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)
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
NASA's Lucy spacecraft captures images of Earth, Moon ahead of gravity assist
IMAGE: NASA’S LUCY SPACECRAFT CAPTURED THIS IMAGE (WHICH HAS BEEN CROPPED) OF THE EARTH ON OCT 15, 2022, AS A PART OF AN INSTRUMENT CALIBRATION SEQUENCE AT A DISTANCE OF 380,000 MILES (620,000 KM). THE UPPER LEFT OF THE IMAGE INCLUDES A VIEW OF HADAR, ETHIOPIA, HOME TO THE 3.2 MILLION-YEAR-OLD HUMAN ANCESTOR FOSSIL FOR WHICH THE SPACECRAFT WAS NAMED.view more
CREDIT: CREDIT: NASA/GODDARD/SWRI
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured an image of the Earth on Oct 15, 2022, and an image of the Earth and the Moon on Oct. 13 as a part of an instrument calibration sequence.
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured an image (which has been cropped) of the Earth on Oct 15, 2022, as a part of an instrument calibration sequence at a distance of 380,000 miles (620,000 km). The upper left of the image includes a view of Hadar, Ethiopia, home to the 3.2 million-year-old human ancestor fossil for which the spacecraft was named.
Lucy is the first mission to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, an ancient population of asteroid “fossils” that orbit around the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. To reach these distant asteroids, the Lucy spacecraft’s trajectory includes three Earth gravity assists to boost it on its journey to these enigmatic asteroids.
The image was taken with Lucy’s Terminal Tracking Camera (T2CAM) system, a pair of identical cameras that are responsible for tracking the asteroids during Lucy’s high-speed encounters. The T2CAM system was designed, built and tested by Malin Space Science Systems; Lockheed Martin Integrated the T2CAMs onto the Lucy spacecraft and operates them.
On October 13, 2022, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured an image of the Earth and the Moon from a distance of 890,000 miles (1.4 million km). The image was taken as part of an instrument calibration sequence as the spacecraft approached Earth for its first of three Earth gravity assists. These Earth flybys provide Lucy with the speed required to reach the Trojan asteroids — small bodies that orbit the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. On its 12 year journey, Lucy will fly by a record breaking number of asteroids and survey their diversity, looking for clues to better understand the formation of the solar system.
The image was taken with Lucy’s Terminal Tracking Camera (T2CAM) system, a pair of identical cameras that are responsible for tracking the asteroids during Lucy’s high speed encounters. The T2CAM system was designed, built and tested by Malin Space Science Systems; Lockheed Martin Integrated the T2CAMs onto the Lucy spacecraft and operates them.
On October 13, 2022, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured this image of the Earth and the Moon from a distance of 890,000 miles (1.4 million km). The image was taken as part of an instrument calibration sequence as the spacecraft approached Earth for its first of three Earth gravity assists. These Earth flybys provide Lucy with the speed required to reach the Trojan asteroids — small bodies that orbit the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter.
CREDIT
Credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI
Why do self-driving cars crash?
Lehigh University Professor Rick Blum seeks to inject cybersecurity at every level of the autonomous vehicle networks of the future
IMAGE: PROF. RICK BLUM HOLDS THE ROBERT W. WIESEMAN ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIP IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING AT LEHIGH UNIVERSITY. HE IS DIRECTOR OF LEHIGH'S SIGNAL PROCESSING AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH LAB, WHICH HIS GROUP CONTRIBUTES TO THE FOUNDATIONAL THEORY OF MACHINE LEARNING AND STATISTICAL DECISION-MAKING, AND ILLUSTRATES THIS THEORY AND ITS RELATED ALGORITHMS BY EMPLOYING THE APPLICATION AREAS OF CYBERSECURITY, INTERNET OF THINGS, CYBER PHYSICAL SYSTEMS, SENSOR NETWORKING, ENERGY NETWORKS, COMMUNICATIONS, RADAR, AND SENSOR PROCESSING.view more
CREDIT: LEHIGH UNIVERSITY
Whether they are built by billionaires plagued by social media addictions, or long-standing corporations of the traditional automotive industry, self-driving vehicles are the future of moving people and stuff.
As they traverse the air, land, or sea, encountering one another or other obstacles, these autonomous vehicles will need to talk to each other. And even cars with actual drivers could benefit from the ability to work together to avoid calamity and assure efficiency. Temporary, ad hoc networks will form around sets of vehicles and the onboard sensors and communications technology that allow them to navigate; they will interact, enabling them all to “see” one another and react accordingly.
“The current trend toward incorporating powerful sensors and communications to form vehicle networks has tremendous potential,” says Rick Blum, the Robert W. Wieseman Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Lehigh University. “But it also has the potential to create a cybersecurity nightmare―or worse. Developing theory around the impact and mitigation of cyberattacks on networks of autonomous and human driven vehicles is critical and urgent, and further study is greatly needed.”
