DOMESTICATION TRANSMUTATION INTO DOGS

Foxes Started Eating Human Food Remains as Early as 42,000 Years Ago

Jul 23, 2020 by News Staff / Source

A team of scientists from the University of Tübingen has studied the diet of Arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus) and red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) that lived during the Paleolithic period in southwestern Germany.

The red fox (Vulpes vulpes). Image credit: Shorty Ox.

Foxes love leftovers. In the wild, they regularly feed on scraps left behind by larger predators like bears and wolves, but the closer foxes live to human civilization, the more of their diet is made up of foods that humans leave behind.

University of Tübingen researcher Chris Baumann and colleagues hypothesized that if this commensal relationship goes back to ancient times, then foxes might be useful indicators of human impact in the past.

They compared ratios of carbon and nitrogen isotopes between the remains of various herbivores, large carnivores, and red and Arctic foxes from several Paleolithic archaeological sites in the Ach Valley (Hohle Fels, Geißenklösterle and Sirgenstein) and the Lone Valley (Bockstein, Hohlenstein-Stadel and Vogelherd) in Germany.

At sites older than 42,000 years, when Neanderthals sparsely occupied the region, fox diets were similar to their local large carnivores.

“In this study, we were seeking to discover whether human hunting activity may have provided advantages for some animal species,” Baumann said.

“Originally, the main food source for red and Arctic foxes was small mammals, which the foxes hunted. That was the case in the Middle Paleolithic, more than 42,000 years ago.”

“In southwestern Germany that was the time of the Neanderthals and the Swabian Jura was only sparsely populated.”

But in the younger sites, as Homo sapiens became common in the area, foxes developed a more unique diet consisting largely of reindeer, which are too big for foxes to hunt but which are known to have been important game for ancient humans of the time.

The results suggest that during the Upper Paleolithic, these foxes made a shift from feeding on scraps left by local large predators to eating food left behind by humans. This indicates that foxes’ reliance on human food goes back a good 42,000 years.

Summary figure for the commensal fox hypothesis. 

Image credit: Baumann et al, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0235692

Fox dietary ecology as a tracer of human impact on Pleistocene ecosystems (plos.org)

“The isotopic data from the fox bones indicate that the composition of several animals’ diets changed,” said University of Tübingen’s Professor Hervé Bocherens, co-author on the study.

“We assume that these foxes now lived mainly on meat waste left behind by humans, or perhaps were even fed by them.”

“The data showed the meat was from large animals that the foxes could not bring down — such as mammoth and reindeer.”

“The humans dragged the whole reindeer into their caves. But the huge mammoths were butchered in the place they were killed.”

The team proposes that, with further studies investigating this fox-human relationship, ancient fox diets may be useful indicators of human impact on ecosystems over time.

“Dietary reconstructions of Ice Age foxes have shown that early modern humans had an influence on the local ecosystem as early as 40,000 years ago,” the authors said.

“The more humans populated a particular region, the more the foxes adapted to them.”

The findings were published online in the journal PLoS ONE.

_____

C. Baumann et al. 2020. Fox dietary ecology as a tracer of human impact on Pleistocene ecosystems. PLoS ONE 15 (7): e0235692; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0235692

I HAVE POSTULATED BEFORE THAT SOME SPECIES OF DOGS ORIGINATED BY BREEDING FOXES WITH ANOTHER CANID, IN PARTICULAR WITH THE ORIGIN OF THE DOG BREED SCHIPPERKE

IF FOXES WERE EATING OUR GARBAGE, LIKE WOLVES WERE THEN THEN THEY WOULD BE EQUALLY CONSIDERED FOR BREEDING DOGS.

THIS IS OF COURSE HERESY, AND BEING A HERESIOLOGIST I KNOW IT IS, BECAUSE ORTHODOX BELIEF IS THAT ONLY WOLF CANIDS CREATED DOGS. 

A RUSSIAN EXPERIMENT IN SIBERIA OVER FORTY YEARS HAS PROVEN THE FOX INTO DOG HYPOTHESIS TO BE A VALID BIOLOGICAL THEORY.

OF COURSE THE OTHER HERETIC THAT BELIEVES IT IS ALSO AN ANARCHIST BIOLOGIST AND BIOGRAPHER OF KROPOTKIN; LEE DUGIN
AND HE HAS WRITTEN AN ACCOUNT OF THIS ONGOING EXPERIMENT AS WELL AS HAVING BECOME INVOLVED WITH IT IN ORDER TO WRITE THIS ACCOUNT.

Diverse Strains of Smallpox Virus Were Widespread in Viking Age, New Study Shows

Jul 25, 2020 by News Staff / Source

Smallpox, caused by the variola virus, is one of the most devastating human diseases. Smallpox killed millions of people but drove Edward Jenner’s invention of vaccination, which eventually led to the annihilation of the virus, declared in 1980. To investigate the history of smallpox, an international team of researchers led by University of Cambridge and University of Copenhagen scientists sequenced and analyzed DNA from 1,867 humans who lived in Europe and the Americas between 31,630 and 150 years ago. The smallpox virus sequences were recovered from 13 northern European individuals, including 11 dated to 600-1050 CE, overlapping the Viking Age.

