Early mammal with remarkably precise bite

Researchers investigate teeth of a small carnivorous mammal that are almost 150 million years old

UNIVERSITY OF BONN

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE INVESTIGATED DENTITION OF P. FRUITAENSIS. THE UPPER MOLARS (M2, M3) ARE OFFSET FROM THE LOWER ONES (M2, M3). THIS CAUSES THE CUSPS TO INTERLOCK IN A WAY THAT CREATES... view more 

CREDIT: © THOMAS MARTIN, KAI R. K. JÄGER / UNIVERSITY OF BONN

Paleontologists at the University of Bonn (Germany) have succeeded in reconstructing the chewing motion of an early mammal that lived almost 150 million years ago. This showed that its teeth worked extremely precisely and surprisingly efficiently. Yet it is possible that this very aspect turned out to be a disadvantage in the course of evolution. The study is published in the journal "Scientific Reports".

At just twenty centimeters long, the least weasel is considered the world's smallest carnivore alive today. The mammal that researchers at the University of Bonn have now studied is unlikely to have been any bigger. However, the species to which it belongs has long been extinct: Priacodon fruitaensis (the scientific name) lived almost 150 million years ago, at a time when dinosaurs dominated the animal world and the triumph of mammals was still to come.

In their study, the paleontologists from the Institute for Geosciences at the University of Bonn analyzed parts of the upper and lower jaw bones of a fossil specimen. More precisely: its cheek teeth (molars). Because experts can tell a lot from these, not only about the animal's diet, but also about its position in the family tree. In P. fruitaensis, each molar is barely larger than one millimeter. This means that most of their secrets remain hidden from the unarmed eye.

The researchers from Bonn therefore used a special tomography method to produce high-resolution three-dimensional images of the teeth. They then analyzed these micro-CT images using various tools, including special software that was co-developed at the Bonn-based institute. "Until now, it was unclear exactly how the teeth in the upper and lower jaws fit together," explains Prof. Thomas Martin, who holds the chair of paleontology at the University of Bonn. "We have now been able to answer that question."

How did creatures chew 150 million years ago?

The upper and lower jaws each contain several molars. In the predecessors of mammals, molar 1 of the upper jaw would bite down precisely on molar 1 of the lower jaw when chewing. In more developed mammals, however, the rows of teeth are shifted against each other. Molar 1 at the top therefore hits exactly between molar 1 and molar 2 when biting down, so that it comes into contact with two molars instead of one. But how were things in the early mammal P. fruitaensis?

"We compared both options on the computer," explains Kai Jäger, who wrote his doctoral thesis in Thomas Martin's research group. "This showed that the animal bit down like a modern mammal." The researchers simulated the entire chewing motion for both alternatives. In the more original version, the contact between the upper and lower jaws would have been too small for the animals to crush the food efficiently. This is different with the "more modern" alternative: In this case, the cutting edges of the molars slid past each other when chewing, like the blades of pinking shears that children use today for arts and crafts.

Its dentition therefore must have made it easy for P. fruitaensis to cut the flesh of its prey. However, the animal was probably not a pure carnivore: Its molars have cone-shaped elevations, similar to the peaks of a mountain. "Such cusps are particularly useful for perforating and crushing insect carapaces," says Jäger. "They are therefore also found in today's insectivores." However, the combination of carnivore and insectivore teeth is probably unique in this form.

The cusps are also noticeable in other ways: They are practically the same size in all molars. This made the dentition extremely precise and efficient. However, these advantages came at a price: Small changes in the structure of the cusps would probably have dramatically worsened the chewing performance. "This potentially made it more difficult for the dental apparatus to evolve," Jäger says.

This type of dentition has in fact survived almost unchanged in certain lineages of evolutionary history over a period of 80 million years. At some point, however, its owners became extinct - perhaps because their teeth could not adapt to changing food conditions.

###

Publication: Kai R. K. Jäger, Richard L. Cifelli & Thomas Martin: Molar occlusion and jaw roll in early crown mammals; Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-79159-4

Team finds surprising connection between dinosaurs and mammals

by University of Manitoba

A complete sabre-toothed canine from a gorgonopsian from Zambia. This specimen includes both the crown (top) and root (bottom) of the tooth. | . Credit: Megan Whitney.

When thinking of fierce predators of the past, it's difficult not to imagine dinosaurs, considering theropods are well known for having blade-like teeth with serrated cutting edges used for biting and ripping their prey.

Next, one might imagine another creature—saber-toothed cats—only they roamed the earth hundreds of millions of years later.

But, a team of researchers discovered a surprising connection between the two vastly different prehistoric animals. And yes, the similarity is in their teeth.

In a paper published in Biology Letters, Megan Whitney from Harvard University, Aaron LeBlanc from King's College London, Ashley Reynolds from the University of Toronto, and Kirstin Brink from the University of Manitoba, examined thin slices of fossilized teeth belonging to a gorgonopsian, a large predatory animal that lived roughly 260 million years ago and resembled a cross between a dinosaur and a saber-toothed cat.

The research team discovered that gorgonopsians, which are early ancestors to mammals and not related to dinosaurs, have very similar tooth structure to carnivorous dinosaurs. Indeed, up until now, it was thought that the complex arrangement of tissues that enabled dinosaurs to have such murderous teeth was unique to them. Turns out, other creatures found a way to grow them too, and first. "When you compare a dinosaur tooth to a gorgonopsian tooth, they look pretty similar, like a blade with serrated edges on the front and back," says Brink, an assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences in the Clayton H. Riddell Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources.

The team of researchers combined their expertise in paleohistology (the study of the microstructure of fossilized skeletal tissues) and examined thin sections of fossils from three synapsids—the group of animals the gorgonopsians belong too that are more closely related to mammals than reptiles on the tree of life—from three different time periods to test a theory of the structure of the serrations of their teeth.

A thin section of a partial gorgonopsian canine under polarized light. Serrations are evident on the right side of this specimen. Credit: Megan Whitney

"I was so sure that this somewhat complicated arrangement of tooth tissues in meat-eating dinosaurs was a character unique to dinosaurs that helped them become powerful predators in the Mesozoic period," says Brink.


"The findings in this study show that this type of tooth actually evolved about 20 million years before dinosaurs did. This suggests that this particular tooth structure is very efficient for biting and ripping into meat, and is a great example of convergent evolution—how a character or feature that evolves in very distantly related groups because of a similar function in the environment, not because of shared heritage—in the synapsid lineage and the reptile lineage. This tooth type evolved first in the synapsid lineage and was convergently evolved in dinosaurs much later."

