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)
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
Kurdish struggle critical linchpin of Iran protests, says BBC World Affairs correspondent Jiyar Gol Protests in Iran are continuing despite a harsh crackdown by security forces. Human rights groups say that at least 201 people have died in the violence that was triggered by the death in custody of a Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini. The 22-year-old was detained by the morality police for supposedly breaking rules on mandatory Islamic-style covering.
BBC World Affairs correspondent Jiyar Gol says much of the violence is concentrated in the Kurdish heavy northwest provinces, where long-running grievances over political repression and poor economic conditions mesh with the regime's suppression of Kurdish identity.
Kurdish gains in Iraq and Syria drive Turkish attacks, says researcher Meghan Bodette With the world's attention focused on Ukraine, Turkey has escalated its campaign against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) across its own borders in Iraq and Syria. Meghan Bodette, director of research at the Kurdish Peace Institute in Washington DC, tells Al-Monitor that Turkey is increasingly targeting activists, politicians and other civilian figures associated with the Kurdish political movement founded by imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. This is because Turkey fears the legitimacy such individuals lend to Kurdish aspirations.
As Iran protests enter sixth week, women take to Afghanistan's streets
Some of the largest protests led by women started after a Sept. 30 suicide attack on an educational center in Kabul in which 53 Hazara girls were killed.
Afghan women hold placards as they take part in a protest in front of the Iranian Embassy in Kabul on Sept. 29, 2022. - WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images
As women-led protests spread across Iran after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody for violating hijab laws, women in neighboring Afghanistan have also been taking to the streets.
Iran's protests quickly turned bloody, with the death toll (including security forces) currently at around 200. Though large protests have happened before, this time the tempo is more sustained and anti-regime demonstrations have spread to religious centers like Qom and Mashhad as well. While the Afghan protests are notably smaller in size and have mostly included Hazara women, they have continued apace for several weeks and university students have gotten involved. The Hazara are an ethnic minority group in Afghanistan who practice Shiite Islam and have faced ongoing discrimination from the Sunni Taliban regime.
In Afghanistan, some of the largest protests led by women started after a Sept. 30 suicide attack on an educational center in Kabul in which 53 Hazara girls were killed. Expanding to universities in Herat, Bamiyan, Daikundi, Balkh and Panjshir, the latest is Kapisa where female students from Al-Biruni University took to the streets.
Heather Barr, associate women’s rights director and former senior Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch, told Al-Monitor that it is very moving to see women’s protests in Afghanistan nowadays. “These are notable for a few reasons. First, we know how brutal the Taliban’s response to women’s protests have been, so these protestors are displaying extraordinary courage — and it is very clear and noticeable that women are the leaders of peaceful opposition to violence and human rights violations in Afghanistan," she noted.
Entering their sixth week, the Iran protests may have been a catalyst and inspired Afghan women to defy a state ban on unsanctioned rallies. Speaking to Arab News, Zarmina Sharifi, a student activist from Nangarhar, said that the protests in Iran are a “symbol of resistance and awakening” for Afghan women.
A European diplomat posted in Islamabad, speaking to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, said “the protest of Iranian women projects a strong symbolism for women throughout the region and therefore, also for Afghan women. These days, Mahsa Amini has become very popular in Afghanistan.”
Ever since the departure of US troops from Afghanistan in 2021, the militant group has seized power and imposed restrictions reminiscent of their last stint in 2001. Barring teenage girls from attending secondary school and instructing many female public sector employees to stay at home, their government remains unrecognized internationally.
Considering that women in both countries live under repressive regimes, what do these struggles for emancipation have in common and what can they hope to achieve?
To start with, both the movements were caused by fundamentalist interpretations of Sharia, implemented in Iran by Muslim clerics and by Taliban militants in Afghanistan.
Barr said, "There are ways in which the protests in Afghanistan and Iran mirror each other, and there is growing solidarity between feminists in the two countries. Women in both countries face a similar foe: misogynistic male rulers who have made denying women and girls their full humanity central to their strategies of social control.”
Ostensibly, the Afghan women’s struggle for empowerment is tougher as they are denied employment and secondary-level education opportunities.
Torek Farhadi, an Afghan regional analyst based in Geneva, told Al-Monitor, “On the surface, from a Western standpoint, both situations might look similar but they are very different. Women in Iran have had access to education over the past 40 years and many work in government at fairly senior levels. Many own and manage businesses as well.”
For two decades, Afghan women had a hiatus from Taliban rule, but now they are back to square one.
Farhadi explained, “Women’s rights in Afghanistan have been in free-fall since the end of the communist regime. Afghan civil wars of the 1990s put a dent, but over the past 20 years, the young generation benefited from Western education and Western aid programs.”
He added, “It was expected that Taliban would crush women’s rights. But to close girl’s schools, this has gone too far for even the most conservative families in Afghanistan. Afghan women live with the compulsory scarf in their society but cannot live without education.”
