GHOST IN THE MACHINE
VR study shows how easy it is to get people to incorrectly think they’re in the presence of another being

2020/7/23 ©PsyPost


Humans have a tendency to incorrectly detect another person or creature in their environment, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as hypersensitive agency detection. New research utilized virtual reality technology to examine whether agency detection was associated with belief in the supernatural.

The study suggests that people with a stronger belief in supernatural agents are not more likely to falsely perceive other beings. This type of false perception, however, might be associated with certain superstitions.

The findings appear in the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior.

“I became interested in this topic through a combination of me-search and research,” said researcher Adam E. Tratner, a doctor of psychology (PhD) affiliated with Oakland University.

“Throughout my life I have met many people who believe in supernatural agents (e.g., ghosts, spirits, bigfoot, etc) and claim to have had direct encounters with them. Despite the lack of evidence for the existence of the supernatural, these beliefs and experiences are so common across human societies that I began to wonder if there were reasonable scientific explanations for them.”

“Fast forward to graduate school and I was introduced to scholarly work that attempted to address this from a psychological standpoint, so I decided to conduct some research that investigated whether cognitive and perceptual processes are related to such beliefs,” Tratner explained.

For their study, Tratner and his colleagues first had 107 college students complete a survey regarding their beliefs in paranormal and supernatural phenomena. The students were then fitted with an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and played an exploration-themed video game for approximately 30 minutes.

The students were asked to explore a virtual forest and click the right mouse button whenever they believed there was someone or something else in the virtual environment. However, no other people or creatures were actually present.

Even though the participants were alone the entire time, the researchers found that 90% of them reported perceiving the presence of another being in the environment at least once. The participants falsely reported another being in their virtual environment about 13 times on average.

“We demonstrated that it’s very easy to get people to think that they are ‘seeing things’ around them in a virtual reality environment,” Tratner told PsyPost.

“Surprisingly, we found that the tendency to falsely perceive agents in the environment was unrelated to actual beliefs in supernatural agents (e.g., ghosts, bigfoot, etc), but was related instead to beliefs in Feng Shui. This was unexpected because Feng Shui is more similar to superstition, whereas we hypothesized that individuals who are more likely to falsely perceive agents would have stronger beliefs in supernatural agents.”

“One possibility for this finding is that individuals who believe in Feng Shui may be more prone to faulty causal reasoning, which may lead them to think that the things they perceive in the virtual reality environment (e.g., sounds, movement) are being caused by an agent in the environment,” Tratner said.

Agency detection doesn’t appear to be related to individual differences in supernatural beliefs. But the general tendency to falsely perceive other beings in one’s environment still may have played a role in facilitating belief in the supernatural over the course of human history.

The researchers hope future research can address the current study’s methodological limitations and provide more information on the topic.

“I interpret the findings of this study with caution because there are different issues surrounding different aspects of the study that could have affected the results. This study used a relatively small convenience sample of undergraduate students, which means that the findings could be a fluke,” Tratner said.

“There are also issues with the study’s procedures. For instance, we explicitly told participants to be on the lookout for agents in the environment, which may have prompted them to mistakenly perceive agents more than they would have if we did not tell them anything. Also, we only assessed their agency detection in one virtual environment, which was admittedly spooky, ominous, and filled with ambiguous stimuli.”

“The study would have really benefited from recruiting a larger, more representative sample, and using multiple virtual reality environments in order to compare the differences in agency detection across different environments,” Tratner added.

The study, “Fear the unseen: supernatural belief and agency detection in virtual reality“, was authored by Adam E. Tratner, Todd K. Shackelford, Virgil Zeigler-Hill, Jennifer Vonk, and Melissa M. McDonald.

(Photo credit: Sergey Galyonkin)TrendMD v2.4.8

Psychedelic drugs can greatly reduce psychiatric symptoms among special forces veterans, study finds

2020/7/27 ©PsyPost



A recent study published in Chronic Stress found support for a psychedelic treatment not yet approved in the United States. US Special Operations Forces (SOF) Veterans treated with ibogaine and 5-Methoxy-N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) showed large reductions in symptoms of PTSD, depression, and anxiety.

Special Operations Forces (SOF) are members of the military who have been singled out for their superior “physical and psychological resilience.” Still, they are typically exposed to more extreme conditions and show psychiatric impairment similar to that of conventional forces veterans.

“Although SOF Veterans exhibit PTSD symptoms at rates comparable to conventional forces Veterans,” study authors Alan K. Davis and associates say, “they may be more reluctant to seek mental health treatment. There is growing concern of a mental health crisis and an alarming increase in the incidence of suicides in SOF members highlighting limited effective treatment methods for this unique population.”

