THE LAND UNDULATES
NASA Perplexed by Strange Geological Stripes Appearing in Russia


(NASA Earth Observatory/Landsat 8)

BRANDON SPECKTOR, LIVE SCIENCE
28 FEBRUARY 2021

Near the Markha River in Arctic Siberia, the earth ripples in ways that scientists don't fully understand.

Earlier this week, NASA researchers posted a series of satellite images of the peculiar wrinkled landscape to the agency's Earth Observatory website. Taken with the Landsat 8 satellite over several years, the photos show the land on both sides of the Markha River rippling with alternating dark and light stripes.

The puzzling effect is visible in all four seasons, but it is most pronounced in winter, when white snow makes the contrasting pattern even more stark.

The striped swirls have scientists perplexed. 

(NASA Earth Observatory/ Landsat 8)

Why is this particular section of Siberia so stripy? Scientists aren't totally sure, and several experts offered NASA conflicting explanations.

Related: Earth's 8 biggest mysteries

One possible explanation is written in the icy ground. This region of the Central Siberian Plateau spends about 9 percent of the year covered in permafrost, according to NASA, though it occasionally thaws for brief intervals.

Patches of land that continuously freeze, thaw and freeze again have been known to take on strange circular or stripy designs called patterned ground, scientists reported in a study published in January 2003 in the journal Science. The effect occurs when soils and stones naturally sort themselves during the freeze-thaw cycle.

The stripes of the Central Siberian Plateau vary by season.

 (NASA Earth Observatory)

However, other examples of patterned ground - such as the stone circles of Svalbard, Norway - tend to be much smaller in scale than the stripes seen in Siberia.

Another possible explanation is erosion. Thomas Crafford, a geologist with the US Geological Survey, told NASA that the stripes resemble a pattern in sedimentary rocks known as layer cake geology.

These patterns occur when snowmelt or rain trickles downhill, chipping and flushing pieces of sedimentary rock into piles. The process can reveal slabs of sediment that look like slices of a layer cake, Crafford said, with the darker stripes representing steeper areas and the lighter stripes signifying flatter areas.

In accordance with the image above, this sort of sedimentary layering would stand out more in winter, when white snow rests on the flatter areas, making them appear even lighter. The pattern fades as it approaches the river, where sediment gathers into more uniform piles along the banks after millions of years of erosion, Crafford added.

This explanation seems to fit well, according to NASA. But until the region can be studied up close, it'll remain another one of those quintessentially Siberian curiosities.

Humans Have The Biological Toolkit to Have Venomous Saliva, Study Finds


Venom extraction from snake for anti-venom preparation. 

(Rithwik photography/Moment/Getty Images)


STEPHANIE PAPPAS, LIVE SCIENCE
29 MARCH 2021


Could humans ever evolve venom? It's highly unlikely that people will join rattlesnakes and platypuses among the ranks of venomous animals, but new research reveals that humans do have the tool kit to produce venom - in fact, all reptiles and mammals do.

This collection of flexible genes, particularly associated with the salivary glands in humans, explains how venom has evolved independently from nonvenomous ancestors more than 100 times in the animal kingdom.

"Essentially, we have all the building blocks in place," said study co-author Agneesh Barua, a doctoral student in evolutionary genetics at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. "Now it's up to evolution to take us there."

Related: Why do Cambrian creatures look so weird?

Oral venom is common across the animal kingdom, present in creatures as diverse as spiders, snakes and slow lorises, the only known venomous species of primate. Biologists knew that oral venom glands are modified salivary glands, but the new research reveals the molecular mechanics behind the change.

"It's going to be a real landmark in the field," said Bryan Fry, a biochemist and venom expert at The University of Queensland in Australia who was not involved in the research. "They've done an absolutely sensational job of some extraordinarily complex studies."
A flexible weapon

Venom is the ultimate example of nature's flexibility. Many of the toxins in venom are common across very different animals; some components of centipede venom, for example, are also found in snake venom, said Ronald Jenner, a venom researcher at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the research.

The new study doesn't focus on toxins themselves, as those evolve quickly and are a complex mix of compounds, Barua told Live Science.

Instead, Barua and study co-author Alexander Mikheyev, an evolutionary biologist at Australian National University who focuses on "housekeeping" genes, the genes that are associated with venom but aren't responsible for creating the toxins themselves. These regulatory genes form the basis of the whole venom system.