The situation on the ground in Afghanistan is more challenging, the diplomat pointed out. “We must not forget that the social situation in Afghanistan is different from Iran with the new set-up in Kabul. The full emancipation of women can only occur through small but significant steps such as, in the short term, [ensuring] their right to education.”
Notwithstanding the advantage of education, for women in Iran it has been a long-drawn fight for freedom since 1979. The current administration of President Ebrahim Raisi is being blamed for these riots as it has been much harsher than the previous government of Hassan Rouhani.
Nevertheless, the new generation has changed irrevocably and schoolgirls are fearlessly abandoning the hijab.
The diplomat said, “Notably, it was the generational changes in Iranian society leading to the increase in number of educated women that gave power to Iranian society in a way not comparable to the years preceding the 1979 revolution. In this regard, Afghanistan has a long way to go. However, it is undeniable that symbolically, the ongoing events in Iran represent a wake-up call for all women in the region fighting for the full affirmation of their rights.”
One major difference between both movements is that men in Iran are supporting the women in much larger numbers now.
Farhadi noted, “In Iran, men are also coming out in the streets and that is where it is different from Afghanistan. It reflects the fact that Mahsa Amini’s death served as a tipping point, starting from covering hair, but in fact the entire population has had enough of the regime’s governance where the economic trickle-down has not worked and the nation’s vast oil and gas wealth has not been mobilized to the benefit of the people all these 42 years.”
The protests in Afghanistan are getting bigger though. Barr noted, “While many of the protestors are Hazara, there are also protestors from other ethnic backgrounds, and this represents important progress in cross-ethnic support.”
Sadly, both the regimes are prone to violent tactics. To break up an Oct. 2 protest, Taliban fighters fired in the air and the following day they locked female students in dormitories in Balkh University. Likewise, Iranian authorities have ruthlessly cracked down on protestors.
Farhadi explained, “Taliban are looking at Iran protests the same way the Iranian Akhunds do. They think the overblown demonstrations after Mahsa Amini are fomented by outside powers. Taliban have already been quick to curtail the ability of Afghan teenage girls coming out in the streets, often violently firing in the air to disperse them. Taliban and Akhunds see these demonstrations as a risk to their regime.”
Astronomers Discover "Spider Stars" That Tear Apart Other Stars
These cosmic monsters tear their companions to shreds.
Image by NASA/Victor Tangermann
An international team of astronomers have spotted a new type of "spider star" — highly energetic pulsars that tear up their companion stars in binary systems.
These highly energetic celestial objects have long fascinated astronomers because they flicker in the night sky in regular rhythms. But before we go on, let's take a couple of steps back.
When a supergiant star collapses in on itself following a supernova, it leaves behind extremely dense remains in the form of a neutron star or white dwarf. With enough electromagnetic radiation, such a star can start spinning at a dizzying clip, turning itself into a pulsar — almost like a cosmic lighthouse.
Astronomers are able to spot these odd stars by observing their regular cosmic ray outbursts released during each rotation, with periods ranging from several milliseconds to whole seconds. They're so predictable, in fact, that scientists suggest using the location of various pulsars to create a kind of "celestial GPS."
Pulsars completing a rotation every 30 milliseconds or less are often referred to as "spider stars" since they are usually found in binary systems where a closely orbiting companion star is actively being broken down by the pulsar accreting matter from its companion.
Spider stars tend to circle their binary star companions at such close distances, they end up tearing their companion to shreds, as Live Science points out.
That's how a subclass of these violent stars ended up with the nickname of "Black Widow Stars," named after the spider genus in which the female eats the male after mating.
"Redback" stars, on the other hand, have a higher mass companion star, which causes signals to be eclipsed every time the companion star passes between it and the Earth.
In a new yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper uploaded to the preprints server arXiv, an international team of astronomers outline their discovery of eight binary millisecond pulsars (MSPs) using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the same one that collapsed unexpectedly in December.
Among these eight stars, three of them are newly identified black widows and one is a redback — as well as a pulsar that defies classification, as the researchers write in their paper. This odd-one-out star has a companion star that would be too massive to be classified as a black widow, but not massive enough for a typical redback.
"This system may represent a rare middle-ground case between these two observational classes," the astronomers wrote in their paper.
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER THAT CATS SIMPLY DO NOT GIVE A CRAP
YES, YOUR CAT KNOWS YOU'RE TALKING TO IT — IT JUST DOESN'T CARE.
Meow Mix
Every cat person has suspected that their cats are ignoring them — and now, new research seems to support that hunch.
As a new study published in the journal Animal Cognition details, feline researchers have demonstrated that cats do appear to know when their owners are talking to them, but that sometimes, they choose to ignore it.
