Monday, August 02, 2021

Big brains may have helped birds survive dinosaur-killing asteroid

Just a few million years before an asteroid killed nearly all dinosaurs on Earth, a creature resembling a small albatross with teeth flew through the Cretaceous skies. The creature, known as Ichthyornis, is considered an early bird -- but not part of the lucky lineage that survived the mass extinction and gave rise to modern birds.MORE: Extreme heat causing baby birds to injure themselves after fleeing hot nests

Now, a newly discovered Ichthyornis fossil sheds light on why some early birds survived the asteroid-triggered catastrophe known as the K-Pg extinction, while close relatives like Ichthyornis perished. The key may have been a vastly expanded forebrain -- a trait that all modern birds possess, but Ichthyornis and other extinct lineages lack.

The earliest known bird is Archaeopteryx, which lived about 84 million years before the K-Pg extinction. Archaeopteryx shared a similar brain shape with nonbird dinosaurs and reptiles, with the cerebellum and optic lobes arranged in a straight line behind a modest-sized forebrain. In contrast, the forebrains of all modern birds are hugely enlarged, spreading above the optic lobes and pushing the whole brain into a new arrangement.

© Ghedo via Wikipedia

There are dozens of other known bird species that lived between Archaeopteryx and the K-Pg extinction, but until now, researchers had no idea how their brains were shaped. That's because bird skeletons are extremely brittle, and none of the other surviving fossils were preserved in enough detail

© Ghedo via Wikipedia An example of the skeleton of an Ichthyornis is displayed in an undated stock image.

"Usually one of the first things that happens is the skull gets crushed," said Christopher Torres, a paleo-ornithologist at Ohio University in Athens. "What makes our new specimen of Ichthyornis so special is that it preserves a nearly complete skull."

Ichthyornis is one of the closest known relatives of living birds, and the new specimen lived just 5 million years before the K-Pg extinction. Thus, it likely shared many traits with the ancestors of modern birds. But Torres and his colleagues found that it had a relatively small forebrain, like Archaeopteryx and more distantly related dinosaurs.MORE: One of the world's biggest-ever new dinosaur species found

There were probably multiple factors that helped the ancestors of modern birds survive, noted Torres. Still, the new findings suggest an enlarged forebrain could be part of what gave them their edge. The forebrain orchestrates many high-level cognitive tasks, and it tends to be enlarged in highly intelligent animals. Torres suspects that early birds with big forebrains were better able to change their behavior in response to the chaotic climate conditions following the asteroid impact.

"Because the ancestor of living birds already had that expanded forebrain, it was uniquely capable -- it was uniquely prepared to modify its own behavior in the face of these rapidly changing circumstances," he said.

The findings were published today in the journal Science Advances.

Nesthy Petecio goes from family farm to fighting for another rare Philippines gold

When Nesthy Petecio wasn’t cleaning up chicken droppings on her family’s tiny farm in the Philippines, she was fighting for food in rudimentary street rings or on basketball courts and beaches.

Nesthy Petecio of the Philippines reacts after winning her fight against Irma Testa of Italy.

Ryan Pyette

Once, the pre-teen matched up against an older, stronger local boy and was on the verge of being stopped — before charging back to win.

“During that time we really had nothing and we would just borrow money to be able to buy our food,” the 29-year-old told the ‘Go Hard Girls’ podcast, via the official Olympic site , last spring of her childhood. “We would join (the neighbourhood bouts) because we knew, win or lose, we would get meals.”

On Tuesday, Petecio will fight for gold against Japanese foe Sena Irie in the women’s featherweight (57 kg.) division. The 2019 world champ roared back from a first-round deficit to beat Italian Irma Testa in the semi-final Saturday.

The Pinoy standout from humble roots is vying to become her country’s second Olympic champion in Games history. Earlier this week, weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz ended a 97-year drought to claim the nation’s first gold.

THIRD WORLD USA

The Delta variant has unemployed Americans begging for more help.

DC isn't doing anything.

insider@insider.com (Juliana Kaplan,Joseph Zeballos-Roig)

Unemployed people at a rally last year in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Cory Clark/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Federal unemployment benefits are set to expire in a little over a month; 26 states ended them early.

In July, the Delta variant is increasingly jeopardizing plans of many to return to work - and the office.

There's little discussion in Congress about renewing the programs, as 20 million face a shortfall.

Natasha Binggeli, 38, has already lost her unemployment benefits. She's in South Carolina, where federal benefits ended on June 27. That's two months before they were set to end in September.

Workers there are one of several groups suing over the early termination of benefits.

"We were ready for the September end date, because my daughter goes back to school August 19th. We were prepared," Binggeli told Insider. Luckily her landlord has been understanding; she's currently a month-and-a-half behind on rent.

Binggeli had worked as a caregiver until the pandemic hit. She told Insider she had cancer several years back, and since then her immune system "has been shot." She didn't want to go out into the world until the vaccine was released.

Childcare has also been a major barrier for Binggeli. The jobs available are paying minimum wage, which she said she used to make work. "Right now," she said, "minimum wage is not a livable wage. And I will literally just be paying for my daughter's childcare and coming home with nothing after the week."

