#DEFUNDTHEPENTAGON

Biden’s Pentagon Backs Missile Defense After a $1.2 Billion Flop

(Bloomberg) -- The Biden administration is pressing ahead with efforts to develop a successor to a failed missile interceptor project that cost $1.2 billion, awarding an initial contract as soon as this month to two of the three biggest U.S. defense contractors.

© Photographer: SAUL LOEB/AFP The Pentagon, Washington, DC.

The decision to proceed is one of the first procurement decisions under new Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency plans to choose two winners for five-year design and development contracts from teams led by Northrop Grumman Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co.

The agency “continues to adhere to established source selection processes as they evaluate each of the proposals and anticipates being ready for contract award this month,” Pentagon spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell said in an email. The Defense Department’s independent cost analysis unit must complete its program estimate before the award, she said.

The competition will culminate with a winner-take-all selection to build as many as 20 new warheads after a “Critical Design Review” scheduled for no later than 2026, a date the agency hopes to accelerate. The new warheads are intended to crash into and destroy incoming missiles from an adversary such as North Korea and Iran. They would be installed on missile interceptors based in Alaska, adding to 44 with earlier model warheads already in place in silos there and in California.

The “Next Generation Interceptor” is intended to correct the mistakes of a failed warhead program that spanned the Obama and Trump administrations before it was canceled in August 2019 after $1.2 billion was spent on a project meant for deployment in 2023.

The Missile Defense Agency and the contractors on that project -- Boeing and the company now known as Raytheon Technologies Corp. -- had multiple opportunities since 2010 to address issues leading to the cancellation, according to the Government Accountability Office in a report last year.

Countering ‘Adventurism’

“The Biden administration can prove it can do missile defense better than the Trump administration” by keeping the program on track, said Tim Morrison, a former Trump administration National Security Council official who’s now an analyst with the Hudson Institute. He said modernizing the ground-based missile defense system would strengthen Biden’s hand against North Korea and Iran and also create “deterrence against the reckless adventurism of Russia and China.”

In the new competition, Boeing has teamed with General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems; Northrop Grumman is working with Raytheon; and Lockheed has teamed with Aeroject Rocketdyne.

The estimated total cost if the earlier “Redesigned Kill Vehicle” had been completed had ballooned to $2.91 billion by the time it was canceled. That was up from an original $870 million estimate in 2015.

According to the GAO, the agency and contractors “did not adequately address technical risks despite numerous warnings from subject matter experts and officials within and outside of the RKV program about the performance issues which later resulted in the program’s cancellation,” the GAO said.

Lessons learned from the failed program are being applied in the new competition with plans for early testing of parts and test flights, the GAO said in confirming the approach announced last year by Vice Admiral Jon Hill, the current director of the Missile Defense Agency.

Hill said last year that he anticipated placing the first of the defensive missiles in the ground “after sufficient intercept testing as early as 2028.”


©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY (plawiuk.blogspot.com)

FROM THE FOREST OF DRUIDS
France searches for centuries-old oak trees to rebuild Notre Dame's spire

France is on the hunt for 100-year-old oak trees to rebuild the famed wooden spire of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, which was destroyed by fire in 2019.

Jordan Fleguel 

© Provided by National Post Smoke billows as flames burn through the roof of the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral on April 15, 2019, in the French capital Paris.

Much of the world’s attention was fixed on Paris is the spring of 2019 as a blaze ripped through the famous landmark. The fire started in the church’s attic and spread quickly throughout the roof, eventually reaching the spire, which became engulfed in flames and collapsed.

French President Emmanuel Macron initially hinted that the spire’s reconstruction could incorporate a “contemporary gesture,” but announced last summer that the spire would be rebuild exactly as it was.

Close to 1,000 oaks, each aged between 150 and 200 years, will be used to reconstruct the spire. The trees will need to be 50 to 90cm (20 to 36 inches) in diameter and between 8 and 14 metres (26 and 46 feet) tall.

Macron hopes that the spire and all additional reconstruction work will be completed by the spring of 2024, in time for the Paris Summer Olympics.

Authorities are now scouring the French countryside for oak trees and, if Macron’s deadline is to be met, the trees must be chopped down by late March before their sap rises or the wood will be too humid.

The trunks will be left to dry for up to 18 months before being cut into beams for the spire.

“For now, we are in the phase of selecting the trees according to the frame that will be needed for the spire. We will choose trees in the forest according to their dimensions: height, diameter, quality,” François Hauet, vice-president of the Normande association of Forest Experts, told France Inter.

Philippe Gourmain, who is coordinating the search for suitable oaks as a member of the forestry professionals group France Bois Forêt, tells the Guardian: “We will be using a little of France’s history to remake this historic wooden structure.”

France’s private forest owners are lining up for the honour of donating their oak trees to the project.

“It will be a matter of pride if some of our trees are used for Notre Dame,” the owner of a 250-hectare forest told the Guardian. “It also shows how our forests are well maintained and are an asset for the country.”

© Getty Images Notre-Dame cathedral, summer 2015.

