It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, April 27, 2020
No time to waste to avoid future food shortages
ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR TRANSLATIONAL PHOTOSYNTHESIS
DURING THE PAST FEW WEEKS, EMPTY SUPERMARKET SHELVES, WITHOUT PASTA, RICE AND FLOUR DUE TO PANIC BUYING, HAS CAUSED PUBLIC CONCERNS ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF RUNNING OUT OF FOOD. AUSTRALIAN FARMERS HAVE REASSURED CONSUMERS SAYING THAT THE COUNTRY PRODUCES ENOUGH FOOD TO FEED THREE TIMES ITS POPULATION. HOWEVER, WILL THIS STATEMENT REMAIN TRUE IN TEN TO TWENTY YEARS IN A COUNTRY SEVERELY AFFECTED BY CLIMATE CHANGE? THE ANSWER IS YES, IF WE ARE PREPARED FOR THIS AND IF THERE IS CONTINUOUS FUNDING TOWARDS CREATING SOLUTIONS TO INCREASE CROP PRODUCTION.
IMAGE: PROFESSOR ROBERT FURBANK, COETP DIRECTOR AND PROFESSOR JOHN EVANS, COETP CHIEF INVESTIGATOR AT THE ANU GLASSHOUSES IN CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA view more
CREDIT: NATALIA BATEMAN, ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR TRANSLATIONAL PHOTOSYNTHESI
"Plant scientists are punching above their weight by participating in global, interdisciplinary efforts to find ways to increase crop production under future climate change conditions. We essentially need to double the production of major cereals before 2050 to secure food availability for the rapidly growing world population," says ANU Professor Robert Furbank from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis (CoETP).
"It is similar to finding a virus vaccine to solve a pandemic, it doesn't happen overnight. We know that Australia's agriculture is going to be one area of the world that is most affected by climate extremes, so we are preparing to have a toolbox of plant innovations ready to ensure global food security in a decade or so, but to do this we need research funding to continue," Professor Furbank says.
Several examples of these innovative solutions were published recently in a special issue on Food Security Innovations in Agriculture in the Journal of Experimental Botany, including five reviews and five research articles.
Co-editor of the Special Issue, ANU Professor John Evans, says that this publication highlights the now widely accepted view that improving photosynthesis - the process by which plants convert sunlight, water and CO2 into organic matter - is a new way to increase crop production that is being developed.
"We are working on improving photosynthesis on different fronts, as the articles included in this special issue show, from finding crop varieties that need less water, to tweaking parts of the process in order to capture more carbon dioxide and sunlight. We know that there is a delay of at least a decade to get these solutions to the breeders and farmers, so we need to start developing new opportunities now before we run out of options," says Professor Evans, CoETP Chief Investigator.
The special issue includes research solutions that range from traditional breeding approaches to ambitious genetic engineering projects using completely different ends of the technological spectrum; from robot tractors, to synthetic biology. All these efforts are focused on finding ways to make crops more resistant to drought and extreme climate conditions and being more efficient in the use of land and fertilisers.
"Our research is contributing to providing food security in a global context, and people often ask what that has to do with Australian farmers and my answer is everything. Aside from the fact that economy and agriculture are globally inter-connected, if Australian farmers have a more productive resilient and stable crop variety, they are able to plan for the future, which turns into a better agribusiness and at the same time, ensures global security across the world," says Professor Furbank.
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This research has been funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis (CoETP), led by the Australian National University, which aims to improve the process of photosynthesis to increase the production of major food crops such as sorghum, wheat and rice.
This research is published in the Journal of Experimental Botany Special issue on Innovations in Agriculture for Food Security (Volume 71, Issue 7, April 2020)
Journalists who want to link to the Journal of Experimental Special issue and associated papers in their stories can use the following link: https://academic.oup.com/jxb/issue/71/7
RUSSIA
What comes after COVID-19? Special issue in the journal Population and Economics
PENSOFT PUBLISHERS
IMAGE: OPEN-ACCESS PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL POPULATION AND ECONOMICS BY LOMONOSOV MOSCOW STATE UNIVERSITY (FACULTY OF ECONOMICS). view more
CREDIT: POPULATION AND ECONOMICSAt this alarming time, when the COVID-19 pandemic is on everyone's mind, a new special issue in the open-access peer-reviewed journalPopulation and EconomicsbyLomonosov Moscow State University(Faculty of Economics) provides a platform for discussion on the impact of the pandemic on the population and economics, both in Russia and worldwide by opening a special issue.An introductory overviewfor the issue is provided by its Editor-in-Chief, Irina E. Kalabikhina of the Faculty of Economics at Lomonosov Moscow State University.
