More than 100 writers sign letter in solidarity with jailed UK climate activists

Damien Gayle
Thu, 5 January 2023 



Ben Okri, Simon Schama, Helen Pankhurst and AL Kennedy are among more than 100 writers who have signed a letter in solidarity with UK climate protest prisoners.

“That the UK now has political prisoners, incarcerated for defending sustainable life on Earth is yet another national disgrace,” Kennedy said.

At least 13 environmental activists began the year behind bars in UK jails, after a year of “civil resistance” against climate policies led by the Just Stop Oil campaign. More than 100 spent time in jail, either convicted or on remand, for environmental protest in 2022.

“We stand with all those who are trying to sound the alarm and to protect our beautiful world,” said the letter, coordinated and published by the group Writers Rebel.

Invoking the urgency of the crises affecting the world’s climate and ecosystems, it continues: “Right now, many people who are deeply concerned about the climate and environment are turning to civil disobedience.

“While it is understandable that the state wishes to limit the disruption this may cause, it is vital that the right to protest is protected. Protest plays an essential part in our society in raising public awareness and enabling change.”

In 2022, parliament passed a host of anti-protest laws written specifically to tackle climate protesters, and more are proposed in a public order bill being considered by MPs.

Among the new laws was a statutory offence of causing a public nuisance, which was used to convict Jan Goodey, a university lecturer from Brighton, after he climbed a gantry over the M25 to stop traffic. He is serving a six-month sentence.

Also behind bars are Abigail Percy-Ratcliff, Alexander Wilcox, Callum Goode, Daniel Shaw, Ian Bates, Karen Matthews, Louis McKechnie, Marcus Decker, Morgan Trowland, Paul Bleach, Roger Hallam and Samuel Price, according to a list provided by Just Stop Oil.

Many are on remand for long periods. Decker and Trowland were remanded on 20 October after pleading not guilty to causing a public nuisance for scaling the Dartford Crossing, closing the motorway bridge over the Thames for two days. They are not due to stand trial until 27 March.

McKechnie has been in prison since last July, after a string of protests including interrupting a football game by tying himself to a goalpost.

Climate activists were the present day’s suffragettes, Pankhurst said. She added: “At Bow Street magistrate courts in 1908 my great-grandmother Emmeline Pankhurst defended the suffragettes’ actions by saying: ‘We are here, not because we are lawbreakers; we are here in our efforts to become lawmakers.’

“The same applies to the actions of climate activists today. They have my support both because the barriers to protest that they are increasingly facing demonstrates the dangers to democracy when protest is silenced and because climate change is an existential threat that those with power must do more to confront.”

Okri said: “Why is it easier to punish people who are trying to save our world than to face the causes of the environmental disaster hanging over the human race?”
Full list of signatories

Saleh Addonia
Patience Agbabi
Amir Amirani
Josh Appignanesi
Chloe Aridjis
Ros Barber
Devorah Baum
Ned Beauman
Ian Bostridge
Frankie Boyle
Susie Boyt
Valerie Brown
Julie Christie
Noam Chomsky
Joe Corré
Lindsey Coulson
Jill Dawson
Jeremy Deller
Tishani Doshi
Cath Drake
Stella Duffy
Joe Dunthorne
Sharon Eckman
Rachel Edwards
Inua Ellams
Brian Eno
Paul Ewen
Jane Feaver
James Flint
Bella Freud
Uri Fruchtmann
Romola Garai
Maggie Gee
Zoe Gilbert
David Gilmour
Linda Grant
Neil Griffiths
Anouchka Grose
Xiaolu Guo
Mark Haddon
Chris Hedges
Peter Hobbs
Stewart Home
Nick Hornby
Philip Horne
Tansy Hoskins
Andrew Hurley
Bianca Jagger
Carsten Jensen
Liz Jensen
Alice Jolly
Sadakat Kadri
AL Kennedy
Roman Krznaric
Olivia Laing
Nick Laird
Deborah Levy
Daniel Lismore
Toby Litt
Alex Lockwood
Dara McAnulty
Adam McKay
Tom McCarthy
Robert Macfarlane
Diana McCaulay
Jarred McGinnis
Jean McNeil
Tessa McWatt
Adam Marek
James Miller
Blake Morrison
Timothy Morton
Tom Mustill
Julie Myerson
Courttia Newland
Gregory Norminton
Andrew O’Hagan
Ben Okri
Susie Orbach
Chris Packham
Ruth Padel
Cindy Palmano
Helen Pankhurst
Laline Paull
Marie Phillips
Joanna Pocock
Max Porter
Chris Power
Irwin Rappaport
Kate Raworth
Miranda Richardson
Adam Roberts
Monique Roffey
Meg Rosoff
Minoli Salgado
Polly Samson
Roc Sandford
Sir Simon Schama
Anakana Schofield
Kamila Shamsie
Shelley Silas
Lemn Sissay
Ali Smith
Simon Stephens
Juliet Stevenson
Clover Stroud
Peter Tatchell
Nick Taussig
Adam Thirlwell
Rupert Thomson
Dame Emma Thompson
Matt Thorne
Jeremy Till
Matthew Todd
Jessica Townsend
Dale Vince
Ed Vulliamy
Dame Harriet Walter
Natasha Walter
Dame Marina Warner
Alex Wheatle
Sarah Winman
Karen McCarthy Woolf
Naomi Wood
Louisa Young

