Friday, March 19, 2021

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

The cofounders of bankrupt poop-testing startup uBiome have been charged with fraud

💩💩💩
lramsey@businessinsider.com (Lydia Ramsey Pflanzer)

3/18/2021

The SEC has charged uBiome cofounders Jessica Richman and Zachary Apte with fraud.

Richman and Apte also face criminal charges related to the poop-testing startup uBi.

uBiome was a microbiome-testing startup that shut down in 2019 after an FBI raid.

Jessica Richman and Zachary Apte, the cofounders of the now shuttered microbiome company uBiome, are facing criminal and civil charges stemming from their efforts to build uBiome into a poop-testing powerhouse.

The Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that Richman and Apte defrauded investors out of $60 million by giving a false impression of how well the company was doing. The married cofounders are also facing criminal charges in federal court in California. They were indicted on Thursday on charges including healthcare fraud and wire fraud, as well as related conspiracy charges.

The SEC complaint alleged Richman, 46, and Apte, 36, portrayed uBiome as receiving health-insurance reimbursements for its tests, which tested poop samples for different conditions related to gut health. The complaint alleged the cofounders made millions as uBiome raised money from investors.

"We allege that Richman and Apte touted uBiome as a successful and fast-growing biotech pioneer while hiding the fact that the company's purported success depended on deceit," Erin Schneider, the director of the SEC's San Francisco regional office, said in a statement.

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uBiome is the latest Silicon Valley biotech to be accused of tricking investors. The now shuttered blood-testing company Theranos in 2018 settled with the SEC over allegations of "massive fraud." Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was charged with fraud and is expected to appear in court this summer.

© Hollis Johnson / Business Insider The microbiome-testing company uBiome came under scrutiny after an FBI raid. Hollis Johnson / Business Insider
uBiome morphed from science project to venture-backed startup

uBiome was founded in 2012 on the promise of helping ordinary people understand the bacteria living in and on them, known as their microbiome.

The company morphed from citizen science project to venture-backed startup, taking in $105 million from investors and reaching a valuation of $600 million.

Then the troubles began. The FBI raided the company in April 2019. By the end of June that year, the company's top leadership and many of its board members had departed. In October 2019, the company said it was shutting down in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing.

The complaints paint a detailed picture of how uBiome got health-insurance companies to cover its tests using what prosecutors say was deception.

The SEC complaint alleged the uBiome founders duped doctors into ordering tests. uBiome built out a portal that connected patients with doctors who could order the test. The complaint alleged the network of doctors was designed to get doctors to order the two medical tests uBiome offered and prescribe based only on an online question form.
How uBiome got health insurers to pay for its tests

The civil complaint also alleged the company fooled doctors into retesting old samples. The criminal complaint alleged that uBiome worked to "re-sequence" existing samples by telling consumers that there had been newer versions of uBiome's test. By doing so, the complaint alleged, uBiome could increase the number of billable claims, all while using an existing sample.

By using this network of doctors, uBiome was often able to get reimbursements from insurers.

The criminal complaint alleged uBiome tricked insurers into paying for tests that weren't medically necessary or properly vetted by medical regulators. In some cases, the company faked documents by using the names of doctors and other healthcare workers without their knowledge, prosecutors said.

But the insurers were catching on to uBiome.

According to the SEC complaint, at least 18 insurers had sent the company letters about its billing practices by April 2019. The criminal complaint alleged that Apte and Richman didn't tell investors about the questions insurers were asking.

What's more, the complaint alleged that Apte and Richman "had to falsify documents and lie to insurance providers in order to attempt to keep them at bay."
Read the original article on Business Insider

US EMBARGO KILLS

Cuban migrants are increasingly embarking on treacherous sea journeys as the economic crisis worsens

By Patrick Oppmann, CNN

3/19/2021

When Beatriz Jimenez closes her eyes, she sees her daughter and two young grandchildren and they are alive.

© U.S. Coast Guard Coast Guard Station Islamorada law enforcement crew interdicts a migrant boat with 7 migrants, Islamorada, Florida, March 2, 2021. The migrants were repatriated to Cuba.

Jimenez's family left the small seaside town of Cabarién, on Cuba's north coast, on March 4, aboard a packed smuggler's boat.

The boat had come from Florida and picked up a group of Cubans desperate to reach the US, according to a statement from the Cuban foreign ministry.

