The Secret Hellfire Club and the Hellfire Caves


Image Credit : Zoltan Kuruc

The Hellfire Club was an exclusive membership-based organisation for high-society rakes, that was first founded in London in 1718, by Philip, Duke of Wharton, and several of society’s elites.

Wharton was a powerful Jacobite politician, writer, a wealthy peer, and Grand Master of the Premier Grand Lodge of England who led a double life as a drunkard, a rioter, an infidel and a rakehell (meaning a man who was habituated to immoral conduct such as womanising, and wasting his fortune through acts of gambling and debauchery).

Wharton’s club was considered a satirical “gentleman’s club” (although women are also purported to attend), intended to shock and ridicule religious beliefs through the act of mock religious ceremonies with the supposed president of this club being the devil.


The club came to an end in 1721, due to political maneuvering by Wharton’s enemies pushing through a bill against “horrid impieties”, resulting in Wharton being removed from Parliament and the club being disbanded.

Hellfire Caves – Image Credit : Zoltan Kuruc

The club was reformed by Francis Dashwood, the 11th Baron le Despencer under the name of the Order of the Knights of St Francis (although the club also went under the names of the Brotherhood of St. Francis of Wy, the Order of the Friars of St Francis of Wycombe and the Order of Knights of West Wycombe) around 1746.

Dashwood commissioned the construction of a complex series of tunnels and chalk and flint caverns for the club’s meetings on the Dashwood estate of West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire, England. Known today as the Hellfire Caves or the West Wycombe Caves, the complex extends for 0.25 miles beneath the church of St Lawrence and the Dashwood family Mausoleum.

Each chamber is connected by a series of narrow passageways, consisting of the Entrance Hall, the Steward’s Chamber, the Whitehead’s Cave, Lord Sandwich’s Circle, Franklin’s Cave, the Banqueting Hall, the Triangle, the Miner’s Cave, and the Inner Temple, which was accessed by crossing a faux river meant to represent the River Styx (a river in Greek mythology that forms the boundary between Earth and the Underworld).

Hellfire Caves – Image Credit : Zoltan Kuruc

Members of the club included prominent 18th-century figures such as John Montagu (the 4th Earl of Sandwich), William Hogarth (an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist), John Wilkes (a journalist and politician), and Thomas Potter (a politician and Vice-Treasurer of Ireland).

It has also been claimed that Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and a close friend of Dashwood visited the caves on more than one occasion.

Many rumours of black magic, satanic rituals and orgies were in circulation during the life of the club, with the notable English writer Horace Walpole stating that “practice was rigorously pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly sacrificed; and the nymphs and the hogsheads that were laid in against the festivals of this new church, sufficiently informed the neighbourhood of the complexion of those hermits.”

Hellfire Caves – Image Credit : Zoltan Kuruc

By the early 1760’s, the club began to decline and would eventually be dissolved, possibly due to Dashwood’s appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer which ended in failure, or him taking a role of greater respectability in society with his elevation as the 11th Baron le Despencer.

Various branches or legacy incarnations of the Hellfire Club continued to carry out meetings, such as the Beggar’s Benison in Scotland which dissolved in the 19th century, and some argued to meet at various historic educational institutions of Ireland and Britain today.

Header Image Credit : Zoltan Kuruc

Cognitive Elements of Language Have Existed for 40 Million Years



Humans are not the only beings that can identify rules in complex language-like constructions – monkeys and great apes can do so, too, a study at the University of Zurich has shown.

Researchers at the Department of Comparative Language Science of UZH used a series of experiments based on an ‘artificial grammar’ to conclude that this ability can be traced back to our ancient primate ancestors.

Language is one of the most powerful tools available to humankind, as it enables us to share information, culture, views and technology. “Research into language evolution is thus crucial if we want to understand what it means to be human,” says Stuart Watson, postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Comparative Language Science of the University of Zurich. Until now, however, little research has been conducted about how this unique communication system came to be.


Identifying connections between words

An international team led by Professor Simon Townsend at the Department of Comparative Language Science of the University of Zurich has now shed new light on the evolutionary origins of language. Their study examines one of the most important cognitive elements needed for language processing – that is, the ability to understand the relationship between the words in a phrase, even if they are separated by other parts of the phrase, known as a “non-adjacent dependency”.

For example, we know that in the sentence “the dog that bit the cat ran away”, it is the dog who ran away, not the cat, even though there are several other words in between the two phrases. A comparison between apes, monkeys and and humans has now shown that the ability to identify such non-adjacent dependencies is likely to have developed as far back as 40 million years ago.

Acoustic signals instead of words

The researchers used a novel approach in their experiments: They invented an artificial grammar, where sequences are formed by combining different sounds rather than words. This enabled the researchers to compare the ability of three different species of primates to process non-adjacent dependencies, even though they do not share the same communication system. The experiments were carried out with common marmosets – a monkey native to Brazil – at the University of Zurich, chimpanzees (University of Texas) and humans (Osnabrück University).

Mistakes followed by telltale looks

First, the researchers taught their test subjects to understand the artificial grammar in several practice sessions. The subjects learned that certain sounds were always followed by other specific sounds (e.g. sound ‘B’ always follows sound ‘A’), even if they were sometimes separated by other acoustic signals (e.g. ‘A’ and ‘B’ are separated by ‘X’). This simulates a pattern in human language, where, for example, we expect a noun (e.g. “dog”) to be followed by a verb (e.g. “ran away”), regardless of any other phrasal parts in between (e.g. “that bit the cat”).