  

Mühlemann et al show that the Vikings also suffered from smallpox. Image credit: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall.

Historians believe smallpox may have existed since 10,000 BCE but until now there was no scientific proof that the virus was present before the 17th century CE.

It is not known how it first infected humans but it is believed to be a zoonotic disease — one that originated in an animal.

Smallpox was eradicated throughout most of Europe and the United States by the beginning of the 20th century but remained endemic throughout Africa, Asia, and South America.

The World Health Organisation launched an eradication program in 1967 that included contact tracing and mass communication campaigns. But it was the global roll-out of a vaccine that ultimately enabled scientists to stop smallpox in its tracks.

“Smallpox is the infection in the world that has killed most people. For that reason alone, it is very important and interesting to know how the disease developed,” said senior co-author Dr. Martin Sikora, a scientist in the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Center at the Globe Institute, the University of Copenhagen.

“It gives us a unique opportunity to understand the evolution of viruses: How did it change and become the pathogen that we know of today?”

“We already knew Vikings were moving around Europe and beyond, and we now know they had smallpox,” added senior co-author Professor Eske Willerslev, a researcher in the Department of Zoology and St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen.

Dr. Sikora, Professor Willerslev and their colleagues screened genomic data from skeletal and dental remains of 1,867 ancient humans for the presence of sequences matching the smallpox virus.

The authors identified sequences of the virus in 13 northern European individuals, including 11 dated to 600-1050 CE.

They were able to reconstruct near-complete smallpox virus genomes for four of the samples.

The genetic structure of this earliest-known smallpox strain is different to the modern smallpox virus eradicated in the 20th century.

“There are multiple ways viruses may diverge and mutate into milder or more dangerous strains,” said first author Dr. Barbara Mühlemann, from the Centre for Pathogen Evolution at the University of Cambridge, the Institute of Virology at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, and the German Center for Infection Research.

“This is a significant insight into the steps the variola virus took in the course of its evolution.”

While it is not clear whether these ancient strains of smallpox were fatal, the Vikings must have died with smallpox in their bloodstream for the scientists to detect it up to 1,400 years later. It is also highly probable there were epidemics earlier than these findings.

“While written accounts of disease are often ambiguous, our findings push the date of the confirmed existence of smallpox back by a thousand years,” said Dr. Terry Jones, also from the Centre for Pathogen Evolution at the University of Cambridge and the Institute of Virology at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, and the German Center for Infection Research.

“To find smallpox so genetically different in Vikings is truly remarkable. No one expected that these smallpox strains existed,” he added.

“It has long been believed that smallpox was in Western and Southern Europe regularly by 600 CE, around the beginning of our samples.”

“We have proved that smallpox was also widespread in northern Europe. Returning crusaders or other later events have been thought to have first brought smallpox to Europe, but such theories cannot be correct.”

The results were published in the July 24, 2020 issue of the journal Science.

_____

Barbara Mühlemann et al. 2020. Diverse variola virus (smallpox) strains were widespread in northern Europe in the Viking Age. Science 369 (6502): eaaw8977; doi: 10.1126/science.aaw8977

Hubble Delivers Incredible New Image of Saturn

Jul 23, 2020 by News Staff / Source

NASA has released a stunning image captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of Saturn and its ring system.

Hubble captured this image of Saturn and its rings on July 4, 2020. Two of Saturn’s icy moons are clearly visible in this image: Mimas (right) and Enceladus (bottom). Image credit: NASA / ESA / A. Simon, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / M.H. Wong, University of California, Berkeley / OPAL Team.

Hubble was used to observe Saturn and its rings on July 4, 2020, when the gas giant was approximately 1.35 billion km (839 million miles) from Earth.

The new image was taken during summer in Saturn’s northern hemisphere as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project.

“Hubble found a number of small atmospheric storms,” said lead investigator Dr. Amy Simon, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and colleagues.

“These are transient features that appear to come and go with each yearly Hubble observation.”

The atmosphere of Saturn is mostly hydrogen and helium with traces of ammonia, methane, water vapor, and hydrocarbons that give it a yellowish-brown color.

“Hubble photographed a slight reddish haze over the northern hemisphere in this color composite,” the researchers said.

“This may be due to heating from increased sunlight, which could either change the atmospheric circulation or perhaps remove ices from aerosols in the atmosphere.”

“Another theory is that the increased sunlight in the summer months is changing the amounts of photochemical haze produced.”

“It’s amazing that even over a few years, we’re seeing seasonal changes on Saturn,” Dr. Simon said.

“Conversely, the just-now-visible south pole has a blue hue, reflecting changes in Saturn’s winter hemisphere.”

The rings of Saturn are mostly made of pieces of ice, with sizes ranging from tiny grains to giant boulders.

Just how and when the rings formed remains one of our Solar System’s biggest mysteries.