Noam Chomsky

Joe Corré

Jeremy Deller

Uri Fruchtmann

Maggie Gee

Chris Hedges

Sadakat Kadri

Daniel Lismore

Dara McAnulty

Adam McKay

Timothy Morton

Chris Packham

Irwin Rappaport

Peter Tatchell

Nick Taussig

Jeremy Till

Matthew Todd

THE ORIGINAL COLONIALISM

The amazing system plants use to shape their roots and why it could help protect crops from climate change

Malcolm Bennett, Professor of Plant Sciences, University of Nottingham and Poonam Mehra, Postdoctoral fellow in Biosciences, University of Nottingham
Thu, 5 January 2023

lewan/Shutterstock

Plants have colonised the vast majority of the Earth’s surface. So what is the key to their success?

People often think of plants as simple, senseless life forms. They may live rooted in one place, but the more scientists learn about plants, the more complex and responsive we realise they are. They are excellent at adapting to local conditions. Plants are specialists, making the most of what is close by to where they germinate.

Learning about the intricacies of plant life is about more than inspiring wonder in people though. Studying plants is also about making sure we can still grow crops in the future as climate change makes our weather increasingly extreme.

Environmental signals shape the growth and development of plants. For example, many plants use day length as the cue to trigger flowering. The hidden half of plants, the roots, also use signs from their surroundings to ensure their shape is optimised to forage for water and nutrients.

Roots protect their plants from stresses such as drought by adapting their shape (branching to increase their surface area, for example) to find more water. But until recently, we didn’t understand how roots sense whether water is available in the surrounding soil.

Water is the most important molecule on Earth. Too much or too little can destroy an ecosystem. The devastating impact of climate change (as recently seen in Europe and east Africa) is making both floods and droughts more common. Since climate change is making rainfall patterns increasingly erratic, learning how plants respond to water shortage is vital for making crops more resilient.

Taking root

Our team of plant and soil scientists and mathematicians recently discovered how plant roots adapt their shape to maximise water uptake. Roots normally branch horizontally. But they pause branching when they lose contact with water (such as growing through an air-filled gap in the soil) and roots only resume branching once they reconnect with moist soil.

Our team found that plants use a system called hydrosignalling to manage where roots branch in response to water availability in the soil.

Barley uses hydrosignalling to form root structure. Bildagentur Zoonar GmbH/Shutterstock

Hydrosignalling is the way plants sense where water is, not by measuring moisture levels directly but by sensing other soluble molecules that move with the water within plants. This is only possible because (unlike animal cells) plant cells are connected to one another by small pores.

These pores enable water and small soluble molecules (including hormones) to move together between root cells and tissues. When water is taken up by the plant root, it travels through the outermost epidermal cells.

The outer root cells also contain a hormone that promotes branching called auxin. Water uptake triggers branching by mobilising auxin inwards to inner root tissues. When water is no longer available externally, say when a root grows through an air-filled gap, the root tip still needs water to grow.

So when roots can’t take in water from the soil they have to rely on water from their own veins deep inside the root. This changes the direction of water movement, making it now move outwards, which disrupts the flow of the branching hormone auxin.

The plant also makes an anti-branching hormone called ABA in its root veins. ABA moves with the flow of water too, in the opposite direction to auxin. So when the roots draw down on water from the plants’ veins, the roots are also drawing the anti-branching hormone towards themselves.

ABA stops root branching by closing all the small pores that connect root cells – a bit like blast doors on a ship. This seals off root cells from each other and stops auxin freely moving with water, blocking root branching. This simple system allows plant roots to fine tune their shape to local water conditions. It’s called xerobranching (pronounced zerobranching).

Flower power

Our study also found that a plant’s roots use a similar system to reduce water loss as its shoots. Leaves stop water loss during drought conditions by closing micro-pores called stomata on their surfaces. Stomata closure is also triggered by the ABA hormone. Similarly, in roots ABA reduces water loss by closing nano-pores called plasmodesmata that link every root cell together.

