North Carolina and Haiti earthquakes compared

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• earthquake

Posted August 21, 2021 

By Tony Rice, NASA Ambassador

The 7.2 magnitude earthquake which rocked Haiti on August 14 came a few days after the year anniversary of the 5.1 near Sparta, North Carolina. A few days later a 2.7 magnitude earthquake was felt in Morganton, NC, 57 miles to the southwest of Sparta.

The 2020 Sparta earthquake was the strongest in North Carolina in a century. It buckled roads, broke water and sewer lines, and damaged hundreds of buildings. But only a single injury was reported. The earthquake occurred when stresses built up an a thrust fault about 2.3 miles under the Blue Ridge Mountains were suddenly released.

The 2021 Haiti earthquake was the strongest in 250 years. It occurred with similar sudden movement along the northern edge of the Caribbean plate which runs the width of the country.

The death toll has risen beyond 2,000. Though 2010's 7.0 quake was about half as strong, but centered closer to the densely populated capitol city of Port-au-Prince, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths or more.

What causes earthquakes

The Earth's crust is made up of a series of plates that move against each other. This builds up stress along fault lines which can only be held in place by friction for so long. Earthquakes are the result of that energy being released.

The greatest energy is released in the mainshock which are often followed by numerous aftershocks that can continue for days or more as remaining energy is released and the plates settle into the new position. A little bit of that energy is sometimes released in relatively small foreshocks,

Western North Carolina felt at least four foreshocks ranging in magnitude 2.1-2.6 in the 25 hours before the mainshock last year. An additional 20 aftershocks of up to magnitude 2.9 occurred over the next two days

No foreshocks were measured before the 7.2 mainshock in Haiti but an additional 20 aftershocks over magnitude 4.0 have been measured in the area in the six days that followed, including four of magnitude 5 or higher.

Measuring earthquake energy

The devastation builds quickly as these relatively small numbers go up. This is because each unit of magnitude represents nearly 32 times (10^1.5) more energy. Even a magnitude increase of just 0.2 doubles the power of an earthquake.

The most recent earthquake in Haiti released more than 1,400 times more energy than last year's quake near Sparta.

HOW MUCH MORE ENERGY IS RELEASED BY A MAGNITUDE 7.2 EARTHQUAKE?

	Aug 14, 2021, Haiti magnitude 7.2
M 2.7 Aug 17, 2021, Morganton, NC	5.6 million times
M 5.8 Aug 14, 2021, Haiti (aftershock)	126 times
M 5.1 Aug 9, 2020, Sparta. NC	1,413 times
M 7.0 Jan 12, 2010, Haiti	2 times

An earthquake centered along the northern coast of Haiti near Cap-Haïtien on May 7, 1842 was estimated at magnitude 8.1. It was 22 times stronger than the recent 7.2 earthquake, triggering a tsunami in the area.

REBUILDING THE COMMONS

The Youth Reforesting Puerto Rico With Soursop, Papaya, and Avocado Trees

Food-filled parks are replacing what Hurricane Maria destroyed.

BY ANNE EWBANK

JULY 30, 2021

A small group of dedicated environmentalists has distributed fruit trees across Puerto Rico. ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF CYEN PR

WHEN THE FURY OF HURRICANE Maria subsided long enough to allow Amira Odeh to leave her grandmother’s home in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, she stepped into a terrifying scene. “It was like waking up in a sci-fi, alien-invasion kind of movie,” she says. “All of this destruction.”

The storm that swept through the Caribbean in the fall of 2017 devastated Puerto Rico, where Odeh was born and raised. High winds, floods, and landslides killed people across the island, destroyed the power grid, and wrecked innumerable homes. Next came months of hardship, as shuttered ports and a carelessly executed aid effort from the mainland United States meant few supplies for weeks on end. “We didn’t have anything to eat,” says Odeh. While the semi-official death toll from the storm is 4,645, the lack of food, clean water, electricity, and shelter led to many more preventable deaths.

But in the immediate aftermath of the storm, the memory that most stands out for Odeh was that first glimpse of the post-Maria landscape. “There wasn’t green anymore,” she says. “A tropical landscape always has green. And the only thing green was the grass. There were no trees.”

It wasn’t just in her neighborhood. Within hours, Hurricane Maria wiped out 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s agriculture. For an island that already depended on imports for much of its food, this compounded the agony of Maria’s impact.Last month, the group planted a fruit park in the village of Camuy.

The same day, Odeh called her friend Dariana Mattei, who was living on the mainland. Only the year before, they had launched the Puerto Rican branch of Caribbean Youth Environment Network (CYEN PR). “We had the group, and we were figuring out where to go,” she says. “And then, we got the impact of this immense hurricane that was disastrous.”

The two quickly hatched a plan. “She was thinking about how to bring seeds to help the farmers who lost everything. And I was thinking on how to reforest,” she says. What ensued, over a shaky internet connection that day, was a remarkable grassroots effort to plant fruit trees and food plants across Puerto Rico. The “Regreen Puerto Rico” initiative was born.

Seven members of the CYEN PR, all women, started driving to the most afflicted areas of the island with emergency supplies, as well as trees and seeds for plants such as tomatoes and peppers. “Our goal is to give people an opportunity to reconnect to the soil, to the ground, to learn about our local foods, to know that not everything needs to come from the supermarket,” Odeh says. But, she adds, “we know we’re going to get more drought, more storms. With food-producing plants in backyards across the island, we’re hoping that communities can get some resilience, even if it’s in a small way.”

