Belarus threatens to fire on anti-Lukashenko protesters

Belarus on Monday threatened to fire on protesters to break up demonstrations against President Alexander Lukashenko, as EU foreign ministers agreed to impose sanctions personally targeting the strongman leader.

© STRINGER 

Police use water cannons and tear gas on demonstrators Sunday

© Provided by AFP Tens of thousands of opposition supporters were seen in this march last month in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, with many being detained by police.

The use of live firearms would mark a major escalation in the two-month standoff between Lukashenko and protesters, who have staged peaceful rallies against his disputed re-election in August and against the abuse and torture of detainees.

© STRINGER There have been regular demonstrations against Lukashenko since his disputed re-election in August

The warning came after security forces cracked down harshly on anti-Lukashenko protests on Sunday, prompting EU foreign ministers to agree it was time to sanction Lukashenko himself.

Later on Monday, officers used tear gas and stun grenades against a group of pensioners holding a regular protest march, prompting outrage from the opposition.

The protests broke out when Lukashenko claimed victory in August 9 elections over a popular opposition candidate, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who claims to be the true winner.

Belarus's first deputy interior minister Gennady Kazakevich said in a video statement that "we will not leave the streets and law enforcement officers and internal troops if necessary will use riot control equipment and lethal weapons".

© STRINGER Pensioners, once thought to be among Lukashenko's strongers supporters, have joined the protests

Police have so far only acknowledged using water cannon, rubber bullets and stun grenades to disperse the protesters.

Kazakevich claimed that protests had become "extremely radical", saying stones and bottles had been thrown at police on Sunday by protesters armed with knives, who built barricades and set fire to tyres.

"This has nothing in common with civil protest," the deputy minister said, claiming that "groups of fighters, radicals, anarchists and football fans" were taking part

- Tear gas for 'grandmothers' -

Belarus was facing attempts to revive the "chaos of the 1990s" and foment the "colour revolutions" that have toppled pro-Kremlin leaders in other ex-Soviet states, he said.

His statement came as police have used some of the harshest tactics yet against protesters.

On Monday, burly men with black balaclavas and batons confronted a crowd of mainly middle-aged and older women carrying placards with slogans such as "the grandmothers are with the people", video footage by Tut.by independent news site showed.

"We deployed stun grenades from an Osa flare gun and fired tear gas when the citizens started to show aggression," Minsk police spokesman Roman Lashkevich told Russia's RIA Novosti news agency.

"Today the regime crossed yet another line," Tikhanovskaya said in a statement, pointing out that older Belarusians had once been seen as Lukashenko's most loyal electorate.

The men were shown spraying from inside their vehicles as protesters angry at the detention of demonstrators threw flowers at them and shouted "Fascists!" and "Cowards!".

Later protesters in Minsk blocked roads and set tyres on fire, as military vehicles drove through the city centre, Tut.by reported.

During Sunday's mass protests, police deployed water cannon and stun grenades in Minsk, detaining more than 700 people across the country, the interior ministry said.

The crackdown ended any expectations that a prison visit by Lukashenko to hold over four hours of talks with critics held in jail at the weekend marked any change in approach.

Two entrepreneurs with links to the opposition who took part in the meeting were moved to house arrest after the talks.

Kazakevich's statement was the first time the authorities have explicitly threatened to use firearms against opposition demonstrators.

But the Nasha Niva independent newspaper on Sunday posted a video in which internal troops appeared to run towards demonstrators while threatening them with guns.

When protests broke out in August, police acknowledged opening fire on protesters in the southern city of Brest, killing one, though it was unclear whether live bullets were used.

They said they acted in self-defence as the men were armed with iron bars, but relatives of the dead man said he had simply been walking along the street.

- Lukashenko sanctioned -

European foreign ministers Monday agreed Lukashenko's name should join a list of 40 of his officials already sanctioned by the EU with travel bans and asset freezes, diplomatic sources said.

The EU had held back from penalising Lukashenko himself, hoping to persuade him to engage in dialogue with opposition forces to resolve the crisis. But the treatment of demonstrators on Sunday proved the last straw.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said earlier that the Belarusian leader should be among those sanctioned as "the violence continues, perpetrated by the Lukashenko regime".

The EU, along with the United States and other countries, has rejected the results of the August 9 election and said it does not regard Lukashenko as the legitimate president.

Lukashenko has been president of his country, wedged between Russia and the EU, since 1994, holding on to power through a combination of strongman tactics and sometimes wily diplomacy.

Analysts say the protest movement is keeping him under pressure but the continued backing of the security forces, and for the moment key ally Russia, is allowing him to stay in power.

burs-as-am/jj

Space Mining Should Be a Global Project—But It’s Not Starting Off That Way

By Edd Gent -Oct 12, 2020

Exploiting the resources of outer space might be key to the future expansion of the human species. But researchers argue that the US is trying to skew the game in its favor, with potentially disastrous consequences.

The enormous cost of lifting material into space means that any serious effort to colonize the solar system will require us to rely on resources beyond our atmosphere. Water will be the new gold thanks to its crucial role in sustaining life, as well as the fact it can be split into hydrogen fuel and oxygen for breathing.

