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)
Sunday, August 22, 2021
ECOCIDE AT DEATH COW
Brazil Discusses Gas Pipeline From Vaca Muerta Shale With Argentina
Brazil is in talks with Argentina about potentially building a $5-billion natural gas pipeline from the Argentinian Vaca Muerta shale play, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said during his weekly live broadcast.
"We are in negotiations with Argentina. Gas from Vaca Muerta. It will happen one day, because it is not easy to start importing gas, you need pipelines," Bolsonaro said, as carried by Reuters.
A pipeline is estimated to cost $3.7 billion in Argentina and another $1.2 billion in Brazil, as per Reuters estimates.
Bolsonaro didn't say how the project would be funded.
A gas pipeline from the prolific Vaca Muerta shale in Argentina's province Neuquén could be one option for reducing natural gas prices in Brazil, according to the Brazilian president.
This year, Brazil is importing a lot of liquefied natural gas (LNG) because of the worst drought in the country in nearly a century.
Brazil is importing so much LNG this year that volumes are close to levels usually seen in countries in Europe and Asia, as the South American country's electricity system grapples with the worst drought in 91 years.
Brazil's electricity mix is heavily dependent on hydroelectric power, which accounted for more than 75 percent of electricity generation in 2020, according to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Brazil has the largest installed hydropower capacity in South America and accounts for two-thirds of the continent's total hydropower capacity.
But this year, Brazil, the most populous country in South America, is experiencing its worst drought in 91 years and is struggling to keep the lights on with hydropower.
At the same time, Vaca Muerta in Argentina is recovering from the pandemic slump and is estimated to hold recoverable resources consisting of 16 billion barrels of oil and 308 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Those numbers make the Vaca Muerta the world's second-largest shale gas deposit.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
NASA says its Hubble telescope captured a spiral galaxy that's as bright as a jewel and 68 million light-years from Earth
Kevin Shalvey
The galaxy is known as NGC 1385. ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
NASA published a "jewel-bright" photo of a spiral galaxy many millions of light-years from Earth.
The galaxy - NGC 1385 - is in the Fornax constellation.
The constellation's name is Latin for "furnace."
The Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a "jewel-bright" spiral galaxy, which is 68 million light-years from Earth.
NASA and the European Space Agency published the photo. NASA said in a Friday blog post that it showed NGC 1385, a galaxy in the constellation Fornax.
Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 - a "workhorse camera" - captured the image, the US space agency said. The camera was installed in 2019 during astronauts most recent Hubble visit, it added.
The name Fornax is not from "an animal or an ancient god," said NASA, but instead comes from the Latin word for furnace.
"The constellation was named Fornax by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, a French astronomer born in 1713," the ESA said in text accompanying the photo.
The agency added: "Lacaille named 14 of the 88 constellations we still recognize today. He seems to have had a penchant for naming constellations after scientific instruments, including Atlia (the air pump), Norma (the ruler, or set square), and Telescopium (the telescope).
The photo was the latest in a long succession of beautiful photos captured by the cameras aboard the Hubble Space Telescope during its three decades observing the cosmos.
How climate change will impact the flight of the bumblebee
CTVNews.ca Writer Published Saturday, August 21, 2021 A bumblebee lands on a poppy flower on a field in Frankfurt, Germany, Friday, May 22, 2020. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
TORONTO -- Bumblebees' ability to fly for foraging and pollination is being impacted by extreme temperatures at both the high and low end.
Researchers at Imperial College London put bees to the test by measuring the motivation bumblebees had to fly at various temperatures ranging from 12 C to 30 C.
The scientists found that the bumblebees struggled flying further than a few hundred metres at the lower end of temperatures, after which their endurance increased with the temperature until 25 C – at which point the bee flight peaked, according to the study.
For most flying insects, body temperature influences flight activity, and air temperature impacts body temperature. Too cold, and the muscles needed for flight can't work quickly enough, too hot and they overheat, according to a press release.
The results, published in Functional Ecology on Wednesday, show that bumblebees living in more northern regions may stand to have improved flight performance from temperature increases, but those in already hot southern regions will suffer.
“Climate change is often thought of as being negative for bumblebee species, but depending on where in the world they are, our work suggests it is possible bumblebees will see benefits to aspects of an important behaviour," lead study author Daniel Kenna, said in the press release.
While this could be beneficial for some bumblebees, Kenna still cautions that the extreme fluctuations in temperatures could have a negative impact.
