It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, June 24, 2022
UK
RMT's Mick Lynch Praised By Hugh Laurie For 'Cleaning Up' During His Media Rounds
The Union boss delivered some killer lines on TV while defending this week's strike action.
By Kate Nicholson 22/06/2022 RMT general secretary Mick Lynch has won over praise for his no-nonsense approach during interviews STEFAN ROUSSEAU - PA IMAGES VIA GETTY IMAGES
Mick Lynch has been praised by none other than celebrated actor Hugh Laurie for his straight-talking attitude in broadcast interviews this week.
The general secretary for RMT – the main union leading the rail strikes – has been thrust into the spotlight in recent days to explain why 40,000 workers are refusing to operate train services over pay, working conditions and job losses.
And Lynch has not disappointed viewers. Laurie tweeted last night: “I don’t know enough about the rail dispute. I only observe that RMT’s Mick Lynch cleaned up every single media picador who tried their luck today.”
Here are a few snippets which Laurie may have been referring to, starting with Lynch’s cutting response of questions from Good Morning Britain’s Richard Madeley.
The host asked Lynch if he was a “Marxist” – as his critics have accused him of being – to which the RMT boss laughed and said: “Richard, you do come up with the most remarkable twaddle sometimes.”
Madeley replied by saying this was not his assessment of the situation, but he was “merely quoting” Lynch’s critics.
He also clashed with Labour’s shadow cabinet office minister Baroness Jenny Chapman on BBC Politics Live over her background.
She claimed Lynch was denying that she came from a working class background as they clashed on live TV.
“I don’t even know who you are,” Lynch replied. “I didn’t tell you you weren’t working class. I don’t even know your name!
Lynch used a similarly direct tactic in conversation with Sky News’ Kay Burley, where he asked her: “Do you not know how a picket line works?”
As the presenter continued to ask what the strikers’ picketing involves, he said: “You can see what picketing involves, I can’t believe this line of questioning. Picketing is standing outside the work place to try to encourage people who want to go to work not to go to work.”
When Burley attempted to draw comparisons with the miners’ strike from the 1980s, Lynch claimed she seems “to have gone off into the world of surreal”.
“Your questions are verging into nonsense,” Lynch said.
Philp was explaining why the government appeared reluctant to get directly involved in the dispute between striking workers and their employers, as the RMT boss called him out again and again over the minister’s version of events.
Another Tory MP, Jonathan Gullis, accused Lynch of “undermining the rail network” by pushing back against modern technology, impacting the UK’s climate crisis and raising prices of travelling on trains. The backbencher also called on him to apologise to everyone affected by the strikes.
Lynch replied: ”I think Jonathan should apologise for talking nonsense. None of that is true.”
He also claimed Gullis had just “learnt it off a script” from the Conservative head office.
12 of the best Mick Lynch memes as RMT General Secretary becomes viral star
We all know that rail strikes aren't exactly the sexiest of subject matters but somehow, someway the RMT's general secretary Mick Lynch has managed to make this summer's biggest strike the talk of the town.
It's fair to say that many of us had probably never heard of Lynch until last week but the calm, astute and resolute 60-year-old has quickly become a minor celebrity thanks to his ruthless interviewing style.
While the strike has been happening, Lynch has been making the media rounds to make the case for the RMT and has been leaving no prisoners in his wake, when presenters and Tory MPs have tried to trip him up.
The likes of Piers Morgan, Kay Burley, Richard Madeley and Robert Jenrick to name but a few have all been left licking the wounds after trying and failing to grill Lynch.
Thanks to this Lynch has become a working man's hero of sorts and the affection for the man has translated into some pretty hilarious memes. Here are some of our favourites.
If you thought this was good then wait until you learn that Lynch is appearing on Question Time on Thursday night.
UK
Summer of discontent as teachers, nurses and NHS workers could join rail workers on strike
Rail workers begin three days of staggered strike action today (June 21)
The National Education Union said unless teachers received a pay offer closer to inflation it would plan to ballot its 450,000 members (Image: PA)
As Britain braces itself for the biggest rail strike in more than 30 years, the signs are pointing towards a summer of discontent with the prospect of teachers, nurses and NHS workers following in their footsteps. Union bosses have said those who work in schools and the health service could be the next to stage walkouts.
Unless teachers receive a pay offer that gets closer to matching the soaring inflation rate, the National Education Union has said it plans to ballot its 450,000 members. The NASUWT, which has around 300,000 members, has also warned it is considering balloting members over strike action if a significant pay rise is not offered.