“NASA’s Cassini spacecraft measurements of tiny grains raining into Saturn’s atmosphere suggest the rings can only last for 300 million more years, which is one of the arguments for a young age of the ring system,” said team member Dr. Michael Wong, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.

_____

This article is based on a press-release provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

UPDATED

World War II’s Warsaw Ghetto Holds Lifesaving Lessons for COVID-19

An outbreak of typhus in the densely packed walled enclosure was countered by adopting all-too-familiar public health measuresBy Gary Stix on July 24, 2020

 Jewish children in the German-established Warsaw Ghetto clean a street as a hygienic measure against the ever- present danger of epidemics. Credit: Getty Images



A paper published on Friday in Science Advances reports on a sophisticated mathematical analysis that shows how personal hygiene, quarantines, social distancing and a grass-roots public education campaign appeared to extinguish a raging typhus epidemic in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941. The incident stands out because these well-recognized health-preserving measures were promulgated successfully, even as the Nazis attempted to use starvation and typhus to wipe out 450,000 people packed into an area the size of New York City’s Central Park—five to 10 times the density of any city in today’s world.

The researchers say some of the lessons from typhus in the Warsaw Ghetto may carry over to COVID-19. “At a basic level, we learn how communities can use simple public health measures designed to beat infectious diseases,” says Lewi Stone, the study’s lead author. “Education, hygiene, motivation and cooperation are incredibly important in trying to beat the pandemic.”

Stone is a mathematical biologist at RMIT University in Australia and Tel Aviv University. And he is part of a community of researchers who simulate epidemiological events using sophisticated mathematical models to study modern outbreaks the plague, influenza and early-childhood diseases. These specialists have now trained an obsessive focus on COVID-19.

Previous work by Stone also explored historical themes. He used data based on railway records, for example, to examine the pace at which the Nazis transported and killed almost the entire Polish Jewish population.

Stone began this latest project three years ago, after he came upon a study that mentioned the World War II–era impact of the lice-borne bacterial illness typhus—a disease that took on a leading role during the Holocaust. The Science Advances paper explains that “the German discourse on hygiene was very much influenced by the anti-Semitic idea of Jews being notorious bearers of diseases. In the Nazis’ ideology, this evolved into Jews being the actual disease, so epidemics were to be naturally expected and dealt with, which in the end meant annihilating the Jews.”

When Stone started exploring the data that he found about typhus in the Warsaw Ghetto, he discovered that underreported official case and death statistics from the area diverged widely from epidemiologists’ records. It took time to reconcile the conflicting information. Details of Jews’ health in the ghetto from the end of 1940 to mid-1942 were intriguing but unclear. In an early analysis, Stone had been surprised that the epidemic had expired at the beginning of the winter of 1941–1942. Winter is when a contagious disease outbreak usually gets worse. For a year afterward, he thought the data might have been corrupted.

Stone recruited a multidisciplinary team of researchers: theoretical ecologist Yael Artzy-Randup of the University of Amsterdam, statistical modeler Daihai He of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and historian Stephan Lehnstaedt of Touro College Berlin. The group used a classical model for disease outbreaks that traces the up-and-down curves of cases. The model typically assumes a pathogen’s transmission rate through a population remains stable. But initially, the results it produced for the team’s study were highly implausible: the model estimated that three quarters of the 450,000 inmates were infected with the typhus bacterium, a number far higher than previous figures supplied by epidemiologists.

The classical model could only accommodate the data and produce a reasonable estimate of what happened when the transmission rate was allowed to vary over the course of the epidemic, permitting the scenario of a rapid decrease in the number of new cases. “To fit the data in a reasonable fashion, the transmissibility had to drop before the epidemic crashed,” Stone says. “And this is the tell-tale signature of public health interventions impacting the disease transmission and leading to its decline.” When the rate could vary, it elicited a far more plausible average estimate of 72,000 cases, along with a maximum estimate of 113,000. This result corresponded to the key historical reports.

The epidemic diminished rapidly before the winter of 1941–1942, a time when the number of new cases would be expected to grow faster. The historical record provided some clues as to what may have happened, based on a wide-ranging public health intervention. Residents’ medical organizations and citizen self-help networks within the Warsaw Ghetto taught health education courses, and the lectures sometimes attracted more than 900 people. An underground university taught medical students. Scientific research on starvation and epidemics was even carried out.

The model Stone and his team used for the epidemic’s trajectory indicated that without steps to fight the disease, the number of people infected would have been two to three times greater. Another factor that could have eased the number of infections—one only implied by the researchers' analysis—was a policy change by the Nazi administration to turn a blind eye on the smuggling of food into the ghetto in order to keep the residents strong enough to work for their incarcerators. It was estimated that for many of the workers, rations of less than 200 calories a day were elevated to about 780 calories, and this increase came largely from smuggled food.The unreliability of official statistics also left many deaths from typhus, starvation and other causes unrecorded. Estimates ranged as high as 5,000 to 9,000 deaths per month at the outbreak’s peak, when corpses were being deposited on the ghetto’s streets. As an alternative means of counting deaths, Stone used what he calls the “maths of food ration cards.” A drop of 118,000 cards on the rolls from March 1941 to July 1942 provided an estimate of a comparable loss of ghetto residents during that period, though Stone is continuing to research this statistic’s validity.