Amira Odeh and others in the CYEN PR geminate most of the plants themselves.

Over Zoom, Odeh twists to peek through her wooden shutters at the trees she’s growing in her yard for distribution. “Soursop, papaya, lemon, orange … What else do I have here? Tamarind, sometimes we have avocado, coco, plantains … those are the most common ones.”

When the group receives donations, they buy fruit trees from greenhouses. “But most of them we grow in our own backyards,” she says. “Our backyards are all overtaken by pots and plants.”

Odeh isn’t a farmer or a horticulturist. Instead, she has a degree in hydrology. But as a Puerto Rican environmental activist, she is intimately aware that many of the island’s issues are interconnected. “One of the reasons I got motivated to plant trees is that I’m a hydrologist. And here, we have a huge issue with water,” she says, noting that increasing the number of trees on the island will help prevent sediment from getting into the water supply.


She’s not alone in turning her attention to agriculture, though. The younger generation in Puerto Rico, especially those who lived through the hurricane, are increasingly passionate about shoring up food security on the island, especially under the increasing effects of climate change. “The newer generation is super woke and doing amazing agricultural work,” she says.

So far, the group has installed 20 fruit parks across Puerto Rico.

So far, CYEN PR has handed out fruit trees and seeds to families in every one of the 78 municipalities of Puerto Rico. In the early years of the project, the group all packed into one car “like sardines,” Odeh laughs, “driving 10 hours in one day, house to house. It was exhausting.” But recently, the group transitioned to creating community fruit tree parks. So far, the group has planted 20 parks, everywhere from vacant lots to empty spaces next to basketball courts.

The group is getting noticed for their work. In 2018, Univision honored Mattei and Odeh as “Agents of Change” at the television network’s yearly Youth Awards for their reforestation work. Odeh also gushes about how CYEN PR this year received a small grant from the One Young World Foundation. “For us, it feels like millions,” she says. “Because we were working on this out of our own pockets.”

One town even invited them back to see their flourishing fruit forest, welcoming the group with a parade, a concert, and a party in their honor. It’s both gratification on a personal level, Odeh says, as well as encouragement to continue the work. “Our first plan was to reach a thousand families with fruits and seeds,” she says. “And then we got to that number, and we just kept going.”

THE LAW IS AN ASS

Puerto Rico hospitals lose appeal over underpaying by federal government

STATEHOOD OR INDEPENDENCE

“While we recognize an apparent (and perhaps unintended) unfairness in this situation, we... conclude that the Secretary did not err in implementing the statute," the appeals court said.

The Capitol building on August 1, 2019 in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images file


Aug. 20, 2021, 7:50 AM MDT / Updated Aug. 20, 2021, 7:53 AM MDT
By Reuters


A federal appeals court has rejected a claim by a group of Puerto Rican hospitals that the federal government systematically underpays them under a program meant to help hospitals that treat a disproportionate share of low-income patients.

A unanimous 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled Wednesday that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was right to calculate aid using a formula based on share of a hospital’s patients eligible for Medicare and Supplemental Security Income — even though residents of Puerto Rico are not eligible for the latter.

“While we recognize an apparent (and perhaps unintended) unfairness in this situation, we, like the district court, necessarily conclude that the Secretary did not err in implementing the statute,” wrote U.S. District Judge Steven McAuliffe of New Hampshire, sitting on the 1st Circuit panel by designation.

Robert Roth of Hooper Lundy & Bookman, a lawyer for the hospitals, and HHS could not be reached immediately for comment.

Medicare provides for additional funding for so-called disproportionate share hospitals (DSH) that serve low-income populations, since those patients are less able to pay for services. Under the Medicare statute, DSH payments are calculated based on a formula using the number of patients eligible for both Medicare and SSI.

When it was first enacted, the DSH program only applied to hospitals in the 50 states, but Congress in 1986 extended it to the territory of Puerto Rico, requiring that aid to hospitals there be given “in the same manner and to the extent” as in the states.

In their 2017 lawsuit in Puerto Rico district court, about 25 hospitals alleged that, by applying the same formula, HHS shortchanged Puerto Rican hospitals, since the territory’s residents are not eligible for SSI. That meant that the formula did not reflect the true income of the patients, they said.

The hospitals argued that to comply with the statute’s requirement that Puerto Rico be treated the same as states, HHS was obligated to use a different proxy for income than SSI, which would be accurate for Puerto Rico.

They also alleged that HHS’s approach was racially discriminatory, since a majority of their patients were of Hispanic descent.

U.S. District Judge Aida Delgado-Colon ruled in favor of HHS. On appeal, McAuliffe agreed that the statute was “neither ambiguous nor open to plausible differing interpretations.”

“Critically, Congress did not vest the Secretary with authority to employ other, likely more accurate or equitable, proxies when calculating DSH payments to Puerto Rico hospitals,” he wrote.

The court also rejected the hospitals’ racial discrimination argument. McAuliffe wrote that the plaintiffs’ real objection was not to HHS’s implementation of the statute, but to the statute itself, which they had not challenged.