The researchers sat with 16 cat-people pairs who lived in studio apartments, and playing them recordings of the pair interacting, followed by recordings of the humans saying the same words they use when baby-talking their cats, but in a voice register similar to that which they'd use to speak to other humans. The researchers also played them recordings of other humans speaking to them as well, which the cats didn't respond much to at all.
To the shock of no one who's ever tried repeatedly to get their cat's attention, the felines seemed to be able to differentiate between the tone of voice used when their humans were speaking to them versus that which humans use to speak to each other. In other words, cats seem to know who's talking to them and if they're being spoken to — even if they act like they don't.
I Cat Even
The most interesting — and funniest — finding in the study, which was conducted by researchers at the Paris Nanterre University, was that some of the cats only indicated that they'd heard their person speaking to them in the baby-talk register by twitching their ears and otherwise seeming completely disinterested in the recordings.
In other instances, some of the cats would look towards the sound of their owner's kitten-babble and meow, pause its activities, or otherwise respond.
"Our results highlight the importance of one-to-one relationships for indoor companion cats," the researchers wrote in the paper, "who do not seem to generalize the communication developed with one human to all human interlocutors."
Translation: cats seem to know when their own people are talking to them — but that doesn't mean they care.
Astronomers Puzzled by Extremely Peculiar Object in Deep Space
It's made of... what?
Image by Getty Images
Astronomers have discovered a mysterious neutron star that's far lighter than previously thought possible, undermining our understanding of the physics and evolution of stars. And fascinatingly, it may be composed largely of quarks.
As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy this week, the neutron star has a radius of just 6.2 miles and only the mass of 77 percent of the Sun.
That makes it much lighter than other previously studied neutron stars, which usually have a mass of 1.4 times the mass of the Sun at the same radius.
The team of astronomers, led by Victor Doroshenko of Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany, therefore suggest it could be an entirely new type of star.
"Our mass estimate makes the central compact object in HESS J1731-347 the lightest neutron star known to date, and potentially a more exotic object — that is, a 'strange star' candidate," the paper reads.
Neutron stars, which are some of the densest objects in the known universe, are typically formed after supergiant stars go supernova.
The star's core can then implode, compressing all of that mass into an extremely dense object. According to scientists' calculations, a single teaspoon of neutron star would have a mass of 2.2 trillion pounds.
But this newly discovered object defies our known definitions and boundaries.
Doroshenko and his team found that the star is actually much closer to us than we thought using data obtained by the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft, which allowed them to recalculate the mysterious star's mass.
The resulting mass and radius, though, simply don't fit into our current definition of a neutron star, which makes this new discovery a possible "strange star" candidate, according to the team.
Strange stars are hypothetical celestial objects thought to be made up of largely "strange quark" matter, allowing them to have lower temperatures and masses of other neutron stars.
Astronomers have also suggested that strange stars could be behind fast radio bursts, mysterious and powerful bursts of radio pulses that have yet to be explained.
In short, it's a highly unusual object that could rewrite our understanding of the universe.
"Such a light neutron star, regardless of the assumed internal composition, appears to be a very intriguing object from an astrophysical perspective," Doroshenko and his team wrote in a statement.
In 2008, the United States embassy in Beijing set up an air quality monitor and started tweeting readings every hour. By 2020, over 50 US embassies in 37 developing countries were doing the same, creating a large, international data set. Sharing this real-time air quality information resulted in lower levels of air pollution, according to a new study.
Image credit: Unsplash.
Air pollution is one of the leading environmental and health problems of our time. Small particulate matter has been associated with dementia and cognitive decline in adults and children, even influencing the sex of babies. However, this is a problem people are rarely aware of. Over 85% of the people that live in cities are exposed to air pollution levels that exceed the suggested guidelines but in many cases, this receives little to no attention.
A team led by Akshaya Jha, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, analyzed satellite data on air pollution in 466 cities in 136 low and middle-income countries, including 50 cities where the US embassies had installed the monitors. They focused on PM2.5 pollution particles, known to have harmful effects.
They found that the cities where the embassies had tweeted air pollution data saw the levels of PM2.5 drop by an average of two to four micrograms per cubic meter compared with those that didn’t. While it might not seem a lot, this would have reduced the number of premature deaths each year by a median of 303 in each city.
“The monetized benefits of reductions in pollution as a result of these monitors were large for both embassy staff and the local population,” Akshaya Jha said in a media statement. “Our findings point to the benefits of improving the availability and awareness of air-quality information in low- and middle-income countries.”
Understanding the data
The researchers believe that making the data accessible made people more aware of the low air quality and increase public pressure to address it via policy change. They registered a significant increase in the number of Google searches on air pollution in the cities where the monitors were installed and pollution levels afterward dropped.
Policy initiatives could have improved air quality, they argued, such as limiting the use of cars or reallocating industries from densely populated cities. The data from the monitors could have given local and national governments the evidence they need to lobby for greener policies while giving journalists relevant findings for media coverage.