Davis and his team conducted a study among 51 US SOF veterans who received psychedelic treatment at a clinical program in Mexico between 2017 and 2019. Over the 3-day treatment, participants were given three to five doses of 5-MeO-DMT (a psychedelic tryptamine) and a single dose of Ibogaine (a psychoactive indole alkaloid).

In 2019, the 51 veterans completed a retrospective survey that asked them to rate various aspects of their mental health one month before the treatment and one month after. The assessments included symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety, depression, and suicidal tendencies. The surveys also assessed cognitive functioning, by asking subjects to report times they had felt “confused or had difficulties with reaction time, reasoning, memory, attention and concentration.”

The results overwhelmingly supported the treatment, uncovering strong decreases in reported symptoms of PTSD, depression, and anxiety following the program. There was also a substantial drop in reports of suicidal ideation and cognitive impairment, and an increase in reported psychological flexibility. In fact, participant reports of post-treatment symptoms no longer met the cut-offs for clinical diagnoses.

Moreover, when asked to evaluate the program, the vast majority (80%) of participants were “either very (28%) or completely (53%) satisfied with the program.” The majority even reported that the program was “one of the top five most personally meaningful (84%), spiritually significant (88%), psychologically insightful (86%), and psychologically challenging (69%) experiences of their entire lives.”

Davis and his team explain how the two psychedelic drugs may have alleviated veterans’ psychiatric symptoms. 5-MeO-DMT, they say, “demonstrates neuroprotective, regenerative, and anti-inflammatory properties” which may be effective in treating the causes of cognitive impairment and PTSD. Ibogaine may also alleviate symptoms of PTSD, by facilitating “the evocation and reprocessing of traumatic memories and occasions therapeutic and meaningful visions of spiritual and autobiographical content.”

The study has significant limitations including recall bias, lack of clinical assessments, and an uncontrolled design which did not allow for a placebo. However, the compelling results lead researchers to call for future controlled studies to verify the effectiveness of ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT in treating veterans with psychological difficulties.

The study, “Psychedelic Treatment for Trauma-Related Psychological and Cognitive Impairment Among US Special Operations Forces Veterans”, was authored by Alan K. Davis, Lynnette A. Averill, Nathan D. Sepeda, Joseph P. Barsuglia, and Timothy Amoroso.TrendMD v2.4.8

LUKE  ON ACID AT THE DU LONG BRIDGE APOCALYPSE NOW 

New research provides ‘robust evidence’ that bisexual men exist
2020/7/29 1©PsyPost



A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has uncovered genital responses in men that are consistent with a bisexual orientation. The research is the most “extensive assessment of bisexual men’s arousal patterns to date,” according to its authors.

“There has long been a controversy whether men who identify as bisexual are actually bisexual. The bisexual men and many others believe that they are. However, some others — including some scientists and lay persons — have doubted this,” said study author J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University.

“The latter believe that men who identify as bisexual are actually either heterosexual or homosexual, and that their claim to be bisexual is based on self-misunderstanding, perhaps due to social pressure not to admit exclusive homosexuality.”

“For reasons I won’t address here (I’d have to speculate), female bisexuality has not elicited nearly as much skepticism as male bisexuality,” Bailey added.

For their study, the researchers combined data from eight previous studies that included objective measures of genital response in men who also reported their Kinsey scores — a measure of self-reported sexual orientation. The data allowed Bailey and his colleagues to examine the sexual orientation of 606 men, who were around 29 years of age on average.

In the studies, the men reported their sexual orientation on the Kinsey scale and viewed erotic video clips while a device measured changes in the circumference of the penis.

The researchers found that 178 participants self-identified as exclusively heterosexual, 102 identified as mostly heterosexual, 46 as bisexual leaning heterosexual, 34 as bisexual, 37 as bisexual leaning homosexual, 70 as mostly homosexual, and 139 as exclusively homosexual.

Importantly, men who identified as bisexual displayed genital responses to female and male stimuli that were consistent with their self-reported orientation. Men in the middle of the Kinsey spectrum showed smaller differences in genital arousal to male versus female erotic stimuli, compared with exclusively heterosexual and homosexual men.

“Men who identify as bisexual tend actually to be more sexually aroused by both sexes compared with heterosexual and homosexual men. The idea that ‘all bisexual men are lying’ is false,” Bailey told PsyPost.

“However, even bisexual men tend not to be equally aroused by both male and female erotic stimuli. They still tend to show preferences, just smaller ones than heterosexual and homosexual men show.”

There are still some men who identify as bisexual who do not have a bisexual orientation, such as so-called “transitional bisexuals,” Bailey said.

