A rare look at the lousy life aboard China's 'Dragon Palace' submarines

Michael Peck

Sat 31 August 2024 

• A new report offers a rare look at the conditions in China's growing submarine fleet.

• It found the crews suffer from excessive noise, poor lighting and bad air quality.

• The question is whether these problems undermine the effectiveness of China's subs.

Chinese sailors have an ironic name for duty aboard submarines: "Dragon Palace." But there is nothing fantastic — or even healthy — about the conditions in China's large submarine force, a new report has found.

Chinese "submariners have long jokingly referred to their boats as the 'dragon palace' in reference to the palace of the dragon king at the bottom of the Eastern Sea in Chinese mythology," explained a new report by the US Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute.

In Chinese mythology, Ao Guang is the king of all sea dragons, ruling over them from his underwater crystal palace. But life aboard People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) submarines is far from palatial, the CMSI report found, offering a rare look at submarine life that is obscured by the Chinese military's secrecy and the regime's widespread censorship and intimidation. It found the crews suffer from excessive noise, poor lighting and bad air quality. The canned foods often served are so tasteless some sailors develop eating disorders.

"Work aboard PLAN submarines can cost personnel their health," said the CMSI report. For example, various surveys over the last two decades found numerous maladies, including mouth ulcers and back pain. "In 2018, researchers from several PLAN institutes and hospitals conducting surveys at a submarine base found that submariners as a profession were prone to lower back pain due to restrictive workspaces, long hours in fixed or contorted positions, and the constant vibration to which they are subjected. Results showed a 33.81%occurrence of lower back pain in commissioned officers and enlisted personnel."

Crews suffer psychological effects from the constant noise and low air quality they're subjected to underway. "Crew members working and living in a submarine's poor microclimate are prone to boredom, fatigue, lethargy, and discomfort, which impacts their psychological state, cognitive abilities, and emotional well-being," the report said. "These problems are further exacerbated by harmful gases, magnetic fields, noise, vibrations, and many other barriers to restful sleep and comfort."

Noise levels aboard Chinese have been measured as high as 90 to 130 decibels, which exceeds even the Chinese military's threshold of 85 to 100 decibels. Sub crews have also reported eyesight problems that stem from the poor quality lighting. "Analysis attributed this to poor lighting causing visual strain and close quarters, causing a problem in the ciliary muscles that regulate changes in eye lens curvature," CMSI said. "Crews requested more lighting in compartments and lighting modes that could provide an indication of day or night."

Meanwhile, medical care during long-duration voyages is lacking due to poorly trained caregivers and unkept medical equipment, the report found.

The report found instances that the cuisine on Chinese submarines was so bad it's led to eating disorders.Photo by Artyom Ivanov\TASS via Getty Images

That may be why China's sub force recently turned to traditional Chinese medicine, already used by other branches of the Chinese military. "Until recently, Chinese traditional medicine was not present on board PLAN submarines, since there were no designated positions to administer it," said CMSI.

Sailors in most navies grumble about food. Even US Navy subs, which reputedly have better chow than other ships, have their share of grousing about penal-quality meals. Providing appetizing food for months at a time is a challenge on Chinese subs, whose crews vary from around 60 on a diesel-powered attack boat to around 120 on a ballistic missile submarine.

Though some recent photos suggest an appealing menu, Chinese submarine cuisine still appears to be lacking. "Since submarines prohibit open flame cooking, canned food appears to have been the staple for many years on long-distance deployments," said CMSI. After "the poor taste of canned food eventually drove some sailors to become anorexic," more fresh and frozen food was served. But when "the fresh food runs out or electricity conservation is enacted, submarine crews reportedly begin eating standard field rations, such as the navy's KT-07 nutritional supplement rations. To make up for these conditions, submariners can usually expect a feast to welcome them when returning to shore."

Ultimately, the question is whether these problems undermine the effectiveness of China's 61 submarines. Though most are conventional rather than nuclear-powered, they could be among Beijing's most effective weapons if China were to invade Taiwan.

"Many of the hallmarks of a professional submarine force culture are present aboard PLAN submarines, especially surrounding secrecy, safety, and expertise," CMSI concluded. "Whether it is procedures for equipment maintenance or nuclear reactor safety, the force appears to demonstrate a high level of professionalism and a desire to uphold the highest standards across the fleet."

Chinese submariners have their own "dragon palace culture." This includes activities such as arm wrestling and ping pong contests, as well as other morale-boosters such as shipboard newsletters and poetry readings.

And what submarine force would be complete without its special rituals (that often baffle landlubbers). For example, a ceremony to honor those doing their first long-duration deployments happens when the submarine reaches maximum dive depth, the report said. "Recognized personnel will kiss a buttered hammer and drink seawater drawn from the depths, which is kept within a vial."

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Scientists Discover Ancient Viruses Frozen in Glacier

Noor Al-Sibai
Sun 1 September 2024

On Ice

While analyzing core samples from an ancient Tibetan glacier, scientists found remnants of more than 1,700 viruses, most of which had never been seen before.

As Ohio State University explained in a press release about the new findings from Tibet's massive Guliya Glacier — which was also the source of another trove of frozen viruses in 2021 — these newly-discovered dormant viral species seem to provide evidence linking climate change and viruses.

Extracted from a 1,000-foot ice core extracted from the giant Tibetan ice cap, these dormant viruses offer what the school calls "pristine snapshots" of the last 41,000 years as the glacier and the world around it have warmed and cooled.