The deputy director of France’s National Forests Office, Dominique de Villebonne, told Le Parisien that the search for suitable oaks will lead them to trees that are “very old, including plantations ordered by former kings to build ships and ensure the grandeur of the French fleet.”

“At the same time as leaving other trees to stand for a long time, we are also planting new ones so future generations can create their own exceptional works,” she added.

Notre Dame was constructed in the 12th Century, with the spire added by architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in 1859.

Reconstruction is expected to begin in early 2022.

#WATERISLIFE

Nestlé sells North American water operations

WELLINGTON COUNTY — Swiss food and beverage giant Nestlé has continued the strategic transformation of its water business with the sale of Nestlé Waters North America to One Rock Capital Partners in partnership with Metropoulos and Co.

The $4.3 billion US sale, which was announced early Wednesday in Switzerland, includes the Canadian Pure Life brand, Poland Spring, Deer Park and Ozarka Brands are among the American labels that are included in the sale.

The company’s international premium brands such as Perrier, S. Pellegrino and Acqua Panna are not included in the sale.

One Rock Capital Partners is a private equity firm with headquarters in New York City. Metropoulos and Co. is a Connecticut-based investment firm specializing in reviving food and beverage brands.

Last year, Nestlé tried to sell its Canadian Pure Life brand to Canadian water bottling company Ice River Springs, but the deal did not meet the requirements of the Competition Bureau.

At the same time, a group of water advocates in the area called on Nestlé to return local wells to their municipalities rather than include them in a sale of the company’s North American properties. The advocates, known as the Wellington Water Watchers, say the Aberfoyle well should be given to the Six Nations of the Grand River, a water insecure community that claims ownership as part of the Haldimand Proclamation and the 1701 Nanfan Treaty.

Leah Gerber’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative. The funding allows her to report on stories about the Grand River Watershed. Email lgerber@therecord.com

Leah Gerber, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Waterloo Region Record

Benchmark lumber prices jump to a record US$1,000 despite slowdown in sales volumes

CALGARY — Homebuyers and renovators hoping for a mid-winter price slump are instead being greeted with new all-time record high prices for lumber and oriented strandboard (OSB) building panels.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Western SPF (spruce, pine, fir) lumber prices rose to a four-digit close for the first time on Tuesday, reaching US$1,000 per thousand board feet, according to a report from CIBC analyst Hamir Patel, citing market watcher Random Lengths.

"The trade magazine pointed to a moderation in sales pace due to cold weather, but prices continued to trend higher," Patel wrote.

"Mills also had difficulty shipping orders given the snow and cold temperatures, while heavy rain hampered logging in some regions."

The North American composite lumber price rose about one per cent to an all-time high of US$979, he said.

Meanwhile, the price of benchmark North Central region OSB panels increased by 1.2 per cent from Friday to a record US$845 per thousand square feet, while OSB pricing in Western Canada improved by the same percentage to an all-time high of US$870.

The impact of higher prices are affecting producers as well as consumers.

Video: Housing demand rising to levels not seen in nearly a decade (Global News)

On Tuesday, Louisiana-Pacific Corp. announced a plan to restart production at the Peace Valley OSB Mill in Fort St. John, B.C., which was shut down in 2019 because of low prices at the cost of about 200 jobs.

"Long-term demographic data and a structural undersupply of housing suggests continued tailwinds for demand. As a result, we have begun the process to restart production of OSB at Peace Valley," said Brad Southern on an earnings conference call.

Last week, B.C.-based lumber producer Interfor Corp. announced it would buy a sawmill in South Carolina from WestRock Co. for US$59 million in cash as part of a growth strategy fuelled by higher prices.

In a report on Tuesday, RBC analyst Paul Quinn said North American softwood lumber production increased by 7.2 per cent in November versus the same month in 2019 but consumption rose by 14.8 per cent.

"We expect that producers were running their mills near capacity as they attempted to take advantage of extremely strong pricing levels," he said, citing Western Wood Products Association statistics.

"We are now re-entering the spring building season where demand tends to peak. Buyers are covering their immediate needs while building up their inventories; however, producers are facing tight conditions with order files booked through March."

He said November production jumped by 8.2 per cent to about 2.9 billion board feet in the U.S. while Canadian production increased 5.9 per cent to about two billion board feet.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 17, 2021.

Dan Healing, The Canadian Press

Genes from NEANDERTHALS slash the risk of severe Covid-19 by 22%

Joe Pinkstone For Mailonline 

© Provided by Daily Mail MailOnline logo

Three genes inherited from Neanderthals slash the risk of severe Covid-19 by 22 per cent, a new study has revealed.

The genes sit next to each other on chromosome 12, and this large chunk of genetic material includes 75,000 individual pieces of DNA.

Researchers compared the DNA of 2,200 Covid-19 patients from around the world with the genes of three Neanderthals that lived 50,000, 70,000 and 120,000 years ago.

They found people with Neanderthal versions of the genes OAS1, OAS2 and OAS3 were less likely to develop severe symptoms after infection with the coronavirus.

These genes produce enzymes which specifically target invading RNA viruses, and the Neanderthal version is thought to be more potent.