“By providing credible, high-quality, information, the US government has drawn attention to high levels of pollution in cities in low- and middle-income countries across the world,” co-author Andrea La Nauze said in a statement. “The resulting reductions in air pollution levels had large health benefits for residents in these cities.”
Fermin Koop is a reporter from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He holds an MSc from Reading University (UK) on Environment and Development and is specialized in environment and climate change news.
International Space Station dodges debris from Russian anti-satellite test
published about 13 hours ago A cargo ship attached to the station performed a five-minute engine burn on Monday night (Oct. 24) to get the ISS out of harm's way.
The International Space Station took evasive action to avoid a piece of space junk on Oct. 24, 2022. (Image credit: NASA)
The International Space Station (ISS) just took evasive action to dodge a fragment of a satellite destroyed in a November 2021 Russian anti-satellite test.
On Monday (Oct. 24) at 8:25 p.m. EDT (0025 GMT on Oct. 25), the ISS team fired the thrusters on Progress 81, a Russian cargo ship attached to the station, for a total of five minutes and five seconds to avoid the debris fragment, according to a NASA statement(opens in new tab).
This "Pre-Determined Debris Avoidance Maneuver" (PDAM) was performed in order to "provide the complex an extra measure of distance away from the predicted track" of the debris fragment, agency officials said.
The maneuver raised the ISS's altitude by 0.2 miles (0.32 kilometers) at apogee (its farthest point from Earth) and 0.8 miles (1.3 km) at perigee (its closest point to Earth), according to NASA. The thruster firing did not affect normal space station operations.
The debris fragment that prompted the avoidance maneuver was created by a Russian test of a direct ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) missile conducted on Nov. 15, 2021. The missile, launched from the ground, destroyed a defunct Soviet satellite known as Cosmos 1408 that had been out of commission since the 1980s.
"There's really no reason they should have used such a big target," astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told Space.com at the time. "They could have used a smaller target and generated less debris."
This is not the first time the International Space Station has had to avoid debris left over from the Russian ASAT test. In June 2022, the space station made a similar maneuver to avoid a fragment of Cosmos 1408.
In the wake of the Russian ASAT test conducted on Cosmos 1408, several nations have made commitments not to perform destructive ASAT tests to help prevent the proliferation of space debris in orbit. These include the Republic of Korea, Germany, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Starlink Terminals Smuggled Into Iran – Report Tom Jowitt, October 25, 2022,
Amid Internet shutdowns and ongoing protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, Starlink terminals are reportedly being smuggled into Iran
Iranian authorities are facing another challenge, after weeks of violent protests in the country following the death last month of 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini in police custody.
Iranians activists are smuggling SpaceX Starlink broadband satellite terminals into the nation, as Tehran restricts internet access amid the ongoing protests.
The protests centre on Mahsa Amini, who died last month whilst in the custody of Iran’s morality police.
Eyewitnesses said that Amini had been severely beaten, which Iranian officials denied. They allege she died of a heart attack.
Amini’s death triggered a wave of protests across Iran, with some female demonstrators removing their hijab or publicly cutting their hair as acts of protest. It is reported that 201 people have been killed by Iranian security forces.
Amnesty International alleged that Iranian security forces were, in some cases, firing into groups with live ammunition, and in other cases were killing protesters by beating them with batons.
Now Iranian political activist Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, tweeted how for more than a month, activists have sent dozens of Starlink terminals into Iran.
Sadjadpour also noted “Iranian popular demand for unfettered Internet access is enormous,” but iPhones, satellite dishes and alcohol are all prohibited. Indeed the latter two are said to be criminal offences.
Sadjadpour said in his thread that Elon Musk has been gracious with his support.
In September Sadjadpour had tweeted that he had spoken with Elon Musk who revealed that Starlink had been activated in Iran. Ukraine situation
This development comes after CNN reported last week that senior US officials in the Biden administration were in talks with Elon Musk about providing Starlink’s broadband service, in order to support activists in Iran.
This was part of a White House effort to push more connectivity into the isolated nation.
It should be remembered that in early March as Russia invaded Ukraine, Musk activated SpaceX’s Starlink satellites for the country, to help Ukraine continue communicating, as Russian forces sought to cut electricity, water, and Internet in the sovereign nation.
But Musk has also courted controversy recently over Ukraine, after he was heavily criticised for suggesting that Ukraine could “de-escalate” the conflict by ceding Crimea to Russia and allow Russia to carry out referendums in partially occupied areas in order to annex those territories.
Musk then suggested he was prepared to pull the plug on Starlink in Ukraine, saying Starlink’s Ukrainian project was losing $20 million (£18m) a month.
IMAGE: BEES ARE OFTEN EXPOSED TO MULTIPLE PESTICIDES IN NATURE.view more
CREDIT: UNI HALLE / MARKUS SCHOLZ
Insecticides containing flupyradifurone and sulfoxaflor can have devastating effects on honey bee health. The substances damage the insects' intestinal flora, especially when used in conjunction with a common fungicide, making them more susceptible to disease and shortening their life span. This was recently proven in a study conducted at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), as published in Science of the Total Environment. The two insecticides were considered harmless to bees and bumblebees when approved, but their use has since been severely restricted.