In her previous work, Brink examined the internal microstructure (only visible with a microscope) of these serrations in dinosaurs to try and figure out how they develop, and if the microstructure could give clues to the function of the tooth. She found a unique arrangement of the tissues deep within the teeth of meat-eating dinosaurs, but not in other animals with serrated teeth like sharks, living lizards, plant-eating dinosaurs, saber-tooth cats, or Dimetrodon, which is an even older ancestor of gorgonopsians in the synapsid lineage.

"I concluded in 2015 that this arrangement of tissues was only found in meat-eating dinosaurs, and helped to strengthen the serrations so that they wouldn't get worn down or break while the dinosaur was eating its prey. This could have been one reason why meat-eating dinosaurs were so evolutionarily successful and dominated at the top of the food chain," says Brink.

The discovery surprised everyone. It meant that this type of serrated, cutting tooth evolved first in the prehistoric animals that eventually evolved into mammals, and only later evolved independently in dinosaurs.

"The results of the study were pretty surprising since we thought these microstructures were features found only in dinosaur teeth. In fact, this unique arrangement of tissues that form the serrations evolved first in the ancient ancestors of mammals, which are not related to dinosaurs at all, and much older."


Explore further

Researchers discover surprising connection between prehistoric dinosaurs and mammals in their teeth

More information: M. R. Whitney et al. Convergent dental adaptations in the serrations of hypercarnivorous synapsids and dinosaurs, Biology Letters (2020). 

DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2020.0750

Journal information: Biology Letters

Provided by University of Manitoba

DECEMBER 24, 2020

Quantum philosophy: 

Four ways physics will challenge your reality

IT'S A QUANTUM UNIVERSE SINCE THEY TURNED ON LHC AT CERN

December 25, 2020 by Peter Evans
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Imagine opening the weekend paper and looking through the puzzle pages for the Sudoku. You spend your morning working through this logic puzzle, only to realise by the last few squares there's no consistent way to finish it.

"I must have made a mistake," you think. So you try again, this time starting from the corner you couldn't finish and working back the other way. But the same thing happens again. You're down to the last few squares and find there is no consistent solution.

Working out the basic nature of reality according to quantum mechanics is a little bit like an impossible Sudoku. No matter where we start with quantum theory, we always end up at a conundrum that forces us to rethink the way the world fundamentally works. (This is what makes quantum mechanics so much fun.)

Let me take you on a brief tour, through the eyes of a philosopher, of the world according to quantum mechanics.

1. Spooky action-at-a-distance

As far as we know, the speed of light (around 300 million metres per second) is the universe's ultimate speed limit. Albert Einstein famously scoffed at the prospect of physical systems influencing each other faster than a light signal could travel between them.

Back in the 1940s Einstein called this "spooky action-at-a-distance". When quantum mechanics had earlier appeared to predict such spooky goings-on, he argued the theory must not yet be finished, and some better theory would tell the true story.

We know today it is very unlikely there is any such better theory. And if we think the world is made up of well-defined, independent pieces of "stuff", then our world has to be one where spooky action-at-a-distance between these pieces of stuff is allowed.

2. Loosening our grip on reality

"What if the world isn't made of well-defined, independent pieces of 'stuff'?" I hear you say. "Then can we avoid this spooky action?"

Yes, we can. And many in the quantum physics community think this way, too. But this would be no consolation to Einstein.

Einstein had a long-running debate with his friend Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, about this very question. Bohr argued we should indeed give up the idea of the stuff of the world being well defined, so we can avoid spooky action-at-a-distance. In Bohr's view, the world doesn't have definite properties unless we're looking at it. When we're not looking, Bohr thought, the world as we know it isn't really there.

But Einstein insisted the world has to be made of something whether we look at it or not, otherwise we couldn't talk to each other about the world, and so do science. But Einstein couldn't have both a well-defined, independent world and no spooky action-at-a-distance … or could he?

3. Back to the future

The Bohr-Einstein debate is reasonably familiar fare in the history of quantum mechanics. Less familiar is the foggy corner of this quantum logic puzzle where we can rescue both a well-defined, independent world and no spooky action. But we will need to get weird in other ways.

If doing an experiment to measure a quantum system in the lab could somehow affect what the system was like before the measurement, then Einstein could have his cake and eat it too. This hypothesis is called "retrocausality", because the effects of doing the experiment would have to travel backwards in time.

If you think this is strange, you're not alone. This is not a very common view in the quantum physics community, but it has its supporters. If you are faced with having to accept spooky action-at-a-distance, or no world-as-we-know-it when we don't look, retrocausality doesn't seem like such a weird option after all.

4. No view from Olympus

Imagine Zeus perched atop Mount Olympus, surveying the world. Imagine he were able to see everything that has happened, and will happen, everywhere and for all time. Call this the "God's eye view" of the world. It is natural to think there must be some way the world is, even if it can only be known by an all-seeing God.

Recent research in quantum mechanics suggests a God's eye view of the world is impossible, even in principle. In certain strange quantum scenarios, different scientists can look carefully at the systems in their labs and make thorough recordings of what they see—but they will disagree about what happened when they come to compare notes. And there might well be no absolute fact of the matter about who's correct—not even Zeus could know!

So next time you encounter an impossible Sudoku, rest assured you're in good company. The entire quantum physics community, and perhaps even Zeus himself, knows exactly how you feel.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This story is part of Science X Dialog, where researchers can report findings from their published research articles. Visit this page for information about ScienceX Dialog and how to participate.

Korean artificial sun sets the new world record of 20-sec-long operation at 100 million degrees

by National Research Council of Science & Technology
Credit: National Research Council of Science & Technology

The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR), a superconducting fusion device also known as the Korean artificial sun, set the new world record as it succeeded in maintaining the high temperature plasma for 20 seconds with an ion temperature over 100 million degrees (Celsius).

On November 24 (Tuesday), the KSTAR Research Center at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) announced that in a joint research with the Seoul National University (SNU) and Columbia University of the United States, it succeeded in continuous operation of plasma for 20 seconds with an ion-temperature higher than 100 million degrees, which is one of the core conditions of nuclear fusion in the 2020 KSTAR Plasma Campaign.