Leaf stomata under the microscope. Barbol/Shutterstock

Roots from tomato, thale cress, maize, wheat and barley all respond to moisture in this way, despite evolving in different soils and climates. For example, tomatoes originated in a South American desert, whereas thale cress comes from central Asian temperate regions. This suggests xerobranching is a common trait in flowering plants, which are over 200 million years younger than non-flowering plants such as ferns.

Roots from ferns, an early evolving land plant species, don’t respond to water in this way. Their roots grow more uniformly. This suggests flowering species are better at adapting to water stress than earlier land plants such as ferns.

Flowering plants can colonise a wider range of ecosystems and environments than non-flowering species. Given the rapid changes in rainfall patterns across the globe, the ability of plants to sense and adapt to a wide range of soil moisture conditions is more important now than ever.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation

Malcolm Bennett receives funding from UK Research Council BBSRC and hosts EU MCSA and EMBO fellow Poonam Mehra.

Poonam Mehra receives funding from EMBO and Horizon 2020

THE NEED FOR A REVOLUTIONARY ORG

Extinction Rebellion says 'we quit' – why radical eco-activism has a short shelf life

Marc Hudson, Research Fellow in Industrial Decarbonisation Policy, University of Sussex
Thu, 5 January 2023 

Margarita Young / shutterstock

The protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has released a statement with the clickbait headline “We Quit”. Dashing the hopes of climate denialists everywhere, the group is not shutting up shop (yet), it is merely changing tactics. XR is keeping its options open, saying there is “a controversial resolution to temporarily shift away from public disruption as a primary tactic”.

The statement comes at a time when activists from affiliated groups Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil are still serving jail terms.

As someone who has been involved in these sorts of movements for 20 years, both as an activist and through my All Our Yesterdays climate history project, XR’s move doesn’t really surprise me. The truth is that such movements rarely last more than a few years, even if their cause remains just as urgent. It’s simply too hard to retain committed activists.

Extinction Rebellion itself nicely highlights the cyclical nature of radical environment action.

Protests and occupations

In the summer of 2018, the UK baked in a heatwave as the IPCC was putting the finishing touches to a report about what would happen if global warming exceeded 1.5℃ (short version: buckle up). Meanwhile, stickers with the now familiar stylised hourglass began to appear on lampposts, and news trickled out of a new group called “Extinction Rebellion”.

Protesters with UK parliament building in background

Over the following year, XR staged protests in Westminster, and occupied bridges and other key sites across London for days on end. Greta Thunberg, by now a sensation for her school strikes, addressed the crowds, and the actress Emma Thompson flew in from Los Angeles.

But an October 2019 “rebellion” was markedly less successful than the first ones. The Metropolitan Police had learned. It raided logistics hubs and issued preemptive banning orders (later successfully legally challenged). But the most damaging moment came as an own goal, when a splinter group undertook a notorious blocking-a-commuter train action, generating lots of media criticism and internal soul-searching about the pros and cons of “decentralised” movement activity.

Then came the pandemic and XR’s favoured tactics of mass mobilisation were rendered impossible – though attempts were made. Meanwhile, somebody put out fake leaflets linking the group to eco-fascist arguments.

This history – a sudden flourishing, followed by gradual fizzling out – is sadly fairly typical.
Direct action in the UK

In the early 1990s, people in the UK began taking environmental action. These actions can be seen as a continuation of the 1980s peace movement, of which the women’s camp at Greenham Common had been an inspiration and focal point.

Three decades ago this month a “Wake up the world is dying” protest took place in London to highlight rainforest deforestation and the importation of mahogany. There were many protests against new roads through woodlands. By the late 1990s, with international climate negotiations proving inadequate, the Rising Tide network sprang up, taking direct action across the country.

Activists from Rising Tide were then part of the Camp for Climate Action group in the 2000s, which emerged after the G8 protests in Scotland as some thought that groups were stuck in a rut of “summit hopping” and wanted to be more radical.

Climate Camp ran from 2006 to 2010, with protests at Drax and Kingsnorth power stations, Heathrow Airport, London and then Edinburgh. In 2011, after what was by accounts a gloomy but determined meeting, those present released a statement called “Metamorphosis”, which has language eerily similar to XR’s We Quit statement. It said its closure was “intended to allow new tactics, organising methods and processes to emerge in this time of whirlwind change”.

Through the 2010s groups such as No Dash for Gas and Reclaim the Power kept doing nonviolent direct action, joined by the ultimately successful anti-fracking movement. In the midst of this, attempts to use the Paris Climate Conference in 2015 as a way of kickstarting renewed activity were not successful.