© Provided by Daily Mail Previous research has found eight genetic locations spread across five chromosomes (3, 6, 12, 19 and 21) which are 'associated with risk of requiring intensive care upon SARS-CoV-2 infection'. However, the new analysis shows only those found at chromosome 3 and 12 come from Neanderthals (pictured). Chromosome 12 contains three genes which help fight Covi and slash risk of severe infection by 22%

Professor Hugo Zeberg and Dr Svante Pääbo from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, respectively, conducted the study.

Previous research has found eight genetic locations spread across five chromosomes (3, 6, 12, 19 and 21) which are 'associated with risk of requiring intensive care upon SARS-CoV-2 infection'.

However, the new analysis shows only those found at chromosome 3 and 12 originate from cross-species trysts between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. 

© Provided by Daily Mail Researchers compared the DNA of 2,200 Covid-19 patients from around the world with the genomes of three Neanderthals that lived 50,000, 70,000 and 120,000 years ago. They found people with neanderthal versions of the genes OAS1, OAS2 and OAS3 were less likely to develop severe symptoms after infection with the coronavirus

The chromosome 3 gene was the subject of previous research from the same team of experts.

It revealed the Neanderthal version, which is present in around one in eight people today, actually doubles the risk of needing intensive care if a person catches Covid.

But the stretch of Neanderthal DNA on chromosome 12 is more common.

It was present in around one in ten humans that lived more than 20,000 years ago, and then increased to around 15 per cent up to 10,000 years ago.

The researchers estimate it continued to become more dominant, with around a third of people who lived between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago having it.

© Provided by Daily Mail

© Provided by Daily Mail

 Pictured, a world map showing the percentage of people who have the Neanderthal versions of the OAS1, OAS2 and OAS3 genes (red portions of pie charts). Due to the ancient migratory patterns of Neanderthals and the fact they sparsely inhabited Africa before going extinct, very little Neanderthal DNA is seen in people living in sub-Saharan Africa today

Five genes make you more likely to die from coronavirus or be admitted to ICU

Five genes identified by the University of Edinburgh increase the likelihood of a Covid-19 patient being admitted to intensive care and dying.

A landmark study published in December gathered DNA from 2,700 Covid-19 patients in 208 intensive care units across the UK.

These are the most severe cases of Covid, and 22 per cent of patients studied died, with 74 per cent unable to breathe on their own and needing mechanical ventilation.

The genetic information of these patients was compared to 100,000 anonymous Britons, and five genes emerged as being extremely common in severe Covid cases.

Researchers say the discovery of five genes that appear so clearly to be linked to the disease is unprecedented in the field.

Knowing which genes are involved in severe cases of coronavirus infection can help scientists identify pre-existing drugs that could help treat Covid, the researchers say.

The genes were identified across the genome, with two on chromosome 19 called TYK2 and DPP9. One, called IFNAR2, is found on chromosome 21.

CCR2 is a gene found on chromosome four and OAS1 is located on the twelfth chromosome.

'Intriguingly, the current allele frequency in Eurasia is around 30 per cent, suggesting that the Neandertal haplotype may have increased in frequency relatively recently,' the researchers write in their paper.

They add: 'It is present in populations in Eurasia and the Americas at carrier frequencies that often reach and exceed 50 per cent.'

Dr Pääbo says it is 'striking' that two Neanderthal variants can have such drastically different impacts on human immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection.

'This shows that our heritage from Neanderthals is a double-edged sword when it comes to our response to SARS-CoV-2,' adds Professor Zeberg.

The researchers believe the location of the Neanderthal DNA on chromosome 12 is key, as it includes three genes (OAS1, OAS2 and OAS3) which play a critical role in fighting infection.

Specifically, they help produce enzymes which target and destroy invasive RNA, such as SARS-CoV-2 which causes Covid-19.

The new research, published in the journal PNAS, also found the Neanderthal variant makes more virus-fighting enzymes than the ancestral Homo sapien alternative.

'One may speculate that, when modern humans encountered new RNA viruses outside Africa, the higher enzymatic activity of the ancestral variants that they acquired through genetic interactions with Neandertals may have been advantageous,' the researchers write.

'Intriguingly, there is evidence that the Neanderthal-like OAS haplotype may have recently increased in frequency in Eurasia, suggesting that selection may have positively affected the Neandertal-derived OAS locus in the last millennium.'

Due to the ancient migratory patterns of Neanderthals and the fact they sparsely inhabited Africa before going extinct, very little Neanderthal DNA is seen in people living in sub-Saharan Africa today.

In fact, the researchers say the Neanderthal Covid-fighting genes are 'almost completely absent' from these populations.

'In the Americas, it occurs in lower frequencies in some populations of African ancestry, presumably due to gene flow from populations of European or Native American ancestry,' they add in the paper.

The latest study backs up previous findings from a separate team of researchers from Canada, which also came to the conclusion the OAS1 gene reduces the risk of serious illness, hospitalisation and death from Covid-19.

Although they did not look at the gene's origin, they did find five genes which increase the odds of severe infection.

Four of these genes — TYK2 and DPP9 on chromosome 19; IFNAR on chromosome 21 and OAS on chromosome 12 — were also studied by the latest study.