It is an achievement to extend the 8 second plasma operation time during the 2019 KSTAR Plasma Campaign by more than 2 times. In its 2018 experiment, the KSTAR reached the plasma ion temperature of 100 million degrees for the first time (retention time: about 1.5 seconds).

To re-create fusion reactions that occur in the sun on Earth, hydrogen isotopes must be placed inside a fusion device like KSTAR to create a plasma state where ions and electrons are separated, and ions must be heated and maintained at high temperatures.

So far, there have been other fusion devices that have briefly managed plasma at temperatures of 100 million degrees or higher. None of them broke the barrier of maintaining the operation for 10 seconds or longer. It is the operational limit of normal-conducting device and it was difficult maintain a stable plasma state in the fusion device at such high temperatures for a long time.

In its 2020 experiment, the KSTAR improved the performance of the Internal Transport Barrier (ITB) mode, one of the next generation plasma operation modes developed last year and succeeded in maintaining the plasma state for a long period of time, overcoming the existing limits of the ultra-high-temperature plasma operation.

Director Si-Woo Yoon of the KSTAR Research Center at the KFE explained, "The technologies required for long operations of 100 million- plasma are the key to the realization of fusion energy, and the KSTAR's success in maintaining the high-temperature plasma for 20 seconds will be an important turning point in the race for securing the technologies for the long high-performance plasma operation, a critical component of a commercial nuclear fusion reactor in the future."

"The success of the KSTAR experiment in the long, high-temperature operation by overcoming some drawbacks of the ITB modes brings us a step closer to the development of technologies for realization of nuclear fusion energy," added Yong-Su Na, professor at the department of Nuclear Engineering, SNU, who has been jointly conducting the research on the KSTAR plasma operation.

Dr. Young-Seok Park of Columbia University who contributed to the creation of the high temperature plasma said: "We are honored to be involved in such an important achievement made in KSTAR. The 100 million-degree ion temperature achieved by enabling efficient core plasma heating for such a long duration demonstrated the unique capability of the superconducting KSTAR device, and will be acknowledged as a compelling basis for high performance, steady state fusion plasmas."

The KSTAR began operating the device last August and plans to continue its plasma generation experiment until December 10, conducting a total of 110 plasma experiments that include high-performance plasma operation and plasma disruption mitigation experiments, which are joint research experiments with domestic and overseas research organizations.

In addition to the success in high temperature plasma operation, the KSTAR Research Center conducts experiments on a variety of topics, including ITER researches, designed to solve complex problems in fusion research during the remainder of the experiment period.

The KSTAR is going to share its key experiment outcomes in 2020 including this success with fusion researchers across the world in the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference which will be held in May.

The final goal of the KSTAR is to succeed in a continuous operation of 300 seconds with an ion temperature higher than 100 million degrees by 2025.

KFE President Suk Jae Yoo stated, "I am so glad to announce the new launch of the KFE as an independent research organization of Korea. The KFE will continue its tradition of under-taking challenging researches to achieve the goal of mankind: the realization of nuclear fusion energy," he continued.

As of November 20, 2020, the KFE, formerly the National Fusion Research Institute, an affiliated organization of the Korea Basic Science Institute, was re-launched as an independent research organization.


Explore further  Superconducting tokamaks are standing tall

Provided by National Research Council of Science & Technology

Japanese spacecraft's gifts: 

Asteroid chips like charcoal

by Mari Yamaguchi

DECEMBER 24, 2020

 

This photo provided Thursday, Dec. 24, 2020, by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), shows soil samples, seen inside the A compartment of the capsule brought back by Hayabusa2, in Sagamihara, near Tokyo. Japanese space officials said Thursday they found more asteroid soil samples collected and brought back from the Hayabusa2 spacecraft, in addition to black sandy granules they found last week, raising their hopes of finding clues to the origins of the solar system. (JAXA via AP)

They resemble small fragments of charcoal, but the soil samples collected from an asteroid and returned to Earth by a Japanese spacecraft were hardly disappointing.


The samples Japanese space officials described Thursday are as big as 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) and rock hard, not breaking when picked up or poured into another container. Smaller black, sandy granules the spacecraft collected and returned separately were described last week.

The Hayabusa2 spacecraft got the two sets of samples last year from two locations on the asteroid Ryugu, more than 300 million kilometers (190 million miles) from Earth. It dropped them from space onto a target in the Australian Outback, and the samples were brought to Japan in early December.

The sandy granules the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency described last week were from the spacecraft's first touchdown in April 2019.

The larger fragments were from the compartment allocated for the second touchdown on Ryugu, said Tomohiro Usui, space materials scientist.

To get the second set of samples in July last year, Hayabusa2 dropped an impactor to blast below the asteroid's surface, collecting material from the crater so it would be unaffected by space radiation and other environmental factors.

This photo provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) shows soil samples, seen inside a container of the re-entry capsule brought back by Hayabusa2, in Sagamihara, near Tokyo, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2020. Officials from Japan's space agency said Tuesday they have found more than the anticipated amount of soil and gases inside a small capsule the country's Hayabusa2 spacecraft brought back from a distant asteroid this month, a sample-return mission they praised as a milestone for planetary research.(JAXA via AP)

This optical microscope photo provided Thursday, Dec. 24, 2020, by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), shows soil samples, seen inside C compartment of the capsule brought back by Hayabusa2, in Sagamihara, near Tokyo. Japanese space officials said Thursday they found more asteroid soil samples collected and brought back from the Hayabusa2 spacecraft, in addition to black sandy granules they found last week, raising their hopes of finding clues to the origins of the solar system. (JAXA via AP)

In this Dec. 8, 2020, file photo, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Hayabusa2 project manager Yuichi Tsuda speaks during a press conference after a capsule containing asteroid soil samples returned to Japan, in Sagamihara, near Tokyo. Officials from Japan's space agency said Tuesday, Dec. 15, they have found more than the anticipated amount of soil and gases inside a small capsule the country's Hayabusa2 spacecraft brought back from a distant asteroid this month, a mission they praised as a milestone for planetary research. (Yu Nakajima/Kyodo News via AP, File)

This photo provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), shows soil samples, seen inside a container of the re-entry capsule brought back by Hayabusa2, in Sagamihara, near Tokyo,Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2020. Officials from Japan's space agency said Tuesday they have found more than the anticipated amount of soil and gases inside a small capsule the country's Hayabusa2 spacecraft brought back from a distant asteroid this month, a sample-return mission they praised as a milestone for planetary research.(JAXA via AP)

Usui said the size differences suggest different hardness of the bedrock on the asteroid. "One possibility is that the place of the second touchdown was a hard bedrock and larger particles broke and entered the compartment."