"Before this work, how viruses linked to large-scale changes in Earth’s climate had remained largely uninvestigated," remarked ZhiPing Zhong, an OSU research associate who led the new study on the viruses, published this week in the journal Nature Geosciences. "Glacial ice is so precious, and we often don’t have the large amounts of material required for virus and microbe research."

Many Such Cases

While this is far from the first time scientists have uncovered ancient viruses from glacial samples, the findings from Tibet's sprawling Guliya Glacier represent, as Yale said in its own statment about the research, a fiftyfold increase in their numbers.

Of the more than 1,700 viral species discovered in this latest Guliya core sample, about three quarters are brand new. The other quarter had genetic signatures that overlapped with known organisms from other parts of the world.

"That means some of them were potentially transported from areas like the Middle East or even the Arctic," Zhong explained.

Of the viruses found in the Guliya sample, the most distinct "viral community," as the scientists are calling it, dates back about 11,500 years. As the school notes, that era saw the world's climate shift from the Last Glacial Stage to the warmer Holocene epoch in which we currently live.

Though the researchers can't say for certain, this trove of newly-discovered ancient viruses seem to indicate that the microbial species reacted to climate change, or as the study lead put it, "indicates the potential connection between viruses and climate change."

The researchers also insisted in their paper that these new viruses pose no risk to humans — but as another study from 2023 suggested, those contained within other ice structures could become dangerous as climate change continues to thaw them out.

Scientists explore impact of offshore wind farms on seabed

Sam Russell, PA
Sat 31 August 2024 

Scientists have collected samples from the seabed at one of the UK’s oldest active offshore wind farms.

The project, led by the University of Essex, will explore the environmental impact of the turbines on the seabed amid plans to build thousands more to reach net zero by 2050.

The samples, taken from as close as 50m to the turbines and as far as one mile away, are now being analysed, with findings to follow.

Researchers chartered a private survey vessel to carry out their expedition to the site off the coast of Cumbria.

Researchers took samples from the seabed (University of Essex/PA)

The active wind farm, which has been operational for more than 15 years and is one of the oldest offshore sites in the UK, is run by Danish energy firm Orsted.

Dr Natalie Hicks, of the University of Essex’s school of life sciences, said the research was “hugely important”.

“There are not enough specialist scientific vessels to gather the evidence in time, so collaborating with industry is key to gathering data,” she said.

“We know our demand for net zero energy targets means we have seen an increase in offshore wind farms, so understanding any environmental effects of these wind farms is urgent.

“We hope this research will feed directly into policy decision-making around offshore wind consenting.

“We know we are going to see an increase in offshore wind, so timely and evidence-based decisions are going to need to be made by policymakers.


The project will explore the environmental impact of the turbines on the seabed (Dr Philippe Laissue/University of Essex/PA)

“This science will hopefully underpin their decision-making, and impact on Government policy.”

The team took samples from the sea floor and hope to discover how the turbines may affect biodiversity, carbon storage and seabed composition.

Research is being carried out with Orsted, the University of St Andrews and the Government’s marine experts, the Centre of Environment Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS).

A CEFAS spokesman said it was “critical to scientifically understand offshore structures and their effects and impacts on the environment”.

“Too often we make assumptions about what is occurring in our marine environment when considering human activities, we need the type of research activity highlighted here to determine whether our assumptions are correct and to provide more confidence in our understanding,” the spokesman said.

“Such improved confidence is a vital element of the integrated scientific understanding needed for informed decision-making towards ensuring the long-term future of our marine environment.”


The team hope to discover how the turbines may affect biodiversity, carbon storage and seabed composition (University of Essex/PA)

Marine scientists will also compare the effects of decommissioned oil platforms to get a snapshot of how fossil fuel and renewable energy assets vary in their impacts.

Professor David Paterson, of the University of St Andrews, said: “It’s important we take learnings from the oil and gas industry on the environmental effects of oil and gas operations and decommissioning and effectively apply these to the offshore wind industry as projects mature towards later life phases.”

A spokesman for Orsted said: “Developing renewable energy in harmony with nature is both possible and necessary to address the twin challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.

“Through collaboration with academic bodies and other stakeholders, our aim is to help develop wider scientific understanding of the potential ecological benefits and impacts of developing critical green energy projects.

“By taking a science-led approach, we can ensure that renewable energy, such as offshore wind, continues to be deployed sensitively and sustainably.”

SPACE

‘She was right and they were wrong’: the female astronomers hidden by science’s male elite

Robin McKie

Sun 1 September 2024 

Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin showed stars were primarily made of hydrogen and helium.Photograph: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives

Eighty-five years ago, several dozen eminent astronomers posed for a photograph outside the newly constructed McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis in Texas. All were men – with one exception. Half-concealed by a man in front of her, the face of a solitary woman can just be made out in the grainy black and white image.

This is Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, whose impact on our understanding of the cosmos was profound. She showed stars were primarily made of hydrogen and helium, contradicting the scientific orthodoxy of the 1920s, which held that they were made of an array of elements. Her claims were suppressed and her work obscured, like her image on the McDonald Observatory photograph.

“You can see what she was up against from that picture taken in 1939,” said Meg Weston-Smith, a family friend of the Gaposhkins. “Astronomy, like so much else, was a man’s world.”