Today is still too early to draw any final conclusions, with too many things yet to happen. Nevertheless, the time is right to start a discussion on how to soften the possible consequences of the pandemic.
In the first published papers, united by the special issue, various teams of economists assess the uneasy dilemma - saving lives now or saving the economy to preserve lives in the future; demographers draw parallels with previous pandemics and its impact on demographic development; and sociologists analyse the state of various strata throughout the crisis.
The coronavirus pandemic came to Russia in mid-March - two months after China, two weeks after Spain, Italy, France, and about the same time as the United States.
As of 24th April, according to the data available at the Center for System Science and Engineering at John Hopkins University, Russia is amongst the top 10 countries by number of recorded cases. International comparability of national data on COVID-19 is a separate issue; it will be addressed in one of the special issue articles.
"Now I just want to state that Russia is affected by the pandemic, and it disturbs population and society. Moreover, a number of anti-epidemic measures taken in the country can bite the economy. In this context, the search for specific Russian consequences of the pandemic initiated by our authors along with the global consequences is particularly interesting", shares Editor-in-Chief of Population and Economics, Prof. Irina E. Kalabikhina.
All economists, demographers and sociologists are invited to consider the impact of the pandemic and its attendant recession on the population and economy in Russia and the global world. Research papers are welcome to the special issue, which will remain open for submissions until the end of June 2020.
What could the pandemic cost to globalisation, what could be the consequences of the crisis? In his paper, Dean of the Faculty of Economics of Lomonosov Moscow State University, Prof. Alexander Auzan calls to take it as a chance to change the path dependency and proposes a tax system revision. He also suggests that the reform is to be made by the law enforcement agencies.
The possible consequences of the crisis, including a technological shift and a change in the direction and volumes of trade flows, are discussed in the paper by Dr. Oleg Buklemishev from Lomonosov Moscow State University. He also examines the likelihood of the role of the State to strengthen in line with the expected deglobalisation in the face of epidemiological uncertainty.
Meanwhile, the pandemic remains "a global social drama" for the global society, as the world faces a step back to the basic needs as outlined in the Maslow pyramid. Income and wealth inequality appears to be increasing in the future, and when it all ends - we will have no choice but to establish the International Victory Day over Coronavirus, suggested in his paper Prof. Leonid Grigoryev of the Higher School of Economics (Moscow).
Every second Russian worker can be considered as a vulnerable employee, suggests the latest analysis by researchers from the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). The highest risks are faced by young people, workers with a low level of education and the residents of the regional centers in Russia.
The most important directions of the current COVID-related crisis research are determined in Prof. Andrey Shastitko's (Lomonosov Moscow State University and Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration) research. He addresses such questions as how to collect, process and report information on the pandemic relevant with regards to the phenomenon of individual cognitive errors, as well as how this information is perceived by the mass consumer and the voter. Current situation can be considered as force majeure, but life does not stop because of force majeure, which requires micro- and meso-institutions also to find the options for a way out.
Another paper by Dr. Alexander Kurdin (Lomonosov Moscow State University and Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration) reveals that the pandemic has provoked the development of "intermediate" regulatory solutions in Russia and has led to the formation of a short-term "institutional continuum", which assumes the possibility of new combinations of norms. At the same time, there is some institutional uncertainty, which stems not only from the lack of legal rules that meet the new "hybrid" regimes, but also from the lack of accompanying informal rules, which often determine human behaviour. However, it is possible that extraordinary circumstances may also increase the flexibility of informal rules.
Within the circumstances of the pandemic, there are many messages across the media about its positive effect on the environment. Though, Prof. Sergey Bobylev (Lomonosov Moscow State University) shares in his research, that despite the short-term reduction in the environmental impact, over the upcoming years we can expect weakened attention from the state, business and the population to environmental issues, a decrease in environmentally oriented costs, redirection of cash flows to maintain or prevent a significant drop in the material standard of living.
Other papers still remain in the press, but we already can get some insights into the future works.