The smuggling run violated both US and Cuban laws and put the passengers' lives at risk. Although the communist-run island is only 90 nautical miles from the US, the weather in the Florida Straits is treacherous, particularly in the spring when "Easter winds," as Cubans call seasonal abrupt shifts in weather, can transform the sea into a frothing monster.

Jimenez said her daughter Lisbethy took the trip because she had been apart from her husband in Florida for more than a year, after the pandemic forced Cuba to cut most international flights. Lisbethy had been afraid to leave her daughter Kenna Mariana, 6 years old, and Luis Nesto, 4, behind in Cuba and risk a lengthy separation.

"My daughter is a good mother. She wouldn't have done this if everything wasn't safe. She wouldn't have put them through this. Her children are everything to her," Jimenez told CNN from the small room full of toys that her daughter had shared with the children.

According to the Cuban foreign ministry statement, the smugglers made the migrants switch boats once they reached Bahamian waters, likely to try and confuse any Coast Guard ships that could be in pursuit.

As the second boat sped north, it lost control and capsized. It is not clear how many people were aboard.

Some 14 hours later, a Royal Bahamian Defence ship found 12 survivors and one dead body, according to a Bahamian government statement. Lisbethy and her children were not among them.

Jimenez said relatives in Florida, who had contacted survivors in the Bahamas, later told her the smugglers had not brought life vests for any of the passengers.

As Cuba's economic crisis worsens, US Coast Guard officials say they are seeing more Cubans attempting the dangerous journey by boat.

Since October 1, the Coast Guard has intercepted 90 Cubans at sea, according to spokesman Brandon Murray. That number already surpasses the 49 Cuban migrants the previous fiscal year and does not account for many migrants who may arrive in third countries like the Bahamas or who successfully reach the US.

In February, a small boat carrying eight Cubans, including two pregnant women, capsized as it reached the Florida coast after 16 days at sea.

The same month, the US Coast guard rescued three Cubans who had been living mostly off coconuts after being stranded on a deserted island in the Bahamas for 33 days.

While so far the numbers of Cuban migrants taking to the seas are far less than the rafters crisis of the 1990's, when thousands of people attempted the dangerous crossing by boat, the increase is raising alarms.

"The Coast Guard does not recommend anyone taking to the seas in vessels that are not seaworthy. The vessels are often overloaded, the seas are unpredictable and the risk of loss of life is too great," the US Coast Guard said in a statement provided to CNN.

Most Cubans caught entering the US now are returned to the island, after President Obama, in his final days in office in 2017, canceled the "Wet Foot, Dry Foot' policy that allowed those who reached the country to remain.

According to figures released by the Coast Guard. 5,396 Cubans were interdicted in the fiscal year of 2016. That number dropped to 1,468 the next fiscal year, following Obama's policy change, and since then has stayed in the hundreds.

But a worsening economic climate could push more Cubans to make the desperate voyage, despite having lost their preferential status. In 2020, the economy shrank by 11%, according to Cuban government figures, as the island's tourism industry was almost entirely shut down by the pandemic.

That followed a series of punishing sanctions by the Trump administration -- the toughest in decades -- that included returning Cuba to the list of countries that support terrorism, limiting US citizens' ability to travel to the island and cutting off channels for Cuban-Americans to send remittances to relatives there.

"Remittances basically determine who can eat and who can't," said Ernesto Gonzalez, whose remittances company Vacuba was impacted by the Trump sanctions. Gonzalez said he is urging the Biden administration to restore the money transfer services before Cubans face a humanitarian crisis.

Desperate circumstances

Increasingly Cubans wait in hours-long lines to buy food, which they must pay for in US dollars at many Cuban government-run stores.

Without tourists, restaurants and home rentals opened by Cuban entrepreneurs sit empty. Many Cubans compare the ongoing crisis to the dark years the island experienced following the collapse of their ally the Soviet Union in 1991, when tens of thousands of Cubans fled to the US by boat and raft.

The Biden administration has said it is studying potential changes to its Cuba policy, including determining how scores of US diplomats working at the US Embassy became ill. The mysterious health incidents led the State Department in 2017 to pull most of their diplomats from the island and shut down embassy services through which Cubans could receive US visas.

According to a State Department report, as of November 2020, more than 78,000 Cubans were on a waiting list for immigrant visas.

Beatriz Jimenez said her daughter had hoped to apply for a visa to reunite with her husband in the US but as the embassy closure and disruption caused by the pandemic dragged on, she could not wait any longer.