Regolith found on the surface of rocky bodies like the moon and Mars will be a crucial building material, while some companies think it will eventually be profitable to extract precious metals and rare earth elements from asteroids and return them to Earth. But so far, there’s little in the way of regulation designed to govern how these activities should be managed.

Now two Canadian researchers argue in a paper in Science that recent policy moves by the US are part of a concerted effort to refocus international space cooperation towards short-term commercial interests, which could precipitate a “race to the bottom” that sabotages efforts to safely manage the development of space.

Aaron Boley and Michael Byers at the University of British Columbia trace back the start of this push to the 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which gave US citizens and companies the right to own and sell space resources under US law. In April this year, President Trump doubled down with an executive order affirming the right to commercial space mining and explicitly rejecting the idea that space is a “global commons,” flying in the face of established international norms.

Since then, NASA has announced that any countries wishing to partner on its forthcoming Artemis missions designed to establish a permanent human presence on the moon will have to sign bilateral agreements known as Artemis Accords. These agreements will enshrine the idea that commercial space mining will be governed by national laws rather than international ones, the authors write, and that companies can declare “safety zones” around their operations to exclude others.

Speaking to Space.com Mike Gold, the acting associate administrator for NASA’s Office of International and Interagency Relations, disputes the authors’ characterization of the accords and says they are based on the internationally-recognized Outer Space Treaty. He says they don’t include agreement on national regulation of mining or companies’ rights to establish safety zones, though they do assert the right to extract and use space resources.

But given that they’ve yet to be released or even finalized, it’s not clear how far these rights extend or how they are enshrined in the agreements. And the authors point out that the fact that they are being negotiated bilaterally means the US will be able to use its dominant position to push its interpretation of international law and its overtly commercial goals for space development.

Space policy designed around the exploitation of resources holds many dangers, say the paper authors. For a start, loosely-regulated space mining could result in the destruction of deposits that could hold invaluable scientific information. It could also kick up dangerous amounts of lunar dust that can cause serious damage to space vehicles, increase the amount of space debris, or in a worst-case scenario, create meteorites that could threaten satellites or even impact Earth.

By eschewing a multilateral approach to setting space policy, the US also opens the door to a free-for-all where every country makes up its own rules. Russia is highly critical of the Artemis Accords process and China appears to be frozen out of it, suggesting that two major space powers will not be bound by the new rules. That potentially sets the scene for a race to the bottom, where countries compete to set the laxest rules for space mining to attract investment.

The authors call on other nations to speak up and attempt to set rules through the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Writing in The Conversation, Scott Shackelford from Indiana University suggests a good model could be the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which froze territorial claims and reserved the continent for “peaceful purposes” and “scientific investigation.”

But the momentum behind the US’ push might be difficult to overcome. Last month, the agency announced it would pay companies to excavate small amounts of regolith on the moon. Boley and Byers admit that if this went ahead and was not protested by other nations, it could set a precedent in international law that would be hard to overcome.

For better or worse, it seems that US dominance in space exploration means it’s in the driver’s seat when it comes to setting the rules. As they say, to the victor go the spoils.

Image Credit: NASA


EDD GENT
I am a freelance science and technology writer based in Bangalore, India. My main areas of interest are engineering, computing and biology, with a particular focus on the intersections between the three.

 

The unending waste management challenge - are we at our wits' end?

Waste management would need a radical change. It could be achieved through the application of knowledge management tools and approaches in the waste management.

UNIVERSITY OF VAASA

Research News

 

IMAGE: BEATRICE OBULE-ABILA view more 

CREDIT: RIIKKA KALMI, UNIVERSITY OF VAASA

The problem of waste management has become persistent. It is a challenge that is growing in bounds and depths as the world's population surges. Are we at our wits' end?

Waste management would need a radical change. According to Beatrice Obule-Abila's doctoral dissertation at the University of Vaasa, Finland, this change could be achieved through the application of knowledge management tools and approaches in the waste management.

Daily, each of the 7.8 billion people inhabiting Earth generates approximately one kilogram of waste, which translates into 5.8 million metric tons of waste. This is about nineteen super-tankers. The problem is not being reduced. Waste generation is bound to continue to increase as the population and urbanization increases, and so are the challenges associated with managing waste, says Obule-Abila.

The doctoral dissertation by Beatrice Obule-Abila focuses on changing the paradigm of waste management by exploring the adoption of knowledge management framework, developing and deploying more knowledge management tools, systems, and approaches in seeking solutions to the problem of waste: so that waste no longer constitutes a nuisance, but a valuable resource.

Are financial incentives or socio-psychological factors the motive for the recycling of waste?

In developing the knowledge management framework that will spur the change in paradigm, Beatrice Obule-Abila answered several germane questions in her thesis. For example, are financial incentives or socio-psychological factors key drivers in promoting recycling and sustainable waste management?

The survey results affirmed that financial incentives are important in accelerating the recycling of municipal solid waste. It was also established that intrinsic and extrinsic factors related to socio-psychology can stimulate consumers' behavior towards adopting recycling and other methods of managing waste sustainably.