David J. D. Earn, an applied mathematician at McMaster University, who was not involved with the new study, says it is “a fascinating example of how modern mathematical and statistical methods can be used to identify likely mechanisms of disease spread and the effects of control measures. The inference that disease control efforts probably greatly reduced the magnitude of the typhus epidemic in the ghetto is illuminating, to say the least.”

Nina H. Fefferman, a mathematical epidemiologist and professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who was also not part of the study, raises questions about whether causes other than the public health measures might have contributed to the sudden decline in typhus cases. Did changes in mourning and burial practices lead to less contagion? Did improving nutrition help aid the decline?

Still, Fefferman calls the new research “wonderful.” This study, she says, “constructs a compelling case for the previously unacknowledged critical role good public health leadership and individual behavioral interventions may have played in the success a severely afflicted population had in curtailing and surviving the epidemic.”

The study makes a connection between the ghetto outbreak and the current pandemic. COVID-19 is more contagious but less deadly than typhus, which could kill more than 20 percent of those infected. Stone says the intersection of health and politics may have some parallels with the crisis today. “These same themes reappear,” he says, “only in an updated form for the 21st century, with the way minority groups are treated—and are, in fact, the true victims in COVID-19 days.”

Ultimately, the Warsaw Ghetto residents’ efforts gave survivors the briefest respite before the majority left were transported beginning in mid-1942, to the Treblinka death camp in occupied Poland. But the public health lessons of those efforts left a legacy that persists today. “The story of a community in these conditions,” Fefferman says, “under threat from both man and disease, still coming together to make and adhere to policies to help better their chances of all surviving together is exactly the sort of understanding and hope we need as we continue to shape our local, regional, national, and global response to COVID-19.”

Jewish doctors in Warsaw Ghetto stopped epidemic in its tracks

Jewish doctors in the ghetto, it seems, enforced social distancing and put those infected in quarantine: much like today.

By TAMAR BEERI
JULY 25, 2020


STUBBORN SPIRIT: Standing strong during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
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Jewish doctors were able to stop the spread of a typhus outbreak in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust, according to a new report by the scientific journal Live Science.

Typhus initially broke out in the ghetto in 1941 and was expected to spread rapidly through the inhabitants, but rather it died out quite quickly using strict containment measures carried out by the Jewish community of the ghetto.

The study, performed by researchers from Israel, Hong Kong, Amsterdam and Berlin, found that doctors had enforced social distancing, quarantine, and given lectures to educate the captives of the ghetto.

Typhus symptoms in common with the pandemic plaguing the world today: the novel coronavirus. It gives those ill a high fever, chills, coughing and severe muscle pain. Approximately 40% of cases which are left untreated prove to be fatal.

Approximately 120,000 people in the ghetto caught typhus, of which 30,000 died directly from it, according to Medical Xpress.

Models in the new study show that the epidemic, which broke out mid-year, should have reached its peak in the ideal conditions of the fall and winter months, but did not do so - likely due to "anti-epidemic activities in the ghetto," according to Live Science, citing researchers of the study.

The ghetto was the perfect location for an epidemic to spread, as it was massively overcrowded with approximately 400,000 Jews, as well as leaving the inhabitants to starve and the exposure to the elements. All Jewish residents of Warsaw and another several thousand from throughout Germany were relocated to the ghetto and sealed off within it with very few hygeinic supplies to take care of themselves. Dozens of thousands of Jews died due to the conditions, not to mention those who were later sent to concentration camps and death camps.

But the illness did not spread at the speed with which it was expected to do so. The lead author of the study was Prof. Lewi Stone of Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Life Sciences and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Melbourne Technical College in Australia. He claimed that "the Warsaw ghetto had many experienced doctors as inmates."

Jewish doctors in the ghetto, it seems, enforced social distancing and put those infected in quarantine: much like today. However, it was practically much more difficult to do so in the extremely overcrowded ghetto.

The doctors seemingly also taught public lectures on the disease and on proper hygiene care to stop its spread. They even went so far as to train medical students in secret.

Members of the Jewish Council in Warsaw Ghetto (Judenrat), assigned by the Nazis, were permitted to bring extra hygienic supplies in, which may have also helped in part.

It seems that, through these preventative measures, just at the time during the winter when typhus was expected to pick up speed and spread more rapidly through the community, it almost entirely dropped off the grid, as can be seen through the modeling and statistical analysis carried out for the study by Dr. Daihai He of Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

"The actions of individuals in practicing hygiene, social distancing and self-isolating when sick, can make a huge difference within the community to reduce the spread," said co-author of the study, assistant professor Yael Artzy-Randrup of the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics.

Why Hundreds of Mathematicians Are Boycotting Predictive Policing

Some academics are calling the controversial practice a "scientific veneer for racism."