In the actual experiments that followed, the researchers played sound combinations that violated the previously learned rules. In these cases, the common marmosets and chimpanzees responded with an observable change of behavior; they looked at the loudspeaker emitting the sounds for about twice as long as they did towards familiar combinations of sounds. For the researchers, this was an indication of surprise in the animals caused by noticing a ‘grammatical error’. The human test subjects were asked directly whether they believed the sound sequences were correct or wrong.

Common origin of language

“The results show that all three species share the ability to process non-adjacent dependencies. It is therefore likely that this ability is widespread among primates,” says Townsend. “This suggests that this crucial element of language already existed in our most recent common ancestors with these species.” Since marmosets branched off from humanity’s ancestors around 40 million years ago, this crucial cognitive skill thus developed many million years before human language evolved.

UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH

Matthew Hopkins – The Real Witch-Hunter


Matthew Hopkins was an infamous witch-hunter during the 17th century, who published “The Discovery of Witches” in 1647, and whose witch-hunting methods were applied during the notorious Salem Witch Trials in colonial Massachusetts.

From the 16th century, England was in the grips of hysteria over witchcraft, caused in part by King James VI, who was obsessed with the dark arts and wrote a dissertation entitled “Daemonologie” in 1599.

James had been influenced by his personal involvement in the North Berwick witch trials from 1590, and amassed various texts on magical studies that he published into three books to describe the topics of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft, and tried to justify the persecution and punishment of a person accused of being a witch under the rule of canonical law.

The published works assisted in the creation of the witchcraft reform, that led to the English Puritan and writer – Richard Bernard to write a manual on witch-hunting in 1629 called “A Guide to Grand-Jury Men”. Historians suggest that both the “Daemonologie” and “A Guide to Grand-Jury Men” was an influence that Matthew Hopkins would draw inspiration from and have a significant impact in the direction his life would take many years later.

Matthew Hopkins was born in Great Wenham, located in Suffolk, England, and was the fourth son of James Hopkins, a Puritan vicar of St John’s of Great Wenham. After his father’s death, Hopkins moved to Manningtree in Essex and used his inheritance to present himself as a gentleman to the local aristocracy.



Hopkins’ witch-finding career began in March 1644, when an associate, John Sterne alleged that a group of women in Manningtree were conducting acts of sorcery and were trying to kill him with witchcraft. Hopkins conducted a physical investigation of the women, looking for deformities and a blemish called the “Devil’s Mark” which would lead to 23 women (sources differ in the number) being accused of witchcraft and were tried in 1645. The trial was presided over by the justices of the peace (a judicial officer of a lower or puisne court), resulting in nineteen women being convicted and hanged, and four women dying in prison.

After their success in the trail, Hopkins and Stearne travelled throughout East Anglia and nearby counties with an entourage of female assistants, falsely claiming to hold the office of Witchfinder General and also claimed to be part of an official commission by Parliament to uncover witches residing in the populous by using a practice called “pricking”. Pricking was the process of pricking a suspected witch with a needle, pin or bodkin. The practice derived from the belief that all witches and sorcerers bore a witch’s mark that would not feel pain or bleed when pricked.

Although torture was considered unlawful under English law, Hopkins would also use techniques such as sleep deprivation to confuse a victim into confessing, cutting the arm of the accused with a blunt knife (if the victim didn’t bleed then they’d be declared a witch) and tying victims to a chair who would be submerged in water (if a victim floated, then they’d be considered a witch).

This proved to be a lucrative opportunity in terms of monetary gain, as Hopkins and his company were paid for their investigations, although Hopkins states in his book “The Discovery of Witches” that “his fees were to maintain his company with three horses”, and that he took “twenty shillings a town”. Historical records from Stowmarket shows that Hopkins actually charged the town £23, taking into account inflation would be around £3800 today.

Between the years of 1644 and 1646, Hopkins and his company are believed to be responsible for the execution of around 300 supposed witches and sent to the gallows more accused people than all the other witch-hunters in England of the previous 160 years.

By 1647, Hopkins and Stearne were questioned by justices of the assizes (the precursor to the English Crown Court) into their activities, but by the time the court resumed both Hopkins and Stearne retired from witch-hunting.

That same year, Hopkins published his book, “The Discovery of Witches” which was used as a manual for the trial and conviction of Margaret Jones in the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the east coast of America. Some of Hopkins’ methods were also employed during the Salem Witch Trials, in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692–93, resulting in hundreds of inhabitants being accused and 19 people executed.

Matthew Hopkins died at his home in Manningtree on the 12th August 1647 of pleural tuberculosis and was buried in the graveyard of the Church of St Mary at Mistley Heath. Within a year of the death of Hopkins, Stearne retired to his farm and wrote his own manual “A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft” hoping to further profit from the infamous career path both men had undertaken that caused the death of hundreds of innocent souls.

Witchfinder General [1968]

Port Royal – The Sodom of the New World



Port Royal, originally named Cagway was an English harbour town and base of operations for buccaneers and privateers (pirates) until the great earthquake of 1692.

The region around Port Royal was first occupied by the Taino, an indigenous people of the Caribbean who Christopher Columbus encountered during his voyage to the New World in 1492.

With the arrival of Europeans to the new continent, the Spanish landed in Jamaica in 1494, who planned to use Jamaica as a supply base for both New Andalusia and Nicuesa and take advantage of the natural resources. Having discovered little to no riches, the Spanish instead started to cultivate the land and established a colony for the processing of sugar cane.

During the Anglo-Spanish War, an English expeditionary force invaded Jamaica in 1655 and the entire island was formally ceded by Spain in the 1670 Treaty of Madrid. The English began to develop a new harbour town named Port Royal and constructed a series of forts for the town’s defence.