The researchers started with the genome of the Taiwan habu (Trimeresurus mucrosquamatus), a brown pit viper that is well studied, in part because it's an invasive species in Okinawa.

"Since we know the function of all the genes that were present in the animal, we could just see what genes the venom genes are associated with," Barua said.

The team found a constellation of genes that are common in multiple body tissues across all amniotes. (Amniotes are animals that fertilize their eggs internally or lay eggs on land; they include reptiles, birds and some mammals.)

Many of these genes are involved in folding proteins, Barua said, which makes sense, because venomous animals must manufacture a large quantity of toxins, which are made of proteins.

"A tissue like this really has to make sure that the protein it is producing is of high quality," he said.

Unsurprisingly, the same sorts of regulatory housekeeping genes are found in abundance in the human salivary gland, which also produces an important stew of proteins - found in saliva - in large quantities. This genetic foundation is what enables the wide array of independently evolved venoms across the animal kingdom.

Researchers studied the genome of the Taiwan habu, a venomous brown pit viper. (Alexander Mikheyev)

From nonvenomous to venomous

In other words, every mammal or reptile has the genetic scaffolding upon which an oral venom system is built. And humans (along with mice) also already produce a key protein used in many venom systems. Kallikreins, which are proteins that digest other proteins, are secreted in saliva; they're also a key part of many venoms.

That's because kallikreins are very stable proteins, Fry said, and they don't simply stop working when subjected to mutation. Thus, it's easy to get beneficial mutations of kallikreins that make venom more painful, and more deadly (one effect of kallikreins is a precipitous drop in blood pressure).


"It's not coincidental that kallikrein is the most broadly secreted type of component in venoms across the animal kingdom, because in any form, it's a very active enzyme and it's going to start doing some messed-up stuff," Fry said.

Kallikreins are thus a natural starting point for theoretically venomous humans.

If after the drama of 2020, Barua joked, "people need to be venomous to survive, we could potentially start seeing increasing doses of kallikreins."

But that's not so likely - not unless humans' currently successful strategies of acquiring food and choosing mates start falling apart, anyway. Venom most commonly evolves as either a method of defense or as a way of subduing prey, Jenner told Live Science. Precisely what kind of venom evolves depends heavily on how the animal lives.

Evolution can essentially tailor venom to an animal's needs via natural selection, Fry said.

There are some desert snakes, for example, that have different venom despite being the same species, just due to where they live, he said: On the desert floor, where the snakes hunt mostly mice, the venom acts mostly on the circulatory system, because it's not difficult for a snake to track a dying mouse a short distance on flat ground. In nearby rocky mountains, where the snakes hunt mostly lizards, the venom is a potent neurotoxin, because if the prey isn't immediately immobilized, it can easily scamper into a crevice and disappear for good.

A few mammals do have venom. Vampire bats, which have a toxic saliva that prevents blood clots, use their chemical weapon to feed from wounds more effectively. Venomous shrews and shrew-like solenodons (small, burrowing mammals) can outpunch their weight class by using their venom to subdue larger prey than they could otherwise kill.

Shrews also sometimes use their venom to paralyze prey (typically insects and other invertebrates) for storage and later snacking. Meanwhile, platypuses, which don't have a venomous bite but do have a venomous spur on their hind legs, mostly use their venom in fights with other platypuses over mates or territory, Jenner said.

Humans, of course, have invented tools, weapons and social structures that do most of these jobs without the need for venomous fangs. And venom is costly, too, Fry said. Building and folding all those proteins takes energy. For that reason, venom is easily lost when it isn't used.

There are species of sea snakes, Fry said, that have vestigial venom glands but are no longer venomous, because they switched from feeding on fish to feeding on fish eggs, which don't require a toxic bite.

The new research may not raise many hopes for new superpowers for humans, but understanding the genetics behind the control of venom could be key for medicine, Fry added.

If a cobra's brain were to start expressing the genes that its venom glands expressed, the snake would immediately die of self-toxicity. Learning how genes control expression in different tissues could be helpful for understanding diseases such as cancer, which causes illness and death in large part because tissues start growing out of control and secreting products in places in the body where they shouldn't.

"The importance of this paper goes beyond just this field of study, because it provides a starting platform for all of those kinds of interesting questions," Fry said.

