It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, August 20, 2021
China’s astronauts make spacewalk to upgrade robotic arm
The foray is part of China’s heavily promoted space programme which has already seen the nation land a rover on Mars and send probes to the moon
BEIJING – Chinese astronauts edged into space on Friday to add the finishing touches to a robotic arm on the Tiangong space station.
The foray, the second spacewalk in two months and relayed on state television, is part of China’s heavily promoted space programme which has already seen the nation land a rover on Mars and send probes to the moon.
In June, three crew arrived at the station, where they are set to remain in space for a total of three months in China’s longest crewed mission to date.
On Friday, astronauts Nie Haisheng and Liu Boming successfully exited the Tianhe core module to install foot stops and a workbench on the station’s robotic arm, said the China Manned Space Agency in a statement.
Video footage showed the astronauts working outside the spacecraft while tethered to it with a long rope.
Their tasks also include working on a thermal unit and adjusting a panoramic camera, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
This marks only the third spacewalk for Chinese astronauts, after the first in 2008 — when Zhai Zhigang made China the third country to complete a spacewalk after the Soviet Union and the United States.
The second took place in early July, when Liu and the third crew member Tang Hongbo left the station.
It is China’s first crewed mission in nearly five years and a matter of huge prestige as the country marks the 100th anniversary of the ruling Communist Party.
When Paolo Fanciulli dropped 39 large marble sculptures down to the bottom of the sea off of Tuscany’s Maremma Regional Park, it was not his first strike in the battle against unsustainable fishing, but it was his first step into the art world.
A fascinating story, at the heart of which is a fascinating and charismatic figure, recounts the confluence of an ancient relationship between man and nature, and a celebration of the Mediterranean Sea as a cradle of civilization.
Sixty-year-old Fanciulli practices sustainable fishing and “pescaturismo” or fishing-tourism at his home in the village of Talamone.
He still wakes up at dawn before heading out into the clear waters off the coast of Tuscany’s Grosseto province. He and his colleague Francesco fish, as their ancient ancestors did, by casting shallow nets that take mullet and bream while leaving the bottom reaches undisturbed.
Fanciulli’s “war” against illegal or unsustainable methods of fishing is long documented, and has appeared in newspapers around the globe.
From 2002 to 2006, he gathered the help of the Tuscan government and WWF-Italia to deploy a strategic formation of 126 underwater cement bollards to ruin any of the deep sea trawling nets he saw were rapidly destroying the fish stocks he grew up harvesting.
The nets would tear up the delicate seabed ecosystem, including seagrass meadows, and simply decapitate the marine food web. But Fanciulli knew the nets were extremely expensive to replace, and the relatively-inexpensive bollards, costing about €560 to make and transport, would last a lot longer than the poachers would.
That work took him twenty years to complete, recount the authors of his biography The House of the Fish.
His next project would be similar, but also quite different. It would expand the protection of his beloved Mediterranean, while enlisting some of the greatest marble sculptors on Earth to bring the world’s attention to the greater problem of general environmental degradation.
Andy Corbley
The House of the Fish
“The importance of the project is that we need some sensible consumption of resources,” Fanciulli told GNN. “However the illegal industry is devastating everything, and with this project we can send a message to the whole world to give back; not only to take.”
“But the intent of mine is also to think of the future; a better future, with more sustainable fishing, and a greater respect for the environment,” he said.
Paolo Fanciulli, is, as he told me when I went out on a tour with him and Francesco, a fisherman, not a super-savvy marketer or social media manager.
So with the help of a childhood friend who had become a successful engineer, Fanciulli imagined a series of large marble sculptures, taken from the Carrara Quarry, the fount of so much of the marble which Michelangelo used to create his artworks.
While Fanciulli asked for two—after a meeting with the President of Grosseto region of Tuscany and Ippolito Turco, the president of an association that now looks after the sculptures—he received 100.
But who would sculpt them? He needed to find generous and far-sighted sculptors who would put their creativity at the service of the sea, and enough funding to transport the 10-20 ton blocks from the north of Tuscany to the south.
Arriving at the house of an artist named Massimo Catalani, who lived in Rome and worked at the famous Federici Palace, Paolo, who brought his morning’s catch in a large pot to cook for dinner, was connected with scores of people from the world of art and architecture, one of whom was Emily Young, considered Britain’s best living sculptor.