Up like a rocket, down like a stick

Why does the pattern, what I call the “emotacycle” keep happening? One factor is how hard it is to retain committed activists. To quote myself from a December 2019 debate in New Internationalist about whether XR had the right tactics:

the emotional dynamics seem unchanged to me – a hardcore of “heroic types”, and a worried but unempowered wider community that can never see themselves doing yoga in a prison cell, [who] come to one meeting, feel alienated and don’t come back.

I went on to say that “previous cycles of climate protest tended to last three years or so”. Three years on, it seems XR has indeed followed this pattern.

XR’s “We Quit” statement also contains a teaser and an invitation to gather back at Parliament Square in Westminster, four and a half years on from the initial “Declaration of Rebellion”. A year ago the group was saying it would bring “millions” onto the streets in September. Now the number it is hoping for is 100,000.

Those predictions are still optimistic, shall we say. But other predictions made by those working on climate change – of increased emissions and an ever thicker blanket of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, trapping heat and causing floods and fires to be more intense and more frequent – are safer. Whether, in light of that, our civilisation is safe is another question.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation

Marc Hudson was a co-founder of Climate Emergency Manchester, but is no longer involved with the group.

Hershey's First Bilingual U.S. Plant Drives Powerful Results

Investment in U.S. Manufacturing Results in Highly Qualified Employees, Improved Retention and Equity

PUBLISHED 12-09-22

SUBMITTED BY THE HERSHEY COMPANY

HERSHEY, Pa., December 9, 2022 /CSRwire/ -- The Hershey Company (NYSE:HSY) announced its first bilingual manufacturing facility. Through the launch of the company’s ‘Say Hola’ initiative, the Hershey plant in Hazleton, Pennsylvania now seamlessly integrates both Spanish and English-speaking employees. The transformation evolves Hershey’s employee experience and ensures a work environment that’s accessible and equitable. In place for nearly one year, the program has enabled hiring of a more experienced workforce, improved retention and reduced recruitment costs.  ‘Say Hola’ further advances Hershey’s commitments to its communities while underscoring enterprise-wide DEI priorities, career development programs and enhanced care systems and rewards for employees.

“At the frontline of our business, our manufacturing employees make what we do possible and are a driving force behind our recent supply chain investments,” said Jason Reiman, SVP, Chief Supply Chain Officer. ‘Say Hola’ precedes a wide range of new and improved employee support programs launching in 2023 including enhanced parental leave, new training and development opportunities and local community efforts. “By delivering exceptional and inclusive experiences for employees, their families and the greater communities, we are doubling down on our legacy commitment to ensure Hershey is a top workplace for manufacturing workers so that people can grow within our company.”

In the past 20 years, Hazleton’s population has seen a rapid growth in Hispanic residents – growing from five to more than 60 percent. Recognizing the opportunity to evolve its approach and build programs that lead with inclusivity, Hershey launched this initiative to equip employees with the tools and resources needed to succeed regardless of their primary language. ‘Say Hola’ is part of Hershey’s larger people-first manufacturing strategy and is a direct reflection of the local community’s diverse, rapidly evolving demographics.

By launching ‘Say Hola’ and opening its doors to the changing Hazleton community, Hershey is seeing an increase in employee retention and highly experienced individuals applying for positions. In fact, more than 90 percent of the facility’s recruitment classes now have the desired manufacturing experience versus 50 percent of recruitment classes prior to program launch. The community’s enthusiasm about the transformation to a bilingual plant and word-of-mouth awareness has also reduced recruitment costs.

With a history of doing the right thing for its communities, Hershey’s investment in the Hazleton facility reflects founder Milton Hershey’s legacy and community-building efforts. The company embraced the opportunity to make internal changes to grow side by side with Hazleton and position the 50-year-old manufacturing facility as a mirror of the community. To do this, Hershey:

• Conducts trainings in both English and Spanish
• Produces all signs, labels and forms in both Spanish and English
• Ensures bilingual employees and resources are made available on the floor to support with communication and introduced a 24/7 1-800 number for assistance

Hershey's partnership with its Latino Business Resource Group (LBRG) was pivotal in ideating, planning and executing the ‘Say Hola’ initiative. The LBRG remains deeply involved as Hershey continues to build and implement the program. As its first multilingual pilot program, Hershey will continue to use key learnings from this initiative to move its people-first manufacturing vision forward and support its overarching DEI roadmap.