Another lesson we could learn is the one from the more recent outbreak of Ebola and the following crisis in Sierra Leone, suggests Dr. Ana Androsik (the New School for Social Research, New York and Feminist Data and Research Inc.) in her research paper. Back then, the population also had to assume extra caretaking responsibilities, while the imposed by the government restrictions negatively made it harder for the people to earn their incomes, which, in turn, hit the travel and local market industries. According to Dr. Androsik, we should use this type of evidence, taken from previous public health crises, to learn the mistakes of the past and design the most efficient program interventions.
Russian families also face new issues in the conditions of self-isolation, while "dachas" (countryside family houses) play an important role during the pandemic.
Effective mechanisms to support the population in a period of temporary, yet large-scale economic decline, which could be a solution for the Russian labour market, are suggested in the paper by Dr. Irina Denisova (University of Manchester and New Economic School, Moscow).
Population and Economics' Editor-in-Chief Irina Kalabikhina addresses in her paper the demographic and social issues of the pandemic.
"We are going through difficult times, and it is hardly possible to overestimate the role of science in the quickest passing through the crisis with the least human and economic losses. We hope that our Journal will contribute to the crucially important discussion on the impact of the pandemic on the economy and population", concludes Editor-in-Chief of Population and Economics, Irina E. Kalabikhina.
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Additional information
About Population and Economics
Population and Economics is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal, published by Lomonosov Moscow State University (Faculty of Economics). The journal covers basic and applied aspects of the relationship between population and economics in a broad sense.
The journal is running on the innovative scholarly publishing platform ARPHA, developed by scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft.
Original sources:
Kalabikhina IE (2020) What after? Essays on the expected consequences of the COVID-19 pandemics on the global and Russian economics and population. Population and Economics 4(2): 1-3. https://doi.org/10.3897/popecon.4.e53337
Kartseva MA, Kuznetsova PO (2020) The economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic: which groups will suffer more in terms of loss of employment and income? Population and Economics 4(2): 26-33. https://doi.org/10.3897/popecon.4.e53194
Ivakhnyuk I (2020) Coronavirus pandemic challenges migrants worldwide and in Russia. Population and Economics 4(2): 49-55. https://doi.org/10.3897/popecon.4.e53201
Bobylev SN (2020) Environmental consequences of COVID-19 on the global and Russian economics. Population and Economics 4(2): 43-48. https://doi.org/10.3897/popecon.4.e53279
Contact:
Prof. Irina E. Kalabikhina
Editor-in-Chief of the "Population and Economics"
Email: niec@econ.msu.ru
How much does it cost California cannabis growers to safety test?
Study finds high cost to disposing of rejected product UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - DAVIS
The high cost of testing cannabis in California leads to higher prices for the consumer, which could drive consumers to unlicensed markets.
A new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, finds the safety tests cost growers about 10 percent of the average wholesale price of legal cannabis. The biggest share of this expense comes from failing the test.
"Testing itself is costly," said study author Dan Sumner, a professor of agricultural economics at UC Davis. "But growers have to destroy the product that doesn't pass the test and that is where the biggest losses occur."
In California, every batch of cannabis has to be tested for more than 100 contaminants before it can be sold to consumers by a licensed retailer. The safety testing laws -- the most stringent in the nation -- include testing for 66 pesticides with tolerance levels lower than allowable by any other agricultural product.
Sumner said an elaborate track-and-trace system for cannabis plants makes it difficult for a batch that failed testing to enter the legal market.
Zero tolerance
Most testing failures are the result of the state's low- or zero-tolerance levels for pesticide residues. Food that is compliant under regulations can have higher minimum detection levels of pesticides than what is required under cannabis laws and regulations.
While labs can and often re-test cannabis if it fails, some labs have reported up to a 10 percent variation in test results taken from the same sample. The cost of testing also varies by batch size, especially for batches under 10 pounds. The maximum batch size allowed in California is 50 pounds, but many are smaller than 15 pounds. Sumner said failure rates declined from 5.6 percent in 2018 to 4 percent in 2019.
High costs vs. unlicensed market
The study finds that higher testing costs translate into higher prices for the licensed cannabis market.
"No one wants a policy shift away from testing cannabis," said Sumner. "But for price-sensitive consumers, the alternative is an illegal market. That means they consume a product with no testing at all."
Further investigation is needed to determine the costs and benefits of current regulations in relationship to the unlicensed cannabis market, he said.