As Jimenez held a vigil with neighbors and relatives for her missing family, she prayed for word of their rescue.

"They are alive. I know it because I believe in God. I know it will be a miracle," she said. "I am desperate but clinging to the idea that we will have an answer."

But ten days after their disappearance, the Cuban government announced it was suspending the search operation. Jimenez still does not know what became of her daughter and grandchildren.

The children and their mother had vanished into the sea.

Fungi are key to our survival.

Are we doing enough to protect them?

Sarah Gibbens

3/18/2021

When Italian botanist Giuseppe Inzenga first tasted the white ferula mushroom in 1863, he described it as one of the tastiest he had ever had.

© Photograph by Rebecca Hale, Nat Geo Image Collection

Edible fungi have been linked to boosting immunity and improving treatment results in cases of cancer, high cholesterol, and neurological diseases.

Found primarily in Sicily’s Madonie mountain range growing in limestone and at elevations of over 1,000 feet, the prized mushroom is sold for around 50 euros for two pounds.

“This mushroom is really delicious. You can eat it raw and also cooked,” says Giuseppe Venturella, a mycologist at the University of Palermo in Sicily. He compares it to a porcini, notes that it’s rich in B vitamins, and says the best way to experience the taste is eating it raw, with a little olive oil and parmesan cheese

© Photograph by Giuseppe Venturella

Pleur nebrodensis, White Ferula Mushroom

Fast forward 100 years from Inzenga’s enthusing, and the same mushroom species, still prized for its taste, is now listed as critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, an organization that tracks population numbers for many of the world’s species.

Picking the mushroom is off limits in protected areas inside the Madonie National Park region, but foragers can pluck mature mushrooms, indicated by a cap with sides growing longer than three centimeters, in surrounding regions. Unlike most mushroom species, the white ferula fruits in spring, with its season lasting from April to late May

© Photograph by Kevin Frayer, Getty Images Tibetan nomads inspect cordycep fungus for sale at a market on May 22, 2016 on the Tibetan Plateau in Yushu town in the Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai province. The Tibetan Plateau is home to the cordyceps fungus, also known as caterpillar fungus, is a parasitic spore that thrives in high altitude, low temperature conditions on the Tibetan plateau. While not historically a part of Tibetan culture, cordyceps are a prized ingredient of traditional Asian medicinal treatments that purportedly heal ailments ranging from asthma to impotence to cancer. Demand in China alone has created a booming economy for what Tibetans call yartsa gunbu, or summer grass, winter worm, which sells for up to $50,000 US per pound. As the state-supported cordyceps industry has developed, Tibetans who rely primarily on farming and herding have turned to the weeks-long harvest as a means of earning income to last through the year. The annual gold rush has transformed parts of rural Tibetan areas, generating about 40% of the local economy. However, environmentalists increasingly warn that over-harvesting of cordyceps carries the cost of degradation to mountain grasslands that are essential for yak and cattle grazing. Due to below average rainfall the 2016 harvest is expected to be the lowest on record with many harvesters reporting yields way lower then expectations.

The white ferula was the first mushroom to be recognized for the impact humans were having on its survival, and from 2006 to 2015 it was the only one of its kind to be globally recognized as endangered.

“It was so beloved by people in [Sicily] that when the numbers began to decline, it was part of popular conversation,” says Nicholas Money, a mycologist at Miami University in Ohio.

But what about the mushrooms we don’t notice? And how many of them are endangered?

“We think the true biodiversity of fungi is somewhere between one million and six million species,” says Anne Pringle, a University of Wisconsin-Madison mycologist—as fungus experts are called—and a National Geographic explorer. Yet despite their global prevalence, fungi have historically been left out of conservation initiatives.

“Because people eat it,” says Pringle of the white ferula, “they notice and care. There might be more than a thousand stories like that of fungi in trouble that we just don’t know about.”

So how do we conserve organisms we can’t see and don’t understand? And why should we try?

“Life on the planet wouldn’t exist without fungi as we know it,” says Greg Mueller, a mushroom conservation expert and the chief scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Conserving them, Money says, “is an urgent concern because of their relationship with forests and trees. You can’t have the trees without the fungi…. We cannot survive without them. In terms of the health of the planet, they’re incredibly important.”