“Skepticism does not only reflect prejudice. Many men who identify as homosexual (‘gay’) as adults go through a stage during their youth in which they identify as bisexual. Asked later, they usually say they were not actually bisexual during this time,” he explained.

“There are other reasons for identifying as bisexual that do not require bisexual orientation (by which I mean sexual arousal and attraction to both sexes to the degree that arousal/attraction to women exceed that of homosexual men and arousal/attraction to men exceed that of heterosexual men). This can include sexual experience with both sexes (which is not uncommon but does not require bisexual orientation) and atypical sexual interests (example: men attracted to she-males — natal males who have acquired breasts surgically while retaining their penises).”

The study, “Robust evidence for bisexual orientation among men“, was authored by Jeremy Jabbour, Luke Holmes, David Sylva, Kevin J. Hsu, Theodore L. Semon, A. M. Rosenthal, Adam Safron, Erlend Slettevold, Tuesday M. Watts-Overall, Ritch C. Savin-Williams, John Syllah, Gerulf Rieger, and J. Michael Bailey.

(Image by Chickenonline from Pixabay)TrendMD v2.4.8

New study links Christian nationalism to going maskless and neglecting to social distance amid the COVID-19 pandemic

2020/7/30 ©PsyPost


Christian nationalism shapes Americans’ responses to the novel coronavirus outbreak, according to new research that analyzed data from 2,519 individuals.

The study, which can be viewed for free in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, indicates that those who embrace Christian nationalist ideology are more likely to flout measures intended to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Samuel Perry (@socofthesacred), an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma who co-authored the research along with Andrew L. Whitehead and Joshua B. Grubbs, spoke with PsyPost about the new findings.

Why were you interested in this topic?

Like many Americans, we were disheartened at how quickly the COVID-19 pandemic, and our responses to it as a nation, became politicized. Perhaps this betrays my own naiveté, but I’d always hoped that when confronted with some catastrophic emergency like an asteroid heading toward earth or a literal pandemic, Americans would be able to lay aside differences and rally toward a coordinated response based on expert recommendations.

That didn’t happen, obviously. All over the news we witnessed political leaders and media pundits on the far-right challenge expert recommendations about social distancing, wearing masks, sheltering in place, etc. And polls were also showing that Americans who were more religiously or politically conservative were following their leaders and reporting a lower likelihood of practicing recommended precautions, and in fact, almost flouting the expert recommendations on purpose.

But we thought this went deeper than just Republican-party loyalty or religious commitment per se. Our previous research on Christian nationalism shows us that oftentimes what’s driving these deep cultural divides is an ideology that, among other things, makes loyalty to one’s ethno-religious tribe the ultimate, but in this case also ties together four tendencies that combine to influence Americans’ COVID-related behaviors in the worst ways possible:

1. Christian nationalism by definition includes the idea that God has a special place in his heart for America, his New Israel. That implies a sort of cosmic preservation that’s expected by those who espouse Christian nationalist views. And in this mindset, if God allows COVID-19 to infect large numbers of Americans, it’s because of our moral and religious waywardness, not because of our failure to follow social distancing recommendations. So in the minds of Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalism, the solution to COVID-19 is moral (and ethnic) purity, not masks.
2. As we’ve shown elsewhere, Christian nationalism is powerfully associated with science skepticism. Americans who score higher on Christian nationalism see science and scientists as an epistemological threat, challenging their moral authority in the public sphere. This would make adults who were higher on Christian nationalism more likely to challenge the recommendations of experts.
3. Research has shown that Americans who are more religiously conservative are more likely to feel targeted by the media and distrust most mainstream sources. While we haven’t directly connected Christian nationalism to media distrust in a peer-reviewed study yet, we felt it was pretty clear that if scientists and health experts are conveying their recommendations through mainstream media sources, their advice was more likely to be rejected by Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalist ideology.
4. Christian nationalism binds Americans to Trump. He’s the guy who sticks up for the values of “Americans like us,” and so Trump’s resistance to mask-wearing and skepticism toward experts was going to bring Christian nationalist Americans with him.

What should the average person take away from your study?

We used nationally-representative panel data collected during May of 2020, so right in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. We asked a series of questions about how often someone engaged in various activities within the 2 previous weeks. These included precautionary behaviors like washing one’s hands more often than normal, wearing masks, avoiding touching one’s face, and using hand sanitizer more than normal. We also included risky or incautious behaviors like attending gatherings with 10+ people, going to a worship service, shopping for non-essential items, and so on.

We used our standard 6-item Christian nationalism scale that we’ve used in over a dozen previous studies thus far, and we included that in models predicting these behaviors along with controls for sociodemographic, religious, and political characteristics.