In the end, the ideas of Payne-Gaposchkin – who was born in Britain and married a Russian scientist, Sergei Gaposchkin – prevailed, though not without considerable opposition from male colleagues, as revealed in a new play, The Lightest Element, by Stella Feehily, opening this week at the Hampstead Theatre.

“Essentially she was up against a men’s club,” says Feehilly. “Astronomers, virtually all of them male, all agreed that the stars and the universe must be made of the same elements as we find on Earth. Being a woman and outside the group, she was free to be more radical in her thinking. She was right and they were wrong. The cosmos is 98% hydrogen and helium.”

Nor was Payne-Gaposchkin alone in being initially disparaged for being a female astronomer and only now being recognised for her brilliance. Annie Maunder and Alice Everett, who in the 19th century were among the first women to earn a living in astronomy, recently had asteroids named after them.

In addition, the biggest camera in the world – to be unveiled in Chile and used to image the entire visible sky every three to four nights beginning next year – has been named the Vera C Rubin Observatory. Rubin, who was American, played a critical role in revealing that our universe appears to be permeated with mysterious, undetectable particles. This is dark matter and it has played a key role in the evolution of the universe.

Like all female students at Cambridge until 1948, Maunder and Everett were not awarded degrees despite passing their examinations with honours; during her education and career, Rubin suffered widespread discrimination. Even after she acquired fame, she was blocked from using the great Palomar Observatory to continue her groundbreaking research because it had no bathrooms for women. Rubin’s “solution” was to tape a piece of paper in the shape of a skirt on top of the men’s symbol on the bathroom door.

“Rubin’s name regularly topped lists of potential Nobel winners, but to the Nobel committee, she was invisible matter,” notes Shohini Ghose, in her book Her Space, Her Time: How Trailblazing women scientists decoded the hidden Universe.

Rubin received some compensation when she was eventually awarded the Gold Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society in 1996. However, the only other woman to receive the award before her was Caroline Herschel – in 1828. As Ghose puts it, the 168-year gap in recognising female astronomers was “a ridiculously long stretch”.

Since the turn of this century, more women have been following careers in astronomy, although the profession still remains predominantly male, says Sue Bowler, journals editor of the Royal Astronomical Society. “‘When you go to meetings about related subjects such as atmospheric physics you find the audience is 50-50 male-female. But at some astronomy meetings, it can be as low as 10% women. I don’t really know why that is.”

Other signs suggest some movement towards recognising female astronomers. In 2020, the American scientist Andrea Ghez became the first female astronomer to win a Nobel prize for physics for her work on the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. Given that only four other women have ever won the physics Nobel, this could scarcely be described as trend-setting.

By contrast, there is a lengthy list of female astronomers who campaigners feel should have won Nobels but were denied them. Examples include Vera Rubin as well as Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who played a key role in identifying the first pulsar stars but who was denied a Nobel, which went instead to her Cambridge colleagues Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle. The decision still causes controversy.

“That was the first Nobel prize ever to be awarded for astronomical observations and Bell Burnell should have got a share, I have no doubt about that,” says Feehily. “Having done my research on this, what surprises me is not that things have changed but how, in so many ways, they have not changed enough.

“In the end, Payne-Gaposchkin prevailed. We now know, thanks to her, that most of the matter in the universe is hydrogen and helium. She was the first person to prove that – though it took a long time before her work was recognised for its remarkable quality. She still had to fight to get her due recognition and it is important to remember the battle she had to endure.”

NASA spacecraft collision may have created a meteor shower that will last for 100 years

Ashley Strickland, CNN
Sat 31 August 2024 


NASA spacecraft collision may have created a meteor shower that will last for 100 years


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Rocky debris blasted away from the tiny asteroid Dimorphos when NASA’s DART spacecraft intentionally slammed into it in 2022 could create the first human-made meteor shower known as the Dimorphids, new study has found.

The space agency planned the DART, or Double Asteroid Redirection Test, mission to carry out a full-scale assessment of asteroid deflection technology on behalf of planetary defense. NASA wanted to see whether a kinetic impact — such as crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid at 13,645 miles per hour (6.1 kilometers per second) — would be enough to change the motion of a celestial object in space.

Neither Dimorphos or the large parent space rock it orbits, known as Didymos, pose a danger to Earth. Still, the double-asteroid system was a perfect target to test deflection technology because Dimorphos’ size is comparable to asteroids that could threaten our planet.

The last complete image of asteroid moonlet Dimorphos was taken by the DRACO imager on NASA's DART mission at a distance of about 7 miles (12 kilometers) and 2 seconds before impact. - NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

Astronomers have used ground-based telescopes to monitor the impact’s aftermath for nearly two years, and they determined that the DART spacecraft did successfully change the way Dimorphos moves, shifting the moonlet asteroid’s orbital period — or how long it takes to make a single revolution around Didymos — by about 32 to 33 minutes.

But scientists also estimated the intentional collision generated more than 2 million pounds (nearly 1 million kilograms) of rocks and dust — enough to fill about six or seven rail cars. Where exactly in space all of that material will end up has remained an open question.

Now, new research suggests fragments of Dimorphos will arrive in the vicinity of Earth and Mars within one to three decades, with the possibility that some debris could reach the red planet within seven years. Small debris could also reach Earth’s atmosphere within the next 10 years. The Planetary Science Journal has accepted the study for publication.