To provide further security for the town, Governor Edward D’Oley invited the Brethren of the Coast, a loose coalition of pirates and privateers commonly known as buccaneers to make the town their homeport of operations. The Brethren of the Coast were a regulated syndicate of captains with outside benefactors, who preyed upon Spanish maritime shipping for their cargo.

By the 1660’s, Port Royal had gained a reputation as the “Sodom of the New World” for notable privateers such as Christopher Myngs (who commanded whole fleets of buccaneers, sacking and massacring entire towns) and Henry Morgan (who raided shipping on the Spanish Main and attacked Panama City).

The port was also a base for buccaneers such as Roche Brasiliano (who was known to cut off the limbs of his captives and roast them alive on a spit), John Davis (who sacked the Dutch island of Tobago, near Trinidad) and Edward Mansvelt (who led the fleet which captured Granada and the island of Santa Catalina).

Submerged remains of Port Royal – Image Credit : National Geographic

This relationship greatly benefited the English crown, as it gave England the means to weaken Spain’s foothold in the Caribbean and America’s, without committing military forces in the endeavour.

The situation changed in 1687, when Jamaica passed anti-piracy laws and Port Royal became one of the primary sites of execution for pirate captains such as Charles Vane, Calico Jack (John Rackham) and Mary Read (a famed female pirate) who died in prison.

The town continued to prosper, and Port Royal grew to a population of around 6500 inhabitants. This rapid development led to a shortage of available land and houses were often built on reclaimed land from heavy brick construction.

On the 7th June, 1692 – the fortunes of Port Royal would change forever. Jamaica was hit by a large earthquake causing the land under Port Royal to liquefy and flow out into Kingston Harbour. Buildings would literally sink into a sludge resembling quicksand and the town was enveloped by a tsunami that followed.

In the aftermath, the lack of clean water, sewage and corpses deposited by the floodwaters led to malignant fever and cholera for the survivors. In the years that followed, attempts would be made to rebuild Port Royal, but mother nature would continue to strike down the “Sodom of the New World” with hurricanes, fires, and outbreaks of disease.

Header Image – Port Royal earthquake 1692 by Jan Luyken and Pieter van der Aa

 

Ancient lake contributed to past San Andreas fault ruptures

Research presented at the 2020 GSA Annual Meeting

GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Research News

 

IMAGE: SAN ANDREAS FAULT AREA view more 

CREDIT: REBECCA DZOMBAK

Boulder, Colorado, USA: The San Andreas fault, which runs along the western coast of North America and crosses dense population centers like Los Angeles, California, is one of the most-studied faults in North America because of its significant hazard risk. Based on its roughly 150-year recurrence interval for magnitude 7.5 earthquakes and the fact that it's been over 300 years since that's happened, the southern San Andreas fault has long been called "overdue" for such an earthquake. For decades, geologists have been wondering why it has been so long since a major rupture has occurred. Now, some geophysicists think the "earthquake drought" could be partially explained by lakes -- or a lack thereof.

Today, at the Geological Society of America's 2020 Annual Meeting, Ph.D. student Ryley Hill will present new work using geophysical modeling to quantify how the presence of a large lake overlying the fault could have affected rupture timing on the southern San Andreas in the past. Hundreds of years ago, a giant lake -- Lake Cahuilla -- in southern California and northern Mexico covered swathes of the Mexicali, Imperial, and Coachella Valleys, through which the southern San Andreas cuts. The lake served as a key point for multiple Native American populations in the area, as evidenced by archaeological remains of fish traps and campsites. It has been slowly drying out since its most recent high water mark (between 1000 and 1500 CE). If the lake over the San Andreas has dried up and the weight of its water was removed, could that help explain why the San Andreas fault is in an earthquake drought?

Some researchers have already found a correlation between high water levels on Lake Cahuilla and fault ruptures by studying a 1,000-year record of earthquakes, written in disrupted layers of soils that are exposed in deeply dug trenches in the Coachella Valley. Hill's research builds on an existing body of modeling but expands to incorporate this unique 1,000-year record and focuses on improving one key factor: the complexity of water pressures in rocks under the lake.

Hill is exploring the effects of a lake on a fault's rupture timing, known as lake loading. Lake loading on a fault is the cumulative effect of two forces: the weight of the lake's water and the way in which that water creeps, or diffuses, into the ground under the lake. The weight of the lake's water pressing down on the ground increases the stress put on the rocks underneath it, weakening them -- including any faults that are present. The deeper the lake, the more stress those rocks are under, and the more likely the fault is to slip.

What's more complicated is how the pressure of water in empty spaces in soils and bedrock (porewater) changes over both time and space. "It's not that [water] lubricates the fault," Hill explains. It's more about one force balancing another, making it easier or harder for the fault to give way. "Imagine your hands stuck together, pressing in. If you try to slip them side by side, they don't want to slip very easily. But if you imagine water between them, there's a pressure that pushes [your hands] out -- that's basically reducing the stress [on your hands], and they slip really easily." Together, these two forces create an overall amount of stress on the fault. Once that stress builds up to a critical threshold, the fault ruptures, and Los Angeles experiences "the Big One."

Where previous modeling work focused on a fully drained state, with all of the lake water having diffused straight down (and at a single time), Hill's model is more complex, incorporating different levels of porewater pressure in the sediments and rocks underneath the lake and allowing pore pressures to be directly affected by the stresses from the water mass. That, in turn, affects the overall fault behavior.

While the work is ongoing, Hill says they've found two key responses. When lake water is at its highest, it increases the stresses enough to push the timeline for the fault reaching that critical stress point just over 25% sooner. "The lake could modulate this [fault slip] rate just a little bit," Hill says. "That's what we think maybe tipped the scales to cause the [fault] failure."