In September, over 20 million Americans are set to join Binggeli in losing their unemployment benefits, according to an analysis from the left-leaning People's Policy Project. That's when the extension - and expansion - of federal benefits from President Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan is set to expire. That might be too soon for benefits to end, as the US contends with a surge in the contagious Delta variant.

Right now, the extension of benefits rests in the hands of the White House and Congress, as Democrats hash out a party-line reconciliation package. But the planned spending doesn't offer the same kind of relief from Biden or Trump's previous stimulus packages. More pandemic aid is not on the agenda. Whether through extended benefits or new wage incentives, economists say that workers need more money.
The case for extending benefits

Binggeli's story shows the impact that early expiration of benefits had on jobless workers. But, as the Delta variant rises, plans for the fall are suddenly being thrown into jeopardy.

"My fear is that everyone's going to start getting sick again," she said. "I don't understand how there's a sign of normality when people are starting to fight for their lives again with this new Delta variant."

Marc Goldwein, head of policy at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told Insider that there should be discussion around at least extending how many weeks people are eligible. Even before the rise of the Delta variant, Goldwein said projections showed there would still be "decent unemployment"come Labor Day.

While benefits don't quite need to be as high as they are, he said, it isn't "necessarily time to cut off benefits altogether, and I do worry that nobody is thinking about this at the moment."

An analysis from payroll platform Gusto found that low vaccination rates - and not enhanced unemployment benefits - may still be keeping workers at home. Their research found that was true of workers in Alabama, the country's least vaccinated state.

But Ahmad Ijaz, the executive director of Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Alabama, told Insider that unemployment compensation won't get extended simply because of the Delta variant.

"Unemployment compensation might get extended if you start seeing mass layoffs - if a lot of businesses start laying off people, then you might see an extension in unemployment benefits," he said. "But nobody's going to extend unemployment benefits just because there's a Delta variant."

"I think there are definitely some workers with health concerns that would still benefit from higher unemployment insurance," Amanda Weinstein, an economics professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, said in an interview. "Some of what's holding people back is still nervousness and going back to work at a job where you're potentially interacting with people."
Raises and bonuses might also do the trick

Ijaz said that enhanced benefits aren't the only thing keeping people out of the workforce. Childcare might also be weighing on the economy. "It would be a great incentive to raise wages to bring people back to work," he said.

Louis Pantuosco, the chair of the accounting, finance, and economics department at Winthrop University in South Carolina, concurs. He said he would be "shocked" if unemployment benefits got extended in the state, and that it could complicate the labor shortage even further.

"What are you going to do to get these people to come back to work? The better thing is - in my opinion - is when these companies are offering bonuses and incentives to get people to come work for them," he said.

© Fight for $15

But Pantuosco noted that this may be easier for bigger companies, since they have bigger margins and volume.

"If the federal government wants to help somebody, I would focus on those small businesses," he said. "Because they're the ones that are really getting clobbered with the higher wages."
More pandemic aid is not on the agenda

Though millions of people will stop receiving federal aid on Labor Day, Congress doesn't appear interested in extending these benefits.

Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden of Oregon said earlier this week that including a comprehensive unemployment insurance reform bill and an extension of federal benefits for workers remains a key priority of his. The White House hasn't committed to the idea yet.

Wyden may crash into resistance from Democratic moderates who believe the economy is on a strong path to recovery and people should return to work. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is one of them.

"The bottom line is people should be working. We have 9 million jobs we can't fill," Manchin said in an Friday interview, in response to a question about renewing a federal eviction ban. "Wages are going up, people can get good jobs and hopefully acquire new skillsets. It's a worker's market."

Extending benefits may also prove complicated in large parts of the country. Twenty-six mostly Republican states have already turned off their federal unemployment programs. Any extension beyond September 4 may simply not be taken up by Republican-led states.

It may be left up to the unemployed to sue for their benefits to be restored, given the Biden administration hasn't intervened through the summer. Already, workers in three states - Indiana, Maryland, and Arkansas - have scored legal wins on their own.

Binggeli, the unemployed worker in South Carolina, said she thinks the government should "absolutely" consider extending benefits.

"We're basically labeled as lazy, like we don't want to go back to work, but it's not true. It's not true. I want the world to go back to normal. I hate it. I can't stand it," she said. "I wish Biden would tell these governors: Look, your people need help."

Earth's interior captures more carbon than previously thought, study finds

Scientists have long known that colliding tectonic plates remove carbon from the atmosphere, but a new study published in Nature Communications reports that these movements bury significantly more carbon than previously thought.

Tectonic plates, Earth’s outermost layer that we live on top of, are always in motion and bumping into each other. An area where two plates converge and one slides underneath the other is called a subduction zone, such as the Cascadia Subduction Zone near North America’s west coast. The Ring of Fire, an area throughout the Pacific Ocean where earthquakes and volcanoes occur, is also characterized by subduction zones.

An illustration of one tectonic plate moving under the other (subduction).

(Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library. Getty Images)

In subduction zones, enormous amounts of ocean water are transported by the subducting plate and oceanic sediments, such as seashells and microorganisms, are sent plunging towards Earth’s interior.