Blum intends to drive that study forward through a new three-year, $500,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research entitled “Cybersecurity in Dynamic Multiple Agent Vehicle Networks.” The project has an official start date of August 1, 2022.
“This project hopes to show that incorporating powerful sensors and communications to form vehicle networks can actually provide greatly enhanced cybersecurity―if these resources are used properly,” says Blum. “While autonomous vehicles are typically tested for deployment just by driving them, this testing alone will not provide suitable information on cyberattack vulnerability.”
In this effort, Blum and his team will develop theory and algorithms for “near optimum low complexity cyberattack mitigation” on sensor-equipped networks of autonomous and human-driven vehicles.
“These algorithms will employ engineering models coupled with unsupervised and supervised machine learning and incorporate all relevant information,” he continues. “The incorporation of engineering models will allow the overall process to be interpretable, which is important for trust in such dangerous cyber physical systems.”
About Rick Blum
Prof. Rick Blum holds the Robert W. Wieseman Endowed Professorship in Electrical Engineering at Lehigh University. He was the lead PI for Lehigh’s DoE Cybersecurity Center (SEEDs) and directed the Integrated Networks for Electricity Cluster. He is director of Lehigh's Signal Processing and Communication Research Lab and is a former director of the Energy Systems Engineering Institute.
His group contributes to the foundational theory of machine learning and statistical decision-making, and illustrates this theory and its related algorithms by employing the application areas of cybersecurity, Internet of Things, cyber physical systems, sensor networking, energy networks, communications, radar, and sensor processing.
Prior to joining the Lehigh faculty, he was a senior member of technical staff at General Electric Aerospace and graduated from GE’s Advanced Course in Engineering. He served on the editorial board for the Journal of Advances in Information Fusion of the International Society of Information Fusion. He was an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and for IEEE Communications Letters. He has edited special issues for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing and IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. He was a member of the SAM Technical Committee (TC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the Signal Processing for Communications TC of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the Communications Theory TC of the IEEE Communication Society.
Blum is an IEEE Fellow, an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer, an IEEE Third Millennium Medal winner, and an ONR Young Investigator.
Lower than normal rainfall linked with a higher chance of food insecurity
IMAGE: MOVING FROM A YEAR WITH TYPICAL RAINFALL TO A PARTICULARLY DRY YEAR WAS ASSOCIATED WITH A 13-PERCENTAGE-POINT INCREASE IN THE RISK OF BEING FOOD INSECURE FOR TANZANIAN HOUSEHOLDS, ACCORDING TO THE RESEARCHERS.view more
CREDIT: HEATHER RANDELL/PENN STATE
Food insecurity is a growing problem in certain parts of the world, especially as climate change affects weather conditions around the globe. New research led by Penn State found that a lack of rainfall was associated with the highest risk of food insecurity in Tanzania.
Specifically, the researchers found that moving from a year with typical rainfall to a particularly dry year was associated with a 13-percentage-point increase in the risk of being food insecure for Tanzanian households, likely due to the effect of less rain on maize production.
Heather Randell, assistant professor of rural sociology and demography in the College of Agricultural Sciences, said the findings could have important policy implications focused on helping agricultural households become more resilient against drought conditions.
“Climate change will continue to change precipitation patterns, so it’s vital to find ways to help at-risk communities fend off food insecurity,” Randell said. “Potential interventions could include providing drought-tolerant maize, increasing access to agricultural extension services, scaling up agricultural index insurance, improving uptake of soil and water conservation practices, and providing cash transfers based on drought early warning systems.”
Randell said the findings — recently published in the journal Food Policy— also could apply to other low- and middle-income countries, especially those heavily dependent on maize production.
According to the researchers, food insecurity — the inability to acquire sufficient, nutritious, safe and affordable food — affected about 2 billion people, or 26% of the global population, in 2019. This is particularly true in sub-Saharan Africa, where the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity grew from 50% in 2014 to 57% in 2019.
Previous research has found that food insecurity can affect both physical and mental health, which in turn can have implications for household labor productivity, child growth and development, and poverty reduction.
But while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that climate change will increasingly threaten food security and nutrition — particularly in poorer parts of the world that rely on agricultural production — the researchers said there has been very little research examining the effects of rainfall and temperature on how and whether households experience food insecurity.
“Most prior studies have focused on other related outcomes, like child nutritional status or food expenditures,” Randell said. “But these do not offer a comprehensive picture on how climatic conditions affect the quality, quantity and variety of food that households are able to access.”
For the current study, the research team wanted to explore how various weather conditions were related to food security in Tanzania, a country with a high prevalence of food insecurity that is also highly dependent on rain to grow its maize crops.