The overall effect of Lake Cahuilla drying up makes it harder for a fault to rupture in his model, pointing to its potential relevance for the recent quiet on the fault. But, Hill stresses, this influence pales in comparison to continent-scale tectonic forces. "As pore pressures decrease, technically, the bedrock gets stronger," he says. "But how strong it's getting is all relevant to tectonically driven slip rates. They're much, much stronger."

###

Session no. 36 - T94. Induced and triggered earthquakes in the United States and Canada
Monday, 26 Oct.: 5:30 to 8:00 p.m. EDT
Presentation time: 6:05 to 6:20 p.m. EDT
Session Link: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2020AM/meetingapp.cgi/Session/50065
Paper 148-9: Can the lack of lake loading explain the earthquake drought on the southern San Andreas Fault?
Abstract Link: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2020AM/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/355082
Contact: Ryley Hill, University of California San Diego, California, USA; ryhill@ucsd.edu.

The Geological Society of America, founded in 1888, is a scientific society with 22,000 members from academia, government, and industry in more than 100 countries. Through its meetings, publications, and programs, GSA enhances the professional growth of its members and promotes the geosciences in the service of humankind. Headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, GSA encourages cooperative research among earth, life, planetary, and social scientists, fosters public dialogue on geoscience issues, and supports all levels of earth-science education. https://www.geosociety.org

 

Aqueducts: How Ancient Rome Brought Water to Its People

The water supply for up to 1 million residents of ancient Rome relied on the city's 11 aqueducts. And many more across the Roman empire used the technology.

By Eric Betz October 26, 2020 3:10 PM

The Roman aqueduct Pont du Gard carried water through underground tunnels and over bridges like this one to reach the city of Nîmes, now part of modern France. (Credit: ER_09/Shutterstock

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Ancient Rome was a thirsty place. The city was adorned with lush gardens and dramatic fountains. Its citizens took steaming public baths and enjoyed running water delivered to their homes — and sewage carried away. Rome’s booming industries used vast amounts of water to power machinery and create goods for the city, which had a population of roughly half a million to 1 million people at its peak. 

None of this would have been possible without the 11 Roman aqueducts that supplied water to the capital from the surrounding countryside. The Roman aqueducts were a crowning technological achievement of the ancient world. Rome’s first aqueduct was built in 312 B.C., and many more would be built over the next five centuries.

They didn’t invent the idea of using aqueducts to move millions of gallons of freshwater, though. The Assyrians, Greeks, Egyptians and more had all used aqueducts to supply dry, thirsty cities. But the aqueducts of ancient Rome stand out thanks to their grand scale and breathtaking architecture, which often used elevated bridges to pass water across valleys and over urban areas. In fact, some carry water even now, some 2,000 years later. 

The Roman aqueduct in Segovia, Spain, is a popular tourist stop and a great example of the lifted structures that carried water across valleys and urban landscapes thousands of years ago. (Credit: Bernard Gagnon/Wikimedia Commons)

Roman Aqueducts: Ancient Technological Marvels

Aqueducts route water over long distances using gravity alone. For the concept to work, though, it needs to be built with staggering precision. Some Roman aqueducts slope just a foot or two per mile, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. And while their stunning, arched stone architecture may have made aqueducts famous, the vast majority of Roman aqueducts were actually built underground. Builders knew that by keeping them covered and protecting the water from sunlight, they’d avoid contaminants and stave off algae. 

Roman aqueducts didn’t only supply water to Rome, either. Over the centuries, the ancient Roman empire grew to conquer much of Europe, Northern Africa and Western Asia. And as its military spread across the globe, Roman culture often replaced local traditions with its language, alphabet, calendar and technology. As a result, Roman aqueducts can still be visited across the ancient world. 

Roman builders constructed these monumental works of public infrastructure in far-off places like Great Britain and Morocco, where fast-growing civilizations also needed ample fresh water. There are dozens of known examples found in Europe, Africa and Asia.  

• In France, a first century A.D. Roman aqueduct called the Pont du Gard delivered water over dozens of miles to the then Roman city of Nîmes.

• In Spain, the Aqueduct of Segovia reaches nearly 100 feet tall on its highest bridge and dates to around the second century A.D. It provided water to the city from a river roughly 10 miles away.

• In Syria and Jordan, builders of the Roman empire spent more than a century constructing a monumental system of channels, tunnels and bridges called the Gadara Aqueduct. Just one section was 60-miles long. It carried water from a now-dry swamp to the booming league of 10 ancient cities called the Decapolis, creating an oasis in the desert.

• In Tunisia, the second century A.D. Zaghouan Aqueduct supplied the ancient city of Carthage with water from more than 80 miles away, making it among the longest Roman aqueducts. 

• In Turkey, the eastern Roman empire capital of Constantinople was supplied with water from the Aqueduct of Valens, which was constructed in the fourth century A.D. The city used it for centuries, and ruling governments maintained the aqueduct long after the Roman empire collapsed. 

The Roman era Gadara Aqueduct carried water from a swamp to 10 ancient cities in Syria and Jordan, creating an oasis in the desert. Ancient aqueducts like this mostly passed underground to protect water quality. (Credit: Pafnutius/Wikimedia Commons)

The Fall of the Roman Empire

Modern engineers still marvel at these feats, yet Rome’s emperors often had access to resources that, thankfully, aren’t common today. They wielded unilateral control of their nation and could utilize slave labor to marshal grand projects. In fact, that was part of the point. While the aqueducts may have served a practical purpose, they also doubled as a sign of Rome’s power abroad. 