As we anticipated, adherence to Christian nationalist ideology was the leading predictor that Americans engaged in risky or incautious behaviors more often within the 2 previous weeks, and it was the second leading predictor that Americans avoided engaging in precautionary behaviors, like wearing masks or washing hands.

A little more surprising, we found that Americans who are more religious (attend service more often, pray more often, feel religion is more important) seemed to engage in precautionary behaviors more frequently. In fact, once we accounted for Christian nationalist ideology in our models, being more religious was the leading predictor that someone frequently engaged in precautionary behaviors.

This suggests to us that polls are getting it wrong if they show Americans who are “more religious” are behaving incautiously regarding COVID-19. It’s not “religiousness” per se that’s leading Americans to resist expert recommendations to curb the spread of disease. It’s Christian nationalist ideology and all that’s associated with it.

What questions still need to be addressed?

In terms of questions that still need to be addressed, we want to assess with future waves of panel data and other sources what the consequences were of this Christian nationalist ideology on actual COVID-19 outcomes. We’ve demonstrated that Americans who espouse Christian nationalist views were more likely to violate expert recommendations. But did they get infected more? Did COVID-19 blow up in regions with high concentrations of Christian nationalism? Did more people die? These are the questions we need to answer in order to tease out the practical consequences of this ideology.

(Photo credit: Russ Allison Loar)TrendMD v2.4.8

Consuming content from Fox News is associated with decreased knowledge of science and society
2020/7/31 ©PsyPost


People who visit FoxNews.com are no more or less likely to understand how the U.S. political system works compared to those who use other online media sources, according to a new study published in American Politics Research. But the study provides some initial evidence that using Fox’s website is associated with reduced knowledge about several politically-relevant topics, such as the state of the economy.

“A few years back, there was a poll that suggested Fox News viewers were less knowledgeable on important issues than people who abstained from watching the news at all,” said study author Peter R. Licari, a PhD candidate at the University of Florida.

“I kept seeing people referencing it on social media but noticed that: 1) It was only about TV news when a lot of news nowadays is consumed over the Internet; and 2) The analysis didn’t control for factors that might influence both Fox News viewership and lower political knowledge.”

“I was originally pretty skeptical of the claim — and I came into the research with that skepticism in hand. For one, there are many different kinds of ‘political knowledge,’ so an all-encompassing effect suggested by headlines and people’s conversational references to the study seemed too over-the-top — and news consumption tends to be positively correlated with political knowledge in general,” Licari explained.

“I realized I knew of a dataset where I could address these issues. I wanted to ‘productively procrastinate’ on my dissertation looking at how video games can increase civic attitudes and political participation, so I dug in.”

For the study, Licari analyzed nationally representative data from 2016 wave of the American National Election Studies. The surveys asked respondents to report their use of online news media sources, including ABC News, BuzzFeed, CNN, Fox News, The Huffington Post, NBC News, The Washington Post, and other outlets.

After controlling for age, gender, race, education, political ideology and other factors, Licari found that using Fox’s website as a news source was associated with lower levels of some types of political knowledge, but not others.

“For some kinds of knowledge, there’s little reason to suspect an association between getting one’s news from FoxNews.com and less knowledge (what I term ‘process-oriented knowledge’ in the paper — or facts about the political system and how things are run),” Licari told PsyPost.

Process-oriented knowledge included things like knowing which party currently had the most members in the U.S. House of Representatives, how many years a United States Senator is elected for, and the political office held by John Roberts.

“But, for other kinds of knowledge (what I call ‘society-oriented knowledge’ comprising important facts about society and things affecting society), the evidence does point to a possible association between visiting the site and lower levels of knowledge,” Licari explained.

Examples of society-oriented knowledge included whether unemployment had gotten better or worse over the past year, whether Barack Obama was a Muslim, and whether the world’s temperature had been slowly increasing over the past 100 years.

“Taking-in additional online sources other than FoxNew.com diminished the negative effect, but the models suggest that, for the vast majority of people, the society-oriented knowledge gap between visitors and non-visitors is pretty durable. That association is statistically and — I feel — substantively significant,” Licari said.

But as with all research, the study includes some limitations.

“First and foremost, this study could only measure statistical associations; it’s not designed to make a causal argument and people should be cautious in interpreting it as such. I included as many controls as I could sensibly do to try and limit the possibility of there being a spurious factor lurking there (such as Party ID, ideology, age, education, 2012 presidential vote, the number of conservative media sources respondents took-in overall, to name a few), but there could always be other unmeasured factors out there in the ether driving both variables,” Licari said.

“It could also be that the causal arrow is reversed. I don’t personally believe it is, but we have to be open to that possibility until other work better-positioned from a causal inference standpoint comes along and settles the issue.”