"More extreme weather events, such as cold snaps and the unprecedented heatwaves experienced in recent years, could consistently push temperatures beyond the comfortable flight range for certain species of bumblebees," he said.
This could prove to be disastrous for bumblebees and other pollinators who set up shop for the season, and forage around their nest site.
"These risks are particularly pertinent for ‘fixed colony’ pollinators like bumblebees, which cannot shift their position within a season if conditions become unfavourable, and potentially provide a further explanation as to why losses have been observed at species’ southern range limits," added Kenna.
In order to measure flight, the bumblebees were temporarily attached to 'flight mills'. Once attached they were able to fly in circles which allowed researchers to capture the distance and speed of flight, they used these results to create a thermal performance curve.
They found that at optimal temperatures, average bumblebee flight was around 3 kilometres. If temperatures rose to 35 C, flight distance would drop to 1 kilometre, and plummet even further, to just a few hundred metres at 10 C. At the colder temperatures, the researchers found that only the largest worker bees would fly.
"While we still need to understand how these findings translate to factors like foraging return to colonies and pollination provision, as well as applicability to other bumblebee species, the results can help us understand how smaller versus larger flying insects will respond to future climate change," Richard Gill, from the department of Life Sciences at Imperial College, said in a press release.
This could have far-reaching implications beyond pollinating insects, he added.
"It’s not just pollination: how different flying insects respond to warming temperatures could also affect the spread of insect-borne diseases and agricultural pest outbreaks that threaten food systems," said Gill. "Applying our experimental setup and findings to other species can help us to understand future insect trends important for managing service delivery or pest control methods.”
The earthquake in Haiti this month has destroyed many buildings, such as the Church St. Anne in Chardonnières, shown here.Credit: Reginald Louissaint Jr/AFP via Getty
A network of inexpensive seismometers, installed in people’s living rooms, gardens and workplaces across Haiti, is helping scientists to unravel the inner workings of the magnitude-7.2 earthquake that devastated the southwestern part of the Caribbean nation this month. The community-science effort launched after the country’s last major earthquake — a magnitude-7 tremor in 2010 that killed more than 100,000 people — and has since helped to reveal details about Haiti’s seismic activity.
In a country whose official seismic-monitoring stations are sometimes offline because of limited resources, the community-seismology project provides much-needed data. Right now, the network is detecting aftershocks that continue to rattle the region. Its seismometers feed data into a system that displays the locations and magnitudes of Haitian earthquakes on a web-based portal in real time.
“It’s not professional equipment, and there are a lot of limitations,” says Dominique Boisson, a geologist at the State University of Haiti in Port-au-Prince who helps to run the network. But “some results are very nice”.
Difficult work
The network underscores just how far seismology in Haiti has come in 11 years. When the 2010 earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, the country had no seismologists and just one official seismic-monitoring station, says Boisson. Now, there are several professional seismologists, as well as 7 stations in the official national network, which is operated by Haiti’s Bureau of Mines and Energy, and 15 in the community-science network.
Sources: C. S. Prentice et al. Nature Geosci. 3, 789–793 (2010)/Ayiti-Séismes
Within days of the big quake hitting on 14 August, teams of scientists and technicians were driving towards its epicentre, carrying seismometers and other instruments to measure how the ground was moving. Monitoring the Earth with scientific instruments immediately after a quake allows researchers to better understand why the earthquake occurred and the future seismic risk. In 2010, it took weeks after the quake for foreign researchers to fly to Haiti and deploy instruments.
This year, many of those foreign teams are forbidden to travel to Haiti because of COVID-19 restrictions and political instability following the assassination in July of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse. Instead, the work is being led by Haitian seismologists, such as Steeve Symithe, also at the State University, who, before he went into the field, was streaming Facebook Live presentations about the science of the quake to the Haitian public.
Both the 2010 and 2021 quakes happened in the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden fault zone, a tangle of fractures in Earth’s crust where the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates slide past one another. It runs from west to east along Haiti’s southern peninsula. The 2010 quake occurred on a previously unknown fault in that zone. The epicentre of the 2021 quake lies about 100 kilometres to the west, in the province of Nippes.
At least 2,100 people died in the 14 August quake, although the total count has yet to be tallied. The US Geological Survey estimates that there might have been more than 10,000 deaths. Many survivors endured heavy winds and rain from a tropical storm as they tried to shelter outside. The scientists en route to the area spent the night in their cars as rain pelted down, softening the ground and generating landslides as aftershocks shook the ground, Boisson tells Nature. “It was pretty difficult” for them, he says.