BY COURTNEY LINDERJUL 20, 2020

TASOS KATOPODIS

Mathematicians at universities across the country are halting collaborations with police departments across the U.S.

A June 15 letter was sent to the trade journal Notices of the American Mathematical Society, announcing the boycott.

Typically, mathematicians work with police departments to build algorithms, conduct modeling work, and analyze data.

Several prominent academic mathematicians want to sever ties with police departments across the U.S., according to a letter submitted to Notices of the American Mathematical Society on June 15. The letter arrived weeks after widespread protests against police brutality, and has inspired over 1,500 other researchers to join the boycott.

These mathematicians are urging fellow researchers to stop all work related to predictive policing software, which broadly includes any data analytics tools that use historical data to help forecast future crime, potential offenders, and victims. The technology is supposed to use probability to help police departments tailor their neighborhood coverage so it puts officers in the right place at the right time.

"Given the structural racism and brutality in U.S. policing, we do not believe that mathematicians should be collaborating with police departments in this manner," the authors write in the letter. "It is simply too easy to create a 'scientific' veneer for racism. Please join us in committing to not collaborating with police. It is, at this moment, the very least we can do as a community."

Some of the mathematicians include Cathy O'Neil, author of the popular book Weapons of Math Destruction, which outlines the very algorithmic bias that the letter rallies against. There's also Federico Ardila, a Colombian mathematician currently teaching at San Francisco State University, who is known for his work to diversify the field of mathematics.

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"This is a moment where many of us have become aware of realities that have existed for a very long time," says Jayadev Athreya, associate professor at the University of Washington's Department of Mathematics who signed the letter, told Popular Mechanics. "And many of us felt that it was very important to make a clear statement about where we, as mathematicians, stand on these issues."

What Is Predictive Policing?

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group, defines predictive policing as "the use of mathematical analytics by law enforcement to identify and deter potential criminal activity."

That can include statistical or machine learning algorithms that rely on police records detailing the time, location, and nature of past crimes in a bid to predict if, when, where, and who may commit future infractions. In theory, this should help authorities use resources more wisely and spend more time policing certain neighborhoods that they think will yield higher crime rates.

Predictive policing is not the same thing as facial recognition technology, which is more often used after a crime is committed to attempt to identify a perpetrator. Police may use these technologies together, but they are fundamentally different.

For example, if predictive policing software shows that a bar sees heightened crime at 2 a.m. on Saturday nights, a police department might deploy more officers there. If and when a crime does occur there, the department might use facial recognition technology to sift through surveillance footage feeds to find and identify the individual.

RAND

According to a 2013 research briefing from the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank in Santa Monica, California, predictive policing is made up of a four-part cycle (shown above). In the first two steps, researchers collect and analyze data on crimes, incidents, and offenders to come up with predictions. From there, police intervene based on the predictions, usually taking the form of an increase in resources at certain sites at certain times. The fourth step is, ideally, reducing crime.

"Law enforcement agencies should assess the immediate effects of the intervention to ensure that there are no immediately visible problems," the authors note. "Agencies should also track longer-term changes by examining collected data, performing additional analysis, and modifying operations as needed."


In many cases, predictive policing software was meant to be a tool to augment police departments that are facing budget crises with less officers to cover a region. If cops can target certain geographical areas at certain times, then they can get ahead of the 911 calls and maybe even reduce the rate of crime.

But in practice, the accuracy of the technology has been contested—and it's even been called racist.
A Cause for Concern



EDUARD MUZHEVSKYI / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYGETTY IMAGES

Part of the impetus behind the mathematicians' move to distance themselves from predictive policing dates back to an August 2016 workshop that advocated for mathematicians' involvement with police departments.

The Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island—which is funded by the National Science Foundation—put on the workshop for 20 to 25 researchers. PredPol, a Santa Cruz, California-based technology firm that develops and sells predictive policing tools to departments across the U.S., was one of the partners.

According to a notice for the event, the one-week program included work alongside the Providence Police Department. Small teams focused on real problems with real crime and policing data to brainstorm mathematical methods and models that could help the officers, even "creating code to implement ideas as necessary."

"WE'RE NOT GOING TO COLLABORATE WITH ORGANIZATIONS THAT ARE KILLING PEOPLE."

The event organizers said at the time that they "fully anticipate that lasting collaborations will be formed, and that work on the projects will continue after the workshop ends."

Christopher Hoffman, a professor at the University of Washington's Department of Mathematics who also signed the letter, tells Popular Mechanics that the institutional buy-in concerned him and his colleagues. "When a large institute does that, it's like saying 'this is something that we, as a community, value,'" he says.

Athreya says that he attended an ICERM workshop prior to the one on predictive policing and voiced his concerns at the time. Mathematicians should not be building this software, or investing in it, he says, noting that the researchers have, at times, both an intellectual and financial stake in the software.