And yet aqueduct construction sometimes faced familiar hurdles. For example, in 19 B.C, the Roman general and legendary builder, Agrippa, was constructing a new aqueduct, the Aqua Virgo, which approached the city from the east. But as the project reached the eastern suburbs, local property owners resisted in a form of 2,000 year old NIMBYism, according to the book Rome: An Urban History from Antiquity to the Present. Agrippa was forced to divert the aqueduct to the north on a much longer course and negotiate a mix of public and private land use. Rome even went as far as appointing a key landowner along the route as the city’s first water commissioner, perhaps in exchange for his allegiance. 

Construction of new aqueducts — and other projects — ultimately faded across the Roman empire in the centuries leading up to its collapse in A.D. 476. And in the centuries that followed, the aqueducts would repeatedly fall into neglect and disrepair, only to be saved by last-ditch repair efforts that kept clean water flowing to the city of Rome. 

In fact, the Aqua Virgo, the aqueduct that Agrippa so carefully orchestrated, still flows through the city today. It’s a reminder of humanity’s technological prowess even in antiquity. And it shows us what’s possible with enough planning and imagination — and a bit of careful negotiation.

Floating gardens: More than just a pretty place

Research presented at the 2020 GSA Annual Meeting

GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Research News

 

IMAGE: FLOATING GARDEN IN SUMMER. view more 

CREDIT: CREDIT ABIGAIL HEATH.

Boulder, Colo., USA: Floating gardens sound so idyllic. Now, a study proves that they are more than just a pretty place. The study, by researchers at Illinois State University, demonstrates that such constructed gardens can have a measurable, positive impact on water quality.

Floating gardens are essentially rafts built on a frame of plastic caging, wrapped in coconut husks, and filled in with native plantings. As plants grow, they extend their roots into the water, growing hydroponically. On Chicago's North Branch of the Chicago River, non-profit Urban Rivers and partners are developing a mile-long, floating eco-park. Dubbed the Wild Mile, the re-development of this former industrial canal is Urban Rivers' flagship project. As part of the park, floating gardens, attached to shore, are being installed.

The primary intent of the floating gardens is beautification. But the Illinois State team, from the University's Department of Geology, Geography, and the Environment, saw an ideal setup for a controlled experiment. "We got involved because it's the perfect opportunity to see if there's an impact on water quality," explains lead author Abigail Heath.

Heath will present the results of the study in an online talk on Tuesday from 10:45 to 11:00 a.m. EDT, during the Geological Society of America's annual meeting.

The study is novel: previous studies have explored floating gardens' impact on water quality over time, primarily in wastewater treatment ponds, but not over space, in moving water. The project also meshes well with Urban Rivers' broader goals. "The city is interested in water quality," says Phil Nicodemus, Urban Rivers Director of Research. "Happily, Illinois State got involved.

Starting in spring 2018, Heath and co-authors have sampled water immediately upstream and downstream of a narrow 3 meter by 50 meter floating garden installed along the shoreline. Samples are collected weekly, at the surface and from 0.3 meters deep, the depth where roots reach from the garden's base into the water. Although the garden is set at the edge of Chicago's urban core, water quality is also impacted by upstream agriculture. Analyses are focused on nutrients including nitrate as nitrogen, chloride, sulfate, and phosphate.

Could this small slice of human-made paradise improve water quality? An average of data collected over the course of the study show modest but definitive improvement. For example, nitrate as nitrogen dropped from 4.69 milligrams per liter in surface water just upstream of the garden to 4.43 milligrams per liter just downstream, a drop of about 1 percent. Phosphate was also lower downstream of the garden.

"Despite how small this garden was there was measurable improvement in water quality from upstream to downstream, especially for nitrates," notes Heath. She and colleagues see this as a scalable model for how larger floating gardens might help remediate water in similar settings. "Even this tiny garden makes a difference," she says.

###

Contact: Abigail Heath
Illinois State University
Department of Geography, Geology and the Environment
Felmly Hall 206
Campus Box 4400
Normal, Illinois 61790-4400
aheath1@ilstu.edu
Phone (Dr. Eric Peterson): 309-438-7865

FEATURED ABSTRACT:
60-4: Assessment of Floating Gardens to Improve the Water Quality of the Chicago River (10:45 a.m. EDT) https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2020AM/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/355783

The Geological Society of America, founded in 1888, is a scientific society with over 20,000 members from academia, government, and industry in more than 100 countries. Through its meetings, publications, and programs, GSA enhances the professional growth of its members and promotes the geosciences in the service of humankind. Headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, GSA encourages cooperative research among earth, life, planetary, and social scientists, fosters public dialogue on geoscience issues, and supports all levels of earth-science education.

https://www.geosociety.org

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Ancient Maya Built Sophisticated Water Filters


Ancient Maya in the once-bustling city of Tikal built sophisticated water filters using natural materials they imported from miles away, according to the University of Cincinnati.

UC researchers discovered evidence of a filter system at the Corriental reservoir, an important source of drinking water for the ancient Maya in what is now northern Guatemala.

A multidisciplinary team of UC anthropologists, geographers and biologists identified crystalline quartz and zeolite imported miles from the city. The quartz found in the coarse sand along with zeolite, a crystalline compound consisting of silicon and aluminum, create a natural molecular sieve. Both minerals are used in modern water filtration.

The filters would have removed harmful microbes, nitrogen-rich compounds, heavy metals such as mercury and other toxins from the water, said Kenneth Barnett Tankersley, associate professor of anthropology and lead author of the study.

“What’s interesting is this system would still be effective today and the Maya discovered it more than 2,000 years ago,” Tankersley said.