“The ‘Say Hola’ initiative showcases Hershey’s commitment to our people and the communities in which we live and work – both on a local and global scale,” said Alicia Petross, Chief Diversity Officer. “‘Say Hola’ has accelerated the diversity of our workforce – a key element of our DEI roadmap – and provided upskilling, improved recruiting and retention and most importantly, the program fosters a workplace that looks more like the communities our colleagues live in.”

Earlier this year, Hershey was named No. 6 on DiversityInc’s Top 50 Companies for Diversity and No. 9 on the Top Companies for Latino Executives list. The candy and snack maker’s Latino executives and board members are frequently honored in outlets like Latino Leaders Magazine.

About The Hershey Company

The Hershey Company is headquartered in Hershey, Pennsylvania and is an industry-leading snacks company known for bringing goodness to the world through its iconic brands, remarkable people and enduring commitment to help children succeed. Hershey has approximately 19,000 employees around the world who work every day to deliver delicious, quality products. The company has more than 100 brand names in approximately 80 countries around the world that drive more than $8.9 billion in annual revenues, including such iconic brand names as Hershey's, Reese's, Kit Kat®, Jolly Rancher and Ice Breakers, and fast-growing salty snacks including SkinnyPop, Pirate's Booty and Dot's Homestyle Pretzels.

For more than 125 years, Hershey has been committed to operating fairly, ethically and sustainably.  Hershey founder, Milton Hershey, created Milton Hershey School in 1909 and since then the company has focused on helping children succeed.

To learn more visit www.thehersheycompany.com.

 

Modern tools reveal the brutality of death by multiple sword blows 700 years ago

by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

Credit: Chiara Tesi et al, Wounded to death. Holistic, multimodal reconstruction of the 

dynamics in a case of multiple perimortem cranial injuries from a medieval site in northern

 Italy, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103643

A team of researchers from the University of Insubria and the University of Siena, both in Italy, has used modern tools to reconstruct the events that led to the death of a young man approximately 700 hundred years ago, in what is now Italy. In their paper published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, the group describes how they used three-dimensional X-ray scans, computed tomography and precision digital microscopy to better understand the events that led to the death of a young Medieval man

In 2006, the skeleton of a decapitated man was found near the entrance to a Medieval tomb that had been built in the 11th century. At the time, researchers suggested the location of the tomb indicated that the skeleton had likely once belonged to a member of the De Citillio family, who had built the church.

Initial study of the skeleton of the young man showed that he was approximately 19 to 24 years old when he died. He had the musculature of an archer and a healed wound on his forehead suggesting he had prior experience in warfare. Closer examination using X-ray technology, tomography and digital microscopy, allowed the researchers to create a virtual skull, which in turn helped to reveal the likely timeline of his death.

Credit: Chiara Tesi et al, Wounded to death. Holistic, multimodal reconstruction of the 

dynamics in a case of multiple perimortem cranial injuries from a medieval site in northern 

Italy, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103643

Examining the placement and angle of the wounds to the skull, the researchers found evidence that suggested the young man had been struck first on the front, top part of his head by a weapon, likely a sword as he faced his attacker. The wound was not deep, suggesting the victim had used a shield to deflect the blow. Then it appears he turned and began to run away.

But he was not able to escape and was hit on the head again, this time from behind, near his ear and then again on the back of the neck. Such blows appeared to have had enough force to knock the young man to the ground, perhaps making him unconscious. One more blow came, this one to the top, back part of the head. Its depth suggested that the young man was no longer attempting to ward off his attacker and that the attacker was intent on killing his victim. The last blow would also have meant nearly instant death.

More information: Chiara Tesi et al, Wounded to death. Holistic, multimodal reconstruction of the dynamics in a case of multiple perimortem cranial injuries from a medieval site in northern Italy, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103643

© 2023 Science X NetworkHead wound suggests ancient Aborigine was killed by a boomerang

Cave markings show that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a lunar calendar

A small team of researchers some independent, some affiliated with University College and the University of Durham, all in the U.K., has deciphered cave markings made by Ice-Age hunters tens of thousands of years ago. In their paper published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, the group suggests the markings are evidence of the first use of a lunar calendar.

Scientists and lay people alike have long known of the cave paintings made by people in the distant past all across Europe and the U.K. Prior research has shown that they were made by Ice-Age hunter-gatherers that lived mostly on the meat from animals of their time. Those animals were often depicted on the walls of the caves in which the people of the time were living.

But one aspect of the cave drawings has remained a mystery—certain dots and dashes placed near the animals. In this new effort, the researchers claim to have at long last deciphered the marks.

After several years of study, the researchers found that the marks coincided with what would have been seasonal behaviors of the animals, such as mating, or birthing. Such information, the researchers note, would have been very important to early hunters because it helped to keep track of which animals would be most easily killed during a given time period.