The researchers linked longitudinal, nationally representative household survey data from more than 3,200 households across Tanzania to high-resolution data on rainfall and temperature during the most recent growing season.
The survey data — collected by the Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics with assistance from the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study–Integrated Survey on Agriculture — included information about the quantity and quality of foods consumed in the household and how households respond to food shortages. This data then was used to determine whether a household was food insecure or not.
“The relationship between low rainfall and food insecurity is likely driven in large part by the effects of weather on maize production,” Randell said. “Maize thrives in warm conditions with ample rainfall, as the crop is sensitive to droughts and to both frost damage and extreme heat.”
Additionally, the researchers found that households with fewer working-age members were most at risk of food insecurity after experiencing low rainfall. Randell said this likely is because during drought conditions, households with only one or two working-age members have fewer opportunities to earn additional income compared to those with three or more working-age members.
The researchers said the findings will continue to be important as weather conditions change within the country. Climate projections for Tanzania predict warmer temperatures overall but more varied rainfall across the country, with more yearly rainfall predicted in the northern and northeastern parts of the country but less rainfall predicted in the south.
Clark Gray, University of North Carolina, and Elizabeth H. Shayo, National Institute for Medical Research, also participated in this work.
The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development helped support this research.
Climatic conditions and household food security: Evidence from Tanzania
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
4-Oct-2022
Climate change is closing daily temperature gap, clouds could be the cause
The diurnal temperature range has a significant effect on growing seasons, crop yields, residential energy consumption and human health issues related to heat stress.
Climate change is shrinking the difference between the daily high temperature and the daily low in many parts of the world. The gap between the two, known as the diurnal temperature range (DTR), has a significant effect on growing seasons, crop yields, residential energy consumption and human health issues related to heat stress. But why and where the DTR shrinks with climate change has been something of a mystery.
Researchers who are part of a new international study that examined the DTR at the end of the 21st century believe they have found the answer: An increase in clouds, which blocks incoming-shortwave radiation from the sun during the day.
This means that while both the daily maximum temperature and the daily minimum are expected to continue to increase with climate change, the daily maximum temperature will increase at a slower rate. The end result is that the DTR will continue to shrink in many parts of the world, but that the changes will vary depending on a variety of local conditions, researchers said.
The study, published in the journal AGU Geophysical Research Letters, is the first to use high-resolution computer modeling to delve into the issue of the Earth’s shrinking DTR, particularly how it is related to cloud cover.
“Clouds are one of the big uncertainties in terms of climate projections,” said co-author Dev Niyogi, a professor at The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences. “When we do this with a very high spatial resolution modeling framework, it allows us to explicitly simulate clouds.”
Lead author Doan Quang Van, an assistant professor at the University of Tsukuba Center for Computational Sciences in Japan, said this is vital for understanding the future of the DTR.
“Clouds play a vital role in the diurnal temperature variation by modulating solar radiative processes, which consequently affect the heat exchange at the land surface, ” he said.
The team included scientists from the UT Jackson School’s Department of Geological Sciences, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, National Defense Academy of Japan, and the University of Tsukuba in Japan. The modeling work used supercomputers at the University of Tsukuba Center for Computational Sciences.
Using the supercomputers, the team was able to model the complicated interplay of land-surface processes on climate change. These include changes in land use (such as deforestation), soil moisture, precipitation, cloud cover and other factors that can affect the temperature in a local region. By creating a model with a finer resolution grid – 2 square kilometer grids rather than the 100-kilometer grids used in most climate models – the researchers were able to more closely analyze the impacts of climate change.
The team focused on two areas: the Kanto region of Japan and the Malaysian peninsula. They used the 10-year period from 2005-2014 as a baseline and then ran different climate scenarios to project what will happen to the DTR in the two regions at the end of the century. They found that the temperature gap closes by about .5 Celsius in the temperate Kanto region and .25 Celsius in the more tropical Malaysian peninsula. Researchers attribute these changes in large part to increased daytime cloud coverage that would be expected to develop under these climate conditions.
The researchers said the study can help scientists improve current global climate models and aid in understanding how the shrinking DTR will affect society and the environment as the climate continues to warm.
“It is very important to know how DTR will change in the future because it modulates human, animal and plant metabolisms,” said Quang Van. “It also modulates the local atmospheric circulation such as the land-sea breeze.”
The research was funded by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI), NASA Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Science, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute for Food and Agriculture.