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The study was published today (April 23) in the journal PLOS ONE. Co-authors include Pablo Valdes-Donoso and Robin Goldstein with UC Davis and the University of California Agricultural Issues Center.
A win-win solution -- Shredded straws can enhance soil fertility and reduce ammonia pollution INSTITUTE OF ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES IMAGE: STRAW MANAGEMENT AND AMMONIA VOLATILIZATION.
Straw incorporation--shredding and burying straws--has been widely promoted as an environmentally friendly method to increase soil organic carbon stocks and improve soil fertility. Scientists have also found crop straw incorporation could help reduce ammonia volatilization from fertilized fields, which contributes to the formation of fine particles thereby resulting in serious air pollution. Still, scientists are not clear about the long-term effects, e.g. 15 years, of crop straw incorporation approaches and rates on ammonia volatilization from calcareous soils, which are hotspots for agricultural ammonia volatilization.
Recently, Dr. Zhou Minghua and his team from the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, investigated the effects of different long-term straw management practices on ammonia volatilization from calcareous agricultural soils under a subtropical climate. Their findings were recently published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters.
"We find long-term crop straw incorporation practices could reduce annual ammonia volatilization fluxes by 16.1% to 35.1%. The magnitude of the inhibition effect increased along with the increasing straw application rate," says Zhou, the corresponding author of the study. "The inhibition effect is likely because the high C/N ratio of crop straw can increase microbial N immobilization and enhance the ammonium transformation [e.g., nitrification]".
Zhou also points out that straw burning, a traditional practice carried out by Chinese peasants but strongly discouraged by the Chinese government owing to concerns around air pollution, resulted in one-third higher annual ammonia volatilization as compared with incorporation of the same amount of unburned crop straw.
Taking into consideration both agronomical (e.g., soil fertility) and environmental performances, this study suggests that long-term crop straw incorporation could be a wise way for reducing ammonia volatilization while sustaining agricultural development.
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Crises are no excuse for lowering scientific standards, say ethicists
CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
Ethicists from Carnegie Mellon and McGill universities are calling on the global research community to resist treating the urgency of the current COVID-19 outbreak as grounds for making exceptions to rigorous research standards in pursuit of treatments and vaccines.
With hundreds of clinical studies registered on ClinicalTrials.gov,Alex John London, the Clara L. West Professor of Ethics and Philosophy and director of theCenter for Ethics and Policyat Carnegie Mellon, andJonathan Kimmelman, James McGill Professor and director of theBiomedical Ethics Unitat McGill University, caution that urgency should not be used as an excuse for lowering scientific standards. They argue that many of the deficiencies in the way medical research is conducted under normal circumstances seem to be amplified in this pandemic. Their paper, published online April 23 by the journalScience, provides recommendations for conducting clinical research during times of crises.
"Although crises present major logistical and practical challenges, the moral mission of research remains the same: to reduce uncertainty and enable care givers, health systems and policy makers to better address individual and public health," London and Kimmelman said.
Many of the first studies out of the gate in this pandemic have been poorly designed, not well justified, or reported in a biased manner. The deluge of studies registered in their wake threaten to duplicate efforts, concentrate resources on strategies that have received outsized media attention and increase the potential of generating false positive results purely by chance.
"All crises present exceptional situations in terms of the challenges they pose to health and welfare. But the idea that crises present an exception to the challenges of evaluating the effects drugs and vaccines is a mistake," London and Kimmelman said. "Rather than generating permission to carry out low-quality investigations, the urgency and scarcity of pandemics heighten the responsibility of key actors in the research enterprise to coordinate their activities to uphold the standards necessary to advance this mission."
The ethicists provide recommendations for multiple stakeholder groups involved in clinical trials:
Sponsors, research consortia and health agencies should prioritize research approaches that test multiple treatments side by side. The authors argue that "master protocols" enable multiple treatments to be tested under a common statistical framework.
Individual clinicians should avoid off-label use of unvalidated interventions that might interfere with trial recruitment and resist the urge to carry out small studies with no control groups. Instead, they should seek out opportunities to join larger, carefully orchestrated studies.
Regulatory agencies and public health authorities should play a leading role in identifying studies that meet rigorous standards and in fostering collaboration among a sufficient number of centers to ensure adequate recruitment and timely results. Rather than making public recommendations about interventions whose clinical merits remain to be established, health authorities can point stakeholders to recruitment milestones to elevate the profile and progress of high-quality studies.