For the study, honey bees that were free from environmental influences were first bred in the laboratory. "We wanted to control every aspect of the bees’ lives - from their diet to their exposure to pathogens or pesticides", says Dr Yahya Al Naggar, the biologist who led the project at MLU and who now works at Tanta University in Egypt. In the first few days, all bees were given the same food: sugar syrup. They were then divided into several groups and various pesticides were added to their food. One group was given flupyradifurone, while another was given sulfoxaflor. Both substances are approved insecticides in Germany, but their use is now limited to greenhouses.
As pesticides are often used as a mixture, the scientists also took this into account in their laboratory experiment by enriching the food administered to two other groups not only with the insecticides mentioned, but also with azoxystrobin, which has been used to protect plants from harmful fungi for many decades. The concentration of the substances was well below the legal requirements in each case. "Our approach was based on the realistic concentrations that might be found in pollen and nectar from plants that have been treated with the pesticides", says Al Naggar. A control group continued to receive the normal sugar syrup without additives.
Over a period of ten days, the team observed whether the substances had any effects on the bees and, if so, what. They found that the pesticides are anything but harmless: Around half of all bees whose diet had been supplemented with flupyradifurone died during the study - and even more when combined with azoxystrobin. While sulfoxaflor produced similar effects, more insects survived the diet.
The scientists also analysed the bees’ intestinal flora, i.e. the bacteria and fungi living in their digestive tract. "The fungicide azoxystrobin led to a significant reduction in naturally occurring fungi. That was to be expected, as fungicides are used to control fungi", says Dr Tesfaye Wubet from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), who is also a member of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig. Over the course of the ten-day study, however, the team was able to show that the mixture of fungi and bacteria detected in the insects differed greatly from the control group depending on the substances used. According to the researchers, the bacterium Serratia marcescens was able to spread alarmingly well in the digestive tract of the treated insects. "These bacteria are pathogenic and harmful to bees’ health. They can make it harder for the insects to fight off infection, leading to premature death", explains Al Naggar.
As the study was conducted in a laboratory in Halle to exclude the number of external influences, it is unclear whether the same results can be found in nature. "The effects of the pesticides could well be even more dramatic - or the bees might be able to fully or at least partially compensate for the negative effects", concludes Wubet. With this in mind, the team calls for the potential effects of new pesticides on beneficial insects to be researched more rigorously before they are approved and for their effects on aspects such as intestinal flora to be included as standard in the risk assessment.
The study was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation with additional support via the EU-funded project "Poshbee".
Study: Al Naggar Y., Singavarapu B., Paxton R.J. & Wubet T.. Bees under interactive stressors: the novel insecticides flupyradifurone and sulfoxaflor along with the fungicide azoxystrobin disrupt the gut microbiota of honey bees and increase opportunistic bacterial pathogens. Science of the Total Environment (2022). doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.157941
Bees under interactive stressors: the novel insecticides flupyradifurone and sulfoxaflor along with the fungicide azoxystrobin disrupt the gut microbiota of honey bees and increase opportunistic bacterial pathogens
ROUNDUP
Popular herbicide weakens bumblebees’ color vision
IMAGE: INDIVIDUAL FORAGER BUMBLEBEES MARKED WITH A SMALL NUMBER TAG WERE EXPOSED EITHER TO VERY LOW ACUTE DOSE OF GLYPHOSATE-BASED HERBICIDE ROUNDUP, OR TO SUCROSE (CONTROL). THEREAFTER, BEES UNDERWENT FIVE LEARNING BOUTS IN WHICH THEY CHOOSE BETWEEN ARTIFICIAL REWARDING FLOWERS (SUCROSE) OR AVERSIVE FLOWERS (QUININE). EXPERIMENTAL BEES WERE INDIVIDUALLY ALLOWED TO ENTER THE ARENA WITH 10 DIFFERENT COLOR FLOWERS (TWO OF EACH COLOR) WITH A DROP OF SUCROSE OR QUININE. DURING THE FIVE LEARNING BOUTS CONTROL BEES LEARNED TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN THE REWARDING AND AVERSIVE FLOWERS, AND TWO DAYS LATER THEY WERE ABLE TO REMEMBER ALL THEY HAD LEARNED. HOWEVER, LEARNING OF THE ROUNDUP EXPOSED BEES WAS DECLINED WITHIN FEW HOURS FROM THE EXPOSURE, AND TWO DAYS LATER IN A MEMORY TEST THEY HAD LOST EVERYTHING THEY HAD LEARNED.view more
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF TURKU
Finnish researchers found out how Roundup, a herbicide containing glyphosate, affects the learning and memory of bumblebees. Already a small dose affected their ability to learn and memorise connections between colors and taste. The weakened fine color vision can severely impair bumblebees’ foraging and nesting success.