EUROPEAN SOCIETY OF HUMAN REPRODUCTION AND EMBRYOLOGY
IMAGE: COMBINED VARIATION RATES OF LIVE BIRTHS IN EUROPE COMPARED TO 2018–2019. VARIATION RATE BETWEEN THE MONTHLY LIVE BIRTHS OB- SERVED DURING 2020 AND 2021 AND THE MEAN OF THE 2018–2019 MONTHLY LIVE BIRTHS WERE WEIGHTED BY THE NUMBER OF BIRTHS IN EACH COUNTRY TO PRESENT CUMULATIVE RATES OF CHANGE, CORRESPONDING TO THE TOTAL VARIATION OBSERVED IN EUROPE.view more
CREDIT: HUMAN REPRODUCTION
Europe saw a 14% decrease in live births in January 2021, just nine to ten months after the first peak of the COVID-19 epidemic and the first lockdowns, compared to the average numbers of live births in January 2018 and 2019.
The researchers of the study, which is published today (Friday) in Human Reproduction [1], one of the world’s leading reproductive medicine journals, say that the decrease may be associated with the lockdowns imposed in many European countries rather than to people becoming infected with COVID-19 and encountering problems as a result of infection, such as deaths, miscarriages or still births. For this to be the case, there would have been a drop in live births just a few weeks or months after exposure to COVID-19, which they did not observe
“The longer the lockdowns the fewer pregnancies occurred in this period, even in countries not severely affected by the pandemic. We think that couples’ fears of a health and social crisis at the time of the first wave of COVID-19 contributed to the decrease in live births nine months later.”
Previous pandemics in the 20th and 21st centuries, such as the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and the 2013 Ebola and 2016 Zika virus outbreaks were associated with a decline in birth rates nine months after their peaks. The reasons were the high death rates in parents for the first two pandemics and high foetal death rates as a result of direct exposure to Zika. The desire of couples to postpone pregnancy in a time of crisis also played a role. The researchers of the current study wondered whether a similar trend would be seen after the COVID-19 pandemic.
They looked at data from 24 European countries [2] for the periods immediately before and after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. They adjusted the live birth rates to take account of seasonal variations and found that January 2021 was the only month in which there was a significant drop in live births.
At the national level, decreases in birth rates in January 2021 were seen in Belgium (12% decrease), Estonia (13%), France (14%), Italy (17%), Latvia 15.5%), Lithuania (28%), Portugal (18%), Romania (23%), Russia (19%), Spain (23.5%), Ukraine (24%), England and Wales (13%), and Scotland (14%). Seven countries had intensive care units that were over-occupied (more than 100% full) and six of these (Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, England and Scotland) saw substantial drops in birth rates. The seventh country, Denmark, did not. Only two out of nine countries in which there was a slight or moderate impact on intensive care units experienced a decline in births nine months later.
March 2021 was the only month with a live birth rate similar to the pre-pandemic monthly rate, corresponding to a rebound nine to ten months after the end of lockdowns. However, the researchers say that this rebound does not seem to compensate for the decline in birth rates in January 2021.
Further analysis showed that the duration of lockdowns was the only factor linked to the drop in live births in January 2021 compared to January 2018 and January 2019. In addition, countries with a lower income per capita tended to have decreases in live births of more than 10% in January 2021. Sweden, which did not have a lockdown but did have a high number of deaths, did not have a drop in live births.
“The association we found with the duration of lockdowns may reflect a much more complex phenomenon, in that lockdowns are government decisions used as a last resort to contain a pandemic. Lockdown duration has a direct impact on couples,” said Dr Pomar.
He said that the information from this study was important for health services and policy makers. “It is of particular importance for maternity services, which could adapt staffing levels to birth patterns after pandemics: fewer pregnancies are expected at the time of pandemics, but a rebound in pregnancies could be observed after the end of them. The fact that the rebound in births does not seem to compensate for the decrease in January 2021 could have long-term consequences on demographics, particularly in western Europe where there are aging populations.”
Dr Pomar and his colleagues plan to see if there are similar trends after the subsequent waves of the pandemic and lockdowns. “Over time, the pandemic becomes endemic, its consequences during pregnancy are better known, vaccination is available, and it is possible that this decline in births has been mitigated in subsequent waves,” he said.
Limitations of the study are that it was based on national data, which might limit the ability to identify other potential factors contributing to a decrease or increase in live births, and the researchers collected data only up to April 2021, which makes it impossible to identify seasonal differences in birth for 2021.
Professor Christian De Geyter, of the University of Basel, Switzerland, was not involved in the research and is a deputy editor of the journal, Human Reproduction. In a commentary accompanying the paper [3], he writes: “These observations are important because they show that human reproductive behaviour, as evidenced by numbers of live births, changes during dramatic events, epidemics and global crises . . . Fewer live births will result in more rapidly aging populations and in lesser economic growth. Some rebound of the live birth numbers after each of these crises may mitigate these constraints, but sequential multiple crises may also result in live birth numbers not recovering . . . People are now aware that profound stressors during pregnancy may affect placental function, neonatal health and even future fertility . . . Undulating fertility aspirations caused by crises will invariably affect fertility treatment; furthermore, temporal fluctuations in live birth numbers will impact on the strain on obstetrical care units, schooling facilities and, ultimately, national socioeconomic stability.”
