New tiny 44 million year old bird fossil links Africa and Asia to Utahby Midwestern University

Graphic reconstruction of the habitat of a new small-sized

 middle Eocene pangalliform discovered in the Uinta Basin

 Credit: Dr. Thomas Stidham

A new species of quail-sized fossil bird from 44 million year old sediments in Utah fills in a gap in the fossil record of the early extinct relatives of chickens and turkeys, and it shows strong links with other extinct species from Namibia in Southern Africa and Uzbekistan in Central Asia.

In their paper in the online scientific journal Diversity, the authors Dr. Thomas Stidham (Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Dr. Beth Townsend (Midwestern University, Arizona), and Dr. Patricia Holroyd (University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley) describe the fossil of a distinct tiny bone from the shoulder girdle of an extinct quail-like bird from 44 million year old rocks in eastern Utah. While it is a unique fossil, the authors have not given it a formal scientific name, waiting until they find more bones of the skeleton. This new Utah bird appears to be the oldest fossil of the extinct group called Paraortygidae, a relative of the living Galliformes (the group that includes the living chicken, turkey, guineafowl, and quail). This fossil fits in a nearly 15 million-year gap in the fossil record of the galliform lineage in North America.

This extinct species is similar in size to the smallest living Galliformes like quail and hill partridges. It likely lived before the evolution of the large crop and gizzard that we see in living chickens and turkeys, and therefore the Utah species likely had a diet different from its living relatives. The earliest fossils of this paraortygid group are from arid habitats, the seashore, and inland forests demonstrating that they had flexibility in their ecology and diet.

Another interesting aspect of this new fossil is that it closely resembles the small size and unique shape of other early paraortygid fossils from sediments with a similar geological age from Namibia in southern Africa and Uzbekistan in Central Asia which were all separated from each other by oceans.

Distinct shoulder bone of extinct species of small-sized 

middle Eocene pangalliform discovered in the Uinta Basin 

Credit: Dr. Patricia Holroyd

Dr. Stidham comments, "I didn't think much of the little fossil at first. It wasn't until I saw a recent paper by a Russian colleague describing a very similar fossil from Uzbekistan that I realized that we were looking at the same group of birds on different continents." The paraortygid fossils from Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America show that the group was very widely dispersed early in their evolution and crossed oceans in order to be so widely spread.

By contrast, Holroyd knew the find was something special the moment she turned it over with her pick. "I have worked with Beth Townsend in the Uinta Basin since 2011, and it was the first bird bone I had found there. They are incredibly rare, especially ones this small. I didn't think there was anything like it found there before and so snapped a picture to send to Tom even before we had left the field."

Dr. Townsend, the project leader, notes: "The new Uinta bird fills not only a time gap, but also helps us better understand the animal community at this time. The Uinta Basin is important for understanding ecosystems during times of global warm temperatures, when forests, primates, and early horses were spread across an area that is now desert. The discovery of this new paraortygid shows us that small ground-dwelling birds were part of these ancient forests and may have competed with early mammals for resources."

In summary, Dr. Stidham says, "Even tiny incomplete fossils can provide the data to link global scientific questions together." All of the scientists involved in this project are eager to search for more fossil discoveries in the eastern Utah during the next field season.

Explore furtherChinese Cretaceous fossil highlights avian evolution
More information: Thomas A. Stidham et al, Evidence for Wide Dispersal in a Stem Galliform Clade from a New Small-sized Middle Eocene Pangalliform (Aves: Paraortygidae) from the Uinta Basin of Utah (USA), Diversity (2020). DOI: 10.3390/d12030090

A fast, ecofriendly way of de-icing aircrafts

by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

A close-up shot of the NACA airfoil’s surface taken from above. It was functionalized using DLIP. Credit: Airbus

Ice on an aircraft's surfaces can be a hazard. It increases drag and fuel consumption, disrupts aerodynamic flows, and decreases lift—which impairs the aircraft's ability to fly safely. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS, Airbus and TU Dresden have developed a laser process that fills two needs with one deed. On one hand, accumulated ice falls off by itself and on the other it takes less heat to de-ice surfaces. Direct Laser Interference Patterning permits surfaces to be structured in ways that effectively repel ice.