The research was published online Monday (March 29) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Genetic Signal of Ancient Australians 

in South America Goes Deeper Than We Knew


Paracas National Reserve, along the Peruvian coast. 

(Vasil Daskalov/Getty Images)

PETER DOCKRILL
30 MARCH 2021

The extent of Australasian influence into the ancient bloodlines of early South American cultures looks to be even greater than scientists thought, according to new research.

In 2015, a pair of scientific studies identified an intriguing link: evidence of Indigenous Australian, Melanesian, and South Asian genetics embedded in modern Native American populations living in the Amazon.

How this mysterious connection was forged between peoples living a globe apart has never been fully understood or agreed upon, although it's thought Australasian genes flowed into the Americas via an epic, land-based migration through Eurasia roughly 20,000 years ago, back when the ancient, now submerged landmass of Beringia still served as a convenient bridge to Alaska.

By about 15,000 years ago, some of the trekkers had made it as far as South America, where the Australasian genes can still be found in the blood of Indigenous Amazonian groups today.

But not all those on the journey necessarily settled in the rainforest. A new study suggests the Australasian contribution to the Native American gene pool of South America was broader in scope than we realized.

One of the previously identified hallmarks of the Australasian influence in South America is what's known as the 'Ypikuéra population' signal (Y signal) – a genetic variant so far only seen in present-day Amazonian populations.

Now, however, this signal has been seen outside the Amazon for the first time, with a genomic analysis comprising 383 individuals from a number of indigenous groups in South America revealing that the Y signal not only exists in Amazonian groups – but also in the indigenous peoples of Chotuna (living near the Pacific coast of Peru), Guaraní Kaiowá (central west Brazil), and Xavánte (close to the center of Brazil).


"Our results showed that the Australasian genetic signal, previously described as exclusive to Amazonian groups, was also identified in the Pacific coastal population, pointing to a more widespread signal distribution within South America, and possibly implicating an ancient contact between Pacific and Amazonian dwellers," the researchers, led by first author and evolutionary biologist Marcos Araújo Castro e Silva from the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil, explain in their study.

In addition to suggesting that the Australasian genetic signature spread within Native American populations from the coast to the center of South America, the new findings indicate that at least two migratory waves likely occurred, with one branch of people with the Y variation settling in the Pacific coastal regions, before another group with the same Australasian ancestry later migrated eastwards, inhabiting the Amazon and central Brazil.

As for how the Y signal hasn't been picked up northwards of South America – even though these ancient migrants must once have passed through that territory – it's possible that by sticking to the Pacific coastal route, the migrants' bloodlines, and the Australasian genetic component it carried, may not have thoroughly mixed in with the contemporaneous populations of North and Central America.

Another possibility, as senior author and USP evolutionary geneticist Tábita Hünemeier told Science, is that those carrying the Y variant in North and Central America may simply not have survived the violent transitions of European colonization.

It may also be that the Y signal just hasn't been searched for widely enough in more northerly located populations. As these ongoing discoveries show, it may be just a matter of time and further testing before more of these ancient, surprising connections become known.

The findings are reported in PNAS.

The Earliest Cherry Blossom Season in 1,200 Years Is Here Due to Climate Change

Cherry blossom bloom on 23 March 2021 in Tokyo, Japan.

 (Yuichi Yamazaki/Getty Images News)

CARLY CASSELLA
30 MARCH 2021


For well over a thousand years, cherry blossoms in Japan have held the scent of spring and reflected the transient beauty of nature itself. Today, these falling flowers also carry the gravity of climate change.

In 2021, after an unusually warm spring, Kyoto has burst into color far sooner than expected. To date, this is the earliest cherry blossoms in the city have bloomed in more than 1,200 years.

We know that because imperial court documents and ancient diary entries on the nation's cherry blossom festivals can be traced back to 812 CE. In all that time, the earliest blooming date was March 27 in the year 1409.

Over the centuries, the long-held tradition of cherry blossom viewing has grown from an aristocratic fancy to a fixture of Japanese life. Each year, from early to mid April, residents in Kyoto have held 'hanami' underneath the cherry trees to watch as hundreds of varieties of white and pink flowers bloom to their fullest.

While cherry blossoms in Kyoto may start to flower in March, their full bloom date - when the majority of buds are open to the skies - lies historically around April 17, although in the past century this date has retreated to April 5.