DIY seismology
The challenge of doing fieldwork in Haiti helped to inspire the creation of the community-seismology project in 2019. That was when Eric Calais, a seismologist at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris who has studied Haiti’s earthquakes for years, happened across a company that sells seismic stations to hobbyists. Looking for ways around the national Haitian network’s intermittent data, he used leftover money from a grant to buy some stations. Known as Raspberry Shakes, they contain tiny accelerometers that detect when the ground trembles and send that information to be processed and commingled with that from other stations.
These US$500 stations are not as sophisticated as Haiti’s official $50,000 monitoring stations. “But when it comes to locating quakes, determining magnitude, doing basic seismology — they are really excellent,” says Calais. And because they are in people’s homes and workplaces, they more often have a steady supply of power and reliable Internet access. The team, which includes Calais, Boisson, Symithe and many others, recruited people to host the stations. Boisson had one in his garden until last week, when he dismantled it to move it closer to the epicentre of the 14 August quake. The host who had the Raspberry Shake closest to the epicentre was chagrined that his station was offline during the quake; he immediately ran out and topped up his Internet plan, says Calais, and the station was soon back up and running.
Funded by international supporters, Calais and his colleagues have kept the network of 15 stations operational for two years1; they aim to soon ramp up to 50 or more stations. Community-seismology networks have sprung up in other places around the world, but the Haiti network is unique in providing data in an area where few seismic data are otherwise collected, says Calais.
The Haitian community-seismology data feed into a nationwide experimental system called Ayiti-Séismes, which is hosted at a website run by the Côte d’Azur University in Nice, France. Ayiti-Séismes also pulls data from official seismic stations in Haiti as well as those in nearby countries, including the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The result is a real-time map of aftershocks blanketing southwestern Haiti in shades of red and orange. “The network is alive and well,” says Susan Hough, a seismologist at the US Geological Survey in Pasadena, California, who has worked in Haiti for many years, including after the 2010 quake.
Future risk
The quake’s epicentre is fairly close to quakes that occurred in 1952 and 1953, which were probably between magnitude 5 and 6, says Calais. In terms of future risk, the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden fault zone could still yield another major quake. “In this area, we cannot say that it’s over,” says Boisson. Some speculate that the 2010 quake contributed to the recent one by transferring stress towards the region that just ruptured — and that seismic risk remains high in Port-au-Prince and across much of the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden fault zone.
Boisson notes that many scientists have been worried about a different major geological region in Haiti’s north, known as the Septentrional fault zone; it unleashed a major quake in 1842. “After 2010, we thought it would be this fault” that would cause future quakes, he says. “And then it was in the south again.”
About 600 aftershocks have been detected from the 14 August quake so far — compared with roughly 10 in the same time period after the 2010 quake, although there were undoubtedly more that were not detected, says Calais. “We now have very strong information about not only where the [14 August] quake occurred, but also how wide the rupture was, in which direction the fault was dipping,” he adds. “That’s essential” to understanding why the quake occurred and what to expect in the future.
The 7.2 magnitude earthquake which rocked Haiti on August 14 came a few days after the year anniversary of the 5.1 near Sparta, North Carolina. A few days later a 2.7 magnitude earthquake was felt in Morganton, NC, 57 miles to the southwest of Sparta.
The 2020 Sparta earthquake was the strongest in North Carolina in a century. It buckled roads, broke water and sewer lines, and damaged hundreds of buildings. But only a single injury was reported. The earthquake occurred when stresses built up an a thrust fault about 2.3 miles under the Blue Ridge Mountains were suddenly released.
The 2021 Haiti earthquake was the strongest in 250 years. It occurred with similar sudden movement along the northern edge of the Caribbean plate which runs the width of the country.
The death toll has risen beyond 2,000. Though 2010's 7.0 quake was about half as strong, but centered closer to the densely populated capitol city of Port-au-Prince, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths or more.
What causes earthquakes
The Earth's crust is made up of a series of plates that move against each other. This builds up stress along fault lines which can only be held in place by friction for so long. Earthquakes are the result of that energy being released.
The greatest energy is released in the mainshock which are often followed by numerous aftershocks that can continue for days or more as remaining energy is released and the plates settle into the new position. A little bit of that energy is sometimes released in relatively small foreshocks,
Western North Carolina felt at least four foreshocks ranging in magnitude 2.1-2.6 in the 25 hours before the mainshock last year. An additional 20 aftershocks of up to magnitude 2.9 occurred over the next two days
No foreshocks were measured before the 7.2 mainshock in Haiti but an additional 20 aftershocks over magnitude 4.0 have been measured in the area in the six days that followed, including four of magnitude 5 or higher.