Ice formation presents a safety risk for aircraft. A thin layer of frost settling on the wings or other neuralgic points such as the tail can adversely affect the aircraft's aerodynamics. Lift may decrease and drag increase. Ice accumulating on probes and sensors can compromise air speed measurements that are critical to in-flight safety. This is why snow and ice have to be cleared from aircraft before they take off. On the ground, this task falls to special vehicles that spray chemical agents onto all vulnerable surfaces. These antifreezes also go to prevent ice from forming. However, fluids of this type are harmful to the environment and expensive. Moreover, a substantial amount—400 to 600 liters—is needed to de-ice a plane. Airborne aircraft also have to be protected against this frosty peril. In most cases, ice protection systems such as heating elements are facilitated on board to do the job. The great drawback of these heaters is that they increase fuel consumption.

Ecologically sustainable

Using a technology known as Direct Laser Interference Patterning (DLIP), a research team at Fraunhofer IWS collaborated closely with project partners Airbus and TU Dresden to develop a process allowing complex, meandering surface structures to be created on the micron and submicron scale to decrease ice accumulation and accelerate de-icing. (More on the DLIP technology in the box below). What sets this process apart is that the researchers combined DLIP with ultra-short pulse lasers to create multilevel, 3-D microstructures on wing profiles in a single step.

As a result, some of the ice simply loses its grip, depending on the conditions under which it froze, and spontaneously detaches after reaching a certain thickness. Also, technical de-icing requires 20 percent less heating energy. Other advantages of the new process are that it potentially reduces the required amount of environmentally harmful de-icing agents and the time passengers spend waiting for the plane to be de-iced. The same goes for in-flight power and fuel consumption. It can even reduce the aircraft's weight if smaller heating units are installed. This combination of these two effects has yet to be achieved with conventional technologies.

Wind tunnel tests with Airbus

This DLIP process was developed in a concerted effort between Fraunhofer IWS and TU Dresden in order to find the optimized DLIP surface structure. Finally, the IWS experts developed the patterning process to transfer the optimized structure onto final demonstrator: a complex three-dimensional NACA airfoil which served as a miniaturized but realistic wing pendant. The NACA airfoil was then tested by AIRBUS experts in the wind tunnel. The performance tests were carried out with a structured NACA airfoil and an unstructured NACA airfoil serving as a reference under realistic conditions at wind speeds ranging from 65 to 120 m/s, with air temperatures below minus ten degrees Celsius and at various humidity levels.

The partners from Airbus were able to demonstrate that ice growth on the functionalized surface is self-limiting. In fact, the ice falls off after a certain amount of time without requiring added surface heating. Additional experiments also showed that it took 70 seconds for the ice on an unstructured airfoil to melt at 60 watts of applied heat. The ice on the structured airfoil receded completely after just five seconds at the same amount of applied heat. The DLIP technology accelerated the process by more than 90 percent. It took 75 watts, or 25 percent more heating power compared to the DLIP surface, to remove the ice on the unstructured demonstrator. "In this wonderful collaboration with Airbus, we demonstrated for the first time and in a realistic way the great anti-icing potential that can be tapped with large-scale laser surface patterning. With our DLIP approach, we realized biomimetic surface structures on a complex component like the NACA airfoil, and demonstrated its distinct advantages over other laser processes", says Dr. Tim Kunze, Team Leader Surface Functionalization at Fraunhofer IWS. His colleague Sabri Alamri adds, "The application of micro- and nanostructures on metal prevents water droplets from adhering. Inspired from nature, this is widely known as the lotus effect. With our new DLIP process, we can create a fragmented surface to significantly reduce the number of adhesion points for ice. We will soon publish a paper on the results." Project partner Elmar Bonaccurso, Research Engineer for Surface Technology / Advanced Materials at Airbus, adds, "Ice formation is particularly dangerous during landing. Water on the surface freezes within milliseconds when the aircraft flies through the clouds at sub-zero temperatures. This can disrupt the functions of control elements such as landing flaps and slats, which impairs the aerodynamics. Today, we use hot air sourced from the engines to heat wing surfaces. The water-repellent structure, which we developed with our partner Fraunhofer IWS in the EU project Laser4Fun, is an attempt to replace conventional technologies with ecofriendly, more cost-effective alternatives." The partners' next step will be to optimize the method and adapt it to various air zones. They will take into account the results obtained in real-world flight tests currently underway with an A350 aircraft whose surfaces have been treated with DLIP.