[2] The countries are: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, England and Wales, Scotland and Ukraine.
[3] “Live birth numbers undulate as crises come and go”, by Christian De Geyter. Human Reproduction journal. doi:10.1093/humrep/deac232
IMAGE: LINDA STONE-FERRIER, WITH A COPY OF HER NEW BOOK, “THE LITTLE STREET.”view more
CREDIT: RICK HELLMAN / KU NEWS SERVICE
LAWRENCE –The importance of knowing what’s going on in your neighborhood and upholding its honor is at least as old as comparable societal expectations in 17th-century Netherlands, according to a new book by a University of Kansas art historian. Numerous Dutch paintings of an array of subjects — scenes of streets, domesticity, professions, and festivity -- conveyed and reinforced those values to contemporary viewers.
A professor of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art in KU’s Kress Foundation Department of Art History, Stone-Ferrier realized she would begin research for a book like “The Little Street” when, by chance, she read an article about 17th-century Netherlandish neighborhoods by the sociologist Herman Roodenburg.
“I knew no art historian had ever talked about the neighborhood, which Roodenburg made very clear was a significant organizing unit for social control and social exchange,” Stone-Ferrier said. “No art historians of Dutch art had ever addressed the neighborhood as an interpretive context for the study of Dutch paintings.”
In the book’s introduction, she writes that studies by art historians tend to silo works by subject matter, like landscapes or scenes of daily life, “presum(ing) that each category raises interpretive issues distinct from the others. In a revision of that paradigm, I argue that certain seemingly diverse subjects share the neighborhood as a meaningful context for analysis.”
In addition, Stone-Ferrier writes, her book challenges scholars’ assumptions that categorize “imagery in paintings within a binary construct of ‘private,’ understood as the female domestic sphere, versus ‘public,’ synonymous with the male domain of the city ...”
The neighborhood was a “liminal space” between home and city that encompassed people of every gender, religion, social class, nationality and political persuasion, she writes. In fact, Dutch citizens of the 1600s were required to officially belong to and participate in their neighborhood organizations – much like today’s homes associations – which collected membership dues, enforced neighborhood rules, and hosted mandatory meetings and annual group meals. Thanks to some exquisite recordkeeping from centuries ago and today’s digital resources, Stone-Ferrier was able to research, among other things, relevant subjects of paintings and the identity and professions of Dutch citizenry who owned them that informed her research. Art collecting was important, Stone-Ferrier said, to a broad and deep urban middle class whose wealth was generated by such trading enterprises as the Dutch East and West India companies.
And it's clear, from an analysis of that art and an array of documents, that what was going on down the street and around the corner was important to Dutch people of that time – just as it is to people in neighborhoods around the world today.
“Honor is the word the Dutch used in in their neighborhood regulations and in other contexts, too,” Stone-Ferrier said. “Honor had to do with how one behaved. To act honorably in all endeavors -- personally, at home, in your business -- was valued highly. An individual's honor or dishonor reflected on that of the whole neighborhood. That was an integral tie. That's why there was gossip and documented witness statements regarding the behavior of one’s neighbors.”
One chapter is subtitled “Glimpses, Glances, and Gossip” because — like today -- not only are people curious about what the neighbor across the street is doing in his driveway, or what is going on with those Rottweilers around the corner, but they want to make sure people are not misbehaving or breaking communal rules.
Paintings showing scenes of people upholding neighborhood virtues both reflected and reinforced those values, Stone-Ferrier writes.
Image: Linda Stone-Ferrier, with a copy of her new book, “The Little Street.” Credit: Rick Hellman / KU News Service
IMAGE: BRENT METZ (RIGHT) WITH CH’ORTI’ LEADERS AT A CH’ORTI’ RIGHTS CELEBRATION IN GUATEMALA.view more
CREDIT: COURTEST BRENT METZ
LAWRENCE – When he first began visiting the Ch’orti’ Maya area of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador decades ago, Brent Metz thought he understood what it meant to be indigenous to the region. It has taken 30 years of collaborative ethnographic research – learning the language, traveling, recovering information from obscure sources, photographing and recording -- with the people there to come to a more nuanced understanding in which he defines indigeneity as the intersection of three different axes.
Metz is director of the University of Kansas Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, professor of Anthropology and an affiliate of KU’s Indigenous Studies Program. He traces the Ch’orti’ language (one of 30 Maya languages) back to the one written by Maya elites of the Classic Period (200-900 A.D.).