The most recent earthquake in Haiti released more than 1,400 times more energy than last year's quake near Sparta.
HOW MUCH MORE ENERGY IS RELEASED BY A MAGNITUDE 7.2 EARTHQUAKE?
Aug 14, 2021, Haiti magnitude 7.2
M 2.7 Aug 17, 2021, Morganton, NC
5.6 million times
M 5.8 Aug 14, 2021, Haiti (aftershock)
126 times
M 5.1 Aug 9, 2020, Sparta. NC
1,413 times
M 7.0 Jan 12, 2010, Haiti
2 times
An earthquake centered along the northern coast of Haiti near Cap-Haïtien on May 7, 1842 was estimated at magnitude 8.1. It was 22 times stronger than the recent 7.2 earthquake, triggering a tsunami in the area.
REBUILDING THE COMMONS
The Youth Reforesting Puerto Rico With Soursop, Papaya, and Avocado Trees
Food-filled parks are replacing what Hurricane Maria destroyed.
JULY 30, 2021 A small group of dedicated environmentalists has distributed fruit trees across Puerto Rico. ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF CYEN PR
WHEN THE FURY OF HURRICANE Maria subsided long enough to allow Amira Odeh to leave her grandmother’s home in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, she stepped into a terrifying scene. “It was like waking up in a sci-fi, alien-invasion kind of movie,” she says. “All of this destruction.”
The storm that swept through the Caribbean in the fall of 2017 devastated Puerto Rico, where Odeh was born and raised. High winds, floods, and landslides killed people across the island, destroyed the power grid, and wrecked innumerable homes. Next came months of hardship, as shuttered ports and a carelessly executed aid effort from the mainland United States meant few supplies for weeks on end. “We didn’t have anything to eat,” says Odeh. While the semi-official death toll from the storm is 4,645, the lack of food, clean water, electricity, and shelter led to many more preventable deaths.
But in the immediate aftermath of the storm, the memory that most stands out for Odeh was that first glimpse of the post-Maria landscape. “There wasn’t green anymore,” she says. “A tropical landscape always has green. And the only thing green was the grass. There were no trees.”
It wasn’t just in her neighborhood. Within hours, Hurricane Maria wiped out 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s agriculture. For an island that already depended on imports for much of its food, this compounded the agony of Maria’s impact.Last month, the group planted a fruit park in the village of Camuy.
The same day, Odeh called her friend Dariana Mattei, who was living on the mainland. Only the year before, they had launched the Puerto Rican branch of Caribbean Youth Environment Network (CYEN PR). “We had the group, and we were figuring out where to go,” she says. “And then, we got the impact of this immense hurricane that was disastrous.”
The two quickly hatched a plan. “She was thinking about how to bring seeds to help the farmers who lost everything. And I was thinking on how to reforest,” she says. What ensued, over a shaky internet connection that day, was a remarkable grassroots effort to plant fruit trees and food plants across Puerto Rico. The “Regreen Puerto Rico” initiative was born.
Seven members of the CYEN PR, all women, started driving to the most afflicted areas of the island with emergency supplies, as well as trees and seeds for plants such as tomatoes and peppers. “Our goal is to give people an opportunity to reconnect to the soil, to the ground, to learn about our local foods, to know that not everything needs to come from the supermarket,” Odeh says. But, she adds, “we know we’re going to get more drought, more storms. With food-producing plants in backyards across the island, we’re hoping that communities can get some resilience, even if it’s in a small way.”
Amira Odeh and others in the CYEN PR geminate most of the plants themselves.
Over Zoom, Odeh twists to peek through her wooden shutters at the trees she’s growing in her yard for distribution. “Soursop, papaya, lemon, orange … What else do I have here? Tamarind, sometimes we have avocado, coco, plantains … those are the most common ones.”
When the group receives donations, they buy fruit trees from greenhouses. “But most of them we grow in our own backyards,” she says. “Our backyards are all overtaken by pots and plants.”
Odeh isn’t a farmer or a horticulturist. Instead, she has a degree in hydrology. But as a Puerto Rican environmental activist, she is intimately aware that many of the island’s issues are interconnected. “One of the reasons I got motivated to plant trees is that I’m a hydrologist. And here, we have a huge issue with water,” she says, noting that increasing the number of trees on the island will help prevent sediment from getting into the water supply.