“It was like a film,” Paolo writes.
Atlantis in Tuscany
Young was among a dozen international and Italian sculptors who donated their time and effort to contribute to a project that would not be seen in traditional museums, but that would slowly become covered in seaweed, and seen only by divers as they sit sentinel-like, defending the life of the depths.
In May 2015, the first 20 stone blocks, each costing thousands simply to transport to the pier of Talamone, were loaded onto a barge and floated out to their final resting place. A second group of 19 were lowered down last summer.
Ippolito Turco told The Independent, “We’ve managed to totally stop the illegal fishing in the area. Now we’re looking at extending the project along the coast to the north. We want to put more sculptures on the seafloor. It has proved to be very effective.”
“What you want to happen is that in time, you won’t know they are sculptures,” said Ms. Young. “They will be so covered in seaweed and algae that they will look like a coral reef or the remains of a wreck.”
Xiao Yang, a Chinese influencer and model based in Chengdu, has been wearing a prosthetic leg for almost 20 years. Though she says it’s now very much a part of her body, Yang’s prosthesis has caused her to have a challenging relationship with fashion and dressing up. “In high school, when I was very eager to dress up, I thought that the prosthetic limbs affected my external beauty,” she tells Vogue. “Wearing a prosthesis also caused one side of my buttocks to be deformed. I [still] feel unsafe if I wear tight pants or tops that are shorter than the buttocks—like [I’m] being exposed. I wore T-shirts and straight pants for a long time.”
Recently, however, Yang began experimenting more with her fashion choices and increasingly found herself wanting her prosthetic to reflect her sleek, modern style (she has a closet full of cool graphic tees and statement blazers, by the way). Cut to earlier this year in Chengdu, when she met Xiaoyu Zhang and Min Li—the two designers behind the Chinese jewelry brand YVMIN—and the three of them came up with an idea: What if we treat prosthetics like wearable art?
“We think it is only natural to decorate any part of our body, prosthetic as well,” says Zhang. Yang was instantly on board with the concept, which involved turning her prosthetic limb into a bold statement accessory of sorts. “This project tells everyone that wearing a prosthesis is a fact that cannot be changed—but wearing a prosthesis that looks gorgeous is also achievable,” Yang says. “This feeling is super cool; there will definitely be more people who need to experience it.” The result? Three different decorative shells that can be worn over Yang’s prosthetic leg, with sweet details like a heart-shaped “knee cap.”
Typically, YVMIN creates delicate, feminine jewelry, such as bowed earrings and heart-shaped pendant necklaces. But the design duo saw an opportunity to challenge themselves by working with Yang to create something entirely new. “When we saw Xiao sharing her OOTD photos on social media with her strong personal style, we thought it would be a good opportunity,” says Zhang. “We decided to only make the shell for the prosthesis, which avoids many technical problems, and can also make many pieces at the same time for Xiao to wear on different occasions,” says Zhang.
Hubble’s ‘Weird’ Crumbling Comet Was Also Seen By Ancient Egyptians, Say Scientists
This pair of Hubble Space Telescope images of comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), taken on April 20 and April … [+] 23, 2020, reveal the breakup of the solid nucleus of the comet. Hubble photos identify as many as 30 separate fragments. NASA, ESA, Quanzhi Ye (UMD) IMAGE PROCESSING: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
About 5,000 years ago, the first humans were settling in what would become Egypt in the Nile River valley may have seen a spectacular comet in the early morning night sky that later split into two.
How could scientists possibly know that? After all, there is no written record of such an event. It’s because both fragments of that comet have since returned—one in 1844 and the other just last year—and we can track their orbital paths backwards through time.
That’s the claim by a new paper published today in the Astronomical Journal. Using observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomer Quanzhi Ye of the University of Maryland in College Park reports that comet ATLAS (C/2019 Y4)—imaged by Hubble in 2020—is likely to be a piece of the same larger comet that caused the 1844 comet.
The New Comet, drawn at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, 1844. From “Illustrated London News”, … [+] 1844, Vol V. Artist Unknown. (Photo by The Print Collector/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
The bright fragment from 1884 won’t return until the 50th century, but at least it will return. In 2020, Comet ATLAS famously disintegrated on camera when still 100 million miles from the Sun.