“I also wish that there were items in the dataset that could make the society-oriented knowledge scale less partisan. There are some things there (like climate change) with a definite partisan lean when it comes to getting the ‘right answer.’ That lean will undoubtedly inject some bias into the measure and into the conclusions. Although, the effects are robust even when those items are nixed from the scale and it just becomes about economic knowledge — so I think that there’s something interesting there that’s still worth following-up on and pursuing,” Licari added.

The researcher hopes his work will inspire additional investigations into the relationship between news media consumption and political knowledge.

“I think that looking at possible informational biases associated with a mainstream news outlet is important work. (And regardless of what Fox’s pundits and uber-fans say — they’re mainstream. You can either be the nation’s most viewed news network or be not-mainstream; can’t have it both ways!) I’d like to see future work come and build off the limitations I know to be there as well as those that undoubtedly are there that I’m not aware of,” he told PsyPost.

“I think, given how many pundits on the network were (and are) skeptical of the COVID-19 outbreak, there might be an understandable temptation to link this paper with the skepticism that is more common among the US right. I’d personally suggest not doing so,” Licari added.

“Instead, I’d recommend Matt Motta, Dominik Stecula, and Christina Farhart’s interesting paper “How Right-Leaning Media Coverage of COVID-19 Facilitated the Spread of Misinformation in the Early Stages of the Pandemic in the U.S.” They get at the topic directly and in a way with far better causal leverage than I’m able to get at here.”TrendMD v2.

Political ideology predicts susceptibility to believing fake news about the novel coronavirus pandemic

2020/8/1 ©PsyPost


Political conservatism was associated with heightened susceptibility to believing fake news about COVID-19 in the early stages of the outbreak in the United States, according to new research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. The study provides preliminary evidence that support for President Donald Trump plays a role in viewing COVID-19 as less of a personal threat and less severe in general.

“When we launched the project in early March, Dustin Calvillo (the first author) and I were talking about the discrepancy with which the threat was being viewed by different people,” said study author Abraham M. Rutchick, a professor of psychology at California State University, Northridge.

“I’d just begun a pretty strict self-quarantine, and I was struck by how varied people’s attitudes and behaviors were. Given the polarization of political leadership and politicized media, we thought this might be worth investigating.”

The researchers used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to conduct two online studies that included 990 participants in total. The first study was conducted on March 8, while the second was conducted on March 17, just a few days after a national emergency was declared in the United States.

As part of the research, the participants were asked to view and rate the accuracy of 16 news headlines. Eight of the headlines included real information taken from USNews.com, while the remaining eight were fake headlines derived from fact-checking websites.

Two examples of fake headlines that were used in the study.

Rutchick and his colleagues found that those who scored higher on a measure of political conservatism tended to be less accurate at distinguishing between real and fake headlines about COVID-19. Conservatism was also associated with perceiving less personal vulnerability and rating COVID-19 as less severe. More conservative participants were also more likely to believe that COVID-19 was the result of a conspiracy and that the media had exaggerated its risks.

More conservative participants also tended to view President Trump’s performance more positively. Approval of Trump was in turn associated with less knowledge about COVID-19, which predicted greater susceptibility to fake news headlines.

The findings indicate that “our responses to the threat are strikingly different depending on our political beliefs. This is probably due to people taking their cues from the president (or refusing to do so), and differences in the media from which people get their news. More broadly, the study shows how hard it is to get aligned on any issue with political overtones, even when it’s a matter of public health that affects everyone,” Rutchick told PsyPost.

When it came to media consumption habits, the researchers found significant differences based on party affiliation. About 32% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats reported obtaining some of their news from CNN; 20% of Republicans and 50% of Democrats reported obtaining some of their news from The New York Times; and 51% of Republicans but only 14% of Democrats reported obtaining some of their news from Fox News.

“The more news participants got from Fox News, the less vulnerable they felt, and the more they agreed that the pandemic is a result of a conspiracy and that the media is exaggerating the threat. The more news participants got from CNN, the more severe they believed COVID-19 was, and the less they agreed that the media is exaggerating the threat,” the researchers said.

But the study — like all research — includes some limitations.

“The sampling was nonrepresentative and imperfect. And the analyses we used to examine the reasons why political ideology predicts threat perceptions – the idea that it’s via presidential approval, knowledge, and fake news discernment – is definitely a speculative one. The study was also conducted at one specific point in time – it’s a snapshot of what was going on in early March. We don’t know (from this study) much about how these processes unfold over time,” Rutchick explained.