STATEHOOD OR INDEPENDENCE
Jasmine Camacho-Quinn wins gold for Puerto Rico, sparking another identity debate

Puerto Rico’s Jasmine Camacho-Quinn, left, celebrates after defeating the United States’ Kendra Harrison, center, for gold in the 100-meter hurdles at the Tokyo Olympics 
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

BY JORGE CASTILLO

STAFF WRITER 

AUG. 2, 2021 

TOKYO —

For just the second time in history, an Olympian representing Puerto Rico, a small Caribbean island territory of the United States, stood on a podium with the Puerto Rican flag raised above two others as “La Borinqueña” played.

Jasmine Camacho-Quinn wiped away the tears flowing down her face and under her white mask during Puerto Rico’s national anthem on Monday at Olympic Stadium. She wore a large crimson flor de maga, the national flower, in her hair, above her left ear. Later, minus her mask, she broke into a glowing smile at officials in the stands waving a Puerto Rican flag.

Earlier in the day, she won gold in the women’s 100-meter hurdles. In Sunday’s semifinals, she set an Olympic record. She made it look easy.

“I’m pretty sure everybody’s excited,” Camacho-Quinn said after the race, still finding her breath. “Just to put on for such a small country, to give little kids hope. I’m just glad I’m the person to do that. I’m pretty happy with that.”

She then burst into tears.

Puerto Rican hurdler Jasmine Camacho-Quinn poses with her gold medal after winning the 100-meter hurdles on Monday.
(Francisco Seto / Associated Press)

The historic performance concluded a redemption tale — Camacho-Quinn failed to qualify for the final at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — and sparked celebrations across Puerto Rico, the diaspora, even in the air.

It also triggered naysayers who have maintained she isn’t Puerto Rican enough to represent the island, shedding light on the island’s complex national identity and its ambiguous position within the international sports landscape.

Camacho-Quinn, 24, comes from the expansive Puerto Rican diaspora; nearly 6 million people who live in the U.S. identify as Puerto Rican while the island’s population has dropped to 3.2 million.

She is the daughter of a Puerto Rican-born mother and a Black American father, born and raised in South Carolina not speaking Spanish. She starred at the University of Kentucky, winning three NCAA championships. She could have chosen to run for the United States but opted for Puerto Rico ahead of the 2016 Games as an homage to her mother.

Critics surfaced with her decision. She’s addressed them over the years, and offered a response from Japan in a tweet Saturday.

“You see my mommy? The PUERTO RICAN woman that birthed me?” Camacho-Quinn wrote above a video of her mother and other family members celebrating her preliminary first-place finish.

Jasmine Camacho-Quinn, left, wins the women’s 100-meter hurdles on Monday.
(David J. Phillip / Associated Press)

On Monday, before Camacho-Quinn’s gold-winning race, tennis player Gigi Fernández, the most accomplished Puerto Rican-born Olympic athlete in history, questioned Camacho-Quinn’s credentials in tweets that were later deleted. Camacho-Quinn is working to learn Spanish, an issue Fernández addressed.

“And is she Puerto Rican?” Fernández wrote in Spanish. “Does she speak Spanish? Was she raised in Puerto Rico? Hhmm. How curious.”

The comments elicited swift backlash, prompting Fernández to deactivate her Twitter account. It was not the first time Fernández tweeted controversial takes about Puerto Rican Olympians. In 2016, she questioned why wrestler Jaime Espinal, who was born in the Dominican Republic and won silver for Puerto Rico at the 2012 Olympics, was chosen as the nation’s flag bearer at the Rio Games.

On Monday, Sara Rosario, the president of the Puerto Rico Olympic Committee, dismissed the disapproval.

“I respect their opinions, but I think they’re wrong,” Rosario said in Spanish. “Every four years when the Olympic Games arrive, they give these opinions. I don’t see it as a necessary issue.”

Camacho-Quinn’s victory came five years after Monica Puig won women’s singles at the Rio Games for Puerto Rico’s long-awaited first Olympic gold medal. Until then, Puerto Rico had claimed two silvers and six bronzes since the island’s debut in 1948. Puig, however, wasn’t the first Puerto Rican-born person — or women’s tennis player — to win Olympic gold. That was Fernández.


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Aug. 2, 2021

Fernández earned gold medals at the 1992 and 1996 Games in women’s doubles for the United States, not Puerto Rico. She represented Puerto Rico in previous international events, but Puerto Rico couldn’t offer a doubles partner in the top 240 of the world rankings for the Olympics.

So Fernández, who rose to No. 1 in doubles in 1991, chose to compete in 1992 for the U.S. alongside Mary Joe Fernández, the No. 9-ranked doubles player in the world, to improve her odds of winning. The decision provoked scorn.

Fernández was given a choice because people born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens. Puerto Rico has been under the United States’ jurisdiction since the U.S. invaded the island and seized control from Spain in 1898 as part of the Spanish-American War but has maintained its own distinct culture and customs, with Spanish and English as the official languages.

The Jones Act of 1917 declared that any person born in Puerto Rico after April 24, 1898, was a U.S. citizen without the right to vote in presidential elections. Puerto Rico was given more autonomy — but remained under U.S. control — when Congress approved the Constitution of Puerto Rico in 1952.

Four years earlier, the International Olympic Committee, pursuing more participants, recognized the Puerto Rico Olympic Committee in time for the London Games. The U.S. did not intervene. Puerto Rico has sent its own delegation to every Summer Games since 1948, including the 1980 U.S.-boycotted Moscow Games.