"We have been a part of these really problematic institutions, and this is a moment for us to reflect and decide that we're not going to do this as a community, we're not going to collaborate with organizations that are killing people."
Accounting for Bias


The Atlanta Police Department displays a city map through PredPol, a predictive crime algorithm used to map hotspots for potential crime, at the Operation Shield Video Integration Center on January 15, 2015 in Atlanta, Georgia. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR  GETTY IMAGES


The researchers take particular issue with PredPol, the high-profile company that helped put on the ICERM workshop, claiming in the letter that its technology creates racist feedback loops. In other words, they believe that the software doesn't help to predict future crime, but instead reinforces the biases of the officers.

But CEO Brian MacDonald tells Popular Mechanics that PredPol never uses arrest data, "because that has the possibility for officer bias." Instead, he says, the company only uses data that victims have reported to police, themselves. So if your car has been broken into, you might call the police to give them information about the type of crime, the location, and the timing. Police officers might take this information over the phone, or have you fill out an online form, he says.

Tarik Aougab, an assistant professor of mathematics at Haverford College and letter signatory, tells Popular Mechanics that keeping arrest data from the PredPol model is not enough to eliminate bias.

"The problem with predictive policing is that it's not merely individual officer bias," Aougab says. "There's a huge structural bias at play, which amongst other things might count minor shoplifting, or the use of a counterfeit bill, which is what eventually precipitated the murder of George Floyd, as a crime to which police should respond to in the first place."
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"In general, there are lots of people, many whom I know personally, who wouldn't call the cops," he says, "because they're justifiably terrified about what might happen when the cops do arrive."

That idea resurfaces in how the software actually works. As a February 2019 Vice story reports, PredPol uses a statistical modeling method used to predict earthquake aftershocks.

MacDonald says that the same approach works in predicting crime because "both of these problems have a location and time element for which to be solved." However, the Vice story echoes Aougab's concern that some crimes go underreported or unreported, meaning that outside influences could skew the time and location data.

How Prevalent Is This Tech?

Los Angeles, CA - October 24: Sgt. Charles Coleman of the LAPD Foothill Division explains during an interview the possible sources of crime on a map for patrols using predictive policing zone maps from the Los Angeles Police Department on Monday, October 24, 2016 in the Pacoima neighborhood of Los Angeles.
THE WASHINGTON POSTGETTY IMAGES

MacDonald says that PredPol has about 50 customers at the moment. For context, there are about 18,000 police departments in the U.S. But Athreya says a better metric comes from PredPol's own website: one in 33 Americans are protected by the software. He says that the figures seem so divergent because some of the largest police departments in the country are using the technology.

Of course, PredPol doesn't exist in a bubble. In 2011, the LAPD began using predictive policing software called the Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration (LASER), which it eventually stopped using in April 2019.

"The [Los Angeles Police Department] looked into this, and found almost no conclusion could be made about the effectiveness of the software," Hoffman says. "We don't even really know if it makes a difference in where police are patrolling."

Meanwhile, the New York City Police Department uses three different predictive policing tools: Azavea, Keystats, and PredPol, as well as its own in-house predictive policing algorithms that date back to 2013, Athreya says.

"IT'S VERY DIFFICULT FOR PEOPLE TO GET INFORMATION ABOUT WHO IS USING THIS SOFTWARE."

In Chicago, officers used an in-house database called the "Strategic Subject List" until last November, when the department decommissioned its use. "The RAND corporation found that this list included every single person arrested or fingerprinted in Chicago since 2013," according to Athreya.


A January statement from Chicago's Office of the Inspector General noted that some of the major issues with the technology included: "the unreliability of risk scores and tiers; improperly trained sworn personnel; a lack of controls for internal and external access; interventions influenced by PTV risk models which may have attached negative consequences to arrests that did not result in convictions; and a lack of a long-term plan to sustain the PTV models."

Just a few weeks ago, the Santa Cruz Police Department banned the use of predictive policing tools. Back in 2011, the department began a predictive policing pilot project that was meant to ease the strain on officers who were swamped with service calls at a time when the city was slashing police budgets.

While the Santa Cruz Police Department's outright ban on the technology might've been influenced by recent Black Lives Matter protests, the department had already placed a moratorium on the technology back in 2017.

Police Chief Andy Mills told the Los Angeles Times that predictive policing could have been effective if it had been used to work together with the community to solve problems, rather than "to do purely enforcement."

"You try different things and learn later as you look back retrospectively," Mills told the LA Times. "You say, 'Jeez, that was a blind spot I didn’t see.' I think one of the ways we can prevent that in the future is sitting down with community members and saying, 'Here's what we are interested in using. Give us your take on it. What are your concerns?'

Still, Hoffman says there's no way to know just how prevalent the technology is in the U.S. "It's very difficult for people to get information about who is using this software and what are they using this for," he says.

A Step Toward Better Policing

Athreya wants to make it clear that their boycott is not just a "theoretical concern." But if the technology continues to exist, there should at least be some guidelines for its implementation, the mathematicians say. They have a few demands, but they mostly boil down to the concepts of transparency and community buy-in.