It is illuminating to discover that in Finland, incentivization, particularly financial incentives, plays an indispensable role in promoting sustainable recycling of municipal solid waste. Thus, financial incentives are prerequisites for attaining the European Union recycling target for municipal solid waste in Finland, says Obule-Abila.

The study further revealed that both income-earning and non-income-earning groups of consumers show interest in monetary incentives, as a factor spurring their recycling behavior.

The major driver in the recycling of municipal solid waste is a belief in the benefits of recycling waste while the minor driver for the recycling of waste is relative to its attached financial incentive.

Over all, consumers' behavior for the recycling of municipal solid waste is more driven by socio-psychological factors in Finland.

Knowledge management approach as a prerequisite for sustainable waste management

According to Obule-Abila, the knowledge management bridges the knowledge gaps in waste management through its integration to all the aspects of waste management.

The key outcome of the research - a waste knowledge management conceptual framework - lays the foundation for understanding the linkage and applicability of knowledge management in waste management.

The researcher outlined the various paths through exploration and adoption of knowledge management process towards attaining the various goals of waste management - which includes material recovery, energy generation, and the attainment of social, economic, and environmental sustainability.

This dissertation advances the insight of researchers, waste companies, government, particularly at the municipal levels, and a broad array of stakeholders to visualize the knowledge management tools, systems, and approaches used in the management of waste as the foundation of knowledge management.

The dissertation consists of six publications. Four publications apply literature review and synthesis, and two publications employ survey method.

Public Defence

The public examination of M.Sc. Beatrice Obule-Abila's doctoral dissertation "Knowledge management approach for sustainable waste management: Evolving a conceptual framework" will be held on Wednesday 14 October 2020 at noon.

###

The public examination will be organized online: https://uwasa.zoom.us/j/62582796222?pwd=ZTBJaUZmZzA3bk5nQmdQOW9HVlNsZz09 (Password: 091232).

The field of dissertation is Industrial Management. Professor Rodrigo Lozano (University of Gävle) will act as an opponent and Professor Petri Helo as a custos.

Obule-Abila, Beatrice (2020) Knowledge management approach for sustainable waste management: Evolving a conceptual framework. Acta Wasaensia 448. Doctoral dissertation. Vaasan yliopisto. University of Vaasa.

Publication pdf: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-476-923-5

Now Time Travel Can Be Paradox-Free, 

Thanks To Math 
Elizabeth Fernandez Contributor Science FORBES
I write about the philosophy and ethics of science and technology.

Time travelers might not have to worry about creating a world where their parents never met. GETTY

It’s a worry of time travelers everywhere. What if they go back in time and do something terrible, like prevent their parents from meeting or killing their grandfather? Such a time-traveling “oops” could prevent them from ever being born. Therefore, they would have never existed to travel back in time in the first place.

This “grandfather paradox” has had want-to-be time travelers scratching their heads ever since we dreamed of traveling back in time. Does this mean that time travel is not possible? Does it mean that each decision we make creates several different branching worlds? This conundrum may have been cleared up (at least mathematically) by fourth-year undergraduate student Germain Tobar of the University of Queensland.

Irish artist Emmalene Blake's mural of characters Marty McFly and Doc Brown from the cult 80's movie 'Back to the Future' in South Dublin. (Photo by Brian Lawless/PA Images via Getty Images)

 PA IMAGES VIA GETTY IMAGES


Time Travel and Philosophy

One way to solve the grandfather paradox? Time travel isn’t possible at all.

This is probably the easiest, yet least fulfilling, of potential solutions. Time travel isn’t possible, let’s wash our hands of any possibility and forget about it. And this very well may be the case.

However, in general relativity, things called closed time-like curves can exist, and are a way to solve general field equations. It’s like stepping on a train, taking a wonderful trip through the mountains, and returning to the same spot you left off, both in space and in time. That means the moment where you step off the train is both in the past and future of when you got on the train in the first place. In a closed time-like curve, an object returns to the same place and time that it was in the past, completing a loop. It’s unclear if closed time-like curves exist in our universe, but if they do, mathematically, they would allow for time travel.

The moment you step onto the train is both in the past and the future of the moment you step off in a closed time-like curve.

 GETTY

Then there’s option two. In this quantum mechanical model, each choice opens up another universe. If time travelers changed something in the past, they would enter another parallel universe. The original timeline would still exist, one among many branching worlds. In such a model, it might be very hard for time travelers to return to the universe they came from.

Finally - time travel is possible, but time travelers can only do certain things. A time traveler who went back in time, for example, could not kill Hitler, no matter what he tried. This raises all sorts of philosophical problems - does the time traveler still have free will? It’s difficult to say time travel is possible while simultaneously destroying freedom of choice.


Paradox-Free Time Travel While Preserving Freedom of Choice

That’s where young physicist Germain Tobar steps in.

Under the supervision of physicist Dr. Fabio Costa, Tobar came up with a way to mathematically preserve freedom of choice, while allowing for paradox-free time travel.