Comets are fragile lumps dust and ice that hang out in the farthest reaches of the Solar System, but they orbit the Sun, so swing into the inner Solar System once in a while.
The “Great Comet” of 1844 is reported to have shone as bright as Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. Comet ATLAS, is seems, followed the same orbital path.
Trace their motions back in time and, claims Ye (along with amateur astronomer Maik Meyer), Comet ATLAS and the 1844 comet are likely to be two parts of a much larger comet last in the Solar System 5,000 years ago.
It would have swept just 23 million miles from the Sun. That’s closer than the orbit of the planet Mercury.
Comet Neowise, over a silhouetted Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England, UK on the 12th July 2020.
If that’s the case, then Comet ATLAS really was “weird,” according to Ye. “If it broke up this far from the Sun how did it survive the last passage around the Sun 5,000 years ago? This is the big question,” he said. “It’s very unusual because we wouldn’t expect it … this is the first time a long-period comet family member was seen breaking up before passing closer to the Sun.”
Comet ATLAS was first detected by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), operated by the University of Hawaii. Its untimely demise remains a mystery.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
Increased snowfall will offset sea level rise from melting Antarctic ice sheet
The Jakobshavn Glacier, Greenland. Credit: Thomas Overly
A new study predicts that any sea level rise in the world's most southern continent will be countered by an increase in snowfall, associated with a warmer Polar atmosphere. Using modern methods to calculate projected changes to sea levels, researchers discovered that the two ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica respond differently, reflecting their very distinct local climates.
The paper, published today in Geophysical Research Letters, is based on the new generation of climate models which are used in the newly published Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, reviewing scientific, technical, and socio-economic information regarding climate change.
The project brought together over 60 researchers from 44 institutions to produce, for the first time, process-based community projections of the sea level rise from the ice sheets. This particular paper focusses on one aspect of the overall project which is how the new generation of climate model projections used in the current IPCC assessments differ from the early generation in their impact on the ice sheets.
Professor Tony Payne, Head of Bristol's School of Geographical Sciences said the team were trying to establish whether the projected sea level rise from the new generation of climate models was different from the previous generation. "The new models generally predict more warming than the previous generation but we wanted to understand what this means for the ice sheets." he said. "The increased warming of the new models results in more melt from the Greenland ice sheet and higher sea level rise by a factor of around 1.5 at 2100.
"There is little change, however, in projected sea level rise from the Antarctic ice sheet. This is because increased mass loss triggered by warmer oceans is countered by mass gain by increased snowfall which is associated with the warmer Polar atmosphere."
The recent findings suggest that society should plan for higher sea levels, and match with virtually all previous estimates of sea level rise, in that scientists expect sea levels to continue to rise well beyond 2100, most likely at an accelerating rate.
Prof Payne added: "Predicting the mass budget of the ice sheets from estimates of global warming is difficult and a great many of the processes involved require further attention.
"Discovering that warmer climates do not affect Antarctic mass budget, in particular, warrants further examination because this is based on large changes in snowfall and marine melt balancing."
"One of the main things to take away from this, interestingly, is that the response of two ice sheets and what impact global heating has on them is different and depends heavily on their local conditions," said Prof Payne.1.5C warming cap could 'halve' sea level rise from melting ice
More information:Antony J. Payne et al, Future sea level change under CMIP5 and CMIP6 scenarios from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets,Geophysical Research Letters(2021).DOI: 10.1029/2020GL091741
Laboratory evolution of a designer enzyme makes it into a much better catalyst . Simulations show that evolution does this by introducing networks of amino acids. These networks promise to be templates for catalyst design. Credit: Dr. Adrian Bunzel
Researchers at the University of Bristol have shown how laboratory evolution can give rise to highly efficient enzymes for new-to-nature reactions, opening the door for novel and more environmentally friendly ways to make drugs and other chemicals.
Scientists have previously designed protein catalysts from scratch using computers, but these are much less capable than natural enzymes. To improve their performance, a technique called laboratory evolution can be used, which American chemical engineer Frances Arnold pioneered and for which she received the Nobel Prize in 2018. Directed evolution imitates natural selection, allowing scientists to use the power of biology to improve the ability of proteins to carry out tasks such as catalyzing a specific chemical reaction.