Fungi, mushroom, mycelium—oh my

Mushrooms as we know them—the cute buttons and flat caps that pop out of soil—are only a small, reproductive part of a larger fungal organism. The above-ground portion is referred to as the fruit body, but below ground, it’s connected to a large network of thin, microscopic threads called mycelium. In 1998, scientists determined that the largest organism on Earth, at least by area covered, was a fungus in Oregon’s Blue Mountains whose mycelium spanned over 2,000 acres underground.

Some so-called mycorrhizal fungi form symbiotic relationships with plants. As many as 90 percent of the common plants we see on land have a beneficial relationship with fungi.

“The fungal filaments penetrate the roots of the plant, forming a placenta-like connection between the fungal colony and the roots,” says Money. “It’s like an additional root system for the plant.”

These root networks help plants take in additional water, minerals, and nutrients, and in return the fungus gets a portion of the sugars plants generate from photosynthesis.

Scoop a chunk of dirt out of soil, and you’re holding unseen mycelium, says Pringle. Advances in DNA sequencing have helped scientists see that fungal DNA sequences live unseen in everything from dirt to the nectar of a flower.

This, however, also makes them hard to count. Depending on the species, mycelium might sprout anywhere from one to several fruiting bodies, meaning what we see above ground doesn’t correspond to how many individuals are living below.

“There might be a mycelium under the ground that sends up one mushroom here and one mushroom here,” says Pringle. “Are they two individuals? Or are they coming from the same individual underground?”

“There are ways to solve it,” she notes, “But they’re time intensive and expensive.” Her work has focused on genetically sequencing fungi to help distinguish them.

State of the fungi

In a 2018 report assessing the state of the world’s fungi, scientists found that compared to the 68,000 animals and 25,000 plants that had been evaluated to assess whether they were existentially threatened, only 56 fungi had been evaluated. Currently, 168 mushrooms have been assessed as threatened around the world.

Overharvesting mushrooms, like the white ferula in Sicily, contributes to their decline. In addition to being eaten, many mushrooms are also prized for their medicinal value. The caterpillar fungus found in Tibet, cordyceps sinesis, is used to treat everything from coughing to back pain. Chaga mushrooms, found around the world and sold as a cure for seemingly everything, are increasingly being overharvested, threatening populations in certain regions.

Mushrooms also face many of the same threats plants contend with. Habitat loss, pollution, and specifically the use of fungicide-laden fertilizer, wipe out mushrooms. Studies show that climate change also affects mushrooms, changing the temperature and humidity levels that determine when they pop a fruiting body out of the ground.

Scientists are currently working to understand the effect fungi themselves might have on the climate.

In 2013, Mueller and his colleagues launched the Fungal Red List as a subsection of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The initiative was launched when just three fungi—two lichens and the white ferula—were listed as endangered, and it sought to highlight the importance of conserving fungi.

“Another great advance that’s helped is the engagement of the citizen science community,” says Mueller. Mushroom-hunting clubs and websites like iNaturalist and Mushroom Observer allow amateur mushroom enthusiasts to log the mushrooms they find and thus generate more field data for scientists.

Pringle, who serves as the vice president of Mushroom Observer, notes that the site has even helped rediscover species previously thought to be extinct, like a fungus called hazel fingers found in the Appalachian mountains and parts of the U.K.

In the past decade, the white ferula has been discovered outside Sicily on a Greek island, and Mueller says it may soon be downgraded from “critically endangered” to “endangered.”
Why does it matter?

Not only are fungi crucial partners for trees, as Money says, they affect the climate of the whole planet.

Walk through a temperate forest in autumn and everything you see on the ground—leaves, branches—is dead. But beneath that layer of dead material is a thriving world of fungi working to decompose it. Studies show that fungi help break down the carbon stored in plant material, locking it into soil. Around the world, soil is a massive reservoir for carbon pollution, holding more carbon than the atmosphere and plants combined.

We’re still learning exactly how fungi play a role in the carbon cycle, which ones are crucial, and how many we need, says Pringle.

“Say there are 100 species [of fungi] that cycle carbon through a forest,” says Pringle. “Can we lose one of them? Ten of them? Fifty? Sixty? Maybe we can lose 99 of them. How many species can we afford to lose before we reach a tipping point, and we’re in some sort of trouble?”