UC’s discovery was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The Maya created this water filtration system nearly 2,000 years before similar systems were used in Europe, making it one of the oldest water treatment systems of its kind in the world, Tankersley said.

Researchers from UC’s College of Arts and Sciences traced the zeolite and quartz to steep ridges around the Bajo de Azúcar about 18 miles northeast of Tikal. They used X-ray diffraction analysis to identify zeolite and crystalline quartz in the reservoir sediments.

At Tikal, zeolite was found exclusively in the Corriental reservoir.

For the ancient Maya, finding ways to collect and store clean water was of critical importance. Tikal and other Maya cities were built atop porous limestone that made ready access to drinking water difficult to obtain for much of the year during seasonal droughts.

UC geography professor and co-author Nicholas Dunning, who has studied ancient civilizations most of his career, found a likely source of the quartz and zeolite about 10 years ago while conducting fieldwork in Guatemala.

“It was an exposed, weathered volcanic tuff of quartz grains and zeolite. It was bleeding water at a good rate,” he said. “Workers refilled their water bottles with it. It was locally famous for how clean and sweet the water was.”

Dunning took samples of the material. UC researchers later determined the quartz and zeolite closely matched the minerals found at Tikal.

UC assistant research professor Christopher Carr, an expert in geographic information system mapping, also conducted work on the UC projects at Bajo de Azúcar and Corriental.

“It was probably through very clever empirical observation that the ancient Maya saw this particular material was associated with clean water and made some effort to carry it back,” Dunning said.

UC anthropology professor emeritus Vernon Scarborough, another co-author, said most research on ancient water management has tried to explain how civilizations conserved, collected or diverted water.

“The quality of water put to potable ends has remained difficult to address,” Scarborough said. “This study by our UC team has opened the research agenda by way of identifying the quality of a water source and how that might have been established and maintained.”

Of course, reconstructing the lives, habits and motivations of a civilization 1,000 years ago is tricky.

“We don’t have absolute proof, but we have strong circumstantial evidence,” Dunning said. “Our explanation makes logical sense.”

“This is what you have to do as an archaeologist,” UC biologist and co-author David Lentz said. “You have to put together a puzzle with some of the pieces missing.”

Lentz said the filtration system would have protected the ancient Maya from harmful cyanobacteria and other toxins that might otherwise have made people who drank from the reservoir sick.

“The ancient Maya figured out that this material produced pools of clear water,” he said.

Complex water filtration systems have been observed in other ancient civilizations from Greece to Egypt to South Asia, but this is the first observed in the ancient New World, Tankersley said.

“The ancient Maya lived in a tropical environment and had to be innovators. This is a remarkable innovation,” Tankersley said. “A lot of people look at Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere as not having the same engineering or technological muscle of places like Greece, Rome, India or China. But when it comes to water management, the Maya were millennia ahead.”

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Header Image Credit – ohhenry415 – CC BY-SA 2.0

Chilling find shows how Henry VIII planned every detail of Boleyn beheading

Archives discovery shows the calculated nature of the execution and reinforces the image of the king as a ‘pathological monster’

The execution of Anne Boleyn, on 19 May, 1536, was conducted by a French swordsman to limit her pain. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

Dalya Alberge
Sun 25 Oct 2020 THE GUARDIAN


It is a Tudor warrant book, one of many in the National Archives, filled with bureaucratic minutiae relating to 16th-century crimes. But this one has an extraordinary passage, overlooked until now, which bears instructions from Henry VIII explaining precisely how he wanted his second wife, Anne Boleyn, to be executed.

In this document, the king stipulated that, although his queen had been “adjudged to death… by burning of fire… or decapitation”, he had been “moved by pity” to spare her the more painful death of being “burned by fire”. But he continued: “We, however, command that… the head of the same Anne shall be… cut off.”

Tracy Borman, a leading Tudor historian, described the warrant book as an astonishing discovery, reinforcing the image of Henry VIII as a “pathological monster”. She told the Observer: “As a previously unknown document about one of the most famous events in history, it really is golddust, one of the most exciting finds in recent years. What it shows is Henry’s premeditated, calculating manner. He knows exactly how and where he wants it to happen.” The instructions laid out by Henry are for Sir William Kingston, constable of the Tower, detailing how the king would rid himself of the “late queen of England, lately our wife, lately attainted and convicted of high treason”.

Boleyn was incarcerated in the Tower of London on 2 May 1536 for adultery. At her trial, she was depicted as unable to control her “carnal lusts”. She denied the charges but was found guilty of treason and condemned to be burned or beheaded at “the King’s pleasure”.

Most historians agree the charges were bogus – her only crime had been her failure to give Henry a son. The most famous king in English history married six times in his relentless quest for a male heir. He divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, to marry Boleyn – the marriage led him to break with the Catholic church and brought about the English Reformation. Boleyn did bear him a daughter, who became Elizabeth I.

Anne’s real ‘crime’ was her failure to produce a male heir.

 Photograph: Roger-Viollet/Rex Features

In recent years, the story of Boleyn’s life and death have reached a new audience thanks to Hilary Mantel’s bestselling saga tracing the life of Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son who became one of Henry VIII’s most trusted advisers. In the Booker-prize-winning Bring Up the Bodies, she explored the destruction of Boleyn, writing of her execution: “Three years ago when she went to be crowned, she walked on a blue cloth that stretched the length of the abbey… Now she must shift over the rough ground… with her body hollow and light and just as many hands around her, ready to retrieve her from any stumble and deliver her safely to death.”

The warrant book reveals that Henry worked out details such as the exact spot for the execution (“upon the Green within our Tower of London”), making clear Kingston should “omit nothing” from his orders.