She’s not alone in turning her attention to agriculture, though. The younger generation in Puerto Rico, especially those who lived through the hurricane, are increasingly passionate about shoring up food security on the island, especially under the increasing effects of climate change. “The newer generation is super woke and doing amazing agricultural work,” she says.
So far, the group has installed 20 fruit parks across Puerto Rico.
So far, CYEN PR has handed out fruit trees and seeds to families in every one of the 78 municipalities of Puerto Rico. In the early years of the project, the group all packed into one car “like sardines,” Odeh laughs, “driving 10 hours in one day, house to house. It was exhausting.” But recently, the group transitioned to creating community fruit tree parks. So far, the group has planted 20 parks, everywhere from vacant lots to empty spaces next to basketball courts.
The group is getting noticed for their work. In 2018, Univision honored Mattei and Odeh as “Agents of Change” at the television network’s yearly Youth Awards for their reforestation work. Odeh also gushes about how CYEN PR this year received a small grant from the One Young World Foundation. “For us, it feels like millions,” she says. “Because we were working on this out of our own pockets.” One town even invited them back to see their flourishing fruit forest, welcoming the group with a parade, a concert, and a party in their honor. It’s both gratification on a personal level, Odeh says, as well as encouragement to continue the work. “Our first plan was to reach a thousand families with fruits and seeds,” she says. “And then we got to that number, and we just kept going.”
THE LAW IS AN ASS
Puerto Rico hospitals lose appeal over underpaying by federal government
STATEHOOD OR INDEPENDENCE
“While we recognize an apparent (and perhaps unintended) unfairness in this situation, we... conclude that the Secretary did not err in implementing the statute," the appeals court said.
The Capitol building on August 1, 2019 in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images file
Aug. 20, 2021, 7:50 AM MDT / Updated Aug. 20, 2021, 7:53 AM MDT By Reuters
A federal appeals court has rejected a claim by a group of Puerto Rican hospitals that the federal government systematically underpays them under a program meant to help hospitals that treat a disproportionate share of low-income patients.
A unanimous 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled Wednesday that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was right to calculate aid using a formula based on share of a hospital’s patients eligible for Medicare and Supplemental Security Income — even though residents of Puerto Rico are not eligible for the latter.
“While we recognize an apparent (and perhaps unintended) unfairness in this situation, we, like the district court, necessarily conclude that the Secretary did not err in implementing the statute,” wrote U.S. District Judge Steven McAuliffe of New Hampshire, sitting on the 1st Circuit panel by designation.
Robert Roth of Hooper Lundy & Bookman, a lawyer for the hospitals, and HHS could not be reached immediately for comment.
Medicare provides for additional funding for so-called disproportionate share hospitals (DSH) that serve low-income populations, since those patients are less able to pay for services. Under the Medicare statute, DSH payments are calculated based on a formula using the number of patients eligible for both Medicare and SSI.
When it was first enacted, the DSH program only applied to hospitals in the 50 states, but Congress in 1986 extended it to the territory of Puerto Rico, requiring that aid to hospitals there be given “in the same manner and to the extent” as in the states.
In their 2017 lawsuit in Puerto Rico district court, about 25 hospitals alleged that, by applying the same formula, HHS shortchanged Puerto Rican hospitals, since the territory’s residents are not eligible for SSI. That meant that the formula did not reflect the true income of the patients, they said.
The hospitals argued that to comply with the statute’s requirement that Puerto Rico be treated the same as states, HHS was obligated to use a different proxy for income than SSI, which would be accurate for Puerto Rico.
They also alleged that HHS’s approach was racially discriminatory, since a majority of their patients were of Hispanic descent.
U.S. District Judge Aida Delgado-Colon ruled in favor of HHS. On appeal, McAuliffe agreed that the statute was “neither ambiguous nor open to plausible differing interpretations.”
“Critically, Congress did not vest the Secretary with authority to employ other, likely more accurate or equitable, proxies when calculating DSH payments to Puerto Rico hospitals,” he wrote.
The court also rejected the hospitals’ racial discrimination argument. McAuliffe wrote that the plaintiffs’ real objection was not to HHS’s implementation of the statute, but to the statute itself, which they had not challenged.
STATEHOOD OR INDEPENDENCE Jasmine Camacho-Quinn wins gold for Puerto Rico, sparking another identity debate Puerto Rico’s Jasmine Camacho-Quinn, left, celebrates after defeating the United States’ Kendra Harrison, center, for gold in the 100-meter hurdles at the Tokyo Olympics (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
For just the second time in history, an Olympian representing Puerto Rico, a small Caribbean island territory of the United States, stood on a podium with the Puerto Rican flag raised above two others as “La Borinqueña” played.