"Fungi from Yuggoth" by H. P. Lovecraft

Forecast for spring: Nasty drought worsens for much of US

With nearly two-thirds of the United States abnormally dry or worse, the government’s spring forecast offers little hope for relief, especially in the West where a devastating megadrought has taken root and worsened

© Provided by The Canadian Press
Weather service and agriculture officials warned of possible water use cutbacks in California and the Southwest, increased wildfires, low levels in key reservoirs such as Lake Mead and Lake Powell and damage to wheat crops.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s official spring outlook Thursday sees an expanding drought with a drier than normal April, May and June for a large swath of the country from Louisiana to Oregon. including some areas hardest hit by the most severe drought. And nearly all of the continental United States is looking at warmer than normal spring, except for tiny parts of the Pacific Northwest and southeast Alaska, which makes drought worse.

“We are predicting prolonged and widespread drought,” National Weather Service Deputy Director Mary Erickson said. “It’s definitely something we’re watching and very concerned about.”

NOAA expects the spring drought to hit 74 million people.

Several factors go into worsening drought, the agency said. A La Nina cooling of parts of the central Pacific continues to bring dry weather for much of the country, while in the Southwest heavy summer monsoon rains failed to materialize. Meteorologists also say the California megadrought is associated with long-term climate change.

Thursday's national Drought Monitor shows almost 66% of the nation is in an abnormally dry condition, the highest mid-March level since 2002. And forecasters predict that will worsen, expanding in parts of Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming and South Dakota, with small islands of relief in parts of the Great Lakes and New England.

More than 44% of the nation is in moderate or worse drought, and nearly 18% is in extreme or exceptional drought — all of it west of the Mississippi River. Climate scientists are calling what’s happening in the West a “megadrought” that started in 1999.

“The nearly West-wide drought is already quite severe in its breadth and intensity, and unfortunately it doesn't appear likely that there will be much relief this spring,” said UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, who writes the Weather West blog and isn’t part of the NOAA outlook. “Winter precipitation has been much below average across much of California, and summer precipitation reached record low levels in 2020 across the desert Southwest.”

With the Sierra Nevada snowpack only 60% of normal levels, U.S. Department of Agriculture meteorologist Brad Rippey said “there will be some water cutbacks and allocation cutbacks in California and perhaps other areas of the Southwest” for agriculture and other uses. It will probably hit nut crops in the Golden State.

Winter and spring wheat crops also have been hit hard by the western drought with 78% of the spring wheat production area in drought conditions, Rippey said.

The dry, warm conditions the upcoming months likely will bring “an enhanced wildfire season," said Jon Gottschalck, chief of NOAA's prediction branch.

Swain of UCLA said the wildfires probably will not be as bad as 2020 because so much vegetation already has burned and drought conditions retarded regrowth. Last year, he said, wildfire was so massive it will be hard to exceed, though this fire season likely will be above average.

Drought and heat breed a vicious cycle. When it's this dry, less of the sun’s energy goes to evaporating soil moisture because it’s not as wet, Swain said. That leaves more of the energy to heat up the air, and the heat makes the drought worse by boosting evaporation.

“Across the West, it is clear that climate change has increased temperatures essentially year round, which has decreased mountain snowpack and increased evaporation — substantially worsening the severity of the ongoing drought conditions," he said.

In the next week or two, parts of the central United States may get pockets of heavy rain, but the question is whether that will be enough to make up for large rain deficits in the High Plains from the past year, Nebraska state climatologist Martha Shulski said.

The drought's flip side is that for the first time in three years, NOAA is projecting zero major spring flooding, with smaller amounts of minor and moderate flooding.

About 82 million people will be at risk for flooding this spring, mostly minor with no property damage. That's down from 128 million people last year.

Flooding tends to be a short-term expensive localized problem while drought and wildfire hit larger areas and are longer lasting, NOAA climatologist Karin Gleason.

Since 1980, NOAA has tracked weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage. The 28 droughts have caused nearly $259 billion in damage, while the 33 floods have cost about $151 billion.

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Read more stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://www.apnews.com/Climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears .

Disrupted Polar Vortex Leads to Winter Temperature Anomalies Across Earth

BY ED BROWNE ON 3/3/21

Arctic temperatures have been exceptionally warm this year amid a disruption in the polar vortex, according to weather maps.

Scott Duncan, co-owner of the weather-modelling service WXCharts, posted a series of images on Twitter highlighting temperature anomalies in the Northern Hemisphere through December, January and February 2021.

They show regions such as Greenland, Canada, and the Arctic colored deep red, indicating they are warmer than they would be in a normal winter.