This year, before April even arrived, the moment had already passed. On Friday 26 March, officials announced cherry blossom trees in Kyoto had fully flowered.

"Evidence, like the timing of cherry blossoms, is one of the historical 'proxy' measurements that scientists look at to reconstruct past climate," climate scientist Michael Mann told The Washington Post.

"In this case, that 'proxy' is telling us something that quantitative, rigorous long-term climate reconstructions have already told us - that the human-caused warming of the planet we're witnessing today is unprecedented going back millennia."

The flowering of the Japanese mountain cherry alone has been carefully detailed 732 times since the 9th century, representing the longest and most complete record of a seasonal, natural phenomenon from any place in the world.

Sifting through this 1,200-year-long series, scientists have mapped out a clear trend that looks very similar to climate change itself. As spring in the Northern Hemisphere arrives earlier with global warming, some plants and animals are also shifting their patterns of activity, including these blooms.

When scientists graph Kyoto's full bloom dates over time, they look remarkably like the hockey stick shape of global warming itself. The flat part of the stick represents relatively stable cherry bloom dates in Kyoto, while the latter end shows a more rapid change in flowering events, as can be seen below.

Cherry blossom blooms since 812. (Osaka Prefecture University)

Since the 1830s, data show the Japanese mountain cherry tree has begun to flower earlier and earlier. Between 1971 and 2000, this specific type of tree was found to bloom on average a week earlier than all previous averages recorded in Kyoto.

The cutting down of trees for roads and buildings accounts for about a third of that change, researchers have found - equivalent to 1.1 °C warming and 2.3 days earlier flowering - while regional climate warming accounts for the rest - roughly 2.2 °C warming and 4.7 days earlier flowering.

Of course, these data are just for a single family of cherry tree in Japan; however, more recent records on cherry trees from 17 taxa have found similar rates of change. Over the past 25 years, these other species have begun blooming 5.5 days earlier on average, and scientists say this is mostly driven by warmer temperatures in February and March.

Nor is it just Kyoto where this is happening. This year in Tokyo, cherry blossom season has also arrived prematurely - 12 days earlier than historical records. In fact, this year ties with last year for the earliest bloom on record in Tokyo, joining the previous eight years in blooming well ahead of schedule of this city's 'normal' March 25 date.

These changing blooms are throwing off many Japanese traditions that have held steady for hundreds of years. Future projections based on historical data suggest that by 2.5 °C warming, cherry blossoms will have already dropped in the mountainous city of Takayama, about halfway between Kyoto and Tokyo, by the time its annual spring festival rolls around.

Even cherry trees in Washington DC have begun to flower earlier after unseasonably warm springs. In 2020, the blooms here arrived roughly two weeks ahead of the long-term average of April 3 (recorded since 1921).

Under a mid-range emissions scenario, scientists estimate the peak bloom dates in this area of the United States will accelerate by an average of five days by 2050 and 10 days by 2080.

Unfortunately, plants and animals changing their patterns in response to climate change can put vital interactions between species out of sync with each other - such as blooms missing out on pollination. This shifting also creates havoc for farmers, because it is not always predictable - three weeks early one year may become one week late the next.

Of course, cherry blossoms aren't the only plants affected by a rapidly warming world. The winter flowering of the Japanese apricot, for instance, has also shown recent changes associated with global warming. But most data on flora and fauna only go back a few decades.

Cherry trees in Japan, on the other hand, are considered the "best-documented examples of the biological effects of climate change in the world."

As beautiful as these flowers appear, their blooms hold a much darker warning of what is to come.

Vast Fragments of an Alien World Could Be Buried Deep Within Earth Itself

PETER DOCKRILL
24 MARCH 2021


They are among the largest and strangest of all structures on Earth: huge, mysterious blobs of dense rock lurking deep within the lowermost parts of our planet's mantle.

There are two of these gigantic masses – called the large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs) – with one buried under Africa, the other below the Pacific Ocean.


These anomalies are so massive, they in turn breed their own disturbances, such as the large phenomenon currently evolving within and weakening Earth's magnetic field, known as the South Atlantic Anomaly.

As for how and why the LLSVPs came to exist like this within the mantle, scientists have lots of ideas, but little in the way of hard proof.