“This material could produce visible meteors (commonly called shooting stars) as they penetrate the Martian atmosphere,” said lead study author Eloy Peña Asensio, a postdoctoral researcher for the Deep-space Astrodynamics Research and Technology group at Italy’s Polytechnic University of Milan. “Once the first particles reach Mars or Earth, they could continue to arrive intermittently and periodically for at least the next 100 years, which is the duration of our calculations.”
Predicting space debris

The individual pieces are small, ranging from sand grain-type particles to fragments similar in size to smartphones, so none of the debris poses a risk to Earth, Peña Asensio said.

“They would disintegrate in the upper atmosphere through a process known as ablation, caused by friction with the air at hypervelocity,” he said. “There is no possibility of a Dimorphos material reaching Earth’s surface.”

But understanding when the debris could reach Earth is more challenging and depends on estimating the velocity of the fragments.

When the spacecraft crashed into Dimorphos, it wasn’t alone. A small satellite named LICIACube separated from the spacecraft before impact to capture footage of the collision and the debris cloud that formed afterward.

“This crucial data has enabled and continues to enable detailed analysis of the debris produced by the impact,” Peña Asensio said.

The research team used LICIACube data and the supercomputing facilities of the Consortium of University Services of Catalonia to simulate the trajectory of 3 million particles that the impact created. The computer modeling measured different possible pathways and velocities of the particles across the solar system as well as how radiation released by the sun might affect the motion of the particles.

LICIACube shows plumes of debris streaming from the Dimorphos asteroid after NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Test made impact with it on September 26, 2022. - ASI/NASA/APL

Previous research ahead of the impact had suggested the possibility of Dimorphos’ particles reaching Earth or Mars, Peña Asensio said, but for the new study, the team restricted the simulations to align with post-impact data from LICIACube.

The study’s results confirm that if the debris were ejected from Dimorphos at speeds of 1,118 miles per hour (500 meters per second), some fragments could reach Mars, while other, smaller and faster-moving debris traveling at 3,579 miles per hour (1,600 meters per second) has the potential to reach Earth.

The team said uncertainties remain regarding the nature of the debris but concluded the fastest-moving particles could reach Earth in less than 10 years.

The study authors consider the possibility of the Dimorphids meteor shower reaching Earth unlikely, but they can’t rule it out, Peña Asensio said. And if it did occur, it would be a small, faint meteor shower.

“The resulting meteor shower would be easily identifiable on Earth, as it would not coincide with any known meteor showers,” he said by email. “These meteors would be slow-moving, with peak activity expected in May, and primarily visible from the southern hemisphere, seemingly originating from near the Indus constellation.”

And while the researchers didn’t explore this possibility in their paper, their investigation suggested Dimorphos’ debris could reach other, nearby asteroids.
A visit to the aftermath

Ejected debris was expected from the impact, but the possibility of material reaching Earth or Mars could only be calculated after the collision, said study coauthor Michael Küppers, planetary scientist at the European Space Astronomy Centre.

“Personally, initially I was surprised to see that, although the impact happened close to Earth (at about an 11-million-kilometer distance), it is easier for the impact ejecta (debris) to reach Mars than to reach Earth,” Küppers said by email. “I believe the reason is that Didymos crosses the orbit of Mars, but stays just outside the orbit of Earth.”

Particles can be ejected from near-Earth asteroids, such as Phaethon, which is responsible for the Geminid meteor shower that peaks in mid-December each year. Studying what was released by the DART impact could help predict when such material could reach Earth or Mars, said Patrick Michel, astrophysicist and director of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France. Michel was not involved in the study.

Boulders can be seen on Dimorphos' surface just before impact. - NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

“This study tries to quantify this possibility and confirms that it may happen, even if it relies on modeling that has its own uncertainties,” Michel said.

Future observations could help researchers refine mass measurements of the debris and determine how quickly it is moving to calculate the expected meteor activity, Peña Asensio said.

Those observations will be conducted by the Hera mission. The European Space Agency mission is expected to launch in October to observe the aftermath of the DART impact, arriving at the asteroid system near the end of 2026. Together with a pair of CubeSats, the spacecraft will study the composition and mass of Dimorphos and its transformation by the impact. Hera will also determine how much momentum was transferred from the spacecraft to the asteroid.

“Is there an impact crater, or was the impact so large that Dimorphos was globally reshaped?” said Küppers, who is also a project scientist for the Hera mission. “From ground-based data, we have some evidence for the latter. Hera will tell us for sure. Also, we will see if the impact left Dimorphos (tumbling).”

Overall, the mission will enable astronomers to understand the dynamical evolution of debris “produced by an impact in such a complex system of double asteroids,” Michel said.

How a little-known 17th-century female scientist changed our understanding of insects

Jennifer Rankin
Sun 1 September 2024 

Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.Photograph: Rijksmuseum

More than three centuries after she made a perilous transatlantic voyage to study butterflies, a rare copy of the hand-coloured masterwork by the great naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian is returning to Amsterdam.

The Rijksmuseum, which holds more than half-a-million books on art and history, last week announced it had acquired a rare first-edition copy of Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname (Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium), described as a high point of 18th-century book production when the Dutch Republic was “the bookshop of the world”.

More than half-a-metre tall and illustrated with 60 richly coloured plates, Metamorphosis revealed to a wider public the transformation of tropical insects from egg to adult.

Merian and her daughters produced about 200 copies from 1705, but today only an estimated 67 remain, and few with colour illustrations.