Neanderthals and Homo erectus went extinct due to bouts of sudden and intense climate change, study claims


Neanderthals and Homo erectus, both cousins of modern-day humans, went extinct due to sudden, and unexpectedly intense, bouts of climate change.

Scientists have long sought to understand the fate of our long-lost brethren, and previous studies have indicated climate change likely plays a major role.

Computer analysis, published today, reveals the hominins failed to adapt to a rapidly changing climate.

Researchers investigated temperature, rainfall and other data over the last five million years to get a gauge of the climate for every 1,000-year window.

They also modelled the evolution of Homo species' through time by plundering an extensive database of more than 2,750 fossils.

The analysis revealed three Homo species - H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthalensis - lost most of their 'climatic niche' just before going extinct.

Climactic niche describes a locale where conditions are just right for the species to survive, not too hot, dry, cold or barren.

According to the researchers, Neanderthals were wiped out around 40,000 years ago and Homo erectus went extinct 70,000 years before that.

Climate change may be behind the massive craters forming in Siberia

The massive crater appeared violently and explosively in the Siberian tundra last year -- a powerful blowout of methane gas throwing ice and rock hundreds of feet away and leaving a gaping circular scar in the empty and eerie landscape.

© From Igor Bogoyavlensky/Skoltech

It was the 17th hole to appear in the remote Yamal and Gyda peninsulas in the Russian Arctic since the first was spotted in 2013, mystifying scientists. The craters are thought to be linked to climate change. Drone photography, 3D modeling and artificial intelligence are helping to reveal their secrets.

"The new crater is uniquely well preserved, as surface water hadn't yet accumulated in the crater when we surveyed it, which allowed us to study a 'fresh' crater, untouched by degradation," said Evgeny Chuvilin, lead research scientist at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology's Center for Hydrocarbon Recovery in Moscow.

It was also the first time researchers have been able to fly a drone deep into a crater -- reaching 10 to 15 meters below ground, allowing them to capture the shape of the underground cavity where methane had built up.

Chuvilin was part of a team of Russian scientists who visited the crater in August 2020. Their findings were published in the journal Geosciences last week.

Climate change

The drone took around 80 images, allowing the researchers to build a 3D model of the crater, which is 30 meters deep -- imagine three buses end to end.

Study author Igor Bogoyavlensky, of the Oil and Gas Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, served as the drone pilot and said he had to lie down on the edge of the 10-story deep crater and dangle his arms over the edge to control the drone.

"Three times we got close to losing it, but succeeded in getting the data for the 3D model," he said.

The model, which showed unusual grottoes or caverns in the lower part of the crater, largely confirmed what scientists had hypothesized: Methane gas builds in a cavity in the ice, causing a mound to appear at ground level. The mound grows in size before blowing out ice and other debris in an explosion and leaving behind the massive crater.

What's still unclear is the source of the methane. It could come from deep layers within the Earth or closer to the surface -- or a combination of the two.

Permafrost is a huge natural reservoir of methane, a potent greenhouse gas much more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat and warming the planet. Warmer summers -- the Arctic is warming two times faster than the global average -- have weakened the permafrost layer, which acts as a cap, making it easier for gas to escape. Some experts estimate that soils in the permafrost region hold twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does, making the region extremely important in the fight against climate change.

"Climate change, of course, has an impact on the probability of gas blowout craters appearing in the Arctic permafrost," Chuvilin said.

With the use of satellite imagery, the researchers were also able to pinpoint when the crater formed. They believe the mound would have exploded at some point between May 15 and June 9, 2020. The crater was first spotted during a helicopter flight on July 16, 2020.

The timing was not random, according to Chuvilin. "This is the time of the year when there's a lot of solar energy influx, which causes the snow to melt and the upper layers of the ground to heat up, and that causes changes in their properties and behavior."

While these craters have appeared in a very sparsely populated region, they do pose risks to Indigenous people and to oil and gas infrastructure. The holes are usually found by accident during helicopter flights or by reindeer herders.

Mapping and predicting crater blowouts

While 17 craters have been documented so far, it's not known how many there are in total or when the next one could blow out.

Scientists don't yet have good tools for detecting and mapping the gas emission craters, although a team at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts is trying to change that.

To log changes in the Arctic landscape, and perhaps ultimately predict where the next blowout crater might occur, the researchers have devised an algorithm to quantify changes to features such as the height of mounds and the expansion or shrinking of lakes on the Yamal and Gyda peninsulas.

The scientists' model correctly predicted all seven craters that had been reported by scientists by 2017 and revealed the formation of three new ones.

The researchers also found that the craters are just one unsettling sign that the northernmost reaches of our planet are undergoing radical changes.

Some 5% of the 327,000 square kilometers the team surveyed saw abrupt changes in landscape between 1984 and 2017. These changes included ground collapses, the formation of new lakes and disappearance of others, plus the erosion of river bends, according to the research, which published in the Geosciences journal in January.

"These craters represent a ... process that was previously unknown to scientists," said Sue Natali, Arctic program director at the Woodwell Climate Research Center and coauthor of the study, in a statement.