What is known, however, is that these giant blobs have been around for a very long time, with many thinking they could have been a part of Earth since before the giant impact that birthed the Moon – ancient traces of the collision between Earth and the hypothetical planet Theia.

Artist's impression of a planetary collision. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

According to that widely held argument, the Mars-sized Theia struck the very early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, with a huge chunk of Theia and/or possibly Earth fragmenting off, and becoming the Moon we know today in orbit around Earth.

As for what happened to the rest of Theia, it's uncertain. Was it destroyed, or did it simply ricochet off into the eternity of space? We don't know.

Some researchers have suggested the cores of these two primordial planets may have fused into one, and that chemical exchanges wrought by this epic merger are what enabled life itself to thrive on the world that resulted.

Now, scientists have returned to these monumental questions with a new proposal, and it's an idea that reconciles the mysterious LLSVP blobs too, weaving them into the Earth/Theia hybrid hypothesis.

According to new modeling by researchers from Arizona State University (ASU), the LLSVPs may represent ancient fragments of Theia's iron-rich and highly dense mantle, which sank deep into Earth's own mantle when the two developing worlds came together, and has been buried there for billions of years.

"The Giant Impact hypothesis is one of the most examined models for the formation of Moon, but direct evidence indicating the existence of the impactor Theia remains elusive," the researchers, led by first author Qian Yuan, a PhD candidate studying mantle dynamics at ASU, explain in a summary of their findings presented last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

"We demonstrate that Theia's mantle may be several percent intrinsically denser than Earth's mantle, which enables the Theia mantle materials to sink to the Earth's lowermost mantle and accumulate into thermochemical piles that may cause the seismically-observed LLSVPs."

While speculation has existed for years that the LLSVPs may be an alien souvenir implanted by Theia, the new research appears to be the most comprehensive formulation yet. The findings are currently under review, ahead of future publication in Geophysical Research Letters.

Beyond the mantle modeling, the results are also consistent with previous research suggesting that certain chemical signatures tied to the LLSVPs are at least as primitive as the Theia impact.


"Therefore, the primitive materials may [originate] from the LLSVPs, which is well explained if the LLSVPs preserve Theia mantle materials that are older than the Giant Impact," Yuan and his co-authors write.

We'll have to see how the rest of the scientific community respond to the team's findings, but for now at least, we've got another lead on just what these mysterious anomalies might be – and it's literally the most far-out explanation yet.

"This crazy idea is at least possible," Yuan told Science.

The findings were presented at the 52nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, conducted as a virtual event last week.

Retail giant discloses data breach two months too late SPECIAL
By Tim Sandle

12 hours ago in Technology

British clothing giant FatFace has experienced a data breach after a hacker accessed its systems. It is likely that customer and employee information was taken by a malicious actor. The incident has been reported two months late.

The form of customer and employee information stollen extends to names, addresses, national insurance details, banking references, and the last four digits of credit cards and store cards, according to TechCrunch. The company initially discovered the breach on January 17, 2021. However, they only elected to notify customers and employees two months later. Their reason? The company claimed they were investigating the matter. This may have been the case, but under the U.K. data protection laws, a company must disclose a data breach within 72 hours of becoming aware of an incident
Additionally, FatFace requested the email it sent out be kept private and confidential. This did not last for long and the breach was made public after a former employee reported it.

In addition, FatFace has additionally paid a $2 million (about £1.5 million) ransom to the Conti ransomware gang, following a successful ransomware attack earlier this year.
Looking at the issue for Digital Journal is Anurag Kahol, CTO and Cofounder of Bitglass.
Kahol begins by looking at the reporting delay, noting: "It’s concerning that it took the company over two months to disclose this data breach. The personally identifiable information and financial details stolen in this incident put those affected at greater risk of financial fraud and identity theft. Organizations that suffer from a breach should take responsibility and disclose its full impact as soon as practicable."

Kahol goes on to look at the security weaknesses: "While maintaining compliance with privacy regulations should always be a top priority, this incident also highlights the inadequacy of reactive approaches to cybersecurity. To prevent unauthorized access, organizations need to adopt flexible security platforms that provide a wealth of capabilities which proactively detect and respond to threats as they arise. For example, implementing capabilities such as step-up multi-factor authentication, data loss prevention, and user and entity behavior analytics can give organizations much needed control over access to their data. In today's frenetic world, real-time protections are absolutely necessary.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/retail-giant-discloses-data-breach-two-months-too-late/article/587716#ixzz6qgC6B4TV

Pandemic delays gender parity by a generation: WEF
BY NINA LARSON (AFP) 3/30/2021


A range of studies have shown that the Covid-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on women, who have lost jobs at a higher rate than men, and had to take on much more of the extra childcare burden when schools closed.The pandemic has rolled back years of progress towards equality between men and women, according to a report released Wednesday showing the crisis had added decades to the trajectory towards closing the gender gap.