Among them include:
Any algorithms with "potential high impact" should face a public audit.
Experts should participate in that audit process as proactive way to use mathematics to "prevent abuses of power."
Mathematicians should work with community groups, oversight boards, and other organizations like Black in AI and Data 4 Black Lives to develop alternatives to "oppressive and racist" practices.
Academic departments with data science courses should implement learning outcomes that address the "ethical, legal, and social implications" of such tools.

Since the letter went live, at least 1,500 other researchers have signed on through a Google Form, Athreya says. And he welcomes that response.

"I don't think predictive policing should ever exist," he says, "especially when it’s costing people their lives."

DNA Is Millions of Times More Efficient Than Your Computer's Hard Drive

Scientists successfully stored 'Wizard of Oz' into DNA, and this yellow brick road could lead to the future of a data storage.
BY COURTNEY LINDER JUL 25, 2020 POPULAR MECHANICS

STEVEN MCDOWELL/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYGETTY IMAGES

DNA can store far more data than a magnetic hard drive, but the technology is limited because the genetic material is prone to errors.
Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have come up with a way to store information in strands of DNA, while also correcting those errors.
To prove it, they've put the entirety of The Wizard of Oz—translated into Esperanto— into strands of DNA, with greater accuracy than prior methods.

When the Voyager spacecrafts launched in 1977, ready to study the outer limits of our solar system, they brought with them two golden phonograph records that each contained an assemblage of sounds and images meant to represent life on Earth. But in the future, the perfect next-gen space capsule could be found within our bodies.

That's because DNA is millions of times more efficient at storing data than your laptop's magnetic hard drive. Since DNA can store data far more densely than silicon, you could squeeze all of the data in the world inside just a few grams of it.
DATA STORAGE

'Racetrack Memory' Could Make Computers Way Faster

"Because DNA has been chosen by all of life as the information storage medium of choice...it turns out to be very robust," Ilya Finkelstein, an associate professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin, tells Popular Mechanics. "Long after our magnetic storage becomes obsolete, nature will still be using DNA."

Finkelstein is part of a team at the University of Texas at Austin who are pushing the limits on DNA-based storage methods. While this research area at the intersection of molecular biology and computer science has been around since the 1980s, scientists have struggled to find a way to correct the errors that DNA can be so prone to making.

In a new paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Finkelstein and company detail their new error correction method, which they tested out on a classic film. They were able to store the entirety of The Wizard of Oz, translated into Esperanto, with more accuracy than prior DNA storage methods ever could have. We're on the yellow brick road toward the future of data storage.

A Brief History of DNA Storage

LVCANDYGETTY IMAGES

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are certainly not the first to have encoded a work of art onto strands of DNA.

Early DNA storage methods actually date back to a 1988 Harvard experiment. Those scientists managed to store an image of one of artist Joe Davis's pieces in an E. coli DNA sequence. Upon decoding, it made up a 5-by-7 matrix that depicted a heady Ancient rune about life and female-centric Earth.
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By 2011, scientists at the European Bioinformatics Institute in the United Kingdom also caught on to the practice. Nick Goldman, a bioinformatics technician, had been commiserating with his colleagues about how they could store the reams upon reams of genome sequences that the world had been producing. It started out as a joke, out of frustration, he told Nature.

"We thought, 'What's to stop us using DNA to store information?'" Goldman said. Two years later, the group had managed to successfully encode five files onto strands of DNA, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream," speech, and sonnets from Shakespeare.

In November 2016, a spinout company from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called Catalog, immortalized the 144 words in Robert Frost's famous poem, "The Road Not Taken" in strands of DNA. That work represented about one kilobyte's worth of data.

Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington have come with the first fully automated system for encoding data onto strands of DNA. While sophisticated machines, like synthesizers and sequencers, already help to speed up the process, the new advancement eliminates the need for lab techs, running around with pipettes.
MICROSOFT

That same year, a team of researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington fit 200 megabytes of data onto lengths of DNA, including the entirety of War and Peace. In March 2019, they even came up with the first automated system for storing and retrieving data in the manufactured genetic material.

Today, other major technology firms are also working in the space, including both IBM and Google. The ultra-secretive U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity—the government's version of DARPA, but for spies—is even invested in the work. These researchers envision a future where some of the most precious, but rarely accessed data, can be stored in vials of DNA, only pulled down from the cool, dark storage of the lab, as needed.
How DNA Storage Works




All the movies, images, emails and other digital data from more than 600 basic smartphones (10,000 gigabytes) can be stored in the faint pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube.
TARA BROWN/UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON



The magnetic hard drive is one of the most popular methods for storing data in today's computers. Inside, there is a pair of rotating discs, called platters, that resemble a CD. They store data onto their circular surface in chunks of 1s and 0s, known as binary code. Centered on a spindle, the platter rotates and an electronic current reads and writes data onto the surface. Electronic components power the whole operation.

Similarly, DNA-based storage requires an encoding and decoding scheme. In this case, scientists chemically create synthetic DNA with certain properties, based on the four nucleotides bases—adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T)—that make up the genetic material's ladder-like helical shape.