“It’s one of the most fascinating books in natural history that we know,” Alex Alsemgeest, curator of library collections at the Rijksmuseum, told the Observer. Also “quite exceptional”, he said, was that Merian took the entire book production process “into her own hands”, from the voyage to Suriname to the commercialisation of the work, which was sold to merchants and scientists across Europe.

With its beautiful, sometimes disturbing images, rendered with pinpoint precision, Metamorphosis is a work of art and scientific scholarship, from a time when there was no rigid division between disciplines. It is also part of the story of Dutch colonialism. Merian recorded the local names of plants and insects she studied. In contrast to other European naturalists, she credited local people with helping her discover the colony’s wildlife, although didn’t name individuals.

Finally, there is the fascinating life of Merian herself. As a 52-year-old divorcee, she embarked on a self-funded voyage to Suriname in 1699, driven by relentless curiosity about the lives of insects.

Born in Frankfurt, Merian learned to paint in her artist stepfather’s workshop, and became fascinated by silkworms, moths and butterflies. She married one of her stepfather’s apprentices and had two daughters. Ensconced in a comfortable life in Nuremberg, she bred and sketched caterpillars, publishing celebrated books about the plants and insects around her.

At this time, many people still believed that insects spontaneously generated in the dirt. While Merian was not the first to show the transformation from egg, through larva and pupa, to adult insect, “her artistic talents helped to bring this message to a wider audience” Alsemgeest said.

Described by the late historian Natalie Zemon Davis as “curious, wilful” and “a harder person to pin down” than other notable contemporaries, Merian left her husband to join a strict Protestant sect in Friesland, before eventually setting up a business in Amsterdam.

It was in the Dutch city she discovered in cabinets the vivid butterflies of Suriname, a Dutch colony until 1975, on the northern coast of South America. Having moved there with her younger daughter, Dorothea, she criticised Dutch settlers who only cared for sugar, ignoring the fertile potential of the soil for other crops.

While she wrote little about human behaviour, Merian noted the cruelty meted out to enslaved women. In a passage about a plant that induced abortions, she described them telling her that abortions would mean their children could be born free in their own country.

Her book depicted the beauty and savagery of the natural world, as well as some wincingly realistic creepy-crawlies. The first image shows cockroaches crawling over an unripened pineapple, a fruit then celebrated in Europe as a status symbol. In another illustration, a tarantula attacks a hummingbird. Merian is credited with giving the creature its Dutch name, vogelspin, meaning “bird-spider”.

Her image would be dismissed as a fantasy. Alsemgeest said: “In the 18th century, people responded: ‘that’s what you get when you send a woman to tropical places. She probably made that up’”. But scientists later confirmed her findings, he added.

The spider plate, he said, was a very good example of how Merian worked. “She was a really good observer.”

UK

Campaigners fear for future of Dartmoor ponies

Caroline Robinson
BBC News, Devon

Campaigners have called for more action to preserve numbers of Dartmoor Hill ponies

Campaigners have called for more protections for Dartmoor ponies amid fears the species could be driven to extinction.

Dartmoor Hill Pony Association (DHPA) said the breed was considered genetically rare as they had adapted to the conditions on the moorland - differing from those that become domesticated pets.

The association said more action was needed to recognise the importance of the country's only semi-wild pony population.

Natural England said it was working to ensure "optimal numbers of Dartmoor ponies remain for generations to come".

Friends of the Dartmoor Hill Pony
Natural England said it was working to ensure "optimal numbers of Dartmoor ponies"

The DHPA said numbers of Dartmoor Hill ponies were estimated to have dropped from from 7,000 to 900 over the past 25 years.

The previous Conservative government endorsed a land management overhaul on Dartmoor.

But the DHPA said new supplements which would pay farmers and landowners to look after the ponies and give them the same status as cattle had not yet been implemented.


'Gone forever'


Secretary Joss Hibbs said the group needed to "press now for action so the numbers do not drop any more".

"The ones you see on Dartmoor are the only ones there are," she said.

"Once they've gone they are gone forever - you can't get them back."

She said Natural England would not "guarantee their number on Dartmoor".

"Defra [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] has done an amazing amount of work on the ground with us," she said.

"Let's not muck it up at the last hurdle."

'Vital role'


Simon Lee, Natural England's principal officer for Dartmoor, said the agency "fully supports the findings of the Dartmoor review".

He said the review "highlighted the importance of ponies as part of a plan to recover nature on Dartmoor".

"Habitats on Dartmoor remain in a poor state and ponies have a vital role in their recovery," he said.

"We are working hard with partners, including the Dartmoor Hill Pony Association, to ensure the optimal numbers of Dartmoor ponies remain for generations to come."

Forty years since bog gave up dark Lindow Man secret


Jonny Humphries & Katie Barnfield
BBC News, Manchester

Manchester Museum
The Lindow Man was one of the most significant archaeological finds in the history of the region

The ancient peat bog of Lindow Moss in Cheshire hid a dark and gruesome secret for almost 2,000 years.

But on 1 August 1984, a peat cutter spotted the astonishingly well-preserved remains of an Iron Age man trundling along a conveyer-belt.

The unfortunate victim of a brutal murder, who became known as the Lindow Man, proved to be one of the most significant archaeological finds in the region's history.

But the unique conditions of the bog, near Wilmslow, that preserved him have been under threat, with serious environmental implications.

The unique conditions in a peat bog, which are acidic and exist in an anaerobic state (devoid of oxygen), mean that bodies like Lindow Man can be preserved in good condition for centuries.