JAXA is continuing the initial examination of the asteroid samples ahead of fuller studies next year. Scientists hope the samples will provide insight into the origins of the solar system and life on Earth. Following studies in Japan, some of the samples will be shared with NASA and other international space agencies for additional research.

Hayabusa2, meanwhile, is on an 11-year expedition to another small and distant asteroid, 1998KY26, to try to study possible defenses against meteorites that could fly toward Earth.

Explore further Japan's space agency finds ample soil, gas from asteroid

© 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Human-made landscape promotes coexistence of two normally separated Andean warblers

Two Andean warbler species that typically occur at different elevations and hunt by tricking insects to escape can co-occur at the same elevation due to fragmentation of tropical montane forests caused by human agricultural practices

LABORATORY OF BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION AT SEOUL NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE TWO SPECIES AND THEIR HABITATS AT THE STUDY SITE IN ECUADOR (PHOTOS BY J. NOWAKOWSKI). THE HIGHER ELEVATION SPECIES, THE SPECTACLED WHITESTART, CHOOSES FRAGMENTED FORESTS WITH FEW TREES AND... view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY JACEK NOWAKOWSKI, THE COAUTHOR OF THE ORIGINAL PAPER AT WWW.NATURE.COM/ARTICLES/S41598-020-78804-2

In the mountains across the world, different types of vegetation occur at different elevations creating distinct zones with well-defined borders between them. Each vegetation zone provides specific living conditions for animals. Therefore species that are adapted to habitats created in the specific zone occur only at the specific elevations and do not overlap with other species of similar ecology and behavior adapted to other vegetation zones at different elevations. This zonation is believed to be especially true for ecologically similar species that narrowly specialize to use specific resources and therefore compete with each other if they co-occur next to each other in the same habitat.

However, human activities modify the natural zones and create new types of habitats disrupting the clear natural borders between them. This has consequences for the distribution, ecology and behavior of animals that in a natural situation would rarely co-occur. In the recent paper published in Scientific Reports a team of Polish ornithologists illustrates how those anthropogenic modifications of natural vegetation in the Andes create new conditions in which two ecologically specialized species of birds, that typically occur in different elevational zones, can now co-occur next to each other at the same elevation.

The team of Polish ornithologists, following the long-standing traditions of Polish ornithology in South America since 1800s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sztolcman; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Taczanowski; https://academic.oup.com/auk/article/120/3/577/5561874), have undertook field research on ecology of two warblers in the tropical montane forests of eastern slopes of the Ecuadorian Andes. Piotr Jablonski (Museum and Institute of Zoology PAS & Seoul National University), Jacek Nowakowski (University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn), Marta Borowiec and Tadeusz Stawarczyk (University of Wroclaw) have focused on two very special warblers: the Slate-throated Whitestart, which typically occurs in the Andean montane forests [example of habitat is here and here, and its close relative, the Spectacled Whitestart, which typically occurs at higher elevation in cloud forests [example of habitat is here]. Both species forage in almost identical way: by foraging with outspread wings and tail, and by presenting spots of contrasting plumage during fast pirouetting movements these birds are able to "overstimulate" and to trigger escapes in their prey, which then is pursued and captured in the air. Therefore, this type of foraging is called "flush-pursue" foraging and it has been extensively studied by Piotr Jablonski. Examples of how "flush-pursuers" forage can be seen here and here.

During several visits to the Yanayacu Biological Station & Center for Creative Studies (Ecuador) , the researchers mapped the distribution of territories of the two species near the station in the landscape that contains patches of natural or secondary forests intermixed with pastures and open bushy areas. [aerial view is here ]. "The field work was hard but exciting for us because we are field ornithologists, who value real field work in various exotic locations" mentions Jacek Nowakowski. "We used classical "old-fashioned" typical ornithological methods of field observations based on ornithological skills and perseverance" comments Tadeusz Stawarczyk, who studied Slate-throated Whitestarts in Costa Rica in the past. "It took us three visits until we collected sufficient material" adds Marta Borowiec, who has also studied Painted Whitestarts in Arizona in the past.

The study found that both species occurred next to each other, but occupied different vegetation types. The Spectacled Whitestart was observed in a sunny man-made mosaic of pastures, clearings, and shrubs with small proportion of high trees, all of which created a landscape similar to the high elevation Andean vegetation where the species normally occurs. The Slate-throated Whitestart, was mostly observed in shady and dense forests with high proportion of tall trees. The two species differed relatively little in their foraging technique, but because they foraged in different habitats and locations they seem to co-occur without any direct competitive aggressive interactions. "In the future, we plan to evaluate the idea that the spatial separation of breeding territories between the two species at the study site may be created during territory establishment, when it is possible that the two species respond aggressively to each other's songs" says Jacek Nowakowski.

This work represents the first quantitative field study that incorporates both, the detailed foraging information and the habitat descriptions in order to evaluate the mechanisms that allows two "flush-pursue" species, that are normally separated in space along the elevation, to co-occur at the same elevation in the Andean landscape modified by man. "Our results illustrate how modern science can benefit from the "good old style" expedition-based intense field work" says Piotr Jablonski.

###

Links:

Original scientific article is at: http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78804-2

For more information contact:

Dr Jacek Nowakowski: jacek.nowakowski@uwm.edu.pl;

Dr Marta Borowiec: marta.borowiec@uwr.edu.pl;

Prof. Tadeusz Stawarczyk, tadeusz.stawarczyk@uwr.edu.pl

FIGURE

The two species and their habitats at the study site in Ecuador (Photos by J. Nowakowski)

RUDN University scientist showed global warming effect on greenhouse gas emissions in paddy soils

RUDN UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: A SOIL SCIENTIST FROM RUDN UNIVERSITY STUDIED THE DECOMPOSITION OF ORGANIC MATTER IN RICE PADDIES--THE SOURCES OF CO2 AND METHANE EMISSIONS. BOTH GASES ADD TO THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND AFFECT... view more 

CREDIT: RUDN UNIVERSITY

A soil scientist from RUDN University studied the decomposition of organic matter in rice paddies--the sources of CO2 and methane emissions. Both gases add to the greenhouse effect and affect climate warming in subtropical regions. The emissions increase when the roots of plants influence microbial communities in the soil. This influence, in turn, depends on temperature changes. Therefore, climate warming can lead to more greenhouse gas emissions. The results of the study were published in the Applied Soil Ecologyclimate change. The intensity of this process depends on the temperature of the environment and soil microorganisms. In the soils of rice paddies, methane is produced by single-cell organisms called archaea. However, to make methane, they require intermediary substances that come from plant roots. This is how the so-called priming effect occurs: the life of microorganisms is supported by organic substances released by plants through their roots. It is this effect that determines the number and activity of microorganisms in the soil. A soil scientist from RUDN University was the first to discover a correlation between the priming effect and greenhouse gas emissions and to describe the dynamics of these processes in view of global warming.