For example, let’s imagine there is a scientist in a laboratory with a time-traveling coin. The coin enters the laboratory at some point in the past as “heads” and leaves at some point in the future as “tails”. Tobar’s model fixes the boundary conditions - the point in time where the coin enters and leaves the laboratory - as always heads and tails. Then, his model allows the state of the coin to change when it is in the laboratory. Since the initial and final state of the coin is fixed, a paradox is avoided. However, anything can happen to the coin when it is in the laboratory. “For example,” says Tobar, “she [the scientist] can decide to always flip the coin, or always prepare heads regardless of what she got... it can flip, it can hit other coins, and so on.” But no matter what she did or how hard she tried, each time the coin time-travels through her lab, it will always leave as “tails”.

Let’s take another pertinent example. “Say you traveled in time, in an attempt to stop COVID-19’s patient zero from being exposed to the virus,” Costa says. “However if you stopped that individual from becoming infected – that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place.”

In Tobar’s model, no matter what you did, the virus would still escape somehow. “You might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would,” says Tobar. “No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you.”

Even time travelers couldn't stop the spread of the coronavirus. GETTY

That means that you have complete freedom of choice, but no matter how hard you tried, you could not stop COVID-19 from escaping.

But this is good news for Marty McFly in Back to the Future. Nothing he did could prevent his parents from falling in love and getting married, and eventually, allowing Marty to be born. Other things might change, like how they met, or what his father ate for breakfast that morning. But nothing could change their eventual meeting.

This doesn’t necessarily rule out other models of time travel, for example, a quantum mechanical one. “Some of the quantum approaches would indeed invoke the existence of multiple universes, which interact through the time machine, possibly creating alternate timelines,” says Tobar. Instead, Tobar and Costa’s model is classical and shows that if only one universe exists, it is possible to allow for paradox-free time travel.

This work has other implications as well, including the unification of quantum theory with general relativity. “One of the main issues is that, in such a theory, time seems to disappear, making the traditional, temporal view of dynamics unsuitable,” says Tobar. “Our work presents a different way to look at physical laws, which could find applications in theories of quantum gravity.”

Could closed time-like curves, and potentially time machines, exist in our Universe?

“Proposals so far involve exotic matter (with negative or infinite energy), and we don't know if such matter exists in our universe,” says Tobar. “An interesting consequence is that the CTCs [closed time-like curves] would only exist after a certain point in time, which means it would not be possible to time travel to before the first time machine was created. This would explain why we haven't seen any time traveler from the future yet.”

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website. 

Elizabeth Fernandez
Dr. Elizabeth Fernandez is the host of SparkDialog Podcasts (sparkdialog.com), which covers the intersection of science and society. She has a PhD in astrophysics 

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Death By Spaghettification! Astronomers Spot a Star Being Consumed by a Black Hole

This could solve the mystery of tidal disruption events or ‘spaghettification.’

 by Rob Lea  October 12, 2020

An international team of researchers has used telescopes from around the world — including instruments operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) — to glimpse a blast of light emitted by a star as it is torn apart by the tidal forces of a supermassive black hole.

The event — technically known as a ‘tidal disruption event’ (TDE) — occurred 215-million light-years from Earth, but despite this intimidating sounding distance, this is the closest to our planet such a flare has ever been captured. This, and the fact the astronomers spotted the event early, means the team was able to study the phenomena in unprecedented detail, in turn uncovering some surprises in this violent and powerful process. 

 

This illustration depicts a star (in the foreground) experiencing spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a supermassive black hole (in the background) during a ‘tidal disruption event’. In a new study, done with the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope and ESO’s New Technology Telescope, a team of astronomers found that when a black hole devours a star, it can launch a powerful blast of material outwards. (ESO/M. Kornmesser)

The astronomers directed the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), based in the Atacama desert, Chile, and other instruments at a blast of light that first occurred last year. They studied the flare, located in AT2019qiz in a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Eridanus, for six months as it grew in luminosity and then faded. Their findings are published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“My research focuses on close encounters between stars and supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies. Gravity very close to a black hole is so strong that a star cannot survive, and instead gets ripped apart into thin streams of gas,” Thomas Wevers, co-author of the study and an ESO Fellow in Santiago, Chile, tells ZME Science. “This process is called a tidal disruption event, or sometimes ‘spaghettification’.

“If not for such tidal disruption events, we would not be able to see these black holes. Hence, they provide a unique opportunity to study the properties of these ‘hidden’ black holes in detail.”Thomas Wevers, ESO Fellow
Catching the Start of the Movie

Wevers, who was part of the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK, as the study was being conducted, explains that it can take several weeks — or even months — to identify these spaghettification events with any certainty. Such an identification also takes all the telescopes and observational power that can be mustered. This can often cause a delay that results in astronomers missing the early stages of the process

.

This image shows the sky around the location of AT2019qiz, at the very centre of the frame. This picture was created from images in the Digitized Sky Survey 2. (ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin)

“It’s like watching a movie but starting 30 minutes in, a lot of information is lost if you can’t watch from the very beginning, and while you might be able to reconstruct roughly what has happened, you can never be completely sure,” the researcher explains. But, that wasn’t the case with this new event.

To stick to the analogy; this time the team had their popcorn and drink and were in their seats before the trailers started rolling.