The NACA airfoil with the water-repellent structured surface. Credit: Airbus

A comparison showed that water adheres to the unstructured NACA airfoil and freezes within seconds at sub-zero temperatures. Credit: Airbus

Tests in the wind tunnel at AIRBUS showed that the ice falls off the structured surface by itself after a defined time. Credit: Airbus

A key technology

The research team has established a key technology by using short and ultrashort pulse lasers for Direct Laser Interference Patterning. It can serve many applications, for example, to structure functional surfaces on wind turbines or other components that can ice over in cold regions. This technology can be also applied to very different fields such as product protection, biocompatible implants and improved contacts for electrical connectors. "We can apply functional microstructures over large areas and at high process speeds, thereby achieving benefits for a number of applications that, until now, had been inconceivable," says Tim Kunze.

Laser system prevents contamination on aircraft surfaces

Provided by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

'Smart water' may aid oil recoveryby Mike Williams, Rice University

Low-salinity brine injected into crude oil forms nanoscale droplets that help separate oil from rock in reservoirs, according to Rice University engineers. The black ring around the droplets, seen in a cryogenic electron microscope image, is asphaltene. Credit: Wenhua Guo/Rice University

Now there's evidence that oil and water do mix. Sort of.

Scientists at Rice University's Brown School of Engineering show that microscopic saltwater droplets emulsify crude oil when each has the right composition. Understanding how they combine is important to enhanced oil recovery.

Rice chemical and biological engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal and her colleagues went to great lengths to characterize the three elements most important to oil recovery: rock, water and the crude itself.

They confirmed wells are more productive when water with the right salt concentration is carefully matched to both the oil and the rock, carbonate or sandstone formation. If the low-salinity brine can create emulsion droplets in a specific crude, the brine appears to also alter the wettability of the rock. The wettability determines how easily the rock will release oil.

The team's work appears in the open-access Nature journal Scientific Reports.

Co-lead author Jin Song said the first hints of seawater's effect came from wells in the North Sea. "Oil companies found that when they injected seawater, which has relatively low salinity, oil recovery was surprisingly good," he said.

Even with that understanding, he said research has been limited. "Usually in the oil and gas industry, when they're looking into low-salinity water, they tend to focus on the effect of the brine and ignore the effect of the oil," said Song, who earned his Ph.D. at Rice this year and is now a researcher at Shell.
High-salinity brine mixed with crude oil does not appear to emulsify like low-salinity brine does, according to Rice University engineers studying the phenomenon. Their results have implications for enhanced oil recovery. Credit: Wenhua Guo/Rice University

"So people haven't been able to find a good indicator or any correlation between the effectiveness of low-salinity water and experimental conditions," he said. "Our work is the first to identify some of the properties of the oil that indicate how effective this technique can be in a specific field.

The team tested how injected brine is dispersed and how it affects oils' interfacial tension and electrostatic interactions with rock.

"How to characterize wettability accurately is a challenge," Biswal said. "Oftentimes, we assume that reservoir rock underground are under a mixed-wet state, with regions that are oil-wet and regions that are water-wet.


"If you can alter your oil-wet sites to water-wet sites, then there's less of a driving force to hold the oil to the mineral surface," she said. "In low-salinity water injection, the brine is able to displace the trapped oil. As you change from oil-wet to water-wet, the oil is released from the mineral surface."