“For us, it’s an honor to be here,” Pamela Rosado, the captain of Puerto Rican women’s basketball team, said in Spanish. “Having Puerto Rico on our chests, I think, is most important.”

Juan Venegas won Puerto Rico’s first medal — a bronze in boxing — at the 1948 Games. In 1984, boxer Luis Ortiz won Puerto Rico’s first silver. At the 2004 Games, Puerto Rico handed the United States men’s basketball team its first Olympic loss with NBA players.

Puig broke through for gold in 2016. On Monday, Camacho-Quinn followed. How many more times “La Borinqueña” is heard on the world’s biggest sporting stage could depend on the island’s political future.

Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States dominates its politics. The island’s three prominent political parties are divided by the three leading status choices: the status quo, statehood and independence.

Statehood would likely end Puerto Rico’s sovereignty within the Olympics and Pan American Games under the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, which established that only one Olympic Committee can exist within the United States.

During his campaign last fall, Puerto Rican Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, the president of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, said he’d hope that Puerto Rico could continue fielding its own delegations at other international competitions if the island was admitted into the union.

Both the IOC and United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee declined to comment on the matter.

“Everyone here is behind Puerto Rico,” said Esteban Pagán Rivera, the sports editor of El Nuevo Día, the biggest newspaper in Puerto Rico. “There aren’t many people paying attention to the United States.”

On Monday, Pierluisi tweeted congratulations to Camacho-Quinn. He thanked her for uniting the nation, giving Puerto Ricans happiness, filling them with pride and for representing Puerto Rican women in front of the world.

Physicists give weird new phase of matter an extra dimension


By Ben Turner 4 days ago

The supersolid's atoms can move without ever losing energy

An artist's impression of the supersolid, which is like a solid and a liquid at the same time. (Image credit: IQOQI Innsbruck/Harald Ritsch)

Physicists have created the first ever two-dimensional supersolid — a bizarre phase of matter that behaves like both a solid and a frictionless liquid at the same time.

Supersolids are materials whose atoms are arranged into a regular, repeating, crystal structure, yet are also able to flow forever without ever losing any kinetic energy. Despite their freakish properties, which appear to violate many of the known laws of physics, physicists have long predicted them theoretically — they first appeared as a suggestion in the work of the physicist Eugene Gross as early as 1957.

Now, using lasers and super-chilled gases, physicists have finally coaxed a supersolid into a 2D structure, an advancement that could enable scientists to crack the deeper physics behind the mysterious properties of the weird matter phase.

Related: 12 stunning quantum physics experiments

Of particular interest to the researchers is how their 2D supersolids will behave when they're spun in a circle, alongside as the tiny little whirlpools, or vortices, that will pop up inside them.

"We expect that there will be much to learn from studying rotational oscillations, for example, as well as vortices that can exist within a 2D system much more readily than in 1D," lead author Matthew Norcia, a physicist at Innsbruck University's Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Austria, told Live Science in an email.

To create their supersolid, the team suspended a cloud of dysprosium-164 atoms inside optical tweezers before cooling the atoms down to just above zero Kelvin (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) using a technique called laser-cooling.

Firing a laser at a gas typically heats it up, but if the photons (light particles) in the laser beam are traveling in the opposite direction of the moving gas particles, they can actually cause slow and cool the gas particles. After cooling the dysprosium atoms as far as they could with the laser, the researchers loosened the "grip" of their optical tweezers, creating just enough space for the most energetic atoms to escape.

Since "warmer" particles jiggle faster than cooler ones, this technique, called evaporative cooling, left the researchers with just their super-cooled atoms; and these atoms had been transformed into a new phase of matter — a Bose-Einstein condensate: a collection of atoms that have been super-cooled to within a hair's breadth of absolute zero.

When a gas is cooled to near zero temperature, all its atoms lose their energy, entering into the same energy states. As we can only distinguish between the otherwise identical atoms in a gas cloud by looking at their energy levels, this equalizing has a profound effect: The once disparate cloud of vibrating, jiggling, colliding atoms that make up a warmer gas then become, from a quantum mechanical point of view, perfectly identical.

This opens the door to some truly weird quantum effects. One key rule of quantum behavior, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, says you cannot know both a particle's position and its momentum with absolute accuracy. Yet, now that the Bose-Einstein condensate atoms are no longer moving, all of their momentum is known. This leads to the atoms' positions becoming so uncertain that the places they could possibly occupy grow to be larger in area than the spaces between the atoms themselves.

Instead of discrete atoms, then, the overlapping atoms in the fuzzy Bose-Einstein condensate ball act as if they are just one giant particle. This gives some Bose-Einstein condensates the property of superfluidity — allowing their particles to flow without any friction. In fact, if you were to stir a mug of a superfluid Bose-Einstein condensate, it would never stop swirling.

The researchers used dysprosium-164 (an isotope of dysprosium) because it (alongside its neighbor on the periodic table Holmium) is the most magnetic of any discovered element. This means that when the dysprosium-164 atoms were supercooled, in addition to becoming a superfluid, they also clumped together into droplets, sticking to each other like little bar magnets.

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By "carefully tuning the balance between long-range magnetic interactions and short-range contact interactions between atoms," Norcia said, the team was able to make a long, one dimensional tube of droplets that also contained free-flowing atoms — a 1D supersolid. That was their previous work.