Carbon dioxide dissolves from the atmosphere into the ocean and is used by mollusks to create seashells and also eventually forms limestone. Based on these processes, scientists have long theorized that the carbon in sediments and shells gets released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide gas after they travel into the Earth's interior and are spewed out by volcanoes.

However, experiments conducted at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility challenge this hypothesis.

This facility in France is used to recreate the high pressures and temperatures found in subduction zones. The researchers simulated subduction zone conditions to analyze how carbon behaves around volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire.

The 'Ring of Fire' is a region of tectonic plate boundaries around the Pacific Ocean, where earthquakes and volcanoes are common. The Ring of Fire has formed as surrounding plates collide with and destroy the Pacific Plate.

(Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library. Getty Images)

The experiments revealed that approximately 66 per cent of the carbon sinks deep into the Earth where most of it will eventually transform into diamonds, which presents a significant opportunity for future carbon capture technology.

“Our results show that these minerals are very stable and can certainly lock up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into solid mineral forms that could result in negative emissions,” Simon Redfern, study co-author and Dean of the College of Science at NTU Singapore, said in the study’s press release.

Compared to the amount of knowledge about carbon storage on the Earth’s surface, there is less known about carbon stores inside the planet, where carbon cycles take millions of years. The researchers say that in addition to researching new methods for carbon capture, having a better understanding of the globe’s carbon cycle will help model what our future climate will look like.

“One of the solutions to tackle climate change is to find ways to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. By studying how carbon behaves in the deep Earth, which houses the majority of our planet’s carbon, scientists can better understand the entire lifecycle of carbon on Earth, and how it flows between the atmosphere, oceans and life at the surface,” the press release states.

Thumbnail credit: Archershoots. Moment. Getty Images

IRONICALLY THIS INCLUDES ALOT OF ALBERTANS

How Canadian tourism sustains Cuba's army and one-party state

WHO HAVE LIVED UNDER A ONE PARTY STATE IN ALBERTA

Evan Dyer

Felix Blanco, who grew up around the tourist city of Varadero, Cuba, attends a protest in Montreal on July 24, 2021.

Standing on a street corner in Montreal, Reinaldo Rodriguez has a message for Canadians.

"Canadian tourists are feeding the Cuban regime," he told CBC News.

Rodriguez was part of a wave of protests that have swept Canada's 30,000-strong Cuban community since unrest spread across the island on July 11.

"The people don't see (the money)," he said. "The same as happens with the money the government makes from its doctors who work overseas. The Cuban hospitals are unsanitary, people don't have medicines."

Fellow protester Felix Blanco carried a sign that read, "All-included resort in Cuba: 51 per cent dictatorship, 49 per cent foreign company, 0 per cent Cuban people."

Plainclothes police detain an anti-government protester during a protest in Havana, Cuba, Sunday, July 11, 2021. Hundreds of demonstrators went out to the streets in several cities in Cuba to protest against ongoing food shortages and high prices of foodstuffs, amid the new coronavirus crisis.

Blanco grew up in Varadero, the heart of the country's sun-and-sand industry.

"The regime uses that money for repression," he told CBC News. "We can see how many police cars they have, how well prepared they are to repress. But we don't have ambulances." (Cuban authorities have said they lack gasoline for ambulances.)

Cuban-Canadian activists say many Canadians are not aware of the extent to which the survival of Cuba's one-party regime depends upon the foreign currency tourists bring into the country, or the lengths the Cuban government will go to keep Canadians coming.

And an even smaller number realize just how many of their dollars are going not to Cuba's undemocratic government, but directly to a group of companies controlled by a small group of well-connected generals in Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces.
COVID crushes tourism

While foreign arrivals in Cuba have crashed this year, no other nationality has stayed away as much as Canadians, according to Cuban government statistics.

Overall visits are down about 95 per cent compared to 2019, but Canadian visits have plunged by 99.5 per cent. (Russia, by contrast, actually sent more visitors in 2021.)

That is hugely damaging to Cuba's economy, because (in normal years) far more Canadians enter and leave Cuba than citizens of any other country — including Cuba itself.

On January 1 this year, Cuba — like many countries — introduced new rules requiring all visitors to produce a negative PCR test for COVID-19 before travel.

Cuba is an island and few of its impoverished citizens can afford to leave it. Foreign visitors are its main source of vulnerability when it comes to COVID.

But just a few days later, Cuba removed the testing requirement exclusively for Canadian visitors.

It wasn't because Canada's COVID risk was lower. In fact, the rules were relaxed just as Canada was approaching peak caseload for the entire pandemic up to that point — about 8,000 new cases a day. (It's just a few hundred per day now.)

Cuba avoided the worst of the pandemic through 2020. That changed in 2021; Cuba reported just 169 new cases on January 1, 2021, but was recording over 1,000 new daily cases by February 1.

The Cuban government also offered PCR tests to Canadians returning home at about one-tenth of the price one would expect to pay in Canada, the U.S. or Mexico.