But although the research team had recently used laboratory evolution to improve a designed enzyme by more than 1,000 fold, it was unknown how evolution boosts its activity. Until now.
Lead author Professor Adrian Mulholland of Bristol's School of Chemistry said: "Evolution can make catalysts much more active. The thing is, evolution works in mysterious ways: for example, mutations that apparently improve catalysis often involve changes in amino acids far from the active site where the reaction happens."
"We wanted to understand how evolution can transform inefficient designer biocatalysts into highly active enzymes.", the first author of the study, Dr. Adrian Bunzel, said.
To do so, the international research team from Bristol, the ETH Zurich and the University of Waikato (NZ) turned to molecular computer simulations. "These show that evolution changes the way the protein moves—its dynamics. Put simply, evolution 'tunes' the flexibility of the whole protein," he added.
The team also identified the network of amino acids in the protein responsible for this 'tuning'. These networks involve parts of the protein that are changed by evolution.
Dr. Bunzel said: "After evolution, the whole protein seems to work together to accelerate the reaction. This is important because when we design enzymes, we often focus only on the active site only, and forget about the rest of the protein."
Prof Mulholland added: "This sort of analysis could help to design more effective 'de novo' enzymes, for reactions that previously we could not target."
The research, published in Nature Chemistry, reveals how evolution makes designer enzymes more powerful, paving the way to tailor-made catalysts for green chemistry.
The researchers will now use their findings to help design new protein catalysts.
A smoke plume rises and spreads over California during the 2018 Ranch Fire. New research demonstrates the ability of the satellite-based sensor EPIC to accurately monitor smoke plumes like this one, as well as other aerosols suspended in Earth’s atmosphere. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CC BY 2.0
Aerosols are small, solid particles that drift aloft in Earth's atmosphere. These minuscule motes may be any of a number of diverse substances, such as dust, pollution, and wildfire smoke. By absorbing or scattering sunlight, aerosols influence Earth's climate. They also affect air quality and human health.
Accurate observations of aerosols are necessary to study their impact. As demonstrated by Ahn et al., the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) sensor on board the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite provides new opportunities for monitoring these particles.
Launched in 2015, DSCOVR's orbit keeps it suspended between Earth and the Sun, so EPIC can capture images of Earth in continuous daylight—both in the visible-light range and at ultraviolet (UV) and near-infrared wavelengths. The EPIC near-UV aerosol algorithm (EPICAERUV) can then glean more specific information about aerosol properties from the images.
Like other satellite-borne aerosol sensors, EPIC enables observation of aerosols in geographic locations that are difficult to access with ground- or aircraft-based sensors. However, unlike other satellite sensors that can take measurements only once per day, EPIC's unique orbit allows it to collect aerosol data for the entire sunlit side of Earth up to 20 times per day.
To demonstrate EPIC's capabilities, the researchers used EPICAERUV to evaluate various properties of the aerosols it observed, including characteristics known as optical depth, single-scattering albedo, above-cloud aerosol optical depth, and ultraviolet aerosol index. These properties are key for monitoring aerosols and their impact. The analysis showed that EPIC's observations of these properties compared favorably with those from ground- and aircraft-based sensors.
The research team also used EPIC to evaluate the characteristics of smoke plumes produced by recent wildfires in North America, including extensive fires in British Columbia in 2017, California's 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire, and numerous North American fires in 2020. EPIC contributed to the observational proof of smoke self-lofting via the tropopause by solar absorption–driven diabatic heating in 2017. EPIC observations successfully captured these huge aerosol plumes, and the derived plume characteristics aligned accurately with ground-based measurements.
This research suggests that despite coarse spatial resolution and potentially large errors under certain viewing conditions, EPIC can serve as a useful tool for aerosol monitoring. Future efforts will aim to improve the EPICAERUV algorithm to boost accuracy.
More information: Changwoo Ahn et al, Evaluation of Aerosol Properties Observed by DSCOVR/EPIC Instrument From the Earth‐Sun Lagrange 1 Orbit, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (2021). DOI: 10.1029/2020JD033651
Scientists dig deep to understand the effects of population pressure on violence levels
Researchers look to the past to understand whether a growing human population is related to a rise in violence levels
Date:
August 18, 2021
Source:
Okayama University
Summary:
A continuous rise in global population has led to fears that conflicts and war will become more frequent as resources dwindle. But this widespread belief has not been quantified based on actual Japanese archaeological data, until now. Researchers have now examined the skeletal remains of people living in the Middle Yayoi period of Japan to set the record straight on the relationship between population pressure and the frequency of violence.