In the study, bumblebees were exposed to an acute dose of herbicide that pollinating bumblebees might be exposed to in a sprayed field during the day. After the exposure, the bumblebees' learning and memory were tested in a 10-color discrimination task, in which the bumblebees learned to associate five specific colors with a rewarding sugar solution and another five colours with an aversive quinine solution.
Control bumblebees learned to distinguish colors associated with sweet sugar water from colors associated with a bad-tasting compound and remembered what they learned after three days. Bumblebees exposed to the herbicide learned significantly less and forgot almost everything they had learned within a few days.
The researchers also found that the herbicide treatment did not affect bumblebees' performance in an easier two-color discrimination task or a 10-odor discrimination task. The results suggest that while exposure to Roundup does not make bumblebees completely color or smell blind, it does impair their fine color vision.
"We focused on the cognitive traits of the bees because these traits determine the successful foraging and social behavior of social insects and therefore their fitness. I am really worried. Even one very small acute dose had a harmful effect on the bumblebees," says researcher, Associate Professor Marjo Helander from the University of Turku, Finland.
"The result is even more worrying when you take into account how much glyphosate-containing herbicides are used globally," states Helander.
"The results are quite worrying considering the importance of color vision for bumblebees. Even small disturbances in color vision can be catastrophic in terms of foraging and nesting success," says Docent Olli Loukola from the University of Oulu, Finland.
We’ve all heard a song or seen a movie that brings back a memory or reminds us of an earlier time. A new study from the University of Kansas has found that people tend to have more memories associated with older songs and movie clips than newer ones, and they tend to be happier memories as well. People also tend to appreciate content that triggers a memory more, and the findings help shed light on why people often find meaning in lighthearted entertainment such as pop music or superhero movies.
Researchers played song clips from artists either from the current day or roughly 10 years ago and did the same with movie clips, then asked research participants about any associated memories from the samples. Older entertainment evoked more memories, and people appreciated older music more as well. They appreciated both forms more when they activated memories, regardless of when it was released.
“What we’re trying to do is understand what happens when we encounter media and how that affects us. We also look at the implications regarding our sense of identity,” said Judy Watts, assistant professor of journalism & mass communications at KU and a co-author of the studies. “People often travel mentally back to a time period when they re-encounter beloved media, but we want to unpack what exactly they’re experiencing when they do that. Did they have appreciation, happiness or other emotions? Music was picked for the first study because it tends to be especially nostalgic. The second study was designed to see if those same effects would happen with audiovisual cues.”
For the music-based study, more than 400 college students heard six song selections from an artist, released either in 2020 or roughly a decade earlier, during their early adolescence from artists such as Taylor Swift, John Legend or Charli XCX. They were asked whether the song activated a memory, and if so to describe the memory. They were also asked about their memory engagement with statements such as “I was so young and naïve in this memory,” “life was so much simpler at the time of this memory” or “I felt completely immersed in this memory.”
For the second study, more than 400 college students were similarly shown clips from a recent or older movie, such as “Frozen” or “Frozen II,” or “Avengers: Endgame” or “Guardians of the Galaxy.” They were then asked the same questions about whether the media had associated memories, and of what type.
As expected by the researchers, study one results showed older music produced more memory recall and the songs were more appreciated. Additionally, the memories associated with older music were also older, more positive and had more downward temporal comparisons — meaning participants felt that while the memories were positive, they also believed their lives were better now than at the time of the memory. Whether a memory was specific or more social did not vary widely, but several variables such as memory recall, memory immersion and positive effect were predictors of appreciation. That suggests people appreciate any type of entertainment that activates a memory, the researchers wrote.
The study with movie clips replicated most of the memory-related findings from that conducted with music, particularly older pieces of media having more associated memories, and those being older, more positive and having more temporal comparisons. One notable difference was that specific memories were a predictor of appreciation of the content versus general memories — and were associated with less appreciation. Also, appreciation did not differ between older and newer movies, but people had a higher level of appreciation overall for movies versus music.
The findings help further understanding of autobiographical memory and how media effects are part of such mental processes. While it has long been understood and accepted that a song, movie or other piece of popular media can trigger a memory, little research has been conducted on whether these memories result in meaningful experiences. In contrast, media effects research tends to focus on more “meaningful” media, such as highly regarded, classic or highbrow forms of entertainment, not necessarily lighter fare such as pop songs, superhero movies or other popular forms of entertainment, Watts said. Better understanding of the emotional outcomes of such media-induced reminiscence is important as well, as such media can potentially help people deal with stress and negative feelings. That is especially true of the temporal findings explored in the study, or whether people feel like life was better at the time of a memory induced by media, or if they are doing better now than when they were younger, and what types of memories are associated with appreciation of media.