"Rigorous research practices can't eliminate all uncertainty from medicine," London and Kimmelman said, "but they can represent the most efficient way to clarify the causal relationships clinicians hope to exploit in decisions with momentous consequences for patients and health systems."
Coronavirus made working from home the new normal. So the FCC is giving us a new Wi-Fi lane
by Mike Feibus, Usa Today
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
About a month ago, the internet started to list.
Up to that point, online activity flowed more or less in balance, with work traffic relegated mostly to the business side of the ship. Then social-distancing directives forced much of the serious stuff over to the starboard side. Which is where we watch Netflix.
As it happens, the country's internet infrastructure has proven robust enough to handle the wholesale shift. Unfortunately, it's a different story for many homes with older Wi-Fi routers that weren't equipped to handle the onslaught.
If your work videoconference is struggling to keep pace because it's crowded out by your spouse's team meeting and the kids' virtual classes, then take heart. Help is on the way.
Thursday, the FCC approved a new lane for Wi-Fi traffic, something it hasn't done in more than two decades. It spans the 6GHz frequency range, which means it's much faster than both 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi. Plus, it's more than twice as wide as both those bands combined. Which means that 6GHz-enabled smartphones and tablets will have plenty of elbow room for all your family's left-boat and right-boat activities.
You can't buy electronics with 6GHz Wi-Fi yet. When devices do become available, they'll be marked with the Wi-Fi 6e designation, which means they support the latest Wi-Fi 6 standard with radios that can communicate on the new band as well as the older, more crowded frequencies.
Expect to start seeing 6GHz devices—as well as routers to connect them—in time for what I'll call the back-to-homeschool shopping season this summer.
A spectrum that can keep up
It's not so much the skyrocketing volume of traffic borne out of social distancing that's stressed older networks so much as the type of traffic. Even before work-from-home directives, Wi-Fi 4 and older-generation routers often had trouble keeping pace in the evening, when family members simultaneously played online games, engaged in social media and streamed videos.
Daytime internet traffic during social isolation has proven to be even more challenging, with multiple family members logged into high-bandwidth videoconferencing sites, with real-time activity flowing in both directions. Wi-Fi 6 laptops and smartphones are built for that. They'll perform even better on 6GHz spectrum, where they will be free of interference from smart doorbells, thermostats and older tablets, PCs and phones.
These new network demands that Wi-Fi 6e addresses aren't fleeting. They'll remain in place long after the current stay-at-home directives are lifted. For one thing, health experts predict we're in for more social-distancing initiatives over the next year or two in response to the ebb and flow of COVID-19 infections. But even when we're not trying to flatten the curve, education and productivity are retooling for a future with more homebound activity than before. For one,school boardsare expected to incorporate video into classrooms so kids can participate virtually when they're home sick. Withyounger children, that likely will force at least one parent to stay behind and work from home.
As well, some professions are already rethinking how they approach face-to-face communication. In healthcare, for example, coronavirus is turning the emerging telemedicine industry on its head. Rather than examine people remotely who aren't sick enough to go to the hospital, clinicians increasingly are tapping the technology to maintain safe distances between them and contagious patients.
I also believe that America's culture of showing up to work sick will suffer collateral damage from the coronavirus crisis. We'll still work, contagious or not. But going forward, we'll probably do it from home.
Although it wasn't planned that way, the new 6GHz spectrum couldn't come at a better time. Because while the hull of our internet infrastructure has proven to be sound enough to handle the stress of an all-hands call to the home side of the deck, older home wireless networks have been exposed.
The upcoming 6GHz Wi-Fi, or Wi-Fi 6e, has the raw bandwidth, range and networking intelligence to run smoothly what we want to do and what we need to do. You might call it the new Wi-Fi for the new normal. IRONY BECAUSE LOTS OF TINFOIL HAT COVIDIOTS SPREAD CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUT 5G AND COVID-19
(c)2020 USA Today Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
Cyberattack can steal data via cooling fan vibrations
by Peter Grad , Tech Xplore
IIlustration of the cover channel. The malware in the compromised computer transmits signals to the environment via vibrations induced on the table. A nearby infected smartphone detects the transmission, demodulates and decodes the data, and transfers it to the attacker via the Internet. Credit: arXiv:2004.06195 [cs.CR]
Israeli researchers uncovered a novel way that hackers could steal sensitive data from a highly secured computer: by tapping into the vibrations from a cooling system fan.