"The winter was exceptionally warm for parts of Canada, Greenland, and some of the high Arctic," Duncan said. "Anomalous warmth in the high latitudes often occurs when there is polar vortex disruption."

Vortex disruption has been linked to the cold blast which brought down Texas' power grid earlier this year, leaving millions without power.

The polar vortex is an area of low pressure and cold air around both the north and south poles that is always present. It rotates counter clockwise, which has the effect of keeping cold air in those locations. Duncan likened the vortex to a doughnut due to its circular shape.

When the polar vortex is disrupted, its circular shape gets warped. This allows the cold air that is normally contained over the Arctic to spread down towards other regions, resulting in temperature drops in affected areas.

According to a report published in the journal Nature Climate Change in October 2016, the vortex has been weakening over a period of 30 years, meaning cold surface air is more likely to spread from high latitudes down into lower ones, including North America. The report also states that this shift in the polar vortex is closely related to Arctic sea ice loss.

Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts, said the recent disruption in the polar vortex was a "major breakdown."

She told NBC News: "It really is the cause of all these crazy weather events in the Northern Hemisphere."

Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, told Bloomberg a weakening of the polar vortex can be attributed to climate change.

Richard Hall, a research associate at the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol, told Newsweek it is also common for Arctic warming not to be linked to stratospheric polar vortex changes.

VIDEO

Disrupted Polar Vortex Leads to Winter Temperature Anomalies Across Earth (newsweek.com)

"The Arctic can be warm as a result of transport of heat and moisture into the Arctic, via storms tracking polewards," he said.

Over the past three decades, the Arctic has been warming up around two times as fast as the rest of the planet in a phenomenon known as arctic amplification, according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center.

Arctic amplification is a phenomenon in which the effects of climate change lead to a runaway effect, creating an environment where further warming is more likely to occur.

For example, white sea ice reflects sunlight and heat away from itself, but when it melts due to high temperatures, it exposes the darker sea to sunlight instead, which absorbs it and drives further loss of sea ice.

HELP ME, I AM MELTING

Icebergs floating on the water on July 30, 2013 in Qaqortoq,

Greenland. Weather maps show parts of the region have

been abnormally warm this winter.

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY

Photos Show Strange Sea Creatures Unveiled by Mega-Iceberg Breaking in Antarctica

Ed Browne NEWSWEEK 3/18/2021

Scientists have captured images of a region of the Antarctic seafloor that, until recently, was hidden under a thick sheet of ice.

© Alfred-Wegener-Institut / OFOBS-Team PS124 A sponge

of almost 30 cm diameter is affixed to a small seafloor stone.

On February 26, a huge iceberg called A74 broke apart from the Brunt Ice Shelf in the Antarctic. The berg has an area of some 790 square miles, which is around one-and-a-third times the size of Houston, Texas.

An iceberg split of this size is rare, occurring roughly once every decade in the Antarctic, according to the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) polar research organization. Smaller ones break more frequently.

A German research ship, the Polarstern, was nearby. Until the glacier broke away, the seafloor underneath it had been off-limits to the ship because the imaging technology onboard involved dragging a camera behind the ship on a cable.

Presented with the new opportunity, the Polarstern sailed up the gap between the iceberg and the shelf from which it broke, and scientists began taking snapshots of the pristine environment of the ocean floor below.

They were thrilled with what they found. According to the AWI, which operates the Polarstern, the researchers onboard discovered impressive biodiversity below them.

The lifeforms they encountered included at least five species of fish, two species of squid, sea cucumbers, mollusks, and more. Photos of the lifeforms can be seen below.

© Alfred-Wegener-Institut / OFOBS-Team PS124

The white curled features are the arms of a type of brittlestar starfish.

© Alfred-Wegener-Institut / OFOBS-Team PS124 A 10 cm

diameter sea anemone uses a small stone as a substrate

The AWI said icebergs of that size only carve roughly once every ten years in the Antarctic, though smaller bits tend to break off more often. A warmer atmosphere driven by global warming could see icebergs calve more frequently.

Hartmut Hellmer, a physical oceanographer at the AWI and head of the expedition, said in a statement: "It's extremely fortunate that we were able to respond flexibly and explore the calving event at the Brunt Ice Shelf in such detail."

Huw Griffiths, from the British Antarctic Survey, told the BBC: "What they have found isn't shocking but it is amazing to get these images so soon after a calving event and it is definitely the largest area that will have been surveyed in this way."