Georgie Johnson, organiser for community group Transition Wilmslow, said the discovery of Lindow Man cemented the importance of the bog as a cultural and natural site.

She said: "He'd been fairly perfectly preserved, so we could see what his last meal was, we know how he died, and where he was placed in the bog as well."

In their natural state, peatlands act as carbon sinks and provide a home for plants and animals.

Emeritus Professor John Handley said it would be a "big win for nature" to restore Lindow Moss

But commercial peat-extraction, which continued at Lindow Moss for centuries until it ended in 2016, has caused severe damage.

Emeritus Professor John Handley, from the University of Manchester, told the BBC: "At the moment looking at the ground, you see it's bare, it's got bare peat, it's drying, oxidising.

"It's fossilised carbon, and it's being released into the atmosphere."

Violent attack'

"We want to completely reverse that process," Mr Handley Transition Lindow and the Lindow Moss Partnership, added.

Since 2022, after campaigns from locals and experts, measures have been put in place to re-wet the bog by raising water levels with artificial structures.

Jack Crowshaw, project manager for the Lindow Moss Partnership, described peat bogs like Lindow Moss as "weird" but "wonderful" places that support biodiversity.

He said: "We've got a population of water-vole, that have been here for a long time, a population that is increasing at the moment, and that is partly as a result of interventions like this that hold water at a steady-level throughout the year."

Manchester Museum
Lindow Man is now one of the most visited attractions in the British Museum in London

Examinations of Lindow Man showed he was in his 20s, of average height, well-built and in good health.

Closer inspections showed he suffered from intestinal parasites and his last meal was unleavened bread.

Radiocarbon dating has put his death, which involved a violent attack including a blow with a weapon such as an axe, as being sometime in the 1st Century AD.

Under the supervision of then county archaeologist Rick Turner, Lindow Man was transported to the British Museum in London where he has been an extremely popular exhibit.

There are several theories about how he met his fate.

Some experts have suggested he could have been sacrificed as an offering to Iron Age gods, whereas others say the evidence only points to the fact he was murdered.

The bog's history is the subject of an ongoing exhibition and art-trail, Window on Lindow, which continues until October.

VEDIC GNOSIS

‘In Britain, we are still astonishingly ignorant’: the hidden story of how ancient India shaped the west

William Dalrymple
Sun 1 September 2024

THE GUARDIAN

A painting of the Indian astronomer Aryabhata (476–550), who calculated the exact length of the solar year to an accuracy of seven decimal points.

Photograph: Dinodia Photos/Alamy

In AD628, an Indian sage living on a mountain in Rajasthan made one of the world’s most important mathematical discoveries. The great mathematician Brahmagupta (598–670) explored Indian philosophical ideas about nothingness and the void, and came up with the treatise that more or less invented – and certainly defined – the concept of zero.

Brahmagupta was born near the Rajasthan hill station of Mount Abu. When he was 30 years old, he wrote a 25-chapter treatise on mathematics that was immediately recognised as a work of extraordinary subtlety and genius.

He was the first mathematician to treat the circular zero symbol – originally just a dot – as a number just like the others, rather than merely as an absence, and this meant developing rules for doing arithmetic using this additional symbol along with the other nine.

These basic rules of mathematics for the first time allowed any number up to infinity to be expressed with just 10 distinct symbols: the nine Indian number symbols devised by earlier generations of Indian mathematicians, plus zero.These rules are still taught in classrooms around the world today.

Brahmagupta also wrote down in Sanskrit verse a set of arithmetic rules for handling positive and negative numbers, another of his innovations. In other writings, he seems to have been the first to describe gravity as an attractive force a full millennium before Isaac Newton.

But Brahmagupta was not alone, and he viewed himself as standing on the shoulders of an earlier Indian genius, Aryabhata (476–550). The latter’s work contains a very close approximation of the value of pi – 3.1416 – and deals in detail with spherical trigonometry. The ease of making calculations using his system had direct implications for astronomy and allowed him to calculate the movements of the planet, eclipses, the size of the Earth and, astonishingly, the exact length of the solar year toan accuracy of seven decimal points.

He also correctly proposed a spherical Earth that rotated on its own axis. “By the grace of Brahma,” he wrote, “I dived deep in the ocean of theories, true and false, and rescued the precious sunken jewel of true knowledge by the means of the boat of my own intellect.”

The ideas of these two men, bringing together the mathematical learning of ancient India, travelled first to the Arab world, then far to the west, giving us not only crucial mathematical concepts such as zero, but the very form of the numbers we use today. In Britain, our education still gives us the impression that most of the great scientific advances of antiquity were the productof the brilliance of ancient Greece. We learn about Pythagoras and Archimedes at primary school, but mathematicians of equal stature of Indian background are still completely unfamiliar to most of us, and neither Brahmagupta nor Aryabhata are names that will ring any bells at all in this country beyond a tiny group of academics.

It was they who perfected the numeral system in use around the world, arguably the nearest thing the human race has to a universal language; yet in the west, we attribute our numerals to the Arabs from whom we borrowed them, not the Indians who actually invented them.

In Britain, we are still quite astonishingly ignorant about India’s often forgotten position as an economic fulcrum, and civilisational engine at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds.

Related: Much ado about nothing: ancient Indian text contains earliest zero symbol

Although we in the west are almost entirely unaware of it, Indian learning, religious insights and ideas are among the crucial foundations of our world. Like ancient Greece, ancient India came up with a set of profound answers to the big questions about what the world is, how it operates, why we are here and how we should live our lives.