“I’d argue that it’s essential for people to read unbiased media (and track media using things like allsides.com). We’re in a challenging age – it used to be that people would agree on what the truth was but disagree about what to do about it. Now, we can’t even agree on the truth on the ground, which is a grave threat to a functioning democracy,” he added.

The study, “Political Ideology Predicts Perceptions of the Threat of COVID-19 (and Susceptibility to Fake News About It)“, was authored by Dustin P. Calvillo, Bryan J. Ross, Ryan J. B. Garcia, Thomas J. Smelter, and Abraham M. Rutchick.TrendMD v2.4.8

The seaweed monster is back devouring South Florida beaches. It's not a pretty sight

2020/8/1 ©Miami Herald

Seaweed covers the beach in Fort Lauderdale as bathers enter the water, July 28, 2020. - CHARLES TRAINOR JR/Miami Herald/TNS

MIAMI — Like most tourists coming to a South Florida beach for a quarantine break, the Mlynek family had a picture-perfect scene in mind when they arrived from Oklahoma this week: turquoise waters glistening in the sun, gently swaying palm trees and shining stretches of white sand.

What they found in Hollywood instead were smelly, messy mounds of seaweed coating the coastline.

Seaweed is once again invading Southeast Florida beaches as mats of the massive macroalgae swirling around in the Atlantic make their annual appearance. But this year is shaping up to be a really bad one: a combination of ocean currents and seasonal southeasterly winds is moving the nasty stuff over from the eastern Caribbean, fouling vast expanses of sand and turning nearshore waters into a slimy soup.

“It’s a bit disappointing, definitely not what we expected,” said Mike Mlynek, a Red Cross executive who booked a vacation at the Margaritaville Hollywood Beach Resort hoping to swim in a pristine beach for a week.

Seaweed, or sargassum, is a natural occurrence, regularly washing up on beaches around the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. But it has become a major headache over the past few years, blanketing popular tourist destinations like Cancun, where the Mexican Navy is using ships in cleanup operations, and Barbados, where the Prime Minister said sargassum is as big a threat to the local economy as a hurricane.

So far it hasn’t been as bad as the sargassum attack of 2018, when a record-breaking crop blanketed beaches from Key Biscayne to Jacksonville. But it’s worse than scientists thought it would be when they calculated predictions earlier this year, said Chuanmin Hu, professor of optical oceanography at the University of South Florida. His lab tracks seaweed movements based on NASA and NOAA satellite images.

“Several months ago we predicted this would be a bad year, but not as bad as 2018; We’ve already seen a whole lot of sargassum reaching our shores faster than we expected,” Hu said. “At this point it’s looking like things are actually worse than our original estimates.”

The total amount of sargassum in the Atlantic is bigger than what satellites registered last year, which is not very encouraging, he added. Over the next two weeks Florida’s east coast will likely see another wave of heavy blooms covering beaches.

In June, vast mats of sargassum continued to increase across the central Atlantic, creating what scientists have dubbed the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt. Over the past few years, this 5,500-mile seaweed blanket stretching from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico has become a permanent occurrence.

In June 2018, the belt was at its thickest, containing more than 20 million metric tons of seaweed — heavier than 200 fully-loaded aircraft carriers. Last month, the total seaweed amount increased to 12.7 million metric tons compared with 8.7 million metric tons in May. In June 2019, sargassum amounts in the Atlantic totalled about 10 million metric tons, Hu’s Sargassum Watch System shows.

Looking ahead, more seaweed will move up the east coast of Florida in August, while the eastern Caribbean will continue experiencing large amounts through September 2020 with many beaching events, Hu said. The western Caribbean will also experience moderate to large amounts.

The algae is not a killer of marine life like red tide or toxic to humans as harmful algae blooms.

In normal years, sargassum is actually a good thing: the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic supports a wide range of species and plays a crucial role in sustaining the early life cycles of whales, dolphins and migratory birds. Baby sea turtles make their way from sandy beaches in Florida and the Caribbean toward the seaweed, finding food and shelter from predators during their first years of life. It’s also a haven for species that live nowhere else, like the Sargassum fish, a frog-like fish whose appearance mimics the seaweed.

Beaches in the Caribbean, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico would historically experience small, manageable amounts of the floating algae until 2011, when unusually large beaching events occurred in all those areas. In late 2009 and 2010, an unusual pattern of winds and surface seawater circulation took place in the Sargasso Sea, taking the algae to new places and expanding its range. An extraordinary number of sunny days and more phosphorus-rich dust blown from the Sahara may have also contributed to the algae explosion.

Scientists also believe that an increase in fertilizer runoff from the Amazon and Mississippi River basins may be contributing to the blooms.