The effects will be felt in the long-term, according to the World Economic Forum, which in its annual Global Gender Gap Report found that the goalposts for gender parity appeared to be moving further away.

The organisation, which usually gathers the global elite in the plush Swiss ski resort of Davos each year, had found in its previous report, published in December 2019 right before the pandemic hit, that gender parity across a range of areas would be reached within 99.5 years.

But this year's report shows the world is not on track to close the gender gap for another 135.6 years.

"Another generation of women will have to wait for gender parity," the WEF said in a statement.

The Geneva-based organisation's annual report tracks disparities between the sexes in 156 countries across four areas: education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment.

- Workplace equality in 267 years -

On the plus side, women appear to be gradually closing the gender gap in areas such as health and education.

But inequality in the workplace -- which has long appeared to be the stickiest area to fix -- is still not expected to be erased for another 267.6 years.

And the pandemic has not helped.

The WEF pointed to a study by the UN's International Labour Organization showing that women were more likely to lose their jobs in the crisis, in part because they are disproportionately represented in sectors directly disrupted by lockdowns.

Other surveys have shown that women were carrying a greater share of the burden of increased housework and childcare during lockdowns, contributing to higher stress and lower productivity levels.

Women were also being hired back at a slower rate than men as workplaces opened up again, according to LinkedIn data referenced in the report.

"The pandemic has fundamentally impacted gender equality in both the workplace and the home, rolling back years of progress," WEF managing director Saadia Zahidi said in the statement.

"If we want a dynamic future economy, it is vital for women to be represented in the jobs of tomorrow," she said, stressing that "this is the moment to embed gender parity by design into the recovery."

- Political gender gap growing -

It was in the political sphere that the march towards gender parity did the biggest about-face, with several large-population countries seeing the political gender gap widen, the WEF study found.

Women still hold just over a quarter of parliamentary seats worldwide, and only 22.6 percent of ministerial positions.

On its current trajectory, the political gender gap is not expected to close completely for another 145.5 years, the report found.

That marks a 50-percent hike from the estimated 95 years in the 2020 report, WEF pointed out.

Progress across the categories varies greatly in different countries and regions.

The report pointed out that while Western European countries could close their overall gender gap in 52.1 years, countries in the Middle East and North Africa will take nearly 142.4 years to do so.

Overall, the Nordic countries once again dominated the top of the table: the gap between men and women was narrowest in Iceland, for the 12th year running, followed by Finland and Norway.

New Zealand took fourth place, ahead of Sweden.








Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/pandemic-delays-gender-parity-by-a-generation-wef/article/587721#ixzz6qg8KUIHK

Australasian genetic influence spread wider in South America than previously thought

by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A team of researchers from Universidade de São Paulo, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, has found evidence of a genetic Australasian influence in more parts of South America than just the Amazon. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of a genomic dataset from multiple South American populations across the continent.

Back in 2015, a team of researchers found what they described as an Australasian influence in native people living in the Amazon. They had found what they described as a Ypikuéra population signal—a genetic marker associated with early people living in Australasian—the region that is now South Asia, Australia and Melanesia. Since that time, researchers have developed theories to explain how such a signal could have been introduced into people living in South America, especially considering it has not been found in early people living in North America. Currently, most in the field believe that both North America and South America were populated by people migrating overland from Asia to Alaska and then traveling south. In this new effort, the researchers have found that the Y signal also appears in native people in South America in areas outside of the Amazon.

The work involved collecting blood samples from native people all across the mid-section of the South American continent and then conducting a genetic analysis of each. In all, they studied samples from 383 people which included 438,443 markers.

