurisdiction in areas such as natural resources, gun control, and health and education.

(Reporting by Nivedita Balu in Toronto; Editing by Leslie Adler)

ARCHAEOLOGY

Ancient 20-inch-long hand ax discovered in Saudi Arabia may be world's largest

Laura Geggel
Sat, November 25, 2023

We see a woman and a man looking at a long hand ax in the lab.

Archaeologists in Saudi Arabia have discovered what may be the world's largest prehistoric hand ax. The stone tool measures 20.2 inches (51.3 centimeters) long and, despite its size, is easily held with two hands, according to a statement.

An international team of researchers found the basalt hand ax on the Qurh Plain, just south of AlUla, a region in northwest Saudi Arabia. Both of the hand ax's sides have been sharpened, suggesting that it could have been employed for cutting or chopping. However, it's still unclear how the stone tool was used and which species, for instance Homo erectus or Homo sapiens, crafted it.

A long stone hand ax on the sand

It's also unknown how old the tool is, as "the handaxe requires much more research to determine an accurate date," Ömer Can Aksoy, an archaeologist and the excavation's project director, told Live Science in an email. However, other tools found at the site may date to 200,000 years ago, according to the team's assessment of their form and characteristics, so it's possible that the hand ax dates also to the Lower or Middle Palaeolithic, Aksoy said.

Related: 7,000-year-old cult site in Saudi Arabia was filled with human remains and animal bones

Researchers nearly missed the enormous hand ax, which is 3.7 inches (9.5 cm) wide and 2.2 inches (5.7 cm) thick. "It was the last 15 minutes of our daily work and it was a hot day," Aksoy said. "Two of our team members found the giant handaxe lying over the surface of a sand dune."

Three hand ax artefacts from Qurh Plain AlUla in Saudi Arabia.

Group of researchers in archaeological site in Saudi Arabia.

Group of researchers in archaeological site in Saudi Arabia.

After hearing the team members' calls, the rest of the crew joined them and then excavated the area in depth. "We recorded 13 more handaxes on the site," Aksoy said. "Each team member took off their yellow vests in order to highlight the locations of each find over the sand dune."

While the other newly found hand axes were similar in style, they were smaller in size. "After the initial excitement when we discovered this remarkable object we carried out an initial search to see if other similar sized objects had been found," Aksoy said. While the search for large hand axes continues, "this might be one of the longest," he said.

Surveys at Qurh Plain are ongoing. The 2023 field season, which lasts from October to December, is nearly over. Archaeological work is planned to start again in winter and spring 2024.

Casas del Turuñuelo, a site of repeated animal sacrifice in Iron Age Spain

Detailed analysis reveals rituals of mass sacrifice of horses and other animals

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

Mass animal sacrifice at casas del Turuñuelo (Guareña, Spain): A unique Tartessian (Iron Age) site in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula — IMAGE:
SACRIFICED EQUIDS FROM THE COURTYARD OF CASAS DEL TURUÑUELO SITE (BADAJOZ, SPAIN). IRON AGE TARTESSIAN CULTURE. YARD DISCOVERED AND EXCAVATED SINCE 2017.
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CREDIT: CONSTRUYENDO TARTESO, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

The Iron Age site of Casas del Turuñuelo was used repeatedly for ritualized animal sacrifice, according to a multidisciplinary study published November 22, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Mª Pilar Iborra Eres of the Institut Valencià de Conservació, Restauració i Investigació, Spain, Sebastián Celestino Pérez of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain, and their colleagues.

Archaeological sites with evidence of major animal sacrifices are rarely known from the Iron Age of the Mediterranean region, and there is a gap between information offered by written sources and by the archaeological record. This makes it difficult to establish a clear understanding of the patterns and protocols of this practice. In this study, researchers examine a well-preserved example of mass animal sacrifice from an Iron Age building in southwest Spain known as Casas del Turuñuelo, associated to Tartessos and dating toward the end of the 5th Century BCE.

The authors examined and dated 6770 bones belonging to 52 sacrificed animals which were buried in three sequential phases. The identified animals were predominantly adult horses, with smaller numbers of cattle and pigs and one dog. In the first two phases, skeletons were mostly complete and unaltered, but in the third phase, skeletons (except equids) show signs of having been processed for food, suggesting that some sort of meal accompanied this ritual. These data indicate that this space was used repeatedly over several years for sacrificial rituals whose practices and purposes varied.

This case study allows researchers to establish details about ritual protocols at this site, including the intentional selection of adult animals rather than young, and the importance of fire evidenced by the presence of burned plant and animal remains. Casas del Turuñuelo also exhibits unique features compared to other sites, such as the high abundance of sacrificed horses. This study advances efforts to contextualize ritual animal sacrifices across Europe.

The authors add: “This study highlights the role of mass animal sacrifices in the context of Iron Age European societies. Zooarchaeological, taphonomic and microstratigraphic investigations shed light on animal sacrifice practices and the Tartessian ritual behavior at the Iron Age site of Casas del Turuñuelo (Badajoz, Spain).”