"DNA IS UNIQUELY FUTURE-PROOF...BECAUSE WE ARE MADE OF IT."

Because there are four building blocks in DNA, rather than the binary 1s and 0s in magnetic hard drives, the genetic storage method is far more dense, explains John Hawkins, another co-author of the new paper. "A teaspoon of DNA contains so much data it would require about 10 Walmart Supercenter-sized data centers to store using current technology," he tells Popular Mechanics. "Or, as some people like to put it, you could fit the entire internet in a shoe box."

Not only that, but DNA is future-proof. Hawkins recalls when CDs were the dominant storage method, back in the 1990s, and they held the promise that their storage could last forever, because plastic does (but scratches can be devastating). Data stored on DNA, on the other hand, can last for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, there is a whole field of science called archaeogenetics that explores the longevity of DNA to understand the ancient past.
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Beyond that, DNA requires virtually zero maintenance once it's stored. After all, fossils preserve DNA sequences after spending millions of years underground. DNA storage doesn't require any energy, either—just a cool, dark place to hang out until someone decides to access it. But the greatest advantage, Hawkins says, is that our ability to read and write DNA will never become obsolete.

"If I wanted to go read an essay I myself wrote as a child, for example, I would already need to first go to a museum to find a working computer from that era, and I'm only in my 30s," he explains. "But DNA is uniquely future-proof on this front because we are made of it. As long as humans are made of DNA, we will always want machines around that can read it."
Getting Past the Errors




When strand slippage occurs during DNA replication, a DNA strand may loop out, resulting in the addition or deletion of a nucleotide on the newly-synthesized strand.
NATURE EDUCATION, 2014, ADAPTED FROM PIERCE, BENJAMIN. GENETICS: A CONCEPTUAL APPROACH, 2ND ED.



But like all data storage methods, DNA has a few shortcomings as well. The most significant upfront hurdle is cost. Hawkins says that current methods are similar to the cost for an Apple Hard Disk 20 back in 1980. Back then, about 20 megabytes of storage—or the amount of data you'd need to use to download a 15-minute video—went for about $1,500.

Beyond that, DNA is also error-prone. Recall the four nucleotide bases that make up the DNA ladder. On average, DNA introduces about one mistake per 100 to 1,000 nucleotides. These can take three forms: substitutions, insertions, and deletions.

In a substitution mutation, a single letter in a string of nucleotides may be switched out for another. In the graphic below, cytosine is replaced with thymine. The strands of DNA remain the same length. In an insertion or deletion, though, the DNA gets an extra nucleotide base, or removes one. But unlike errors in computer code, there is no space left behind where a removed base once lived, which can quickly become problematic when you go to decode the data stored in the DNA.

A substitution error in DNA. Here, cytosine is replaced with thymine.
BIOLOGY DICTIONARY

Hawkins likes to compare this to English words: "A deletion of the letter 'L' turns 'world' into 'word.' Additionally, inserting an 'S' then turns it into 'sword.' Correctly reading 'world' from 'sword' is hard not only because sword is still a valid English word, but because all the letters shifted around."

Other forms of DNA storage got past these replication errors by repeating the code for the data 10 to 15 times over—but that's a massive waste of space. In the new method described in the team's research paper, however, they build the data into the DNA in a lattice shape, wherein each bit of data reinforces the next, so that it only needs to be read once.

They also developed an algorithm that overcomes insertion, deletion, and substitution errors all at once, making DNA-based digital data storage far more efficient. It's why the team could so readily fit "The Wizard of Oz" onto strands of DNA without replicating the combination of A, C, T, and G bases many times over.
A Vision of the Future


Moving forward, the potential for DNA-based storage is nearly limitless. Finkelstein presents a vision of the future wherein DNA, encoded with data, can be incorporated inside other materials.

In one example, he says, researchers impregnated a piece of 3D-printed plastic with strands of DNA that contained the object files for the plastic object being printed. As the plastic passes through the printer, it can release the DNA to recreate the file in a circular process.

Or, you could use DNA-based data storage as a way to make forensic discoveries about inanimate objects that don't have their own genetic material. Say you coat an airplane with a material that contains DNA, with the full instructions for building that particular portion of the plane. If something goes awry, and the plane ends up in the sea, the DNA contained in the coating will degrade to some degree due to the sun's ultraviolet rays.
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But put another way, that degradation is just a way to record information about what has happened to the plane. If even one piece of the wreckage is recovered, scientists can analyze the stored DNA–and the degradation—to see how long it has been lost at sea.

Even with the breakthroughs that Finkelstein's team has made, DNA-based digital storage is still some time away. "I think that niche applications are probably close to being on the horizon," he says, "but I don’t think it’s going to be a mass market product for a decade or more."

It's been nearly 60 years since magnetic tape overcame punch cards as the primary mode for data storage, bringing about a revolution in personal computing. Since then, disk drives have only gotten smaller and smaller. So a future where the storage medium of choice is so small that you can hardly even see it actually makes sense.

When we reach that reality, DNA-based storage will be the most impressive leap yet.