Some Canadians remained so eager to visit Cuba they sought to extend the Atlantic bubble to include the Caribbean island — by travelling from Halifax to Cayo Coco to stay in a Canadians-only hotel at a time when Nova Scotia was requiring most Canadians looking to visit the province to apply for government permission.
The army and the resorts

In December 2019, just before COVID hit, Cuban President Raul Castro named Manuel Marrero Cruz as Cuba's first prime minister in over 30 years.

The last person to hold the post had been Fidel Castro himself, who left it to become president. The appointment of the long-serving minister of tourism demonstrated the vital importance of hotels and resorts to Cuba's economy.

Other than tourism, there is little Cuba has to offer world markets in comparison to its needs. For every dollar it gains through exports, it spends five on imports. It looks to tourists to make up that yawning gap year after year.

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

A woman passes by a poster displaying images of late Cuban President Fidel Castro, Cuba's First Secretary of the Communist Party and former President Raul Castro and Cuba's President Miguel Diaz Canel in Havana, Cuba, on April 12, 2021.

Raul Castro, more than anyone else, is responsible for Cuba's modern resort industry. Seen by many Cubans as more pragmatic than his brother Fidel, Raul was in charge of the Revolutionary Armed Forces when Soviet aid to Cuba dried up.

He used the country's defence budget to branch out into tourism and other businesses, creating the nucleus of a business empire that today is the biggest player in the Cuban economy. Hotels went up around Cuba's western coast, although Cuba's own people were forbidden to visit them until 2008 (the same year the Cuban government dropped its ban on cellphones, computers and DVD players.)

A hotel empire led by a general

At the top of the military's hotel empire sits General Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez-Calleja, father of two of Raul Castro's grandchildren and a member of Cuba's Politburo — a man some Cubans believe is the one really running the country alongside his father-in-law, using President Miguel Diaz-Canel as a replaceable public face.

Rodriguez Lopez-Calleja heads the armed forces' holding company GAESA, which runs a range of tourism, construction, banking, air and ground transport and retail businesses across the country, including the hotel chain Gaviota, which owns most of the four- and five-star hotel rooms in the country.

The Cuban state also owns Cuba's two other big chains, the Gran Caribe Hotel Group and Cubanacan, although both chains recently have been losing ground to the military's holding company.

The accounts of the chains, like those of all state enterprises in Cuba, are closed.

But the Cuban government has been very public about its intentions to build its economic future on tourism.

Cuba's current development plan foresees the construction of over 100,000 new hotel rooms by 2030, along with 24 new golf courses.

At the heart of the growth plan are GAESA and other companies owned by the armed forces. GAESA will spend over $15 billion on 121 hotel projects, twice as much as is expected to come from foreign investors and Cuba's civilian government combined.

The Cuban military is on track to own over 90,000 hotel rooms by 2030 — more rooms than currently exist in the entire Dominican Republic, the most hotel-rich country in the Caribbean.

And spending on new hotel and real estate ventures now far outstrips Cuba's shrinking budgets for health, education, agriculture and science combined.

Even as the pandemic gripped Cuba and tourism plunged, Cuba's Communist government was able to find Canadian partners. Blue Diamond Resorts, a company that already manages about 20 state-owned hotels in Cuba, went into business with the Cuban state again in August 2020 to open boutique hotel Mystique Casa Perla in Varadero.

Tourists walk at the beach in Varadero, Cuba on December 7, 2018.

Neither Blue Diamond nor its parent company Sunwing responded to CBC News inquiries for this article. Neither did the Cuba Tourist Board of Canada.

Richard Feinberg of the University of California San Diego co-wrote a paper on Cuba's tourist industry for the Brookings Institution. He said foreign hotel chains typically have one of two types of arrangements with the Cuban state or military.

Hotels owned by the Ministry of Tourism, he said, often have foreign companies as junior partners (typically with a 49 per cent stake in the property, with Cuba holding the controlling share). Military-owned hotels, he said, more often belong entirely to the military's real estate company Almest S.A., and foreign partners merely have management contracts.

Low wages, 'captive' workforce

Workers are provided through an employment agency also controlled by GAESA/Gaviota. While a foreign company pays Gaviota an estimated $750 a month for the average base-salary worker, the worker would typically receive less than 10 per cent of that amount in salary. The rest goes to the Cuban military.

Cuban hotel workers take home only a tiny fraction of what their counterparts in Cancun or the Dominican Republic earn for similar work. Guest workers from India working on one hotel were paid ten times more than their Cuban peers.

Communist Party organs defended the pay difference by claiming that the productivity of Indian workers was "three or four times better" than the average Cuban's.

Wearing a mask against the spread of the new coronavirus, a maid goes to clean the rooms at the Hotel Comodoro in Havana, Cuba, Thursday, Feb. 11, 2021.

In addition, GAESA's construction projects benefit from the forced labour of military conscripts, such as those who dug the foundation beneath the new Hotel Prado y Malecon in Havana.

Felix Blanco points to another difference between Cuba's tourist industry and other Caribbean destinations: a captive workforce. While Mexican workers unsatisfied with their wages can leave and set up on their own, "my family in Cuba are not allowed to have their own business." A Cuban who leaves a $40/month job in the tourist sector will be lucky to earn $30/month in other sectors of the economy.