“In this new event, we were lucky enough to identify and hence observe it very quickly, which has allowed us to see and understand what happens in the early phases in great detail.”Thomas Wevers, ESO Fellow

Spotting spaghettification events is not just difficult due to timing issues, though. Such events are fairly rare, with only 100 candidates identified thus far, and are often obscured by a curtain of dust and debris. When a black hole devours a star, a jet of material is launched outwards that can further obscure the view of astronomers. The prompt viewing of this event allowed that jet to be seen as it progressed.

“The difficulty comes first from picking out these rare events in among all the more common things changing in the night sky: variable stars and supernova explosions,” Matt Nicholl, a lecturer and Royal Astronomical Society research fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK, and the lead author of the study tells ZME Science. “A second difficulty comes from the events themselves: they were predicted to look about 100 times hotter than the flare that we observed. Our data show that this is because of all the outflowing debris launched from the black hole: this absorbs the heat and cools down as it expands.”

Spaghettification: Delicious and Dangerous

The spaghettification process is one of the most fascinating aspects of black hole physics. It arises from the massive change in gravitational forces experienced by a body as it approaches a black hole.

“A star is essentially a giant ball of hot, self-gravitating gas, which is why it is roughly spherical in shape. When the star approaches the black hole, gravity acts in a preferential direction, so the star gets squeezed in one direction but stretched in the perpendicular direction,” Wevers says. “You can compare it to a balloon: when you squeeze it between your hands, it elongates in the direction parallel to your hands. Because the gravity is so extreme, the result is that the star essentially gets squeezed into a very long and thin spaghetti strand — hence the name spaghettification.”

Death by Spagettification! (ESO/M. Kornmesser/ Robert Lea)

Nicholl continues, explaining what happens next to this stellar spaghetti strand: “Eventually, it wraps all the way around and collides with itself, and that’s when we start to see the light show as the material heats up before either falling into the black hole or being flung back into space.

“The distance at which the star encountered the supermassive black hole was around the same distance between the Earth and Sun — this shows how incredibly strong the gravitational pull of the black hole must be to be able to tear the star apart from that distance.”

“If you picture the Sun being torn into a thin stream and rushing towards us, that’s roughly what the black hole saw!” Matt Nicholl, Royal Astronomical Society research fellow.

Suprises and Future Developments

The observations made by the astronomers have allowed them to study the dynamics of a star undergoing the spaghettification process in detail, something that hasn’t been possible before. And as is to be expected with such a first, the study yielded some surprises for the team.

“The biggest surprise with this event was how rapidly the light brightened and faded,” Nicholl tells ZME. “It took about a month from the encounter for the flare to reach its peak brightness, which is one of the fastest we’ve ever seen.”

The researcher continues to explain that faster events are harder to find, so it suggests that there might be a whole population of short-lived flares that have been escaping astronomers’ attention. “Our research may have solved a major and long-standing mystery of why these events are 100 times colder than expected — in this event, it was the outflowing gas that allowed it to cool down.”

Confirming this idea means that the team must now seek scarce telescope time to investigate more of these events to see if this characteristic is unique to the AT2019qiz flare, or if it is a common feature of such events. “Because we studied only one event, it is still unclear whether our results apply universally to all such tidal disruption events. So we need to repeat our experiment multiple times,” Wevers says. “Unfortunately, we are at the whims of nature and our ability to spot new TDEs. When we do, we will need to confirm the picture we have put forward or perhaps adapt it if we find different behaviour.”

The ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) will play an important role in the identification and study of future ‘spaghettification’ events. (ESO Photo Ambassador Serge Brunier.)

Wevers concludes by highlighting the unique position he, Nicholl, and their team find themselves in by studying such rare and difficult to observe events and the objects that lie behind them. “We aren’t yet in the phase where we think we have mapped all the behaviour that occurs following these cataclysmic events, so while each new TDE helps us to answer outstanding questions, at the same time it also raises new questions.

“We find ourselves continually in a catch-22 like situation, which in this case is a good thing as it propels our research forward!” exclaims Wevers. “I find it pretty amazing that we can study gargantuan black holes, weighing millions or even billions of times the mass of our sun, and which are located hundreds of millions of light-years away, in such detail with our telescopes.”

Original research: Nicholl. M., Wevers. T., Oates. S. R., et al, ‘An outflow powers the optical rise of the nearby, fast-evolving tidal disruption event AT2019qiz,’ Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, [2020].

                                             DE DEI SCIENTIA

 

CORNELL ALLIANCE FOR SCIENCE 

How the Alliance is going to vote

BY AFS STAFF

OCTOBER 12, 2020

At the Alliance for Science, we believe that everyone should make their voices heard and participate in democracy. With team members spread throughout the country and others based internationally, those of us who are United States citizens have various plans for voting in the Nov. 3 election. Below, a few of us share our personal voting plan. Have you made yours yet? If not, please visit vote.org to check your registration status and the voting rules that apply to your state.

Alliance Director Sarah Evanega, shown here voting with her children in 2016, will return with them to the polls in 2020.