Lead cyber-security researcher Mordechai Guri at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev said data encoded by hackers into fan vibrations could be transmitted to a smartphone placed in the vicinity of the targetedcomputer.
"We observe that computers vibrate at a frequency correlated to the rotation speed of their internal fans," Guri said. Malware can control computer vibrations by manipulating internal fan speeds, he explained. "These inaudible vibrations affect the entire structure on which the computer is placed."
The covertly transmitted vibrations can be picked up by a smartphone resting on the same surface as the computer.
Since accelerometer sensors in smartphones are unsecured, they "can be accessed by any app without requiring user permissions, which make this attack highly evasive," he said.
Guri demonstrated the process, named AiR-ViBeR, with an air-gapped computer setup. Air-gapped computer systems are isolated from unsecured networks and the internet as a security measure.
The research team said three measures would help secure a computer system against such an assault. One would be to run the CPU continuously at maximum power consumption mode, which would keep it from adjusting consumption. Another would be to set fan speeds for both CPU and GPU at a single, fixed rate. The third solution would be to restrict CPUs to a single clock speed.
The Ben-Gurion University cybersecurity team specializes in what are termed side-channel attacks. Rather than exploiting software or coding vulnerabilities, side-channel attacks zero in on the manner in which a computer accesses hardware.
"This is the very essence of a side-channel attack," Guri said of AiR-ViBer. "The malware in question doesn't exfiltrate data by cracking encryption standards or breaking through a network firewall; instead, it encodes data in vibrations and transmits it to the accelerometer of a smartphone."
AiR-ViBer relied on vibration variances sensed by an accelerometer capable of detecting motion with a resolution of 0.0023956299 meters per square second. There are other means of capturing data through side channels. They include electromagnetic, magnetic, acoustic, optical and thermal.
In 2015, for instance, Guri's team introduced BitWhisper, a thermal covert channel that allowed a nearby computer to establish two-way communication with another computer by detecting and measuring changes in temperature.
A year earlier, his team demonstrated malware that extracts data from air-gapped computers to a nearby smartphone through FM signals emitted by the screen cable. He subsequently showed that he could exfiltrate data using cellular phone frequencies generated from buses connecting a computer's RAM and CPU.
More information: AiR-ViBeR: Exfiltrating Data from Air-Gapped Computers via Covert Surface ViBrAtIoNs, arXiv:2004.06195 [cs.CR] https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.06195v1
Court approves record $5 bn fine of Facebook over privacy
Facebook said it is already implementing provisions of a privacy settlement with US authorities, approved this week by a federal judge, which included a record $5 billion fine over data protection missteps
US regulators on Friday welcomed a "historic" $5 billion settlement with Facebook over data privacy as the social network said it was already implementing the provisions of the deal.
The deal between the leading social network and the US Federal Trade Commission became official with the approval Thursday of a federal judge.
Along with the fine, the settlement announced last July requires Facebook to ramp up privacy protections; provide detailed quarterly reports on compliance with the deal, and have an independent oversight board.
Some privacy activists had challenged the deal claiming it let off Facebook too easy after the Cambridge Analytica scandal that allowed the hijacking of personal data of millions of users ahead of the 2016 US presidential election.
FTC chairman Joe Simons said in a statement he was "pleased" with the court approval, pointing out it was the largest monetary penalty ever obtained by consumer protection agency.
"At the same time, the court also highlights that the conduct relief included in this settlement will require Facebook 'to consider privacy at every stage of its operations and provide substantially more transparency and accountability for its executives' privacy-related decisions," Simons said.
The agreement goes beyond measures required by US law and should "serve as a roadmap for more comprehensive privacy regulation," Facebook chief privacy officer Michel Protti said in a blog post.
"We hope this leads to further progress on developing consistent legislation in the US and elsewhere," Protti said.
"Ultimately, our goal is to honor people's privacy and focus on doing what's right for people."
The FTC reopened its investigation of Facebook's data handling following revelations of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other missteps by the California giant.
Facebook has created dozens of team devoted to privacy and has thousands of people working on privacy-related projects, according to Protti.
"This agreement has been a catalyst for changing the culture of our company," Protti said.