To make the leap from a 1D to a 2D supersolid, the team used a larger trap and dropped the intensity of their optical tweezer beams across two directions. This, alongside keeping enough atoms in the trap to maintain a high enough density, finally allowed them to create a zig-zag structure of droplets, similar to two offset 1D tubes sitting next to each other, a 2D supersolid.

With the task of its creation behind them, the physicists now want to use their 2D supersolid to study all of the properties that emerge from having this extra dimension. For instance, they plan to study vortices that emerge and are trapped between the droplets of the array, especially as these eddies of swirling atoms, at least in theory, can spiral forever.

This also brings researchers one step closer to the bulk, 3D, supersolids envisioned by early proposals like Gross', and the even more alien properties they may have.

The researchers published their findings Aug. 18 in the journal Nature.

Originally published on Live Science.

Lab-made mini brains grow their own sets of 'eyes'


By Yasemin Saplakoglu 4 days ago

The 'eyes' are the precursors to the retina

Scientists grew brain organoids with optic cups. (Image credit: Elke Gabriel)

Scientists recently grew mini brains with their own sets of "eyes," according to a new study.

Organoids are miniature versions of organs that scientists can grow in the lab from stem cells, or cells that can mature into any type of cell in the body. Previously, scientists have developed tiny beating hearts and tear ducts that could cry like humans do. Scientists have even grown mini brains that produce brain waves like those of preterm babies.

Now, a group of scientists has grown mini brains that have something their real counterparts do not: a set of eye-like structures called "optic cups" that give rise to the retina — the tissue that sits in the back of the eye and contains light-sensing cells, according to a statement.


Related: 11 body parts grown in the lab

In the human body, the retina sends signals to the brain via the optic nerve, allowing us to see images. "In the mammalian brain, nerve fibers of retinal ganglion cells reach out to connect with their brain targets, an aspect that has never before been shown in an in vitro system," senior author Jay Gopalakrishnan, a researcher at University Hospital Düsseldorf, said in the statement. (Ganglion cells are neurons located in the inner surface of the retina that communicate directly with the brain.)

Previously, researchers had grown optic cups individually in labs, but this is the first study that integrated optic cups into brain organoids, according to the statement.

Gopalakrishnan and his team adapted a technique they previously developed for turning stem cells into neural tissue in order to create the mini brains with optic cups. Once the stem cells had developed into mini brains, the organoids formed optic cups. The optic cups appeared as early as 30 days and matured within 50 days, a timeframe similar to how the retina develops in a human embryo, according to the statement.

In total, the researchers created 314 mini brains, and 72% of them formed optic cups. The organoids contained different types of retinal cells that formed active neuron networks that responded to light, according to the statement. The organoids also formed lens and corneal tissue.

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"Our work highlights the remarkable ability of brain organoids to generate primitive sensory structures that are light sensitive and harbor cell types similar to those found in the body," Gopalakrishnan said in the statement.

Why are scientists growing mini brains like these in the lab? These organoids can be useful for studying human brain development and related diseases. Scientists could use the new organoids — with their optic cups — to study brain-eye interactions during embryo development, Gopalakrishnan said. What's more, they can be used to study retinal disorders and maybe even be used to create personalized retinal cell types for therapies.

The researchers now hope to figure out how to keep the optic cups viable for a long time and use them to research the mechanisms behind retinal disorders.

The findings were published Aug. 17 in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

Originally published on Live Science.

#CRYPTID     #KRAKEN     #CRYPTOZOOLOGY

World's most elusive giant squid could be monogamous, female corpse hints


By Stephanie Pappas 3 days ago

Squid was embedded with sperm from a single male.

A female giant squid caught in a net off Kyoto had dozens of sperm packets from a single male embedded in her muscles. (Image credit: Miyazu Energy Aquarium)

A female of the world's largest squid — sometimes called the "kraken" after the mythological sea monster — that was caught off the coast of Japan apparently had just one amorous encounter in her lifetime.

The female had sperm packets from just one male giant squid embedded in her body, which surprised researchers. Because giant squid are solitary creatures that probably run across potential mates only occasionally, scientists expected that females would opportunistically collect and store sperm from multiple males over time.

"We were almost confident that they are promiscuous," said Noritaka Hirohashi, a biologist at Shimane University in Japan. "We just wanted to know how many males are involved in copulation. So this is totally unexpected."


Related: Release the kraken! Giant squid photos


Mysterious mating

Hirohashi and his colleagues study reproduction and sperm biology in several squid species, but the most mysterious of all is Architeuthis dux, the giant squid. Rarely seen alive, the giant squid has a life cycle shrouded in deep ocean mystery. Video of living giant squid in their natural habitats has been captured only twice. The only thing researchers know about these mysterious creatures' mating habits is that female giant squid are sometimes found with large sperm packets known as spermatangia embedded in their muscles. Researchers writing in a 1997 paper in the journal Nature posited that male giant squid probably use their "muscular elongate penis" to inject the sperm packets into the females.

How sperm meets egg from there isn't entirely clear. It's possible that the female releases chemical cues that activate the sperm when she's ready to spawn, or perhaps she releases her eggs in such a way that they trail along the sperm packets as they leave her body. Squid females do have organs near the mouth called seminal receptacles, where some species storm sperm, and it's possible that in those species, the embedded sperm can travel over the skin to these receptacles.