The researchers found the Y marker in native people living on the Brazilian plateau in the center of the country and also in those living in the western part of the county—and they also found the signal in the Chotuna people of Peru. The findings suggest migrations of people with the Y signal were far more widespread in South America than were thought. Their findings also suggest that two waves of such migrations occurred. This has led to scrutiny of previous theories regarding how such individuals arrived in South America and why the signal has not been found in early North American people. Some have suggested it is because those in North America were wiped out by European colonists. Others have suggested that it is more likely that closer study of North American native people will eventually find some with the Y signal. And finally, the hardest theory to swallow is the possibility that early people from Australasia somehow made their way directly to the shores of South America.

Explore further

Disproportionate extinction of South American mammals when Americas collided evident today

More information: Marcos Araújo Castro e Silva et al. Deep genetic affinity between coastal Pacific and Amazonian natives evidenced by Australasian ancestry, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2025739118

Sharp increase in destruction of virgin forest in 2020

BY KELLY MACNAMARA (AFP)

An area of pristine rainforest the size of the Netherlands was burned or hacked down last year, as the destruction of the planet's tropical forests accelerated despite a global economic slowdown, according to research Wednesday.

The worst losses were in Brazil, three times higher than the next highest country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a report from Global Forest Watch based on satellite data.

Across the tropics, the study registered the destruction in 2020 of 4.2 million hectares (10.4 million acres) of primary forest -- 12 percent higher than the year before.

Ecosystems straddling the equator shelter abundant biodiversity and store vast amounts of carbon.

In total, the tropics lost 12.2 million hectares of tree cover -- including forests and plantations -- last year, driven largely by agriculture.

But researchers said extreme heat and drought also stoked huge fires that consumed swathes of forest across Australia, Siberia and deep into the Amazon.

These losses are a "climate emergency. They're a biodiversity crisis, a humanitarian disaster, and a loss of economic opportunity", said Frances Seymour of the World Resources Institute, which is behind the report.

The study found some evidence that Covid-19 restrictions may have had an effect around the world -- with an increase in illegal harvesting because forests were left less protected, or the return of large numbers of people to rural areas.

2020 primary forest loss
John SAEKI, AFP

But researchers said there was little sign that the pandemic had changed the trajectory of forest destruction and warned that the worst could be still to come if countries slash protections in an attempt to ramp up economic growth.

But Seymour said the most "ominous signal" from the 2020 data is the instances of forests themselves falling victim to climate change.

"I mean, wetlands are burning," she said in a press briefing.

"Nature has been whispering this risk to us for a long time. But now she is shouting."

Plants -- especially in the tropics -- and soil comprise an enormous carbon sink, sucking up roughly a third of all the carbon pollution humans produce annually.

Yet tropical forests continue to disappear rapidly, threatening irreparable losses to Earth's crucial biodiversity.

Researchers said the destruction of tropical primary forests in 2020 released 2.64 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2020, equal to the annual emissions of India or 570 million cars, more than double the number on the road in the United States.

"The longer we wait to stop deforestation, and get other sectors on to net zero trajectories, the more likely it is that our natural carbon sinks will go up in smoke," Seymour said.

- 'Heartbreaking' -

Brazil, where far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has cut funding for environmental programs and pushed to open protected Amazon lands to agribusiness and mining, lost 1.7 million hectares of primary forest in 2020, an increase of 25 percent from 2019, the report said.

Bolivia saw the third highest level of forest destruction in 2020
Aizar RALDES, AFP/File

"Brazil, having achieved a huge reduction in deforestation in the Amazon, is now seeing an unravelling of that success, and it's heartbreaking," said Seymour.

Much of the loss was in the Amazon, including new areas that were deliberately cleared.

But dry conditions also meant fires lit on previously deforested land spread to once humid forests, burning out of control.

Fires also devastated the Pantanal wetlands, a paradise of biodiversity that extend from Brazil into Bolivia -- the country with the third highest level of forest loss in 2020.

Almost a third of the Pantanal was scorched, including indigenous lands and jaguar habitats, and researchers said it could be decades before the region recovers.

- Appetite for destruction -

One bright area was in Indonesia, which reduced its rate of forest loss by 17 percent from 2019 and dropped out of the global top three for the first time in the 20 years of Global Forest Watch monitoring.

Forest destruction has slowed for four years in a row in Indonesia and researchers said government policies -- helped last year by wetter weather -- appeared to be having "a long-term effect on reducing primary forest loss".

Forests cover more than 30 percent of Earth's land surface, and tropical forests are home to between 50 and 90 percent of all terrestrial species.