The reasons may not be fully understood yet, but the result is that massive amounts of sargassum seem to have become the new normal, said Stephen Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University. In large quantities, it can prevent newly hatched sea turtles from reaching the water and can get tangled in boat propellers, not to mention the stench as it decays.

“Sargassum is a huge issue for destinations like Barbados or Cancun in Mexico because it’s chasing tourists away,” he said. The Mexican navy is building a fleet of ships to collect the blooms before they reach its famed beaches while Barbados has called on other Caribbean nations to come up with regional solutions to deal with the scourge.

In Hollywood, the city has been using modified tractors to mix the seaweed with sand early in the morning to get the beach ready for visitors. But that wasn’t enough for Valeria Prieto, a visitor from Mexico City. She walked tentatively to the surf, tiptoeing around the thicker piles of sargassum. She quickly dipped her feet in the water and walked back to her beach chair.

“Even if things are better here than in other places like Cancun, it’s the same seaweed, and it’s just nasty,” she said.

———

©2020 Miami Herald

Seagulls lay in the sand as Monica Madrigal find her way to the ocean through a thick raft of Sargassum seaweed that washed up on the seashore by the 71st Street area in Miami Beach Tuesday July 28, 2020. - Pedro Portal/Miami Herald/TNS

REVEALED: Trump wasted half a billion on 10,000 ventilators that won’t arrive until September 2022

n August 2, 2020
By Daniel Villarreal, New Civil Rights Movement

THE THREE STOOGES

A new report from the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that the Trump Administration repeatedly delayed an Obama-era order from the health-technology company Philips for 10,000 ventilators, wasting half-a-billion dollars for machines that won’t even arrive until September 2022.

According to the report, in 2014, the Obama Administration signed a contract with Philips to add 10,000 ventilators to the nation’s stockpile by June 2019. Though Philips delayed the fulfillment until November 2019, had they been held to that deadline, the nation would have had plenty of ventilators for when the coronavirus epidemic started in March 2020.

However, the Trump Administration granted Philips three extensions.

“On January 21, 2020, when the first coronavirus case was reported in the United States,” the report states, “Philips approached the Trump Administration about accelerating the delivery of ventilators under its existing contract. The Trump Administration ignored this opportunity, and for six weeks, it did not respond to Philips’ offer.”

When Peter Navarro — Assistant to the President, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy — and other senior officials in the White House negotiated a new contract with Philips, they ended up scrapping the Obama-era terms and agreed to pay almost five-times the price set under those terms.

While Philips had sold ventilators to other purchasers for prices as low as $9,327 per unit, the Trump Administration ended up paying $50,000 per unit.

“The documents show that the Administration accepted Philips’ first offer without even trying to negotiate a lower price,” the report reads.

The ventilators may arrive after a vaccine for the illness does. In the meanwhile, the U.S. has surpassed over 156,000 coronavirus deaths.

This revelation comes just a day after Vanity Fair revealed that the Trump White House scrapped a national testing plan for the epidemic, thinking that coronavirus would mostly kill of blue states voters and the administration could then blame Democratic governors for it.

SpaceX capsule and NASA crew make 1st splashdown in 45 years

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In this frame grab from NASA TV, the SpaceX capsule is lifted onto a ship, Sunday, Aug. 2, 2020 in the Gulf of Mexico. Astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken spent a little over two months on the International Space Station. It will mark the first splashdown in 45 years for NASA astronauts and the first time a private company has ferried people from orbit. (NASA TV via AP)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Two NASA astronauts returned to Earth on Sunday in a dramatic, retro-style splashdown, their capsule parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico to close out an unprecedented test flight by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.

It was the first splashdown by U.S. astronauts in 45 years, with the first commercially built and operated spacecraft to carry people to and from orbit. The return clears the way for another SpaceX crew launch as early as next month and possible tourist flights next year.

Test pilots Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode the SpaceX Dragon capsule back to Earth less than a day after departing the International Space Station and two months after blasting off from Florida. The capsule parachuted into the calm gulf waters about 40 miles off the coast of Pensacola, hundreds of miles from Tropical Storm Isaias pounding Florida’s Atlantic coast.

“Welcome back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX,” said Mission Control from SpaceX headquarters.

“It was truly our honor and privilege,” replied Hurley.

The astronauts’ ride home in the capsule dubbed Endeavour was fast, bumpy and hot, at least on the outside.

The spacecraft went from a screaming orbital speed of 17,500 mph (28,000 kph) to 350 mph (560 kph) during atmospheric reentry, and finally to 15 mph (24 kph) at splashdown. Peak heating during descent was 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,900 degrees Celsius). The anticipated top G forces felt by the crew: four to five times the force of Earth’s gravity.