The researchers tested two brines, one high-salinity and one with a quarter of the salinity of seawater, on Indiana limestone cores against six crude oils from the Gulf of Mexico, Southeast Asia and the Middle East and a seventh oil with added asphaltene. They found that high-salinity brine clearly inhibited water droplets from emulsifying in crude, unlike the low-salinity samples.

To better understand the thermodynamic nature of the emulsion, Rice research scientist Wenhua Guo took cryogenic electron microscope images of about 100 mixtures of oil and water. Because oil is opaque, the samples had to be placed in very thin containers, and then frozen with liquid nitrogen to keep them stable for imaging.

"This is the first time anyone has seen these water droplets inside crude oil," Biswal said. "They spontaneously arise inside the crude oil when you expose it to a low-salinity brine."

The images revealed droplets varying in size from 70 to just over 700 nanometers. Biswal said chemical surfactants—aka soap—are also good at loosening oil in a reservoir, but are prohibitively expensive. "You can change the salt concentration to modify the composition of the brine and get the same effect as in including the detergent," she said. "So it's basically a low-cost technique trying to achieve the same goal as detergent."

Nanoparticle-based solution pulls last drops of oil from well water
More information: Jin Song et al, Evaluating physicochemical properties of crude oil as indicators of low-salinity–induced wettability alteration in carbonate minerals, Scientific Reports (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-60106-2

Scientists' ability to predict 'flash droughts' could assist farmers


Flash droughts that can cause major crop damage can be predicted with weather data, new research says. Photo by Curt Reynolds, courtesy of U.S. Department of Agriculture

DENVER, March 5 (UPI) -- Scientists have identified ways to predict a type of quick-hitting drought, which could give farmers, ranchers and water managers early warning and options for irrigation and help them protect crops and livestock.

"Flash droughts" occur quickly and are characterized by their speed and high intensity. They can be devastating to agriculture and water supplies, a peer-reviewed essay published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change said.

"The weather will go from a normal state and then suddenly enter a drought within a few weeks, or a mild drought gets much worse very rapidly," lead author Angie Pendergrass, an atmospheric scientist at Boulder's National Center for Atmospheric Research, told UPI.

Giving a few weeks' notice to farmers and water managers might lessen the blow of a flash drought, said co-author Philip Mote, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University.

"Forewarned is forearmed," Mote said. "The more experience we get with making these forecasts, the more helpful they will be for water use."

Flash droughts could be predicted by factoring in the evaporation rate of the atmosphere when other weather patterns are in place, researchers said in "Flash droughts present a new challenge for subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction."

A combination of thirsty air, or high evaporative demand, combined with stretches of no rain and extra heat, can lead to a flash droughts, Pendergrass said.

RELATED El Niño weather patterns blamed for declines in insect biodiversity

A 2012 flash drought hit the agricultural heartland of the Midwest and Great Plains, in early June, lasting through the summer and causing billions of dollars in crop losses, said Mary Knapp, assistant Kansas state climatologist.
"We got a cessation of rainfall at critical points when the crops were needing it with the highest demand," Knapp said.

Notice of flash drought conditions could help water managers in the West plan for irrigation and drinking water usage, she said.

RELATED Wetter and drier: Global warming drives weather extremes

"As we go into the spring, if we're going to see an onset of a flash drought, reservoir managers might not lower the storage levels because they will need that water later," Knapp said.

If farmers had a heads-up about the drought in 2012, they might have planted more water-tolerant crop varieties or increased row spacing in the fields so crops did not compete for water, she said.

But some decisions, like following a five-year planned crop rotation, would not have been alterable with only a few weeks' notice, Knapp said.

In summer 2017 in Eastern Montana and western North Dakota, a wet spring was followed by a flash drought.

Rangeland for cattle grazing suddenly dried up under extreme dry conditions. During the same period, a fast-moving wildfire destroyed 300,000 acres of rangeland.

Many producers weaned calves early and sold them to market, and many cut down their herds significantly that year, said Jay Bodner, executive vice president of the Helena-based Montana Stock Growers Association.

"Grass composition was such poor quality that the young calves were not putting on pounds and coming in underweight," Bodner recalled.