“We tend to assign meaning to pieces of entertainment we experience in formative times of our lives. That’s typically cast off as something that’s not particularly meaningful,” Watts said. “But we think it matters because it’s about how you experienced it, often with people we care about, and when we revisit it, we can feel warm, happy or other emotions. We’re interested in the psychological processes of memory and media, and it is one way, I think, to speak to a person’s memories, how they connect media to a time, place or people.”
In the study, the researchers examined how traffic noise and birdsong affect mood, paranoia, and cognitive functioning by carrying out a randomized online experiment with 295 participants. These heard six minutes of either typical traffic noise or birdsong with varying numbers of different traffic sounds or birdsongs. Before and after hearing the sound clips, the participants filled in questionnaires assessing their mental health and performed cognitive tests. „Everyone has certain psychological dispositions. Healthy people can also experience anxious thoughts or temporary paranoid perceptions. The questionnaires enable us to identify people's tendencies without their having a diagnosis of depression, anxiety, and paranoia and to investigate the effect of the sounds of birds or traffic on these tendencies,“ says first author Emil Stobbe, Predoctoral Fellow at the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
The present study suggests that listening to birdsong reduces anxiety and paranoia in healthy participants. Birdsong did not appear to have an influence on depressive states in this experiment. Traffic noise, however, generally worsened depressive states, especially if the audio clip involved many different kinds of traffic sounds. The positive influence of birdsong on mood is already known, but to the best of the authors‘ knowledge, this study is the first to reveal an effect on paranoid states. This was independent of whether the birdsong came from two or more different bird species.The researchers also found that neither birdsong nor traffic noise influenced cognitive performance.
In the researchers‘ view, the explanation for these effects is that birdsong is a subtle indication of an intact natural environment, detracting attention from stressors that could otherwise signal an acute threat. Taken together, the results suggest interesting avenues for further research and applications, such as the active manipulation of background noise in different situations or the examination of its influence on patients with diagnosed anxiety disorders or paranoia.
„Birdsong could also be applied to prevent mental disorders. Listening to an audio CD would be a simple, easily accessible intervention. But if we could already show such effects in an online experiment performed by participants on a computer, we can assume that these are even stronger outdoors in nature,“ says Stobbe. He is a member of the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, which studies the effects of the physical environment on the individual. „We were recently able to perform a study showing that a one-hour walk in nature reduces brain activity associated with stress,“ adds the research group’s head Simone Kühn. „We cannot say yet which features of nature – smells, sounds, color, or a combination thereof – are responsible for the effect. The present study provides a further building block to clarify this issue,“ continues Kühn. What is clear is that nature improves mental health and well-being. So, out we go!
IMAGE: HEBRIDES REDACTED SCORE WITH NOTES SCRUBBED OUT TO REFLECT DECLINING HUMPBACK WHALE POPULATIONview more
CREDIT: EWAN CAMPBELL
A Cambridge team frustrated by the apathetic response to biodiversity loss has developed a dramatic new way to highlight the demise of nature – and people are listening.
Driven by the observation that human activities are silencing nature, Dr Matthew Agarwala is using sound to convey the enormity of biodiversity loss - and help draw attention to what must be done to help species recover.
His collaboration with composer Dr Ewan Campbell is capturing the attention of new audiences by linking a piece of classical music: Mendelssohn’s ‘Hebrides Overture’, with the loss of an iconic species: the North Atlantic Humpback Whale.
Crucially, the roughly 30,000 notes in the original music score approximate to the number of Humpback Whales there were in the sea in 1829, when the piece was written. But then extensive commercial whaling began to cause a dramatic decline in the whale population - and by 1920, two thirds of all Humpback Whales were gone.
Campbell divided Mendelssohn’s score into decades, then scrubbed out notes in proportion to the decline of the whale population as the music - and time - progresses. The resulting piece, ‘Hebrides Redacted’,has proved to be a dramatically simple way for audiences to grasp the enormity of biodiversity loss over time.
A short film about the music, and its impact on live audiences, will be released online on Friday 14th October, 2022 as part of the Cambridge Zero Climate Change Festival.
The musicwas performed by the 38-piece Wilderness Orchestra at this year’s August Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire, conducted by Campbell and narrated by Agarwala. The audience response was overwhelmingly positive – and the piece received a standing ovation.
“It really was an uninitiated audience at the Wilderness Festival - people were there for a good time, not to be told that the world is falling apart through the medium of music from the 19th century. But somehow it worked,” says Campbell, Director of Music at Churchill College and Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.
“Over the past century we have seen nearly a million species pushed to the brink of extinction – nature is going quiet,” said Agarwala, an Economist at the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
He added: “Researchers – including me – have been sounding the alarm about the consequences of biodiversity loss for a long time, but the message isn’t landing. Music is visceral and emotional, and grabs people’s attention in ways that scientific papers just can’t.”