Knowing that witnessing two giant squid mating is highly unlikely, Hirohashi and his team developed a window into the process, using genetics. Examining squid specimens from fisheries and museum archives, they pinpointed some segments of the giant squid genome that would distinguish one set of squid DNA from another. Think of it like a squid paternity test: Any sperm packets found on a female can be tested to see if they came from multiple males and, if so, how many.

The researchers are always on the lookout for sperm-spangled females. They send out flyers to local museums, fisheries and aquariums, asking them to alert the research lab if a giant squid specimen turns up. In February 2020, they got good news.

"In this case, we found [a] Yahoo News [article] telling that the giant squid was caught," Hirohashi wrote in an email to Live Science.

Saving sperm


The spermatangia, or sperm packets, embedded in the upper layer of muscle on the female giant squid. No one knows how the sperm get to the eggs to fertilize them. (Image credit: Miyazu Energy Aquarium)

The specimen was a female, with a mantle, or main body, 5.25 feet (1.6 meters) long. It was missing a pair of tentacles and one eye but still weighed 257 pounds (116.6 kilograms). The squid had been caught in a fisher's net in Kyoto and was displayed at the Miyazu Energy Aquarium before being dissected.


When Hirohashi's team examined the body, they found that the squid was just reaching maturity and that it had squiggly spermatangia 3.9 inches (10 centimeters) long embedded in five separate locations: three places on the squid's mantle, one by an arm and one on the head. Each location hosted at least 10 spermatangia. Some were near gashes that may have been caused by a mating male's beak.


Genetic analysis of the spermatangia revealed that each and every one came from the same male. This was shocking to the research team; giant squid are often found bearing sperm packets, in a way that suggests that males aren't particularly picky. Spermatangia have been found on immature females, perhaps as a way for males to make their sperm available after the female matures, and even on males, perhaps because males are willing to try anything (or perhaps because they sometimes accidentally self-fertilize). All of the evidence pointed to a species that would mate first and ask questions later.

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The specimen, of course, is just one female, so more research is needed to see if monogamy is the norm among giant squid females. It's possible that this female had simply only encountered one male before she was entangled in the net that ended her life, the researchers wrote in the September issue of the journal Deep Sea Research Part 1. Or perhaps it is typical for females to mate with just one male. The gashes might be part of the males' strategy for ensuring other males don't move in, perhaps by limiting a female's life span after mating so that she doesn't have time to collect more sperm. Or, the researchers speculated, the aggression and injuries could spur the females to mature and spawn so that the sperm is speedily fertilized.

The next step is to study the spermatangia of more specimens, Hirohashi said. And researchers need to figure out how the stored sperm reaches the eggs, which are not deposited particularly close to the spermatangia. Researchers also need to figure out basically everything else about this elusive creature, including its life span, migration and habitats, he added.

"Kids ask these questions at the aquarium, so we must answer," Hirohashi said.

Originally published on Live Science

What can we do with a captured asteroid?

There's gold in them thar asteroids — literally.


Artist's concept of the asteroid 16 Psyche, which is thought to be a stripped planetary core. (Image credit: Maxar/ASU/P. Rubin/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

By Paul Sutter 

about 10 hours ago

There's gold in them thar asteroids! Literally — asteroids have more than enough gold, plus other metals, to provide a few lifetimes' worth of fortunes. But there are plenty of other reasons asteroids are valuable.

So how do we get these metals from these faraway asteroids? Perhaps the best way is to bring the space rocks to Earth.

Photos: Asteroids in deep space

Most of the metals we use in our everyday lives are buried deep within Earth. And I mean deep: When our planet was still molten, almost all of the heavy metals sank to the core, which is pretty hard to get to. The accessible veins of gold, zinc, platinum and other valuable metals instead came from later asteroid impacts on Earth's surface.

Those asteroids are the fragmented remains of almost-planets, but they contain all of the same mixtures of elements as their larger planetary cousins. And you don't have to dig down into their cores to get it: The asteroid 16 Psyche, for example, contains roughly 22 billion billion pounds (10 billion billion kilograms) of nickel and iron, which are used in everything from reinforced concrete to mobile phones.

If we maintained our current consumption of nickel and iron, 16 Psyche alone could supply our industrial needs for several million years.

Far, far away

But the main problem with asteroids is that they are far away. Not just in space (tens of millions of miles for even the "near"-Earth asteroids), but also in speed. To launch from Earth's surface and go into orbit, a rocket needs to change its velocity from zero to 5 miles per second (8 kilometers per second). To rendezvous with an average asteroid, the rocket has to change its velocity by another 3.4 miles per second (5.5 km/s).

That requires almost as much fuel as the launch itself, which the rocket would just have to carry as dead weight, thus adding to the already-obscene cost of trying to set up a remote mining operation in the first place.

And once the asteroid were mined, asteroid prospectors would be faced with a difficult choice: They could try to refine the ore right there on the asteroid, which would entail setting up an entire refining facility, or ship the raw ore back to Earth, with all the waste that would involve

So instead of trying to mine a distant asteroid, how about we bring the asteroid back to Earth? NASA's ill-fated Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) was an attempt to do just that. The goal of the mission was to grab a 13-foot (4 meters) boulder from a nearby asteroid and return it to cislunar space (between the orbits of Earth and the moon), where we could then study it at our leisure.

To move the boulder, ARM would use solar electric propulsion, with solar panels absorbing sunlight and converting it into electricity. That electricity would, in turn, power an ion engine. It wouldn't be fast, but it would be efficient — and it would eventually get the job done.