What Greece was first to Rome, then to the rest of the Mediterranean and European world, so at this period India was to south-east and central Asia and even to China, radiating out and diffusing its philosophies, political ideas and architectural forms over an entire region, not by conquest but instead by sheer cultural allure and sophistication.

For a millennium and a half, from about 250BC to 1200, India was a confident exporter of its own diverse civilisation, creating around it an empire of ideas that developed into a tangible “Indosphere”, where its cultural influence was predominant.

During this period, the rest of Asia was the willing and even eager recipient of a startlingly comprehensive mass transfer of Indian soft power – in religion, art, music, dance, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, language and literature.

Out of India came not just pioneering merchants, astronomers and astrologers, scientists and mathematicians, doctors and sculptors, but also the holy men, monks and missionaries of several distinct strands of Indic religious thought and devotion, Hindu and Buddhist.

These different religious worlds sometimes mingled and melded, sometimes competed; occasionally, they clashed. But between them they came to dominate south, central, south-east and eastern Asia. More than half the world’s population today lives in areas where Indian ideas of religion and culture are, or once were, dominant, and where Indian gods ruled the imaginations of men and women.

This entire spectrum of early Indian influence has always been there, hiding in plain sight: in the Buddhism of Sri Lanka, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan; in the place names of Burma and Thailand; in the murals and sculptures of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Laos and Cambodia; and in the Hindu temples of Bali.

Yet somehow the Golden Road of monsoon-blown maritime trade routes linking all this into a single cultural unit – a vast Indosphere stretching all the way from the Red Sea to the Pacific – has never been recognised as the link connecting all these different places and ideas to each other; and never been given a name.

If India’s transformative effect on the religions and civilisations around it was so central to world history, why is the extraordinary diffusion of its influence not better and more widely known?

This is surely a lingering legacy of colonialism and more specifically Victorian Indology, which undermined, misrepresented and devalued Indian history, culture, science and knowledge from the period when Thomas Babington Macaulay confidently proclaimed that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”.

If India were acknowledged to already have been a powerful, cosmopolitan and profoundly sophisticated civilisation, then what justification would there be for Victorian Britain’s civilising mission?

How would you set out to bring civilisation to a part of the world that you recognised has been supremely civilised for thousands of years and which indeed was spreading its influence all over Asia long before the coming of Christianity? The irony was that it was Indian ideas that in many ways allowed the west to move eastward and subjugate India.

The numerals invented in India were adopted by the Arabs by the 8th century, thanks to a dynasty of viziers of Baghdad, the Barmakids, who were Sanskrit-literate converts from Buddhism, some of whose members had studied Indian mathematics in Kashmir.

It was the Barmakids who sent missions to India in search of Indian scientific texts, resulting in a mission from Sindh that brought a compilation of the works of Brahmagupta and Aryabhata to Baghdad in 773.

A generation later, all the Sanskrit mathematical texts stored in the House of Wisdom library in Baghdad were brilliantly summarised by the Persian polymath Khwarizmi, whose name is the origin of our word “algorithm” and whose book popularly known as Kitab al-Jabr is the basis of our word “algebra”.

It became the basis for mathematics across the Arab world. But it is the original name of the book that points to its inspiration: The Compendious Book on Calculating by Completion and Balancing, According to Hindu Calculation.

From Baghdad, these ideas spread across the Islamic world. Five hundred years later, in 1202, Leonardo of Pisa, known by his nickname Fibonacci, returned from Algeria to Italy with his father, where he found his compatriots still shackled by the Latin numeral system.

Fibonacci had grown up in a Pisan trading post in Béjaïa, where he had learned fluent Arabic as well as Arab mathematics. On his return, at the age of 32, he wrote the Liber Abaci, the Book of Calculation. As he explained in the introduction, it was in Algeria that “I was introduced to a wonderful kind of teaching that used the nine figures of the Indias.

“With the sign 0, which the Arabs call zephyr (al-sifr), any number whatsoever can be written. Getting to know this pleased me far beyond all else … Therefore I made an effort to compose this book so that in future the Latin race may not be found lacking in mathematical knowledge.”

It was Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci that first popularised in Europe the use of what were later thought of as “Arabic numerals”, so seeding the growth of banking and accounting, initially in Italy, under dynasties such as the Medici and then in the rest of Europe.

These innovations helped propel the commercial and banking revolution that financed the Renaissance and in time, as these ideas spread, the rise of Europe, ultimately making it look east towards the riches of India, the source of all these ideas.

For it was arguably European commercial prowess and initiative just as much as military might that gave Europe the edge over India.

From the mid-18th century, it was a European corporation, the East India Company – run from the City of London by merchants and accountants, with their ledgers and careful accounting – that ran amok and seized and subjugated a fragmented and divided India in what was probably the supreme act of corporate violence in history.

Today, three-quarters of a century after independence, many believe that India’s moment has come again. Its economy has quadrupled in size in a single generation. Its reputation as a centre for mathematics and scientific skills remains intact, as Indian software engineers increasingly staff the new Houses of Wisdom in Silicon Valley.

The only questions are whether it is India, China or the US that will dominate the world by the end of this century, and what sort of India that will be.

For a thousand years, India’s ideas spread along the Golden Road and transformed the world, creating around itself an Indosphere, a cultural zone that spread over political borders by the sheer power of its ideas.

Within this area, Indian culture and civilisation transformed everything they touched.