Tourism jobs are highly sought after, said Feinberg.

"Cubans leave their jobs as engineers, as medical professionals, as teachers, to work in those hotels," he told CBC News, "because that's where the salaries are better, the working conditions are better, and you have access to tips from international tourists."
No way around the military

Some tourists choose to avoid big hotels and resorts in Cuba, preferring private homes and B&Bs. Even then, it's hard for them to avoid enriching Cuba's military. It operates the banks through which tourists make credit card payments to individuals. It operates the stores that sell imported food and goods.

The Cuban military dominates hotel building in Havana and five years ago took over control of Habaguanex, the consortium that operates Old Havana's stores and restaurants, previously run by the city's official historian Eusebio Leal.

As U.S. hotel company Marriott discovered last year, it is virtually impossible to operate on the island today without enriching what is already the country's richest institution: the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

Opinions are divided on whether Canadian tourists might, by staying away, hasten the fall of Cuba's one-party state. Cuban-Canadians like Felix Blanco say they believe it would help.

Feinberg, meanwhile, said he's skeptical of "the idea that if we could only reduce the number of stays at these hotels we could somehow starve out and shrink the Cuban security apparatus."

The Cuban government would ensure that resources flow to that apparatus one way or another, he said.

What's not clear is where they would flow from. Cuba's increasing dependence on tourism has been acknowledged by President Miguel Diaz-Canel himself, who has called it "the locomotive of the Cuban economy" and once told national deputies that "what we have on a weekly basis to pay credits, to buy raw materials and to invest, comes from tourism."

"Cuba is a place that a lot of Canadians have affection for," said Karen Dubinsky of Queens University, who has written about the lives of ordinary Cubans.

"Canadians aren't stupid. They know that to be on vacation in a resort hotel is not the same as living life, certainly not the same as how Cubans live life. And maybe Canadians could dig a little deeper," she told CBC News. "If Canadians become more sympathetic and educated tourists as a result of this, that's a good place to start."

EXPLAINER: How gymnastics evolved from 'exercising naked'

TOKYO (AP) — The word gymnastics is derived from the ancient Greek “gymnazein," meaning “to exercise naked.”

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The sport, now among the Olympics’ most beloved events, was born millennia ago, as young men trained for war in the buff.

Throughout human history, in all corners of the globe, people have flipped and spun and twisted to explore the limits of the human body. Egyptian hieroglyphs depict backbends, according to Britannica, and stone engravings from ancient China illustrate acrobats.

In arenas today, gymnasts compete on a series of what are called apparatuses: both men and women do a tumbling routine, called a floor exercise, and launch themselves off a vault. But their other events are different. Men compete in a total of six: the floor, the vault, the pommel horse, still rings, parallel bars and horizontal bar. Women compete in just four, with the balance beam and uneven bars added to the floor and vault.

It wasn’t always that way. Early gymnastics included activities like rope climbing.

So how did gymnastics move from young Greeks training naked to specific, highly calibrated events with a complicated scoring system?

POMMEL HORSE

At the Games, men swing around a leather-covered block with handles called a pommel horse, that in early iterations roughly mimicked the size and shape of the actual animal. Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia from 336 to 323 B.C., had his Macedonian soldiers train on a similar device to practice mounting their horses for battle, according to the European Gymnastics Service.

The modern version was invented in the early 19th century by German Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, known as the “father of gymnastics” for founding a series of gymnastics centers meant to cultivate health and patriotism. These gyms were meant, in part, to get young Germans ready to defend the country against Napoleon’s French military.

Jahn also invented the early versions of the bar exercises that exist today: parallel bars and horizontal bars for men, and the women’s uneven bars evolved from the parallel bars to showcase agility and elegance.

THE VAULT

For most of modern gymnastics history, the vault looked like the pommel horse without handles. Both men and women sprint toward it, flip and launch themselves into a series of spins and twists.

But it was redesigned two decades ago after horrific injuries in the 1980s and 1990s as gymnasts started trying more risky maneuvers: American Julissa Gomez was paralyzed in a vaulting accident in 1988 and died three years later. A decade later, Chinese gymnast Sang Lan fell, broke her neck and was paralyzed.

Then, in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, the vault was set two inches too low. In this sport of precision and timing, the problem caused a disastrous set of mistakes including one athletes nearly missing the vault entirely.

The new apparatus was called a “vaulting table,” and has a wider, more cushioned surface for athletes to spring from. Slate magazine reported in 2004 when it made its first Olympics debut that athletes had taken to calling it “the tongue.”

STILL RINGS

When men suspend themselves on two rings, hanging from straps, they are performing the gymnastics event that requires the most physical strength of any of the apparatuses.

They are called still rings because the gymnasts attempt to keep them as stationary as possible as they swing into different positions. They were originally called the “Roman rings,” because their origin as a strength-training device is believed to date back thousand of years in Italy. In early iterations of the modern Olympics, they were sometimes referred to as the “flying rings.”

BALANCE BEAM

The balance beam started off hundreds of years ago as a log suspended in the air. It has been refined over the years to a padded beam, 16 feet long, four feet high and four inches wide. It is considered the women’s event that requires the more focus and precision. A minuscule misstep can send a gymnast tumbling to the ground.