"The craters and other abrupt changes occurring across the Arctic landscape are indicative of a rapidly warming and thawing Arctic, which can have severe consequences for Arctic residents and globally."

© From Dr. Evgeny Chuvilin/Skoltech Massive craters have been appearing in parts of the Russian Arctic. This one appeared between May 15 and June 9, 2020.

© From Dr. Evgeny Chuvilin/Skoltech The crater is 30 meters deep. 

Scientists made a 3D model of it by using images taken by a drone.

Russian scientists seek ancient viruses in body of frozen 4,500-year-old Siberian horse
Shari Kulha 

The remains of a 4,500-year-old horse, found in melted Siberian permafrost in 2009, is undergoing analysis in a Russian lab researching ancient viruses.

© Provided by National Post Scientists in Russia remove samples from a horse that had been frozen in permafrost.

A former centre for the development of biological weapons in Soviet times, the Vektor laboratory is one of only two facilities in the world to store the smallpox virus, and has developed the EpiVacCorona vaccine, which is scheduled to begin mass production later this month.

But in collaboration with the University of Yakutsk, the lab in the Novosibirsk region is now searching for paleoviruses in prehistoric animals, including mammoths, elk, dogs, partridges, rodents and hares, furthering study into virus evolution.

The chief of the university’s Mammoth Museum lab, Maxim Cheprasov, said in a press release that the recovered animals had already been the subject of bacterial studies. “We are conducting studies on paleoviruses for the first time.”

Finding prehistoric animals in permafrost is happening more often as climate change warms the Arctic at a faster pace than the rest of the world, thawing the ground in some areas that have stored ancient viruses for millennia.

In Siberia’s region of Yakutia, melting permafrost was likely to yield up even more treasures , The Guardian reported in 2016, with the number of reported prehistoric finds rising “severalfold” in the previous decade as warm and wet weather contributed to the thaw. A pair of frozen three-month-old puppies found in 2011 drew global interest to scientific and cultural secrets to be gleaned from such animals.

In Russia, indigenous peoples have rights to hunt for ancient remains on ancestral lands. They now search for mammoth tusks to sell direct to China , where the ivory — now in demand, given trade bans on elephant ivory — is fashioned into jewellery, trinkets, knives and other decorations, the Guardian says.

Woolly mammoth ivory up to 30,000 years old and preserved in the permafrost in the Yakutia region makes up 80 per cent of Russia’s trade in a largely unregulated market worth more than US$50 million a year, Russian officials told the Guardian. If any paleoviruses still exist in the animals and are able to revive themselves, any number of unknown diseases could be released.

In other parts of the world, scientists are studying glacial microbes . Two ice core samples from 50 metres deep in the Guliya ice cap on the Tibetan Plateau were collected in 1992 and 2015, and analysis revealed 33 groups of virus genuses. Of these, 28 were previously unknown to science. According to the study, melting glaciers are releasing microbes and viruses that have been trapped for tens to hundreds of thousands of years.

Chantal Abergel, a researcher in environmental virology at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, led a team that revived a 30,000-year-old giant virus from permafrost, showing that it could still infect its target, a single-celled amoeba.

The world's oldest DNA has been discovered, scientists announced in a new study published Wednesday.

  

© Beth Zaiken/CPG An artist's conception of ancient steppe mammoths, which preceded the woolly mammoth. The DNA was obtained from a tooth of a steppe mammoth.

The DNA, which is more than 1 million years old, was recovered from two specimens of steppe mammoth, a predecessor to the more well-known woolly mammoth. The oldest previously sequenced DNA had dated from 780,000 to 560,000 years ago, the study said

"This DNA is incredibly old. The samples are a thousand times older than Viking remains, and even predate the existence of humans and Neanderthals," study lead author Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, said in a news release.

The DNA came from the molars of mammoth specimens from the Early and Middle Pleistocene subepochs from northeast Siberia. The teeth had been buried for more than 1 million years in the Siberian permafrost.

The coronavirus vaccine wasn't the only amazing discovery: A look at all the ways science thrived in 2020

Extracting the DNA from the samples was "challenging," the scientists said, adding that only minute amounts of DNA remained in the samples and that the DNA was degraded into very small fragments. 

The mammoth specimens were first uncovered in the 1970s, and since then they have been stored in Moscow's Russian Academy of Sciences. 

The mammoth was not actually a woolly mammoth: About 1 million years ago there were no woolly mammoths; they had not yet evolved. This was the time of their predecessor, the ancient steppe mammoth, a species from Europe that scientists believe predated both woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths, a North American species. 

The DNA is helping to sort out the genetic history of mammoths and how they migrated and evolved around the world, scientists said. In addition, the study provides new insights into when and how fast mammoths adapted to cold climates. 

The new results also open the door for future studies on other species, researchers say. About 1 million years ago, many animal species expanded across the globe, according to the study. This was also a time period of major changes in climate and sea levels, as well as the last time Earth’s magnetic poles changed places.

Because of that, the researchers believe genetic analyses on this time scale have great potential to explore a wide range of scientific questions.

“One of the big questions now is how far back in time we can go," said Anders Götherström, a professor in molecular archaeology and joint research leader at the Centre for Palaeogenetics. 