The Polarstern conducts research in the area to help scientists understand the processes behind such glacial calving events as well as create computer models to help them predict how global warming will affect Antarctica. The region hit a record high temperature in 2020.

Global rises in temperature have not yet affected East Antarctica, where Polarstern operates, in the same way as it has warmed West Antarctica. But climate models predict this could come to an end over the course of the century as air temperatures affect sea ice.

© Alfred-Wegener-Institut/Tim Kalvelage The Polarstern research ship in front of iceberg A74. The ship took the photographs of the sea creatures.

Prehistoric "eagle shark" combined traits of sharks and rays

© Illustration by Oscar Sanisidro Life reconstruction of Aquilolamna milarcae.

The idea of a shark with manta ray-like features might seem like something fit for a low-budget sci-fi movie. Yet paleontologists have reported discovering just such a creature in the Cretaceous-period rock of Mexico. This strange shark combines a streamlined body with expansive wing-like fins, an ancient creature unlike anything found before in the fossil record.

In 2012, an unknown quarry worker found a strange set of bones in 95-million-year-old rock layers near Vallecillo, Mexico, says Romain Vullo, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Karlsruhe in Germany. The fossil came to the attention of local paleontologist Margarito González González, who collected and prepared it by chipping rock off the preserved skeleton. Photos of the shark started making waves at paleontological conferences, and the specimen was described in a study published today in the journal Science.

Named Aquilolamna milarcae, the six-foot-long fossil represents a kind of filter-feeding shark unlike any previously known. “My first thoughts on seeing the fossil were that this unique morphology is totally new and unknown among sharks,” says Vullo, the lead author of the new study. Most of the time, fossil sharks are identified by teeth and the occasional piece of the spinal column. To find a complete skeleton, and one so strange, presents a rare opportunity to study the anatomy of this ancient swimmer.

Even though no teeth from Aquilolamna have been found, Vullo and colleagues propose that it belongs in the same family of sharks that includes great white, mako, and basking sharks. The broad head and long, wing-like fins hint that this was no hunter, though. Aquilolamna was more likely a filter feeder, opening its mouth to sift plankton and other small organisms out of the water.

A prehistoric oddity

Aquilolamna appears to combine characteristics of both sharks and manta rays, the latter of which would not evolve until millions of years later. The body of Aquilolamna is long and tube-like, similar to many sharks that cruise the oceans today. But the expanded pectoral fins are reminiscent of manta and devil rays, forming broad underwater wings.

This would make Aquilolamna one of the oldest known animals to move via “underwater flight,” slowly flapping its fins much like living manta rays. “Aquilolamna may have swum relatively slowly with slight movements of its caudal fin [tail fin] and the long pectoral fins mainly acted as an effective stabilizer,” Vullo says.

This type of body plan is completely unexpected for sharks, says Kenshu Shimada, a paleobiology professor at DePaul University in Chicago. Older sharks from before the time of the dinosaurs had a wide variety of different body shapes, but by the Cretaceous period, they were thought to have evolved into much more modern-looking forms.

Aquilolamna could be evidence that a broad variety of strange sharks continued to exist for much longer than thought. “The proposed body form and filter-feeding lifestyle in the new study are quite compelling,” Shimada says.

Shark or something else entirely?

But not all experts are convinced that this new creature was a manta-like shark. “There are a lot of unusual features described by these authors, and I have some reservations about some of their interpretations, so I would be excited to see further investigations of this new, remarkable fossil,” says Allison Bronson, a paleontologist with Humboldt State University in California.

While skin impressions from Aquilolamna are mentioned in the new study, they are not shown in enough detail for outside experts to determine whether the tissue is really fossilized skin or some other material that resembles skin, like a bacterial mat. And even though this fish likely fed by sifting plankton or other small morsels from the water column, it may have had tiny, pointed teeth similar to modern filter-feeding sharks such as the basking shark and megamouth. These teeth can be used to determine the evolutionary relationships of these sharks, but none were found with the new fossil.

“It is truly unfortunate that no teeth were preserved in the specimen that could have allowed researchers to determine the exact taxonomic affinity of the new shark,” Shimada says.

kinds fossils, including shark teeth, ammonites, fis

(Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

The idea that this animal was a shark and a filter feeder will likely need to be confirmed by future finds and additional analysis. If this interpretation is correct, Aquilolamna was straining the seas for plankton long before its modern relatives evolved to do the same. Perhaps this shark represents one particular way to filter feed that evolved prior to the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period that killed off roughly 75 percent of all marine species. Other filter feeders, including the ancestors of megamouth, whale, and basking sharks, evolved after the world’s oceans had bounced back.