Recent research has shown that, beyond a certain threshold, deforestation in the Amazon basin could tip the region into a new climate regime, turning tropical forests into savannah.

In January, two top Brazilian indigenous leaders asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate Bolsonaro for "crimes against humanity", accusing him of unprecedented environmental damage, killings and persecution.

On Monday, a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution estimated that rising demand in wealthy countries for commodities ranging from coffee to soybeans was accelerating deforestation in the tropics.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/sharp-increase-in-destruction-of-virgin-forest-in-2020/article/587741#ixzz6qg50MfTx

Moroccan illustrator using comics for #MeToo campaign
BY SOPHIE PONS (AFP) 



Young Moroccan cartoonist Zainab Fasiki draws on a whiteboard in a Casablanca studio where she is holding a workshop that mixes art with a homegrown illustrated #MeToo campaign.

"We are here to change this rape culture, which says the victim deserves what they get while the criminal is innocent," says Fasiki, 26, her eyes flashing with indignation.

A dozen students and professionals have joined forces with Fasiki, a pioneer in comics and illustration in Morocco, in response to a web series titled #TaAnaMeToo that depicts women's real-life ordeals.

As part of the series -- "Ta ana" means "Me Too" in Moroccan Arabic dialect -- she illustrated the harrowing testimony of a 22-year-old woman who for years was raped by her brother, to the indifference of her parents.

Unlike in the broader #MeToo movement, the Moroccan women who have agreed to share their stories for the campaign have preferred to remain anonymous.

Series producer Youssef Ziraoui says rape victims in Morocco not only have to deal with a sense of "shame" and the risk of being cast out by their families, but can face charges for sex before marriage under Moroccan law if they go to the police.

The participants in the Casablanca workshop are looking for creative comebacks to some of the toxic reactions the campaign has elicited.

"Choose a negative comment and respond to it," Fasiki says, as the group gets to work on tablets or with paper and pencil.

Fasiki, who calls herself an "artivist" (an artist and activist), says art is "a major instrument of change".

"Images have power, particularly on social media."

- 'Revolution, resistance' -

Students and professionals have joined forces with Fasiki in response to a web series titled #TaAnaMeToo that depicts several Moroccan women's real-life ordeals
Fadel SENNA, AFP

The illustrator, her dark hair cropped in a short bob, says she became a feminist at age 14, when she began to feel that often "being a woman is a sin" in the North African country.

"There is a culture where men correct women, keep an eye on them -- it's a patriarchal system," she says. "Men treat us as if we weren't humans who are responsible for our choices."

She is pushing through her illustrations for "changes to laws written by men, for men, to control women's bodies", she adds.

The self-taught Fasiki says her artistic training involved reading comics as a child, drawing in her bedroom as an adolescent, and "meeting authors at comics festivals" when she was old enough to travel.

Fasiki became known on social media for her nude self-portraits and for illustrations showing "the female body as it is, without taboos".

Her book "Hshouma" (modesty) -- a term she says covers "the culture of shame" around women's bodies in Morocco -- took her to a wider audience, in a country where sex education is also taboo.

"Some feminists think that drawing the naked female form doesn't serve the cause," she says.

"I think it's a revolution -- a form of resistance in the face of a patriarchy-based history."

- Stifling talent -

Fasiki says she was unable to find a local publisher for "Hshouma", and the book's first edition was instead published in Paris in 2019.

Florent Massot, her French publisher, told AFP the book had had "good sales" in Morocco.

"Zainab is very courageous," he said. "She is always very positive even though she gets insulted a lot on social media."

Fasiki is preparing for an exhibition at a contemporary art museum in Tetouan, and will also be teaching at a fine arts school in the northern Moroccan city.

She says she is looking forward to countering "artists who preach against artistic nudity", and wants to "develop the female presence in art".

First and foremost, that requires helping girls "escape the control of their family", says Fasiki, adding that she was influenced by French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir and her seminal work "The Second Sex".

"When I started to publish (my work) on social media, my family told me, 'either you stop or we don't consider you a member of the family anymore'," she says.

But she was undeterred.

"This type of control over children, who are doing nothing wrong apart from living their passion, has destroyed thousands of talents," she says.




Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/moroccan-illustrator-using-comics-for-metoo-campaign/article/587727#ixzz6qg3y61gt