This poses a question, unthinkable back in 1947 at independence from Britain: could they do so again?

• The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple is published by Bloomsbury (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

The cynical manipulation of ‘dynamic pricing’ for Oasis tickets

1 September 2024

THE SPECTATOR
Alexander Larman

(Photo: Getty)

Given my unequivocal feelings about the Oasis reunion, I was, apparently, one of the few people in Britain who was not attempting to obtain tickets yesterday for one of their stadium gigs next year. As is usually the case these days when a much-hyped act returns for a series of mega-concerts, the wall-to-wall publicity that the concerts had attracted meant that it seemed almost obligatory for the average punter to extract their credit card, gulp, breathe a silent prayer and at least try and secure their place in Manchester, London, Dublin or any of the other venues that the Gallaghers will be gracing next year.

Had they done so, they would have experienced a remarkable day of frustration and cynical manipulation.

Despite around a million tickets being on sale, the major ticket websites – Ticketmaster, Gigs and Tours and See Tickets – all crashed under a level of demand that could easily have been anticipated but the operators seemed unable to cope with, not least because of an onslaught of opportunistic ticket-scalping bots. If those humans who were attempting to buy tickets were not being informed by grim messages that they were number 712,921 or so in an apparently never-ending queue, they then found themselves faced with an error message after patiently waiting for several hours, sending them straight to the virtual waiting room all over again in frustration and disappointment.

This, of course, reflects a wider issue with the industry and ticket sales at the moment. The Oasis gigs are undoubtedly the most hyped since Taylor Swift graced the country with her presence earlier this summer, and while the stadium audiences next year might be swapping friendship bracelets and excited shrieks of pleasure for beery singalongs and the warm rush of Nineties nostalgia, they are nevertheless attracting a similarly enthusiastic and committed fanbase.

It is therefore disheartening to find that tickets were rising in cost on the day thanks to so-called ‘dynamic pricing’. This can be set by the artist and meant that standing tickets, with a face value of £150 – nearly four times the £38 the band’s last appearance cost at Wembley Stadium in 2009 – could shoot up to over £350 on Ticketmaster, in effect punishing Oasis’s most committed fans for their enthusiasm. The alternative, if you’re not fortunate enough to have secured tickets on the first day? Grit your teeth and head to the secondary market, where – at the time of writing – two tickets start at a mere £800 apiece for limited or restricted view seats. One optimist is asking nearly £5,000 for tickets with a clear view of the stage. That’s £5,000 each, of course.

Pictures released of the Gallagher brothers standing together to promote the forthcoming gigs did not show them looking pugnacious and superior, as usual, but instead depicted the pair smiling and looking cheerful. No doubt the main reason for their good cheer is that both men know that they are on course to make a fortune out of the reunion gigs – around £50 million each, according to reports, but this can only rise thanks to the possibility of future concerts, each with their own ‘dynamic pricing’ opportunity. And then there are festivals, a no-doubt lucrative documentary, further homecoming gigs, etc, etc.

Should the Gallaghers keep their relations businesslike – it seems rash to expect anything else – they will make more money out of these gigs than they could ever have imagined possible at the height of their success in the Nineties.

And for the frustrated and disappointed legions of fans, who will today be very much looking back in anger at their inability to buy tickets to see their idols, it will be difficult not to echo the words of one high-profile thwarted purchaser, the MP Zarah Sultana, who tweeted ‘Nationalise Ticketmaster’, after waiting three fruitless hours. Perhaps there is an easier option. Nationalise Oasis instead, link the ticket costs to income and location, and force the Gallaghers to play for the next decade until everyone who wishes to see them has had an opportunity. I can’t say that it would convince me to give them a go, but at least it would give us unconverted types a laugh.

 
Written byAlexander Larman
Alexander Larman is an author and books editor of Spectator World, our US-based edition

Russian forces establish observation point in Syria near Israeli-occupied Golan Heights: monitor

A war monitor reported that Russian forces had established an observation point in Syria near the frontier with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The New Arab Staff
01 September, 2024

The Golan Heights is a territory split between Syrian control and illegal Israeli occupation [JALAA MAREY/AFP via Getty Images-file photo]

Russian forces have established a new observation point in the Syrian-controlled part of the Golan Heights to limit attacks between Israel and Hezbollah-linked groups, according to a war monitor.

Israel illegally occupies the remainder of the Syrian Golan, as well as the Shebaa Farms.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that Russian forces had established an observation point in the western plains area of the town of Koudna, near the frontier with the occupied part of the Golan, to limit attacks between Israel and groups working with Lebanon's Hezbollah.

It brings the number of Russian points near the border with the occupied Golan to 15, according to the war monitor.

Russia, a key ally of President Bashar Al-Assad, began a military intervention in Syria in 2015 in support of the ruling regime.

Iran, Hezbollah, and other groups in the Middle East have exchanged fire with Israel amid its war on the Gaza Strip, which began in October.

The war on Gaza has so far killed at least 40,691 people, according to the Palestinian enclave's health ministry, and has seen South Africa accuse Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice.

Hezbollah and Israel began trading fire on 8 October, the day after the Gaza war began.

The Lebanese group last month fired rockets and drones in retaliation for the late July killing of senior commander Fuad Shukr in an Israeli strike on Beirut's southern suburbs.

Israel began occupying Syria's Golan in 1967 during a Middle East war.

It also illegally occupies the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Agencies contributed to this report.