If Aquilolamna was indeed an odd relative of basking sharks, there were probably even more strange sharks or marine creatures that paleontologists have yet to uncover. “The fossil record of sharks and rays is good” in terms of time periods covered, Vullo says, but “the body shape of many extinct species remains enigmatic.” Perhaps some teeth that paleontologists have already found belonged to bizarrely shaped animals.

Even the famous giant shark Otodus megalodon has only been described from teeth and vertebrae—megalodon means “great tooth” in Greek—leading to varying interpretations of what the animal could have looked like. Exceptional fossils, like that of Aquilolamna, hint that many fossil sharks may have been far stranger than scientists ever expected.

“When we have the opportunity to discover complete skeletons in localities such as Vellecillo,” Vullo says, “we can have some surprises.

Ottawa invests $50.5M in Moltex Energy Canada to develop nuclear reactor technology

SAINT JOHN, N.B. — Ottawa is investing $50.5 million in Moltex Energy Canada Inc. to help in the development of the company's stable salt nuclear reactor and spent fuel recycling technology.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The money includes $47.5 million from the Strategic Innovation Fund and $3 million from the Regional Economic Growth through Innovation program.

As part of the SIF investment, the company has committed to creating and maintaining 48 full-time jobs.

Moltex wants to build a stable salt reactor that uses a process that recycles existing used nuclear fuel at the Point Lepreau Generating Station site in Saint John and hopes to be providing power to the grid by the early 2030s.

The stable salt reactor and spent fuel recycling technology has the potential to reduce storage needs for existing used nuclear fuel.

Ottawa also announced $5 million to help NB Power Corp. prepare the Point Lepreau site and $561,750 to help the University of New Brunswick's Centre for Nuclear Energy Research.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 18, 2021.

Bushfires that ravaged Australia were so huge that they spewed as much smoke into the stratosphere as a large volcanic eruption

The bushfires that ravaged Australia between 2019 and 2020 were so huge that they spewed as much smoke into the stratosphere as a large volcanic eruption, with serious consequences for the environment, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

© Saeed KHAN Bushfires burn out of control in Richmond Valley, New South Wales in November 2019

The stratosphere is the second layer of the atmosphere, right above the troposphere -- where we live.

"For us it was a huge surprise" to see such a significant effect, study co-author Ilan Koren, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, told AFP.

"I never saw such an injection (of smoke) to the stratosphere," he said.R

The amount of smoke released into the atmosphere by the fires is comparable to that put out by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which was the second-largest of the 20th century.

Researchers noted that the smoke drifted away from Australia to the east, and then returned again from the west two weeks later.

"We could see the smoke completing a whole circulation in two weeks," Koren said. "I never saw such a strong event spread so fast."

The phenomenon can be explained by three factors, according to the study.

First, the fires themselves were intense. Second, they occurred in an area of far southern Australia where the distance between the troposphere and the stratosphere is smaller than elsewhere. And lastly, the fires took place near strong storms, which helped draw the smoke up higher into the atmosphere.

The fact that the smoke was able to billow so high is crucial to understanding its environmental impact: Usually, such smoke might only stay in the lower part of the atmosphere for a few days or weeks.

"But once it gets to the stratosphere, it stays between months to years," Koren explained.

The winds are stronger up there, allowing the smoke to be dispersed farther and faster than might otherwise be possible.

"Basically what we get is a very thin smoke blanket that covers the whole hemisphere for many months," Koren said.

- 'Not clear yet' -

Researchers could see the smoke in the stratosphere for six months, from January to July 2020, via satellite monitoring.

Eventually, it became too difficult to separate the smoke from the Australian bushfires from smoke in the stratosphere that might have come from other sources.

"But most likely there is still today a signature of the smoke in the stratosphere," Koren said.

The main effect of the smoke staying in the atmosphere for so long is that it can reflect radiation coming from the sun.

According to Koren, that "definitely has a cooling effect overall," especially on the ocean, potentially disrupting processes such as algae photosynthesis in the southern hemisphere.

The smoke can also absorb solar radiation, which can have a localized warming effect.

"The consequences of the warming of the smoke in the stratosphere are not clear yet," Koren said.

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