The famous Maya cities were abandoned, and scholars have been piecing together why and where the populations went, although the public has invented their own fantastical stories.
“It seemed like they just disappeared,” Metz said, joking that “They got back in their spaceship and took off after they built the pyramids,” before quickly adding “No, they're still around.”
Metz’s theory that indigeneity is subject to the interplay of varying forces – historical, social, political and otherwise -- explains, for instance, why Honduras was for years presumed to have virtually no Ch’orti’ Maya descendants in its midst, only to see a thousands-strong movement arise when it became advantageous to claim their ancestral land rights in a 1990s political context.
Metz points out that, until recently, there was no socio-political advantage -- and, in fact, it has been disadvantageous – to be considered indigenous in the three countries he studied. For one thing, they are now a minority among the descendants of Hispaniccolonial powers.
“Indio is a negative term in Mesoamerica with several connotations,” he said. “During the colonial period, it was a legal term that essentially denoted conquered populations who were forced to work and pay taxes, tribute, and other fees to their Iberian overlords. Today, the term can refer to both an exoticized caricature living in some sort of cosmic timelessness or a backwards country bumpkin or hillbilly. So nobody wants to be called an Indian. They'd rather be called indigenous, or, better still, their own ethnic designation.”
Many Ch’orti’ internalized this oppression, which led to them hide or otherwise ignore their indigenous ancestry, Metz said. This phenomenon gives rise to one of his three pillars of indigeneity: contingency.
“Most of them publicly repress their identity, and they only come out of the closet when there's a very good reason to do so,” the KU researcher said. “They express it when uniting in self-defense. They also do it through celebration; out of pride. And they also do it when a good opportunity arises, like joining international movements to reclaim their rights to territory, control over their own development and respectful inclusion in official programs. In fact, this is not different from any other ethno-national identity, particularly ones that are marginalized or persecuted.”
Contingent identification as indigenous is hardly enough, though, as Metz argues. Such waiving of public identification subjects Ch’orti’s to accusations of being inauthentic, i.e., of being fair-weather indigenous, which leads to another axis necessary for understanding indigeneity: history.
“You’ve got to do your historiography,” Metz said, “because indigeneity isn’t just invented or constructed or imagined for the moment. Historical research is necessary to identify the pretenders among those with indigenous heritage. And now that there is at least some recognition of indigenous rights and sympathy with the indigenous, more pretenders are emerging.”
That’s why, in addition to reading everything he could on the subject, Metz and Ch’orti’ activists repeatedly traveled up and down mountainsides in the region between 2003 and 2018, speaking with elders who could recount their villages’ histories, etc.
The final pillar of Metz’s theory of indigeneity is relationality. How do a group of people define themselves as distinct from their neighbors?
On Metz’ research trips, he and Ch’orti’ collaborators found many people still observed distinctive ethnic traditions, including annual ritual offerings to natural forces (called “The Payments”) in hopes of achieving favor for a good harvest, and sometimes they did so in secret due to past persecution by Christian proselytizers and the Guatemalan army. However, these people maintaining ancient Maya traditions denied being indigenous Ch’orti’ Mayas. Why? Because, they told the researchers, their religion is universal, not Maya per se, and that the true indigenous Ch’orti’s live in other towns and are identifiable by their poverty, subsistence agriculture, dark skin and language. People compare who is more and less indigenous with communities and across municipal, state and national boundaries, Metz. said. So, for example, someone in Honduras may fight to the death over indigenous rights, and then defer to Guatemalans as the true indigenous because of national stereotypes.
“I've witnessed an Honduran indigenous activist apologizing to Guatemalan Mayans who’ve come to do a ritual at their Mayan archaeological sites for how little indigenousness they have been able to maintain,” Metz said.
If indigenousness implies colonization, he said, then social and therefore cultural and therefore identity changes are inescapable.
“Guatemala is considered by far the most indigenous of those three countries. So someone in El Salvador might consider themselves indigenous. But when we have a tri-national meeting, they see themselves more as mestizos, that is, of mixed race or heritage,” Metz said. “So a lot of it depends on ‘In contrast to who? What is the context and history?’ ”
Metz believes his approach can be applied to other contexts besides the Ch’orti’ area. And furthermore, he said, it shows the futility of trying to define indigeneity by race, biology or genetics.
“Indigenous groups marry with and welcome others into their societies, and many with indigenous ancestry abandon their societies to live among the dominant ones,” he said. “Once we get into biology and so-called race, you're going in the wrong direction. You're getting colder."