“Endeavour has you loud and clear,” Hurley radioed following a brief communication blackout caused by the heat of atmospheric entry.

Within a half-hour of splashdown, the scorched and blistered 15-foot capsule was on board a SpaceX recovery ship with more than 40 staff, including doctors and nurses. To keep the returning astronauts safe in the pandemic, the recovery crew quarantined for two weeks and were tested for the coronavirus.

The opening of the hatch was held up by extra checks for toxic rocket fumes. After medical exams, the astronauts were expected to fly home to Houston for a reunion with their wives and sons.
The last time NASA astronauts returned from space to water was on July 24, 1975, in the Pacific, the scene of most splashdowns, to end a joint U.S.-Soviet mission known as Apollo-Soyuz. The Mercury and Gemini crews in the early to mid-1960s parachuted into the Atlantic, while most of the later Apollo capsules hit the Pacific. The lone Russian “splashdown” was in 1976 on a partially frozen lake amid a blizzard following an aborted mission; the harrowing recovery took hours.

SpaceX made history with this mission, which launched May 30 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. It was the first time a private company launched people into orbit and also the first launch of NASA astronauts from home turf in nearly a decade. Hurley came full circle, serving as pilot of NASA’s last space shuttle flight in 2011 and the commander of this SpaceX flight.

Musk monitored the descent and splashdown from SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, California.

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, who both watched the launch in Florida, sent their congratulations via Twitter.

“Great to have NASA Astronauts return to Earth after very successful two month mission. Thank you to all!” Trump tweeted.

NASA turned to SpaceX and also Boeing to build capsules and ferry astronauts to and from the space station, following the retirement of the shuttles. Until Hurley and Behnken rocketed into orbit, NASA astronauts relied on Russian rockets. SpaceX already had experience hauling cargo to the space station, bringing those capsules back to a Pacific splashdown.

“This is the next era in human spaceflight where NASA gets to be the customer,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said from Johnson Space Center in Houston shortly before the astronauts’ return.


SpaceX needs six weeks to inspect the capsule before launching the next crew around the end of September. This next mission of four astronauts will spend a full six months aboard the space station. Hurley and Behnken’s capsule will be refurbished for another flight next spring. A Houston company run by a former NASA official, meanwhile, has partnered with SpaceX to send three customers to the space station in fall 2021.

Boeing doesn’t expect to launch its first crew until next year. The company encountered significant software problems in the debut of its Starliner capsule, with no one aboard, last year. Its capsules will touch down in the U.S. Southwest desert.

By beating Boeing, SpaceX laid claim to a small U.S. flag left at the space station by Hurley and the rest of the last shuttle crew. The flag — which also flew on the first shuttle flight — was carefully packed aboard the Dragon for the homecoming.

Also on board: a toy dinosaur named Tremor, sent into space by the astronauts’ young sons.

The boys recorded a wake-up call for their fathers Sunday morning, urging them to “rise and shine” and “we can’t wait to see you.”

“Don’t worry, you can sleep in tomorrow,” said Behnken’s 6-year-old son Theo, who was promised a puppy after the flight. “Hurry home so we can go get my dog.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Facebook bows to Brazil judge, blocks 12 accounts worldwide

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — Facebook announced Saturday it has obeyed a Brazilian judge’s order for a worldwide block on the accounts of 12 of President Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters who are under investigation for allegedly running a fake news network.

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes said Friday night that the company had failed to fully comply with a previous ruling ordering the accounts to be shut down, saying they were still online and publishing by changing their registration to locations outside Brazil.

Facebook issued a statement saying it complied due to the threat of criminal liability for an employee in Brazil.

But it called the new order “extreme,” saying it poses a “threat to freedom of expression outside of Brazil’s jurisdiction and conflicting with laws and jurisdictions worldwide.” The company said it would appeal to the full court.

Facebook also argued it had complied with the previous order by “restricting the ability for the target Pages and Profiles to be seen from IP locations in Brazil”.

“People from IP locations in Brazil were not capable of seeing these Pages and Profiles even if the targets had changed their IP location”, the company said.

Moraes said that Facebook ought to pay $ 367,000 in penalties for not complying with his previous decision during the last eight days.

He also had ruled Twitter should block the accounts. While Twitter said then the decision was “disproportionated” under Brazil’s freedom of speech rules and that it would appeal, the targeted profiles were disabled.

Moraes is overseeing a controversial investigation to determine whether some of Bolsonaro’s most ardent allies are running a social media network aimed at spreading threats and fake news against Supreme Court justices.

The probe is one of the main points of confrontation between Bolsonaro and the Supreme Court.

The president himself filed a lawsuit last week demanding the accounts to be unblocked.