"We haven’t reached the limit yet," Götherström said. "An educated guess would be that we could recover DNA that is 2 million years old, and possibly go even as far back as 2.6 million. Before that, there was no permafrost where ancient DNA could have been preserved."

The study was published in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature. 

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: World's oldest DNA discovered in 1.2-million-year-old mammoth teeth

In a mammoth's molar, scientists get a glimpse of evolution in action
Tom Metcalfe 

Some of the secrets of evolution could be found in the molar teeth of three mammoths that roamed northeastern Siberia — two of them more than a million years ago.

© Provided by NBC News

A research team on Wednesday published a study in the journal Nature detailing the successful collection of DNA from fossilized mammoths, making it by far the oldest genetic material ever studied.

And its age is only part of its importance. Scientists said they can compare the DNA samples to reveal how the genetics of an earlier species changed as it evolved into a later species, also known as speciation.

“This is the first time that anyone has ever sampled before and after a speciation event, to trace the genomic changes that happen during speciation,” said Love Dalén, a professor in evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm and an author of the study.

The oldest “ancient DNA” previously recovered was from the remains of a Siberian horse about half as old as the mammoths.

The study describes research on the fossils of three mammoths unearthed in the 1970s by Russian paleontologists. They’ve since been kept in archaeological collections, and the new study used DNA extracted from their molar teeth, Dalén said.

© Love Dalén A tusk from a woolly mammoth discovered in a creek bed on Siberia's Wrangel Island in 2017. (Love Dalén)

One crucial factor in the work was that the fossils were surrounded by permafrost – a layer of subsoil in polar regions that stays frozen throughout the year. DNA degrades rapidly when it is exposed to liquid water, and so the frozen soil was pivotal to recovering such ancient genetic material, he said.

The researchers have dubbed the oldest mammoth fossil “Krestovka,” and say the age of the permafrost layer where it was found suggests it is about 1.65 million years old.

Another fossil,“Adycha,” dates from about 1.34 million years ago, while the third,“Chukochya,” dates from about 870,000 years ago. The three names come from rivers in Siberia.

The genetics of all three mammoths, revealed in the sequences of millions of genes produced from their ancient DNA, show there were two distinct lineages of what are called “steppe mammoths” (Mammathus trogontherii) in Siberia about a million years ago, although only one lineage was known about, Dalén said.

Adycha and Chukochya came from the line that gave rise about 700,000 years ago to the woolly mammoth species (Mammathus primigenius), but Krestovka belonged to the previously unrecognized lineage.

Examinations of its genetic material suggested that the Krestovka lineage diverged from other mammoths 1.78 million to 2.66 million years ago, and that it was ancestral to the first mammoths to colonize North America, he said.

© Love Dalén A woolly mammoth tusk emerging from permafrost on Wrangel Island in northeastern Siberia. (Love Dalén)

Some scientists claimed in the 1990s that they had recovered genetic material from fossilized dinosaur eggs dated to more than 140 million years ago, but those studies used a method of DNA analysis called PCR – polymerase chain reaction – which has been found inadequate, Dalén said.

The latest study used a more accurate method called “shotgun sequencing,” which reproduces distinctive damage in parts of the DNA genome that shows it is authentically ancient, he said.

The recovery of such ancient DNA raises the possibility it could be used to “resurrect” extinct mammoths, perhaps by modifying the genetics of an elephant fetus – elephants and mammoths shared a common ancient ancestor about 6 million years ago.

But Dalén said he is skeptical that such an idea could work, because comparatively little of the entire genome of extinct mammoths can be recovered in ancient DNA samples.

The prospects for using ancient DNA techniques for studying human evolution may be slightly better.

Paleontologists have found numerous fossils of our ancestral species, some dating back millions of years, but only in warm regions where their DNA is not preserved by permafrost, Dalén said.

However, there remains a possibility that fossils of ancestral human species might someday be found frozen in the permafrost of the far north, and these techniques could be used on them, he said

.

Alfred Roca, a geneticist and professor of animal sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said the study means biologists can now use ancient DNA to study genetic changes as extinct species diverged from each other: “You don’t have to infer things, you don’t have to use some sort of deductive method; you can actually see the DNA.”

Roca, who researches the genetics of modern elephants, was not involved in the latest study but reviewed it for Nature.

He said one future step might be to use the new ancient DNA techniques on the fossils of other animals preserved in the permafrost, especially small rodents such as pikas, voles and lemmings.

“Genomics has been pushed into deep time by the giants of the Ice Age — the wee mammals that surrounded them might soon also have their day,” Roca wrote.

Texas blackouts explained: 

Arctic weather shut down power plants as demand for heat surged, and the state's grid is on its own

TEXAS; THE STATE OF PRIVATIZATION

AND LOW TAXES

bjones@businessinsider.com (Benji Jones)

 Service trucks lining up after a snowstorm in Fort Worth, Texas. Winter Storm Uri has brought historic cold weather and power outages to the state this week. Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

Half a million Texans were still without power Thursday morning as arctic weather pummeled the state.

The cold weather caused energy sources to go offline just as demand for electricity went up.