The researchers also found that the seasonal information drawn on the walls could be broken down into 13 periods, which coincided with the lunar calendar year. And this, they further suggest, is evidence of the first use of a lunar calendar. They also found that certain marks, such as Y-shaped symbols, held specific information, such as the beginning of birthing season for a given animal, while other marks noted seasonal information, such as snow.

The researchers also suggest that such a system of recording could be construed as a means of writing, or perhaps proto-writing system, which they further note, would be evidence of the earliest form of writing by Homo sapiens. They conclude by noting that more work still needs to be done in studying the wall art—there are still marks that have not yet been deciphered.

More information: Bennett Bacon et al, An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar, Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2023). DOI: 10.1017/S0959774322000415

Examples of animal depictions associated with sequences of dots/lines. (a) Aurochs: 

Lascaux, late period; (b) Aurochs: La Pasiega, late; (c) Horse: Chauvet, late

 (we differ in opinion with the Chauvet team, for whom it would be early); 

(d) Horse: Mayenne-Sciences, early; (e) Red Deer: Lascaux, late; 

(f) Salmon: Abri du Poisson, early; (g) Salmon (?): Pindal, late; (h) Mammoth: Pindal, 

early. (Sources: (a) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lascaux_004.jpg (b)

 Breuil et al. Reference Breuil, Obermaier and Alcalde del Rio1913, pl. XVIII; 

(c) free 

https://web.archive.org/web/20120222092520/http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe

-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html (d) https://www.hominides.com/m

usees-et-sites/grotte-mayenne-sciences/ (e) Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International 

(CC BY 4.0); (f) © The Wendel Collection, Neanderthal Museum; (g) Berenguer Reference Be

renguer1994, 92, fig. 63; (h) H. Breuil, in del Rio et al. Reference del Rio, Breuil and Sierra191

1, 61, fig. 57.). Credit: Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2023). DOI: 10.1017/S0959774322

000415

© 2023 Science X Network

Ancient handprints on cave walls in Spain found to include children's hands

Durham professors play part in new discovery about Ice Age hunters and cave paintings

Patrick Gouldsbrough

The Northern Echo
Thu, 5 January 2023 

Two Durham professors have helped make a breakthrough discovery when it comes to ice age hunters.

 Pictures: PA MEDIA 

Professors from Durham University have helped make a breakthrough discovery that Ice Age hunter-gatherers used cave paintings to record sophisticated information about the world around them.

Decoding marks on the drawings for the first time, a team of specialists has proven that at least 20,000 years ago, people across Europe made notes about wild animals and the timings of their reproduction cycles.

Despite help from two professors from Durham University and one from University College London, the initial discovery was made not by an academic, but by London-based furniture conservator Ben Bacon who spent countless hours of his own time looking at examples of cave painting and analysing data.

The so-called “proto-writing” system pre-dates others that are thought to have emerged during the Near Eastern Neolithic by at least 10,000 years.

Mr Bacon said he went to academics with his theory and they listened and encouraged him to pursue it, despite him being “effectively a person off the street”.

The Northern Echo: A red ochre drawing of an aurochs (wild cattle) in La Pasiega cave (Cantabria, Spain) around 23,000 years ago showing a set of four dots. Picture: PA

A red ochre drawing of an aurochs (wild cattle) in La Pasiega cave (Cantabria, Spain) around 23,000 years ago showing a set of four dots. Picture: PA (Image: PA MEDIA)

Archaeologists have long known that sequences of dots and other marks on the drawings had meaning, but no-one could decipher them.

Mr Bacon was keen to decode these, and in particular the inclusion of a “Y” sign – formed by adding a diverging line to another – which he believed meant “giving birth”.

Mr Bacon, who has an English degree but decided not to go into academia, said: “The meaning of the markings within these drawings has always intrigued me so I set about trying to decode them, using a similar approach that others took to understanding an early form of Greek text.

The Northern Echo: Professor Paul Pettitt. Picture: PA

“Using information and imagery of cave art available via the British Library and on the internet, I amassed as much data as possible and began looking for repeating patterns.

Professors Paul Pettitt and Robert Kentridge, both of Durham University, have worked together to develop the field of visual palaeopsychology, the scientific investigation of the psychology that underpins the earliest development of human visual culture.

Professor Pettitt, of the Department of Archaeology at Durham University, said: “To say that when Ben contacted us about his discovery was exciting is an understatement. I am glad I took it seriously.

The Northern Echo: Professor Robert Kentridge. Picture: PA


“This is a fascinating study that has brought together independent and professional researchers with expertise in archaeology and visual psychology, to decode information first recorded thousands of years ago.