Laying geological groundwork for life on Earth
Harvard-led study offers new, sharper proof of early plate tectonics, flipping of geomagnetic poles
IMAGE: AN INTERIOR CUTAWAY OF THE EARLY EARTH HIGHLIGHTING ITS MAJOR GEODYNAMIC PROCESSES. MAGNETIC FIELD LINES ARE DRAWN IN BLUE AND RED EMANATING FROM THE LIQUID CORE THAT GENERATED THEM, WHILE PLATE TECTONIC FORCES REARRANGE THE SURFACE AND PLAY A ROLE IN THE CHURNING CIRCULATION OF THE ROCKY MANTLE BELOW.view more
CREDIT: ALEC BRENNER
New research analyzing pieces of the most ancient rocks on the planet adds some of the sharpest evidence yet that Earth’s crust was pushing and pulling in a manner similar to modern plate tectonics at least 3.25 billion years ago. The study also provides the earliest proof of when the planet’s magnetic north and south poles swapped places.
The two results offer clues into how such geological changes may have resulted in an environment more conducive to the development of life on the planet.
The work, described in PNAS and led by Harvard geologists Alec Brenner and Roger Fu, focused on a portion of the Pilbara Craton in western Australia, one of the oldest and most stable pieces of the Earth’s crust. Using novel techniques and equipment, the researchers show that some of the Earth’s earliest surface was moving at a rate of 6.1 centimeters per year and 0.55 degrees every million years.
That speed more than doubles the rate the ancient crust was shown to be moving in a previous study by the same researchers. Both the speed and direction of this latitudinal drift leaves plate tectonics as the most logical and strongest explanations for it.
“There’s a lot of work that seems to suggest that early in Earth’s history plate tectonics wasn’t actually the dominant way in which the planet’s internal heat gets released as it is today through the shifting of plates,” said Brenner, a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and member of Harvard’s Paleomagnetics Lab. “This evidence lets us much more confidently rule out explanations that don’t involve plate tectonics.”
For example, the researchers can now argue against phenomena called “true polar wander” and “stagnant lid tectonics,” which can both cause the Earth’s surface to shift but aren’t part of modern-style plate tectonics. The results lean more toward plate tectonic motion because the newly discovered higher rate of speed is inconsistent with aspects of the other two processes.
In the paper, the scientists also describe what’s believed to be the oldest evidence of when Earth reversed its geomagnetic fields, meaning the magnetic North and South Pole flipped locations. This type of flip-flop is a common occurrence in Earth’s geologic history with the pole’s reversing 183 times in the last 83 million years and perhaps several hundred times in the past 160 million years, according to NASA.
The reversal tells a great deal about the planet’s magnetic field 3.2 billion years ago. Key among these implications is that the magnetic field was likely stable and strong enough to keep solar winds from eroding the atmosphere. This insight, combined with the results on plate tectonics, offers clues to the conditions under which the earliest forms of life developed.
“It paints this picture of an early earth that was already really geodynamically mature,” Brenner said. “It had a lot of the same sorts of dynamic processes that result in an Earth that has essentially more stable environmental and surface conditions, making it more feasible for life to evolve and develop.”
Today, the Earth’s outer shell consists of about 15 shifting blocks of crust, or plates, which hold the planet’s continents and oceans. Over eons the plates drifted into each other and apart, forming new continents and mountains and exposing new rocks to the atmosphere, which led to chemical reactions that stabilized Earth’s surface temperature over billions of years.
Evidence of when plate tectonics started is hard to come by because the oldest pieces of crust are thrust into the interior mantle, never to resurface. Only 5 percent of all rocks on Earth are older than 2.5 billion years old, and no rock is older than about 4 billion years.
Overall, the study adds to growing research that tectonic movement occurred relatively early in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history and that early forms of life came about in a more moderate environment. Members of the project revisited the Pilbara Craton in 2018, which stretches about 300 miles across. They drilled into the primordial and thick slab of crust there to collect samples that, back in Cambridge, were analyzed for their magnetic history.
Using magnetometers, demagnetizing equipment, and the Quantum Diamond Microscope — which images the magnetic fields of a sample and precisely identifies the nature of the magnetized particles — the researchers created a suite of new techniques for determining the age and way the samples became magnetized. This allows the researchers to determine how, when, and which direction the crust shifted as well as the magnetic influence coming from Earth’s geomagnetic poles.
The Quantum Diamond Microscope was developed in a collaboration between Harvard researchers in the Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) and of Physics.
For future studies, Fu and Brenner plan keep their focus on the Pilbara Craton while also looking beyond it to other ancient crusts around the world. They hope to find older evidence of modern-like plate motion and when the Earth’s magnetic poles flipped.
“Finally being able to reliably read these very ancient rocks opens up so many possibilities for observing a time period that often is known more through theory than solid data,” said Fu, professor of EPS in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Ultimately, we have a good shot at reconstructing not just when tectonic plates started moving, but also how their motions — and therefore the deep-seated Earth interior processes that drive them — have changed through time.”