Climate change could make events like these more frequent, experts say.

Almost half a million Texans are still without power Thursday as arctic weather continues to pummel the state. The blackout, which affected a few million residents at its peak, is among the largest in US history.

"We know millions of people are suffering," Bill Magness, the president of Texas' electric-grid manager, ERCOT, said in a statement Wednesday. "We have no other priority than getting them electricity."

ERCOT said it made "significant progress" Wednesday night, but outages are expected to continue through the week. About 490,000 customers are without power as of Thursday morning, according to an outage tracking site.

Misinformation spread online on Tuesday as some conservative groups and lawmakers falsely blamed the blackouts on frozen wind turbines that quit generating power. In reality, thermal energy sources that went offline, such as natural-gas plants, contributed more to the problem.

But the drop in the energy supply is just part of the reason so many people in Texas lost power this week. Here's what you need to know.

A man walking in a neighborhood without electricity in Pflugerville, Texas. Bronte Wittpenn/Austin American-Statesman/USA Today Network via Reuters

The simple reason that millions lost power: A gap between supply and demand

A major winter storm that hit Texas over the long weekend caused two important things to happen: Sources of electricity, like natural-gas plants, went offline, and demand for the energy they produce went up as people across the state turned on heaters to stay warm.

That caused a massive shortfall in energy.

The organization that manages most of Texas' grid, known as ERCOT, or the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, responded by cutting power to millions of homes in chunks, to limit the time any one household was dark. These so-called rolling blackouts are similar to what happened in California last year, also during extreme weather.

On Thursday morning, 40 gigawatts of electricity were offline in ERCOT's territory, down from 46 gigawatts Wednesday. This is one of the largest shortfalls in energy supply in modern US history, Patrick Milligan, a manager and power expert at the consulting firm ICF, told Insider.
Most of the supply that went offline was coal and natural gas, not wind

About 60% of the energy sources offline in Texas on Wednesday and Thursday were thermal - that is, power plants that run on coal, natural gas, or nuclear energy - while the rest was from solar and wind farms, ERCOT said.

Cold weather is the obvious culprit: All different kinds of power plants in Texas, not just wind turbines, have trouble operating in arctic weather as their instruments freeze. In fact, earlier this week, wind farms were overperforming forecasts, said Rebecca Miller, a research manager at Wood Mackenzie who tracks output across the state.

It can be more difficult to pump natural gas out of the ground or transport it to power plants in freezing conditions. What's more, utilities have prioritized sending natural gas to homes for heating instead of to power plants, Miller said

.

© Nick Oxford/Reuters Wind turbines in Loraine, Texas. 

There are less obvious drivers behind the Texas blackouts

The US is made up of three major electric grids, and one of them overlaps almost entirely with Texas.

In other words, Texas essentially has its own grid.

That can exacerbate a situation like this by making it harder for Texas to draw power from other regions that aren't under the same weather-related stress, said Emily Grubert, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at Georgia Tech who studies large infrastructure.

"The entire grid of Texas is subjected to this emergency condition at once," Grubert said. "That's a lot of pressure to be putting on a grid that doesn't have access to other areas that aren't under those conditions."

But other issues were at play, such as a lack of preparedness - on the sides of both supply and demand.

Homeowners weren't told to do much to conserve energy, Miller said. Meanwhile, power plants weren't properly weatherized.

Take wind turbines: They have no problem operating in much colder states than Texas. Minnesota and Iowa, for example, have large wind farms, but they don't suffer blackouts when temperatures plunge to single digits.

"Wind can operate perfectly in cold weather," Milligan said.

Like natural-gas and coal-fired power plants, wind turbines can be weatherized to withstand tough winter conditions. But weatherization costs money, and turbines in Texas generally aren't equipped for cold weather.

"Why would you have a snowplow in Austin? That kind of same thinking applies to the power plants," Grubert said.
It didn't have to get this bad

This isn't the first time Texas has been hit by an arctic burst. In 2011, around the Super Bowl, cold weather swept through the state, plunging millions of people into darkness.

That's left many people wondering: Why didn't energy producers and regulators do more to prepare for this cold spell?

That summer, a federal report recommended things like weatherization to prevent supply from going offline in the future, the Houston Chronicle reported.

But a lot of that advice wasn't followed, Milligan said, partly because it wasn't enforceable and there was no mechanism in place to pay for it. Weatherization is expensive, he said.

Plus, Texas' energy market is deregulated, and suppliers there try to produce energy as cheaply as possible, Milligan added.

"The generators are not really incentivized to undertake these kinds of [weatherization] investments," Milligan said.

It would have been hard to completely prevent these blackouts, experts told Insider; this kind of weather really is unusual for Texas. But they said the effects would not have been so devastating if companies had done more to prepare.

© David J. Phillip/AP A car driving on snow- and sleet-covered roads in Spring, Texas. David J. Phillip/AP

More blackouts are coming if we don't do more to prepare

The irony of blaming wind turbines for the power outages in Texas is that extreme weather events are made worse by climate change, which is fueled by burning coal and natural gas. In theory, wind and solar farms offset emissions spewed into the atmosphere, lessening the impact of climate change.