The team took soil samples from rice paddies located in the Hunan province in South-Eastern China. The samples were sifted to remove soil fauna and bits of plants. After that, water was added to them to model the conditions of a submerged rice paddy. After that, the samples were kept in plastic containers in a dark room for 75 days. To imitate different seasons, the scientists maintained different temperatures in the containers: 5 °C (winter), 15 °C (spring), 25 °C (autumn), and 35 °C (summer). The team wanted to measure how methane and CO2 emissions would vary under the influence of the priming effect in different temperature regimes. Sodium acetate, the simplest form of organic carbon produced by plant roots, was added to the soil to support the archaea.

The team measured the levels of greenhouse gas emissions every 2 to 5 days. On the 75th day, methane emissions from primed soils turned out to have increased 153 times compared to the samples without sodium acetate. The scientists also learned that the priming effect depended on the temperature. The soils demonstrated the highest sensitivity at 15 °C: in these samples, a 10? increase in temperature caused methane emission volumes to grow 25 times. As for CO2 emissions, they directly correlated with temperature levels. According to the team, this is because microorganisms become more active in a warm environment.

"The priming effect determined the correlation between the temperature and the process of organic matter decomposition in the soil. At 5-15 °C, temperature fluctuations had a huge effect on methane emissions: they increased almost 25 times. One could conclude that in warm winters methane emissions from the soil could be the main reason for the greenhouse effect. The results of other studies that do not take the priming effect into account should be interpreted with caution," said Yakov Kuzyakov, a Ph.D. in Biology, and the Head of the Center for Mathematical Modeling and Design of Sustainable Ecosystems at the Agrarian and Technological Institute, RUDN University.

###

International research team calls for 'glocal' approach to help mitigate flooding damage

INSTITUTE OF ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

 RELEASE 24-DEC-2020

Research News

 

IMAGE: BY COUPLING A LARGE-SCALE HYDROLOGICAL MODEL WITH A LOCAL-SCALE, HIGH-RESOLUTION HYDRAULIC MODEL AND URBAN FLOOD MODEL WHILE INTEGRATING MULTIPLE SOURCES OF GROUND AND SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING DATA, A "GLOCAL " (GLOBAL... view more 

CREDIT: ADVANCES IN ATMOPHERIC SCIENCES

Large-scale global forecasting and on-the-ground observations need to meld into one system to better predict and prevent wide-spread flooding disasters, according to an international research team who published a short view in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on Dec. 23.

"A 'glocal' -- global to local -- hydrometeorological solution for floods is considered to be critical for better preparedness, mitigation, and management of different types of significant precipitation-caused flooding, which happen extensively almost every year and in many countries, such as China, India and the United States," said paper author Huan Wu, professor and deputy director in the Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Climate Change and Natural Disaster Studies and School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University.

Such a solution, dubbed GHS-F by the researchers, is necessary for both scientific research and operational logistics, according to Wu. A GHS-F could combine wide-spread weather predictions with the deep understanding of how forecasted rain could affect river basins to produce highly detailed and consistent rain-flood information.

Wu pointed to the complex relationship between rain and floods, making the argument that if the meteorological and hydrological communities shared more observations, techniques, measurements and modeled data, as well as lessons learned, some flooding damage might be avoided.

The researchers specifically examined the flood events from May 20 to July 18 of 2020 in central-eastern and southern China. In those two months, the Yangtze River -- the longest river in Asia at a length of almost 4,000 miles -- had 49% more rain than the average amounts for the same time period over the last 60 years. The seven major rain events of this period affected almost 40 million people in 27 provinces, with 141 people reported dead or missing, according to the researchers.

"An encompassing view of flood occurrences, evolution, extent dynamics, and spatial distribution of areas at high risk from flooding over a global or national scale with local detail is highly desirable and, yet, missing for international and national agencies with a mandate in flood response and management," Wu said.

A GHS-F was first suggested about 10 years ago, Wu said, but the unprecedented computing capability and timely data availability, as well as model and data interoperability of the current era mean such a solution is now more practical.

The researchers plan to demonstrate feasibility in a GHS-F by assessing water level observations from ground and remote-sensing instruments in real time, with the goal of increasing the confidence of emergency management decision makers in using this tool for information and risk estimation.

###

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China, by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and, in part, by the Program for Guangdong Introducing Innovative and Entrepreneurial Teams and the project of the Chinese Ministry of Emergency Management on "Catastrophe Evaluation Modeling Study."

Wu is also affiliated with the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Laboratory in China and the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center at the University of Maryland in the United States. Xiaomeng Li, Zhijun Huang, Weitian Chen and Ying Hu, all with the Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Climate Change and Natural Disaster Studies and School of Atmospheric Sciences at Sun Yat-sen University in China; Guy J.-P. Schumann, with the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and the DFO Global Flood Observatory at the University of Colorado Boulder in the United States; Lorenzo Alfieri, with the CIMA Research Foundation in Italy; Yun Chen and Hui Xu, both with the National Meteorological Center in China; Zhifang Wu, with the Guangdong Meteorological Center; Hong Lu with the GuangXi Climate Center; Yamin Hu, with the Guangdong Climate Center; and Qiang Zhu, with the China Three Gorges Corporation. Chen is also affiliated with the Southern Maine Science and Engineering Laboratory.

What did Henry Wallace stand for?

Henry Wallace was attacked and then dismissed because he proposed “a century of the common man and woman.” Almost eighty years of that century have passed since his dismissal, and his fight for the future is largely forgotten.