Individuals who deal with anxiety are no less hesitant to get the COVID-19 vaccine compared to those without anxiety, according to new research.
The new study led by the University of Waterloo aimed to investigate the relationship between vaccine hesitancy, psychological factors associated with anxiety, and individuals’ reasoning for and against getting the COVID-19 vaccine.
To conduct the study, the researchers surveyed 148 participants with and without anxiety disorders. All participants completed an online questionnaire examining COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy along with other related variables such as conspiracy beliefs, individualism, and intolerance of uncertainty. The researchers also surveyed the top reasons why individuals were motivated to get the vaccine and the top reasons why they were hesitant.
The most common reasons that participants were hesitant to get the vaccine were related to the vaccine’s effectiveness and novelty, and fear of adverse effects. In contrast, the most frequent reasons that participants were motivated to get the vaccine were to protect others, to protect self, and to return to a sense of normalcy.
The researchers found that anxious and non-anxious participants did not differ in vaccine hesitancy. However, discomfort with uncertainty predicted greater vaccine hesitancy in non-anxious participants, and in both groups’ vaccine hesitancy was predicted by individualistic worldviews, conspiracy beliefs, and a lack of trust in authority.
“People with anxiety difficulties were not more hesitant about the vaccine, rather, the more discomfort they had with uncertainty, the less hesitant they were,” said Dr. Christine Purdon, professor of Clinical Psychology at Waterloo. “The opposite was true of those without anxiety, suggesting that discomfort with uncertainty may be an important factor when addressing vaccine hesitancy.”
Aliya McNeil, lead author of the study and a master’s candidate in clinical psychology at Waterloo, adds that the findings could suggest that people without anxiety disorders are concerned with uncertainty related to the vaccine itself, whereas people with anxiety disorders might view the vaccine as an opportunity to reduce stress and uncertainty related to the virus. This may indicate that vaccine hesitancy is related to how one values independence.
These findings help shed light on the best way for the government to promote vaccination.
“Governments and public health departments might want to consider advertising vaccines in ways that activate fewer feelings of individualism,” McNeil said. “It’s important for campaigns to enhance trust in the vaccine focusing on the scientists responsible for vaccine development rather than large corporations. In addition, by normalizing feelings of uncertainty and providing evidence-based information, governments can guard against the worrying that occurs with vague and uncertain information.”
The researchers hope that their findings will help aid in future research that continues to explore vaccine hesitancy and interventions to promote vaccine uptake.
Pakistan's Khan announces 'long march' on Islamabad to press for snap polls
Ex-PM Imran Khan's announcement comes after the Election Commission of Pakistan disqualified him for failing to disclose gifts and proceeds of their alleged sale he received while serving as prime minister
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Imran Khan has held rallies across the country in recent months calling for snap elections in Pakistan. (AP Archive)
Former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan has announced that he would begin a protest march with his supporters from the eastern city of Lahore to Pakistan's capital Islamabad on Friday to call for early elections.
"I have decided to launch the long march from Friday at 11.00 am from Liberty Square in Lahore to Islamabad," Khan said at press conference in Lahore on Tuesday evening. The distance between the two cities is about 380 kilometres.
"I am marching to press the government to announce elections immediately," he said, adding his supporters and party members should avoid violence.
Smaller protests by Khan's supporters took place last week after Pakistan's top election tribunal found Khan guilty of unlawfully selling gifts from foreign dignitaries and heads of state, removing him of his parliamentary seat.
Since being removed from office by a no-confidence vote in the legislature in April, Khan has held protests across the country calling for snap elections, but the government has said they will be held as scheduled in October or November next year.
In response to a query about the government's possible use of force to impede protesters, he claimed that his protest march will be peaceful and that he has no intention of entering the capital's red zone.
"We will remain peaceful as families will join us," Khan said, adding that the government will be held accountable "if they use any force against peaceful people."
Political, economic uncertainty
The government has already promised that demonstrators will be barred from entering Islamabad, and they expect to deploy some 30,000 law enforcement to encircle the capital for protection.
The authorities also sent hundreds of containers into Islamabad to barricade all entry points before the demonstrators arrived.
Last week's ruling has added to the political and economic uncertainty plaguing Pakistan this year.
The 70-year-old cricketer-turned-politician was accused of misusing his 2018 to 2022 premiership to buy and sell gifts in state possession that were received during visits abroad and worth more than 140 million Pakistani rupees ($634,920.63).
The Election Commission of Pakistan ruled that Khan would be removed from his seat in parliament but did not order a longer disqualification from public office, which under Pakistani law can be up to five years.
The Islamabad High Court, however, said he is not barred from contesting elections in the future.
The political instability has also fuelled economic uncertainty, with international ratings agencies questioning if the current government can maintain difficult economic policies in the face of political pressure and looming elections.