Related: How it works: NASA asteroid-capture mission in pictures

Unfortunately, in 2017, NASA canceled ARM. Some of the critical technologies wound up in other projects, like the OSIRIS-REx mission to the asteroid Bennu, and NASA continues to investigate and use ion engines. When properly scaled up, a future version of ARM could potentially send large chunks of asteroids — if not entire small asteroids — into nearby outer space.

In fact, a recent study found a dozen potential asteroids, ranging from 6.6 to 66 feet (2 to 20 meters) across, that could be brought into near-Earth orbit with a change in velocity of less than 1,640 feet per second (500 m/s). And the solar electric propulsion schemes cooked up for ARM would be perfectly capable of that, although it would take a while.

Once an asteroid is in near-Earth space, many of the difficulties of asteroid mining are significantly reduced. Just compare the ease of getting to low Earth orbit, or even to the moon, versus reaching Mars. The Red Planet's extreme distance from Earth presents enormous logistical, engineering and technical challenges that we are still trying to solve, all while we've maintained a continuous human presence in low Earth orbit for over two decades.

A cislunar asteroid would be much easier to study and much easier to test different mining strategies on. In addition, its resources would be much easier to bring back to Earth.

As a bonus, any asteroid redirect mission meant for mining would also automatically become an asteroid redirect mission for saving Earth: If we can successfully change the speed and orbit of a harmless asteroid, we can potentially do it for a dangerous Earth-crossing one. The solar electric propulsion drive, for example, might be humanity's best chance to avoid calamity.

Too bad the project was canceled.

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of "Ask a Spaceman" and "Space Radio," and author of "How to Die in Space."

Learn more by listening to the episode "What are asteroids good for?" on the "Ask a Spaceman" podcast, available on iTunes and askaspaceman.com. Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter.  

#ENDCOMBUSTIONENGINES

Can synthetic fuels save the combustion engine?

 STEPHEN EDELSTEIN

AUGUST 22, 2021


Automakers like BMW and Porsche are investigating synthetic fuels as a way to keep internal-combustion engines alive in the face of stricter emissions standards. But Engineering Explained host Jason Fenske is skeptical of this new fuel technology.

While gasoline and diesel are refined from naturally occurring stocks of crude oil, synthetic fuels are made by combining different molecules into a substance that performs like a conventional fossil fuel in a combustion engine.


That process is supposed to be carbon neutral, because one component of most synthetic fuels is carbon extracted from the atmosphere, Fenske noted. So while burning synthetic fuel may still produce carbon emissions, they would theoretically be canceled out by the recovery of that carbon for more fuel production. Plus, unlike fossil fuels, you can always make more synthetic fuel.

In addition to keeping gasoline cars on the road, synthetic fuel also has one of gasoline's main advantages—energy density. It can't match gasoline for energy density, but it's much better than hydrogen or the lithium-ion batteries used in current electric cars, Fenske said.




Artist's impression of Haru Oni synthetic fuel pilot plant

However, synthetic fuel must be made using renewable energy in order to be cleaner than gasoline, Fenske said. That's not true of electric cars, which can still have a very small carbon footprint even when charged from the dirtiest electricity grids.

Charging an electric car is also a fairly straightforward process, whereas making synthetic fuel, transporting it, and then burning it in a combustion engine adds a lot more steps, making it inherently less efficient.

Consequently, less of the energy put into synthetic fuel actually makes it to the wheels, Fenske said, citing some recent studies. Synthetic fuels' greater energy density might make them a good fit for aviation or maritime applications, but even that would still be very expensive, Fenske concluded.

Those challenges haven't discouraged automakers from experimenting with synthetic fuels. Porsche is testing it in race cars, and is backing a pilot plant in Chile. Last year, BMW invested in Prometheus Fuels, claiming the startup would be able to sell synthetic fuel at a price comparable to gasoline.

  

Synthetic fuel - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthfuel

The Bergius process plants were Nazi Germany's primary source of high-grade aviation gasoline, synthetic oil, synthetic rubber, synthetic methanol, synthetic ammonia, and nitric acid.

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Article: Whatever Happened to Nazi Synthetic Gas and Oil ...

https://www.opednews.com/articles/Whatever-Happened-to-Nazi-by-Grant...

What is not as well known is that the technology that created Nazi synthetic gas and oil is still around today and in use. In South Africa, there is a company called Sosol that utilizes the same...

Synthetic fuel in nazi germany | History Forum

https://historum.com/threads/synthetic-fuel-in-nazi-germany.125367

Event more fascinating but incredibly sad is the career of Harbor, a brilliant chemist but ironically a Jew and German patriot. His pioneering work having saved (or least extended the war for) Germany, he weaponised the use of Chlorine Gas, amongst other chemical weapons. His wife also a scientist begged him not to do so - he refused and went ahead; she committed suicide. After the War, Bosch ...

Mass grave from Nazi atrocity discovered in Poland's 'Death Valley'


By Laura Geggel

4 days ago

Among the victims were members of the Polish resistance.





Study researcher Dawid Kobiałka during an excavation in Death Valley. (Image credit: D. Frymark; Antiquity Publications Ltd.)

Archaeologists in Poland have discovered a mass grave that the Nazis tried to destroy at the end of World War II, a new study finds.