The human capacity for warfare and whether it is an inescapable part of human nature is a hot button issue at the heart of various disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, and so on. Researchers have posited a range of ideas about why humans engage in war, and the running list of various triggers for inter-group violence is long, be it the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, the development of weapons, ecological constraints, or population pressures.
Among these, the population pressure hypothesis has become more prominent recently as people globally experience climatic changes and environmental breakdown. The hypothesis states that population increase can result in resource scarcity, leading to competition and conflict over resources. While there is wide acceptance of this claim, there are very few studies that have quantitatively backed up the origin of inter-group violence due to population pressure based on actual archaeological data.
To correct this gap, Professor Naoko Matsumoto from Okayama University and her team surveyed the skeletal remains and jar coffins, called kamekan, from the Middle Yayoi period (350 BC to AD 25 CE) in northern Kyushu, Japan. This region has been the focus of inter-group violence investigations because the skeletal remains in the Yayoi period indicate a significant increase in the frequency of violence compared to those living in the preceding Jomon period.
"The inhabitants of the Yayoi period practiced subsistence agriculture, in particular wet rice cultivation," says Professor Matsumoto. "This was introduced by immigrants from the Korean peninsula along with weapons such as stone arrowheads and daggers, resulting in enclosed settlements accompanied by warfare or large-scale inter-group violence. However, those living during the Jomon period were primarily pottery-makers who followed a complex hunter-gatherer lifestyle and had low mortality rates caused by conflict."
Professor Matsumoto and her team inferred demographic changes using the numbers of well-dated burial jars as a proxy for population size, and estimated population pressure from the ratio of population to arable land. The team calculated the frequency of violence by using percentages of injured individuals identified within the skeletal population, followed by a statistical analysis between population pressure and the frequency of violence.
The results of the investigation were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The researchers uncovered 47 skeletal remains with trauma, in addition to 51 sites containing burial jars in the Itoshima Plain, 46 in the Sawara Plain, 72 in the Fukuoka Plain, 42 in the Mikuni Hills, 37 in the east Tsukushi Plain, and 50 in the central Tsukushi Plain, encompassing all six study sites. They found that the highest number of injured individuals and the highest frequency-of-violence levels occurred in the Mikuni Hills, the east Tsukushi Plain, and the Sawara Plain. Interestingly, the Mikuni Hills and the central Tsukushi Plain also showed the highest overall values for population pressure. Overall, statistical analyses supported that population pressure affected the frequency of violence.
However, the peak population did not correlate with the frequency of violence. High levels of population pressure in the Mikuni Hills and the central Tsukushi Plain showed low frequency-of-violence values, while the relatively low population pressures of the east Tsukushi Plain and Sawara Plain were linked to higher frequency-of-violence levels.
Professor Matsumoto reasons there may be other factors that could have indirectly influenced such high levels of violence in the Middle Yayoi period. "I think that the development of a social hierarchy or political organization might also have affected the level of violence. We have seen stratified burial systems in which certain members of the ruling elite, referred to as 'kings' in Japanese archaeology, have tombs with large quantities of prestige goods such as weapons and mirrors," she says. "It is worth noting that the frequency of violence tends to be lower in the subregions with such kingly tombs. This suggests that powerful elites might have a role in repressing the frequency of violence."
The evidence collected by Professor Matsumoto and her team undeniably confirms a positive correlation between population pressure and higher levels of violence and may help devise mechanisms to avoid seemingly never-ending conflicts in motion today. Further research based on these insights could identify other variables at play in determining the root causes of inter-group violence and actively prevent them.
Tomomi Nakagawa, Kohei Tamura, Yuji Yamaguchi, Naoko Matsumoto, Takehiko Matsugi, Hisashi Nakao. Population pressure and prehistoric violence in the Yayoi period of Japan. Journal of Archaeological Science, 2021; 132: 105420 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2021.105420
Okayama University. "Scientists dig deep to understand the effects of population pressure on violence levels: Researchers look to the past to understand whether a growing human population is related to a rise in violence levels." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 18 August 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210818130517.htm>