Giving ranchers a three-week lead time before a flash drought could have helped make some decisions about locating pasture options or alternative hay, he said.

"They might not have had to sell those animals," Bodner said.

Droughts are among the most complex weather patterns, still not well understood by climate scientists, the essay said. They can last for a few weeks or decades, and can affect a few square miles or stretch over continents.

Some parts of the western United States have been in a state of drought for decades, and that can increase wildfires.

Weather scientists and farmers try to predict how a drought is progressing via the U.S. Drought Monitor website, run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Climate scientists might have predicted the flash drought of 2012 early if they added analysis of atmospheric thirst, or evaporative demand drought index, the paper said.

Evaporative demand numbers showed that by early May, weeks before the drought actually hit, arid, hot weather conditions already were building.

One thing climate scientists can't predict, however, is when a drought will end.

It's actually harder to predict when it will rain than whether atmospheric conditions are right for a flash drought, Pendergrass said.

Meanwhile, she said she hoped more research would lead to better predictions.

"If communities are able to make plans and have them at the ready, they can prepare ahead of time before a flash drought event gets too far underway," she said.

On this date in history: MARCH 5,  1946 Winston Churchill, in a famous speech in Fulton, Mo., stated that a Soviet Union "Iron Curtain" had "descended across" Europe. 

"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." (1939)

File Photo courtesy Cecil Beaton/Imperial War Museums

March 5 (UPI) -- On this date in history In 1984, the Standard Oil Co. of California, also known as Chevron, bought Gulf Corp. for more than $13 billion in the largest business merger in U.S. history at the time.

THIS WAS ALSO THE TIME OF THE GREATEST CRASH IN OIL MARKET HISTORY, WHICH LED TO THE CREATION OF PETROCAN AND THE NEP
IN CANADA. PETROCAN BOUGHT UP ABANDONED CANADIAN OIL COMPANY SUBSIDIARIES LIKE CHEVRON AND GULF WHEN THESE MERGERS OCCURRED

On this date in history: MARCH 5,1933,

in German elections, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party won nearly half the seats in the Reichstag (the Parliament).

On this date in history: MARCH 5,1953, the Soviet Union announced that Joseph Stalin had died at age 73. Stalin had been in a coma after having a stroke four days earlier. 

WHO KILLED STALIN

File Photo by Library of Congress/UPI

SEE STALIN

New Study Supports Idea Stalin Was Poisoned

By Michael Wines
March 5, 2003

Fifty years after Stalin died, felled by a brain hemorrhage at his dacha, an exhaustive study of long-secret Soviet records lends new weight to an old theory that he was actually poisoned, perhaps to avert a looming war with the United States.

That war may well have been closer than anyone outside the Kremlin suspected at the time, say the authors of a new book based on the records.

The 402-page book, ''Stalin's Last Crime,'' will be published later this month. Relying on a previously secret account by doctors of Stalin's final days, its authors suggest that he may have been poisoned with warfarin, a tasteless and colorless blood thinner also used as a rat killer, during a final dinner with four members of his Politburo.

They base that theory in part on early drafts of the report, which show that Stalin suffered extensive stomach hemorrhaging during his death throes. The authors state that significant references to stomach bleeding were excised from the 20-page official medical record, which was not issued until June 1953, more than three months after his death on March 5 that year.



Four Politburo members were at that dinner: Lavrenti P. Beria, then chief of the secret police; Georgi M. Malenkov, Stalin's immediate successor; Nikita S. Khrushchev, who eventually rose to the top spot; and Nikolai Bulganin.

The authors, Vladimir P. Naumov, a Russian historian, and Jonathan Brent, a Yale University Soviet scholar, suggest that the most likely suspect, if Stalin was poisoned, is Beria, for 15 years his despised minister of internal security.

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Beria supposedly boasted of killing Stalin on May Day, two months after his death. ''I did him in! I saved all of you,'' he was quoted as telling Vyacheslav M. Molotov, another Politburo member, in Khrushchev's 1970 memoirs, ''Khrushchev Remembers.''