___

AP National Writer Claire Galofaro is on assignment in Tokyo covering gymnastics at the Olympics. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ClaireGalofaro. More AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2020-tokyo-olympics and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

Claire Galofaro, The Associated Press

No 'eureka moment': the evolution of climate science

What if Earth's atmosphere was infused with extra carbon dioxide, mused amateur scientist Eunice Foote in an 1856 research paper that concluded the gas was very good at absorbing heat.

AFP

"An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature," she wrote in the study, published in the American Journal of Science and Arts and then swiftly forgotten.

The American scientist and women's rights activist, who only wrote one more paper, could not have known the full significance of her extraordinary statement, said Alice Bell, author of a recent book on the climate crisis -- "Our Biggest Experiment" -- that features Foote.

© HO An undated picture of a coal mine in Lens, northern France

This was the decade that the United States first began to drill for oil. It is also the baseline period of global temperatures we now use to chart the fossil fuel driven warming of the planet.

Foote, whose work was rediscovered in recent years, is now seen as part of a multi-generational exploration, spanning some 200 years, unravelling the mysteries of how the climate works -- and more recently how human activities have tipped it out of balance.

© Ricardo ARDUENGO The UN now says nature thrives when indigenous communities are allowed to manage their lands

"There is no eureka moment with one great genius in climate change science," Bell told AFP.

"Climate science is a story of people over centuries and different disciplines, different countries working together, incrementally learning more and more."

People have believed human activities like deforestation could alter the local climate since at least the ancient Greeks.

But in terms of the global climate, the story of our understanding of what we now call the greenhouse effect, arguably began in the 1820s with French scientist Joseph Fourier.

© Filippo MONTEFORTE People around the world are increasingly demanding urgent climate action

- Greenhouse gases -

Fourier calculated that Earth would be much colder if it was not enveloped in an insulating blanket of gases.

"He realised that the atmosphere was doing something to prevent heat immediately being radiated into space," said science historian Roland Jackson.

A few decades later -- in perhaps the first documented experiment of C02's warming potential -- Foote filled glass cylinders with ordinary air, moist air and carbon dioxide to see how hot they became in sunlight compared to shade.

The container with C02 warmed more than the others and "was many times as long in cooling", she reported, although she was not able to make a distinction between Earth's outgoing infrared radiation -- which is behind the greenhouse effect -- and incoming solar radiation.

It is now understood that climate change involves not just higher temperatures, but also more intense and frequent extreme events like heatwaves that spark wildfires

"Carbon dioxide can absorb heat, that's her discovery," said Jackson, who co-authored an analysis of her work published by the Royal Society last year.

Even now countries including Germany continue to burn coal

"And she made the supposition from that, that if you increase the amount of C02, it could change the climate. She needs to be recognised for that."

- Cooling fears -

A few years later, the Irish physicist John Tyndall performed a more rigorous study showing that water vapour and C02 absorbed infrared radiation -- the mechanism of the greenhouse effect.

His discovery was taken seriously, but even then it was twenty years before his findings on water vapour were fully accepted, said Jackson, who is the author of a biography of Tyndall. "C02 didn't feature."

In December 1882, a letter to the editor published in Nature cited Tyndall's work on gases.

"From this we may conclude that the increasing pollution of the atmosphere will have a marked influence on the climate of the world," said the letter, signed H. A. Phillips, in one of the earliest published links between human-made emissions and a changing climate.

© STR Scientific advances have not only given us knowledge of climate change but also technological solutions, like these solar panels

But it would be decades before there was wider concern that coal smoke belching from factories could one day heat the whole planet.

When Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius -- a distant relation of climate campaigner Greta Thunberg -- suggested in the late 1800s that burning fossil fuels could influence the climate and calculated what would happen if C02 doubled, it was not seen as a cause for alarm.

This is not only because the amounts of C02 being emitted at the time were considered negligible, but also because scientists were preoccupied with understanding the carbon cycle in relation to past ice ages, said Robbie Andrew of the CICERO Center for International Climate Research.

"Nothing survived in large parts of the planet during the Ice Age, that's kind of the thinking -- 'We hope we're not going back there'," he told AFP.

Even into the 1930s, when scientists said temperatures were already rising, they thought a little warming could be beneficial.

"The idea that it changed not only temperatures, but other aspects of climate might not have occurred to them," said Andrew, who has compiled a history of emissions predictions.

- 'Life itself' -

There are a few examples of public commentary linking emissions to the risks of warming, although Andrew said the burning of coal was largely seen as a "necessary evil" and health fears were put aside for the sake of progress.

In 1958, an American television show, The Bell Telephone Science Hour, said C02 from factories and cars could be warming Earth's climate.

"We are not only dealing with forces of a far greater variety than even the atomic physicist encounters, but with life itself," the narrator said.

But fear of global cooling -- centred on aerosol pollution and the nuclear winter that would follow atomic warfare -- was dominant, and continued well into the 1970s and 80s.

It was only in 1975 that the scientist Wallace Broecker wrote a paper asking "Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" and the expression began to enter the popular lexicon.