“The results show that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systematic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar.

The Northern Echo: A horse drawn onto the wall of Niaux Cave (Ariege, France) around 15,000 years ago.

A horse drawn onto the wall of Niaux Cave (Ariege, France) around 15,000 years ago. (Image: PA MEDIA)

“In turn, we’re able to show that these people, who left a legacy of spectacular art in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira, also left a record of early timekeeping that would eventually become commonplace among our species.”

Mr Kentridge, Professor of the Psychology of Vision, Durham University, said: “The implications are that Ice Age hunter-gatherers didn’t simply live in their present, but recorded memories of the time when past events had occurred and used these to anticipate when similar events would occur in the future, an ability that memory researchers call mental time-travel.”

'The pace of change has been spectacular': The bid to legalise same-sex marriage in India

 India's Supreme Court is hearing arguments on legalising same-sex marriage after being petitioned by four gay couples who argue they are being denied key rights such as medical consent and adoption as their unions are not recognised. France 24's Delano D'Souza spoke to Joydeep Sengupta and his partner Blaine Stephens, plaintiffs in a case to have their overseas marriage recognised in India, about what legalised same-sex marriage would mean for them and other gay couples in the country.

High-profile flops fill gallery at CES gadget fest

Issued on: 06/01/2023 - 

The Gallery of Flops at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas displays past product ideas that failed to become household items © Robyn BECK / AFP


Las Vegas (AFP) – A Gallery of Flops including a handset just for tweeting and a failed Apple stereo system warned entrepreneurs at CES on Thursday that dreams of market glory can crumble.

Iconic product failures put on display at the CES consumer electronics show included a skin-toning face mask reminiscent of a horror film; eyewear embedded with therapeutic magnets and a model of failed 80s sports car DeLorean.

"Many founders have this bias where they think they're geniuses and everything that they are doing is super right," the gallery of failures organizer, Prelaunch founder Narek Vardanyan told AFP.

"(But) you can burn a lot of money and lose a lot of years."

The annual CES consumer electronics extravaganza threw open its doors in Las Vegas on Thursday as the industry looks to the latest innovations to help cure the pain from an ailing global economy.

Failures on display in the cautionary Gallery of Flops also included Zune MP3 players launched by Microsoft and the defunct Pippin game console from Apple, which never became popular.

About 80 percent of new products launched every year fail, often because founders failed to assess whether people were really willing to spend money on what they were selling, according to Vardanyan.

While tech giants can afford to have products occasionally bomb, such an outcome can be the end of a young startup.

"I think it's great to consider failures because failures are valuable learning experiences," said Brad Holliday of ID8 Innovation, which advises big companies launching startup projects.

"If you can speed your process of understanding when something is not going to be successful, you can save yourself money in the long run," he added.
'Waste money'

Flop show organizer Armenia-based Prelaunch specializes in checking potential demand for new products early in the creation process, according to its chief.

"For a starry-eyed entrepreneur, this type of idea could probably help them not waste a lot of money or time chasing something that isn't reasonable," said MH3 Collective founder Mark Harrison, whose group of ventures in Canada includes marketing agencies and nonprofit organizations.

With close to 100,000 attendees expected, the Consumer Electronics Show runs through Sunday in Las Vegas © Robyn BECK / AFP

"It's interesting; you could have a whole museum," Harrison added while surveying the flops on display.

Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi told AFP that gadget makers showing off innovations this year will be keen to get products to market quickly.

Given the tough global economy, startups don't have the five years they might have once expected to perfect their projects and avert failure, she said.

Startups today need to be "banking on money coming into their coffers in the near future," Milanesi said.

CAPITALI$T ANARCHY

The oven won't talk to the fridge: 'smart' homes struggle

Julie JAMMOT

Fri, January 6, 2023

Tech firms have spent years hawking the idea of a connected home filled with "smart" devices that help smooth daily domestic lives -- and this year's CES gadget show in Las Vegas is no different.

The world's biggest tech trade show features everything from televisions that ping when your clothes dryer is done, to mirrors that fire up your coffee machine in the morning.

But the vision on display at CES remains far from reality as the devices are pricey and they do not yet talk to each other with any fluency.

French company Baracoda is at CES, which runs from 5 to 8 January, to show off a prototype connected mirror that can interact with bathroom scales, the toilet or a toothbrush.

"You can see immediately if you've brushed your teeth properly or if you need to put on sunscreen, for example," says the firm's Baptiste Quiniou.

But it can only work to its full capacity with devices developed by Baracoda or its partners.