Sarah Evanega: Voting early, in-person

At my house, voting is a family affair, involving all three of my young kids—even if it means arriving late to school. It’s important to me to instill the significance of voting in each of my children so that they will be active, voting citizens throughout their adult lives. This year, we have an early in-person voting option in Ithaca, New York, where we live. We even have the opportunity to do it on the weekend — so no need to miss school! In New York, the early voting period runs from Saturday, Oct. 24, 2020 to Sunday, Nov. 1, 2020. Our plan is to walk the short 3 ½ blocks to the Town of Ithaca Courthouse and participate as in-person voters. We’ll be wearing our masks and will be proud to take part in this important part of our American democracy. Afterwards, we’ll have a picnic in Seneca Falls, NY, which shares the shores of Lake Cayuga with Ithaca and is cited by many as the birthplace of the US women’s suffrage movement. That’s significant to us because 2020 is the centennial anniversary of the formal adoption of the 19th Amendment into the US Constitution. One-hundred years later, may we as a nation continue to fight for the right of all Americans to have easy voting access to ensure that their ballots are cast and counted.

Alliance Deputy Director Vanessa Greenlee turns in her ballot.

Vanessa Greenlee: Dropped off absentee ballot

I registered online for New York State’s absentee option in September, selecting the “potential transmission of Covid-19” dropdown option as rationale. This past weekend, we received our ballots in the mail. I drove to the Tompkins County Board of Elections last week to deliver my ballot.

I chose personal delivery instead of sending via the US Postal Service because of the delays and uncertainties regarding the USPS in the news. I’m happy with my choice. There were two staff members in the elections office when I arrived, both wearing masks. The staff member asked me if I would like to see my cover envelope opened as he checked the ballot envelope for completion of signature and date. Everything checked out, and I saw my ballot placed in the ballot box. And I left with the customary “I voted” sticker to wear.

Joan Conrow: Voting by mail

I usually prefer to vote in person, but I didn’t want to overload the polls before or on Election Day. It’s very easy to vote by absentee ballot in New Mexico, where I live, so I’ll be casting my ballot by mail instead. I’ve also volunteered to be a poll monitor on Nov. 3. There’s some concern that people may try to disrupt voting at the polls. I don’t anticipate that happening in my community, but I agreed to be present and keep an eye on things. I figured my background as a journalist would be useful in providing accurate documentation of anything that seems questionable. It’s the first time I’ve ever done something like that. But I feel like we all have to vote and make sure that others aren’t prevented from exercising their legal right to participate in this very critical aspect of our fragile democracy.

Anna Garber Hammond: Voting early

I came to the United States in 2008, just before the first election of Barack Obama. At that time, I was just a visitor and witnessed the election as a spectator. I remember the energy during that time very well! That experience was new and unreal to me as a brand-new person in a very unfamiliar country and culture.

Four years later I was a green card holder, still unable to vote. Another four years later, I was just becoming a US citizen, so I couldn’t vote in the 2016 election, either. I did, however, attend my first Election Day party with friends and colleagues.

Soon I will be voting for the first time in the US election! I plan to vote early, to avoid crowds on Election Day.

Justin Cremer: Voting absentee from abroad

I’ve voted via absentee ballot since moving abroad in 2010 and will do so again this year. I’m registered to vote in Iowa, where I both grew up and later returned to for a five-year stretch as an adult. The last time I voted in person was the 2008 election. As an Iowan, you get unprecedented access to candidates because of the state’s first-in-the-nation status and I’ll never forget the atmosphere that surrounded the 2008 rallies I attended, nor the night when the caucus results were announced and shocked the world.

Although I miss being in the US (not just at election time, but all the time), I still taking voting very seriously. Luckily, it is very easy and straightforward to vote in Iowa as an overseas citizen. I did have a minor complication this year because my parents moved for the first time in nearly 25 years. Because their home serves as my official US address, I had to file a new ballot request even though I had already received one. The Polk County election officials were super helpful and a new correct ballot (my new US address is in a different statehouse district) quickly arrived via email. Iowa rules allow overseas citizens to vote electronically, so once I have researched the down-ballot and local candidates, I will return my ballot via email.

Nassib Mugwanya: A Ugandan’s perspective

I had not been following the US election that much until recently, when almost every news source I listen to is talking about it. All the political experts and friends I’ve listened to seem to suggest that this is probably one of the most important elections the US has had in recent times. One of my friends who will be graduating next year told me that she is going to vote because she thinks the economy has been greatly disrupted by the pandemic, and she wants a president who would steer it back to normal for her to have a job when she’s done. As an international student from Uganda studying at North Carolina State University, this election is equally important to me, because how America votes has a direct impact on higher education policies — especially for non-citizens. As an international student, you want an administration whose policies would not constantly make you feel like you can be put on the plane to go back home any time in the middle of your studies without completing your program.

https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu

The Cornell Alliance for Science seeks to promote access to scientific innovation as a means of enhancing food security, improving environmental sustainability, and raising the quality of life globally.

We are building a global network of science allies who share our commitment to solve complex global hunger issues by leveraging advances in agriculture, including biotechnology.

We train with a purpose, empowering science champions around the world with the tools and skills needed to communicate effectively about science and promote evidence-based decision-making.