An excerpt from The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry Wallace's Anti-Fascist, Anti-Racist Politics by John Nichols,


In the summer of 1948, when his own fight against American fascism had been lost but he still refused to surrender the radical hope of a future framed by justice and peace, Henry Wallace would ask Pete Seeger to sing a favorite song. The words and music had been submitted by a young college instructor named Dick Blakeslee to the “People’s Songs” project that Seeger, Alan Lomax, Lee Hays and a handful of others launched after World War II to champion a revival of old folk music and new songs of work, struggle and idealism. Blakeslee’s lyrics sampled from Bible verses and ranged across American history. Yet his song closed in the moment, or, rather, in the moment that Wallace had hoped to create:


I was with Franklin Roosevelt’s side on the night before he died. He said, “One world must come out of World War Two, Yankee, Russian, white or tan,” he said, “a man is still a man. We’re all on one road, and we’re only passing through.”

As they traveled the backroads of North Carolina and the other segregated states where Wallace challenged racial hatred, Seeger would sing the words “a man is still a man.” Hundreds of miles to the north, a Jewish teenager from Montreal learned those words from a socialist summer-camp counselor. They inspired an interest in folk music that proved to be transforma- tive for Leonard Cohen. Years later, Cohen would add a slight variation to “Passing Through” as he sang the song from the concert stages of Europe and the Americas. After the line “One world must come out of World War Two” he would whisper “… ah, the fool.” Those who know something of Cohen’s wry romanticism, and the political penchants of the man who chal- lenged his adopted United States (“the cradle of the best and of the worst”) with the slyest protest song of his time (“Democracy Is Coming to the USA”), will recognize that this was no insult. Rather, it was an invitation to reconsider casual notions of wisdom and folly.

Wallace and Seeger barnstormed across the segregated South for a doomed third-party campaign for the presidency, that of a New Party, which came to be known as Progressive. They were demanding that the United States make real the promise of World War II as a liberation struggle meant to defeat fascism abroad and at home. They knew they were being portrayed as nostalgic New Dealers who refused to give up on the hope that died with Franklin Roosevelt; as dupes of the Soviet Union in a nascent Cold War; as naïve idealists. Yet they persevered, in the face of the physical violence of the Jim Crow South and the ideological violence of a dawning Red Scare. This was not just their own political project; it was the mission that FDR had outlined in the last months of his life.

“We cannot be content,” explained Roosevelt in the waning days of World War II, “no matter how high [the] general stand- ard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.” Recognizing that “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independ- ence,” the president warned, “necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” And he proposed to address the threat of future fascisms with “a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all— regardless of station, race, or creed.”

The Democratic Party that in 1940 nominated Roosevelt and Wallace would, as the decade wore on, abandon FDR’s certainty that “an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order” was “the minimum requirement of a more permanently safe order of things.” But despite that surrender, Wallace refused to abandon the New Deal and the promise of Wendell Willkie’s manifesto One World and FDR’s Four Freedoms and Second Bill of Rights. He could not accept that an unjust order built upon the crumbling foundations of racism, monopoly and militarism would need to be maintained for decades, and then generations, because his own Democratic Party had lost its nerve—and its faith.

Wallace, a brilliant writer and thinker and an accomplished editor, cabinet member, vice president, presidential candidate and businessman, never suggested it would be easy to end segregation and sexism, address poverty and inequality, upend the military-industrial complex and avert nuclear war. Rather, with the support of Albert Einstein, W.E.B. Du Bois, a young Betty Friedan and a younger Noam Chomsky, he argued that this program was an urgent necessity that could not be cashiered as political concession or electoral compromise. His supporters circulated posters with the picture of an African-American youth and the message: “A black child born on the same day in the same city as a white child is destined to die 10 years earlier. … We are fighting for those 10 extra years.”

Wallace embraced a “new liberalism,” asserting: “A liberal is a person who in all his actions is continuously asking, ‘What is best for all the people—not merely what is best for me personally?’ Abraham Lincoln was a liberal when he said he was both for the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict he was for the man before the dollar. Christ was the greatest liberal of all when he put life before things.” He identified as a patriotic American who believed “in using in a nonviolent, tolerant and democratic way the forces of education, publicity, politics, economics, business, law and religion to direct the ever-changing and increasing power of science into channels which will bring peace and the maximum of well-being both spiritual and eco- nomic to the greatest number of human beings.”

These were not uncommon notions at a time when political leaders, having survived the Great Depression and thwarted Adolf Hitler, imagined a new world order of peace and prosperity, freedom and equality. Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee, a young Michael Foot, a younger Tony Benn and the British Labour Party preached another version of this social gospel as they set out to win the peace in 1945 with a “Let Us Face the Future!” campaign on behalf of a national health care system, the nationalization of basic industries and a redistribution of wealth from Downton Abbey elites to the toiling masses. Tage Fritjof Erlander, Einar Henry Gerhardsen and the Scandinavian social democrats echoed that message as they forged the model of the modern social welfare state. Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur joined their voices to the chorus as they saw off British colonialism and announced that “at the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

In America, however, Wallace was deemed dangerous by the Southern power brokers, the patronage bosses, the corporatists and the monopolists who were quite happy to bury the New Deal with FDR. The men who schemed to divert the postwar march of democracy disdained Henry Wallace. And he disdained them. Their corruptions, their calculations, he warned, were the stuff of “American Fascism.”

From the mid-1940s onward, Wallace was prepared to name the enemies of human progress. He shared Paul Robeson’s view that the danger for the United States in the postwar era lies “in the resurgent imperialist and profascist forces in our own country.” As the vice president of the United States, he did not hesitate to make the appropriate, yet too rarely spoken, connection between Hitler’s preachments about racial “purity” and the language of Southern segregationists who also spoke of a “master race.”

For Wallace, a breaking point came in the summer of 1943, after racial violence flared in Detroit, leaving thirty-four dead (including seventeen African Americans at the hands of the police). Wallace traveled to the city and addressed a mass meeting of labor and civic organizations. “We cannot fight to crush Nazi brutality abroad and condone race riots at home,” he told the crowd. “Those who fan the fires of racial clashes for the purpose of making political capital here at home are taking the first step toward Nazism.” Wallace warned: “There are powerful groups who hope to take advantage of the President’s concentration on the war effort to destroy everything he has accomplished on the domestic front over the last 10 years. Some people call these powerful groups ‘isolationists,’ others call them ‘reactionaries’ and still others, seeing them following in European footsteps, call them ‘American Fascists.'"