Jasmine Camacho-Quinn wiped away the tears flowing down her face and under her white mask during Puerto Rico’s national anthem on Monday at Olympic Stadium. She wore a large crimson flor de maga, the national flower, in her hair, above her left ear. Later, minus her mask, she broke into a glowing smile at officials in the stands waving a Puerto Rican flag.
Earlier in the day, she won gold in the women’s 100-meter hurdles. In Sunday’s semifinals, she set an Olympic record. She made it look easy.
“I’m pretty sure everybody’s excited,” Camacho-Quinn said after the race, still finding her breath. “Just to put on for such a small country, to give little kids hope. I’m just glad I’m the person to do that. I’m pretty happy with that.”
She then burst into tears.
Puerto Rican hurdler Jasmine Camacho-Quinn poses with her gold medal after winning the 100-meter hurdles on Monday. (Francisco Seto / Associated Press)
The historic performance concluded a redemption tale — Camacho-Quinn failed to qualify for the final at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — and sparked celebrations across Puerto Rico, the diaspora, even in the air.
It also triggered naysayers who have maintained she isn’t Puerto Rican enough to represent the island, shedding light on the island’s complex national identity and its ambiguous position within the international sports landscape.
Camacho-Quinn, 24, comes from the expansive Puerto Rican diaspora; nearly 6 million people who live in the U.S. identify as Puerto Rican while the island’s population has dropped to 3.2 million.
She is the daughter of a Puerto Rican-born mother and a Black American father, born and raised in South Carolina not speaking Spanish. She starred at the University of Kentucky, winning three NCAA championships. She could have chosen to run for the United States but opted for Puerto Rico ahead of the 2016 Games as an homage to her mother.
Critics surfaced with her decision. She’s addressed them over the years, and offered a response from Japan in a tweet Saturday.
“You see my mommy? The PUERTO RICAN woman that birthed me?” Camacho-Quinn wrote above a video of her mother and other family members celebrating her preliminary first-place finish.
Jasmine Camacho-Quinn, left, wins the women’s 100-meter hurdles on Monday. (David J. Phillip / Associated Press)
On Monday, before Camacho-Quinn’s gold-winning race, tennis player Gigi Fernández, the most accomplished Puerto Rican-born Olympic athlete in history, questioned Camacho-Quinn’s credentials in tweets that were later deleted. Camacho-Quinn is working to learn Spanish, an issue Fernández addressed.
“And is she Puerto Rican?” Fernández wrote in Spanish. “Does she speak Spanish? Was she raised in Puerto Rico? Hhmm. How curious.”
The comments elicited swift backlash, prompting Fernández to deactivate her Twitter account. It was not the first time Fernández tweeted controversial takes about Puerto Rican Olympians. In 2016, she questioned why wrestler Jaime Espinal, who was born in the Dominican Republic and won silver for Puerto Rico at the 2012 Olympics, was chosen as the nation’s flag bearer at the Rio Games.
On Monday, Sara Rosario, the president of the Puerto Rico Olympic Committee, dismissed the disapproval.
“I respect their opinions, but I think they’re wrong,” Rosario said in Spanish. “Every four years when the Olympic Games arrive, they give these opinions. I don’t see it as a necessary issue.”
Camacho-Quinn’s victory came five years after Monica Puig won women’s singles at the Rio Games for Puerto Rico’s long-awaited first Olympic gold medal. Until then, Puerto Rico had claimed two silvers and six bronzes since the island’s debut in 1948. Puig, however, wasn’t the first Puerto Rican-born person — or women’s tennis player — to win Olympic gold. That was Fernández.
Fernández earned gold medals at the 1992 and 1996 Games in women’s doubles for the United States, not Puerto Rico. She represented Puerto Rico in previous international events, but Puerto Rico couldn’t offer a doubles partner in the top 240 of the world rankings for the Olympics.
So Fernández, who rose to No. 1 in doubles in 1991, chose to compete in 1992 for the U.S. alongside Mary Joe Fernández, the No. 9-ranked doubles player in the world, to improve her odds of winning. The decision provoked scorn.
Fernández was given a choice because people born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens. Puerto Rico has been under the United States’ jurisdiction since the U.S. invaded the island and seized control from Spain in 1898 as part of the Spanish-American War but has maintained its own distinct culture and customs, with Spanish and English as the official languages.