We provide accurate information about agricultural biotechnology and share the stories of those who are engaged in its development and implementation through our photographs, videos, blog posts, fact sheets, and other multimedia resources.

Using this three-pronged approach, the Cornell Alliance for Science works to ensure global access to life-improving agricultural innovations that can shrink farming’s footprint, deliver food security, reduce the drudgery of field work that often falls on women and children, provide rural families with sufficient income to educate their children, and inspire young people to pursue a career in agriculture and science

The Global Suppression of Indigenous Fire Management


Indigenous peoples’ techniques to manage and benefit from fire are threatened, even as wildfires burn more frequently and intensely.

Fire lights the hills from a controlled burn off of maize stubble on a farm property at Makikihi in South Canterbury, South Island, New Zealand. Getty

By: Livia Gershon
October 12, 2020


With devastating wildfires happening more regularly due to climate change, many Native people in U.S. states like California are pointing out that traditional Native methods for managing fire are often suppressed. As geographer Jayalaxshmi Mistry, biologist Bibiana A. Bilbao, and ecologist Andrea Berardi point out, this is actually a global story. Non-Indigenous governments all over the world have stamped out traditional ways of working with fire. But some people are working to bring them back.

Many Indigenous societies use fires in ways that connect ecological, social, and spiritual purposes. For example, the Mebêngôkre of Mato Grosso, Brazil, use fire in their hunt for tortoises. The event is part of an annual festival associated with courtship, youth initiation, and the education of younger generations. The Pemón in Venezuela organize large cooperative groups for tree cutting and burning. This strengthens social ties and passes along knowledge while accomplishing a difficult task.

Areas controlled by Indigenous peoples tend to suffer less from deforestation and other ecological harms than other comparable land.

“Therefore, savanna and forest ecosystems are being protected within Indigenous lands not because they are being ‘managed’ in a direct and active way, but as the indirect outcome of a healthy social-ecological system,” the authors write.

This kind of relationship with ecosystems is a boon to forests and the climate. Mistry, Bibao, and Berardi write that areas controlled by Indigenous peoples tend to suffer less from deforestation and other ecological harms than other comparable land. That means they emit less greenhouse gases. For example, in the Bolivian Amazon, only 0.5 percent of Indigenous territories were deforested between 2000 and 2010, compared with 3.2 percent in the region overall.

However, Indigenous ways of working with fire have come under attack. In California, for example, the Indigenous use of fire was banned outright—even as many Native people in the U.S. were enlisted as firefighters. In other cases, knowledge about these techniques is being lost. On the savannas of Guyana, some Wapishana and Makushi have adopted anti-fire ideas from state resource management agencies and environmental groups. Meanwhile, private cattle owners have increased burns to clear more grazing land, without necessarily employing traditional knowledge about the use of fire. The result is less patch-burning during the wet season—which can reduce the likelihood of large, uncontrolled fries—and more potentially damaging dry-season burning.

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Mistry, Bibao, and Berardi point to some hopeful examples of increased support for Indigenous fire management. In 2015, officials in Brazil began working with Xerente Indigenous fire experts to plan prescribed burns. In Australia, under a market-based carbon offset, ConocoPhillips is paying for the hiring of Indigenous rangers who collaborate with fire ecologists and traditional Indigenous owners of the land.

However, the authors argue that these programs risk simplifying Indigenous methods into a small set of tools that have an easily measured impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, they write, truly community-based solutions must go hand-in-hand with protecting and reviving Indigenous communities and increasing their control over their own traditional territories.

That’s an idea that’s as relevant for California as it is for anywhere else in the world.

NASA-style caution needed before allowing research to influence policy

by University of Oxford


Behavioural science should undergo rigorous testing and review before it informs public policy such as government responses to COVID-19, according to a paper in Nature Human Behaviour titled "Use caution when applying behavioural science to policy."

Professor Andrew K. Przybylski, director of research at Oxford's Internet Institute, is joint lead author of the paper, which recommends NASA's Technology Readiness levels be used to ensure new ideas are adequately tested before being adopted by governments and politicians.

The NASA system envisages a nine-stage process, beginning with 'basic principles' going through to 'successful mission operations', to ensure safety and efficacy. Such an approach to behavioural science, could have a significant effect on how governments decide advice on household mixing or whether to encourage the use of public transport during a pandemic.

The paper argues social and behavioural science research methods can make it difficult to know if policies will do more good than harm and argues for caution in the way research is communicated during crises. The team also calls for greater diversity and expertise of researchers, and experts in philosophy, ethics, statistics, and data and code management to work together to produce internationally-relevant research.


Explore further 

Keeping governments accountable: The COVID-10 assessment scorecard

More information: Hans IJzerman et al. Use caution when applying behavioural science to policy, Nature Human Behaviour (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-00990-w

Journal information: Nature Human Behaviour

Provided by University of Oxford

Private and public prostate cancer patients are being treated differently

by Medical Journal of Australia (MJA)

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Men seeking prostate cancer treatment within the private health system were more likely to opt for more radical treatment than men in the public system, according to research published online today by the Medical Journal of Australia.