Borman is joint chief curator for Historic Royal Palaces, the charity that manages the Tower of London, among other sites. She will include the discovery in her forthcoming Channel 5 series, The Fall of Anne Boleyn, which begins in December.

She had visited the National Archives to study the Anne Boleyn trial papers when archivist Sean Cunningham, a Tudor expert, drew her attention to a passage he had discovered in a warrant book. Most of these warrants are “just the minutiae of Tudor government”, she said. “They’re pretty dull. The Tudors were great bureaucrats, and there are an awful lot of these warrant books and account books within the National Archives… It’s thanks to Sean’s eye for detail that it was uncovered.”

Borman argues that, despite the coldness of the instructions, the fact Henry spared Boleyn from being burned – a slow, agonising death – was a real kindness by the standards of the day. A beheading with an axe could also involve several blows, and Henry had specified that Boleyn’s head should be “cut off’, which meant by sword, a more reliable form of execution, but not used in England, which is why he had Cromwell send to Calais for a swordsman.

Henry’s instructions were not followed to the letter, though, partly due to a series of blunders, Borman said. “The execution didn’t take place on Tower Green, which is actually where we still mark it at the Tower today. More recent research has proved that… it was moved to opposite what is today the Waterloo Block, home of the crown jewels.”

She added: “Because we know the story so well, we forget how deeply shocking it was to execute a queen. They could well have got the collywobbles and thought we’re not going to do this. So this is Henry making really sure of it. For years, his trusty adviser Thomas Cromwell has got the blame. But this shows, actually, it’s Henry pulling the strings.”

• This article was amended on 26 October 2020. An earlier version said that Anne Boleyn “refuted the charges”. To clarify: she “denied the charges”.

 

Postpartum depression may persist three years after giving birth

NIH study suggests women with mood disorders, gestational diabetes may have a higher risk

NIH/EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF CHILD HEALTH AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Research News

 

A National Institutes of Health study of 5,000 women has found that approximately 1 in 4 experienced high levels of depressive symptoms at some point in the three years after giving birth. The rest of the women experienced low levels of depression throughout the three-year span. The study was conducted by researchers at NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). It appears in the journal Pediatrics.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that pediatricians screen mothers for postpartum depression at well-child visits at one, two, four and six months after childbirth. Researchers identified four trajectories of postpartum depressive symptoms and the factors that may increase a woman's risk for elevated symptoms. The findings suggest that extending screening for postpartum depressive symptoms for at least two years after childbirth may be beneficial, the authors write.

"Our study indicates that six months may not be long enough to gauge depressive symptoms," said Diane Putnick, Ph.D., the primary author and a staff scientist in the NICHD Epidemiology Branch. "These long-term data are key to improving our understanding of mom's mental health, which we know is critical to her child's well-being and development."

The researchers analyzed data from the Upstate KIDS study, which included babies born between 2008 and 2010 from 57 counties in New York State. The study followed 5,000 women for three years after their children were born.

Researchers assessed women's symptoms through a brief, five-item depression screening questionnaire, but the study did not clinically diagnose depression in the women. Women with underlying conditions, such as mood disorders and/or gestational diabetes, were more likely to have higher levels of depressive symptoms that persisted throughout the study period.

The researchers noted that the study participants were primarily white, non-Hispanic women. Future studies should include a more diverse, broad population to provide more inclusive data on postpartum depression, Dr. Putnick said.

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Reference
Putnick, D, et al. Trajectories of Postpartum Depressive Symptoms. Pediatrics. September 2020.

About the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD):

NICHD leads research and training to understand human development, improve reproductive health, enhance the lives of children and adolescents, and optimize abilities for all. For more information, visit http://www.nichd.nih.gov.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH):

NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov

How Last Year's Pandemic Simulation Foreshadowed Covid-19

GIZMONDO

https://gizmodo.com/how-last-years-pandemic-simulation-foreshadowed-covid-1-1845484059

One year ago, at the last minute, I decided to attend a presentation held by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at a Manhattan hotel facing Central Park. Epidemiologists, economists, and other public health experts ran a simulation of what a realistic pandemic would look in the modern world. The basic conclusion of the Event 201 exercise—that we were nowhere near ready to handle the next outbreak—has proven frightfully true over the past year.

“It has been a bit surreal to see so many of the story elements in Event 201 play out in real life, but also sad”

To be very clear, Event 201 did not preview a “plan” for covid-19, as the conspiracy-soaked corners of the internet now argue. Their fictional germ was also a coronavirus related to SARS, but that’s nothing to raise an eyebrow at; scientists have long worried about the potential for coronaviruses in the wild to cross over to humans and spark the next major epidemic. There are also plenty of clear differences between the mock pandemic of the fictional CAPS (Coronavirus Acute Pulmonary Syndrome) and covid-19, such as their respective origins. Even if you wanted to humor the conspiracy angle, you’d have to wonder why anyone would publicly reveal their grand plan (for a never-explained goal) months before schedule, like a Z-grade Scooby Doo villain.

We're Not Ready for the Next Pandemic
If the seeds of a pandemic illness were planted tomorrow, how would the world fare? Well, according

But having attended Event 201, I can say that it certainly foreshadowed at least some of the world’s response to covid-19. Go ahead and read this section from my write-up and see if any of it rings familiar:

Within the first few months, CAPS spread to several countries, aided by international travel and the fact that, like with many real-life diseases, not all people infected with the virus ended up sick and others only experienced mild flu-like symptoms. As it raged on in poorer and richer countries alike, governments and pundits squabbled about where to allocate money and resources, including experimental antiviral drugs. Social media outlets also fanned the flames by allowing trolls and even governments to spread disinformation about CAPS, such as blaming foreigners for the problem; that in turn made people even less likely to trust public health experts.