And in 1988, amid record temperatures, US government scientist James Hansen told a Congressional hearing "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now".

That same year, the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Since then climate science has become ever more sophisticated -- IPCC reports detail in ever-greater urgency the pace of warming, while scientists can now say whether a particular deadly heatwave, storm or wildfire was amplified by climate change.

But this greater knowledge has been met with industry efforts to sow public confusion about the effects of fossil fuel pollution.

"It's a long history of scientists battling to get this out there. Just stop fighting us," said Andrew.

- 'Not fiction' -

Bell, who co-runs the climate charity Possible, welcomed the recognition of Foote as part of that history.

But she said there are "an awful lot of other voices that have been lost along the way".

For example, she said the colonial era was in some ways a period of "unlearning" -- when European settlers brutalised indigenous peoples and disregarded their knowledge.

Now it is widely recognised that these communities are often far better at managing their lands sustainably.

With the evidence of climate change and record temperatures now impossible to ignore, Bell said decades of scientific endeavour has armed us with both knowledge and technology -- "we have a lot of the solutions".

But societies must now act to avert the most catastrophic effects.

"It is especially hard to admit that the entire responsibility rests on the people who are active in this decade: that everything depends on us, here, now," said Spencer Weart in his history of climate change science.

"It's as if we have woken up in a science-fiction movie. But it's not fiction, it's physics."

klm/mh/lc

HEALTHCARE INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM, MISOGYNY

Women less likely than men to receive opportune care after stroke, study finds

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS HEALTH SCIENCE CENTER AT HOUSTON

Women are less likely than men to receive timely care for strokes caused by blockages in large vessels, known as emergent large vessel occlusion (ELVO), according to researchers with The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

The study, “Women with Large Vessel Occlusion Acute Ischemic Stroke Are Less Likely to Be Routed to Comprehensive Stroke Centers,” was presented today at the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery’s 18th Annual Meeting.

ELVO is caused by a blockage in a large vessel in the brain, cutting off significant blood flow. The most effective treatment to help prevent long-term disabilities from the stroke is a thrombectomy, a minimally invasive procedure that uses catheters to reopen blocked arteries in the brain.

“Many of the women who suffer emergent large vessel occlusion ischemic strokes are not being routed to the appropriate setting where they can get the most effective treatment,” said Muhammad Tariq, MD, the study’s author and a neurology resident with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. “These patients should be sent to comprehensive stroke centers, where the care team specializes in treating strokes and preventing further damage.”

Comprehensive stroke centers have the expertise to perform thrombectomies and other treatments not available in primary stroke centers.

Researchers analyzed data from 10 stroke centers to determine which patients experiencing an ELVO were routed directly to comprehensive stroke centers to receive more intensive care.

Of 490 patients who suffered an ELVO, women made up nearly half (46%) of the total and were nearly 11% less likely to be taken to a comprehensive stroke center, while 90% of the men who suffered an ELVO were routed directly to these centers.

“Women who suffer a stroke, not limited to an emergent large vessel occlusion ischemic stroke, have been identified to receive less stroke treatment,” said Youngran Kim, PhD, author on the study and postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Neurology at McGovern Medical School. “A potential explanation for this difference could include failure to recognize stroke symptoms, which delays women in seeking care. Additionally, women who suffer a stroke tend to be older and may be frailer. Studies also show that women are more likely to present with ‘nontraditional’ stroke symptoms, such as fatigue, weakness, disorientation, and mental status change.”

“My hope is that by presenting these results, we can help providers understand that we need to work to bridge the gender gap in health care,” said Tariq, who sees patients with UTHealth Neurosciences, a clinical practice of McGovern Medical School. “There are already existing routing mechanisms to ensure that patients receive the best care for their chance at survival and recovery. I hope we can open up the conversation to show that there are patients who should be getting this treatment, but are actually not getting the help quick enough.”

Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center, the teaching hospital of UTHealth, is recognized by The Joint Commission and the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association as a comprehensive stroke center. It is the first Stroke Center in Houston and one of the first dedicated stroke programs in the world.

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£40k SIGN grant for screen industry diversity project

The phenomenon of social media influencers and how to diversify the screen media industries is the basis of a new project involving the University of Huddersfield.

Grant and Award Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD

£40k SIGN grant for screen industry diversity project — IMAGE: THE PHENOMENON OF SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCERS AND HOW TO DIVERSIFY THE SCREEN MEDIA INDUSTRIES IS THE BASIS OF A NEW PROJECT INVOLVING THE UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD. view more
CREDIT: PEXELS

The 12-month project, ‘Creator Labour: Screen Production Cultures and Transmedia Intersectionality in Yorkshire’, is backed by a grant of £40,000 from the Screen Industries Growth Network (SIGN) and sees the institution collaborate with researchers at the University of Sheffield.

Led by the University of Huddersfield’s Dr Errol Salamon, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Communication, the project will look at diversity and inclusivity in the creation of content for social media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube in the screen industry. It will also address how burgeoning influencers can get a foothold with and possibly even influence ‘legacy’ media organisations.