But Mr. Naumov and Mr. Brent dismiss Khrushchev's own account of Stalin's death, in the same memoirs, as an almost cartoonish distortion of the truth. With virtually everyone connected to the case now dead, the real story may never be known, Mr. Brent said in an interview this week.

''Some doctors are skeptical that if an autopsy were performed, that a conclusive answer to the question of whether he was poisoned could be found,'' he said. ''I personally believe that Stalin's death was not fortuitous. There are just too many arrows pointing in the other direction.''

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The book, like most such volumes, paints a chilling portrait of Stalin, at once deeply paranoid and endlessly crafty, continually inventing enemies and then wiping them out as part of the terror that killed millions and kept millions more in the toil that enabled the Soviet Union to leap from czarism to the industrial age.


Yet modern Russians are torn about his memory. The latest poll of 1,600 adults by the All-Russian Public Opinion Center, released today on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his death, shows that more than half of all respondents believe Stalin's role in Russian history was positive, while only a third disagreed.

By the poll's reckoning, 27 percent of Russians judge Stalin a cruel and inhumane tyrant. But 20 percent call him wise and humane -- among them the head of the Communist Party, Gennadi Zyuganov, who today compared Stalin to ''the most grandiose figures of the Renaissance.''

Mr. Brent and Mr. Naumov, the secretary of a Russian government commission to rehabilitate victims of repression, have spent years in the archives of the K.G.B. and other Soviet organizations.

Russian officials granted them access to some documents for their latest work, which primarily traces the fabulous course of the Doctors' Plot, a supposed collusion in the late 1940's by Kremlin doctors to kill top Communist leaders.

The collusion was in fact a fabrication by Kremlin officials, acting largely on Stalin's orders. By the time Stalin disclosed the plot to a stunned Soviet populace in January 1953, he had spun it into a vast conspiracy, led by Jews under the United States' secret direction, to kill him and destroy the Soviet Union itself.

That February, the Kremlin ordered the construction of four giant prison camps in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Arctic north, apparently in preparation for a second great terror -- this time directed at the millions of Soviet citizens of Jewish descent.



But the terror never unfolded. On March 1, 1953, two weeks after the camps were ordered built and two weeks before the accused doctors were to go on trial, Stalin collapsed at Blizhnaya, a north Moscow dacha, after the all-night dinner with his four Politburo comrades.

After four days, Stalin died, at age 73. Death was laid to a hemorrhage on the left side of his brain.

Less than a month later, the doctors previously accused of trying to kill him were abruptly exonerated and the case against them was deemed an invention of the secret police. No Jews were deported east. By year's end, Beria faced a firing squad, and Khrushchev had tempered Soviet hostility toward the United States.

In their book, Mr. Naumov and Mr. Brent cite wildly varying accounts of Stalin's last hours as evidence that -- at the least -- Stalin's Politburo colleagues denied him medical help in the first hours of his illness, when it might have been effective.

Khrushchev and others recalled long after Stalin's death that they had dined with him until the early hours of March 1. His and most other reports state that Stalin was later found sprawled unconscious on the floor, a copy of Pravda nearby.

Yet no doctors were summoned to the dacha until the morning of March 2. Why remains a mystery: one guard later said that Beria had called shortly after Stalin was found, ordering them to say nothing about his illness. Khrushchev wrote that Stalin had been drunk at the dinner and that his dinner companions, told of his illness, presumed that he had fallen out of bed -- until it became clear things were more serious.

More telling, however, is the official medical account of Stalin's death, given to the Communist Party Central Committee in June 1953 and buried in files for almost the next 50 years until unearthed by Mr. Naumov and Mr. Brent. It maintained that Stalin had become ill in the early hours of March 2, a full day after he actually suffered a stroke.



The effect of the altered official report is to imply that doctors were summoned quickly after Stalin was found, rather than after a delay.