Hebrides Redacted doesn’t just fizzle out at the end. The duo also want to draw attention to the policies that would be needed to help Humpback Whale populations recover – so the last part of the piece looks into the future, allowing an optimistic 8% rise in whale population every decade.
“We can see when the oceans are better managed, whale populations can start to rebound,” says Agarwala.
He says that if the ocean food chain is protected through enforced marine protected areas, maritime freight re-routed to reduce the number of whales struck by ships, and ocean pollution minimised, the Humpback Whale population could fully recover. And so their music does the same.
“At its nadir, the score is thin and fragmented, with isolated notes reaching for a tune that is only partially present. But even in the face of devastating destruction, nature is resilient and always beautiful, and so even when two-thirds of the music is absent there’s still a delicate beauty, though a pale imitation of its once dramatic glory,” said Campbell.
He added: “Redaction is a word normally associated with censorship, and silencing history. I find it really apt for this piece of music - we’re showing how human activities have silenced nature.”
Agarwala and Campbell are excited by the power to engage public audiences when arts and sciences work together in this way. They have ideas for many more music projects, which they also hope will encourage policy-makers to take action to protect the natural world.
The Cambridge Zero Climate Change Festival 2022 includes a focus on ensuring the conversation around climate change is accessible to the general public. It runs from Friday 14th to Sunday 16th October.
Inspired by his 1829 trip to a sea cave - Fingal’s Cave - in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides, Mendelssohn’s original music captures the beauty, power, and vitality of the sea just before the introduction of mechanised industrial fishing.
The orchestra performs 'Hebrides Redacted' at the 2022 Wilderness Festival, UK
CREDIT
Tom Besley
First, the full score is played by the Hebrides Orchestra. Then, after 1 min 51, the same piece is played by only 1 in every 16 notes remains - this represents the precipitous decline in the whale population since 1829. Ewan Campbell
IMAGE: ACTIVITY OF A SET OF NEURONS IN THE AUDITORY CORTEX DURING WAKEFULNESS (WHITE DOT) AND UNDER ANAESTHESIA (GREEN DOTS). EACH DOT CORRESPONDS TO AN ELECTRICAL IMPULSE FROM A NEURON. THE IMAGE OF THE CELL BODIES OF THE NEURONS IS SUPERIMPOSED ON THIS GRAPH.view more
A new study co-led by Human Brain Project researchers in France has revealed how consciously listening generates sound-specific assemblies of neurons in the brain. While awake, hundreds of nerve cells at a time can coordinate to form these sound-specific patterns. Under anaesthesia, a brain response to auditory stimuli is still observed, but indistinguishable from spontaneous brain activity. The study, which combined in vivo experiments and computational modelling, has been published in Nature Neuroscience.
Even when we are unconscious, ongoing activity in the brain combines with sensory perception to respond and process stimuli. It is however still unclear if each stimulus is processed differently by this combined activity, or if the same underlying dynamics are responsible. Differentiating the neuronal activity during conscious perception, compared to non-conscious states, is still a complicated matter.
The study by HBP-researcher Alain Destexhe (Neuroscience Institute of Paris-Saclay University) and Brice Bathellier (Institut de l’Audition of Pasteur, Paris) now sheds new light on the brain’s response to sound during these states.
The scientists found that the cerebral cortex organizes itself in specific neuronal assemblies when consciously perceiving sounds, generating “creative” patterns of activity. Assemblies of hundreds of neurons are also present while the brain perceives auditory stimuli under anesthesia, but it’s only during wakefulness and awareness that specific ones emerge and become associated with specific sounds.
The researchers used an optical recording technique, calcium imaging coupled with multiphoton microscopy, to follow the activity of nearly a thousand neurons in the auditory cortex between the awake and anaesthetized states in mice.
To interpret the observed date, the team simulated different hypotheses about what determines the groups of neurons that are activated. This analysis showed that under anaesthesia, the likelyhood that a neuron becomes part of a response to sound is strongly influenced by its chances of becoming a part spontaneous activity, leaving less freedom to encode actual sound information. In the awake state, these two likelyhoods are more independent of each other, opening up larger possibilities to encode information in different ways.
Under anesthesia, the cortex responds to auditory stimuli, but this response evokes neuronal assemblies that are already present in the spontaneous activity in the absence of stimulus. If the stimulus is perceived while awake instead, the auditory cortex creates new assemblies, which are specific to each sound. By using a technique to image the auditory input fibers, the researchers also showed that the new assemblies are generated purely at the cortical level.
“Compared to unconscious states, the cerebral cortex gets more creative while awake and invents new patterns of neuronal activity in response to each sound. This creativity appears to be an important correlate of sensory perception” says Alain Destexhe.
The data, collected by the CNRS-NeuroPSI and Institut de l'Audition, and the computational analysis carried out within the Human Brain Project, will be made available on the digital research infrastructure EBRAINS.