Dr. Luc te Marvelde, a Research Fellow at Cancer Council Victoria, and colleagues analyzed Victorian Cancer Registry data linked to population-based administrative health datasets for 29 325 Victorian men diagnosed with prostate cancer during 2011–2017, looking for the proportions of men in private and public health services receiving radical prostatectomy (with or without curative radiation therapy) or curative external beam radiation therapy alone within 12 months of diagnosis.

They found that even after adjusting for age, tumor classification and comorbidity, men diagnosed in private health services received radical treatment more frequently than men diagnosed in public health services (odds ratio [OR], 1.40); the proportion of private patients who underwent radical prostatectomy was larger than that for public patients (44% v 28%) and the proportion of private patients who received curative external beam radiation therapy alone (excluding brachytherapy) was smaller (9% v 19%).

"Men diagnosed in private health services more frequently underwent radical prostatectomy (OR, 2.28)," te Marvelde and colleagues wrote.

"Radical prostatectomy was more frequent for men diagnosed in private health services for each International Society of Urological Pathology (ISUP) grade subset and socio-economic quintile. The difference was greater for men diagnosed after the age of 70 years (private v public: OR, 3.45) than for younger men (OR, 1.96)."

Although the authors offered no hypotheses for why the difference may exist, they acknowledged the need for further research.

"Treatment of people with cancer should be consistent, safe, of high quality and evidence-based, as described in the Cancer Council optimal care pathway for men with prostate cancer," the authors concluded.

"Our findings indicate a notable difference between the Victorian public and private health service sectors in the treatment chosen by men with localized prostate cancer. Men with prostate cancer who have no comorbid conditions, live in areas of higher socio-economic status, and have less aggressive disease more frequently receive their biopsy diagnoses at private health services. Further, after adjusting for the influence of these factors on their subsequent treatment, differences between choices in the private and public systems remained evident, suggesting that other factors have a strong influence on whether men undergo surgery or receive radiation therapy."


Explore furtherAdjuvant radiotherapy no better for localized prostate cancer

More information: Luc te Marvelde et al. Differences in treatment choices for localized prostate cancer diagnosed in private and public health services, Medical Journal of Australia (2020). DOI: 10.5694/mja2.50794

Journal information: Medical Journal of Australia

Provided by Medical Journal of Australia (MJA)

Scientists develop new precise therapeutic leukemia vaccine

MUTANT MICE WITH HUMAN DNA

by Chinese Academy of Sciences

High expression of Eps8 and PD-1/PD-L1 in acute leukemia and construction of microcapsule vaccine loading with new epitope Eps8 and PD-1 antibody Credit: WEI Wei

Exploration of new leukemia antigens and construction of appropriate delivery systems using FDA-approved material are important strategies for developing leukemia vaccines for clinic use.

Researchers from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Zhujiang Hospital of Southern Medical University have developed a new type of precise therapeutic vaccine against leukemia. It utilizes self-healing polylactic acid microcapsules for co-encapsulating a new epitope peptide and PD-1 antibody.

The study was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering on October 12.

Although the possibility of treating leukemia through vaccination has been established, therapeutic performance still falls short of expectations in clinic.

"Our clinical findings revealed the high expression of EPS8 and PD-1/PD-L1 in leukemia patients, which could be respectively used as a new type of leukemia antigen and a checkpoint target for a leukemia vaccine," said Prof. Li Yuhua from Zhujiang Hospital.

In the novel vaccine, epitope peptides and PD-1 antibodies can be simply, mildly and efficiently loaded into polylactic acid microcapsules, facilitated by the unique self-healing feature of the microcapsule.

Potent anti-leukemia activity in the PDX model Credit: WEI Wei

After a single vaccination, the deposition and degradation of microcapsules at the local injection site lead to recruitment of activated antigen-presenting cells and sustained release of both cargos.

"With the synergism of these two aspects, we observed a significant improvement in specific Cytotoxic T Lymphocyte (CTL) activation," said Prof. Wei Wei from IPE.

The researchers also verified the availability of the novel vaccine using various epitope peptides in different models, such as murine leukemia, humanized cell line-derived leukemia xenograft (CDX) and patient-derived leukemia xenograft (PDX) models.

The microcapsule-based formulation demonstrated its superior performance over that of the ISA adjuvant (commercialized adjuvant) in all leukemia therapeutic models, showing the promise of the microcapsule-based vaccine for use against various leukemia antigens in clinic.

"With the advantages of FDA-approved polylactic acid material, convenience in preparing the vaccine formulation, diversity of vaccine components, and excellent therapeutic effect, the microcapsule-based vaccine exhibits great potential for clinical translation," said Prof. Ma Guanghui from IPE.

A peer reviewer from Nature Biomedical Engineering described the study as "comprehensive for a new platform." The reviewer also emphasized that the work is "exciting and convincing."


Explore further 

Researchers develop high-performance cancer vaccine using novel microcapsules

More information: Therapeutic vaccination against leukemia via the sustained release of co-encapsulated anti-PD-1 and a leukemia-associated antigen. Nature Biomedical Engineering (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41551-020-00624-6
Journal information: Nature Biomedical Engineering


Provided by Chinese Academy of Sciences