The Jones Act of 1917 declared that any person born in Puerto Rico after April 24, 1898, was a U.S. citizen without the right to vote in presidential elections. Puerto Rico was given more autonomy — but remained under U.S. control — when Congress approved the Constitution of Puerto Rico in 1952.
Four years earlier, the International Olympic Committee, pursuing more participants, recognized the Puerto Rico Olympic Committee in time for the London Games. The U.S. did not intervene. Puerto Rico has sent its own delegation to every Summer Games since 1948, including the 1980 U.S.-boycotted Moscow Games.
“For us, it’s an honor to be here,” Pamela Rosado, the captain of Puerto Rican women’s basketball team, said in Spanish. “Having Puerto Rico on our chests, I think, is most important.”
Juan Venegas won Puerto Rico’s first medal — a bronze in boxing — at the 1948 Games. In 1984, boxer Luis Ortiz won Puerto Rico’s first silver. At the 2004 Games, Puerto Rico handed the United States men’s basketball team its first Olympic loss with NBA players.
Puig broke through for gold in 2016. On Monday, Camacho-Quinn followed. How many more times “La Borinqueña” is heard on the world’s biggest sporting stage could depend on the island’s political future.
Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States dominates its politics. The island’s three prominent political parties are divided by the three leading status choices: the status quo, statehood and independence.
Statehood would likely end Puerto Rico’s sovereignty within the Olympics and Pan American Games under the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, which established that only one Olympic Committee can exist within the United States.
During his campaign last fall, Puerto Rican Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, the president of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, said he’d hope that Puerto Rico could continue fielding its own delegations at other international competitions if the island was admitted into the union.
Both the IOC and United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee declined to comment on the matter.
“Everyone here is behind Puerto Rico,” said Esteban Pagán Rivera, the sports editor of El Nuevo Día, the biggest newspaper in Puerto Rico. “There aren’t many people paying attention to the United States.”
On Monday, Pierluisi tweeted congratulations to Camacho-Quinn. He thanked her for uniting the nation, giving Puerto Ricans happiness, filling them with pride and for representing Puerto Rican women in front of the world.
Physicists give weird new phase of matter an extra dimension
By Ben Turner 4 days ago The supersolid's atoms can move without ever losing energy
An artist's impression of the supersolid, which is like a solid and a liquid at the same time. (Image credit: IQOQI Innsbruck/Harald Ritsch)
Physicists have created the first ever two-dimensional supersolid — a bizarre phase of matter that behaves like both a solid and a frictionless liquid at the same time.
Supersolids are materials whose atoms are arranged into a regular, repeating, crystal structure, yet are also able to flow forever without ever losing any kinetic energy. Despite their freakish properties, which appear to violate many of the known laws of physics, physicists have long predicted them theoretically — they first appeared as a suggestion in the work of the physicist Eugene Gross as early as 1957.
Now, using lasers and super-chilled gases, physicists have finally coaxed a supersolid into a 2D structure, an advancement that could enable scientists to crack the deeper physics behind the mysterious properties of the weird matter phase.
Of particular interest to the researchers is how their 2D supersolids will behave when they're spun in a circle, alongside as the tiny little whirlpools, or vortices, that will pop up inside them.
"We expect that there will be much to learn from studying rotational oscillations, for example, as well as vortices that can exist within a 2D system much more readily than in 1D," lead author Matthew Norcia, a physicist at Innsbruck University's Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Austria, told Live Science in an email.
To create their supersolid, the team suspended a cloud of dysprosium-164 atoms inside optical tweezers before cooling the atoms down to just above zero Kelvin (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) using a technique called laser-cooling.
Firing a laser at a gas typically heats it up, but if the photons (light particles) in the laser beam are traveling in the opposite direction of the moving gas particles, they can actually cause slow and cool the gas particles. After cooling the dysprosium atoms as far as they could with the laser, the researchers loosened the "grip" of their optical tweezers, creating just enough space for the most energetic atoms to escape.
Since "warmer" particles jiggle faster than cooler ones, this technique, called evaporative cooling, left the researchers with just their super-cooled atoms; and these atoms had been transformed into a new phase of matter — a Bose-Einstein condensate: a collection of atoms that have been super-cooled to within a hair's breadth of absolute zero.
When a gas is cooled to near zero temperature, all its atoms lose their energy, entering into the same energy states. As we can only distinguish between the otherwise identical atoms in a gas cloud by looking at their energy levels, this equalizing has a profound effect: The once disparate cloud of vibrating, jiggling, colliding atoms that make up a warmer gas then become, from a quantum mechanical point of view, perfectly identical.