"Can you expect more extremes? Yes," Grubert said. "In terms of what that means for the grid, that's a question that we as a society will have to grapple with."

It's important not only to prevent outages outright but to ensure that we have ways to keep people safe when the grid goes down, she said.

"Even if the energy system had stayed up, there would have been a lot of people in trouble during this event," she said, such as those who may not have access to heat.

The importance of managing demand, such as through measures that make buildings more energy-efficient, also can't be overstated, she said.

Power lines in Fort Worth. Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

When power will be restored and what happens next

The outages are likely to continue through the week as a second winter storm brings freezing rain and sleet to the state.

"We are anticipating another cold front this evening which could increase the demand," Dan Woodfin, the senior director of system operations at ERCOT, said in a statement on Wednesday morning. "The ability to restore more power is contingent on more generation coming back online."

Gov. Greg Abbott has called the blackout event "unacceptable" and said he would add the reform of ERCOT as an emergency item for the 2021 legislative session.

"The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has been anything but reliable over the past 48 hours," Abbott said.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has also launched a task force to investigate the outages in Texas and elsewhere in the US.
Read the original article on Business Insider

Federal law on municipal gun bans could take precedence over Alberta bill, expert says
Michelle Bellefontaine 

© Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press A restricted gun licence holder carries an AR-15 at his home in Langley, B.C., on May 1, 2020. The federal government introduced new gun control legislation Tuesday that would allow municipalities to ban handguns. It may take…

New gun control legislation proposed by the federal government would likely take precedence over a private member's bill that aims to prevent Alberta municipalities from passing municipal gun bans, according to a constitutional law expert.

The federal government introduced Bill C-21 on Tuesday. The proposed legislation would give municipalities the power to ban handguns by passing bylaws on their storage and transportation.

Michaela Glasgo, the UCP MLA for Brooks-Medicine Hat, introduced Bill 211 the Municipal Government (Firearms) Amendment Act on Dec. 8.

MORMON AND DUTCH REFORM CHURCH REACTIONARIES

The existence of the two bills dealing with a similar issue raises a question about which would take precedence.

"Our system of constitutional law says that in those cases of conflict, the federal law will prevail," Eric Adams, a professor at the University of Alberta's Faculty of Law, said in an interview with CBC News on Tuesday.

Adams said the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments is set in the constitution. Usually the province has power over municipalities. But on the issue of firearms, he said the question is complicated.

"Is that valid for a province to deny the ability of the municipality to do that thing that the federal government or the Parliament of Canada specifically authorizes?" he asked.

"I can't think of a scenario that I'd seen that play out in terms of cases in the Supreme Court or other levels. So I do think we've got ourselves a reasonably novel federalism Rubik's Cube."

EVERY TIME ALBERTA REACTIONARIES CHALLENGE THE FEDS IN COURT THEY LOSE
Alberta Justice Minister Kaycee Madu thinks the law is on Alberta's side.

In a written statement issued late Tuesday afternoon, he challenged the constitutionality of the federal bill, which also introduced a buy-back program for prohibited weapons and increased penaities for gun smuggling and trafficking.

"The constitution is clear that municipalities fall under the jurisdiction of the provinces," Madu said.

"In fact, municipalities in Alberta are a creation of the provincial government. The federal bill has just been introduced, but should it pass, Alberta would vigilantly defend its jurisdiction."

Madu said passage of Glasgo's bill would be expedited by the Alberta legislature.

 
City-by-city approach panned by mayors

The federal legislation is aimed at larger cities that grapple with gun violence, but the mayors of Alberta's two largest cities were opposed to the measure.

Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi and Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson said their preference was for a consistent regional or national approach on firearms as opposed to city-by-city prohibitions.

"It's not the direction we would go in to pursue a city-specific ban when the issue of the flow of these weapons and their ties to particularly drugs and organized crime is much more than a municipality-by-municipality issue," Iveson said in a news conference Tuesday.

"I prefer one law for the country," Nenshi told reporters on Tuesday. "Even though I generally like municipalities to have more powers, I've never been in favour of this approach."

Nenshi said the recommendations of the city's public safety task force could determine whether Calgary city council was interested in municipal firearm restrictions.

In his statement, Madu said municipal gun bylaws would be be "futile" and easily ignored by criminals.

"A patchwork approach of policy varying by invisible municipal boundaries would create obvious confusion in enforcement, and the federal government clearly knows that," he said.
Alberta bill could be signal to UCP base

Adams, from the University of Alberta, said Glasgo's bill may just be a signal to the UCP base.

"Is this just another piece of a narrative that allows the UCP and their members to say we fight Ottawa at every turn? Maybe it's simply that," he said.

"And so whether or not it is ultimately effective or is upheld as constitutional or not is maybe not the most important part of that political side of why they may be interested in the existence of this prohibition."

Glasgo's bill was introduced for first reading on Dec. 8, the last day of the fall sitting. Private member's bills are reviewed by the Standing Committee on Private Bills and Private Members' Public Bills before they return to the legislature for additional debate.

The UCP majority on both the committee and in the Alberta legislature means the bill will likely become law.

The legislature resumes on Feb. 25.