Those were jarring words from the vice president of the United States, but Henry Wallace chose them carefully. Starting when he was Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture, Wallace studied foreign languages so that he could speak directly with the leaders and planners of the fight against Hitler and his Axis. He traveled widely and consulted often with those who had resisted the rise of fascism in Europe and who were resisting its pull in Latin America and Asia. He made a study of the threat, and he intended to speak about it in an American context. He proposed a broad definition of this charged term that could apply to the racists, warmongers and monopolists who manipulated media and politics to maintain their grip on America.

Speaking to that 1943 mass meeting in one of the nation’s great industrial centers, Wallace warned that “the people of America know that the second step toward fascism is the destruction of labor unions. There are midget Hitlers here who continually attack labor. There are other demagogues blind to the errors of every other group who shout, ‘We love labor, but…’ Both the midget Hitlers and the demagogues are enemies of America. Both would destroy labor unions if they could. Labor should be fully aware of its friends and of its enemies.”

Wallace ripped into industrialists. “We know that imperi- alistic freebooters using the United States as a base can make another war inevitable,” he warned. “Too many corporations have made money by holding inventions out of use, by holding up prices and by cutting down production.”

Could the schemes of the midget Hitlers, the imperialist freebooters, the American fascists be stopped? “Shouldering our responsibilities for enlightenment, abundant production and world cooperation, we can begin now our apprenticeship to world peace,” Wallace said. “There will be heart-breaking delays—there will be prejudices creeping in and the faint-hearted will spread their whispers of doubt. But … nothing will prevail against the common man’s peace in a common man’s world as he fights both for free enterprise and full employment.

“The world,” pledged Henry Wallace, “is one family with one future—a future which will bind our brotherhood with heart and mind and not with chains!”

Segregationists, the captains of industry and the big-city bosses of the Democratic Party set out to destroy Wallace, and for the most part they succeeded. They denied him the vice-presidential nomination at the 1944 Democratic National Convention and, by extension, the prospect of the presidency, for it was well understood that, were a Roosevelt-Wallace ticket to be re-elected in 1944, an ailing Roosevelt would in all likelihood be replaced by Wallace. They drove Wallace from the power- ful cabinet position that FDR had chosen for him, secretary of commerce, in the Truman administration. In the late 1940s, they elbowed the former vice president to the margins of American politics and then shoved him into the shadows. Eventually, they reimagined our history and our politics so aggressively, and so completely, that Wallace’s warnings were laughed off as a sort of political madness while generation after generation of centrist Democrats neglected fundamental economic and social challenges. Ultimately, FDR’s New Deal coalition collapsed and a yawning space was opened for the sort of “American fascist… who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings.” With the arrival of Donald Trump on the political scene—to the accompaniment of headlines like the CBC’s that asked: "Flirting With Fascism: America’s New Path?"—the full consequences of that failure reveal itself.

Wallace could be prophetic. He raised the prospect of a totalitarianism, of a soft fascism, lurking beneath the facade of democracy in the United States. What he suggested was unimaginable for many in his time, as it is for many in this time. Yet as the U.S. slides further down democracy indexes, even those compiled by corporate-friendly groups like The Economist Intelligence Unit, there must be a recognition that established norms are being diminished, that standards are being disregarded. Wallace urged us to be on the alert for moments such as this. More importantly, he outlined ideals and agendas for avoiding them.

There were those in his time who worshiped Wallace as a hero, and those today who do the same. But Wallace would have been the first to tell you about his flaws. He was constantly reassessing his stances, based on new information, and he was quite capable of acknowledging when he had been wrong. His mistakes are a part of his story. Indeed, they help us to make sense of why an exceptionally popular and extraordinarily talented American leader came so close to the presidency, only to be quickly and thoroughly marginalized.

Any political assessment of Wallace must look at the whole man. Even his sharpest critics acknowledged that Wallace was known for “modesty, human decency, competence, energy, and receptivity to new ideas,” as essayist Dwight Macdonald said. Wallace was confident that it was possible to reason to a better world. FDR described his vice president as “Old Man Common Sense,” but James Farley, the Democratic National Committee chairman, saw Wallace as “a wild-eyed fellow” who might scare away party backers in the South with his talk of eliminating the poll taxes and “white primaries” that locked in segregationist power. Certainly there was nothing of the traditional backslapping campaigner in Wallace. He arrived on the national scene with few political skills, and turned too frequently for counsel to others who lacked those skills. “I love him as much as you do,” novelist Dashiell Hammett confided to playwright Lillian Hellman, “but you simply cannot make a politician out of him.”

Yet Franklin Roosevelt did make a politician out of Henry Wallace, at a moment in 1940 when the 32nd president of the United States was under assault by conservatives in both parties. By choosing Wallace as his running mate, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin suggests, FDR elevated a leader who was “as strong or stronger than he was on those liberal issues” that mattered most then. Goodwin has argued that FDR promoted Wallace from his cabinet to the vice presidency not to be a party man but to be “a weapon against the conservatives.”

Wallace was against the conservatives, wherever he found them, and at every stage of his life. A born-and-bred “Party of Lincoln” Republican who became a Teddy Roosevelt Bull Moose Progressive in 1912, he then returned to the Republican fold and remained there until he embraced Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette’s independent Progressive campaign of 1924. Wallace rejoined the Republicans and worked to steer the party to the left, in tandem with his influential father, who served as secretary of agriculture in the Harding and Coolidge administrations. As Herbert Hoover’s Republican presidency imploded in 1932, Wallace signed on with FDR and became the most ardent New Deal Democrat. After Roosevelt’s death and his expulsion from the inner circles of power and the Democratic Party, Wallace launched his New Party project, which became the Progressive Party, to mobilize the left for the 1948 election. Eventually, Wallace voted for Dwight Eisenhower because of the Republican president’s recognition that domestic programs would be cheated to feed the Pentagon, and because the old soldier saw the threat posed by the military-industrial complex. Toward the end of his life, Wallace displayed considerable enthusiasm for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. But before he died in 1965, Wallace was expressing dread over LBJ’s lurch toward war in Southeast Asia.