There have been genuinely unexpected bright spots during our real-life pandemic. Scientists around the world were able to quickly band together and study the coronavirus, leading to a diagnostic test in a matter of weeks. And the breakthrough pace in developing potential vaccines has been nothing short of remarkable. It’s possible, even likely, that we could have a successful vaccine ready to go into mass production by early next year. Many countries throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe have also had success in avoiding the worst of the viral illness, and some have even been able to resume some semblance of normal life through a hard-fought suppression of outbreaks within their borders.

“The positive surprise is that measures to flatten the curve worked so well—much better than expected,” Eric Toner, a senior scholar with the Center for Health Security and project director of Event 201, said in an email. “The flip side is that many governments gave up on them too soon.”

Indeed, the broad strokes of Event 201’s forecast have been uncannily accurate.

The U.S., in particular, has failed by every metric to combat covid-19, leading to a death toll of over 220,000 Americans and counting—by far the deadliest single epidemic seen in the country in over a century. Led by President Trump and the GOP, the federal government has routinely downplayed the pandemic, while Trump blames everyone but himself—especially China—for these deaths. This weekend, the White House’s Mark Meadows all but announced the country’s surrender to the coronavirus, stating it wasn’t possible to control its spread.

Though most if not all other countries have fared better than the U.S., much of the world is now facing a second wave, and over a million people worldwide have died. Hard-hit hospitals are still struggling to secure essential medical resources. Disinformation about covid-19 continues to spread largely unchecked on Facebook and Twitter, not to mention from Trump’s mouth.

“It has been a bit surreal to see so many of the story elements in Event 201 play out in real life, but also sad, because we included them in the scenario because they reflect many of the policy mistakes that are often made in large epidemics,” Toner said.

The moral of Event 201 wasn’t that a pandemic and its effects could be entirely prevented. Past a certain point, once a novel and highly contagious disease has gone global, there’s only so much you can do. The real hard work is supposed to come beforehand, as Toner himself noted when we spoke last year. Back then, he warned about the need to stockpile medical supplies—another concern that proved unfortunately correct during this pandemic.

Look at This Horrible, Horrible Map
Here’s the most depressing map you’re likely to see this week, courtesy of Anthony Fauci, head of…Read more

Like all natural disasters, covid-19 will eventually come to an end. But it’s only a matter of time before the next potential pandemic rears its microscopic head. Hopefully, the experiences of covid-19 will provide enough of an incentive for countries and other parties to invest in the things that will either prevent pandemics from starting, like widescale disease surveillance, or in the crucial resources needed once a pandemic has begun, like protective equipment for medical workers. But just judging from our recent track record, that’s going to be a tall order.Subscribe to our newsletter!

“Event 201 illustrated, among other things, the need for robust, consistent, evidence-based, and truthful communications from governments,” Toner said. “We did anticipate that there could be disinformation from governments, but we underestimated the degree to which it would occur.”

Vampire bats social distance when they get sick

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS USA

Research News

 

IMAGE: A NEW PAPER IN BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY FINDS THAT WILD VAMPIRE BATS THAT ARE SICK SPEND LESS TIME NEAR OTHERS FROM THEIR COMMUNITY, WHICH SLOWS HOW QUICKLY A DISEASE WILL SPREAD.... view more 

CREDIT: SHERRI AND BROCK FENTON/BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY

A new paper in Behavioral Ecology, published by Oxford University Press, finds that wild vampire bats that are sick spend less time near others from their community, which slows how quickly a disease will spread. The research team had previously seen this behavior in the lab, and used a field experiment to confirm it in the wild.

As a pathogen spreads across a population, changes in social behavior can alter how the disease spreads. Transmission rates can increase when parasites change host behavior or decrease when healthy individuals avoid sick ones. In certain social insects, sick ones might self-isolate voluntarily or be excluded by their colony mates. A simpler mechanism causing reduced transmission is that infected animals often show sickness behavior, which includes increased lethargy and sleep, and reduced movement and sociality. This sickness-induced social distancing does not require cooperation from others and is probably common across species.

Researchers here conducted a field experiment to investigate how sickness behavior affects relationships over time using a dynamic social network created from high-resolution proximity data. After capturing 31 adult female vampire bats from a roost inside a hollow tree at Lamanai, Belize, researchers simulated "sick" bats by injecting a random half of bats with the immune-challenging substance, lipopolysaccharide, while the control group received saline injections.

Over the next three days, the researchers glued proximity sensors to the bats, released them back into their hollow tree, and tracked changes over time in the associations among all 16 "sick" bats and 15 control bats under natural conditions.

Compared to control bats, "sick" bats associated with fewer groupmates, spent less time with others, and were less socially connected to healthy groupmates when considering both direct and indirect connections. During the six hours of the treatment period, a 'sick' bat associated on average with four fewer associates than a control bat. A control bat had, on average, a 49% chance of associating with each control bat, but only a 35% chance of associating with each "sick" bat. During the treatment period, "sick" bats spent 25 fewer minutes associating per partner. These differences declined after the treatment period and when the bats were sleeping or foraging outside the roost.

"The sensors gave us an amazing new window into how the social behavior of these bats changed from hour to hour and even minute to minute during the course of the day and night, even while they are hidden in the darkness of a hollow tree," said the study's lead author, Simon Ripperger. "We've gone from collecting data every day to every few seconds."

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The paper "Tracking sickness effects on social encounters via continuous proximity-sensing in wild vampire bats" is available (at midnight on October 27) at: https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araa111.