The mass grave, filled with the remains of about 500 individuals, is linked to the horrific "Pomeranian Crime" that took place in Poland's pre-war Pomerania province when the Nazis occupied the country in 1939. The Nazis killed up to 35,000 people in Pomerania at the beginning of the war, and they returned in 1945 to kill even more people, as well as to hide evidence of the prior massacres by exhuming and burning the bodies of victims.

Despite this elaborate Nazi cover-up, archaeologists have now found abundant evidence of one of these mass graves after examining archives, interviewing locals and conducting extensive archaeological surveys, the researchers said.

Related: Photos: Escape tunnel at Holocaust death site

The 1939 Pomeranian Crime was the first large-scale atrocity of World War II in Poland. This includes 12,000 people who were killed in the forests around the village of Piaśnica and 7,000 people who were buried in the forests near the village of Szpęgawsk in 1939. Some historians say the massacres were a prelude to the later Nazi atrocities committed during the Holocaust, the researchers said.


So many people were killed in 1939 and 1945 in one area of Pomerania, near the outskirts of the town of Chojnice, it became known locally as Death Valley. One witness, who testified after the war, recalled seeing that "a column of approximately 600 Polish prisoners from Bydgoszcz, Toruń, Grudziad̨z and neighboring villages, under the escort of the Gestapo, was taken to Death Valley during the second half of January 1945," the researchers wrote in the study. "They were executed there, and the witness speculated that the bodies of the victims were burned to cover up the evidence."

An aerial photo of Death Valley taken in July 2020. (Image credit: D. Frymark; Antiquity Publications Ltd.)

A researcher uses a metal detector to search for artifacts at the mass grave site. (Image credit: D. Frymark; Antiquity Publications Ltd.)

After the war, in 1945, exhumations at that spot in Death Valley unearthed the remains of 168 people. But it was evident from the exhumation reports and the witness' testimony that there were more burials to be found, the researchers said.

"It was commonly known that not all mass graves from 1939 were found and exhumed, and the grave of those killed in 1945 was not exhumed either," study lead author Dawid Kobiałka, an archaeologist and cultural anthropologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, said in a statement.

To investigate, Kobiałka and his colleagues used noninvasive techniques to study the area, including with lidar (light detection and ranging), which uses lasers shot from an aircraft flying overhead to map the topography of the ground. The lidar work revealed trenches that the Polish army had dug in 1939 in anticipation of a war with the Third Reich. But just a few months later, the Nazis used these trenches to hide the bodies of their victims, the researchers said.

"Executions took place at the trenches," they wrote in the study. "The victims fell into the trenches or their bodies were thrown there by the perpetrators. Later, the trenches were backfilled with soil."

At the trench site, the team performed surveys on the soil underground with ground-penetrating radar, electromagnetic field analysis and electrical resistivity, and found many anomalies hidden in the soil underground. Metal-detector surveys also revealed many artifacts, which led the researchers to excavate eight of the trenches. Since then, they have found more than 4,250 artifacts, many from 1939 and 1945, that included bullets, shell casings and charred wood that was likely used to burn the bodies.

Image 1 of 4



Photos of (A-B) the funeral of people murdered in Death Valley; (C) the gateway to the Cemetery of the Victims of Nazi Crimes in Chojnice; and (D) one of the mass graves in the Cemetery of the Victims of Nazi Crimes in Chojnice. (Image credit: Historical-Ethnographic Museum of Julian Rydzkowski in Chojnice; D. Kobiałka; Antiquity Publications Ltd.)

Pieces of charred wood: (A-B) used to build a stack on which the bodies of victims were burned; (C) blue stains on the wood left by a flammable substance; (D) fragments of burned human bones preserved on the surface of the wood. (Image credit: J. Rennwanz; Antiquity Publications Ltd.)



The wedding ring of Irena Szydłowska, a courier with the Polish resistance. (Image credit: A. Barejko; Antiquity Publications Ltd.)



Personal belongings from victims murdered at Death Valley in 1945, including (A) a wristwatch; (B) a badge with crest of Toruń; (C) a woman's earring; and (D) a holy medal. (Image credit: A. Barejko; Antiquity Publications Ltd.)


The team also found cremated bones and jewelry, including a gold wedding ring, suggesting the victims were not robbed when they were killed. The researchers identified the ring's owner as Irena Szydłowska, a courier in the Polish Home Army. "Her family was informed about the finding, and the plan is to return the ring to them," Kobiałka said.




(A) Study author Dawid Kobiałka interviews Urszula Steinke, who lost her father in 1939 in Death Valley; (B) Alojzy Słomiński, the father of Urszula Steinke; (C) An interview with Aleksandra Lubińska, who lost her father in 1939 in Death Valley; and (D) Władysław Kręcki, the father of Aleksandra Lubińska. (Image credit: D. Frymark; U. Steinke’s private archive; A. Lubińska’s private archive; Antiquity Publications Ltd.)
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Their historical investigation revealed that some of the killed prisoners were part of the Polish resistance.

"A series of specialized analyses of the finds is taking place right now," Kobiałka said. "It is believed that more victims killed in Death Valley will be identified soon, and their families will be informed about what really happened to their beloved ones."

The team also hopes to identify some of the victims with DNA analysis. After the researchers are done examining the site, "the remains will be reburied in Death Valley and the site will become an official war cemetery," they wrote in the study.

The study was published online Wednesday (Aug. 18) in the journal Antiquity.

Originally published on Live Science.