A study has tracked the shift from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to early farming that occurred in prehistoric Europe over a period of around 1,500 years.
An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of York, analysed the molecular remains of food left in pottery used by the first farmers who settled along the Atlantic Coast of Europe from 7,000 to 6,000 years ago.
The researchers report evidence of dairy products in 80% of the pottery fragments from the Atlantic coast of what is now Britain and Ireland. In comparison, dairy farming on the Southern Atlantic coast of what is now Portugal and Spain seems to have been much less intensive, and with a greater use of sheep and goats rather than cows.
The study confirms that the earliest farmers to arrive on the Southern Atlantic coast exploited animals for their milk but suggests that dairying only really took off when it spread to northern latitudes, with progressively more dairy products processed in ceramic vessels.
Prehistoric farmers colonising Northern areas with harsher climates may have had a greater need for the nutritional benefits of milk, including vitamin D and fat, the authors of the study suggest.
Senior author of the paper, Professor Oliver Craig from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, said: "Latitudinal differences in the scale of dairy production might also be important for understanding the evolution of adult lactase persistence across Europe. Today, the genetic change that allows adults to digest the lactose in milk is at much higher frequency in Northwestern Europeans than their southern counterparts".
The research team examined organic residues preserved in Early Neolithic pottery from 24 archaeological sites situated between Portugal and Normandy as well as in the Western Baltic.
They found surprisingly little evidence for marine foods in pottery even from sites located close to the Atlantic shoreline, with plenty of opportunities for fishing and shellfish gathering. An exception was in the Western Baltic where dairy foods and marine foods were both prepared in pottery.
Lead author of the paper, Dr. Miriam Cubas, said: "This surprising discovery could mean that many prehistoric farmers shunned marine foods in favour of dairy, but perhaps fish and shellfish were simply processed in other ways.
"Our study is one of the largest regional comparisons of early pottery use. It has shed new light on the spread of early farming across Atlantic Europe and showed that there was huge variety in the way early farmers lived. These results help us to gain more of an insight into the lives of people living during this process of momentous change in culture and lifestyle—from hunter-gatherer to farming."
'Latitudinal gradient in dairy production with the introduction of farming in Atlantic Europe' is published in Nature Communications
Salmonid fishes use different mechanism to defend against parasite infections. populations have evolved different optima of defence, likely matching the infection pressure in their own natural environment. Credit: Pekka Hyvärinen, Natural Resources Institute Finland
Research on salmonid fishes by the University of Jyväskylä and the Natural Resources Institute Finland sheds light on animal defence mechanisms and their interactions. The research demonstrates that populations with a strong physiological resistance show little behavioural avoidance and damage repair, and vice versa. The results can have important practical implications for stocking activities of endangered salmonids. The study was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B in April 2020.
Animals can use a set of different defence mechanisms to combat infections. There are three main routes of defence that can be jointly used: behaviours that reduce exposure (such as the currently practised social distancing in humans), physiological resistance (immune system) that attacks the pathogen, and mechanisms that repair tissue damages of infection (tolerance).
"We studied populations of Atlantic salmon and sea trout from different rivers in Finland and found that those with a strong physiological resistance against an eye parasite showed little behavioural avoidance and damage repair, and vice versa. This suggests that each defence type comes with costs for the host and that fish have to balance between these defence mechanisms," says researcher Ines Klemmefrom the University of Jyväskylä.
"It seems that different salmonid populations have evolved different optima of defence, likely matching the infection pressure in their own natural environment," says Klemme.
"It is important to release fish stocks to their original habitats"
The present investigation provides information of the overall level of defence and interactions between individual mechanisms. Previous studies have commonly focused on one mechanism at a time.
Repairing tissues, i.e., tolerance, does not harm the parasite itself, but avoidance and immune defense negatively affect parasite reproduction and induce counteractions that lead to the evolutionary arms races.
The results have important practical implications for artificial selection and stocking programmes.
"The results suggest that artificial selection, for example to increase immunological defences, can lead to reduction in other defence mechanisms. It is also important for aquaculture stocking programs, which are used to support threatened salmonid populations, to release fish stocks to their original populations and habitats to which they may be adapted to," says senior lecturerAnssi Karvonenfrom the University of Jyväskylä.
More information: Ines Klemme et al. Negative associations between parasite avoidance, resistance and tolerance predict host health in salmonid fish populations, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2020.0388