This opens the door to some truly weird quantum effects. One key rule of quantum behavior, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, says you cannot know both a particle's position and its momentum with absolute accuracy. Yet, now that the Bose-Einstein condensate atoms are no longer moving, all of their momentum is known. This leads to the atoms' positions becoming so uncertain that the places they could possibly occupy grow to be larger in area than the spaces between the atoms themselves.
Instead of discrete atoms, then, the overlapping atoms in the fuzzy Bose-Einstein condensate ball act as if they are just one giant particle. This gives some Bose-Einstein condensates the property of superfluidity — allowing their particles to flow without any friction. In fact, if you were to stir a mug of a superfluid Bose-Einstein condensate, it would never stop swirling.
The researchers used dysprosium-164 (an isotope of dysprosium) because it (alongside its neighbor on the periodic table Holmium) is the most magnetic of any discovered element. This means that when the dysprosium-164 atoms were supercooled, in addition to becoming a superfluid, they also clumped together into droplets, sticking to each other like little bar magnets.
By "carefully tuning the balance between long-range magnetic interactions and short-range contact interactions between atoms," Norcia said, the team was able to make a long, one dimensional tube of droplets that also contained free-flowing atoms — a 1D supersolid. That was their previous work.
To make the leap from a 1D to a 2D supersolid, the team used a larger trap and dropped the intensity of their optical tweezer beams across two directions. This, alongside keeping enough atoms in the trap to maintain a high enough density, finally allowed them to create a zig-zag structure of droplets, similar to two offset 1D tubes sitting next to each other, a 2D supersolid.
With the task of its creation behind them, the physicists now want to use their 2D supersolid to study all of the properties that emerge from having this extra dimension. For instance, they plan to study vortices that emerge and are trapped between the droplets of the array, especially as these eddies of swirling atoms, at least in theory, can spiral forever.
This also brings researchers one step closer to the bulk, 3D, supersolids envisioned by early proposals like Gross', and the even more alien properties they may have.
The researchers published their findings Aug. 18 in the journal Nature.
Originally published on Live Science.
Lab-made mini brains grow their own sets of 'eyes'
Scientists grew brain organoids with optic cups. (Image credit: Elke Gabriel)
Scientists recently grew mini brains with their own sets of "eyes," according to a new study.
Organoids are miniature versions of organs that scientists can grow in the lab from stem cells, or cells that can mature into any type of cell in the body. Previously, scientists have developed tiny beating hearts and tear ducts that could cry like humans do. Scientists have even grown mini brains that produce brain waves like those of preterm babies.
Now, a group of scientists has grown mini brains that have something their real counterparts do not: a set of eye-like structures called "optic cups" that give rise to the retina — the tissue that sits in the back of the eye and contains light-sensing cells, according to a statement.
In the human body, the retina sends signals to the brain via the optic nerve, allowing us to see images. "In the mammalian brain, nerve fibers of retinal ganglion cells reach out to connect with their brain targets, an aspect that has never before been shown in an in vitro system," senior author Jay Gopalakrishnan, a researcher at University Hospital Düsseldorf, said in the statement. (Ganglion cells are neurons located in the inner surface of the retina that communicate directly with the brain.)
Previously, researchers had grown optic cups individually in labs, but this is the first study that integrated optic cups into brain organoids, according to the statement.
Gopalakrishnan and his team adapted a technique they previously developed for turning stem cells into neural tissue in order to create the mini brains with optic cups. Once the stem cells had developed into mini brains, the organoids formed optic cups. The optic cups appeared as early as 30 days and matured within 50 days, a timeframe similar to how the retina develops in a human embryo, according to the statement.
In total, the researchers created 314 mini brains, and 72% of them formed optic cups. The organoids contained different types of retinal cells that formed active neuron networks that responded to light, according to the statement. The organoids also formed lens and corneal tissue.
"Our work highlights the remarkable ability of brain organoids to generate primitive sensory structures that are light sensitive and harbor cell types similar to those found in the body," Gopalakrishnan said in the statement.
Why are scientists growing mini brains like these in the lab? These organoids can be useful for studying human brain development and related diseases. Scientists could use the new organoids — with their optic cups — to study brain-eye interactions during embryo development, Gopalakrishnan said. What's more, they can be used to study retinal disorders and maybe even be used to create personalized retinal cell types for therapies.
The researchers now hope to figure out how to keep the optic cups viable for a long time and use them to research the mechanisms behind retinal disorders.
The findings were published Aug. 17 in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