The authors state that a cerebral hemorrhage is still the most straightforward explanation for Stalin's death, and that poisoning remains for now a matter of speculation. But Western physicians who examined the Soviet doctors' official account of Stalin's last days said similar physical effects could have been produced by a 5-to-10-day dose of warfarin, which had been patented in 1950 and was being aggressively marketed worldwide at the time.

Why Stalin might have been killed is a less difficult question. Politburo members lived in fear of Stalin; beyond that, the book cites a previously secret report as evidence that Stalin was preparing to add a new dimension to the alleged American conspiracy known as the Doctors' Plot.

That report -- an interrogation of a supposed American agent named Ivan I. Varfolomeyev, in 1951 -- indicated that the Kremlin was preparing to accuse the United States of a plot to destroy much of Moscow with a new nuclear weapon, then to launch an invasion of Soviet territory along the Chinese border.

Mr. Varfolomeyev's fantastic plot was known in Soviet documents as ''the plan of the internal blow.'' Stalin, the book states, had assigned the Varfolomeyev case highest priority, and was preparing to proceed with a public trial despite his underlings' fears that the charges were so unbelievable that they would make the Kremlin a global laughingstock.

Mr. Naumov said in an interview today that that plan, combined with other Soviet military preparations in the Russian Far East at the time, strongly suggest that Stalin was preparing for a war along the United States' Pacific Coast. What remains unclear, he said, is whether he planned a first strike or whether the mushrooming conspiracy unfolding in Moscow was to serve as a provocation that would lead both sides to a flash point.

''I am told that the only case when the two sides were on the verge of war was the Cuban crisis,'' in 1962, he said. ''But I think this was the first case. And this first time that we were on the verge of war was even more dangerous,'' because the devastation of nuclear weapons was not yet an article of faith.



Mr. Brent said he believes that fear of a nuclear holocaust could have led Beria and perhaps others at that final dinner to assent to Stalin's death.

''No question -- they were afraid,'' he said. ''But they knew that the direction Stalin was going in was one of fiercer and fiercer conflict with the U.S. This is what Khrushchev saw, and it is what Beria saw. And it scared them to death.''

The authors say that Stalin knew of his comrades' fears, citing as proof remarks at a December 1952 meeting of top Communist leaders in which Stalin began laying out the scope of the Doctors' Plot and the American threat to Soviet power.

''Here, look at you -- blind men, kittens,'' the minutes record Stalin as saying. ''You don't see the enemy. What will you do without me?''


Correction: March 8, 2003

An article on Wednesday about the death of Stalin and the possibility that he was poisoned by Politburo members to avert a looming war with the United States misstated the title and author of a memoir that included such a theory. It was by Vyacheslav M. Molotov, not by Nikita S. Khrushchev, and published in 1992 as ''Molotov Remembers.''

On This Day: Hula Hoop patented
On March 5, 1963, Wham-O patented the Hula Hoop, which then became a fad across the country.
UPI


A woman performs with a Hula Hoop as she walks in the St. Louis Mardi Gras Parade on February 22. Photo by Bill Greenblatt/UPI | License Photo

LGBTQ

Virginia governor signs law banning conversion therapy for minors

BAN IT OUTRIGHT


Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed a bill to ban conversion therapy, making it the 20th state with laws to protect children from the practice that seeks to change a child's sexuality or gender identity. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/UPI | License Photo

March 4 (UPI) -- Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has signed a bill banning conversion therapy for minors in the state.

With the signing of the law Wednesday, Virginia became the 20th state to protect youth from the practice that attempts to forcibly change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity.

"Conversion therapy sends the harmful message that there is something wrong with who you are," Northam said. "This discriminatory practice has been widely discredited in studies and can have lasting effects on our youth, putting them at a greater risk of depression and suicide. No one should be made to feel they are not okay the way they are -- especially not a child. I am proud to sign this ban into law."

Virginia Delegate Patrick Hope, who introduced the bill in the state House, described conversion therapy as "a dangerous, destructive practice."

"We should be supporting and celebrating our LTGBQ youth, not putting them in harm's way," Hope said.

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah Vermont, Washington, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have similar laws, according to the Human Rights Campaign.