Of particular interest is how young content creators who are either based in Yorkshire or have moved away from the area can showcase their distinctive Yorkshire brand in what they create.

Tapping into Yorkshire’s social media talent

With large legacy media organisations, such as Channel 4 in Leeds and the BBC over the Pennines in Salford, moving large parts of their operations away from London, the project’s leaders hope to tap into how the region’s young social media influencers can grow their portfolios with large ‘traditional’ media organisations.

“The overarching aim of this project is looking at diversity and inclusivity in digital-based content creation,” says Dr Salamon. “We are looking at content creators who use digital platforms but also legacy media to create content over platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or Facebook Live. They are creating content across multiple platforms to build their own brand.

“Others might be from Yorkshire or working online elsewhere – even overseas – but their Yorkshire identity defines part of what their brand is.

“We will analyse the growing phenomenon of influencers, and the way that they use multi-platform media to share their content and build relationships with their fans.”

A long-standing problem for the film and TV industries in the UK has been its lack of diversity, despite strenuous efforts to address inequalities. Media outlets, like the BBC and C4, are investing more time and money into their social media output, but the lack of diversity of their content creators is still an issue.

Lack of diversity still a problem for screen industry

One hope for the project is that the diversity of Yorkshire’s social media creatives could help these media outlets, as well as add to their own portfolios.

“It’s also important for us to focus on diversity, because there has long been criticisms of a lack of diversity and inequality in screen-based media industries,” adds Dr Salamon.

“There has been a push from government to diversify in screen-based media, but there is still growing inequality. We will look at digital-based platforms of content creation as a possible avenue of diversifying in screen-based media industries.

“This starts from the creators themselves, who do not rely so much on legacy organisations. We will ask, how can people from historically marginalised groups take control of their own careers and diversify screen-based media industries, without having to break into a mainstream media organisation?”

Large media outlets can learn from influencers

One area where influencers can help legacy organisations is in their ability to quickly adapt to trends. Media outlets have been traditionally slow to adopt social media and then move with changes, but they undoubtedly have an advantage in the resources they can commit. Dr Salamon says that the project will look at where individuals and larger organisations can collaborate.

“We see this as an opportunity not only to look at content creation from individuals and their personal portfolios, but also for potential links they could make with legacy media organisations. BBC and Channel 4, for example, are on TikTok and are producing their own content, so there is a chance to build relationships between entrepreneurial content creators and legacy media. They could learn from the content creators as well on what to do with this newer technology.

“There is a lot that these organisations could learn from content creators, but because of their long-standing brands, they can also provide platforms for diverse voices to expand their individual brands.”

SIGN aims to empower people and support economic growth in the screen industries in Yorkshire and the Humber.

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Dr Salamon’s co-investigators on the project are:

• Dr Ysabel Gerrard (University of Sheffield)
• Dr Sophie Bishop (University of Sheffield)
• Dr Rebecca Saunders (University of Huddersfield)
• Professor Catherine Johnson (University of Huddersfield)
• Professor Cornel Sandvoss (University of Huddersfield)

New project uses empathy to teach students about cybersecurity and AI ethics

Grant and Award Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS SCHOOL OF INFORMATION SCIENCES

While empathy is important in almost every aspect of daily life, it is not always a priority in the development of technology, especially technology using artificial intelligence (AI). iSchool researchers are working to address this gap by using empathy to teach high school students about cybersecurity and AI ethics issues. Led by Yang Wang, associate professor of information science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the project, "Teaching High School Students about Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence Ethics via Empathy-Driven Hands-On Projects," has received a two-year, $297,575 National Science Foundation (NSF) Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER). Yun Huang, assistant professor of information science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Pilyoung Kim, associate professor of psychology at the University of Denver; and Tom Yeh, associate professor of computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder, will serve as co-principal investigators.

"We have seen many AI technologies that are fraught with ethical issues, for instance, having implicit biases toward certain populations or treating them unfairly," said Wang. "If we want tomorrow's AI technologies to be ethical, we need to plant the seed today and educate the future AI designers now."

According to Wang, developers are under a lot of pressure to ship products quickly, so ethics and empathy tend to get sidelined or ignored. In addition, "developers probably didn’t get empathy-driven education when they were in school."

"Our project makes an initial step towards changing that," he said.

For their project, the researchers will develop hands-on labs that cover a variety of scenarios, such as online gaming, social media, mobile apps, and smart toys. The labs, which will be made publicly available for schools to use, will include real-life examples of young children who are interacting with unethical AI or exposed to cybersecurity risks. Using a cutting-edge non-invasive neuro-imaging technique, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), the researchers will be able to assess the impact of these labs on the activation of brain regions associated with empathy in high school students.

"We hope the hands-on labs we develop in this project are effective and will be adopted widely in teaching high school students about AI and cybersecurity ethics issues," said Wang. "And that students will have more empathy for others, especially those who are vulnerable and can be disproportionately affected by these emerging technologies."

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Wang conducts research focusing on usable privacy and security technologies, social computing, human-computer interaction, and explainable artificial intelligence. He earned his PhD in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine.

Huang's research areas include social computing, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and crowdsourcing. She received her PhD in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine.

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