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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0293654

Citation: Iborra Eres MP, Albizuri S, Gutiérrez Rodríguez M, Jiménez Fragoso J, Lira Garrido J, Martín Cuervo M, et al. (2023) Mass animal sacrifice at casas del Turuñuelo (Guareña, Spain): A unique Tartessian (Iron Age) site in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula. PLoS ONE 18(11): e0293654. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0293654

Author Countries: Spain, France

Funding: The financial support and the results of this study stem from the National Project Construyendo Tarteso 2.0 I+D+I PID2019-108180GB-I00 ʽAnálisis constructivo, espacial y territorial de un modelo arquitectónico en el valle Medio del Guadianaʼ and from two projects of the Junta de Extremadura: PRI I+D+I IB18131 ‘Estudio de la hecatombe animal del yacimiento de ‘Casas del Turuñuelo’ (Guareña, Badajoz). La gestión de la cabaña equina y sus implicaciones socioeconómicas y rituales en época tartésica’ and PRI I+D+I IB18060 ‘Iberia a través de sus caballos: Estudio integral de la diversidad genética, enfermedades infecciosas y paleopatologías de los caballos extremeños de la Edad del Hierro’.

JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0293654

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Mass animal sacrifice at casas del Turuñuelo (Guareña, Spain): A unique Tartessian (Iron Age) site in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

22-Nov-2023

Childhood in medieval Bavaria: What teeth reveal about nutrition and migration

Peer-Reviewed Publication

STAATLICHE NATURWISSENSCHAFTLICHE SAMMLUNGEN BAYERNS

What teeth reveal about nutrition and migration — IMAGE:
RESEARCHERS WERE ABLE TO OBTAIN INFORMATION ABOUT THE EARLIEST PHASE OF LIFE OF ADULT HUMANS FROM THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES THROUGH ISOTOPE ANALYSES OF THEIR TEETH.
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CREDIT: M. HARBECK, STAATSSAMMLUNG FÜR ANTHROPOLOGIE MÜNCHEN (SNSB-SAM)

A team of researchers led by anthropologist PD Dr. Michaela Harbeck, curator at the Bavarian State Collection for Anthropology in Munich, Germany (SNSB-SAM) and the LMU doctoral student and project collaborator at the State Collection, Maren Velte, were able to obtain information about the earliest phase of life of adult humans from the early Middle Ages through isotope analyses of their teeth. Harbeck and her colleagues analyzed human teeth from various medieval Bavarian cemeteries, mainly from the period around 500 AD. Teeth are formed during childhood and are characterized by little or no remodeling during lifetime. This developmental quality makes them an ideal "archive of childhood". Strontium isotopes, for example, provide an indication of a person's geographical origin, while analyses of carbon and nitrogen provide information to diet. Serial isotope analysis shows the course of nutrition from birth to around 20 years of age. This method reveals the transition process from breast milk feeding in infancy to the inclusion of solid food during early childhood.

Complex migration processes
The origins of modern-day Europe date back to a period known as the Migration Period. During this time, which dates between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Western Roman Empire came to an end and profound cultural and political changes began. Many towns, villages and settlements have their origins during this period. In southern Bavaria, the Bavarian duchy emerged from the former Roman province of Raetia secunda in the sixth century. The role migration played in this process remains a point of discourse. Stable strontium isotopes from over 150 early medieval human skeletal remains reveal: At the end of the 5th century, an above-average number of people of non-Bavarian origin migrated to the region of present-day southern Bavaria. These treks involved men as well as women. "Although we cannot narrow down the exact areas of origin for many individuals, we can show that they came from various non-local regions," says Harbeck, lead author of the study.

Certain dietary patterns atypical for Bavaria further suggest a foreign origin of some of the buried individuals. Several women who were shown to have genetic markers characteristic for south-eastern Europe and who also exhibit artificially modified skulls, consumed a diet comprised mainly of millet during their formative years. Millet farming is common in Eastern Europe and even Asia, yet seldom grown in Bavaria at this time. Harbeck states, "These women obviously grew up in other cultures outside of Bavaria. For some women, we were even able to narrow down the approximate time of their diet change and thus when they immigrated to Bavaria. Many of the women from south-eastern Europe, for example, did not immigrate as teenagers - as one might expect in the context of marriage migration at that time - but were already well over 20 years of age when they arrived in Bavaria".

Weaning and complementary food
A detailed dietary reconstruction from birth to around the age of ten, including the switch from breast milk to solid food, was conducted for some individuals. These analyses show that women in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages breastfed their children much longer than today. Maren Velte showed in her doctoral thesis: "The weaning from breast milk was completed between the second and third year of life for most of the early Bavarians studied. Women of foreign origin in particular were obviously breastfed longer. Such long breastfeeding periods are known from nomadic peoples, for example."

"Weaning stress"
The weaning process, i.e. the gradual addition of solid foods to replace breast milk, always poses a certain health risk to an infant. Children are suddenly and repeatedly exposed to new pathogens, and potentially, malnutrition. Resulting visible malformations in tooth enamel that occur during dental development and are considered identifiable physiological stress markers, can be interpreted to determine at what age children were exposed to these stress events. Infants raised in the period after the social upheavals in Bavaria apparently experienced a particularly high level of "weaning stress": in the 7th century, stress-related developmental changes in dental morphology are particularly frequent. The research team believes that fundamental changes in childhood nutrition, especially with regard to complementary foods, are to blame. Future research will reveal more details

Serial isotope analysis shows the course of nutrition from birth to around 20 years of age.