There were plenty of liberal Democrats who loved Wallace’s passions and policies but distanced themselves from his campaigning because they feared it was simply too bold for the times. Wallace brought some failures upon himself. He could be strategically inept. He erred in his assessments of particular people and particular policies, at home and abroad. He was a deeply religious man who explored the spiritual traditions of his own Christian faith and other traditions with an enthusiasm that sparked ridicule and concern. He was, as wise historians always say with a poignant pause, a complex man. With the exceptions of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan and a handful of others, he was as fascinating a figure as the ferment surrounding the American presidency has yet produced. The story of how the editor of an Iowa agricultural journal, Wallace’s Farmer, became the most controversial vice president in the twentieth century has inspired fine biographies. In American Dreamer, former Iowa Senator John Culver and journalist John Hyde ably explain how the son of Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of Agriculture came to define New Deal liberalism and mounted a doomed 1948 challenge to Truman as the nominee of a party that welcomed radicals, socialists and communists. Filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick collaborated on The Untold History of the United States, a 2012 book and television series; in it, they advanced the argument that, had Wallace remained on Roosevelt’s ticket and succeeded FDR in 1945, “there would not have been this Cold War. There would have been the continuation of the Roosevelt- Stalin working out of things. Vietnam wouldn’t have happened.” The Stone-Kuznick project was hailed by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and journalist Glenn Greenwald, savaged by neoconservatives and dismissed by Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz as “a skewed political document.” In truth, Wallace remains so controversial that every examination of the man inspires excitement and enthusiasm, objection and acrimony.

The debate about Wallace and a presidency that might have been has often distracted us from an understanding of what Wallace’s fights in the mid-1940s were about, and how they defined the Democratic Party. It is the purpose of this book to renew that understanding. The abandonment of progressive populism by the Democrats, along with the redistributionist policies that FDR developed and popularized, did much to destroy the New Deal coalition. Ronald Reagan would exploit it in the 1980s, winning landslide victories by drawing so-called “Reagan Democrats” to the extreme right. This opened a void in American politics that would be filled first by the self-serving politics of corporate “centrists” in both parties and then, as neoliberalism failed to answer the needs of the great mass of people, by the right-wing populism of Donald Trump. There are many wise observers who believe that the Democratic Party cannot be reformed. But a reflection on Wallace raises a question in this moment of political, economic and social ferment, of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and resurgent democratic socialism and Elizabeth Warren’s promise of “big, bold structural change”: Might today’s Democratic Party take up where FDR and his vice president left off, and become an alternative to the overt and covert American fascism Wallace warned us about?

Answering this in the affirmative is the mission of an insurgency within the Democratic Party that has grown from Sanders’s 2016 presidential bid and the efforts of a new generation of activists who have often operated outside the political arena but now seek to transform debates about domestic and foreign policy This makes Wallace’s struggle more than an isolated story from an all-but-forgotten past.

Trump’s election created a sense of urgency. But Democrats must know something about how it all fell apart in order to see how it all might be put together again. It is easy to be drawn to the 1948 campaign, as it provided a rare glimpse of what multiparty competition might look like in a country dominated by the two “old parties” that so frustrated Wallace and his contemporaries, and that still frustrate the majority of Americans who tell pollsters they long for different and better political options. The 1948 race offered more plot twists than all but a handful of campaigns in American history, along with a dramatic conclusion that produced the greatest wrong headline of all time: “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Truman was, of course, not defeated, and his victory defined the Democratic Party going forward.

There have been significant examinations of the 1948 campaign in general and of Wallace’s crusade in particular. Curtis D. MacDougall’s deeply reported 1965 text, Gideon’s Army, tells an essential story, as does Thomas Devine’s thoughtful 2013 book, Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism. For those on the old left who remember it, and for a rising generation of young leftists, the 1948 campaign has become the electoral equivalent of the Spanish Civil War, where a Gideon’s Army of campaigners armed with leaflets and placards takes the place of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. For guardians of the status quo, the 1948 campaign is something else altogether: a blunt instrument to pull out whenever they feel it necessary to warn against what Wallace described as a “keep the door open” popular-front politics that makes common cause with socialists, communists, social justice crusaders and radical reformers. The contention is less intense now than it was in the days when Democrats shuddered at the mention of the term “Wallace-ite” and its successor: “McGovernism.” History will circle back to the 1948 campaign and it will continue to evoke radically different interpretations of what was, and what might have been. More books will be written on Wallace’s presidential bid in general, and its courageous challenge to racism in particular.

John Nichols
19 May 2020

VERSO BLOG

Reviews

“More than a history book—this is an examination of what progressives must do to retake our democracy. Nichols points the way toward how we can build a party based on peace, liberty, and justice for all.”

– Representative Ilhan Omar

“Every progressive must read this book. John Nichols reminds us that Henry Wallace was the true heir to Roosevelt’s New Deal. He stood up against militarism, championed health care as a right, and fought for racial justice. When the party bosses denied Wallace a place on the Democratic Party’s 1944 ticket, they chose caution over a bold vision for ‘winning the peace’ with an Economic Bill of Rights and the Four Freedoms. As Nichols reveals, that set a pattern for compromise that sold the party and the nation short. Now, seventy-five years later, as progressives again fight for the soul of the Democratic Party, Nichols gives us the history and vision for a new progressive era.”

– Representative Ro Khanna

“Henry Wallace is a political figure—one of the giants of the mid-twentieth century—who has kind of been pushed out of the national political discussion … Nichols [tells us] that one of the reasons Wallace was not renominated in 1944 was because of his opposition to racism. The segregationists didn’t want him around.”

– Senator Bernie Sanders

“Nichols is a remarkable thinker and writer. He recognizes that fights that were not won in the past by advocates of economic and racial justice and peace can now be won—if we are determined enough, and hopeful enough, to carry the struggle forward.”

– Reverend Jesse Jackson

“Nichols is so good at exploring the roots of U.S. radical politics, including our long socialist history. He puts the fights we’re in now into perspective—and gives us inspiration to carry on.”

– Maria Svart, National Director of Democratic Socialists Of America

“Henry Wallace thought we could avoid the Cold War internationally and work on addressing racism at home. He was ahead of his time, and he was punished for that. Maybe, now, we can recognize he was right about a lot of things.”

– Noam Chomsky

IT WAS IN THE AIRE

Fanfare For the Common Man

by Aaron Copland.

(A COMMUNIST PARTY USA MEMBER) This fanfare was written on request from Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, in response to the US entry into the Second World War.

During the First World War, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra had asked British composers for a fanfare to begin each orchestral concert. It had been so successful that he thought to repeat the procedure in World War II with American composers.

Goossens suggested titles like Fanfare for Soldiers, but Copland gave it the much better title Fanfare for the Common Man.

The piece was premiered 12 March 1943 at income tax time, as a homage to the common man.