For start-ups and multinationals, making these products work with other brands is becoming crucial.

"Sometimes they can do incredibly useful things, but if they're not connected to the wider info system, information dies alone," said analyst Avi Greengart.

- Battle of ecosystems -

Big players from Amazon and Apple to Google and Samsung have built entire ecosystems for their devices, often around a voice assistant like Alexa or Siri.

Greengart said each company thought its ecosystem would draw in enough people and devices to dominate the others.

"What ended up happening is that nobody grew," he said, and the industry "to an extent stagnated".

The biggest firms have spent years trying to tackle the "interoperability" problem, finally agreeing a protocol last year called "Matter" that sets a standard for connected home products.

"You can think about it as the USB of the smart home," said Mark Benson of Smart Things, Samsung's connected home subsidiary.

Just as USB ports allowed all devices to plug into all machines, so the Matter protocol means all connected devices will work with each other, he said, and users will no longer need to download a different app for each device.

But Matter will not kill off Alexa, Siri and their friends just yet.

Jeff Wang of Accenture said making the devices work with each other was the easier part.

"The hard part is the app model, the data model, the sharing of this, because the human nature of companies is to be very selfish about this," he said.

Each brand is now trying to convince the public to adopt its app to centralize control of household appliances.

At CES, Samsung presented a vision of consumers using its Smart Things app to monitor the chicken in the Samsung oven while watching a Samsung TV that would also tell them when their Samsung washing machine was finishing its cycle.

- The last 'smart' device -

Mark Benson reckoned more than half of homes in America now have a smart device in them.

"And more than half of those started their smart home journey just in the last three years," he said.

Yet for now, consumers have largely limited their buy-in to the connected home to inexpensive "smart" speakers, using them as timers or to listen to music.

A spokesperson for CTA, the industry body that organizes CES, said connected home devices were facing "a tough year in the US because of the decline in home sales".

But CTA reckoned the Matter standard would drive the connected home market as the housing sector recovers.

The association said in particular sales of devices that promise to help save energy were likely to go up this year.

It predicted that almost 5 million connected thermostats would be sold in 2023, up 15 percent year-on-year.

In the same field, US company Savant has designed a connected fuse box that will help people monitor energy use.

"That's maybe one of the last, forgotten, things in the home that can be made smart," said Ian Roberts, a group vice president.

juj-jxb/bgs

International fusion energy project faces delays, says chief

ITER, under construction at Saint-Paul-les-Durance in southern France, aims at emulating

 the Sun, which fuses particles together to release energy.

An international project in nuclear fusion may face "years" of delays, its boss has told AFP, weeks after scientists in the United States announced a breakthrough in their own quest for the coveted goal.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project seeks to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy.

Installed at a site in southern France, the decades-old initiative has a long history of technical challenges and cost overruns.

Fusion entails forcing together the nuclei of light atomic elements in a super-heated plasma, held by powerful magnetic forces in a doughnut-shaped chamber called a tokamak.

The idea is that fusing the particles together from isotopes of hydrogen—which can be extracted from seawater—will create a safer and almost inexhaustible form of energy compared with splitting atoms from uranium or plutonium.

ITER'S previously-stated goal was to create the plasma by 2025.

But that deadline will have to be postponed, Pietro Barabaschi—who in September became the project's director-general—told AFP during a visit to the facility.

The date "wasn't realistic in the first place," even before two major problems surfaced, Barabaschi said.

One problem, he said, was wrong sizes for the joints of blocks to be welded together for the installation's 19-by-11-metre (62-by-36-feet) chamber.

The second was traces of corrosion in a thermal shield designed to protect the outside world from the enormous heat created during nuclear fusion.

Fixing the problems "is not a question of weeks, but months, even years," Barabaschi said.

A new timetable is to be worked out by the end of this year, he said, including some modification to contain the expected cost overrun, and to meet the French nuclear safety agency's security requirements.

Barabaschi said he hoped ITER would be able to make up for the delays as it prepares to enter the full phase, currently scheduled for 2035.

On December 13, US researchers working separately from ITER announced an important technical breakthrough.

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California said they had used the world's largest laser to create, for the first time, a fusion reaction generating more energy than it took to produce.

"Some competition is healthy in any environment," Barabaschi said about the success.

"If tomorrow somebody found another breakthrough that would make my work redundant, I would be very happy," he added.

ITER was set in motion after a 1985 summit between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Its seven partners are China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States.

Russia still participates in ITER despite the start of the Ukraine conflict.

In November it dispatched one of six giant magnets needed for the top part of the tokamak.

© 2023 AFP

French scientist leading nuclear fusion project dies at 72