And Unison chief Christina McAnea said the Government had a simple choice; to make a “sensible pay award... or risk a potential dispute” in hospitals. Unison represents workers across the NHS, including science, therapy and technical staff.
It has been reported that nurses could strike too. Teachers and nurses have been offered pay rises of three per cent.
Meanwhile, the Bank of England has said it expects inflation to hit 11 per cent this year. The Labour party has accused the Government of failing to do its job as ministers again refused to intervene in a bid to halt the rail strikes due to begin today (Tuesday June 21).
But Transport Secretary Grant Shapps dismissed the prospect of negotiations and branded the rail strike a “stunt”. Thousands of public sector workers attended a rally in Parliament Square on Saturday to call for more support to cope with the cost of living crisis.
West Midlands Railway is one of 13 operators affected by striking staff this week
(Image: Birmingham Live/Darren Quinton)
Shadow Levelling Up Secretary Lisa Nandy called on ministers to “listen seriously” to workers’ concerns. She said: “It’s not about whether workers go on strike, it’s about the fact we have a Government that’s currently on strike and not doing its job. This is a Government that in 2019 came to power on a promise to level up and instead what they’ve presided over is absolute chaos.
"Chaos at the ports, chaos on the railways, chaos at airports, chaos everywhere you go, and that is because this is a government that is not doing its job.”
From Tuesday, rail services across the country and on the London Underground will grind to a halt amid the biggest walkout in the industry for more than 30 years in a row over pay, jobs and conditions. Strikes at Network Rail and 13 train operators will go ahead today, Thursday and Saturday, and on the London Underground on just Tuesday.
The National Education Union said unless teachers received a pay offer closer to inflation it would plan to ballot its 450,000 members
(Image: PA)
The National Education Union has said unless teachers receive a pay offer closer to inflation, it would plan to ballot its 450,000 members, the Observer reported yesterday. Unison warned there could be industrial action in hospitals without a pay deal close to inflation.
Christina McAnea, Unison general secretary, said: “The Government has a simple choice, either it makes a sensible pay award, investing in staff and services and reducing delays for patients, or it risks a potential dispute, growing workforce shortages and increased suffering for the sick.”
Chairman of the NHS Confederation Victor Adebowale warned a real-terms pay rise for the lowest paid NHS staff was needed to avoid “a worsening of the NHS workforce crisis”.
TUC boss Frances O’Grady called for the Government to intervene in the rail dispute. She said: “Rather than working in good faith to find a negotiated settlement, ministers are inflaming tensions.
"Instead of threatening to do a P&O on workers and rip up their rights, ministers should be getting people around the table to agree a fair deal.”
Frances O'Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, says pay has to rise across the board
(Image: PA)
Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies said demands for pay irises were “understandable”, but the Government had done enough to help lower-paid workers.
He said: “Any group of workers are going to try, quite understandably, quite reasonably, to get pay rises going up in line with prices But if everybody does that, it will mean the inflation becomes embedded in the economy, so we would all be better off if we all took the low inflation pay rises.”
The Department for Transport said: “Strikes should always be the last resort, not the first. It is hugely disappointing and premature that the RMT is going ahead with industrial action.”
Mystery deepens over fate of Hong Kong’s Jumbo Floating Restaurant
Mystery over the fate of Hong Kong’s Jumbo Floating Restaurant deepened Friday after its owner stirred confusion over whether the financially struggling tourist attraction had actually sunk while being towed away from the city last week.
On Monday Aberdeen Restaurant Enterprises released a statement saying the vessel had capsized on Sunday near the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea after it “encountered adverse conditions” and began to take on water.
“The water depth at the scene is over 1,000 metres, making it extremely difficult to carry out salvage works,” it added.
On Thursday night, Hong Kong’s Marine Department put out a statement saying it had only learnt of the incident from media reports, and had immediately requested a report from the company.
The department said the report was delivered on Thursday, saying the restaurant had capsized but that “at present, both Jumbo and the tugboat are still in the waters off Xisha islands,” using the Chinese name for the Paracels.
Hours later an AFP journalist was contacted by a spokesman representing the restaurant who said the company had always used the word “capsized” not “sank”.
Asked directly if the boat had sunk, he said again the statement had said “capsized”, and did not explain why it had referred to the depth of the water when mentioning salvage.
The South China Morning Post reported a similar conversation with a spokeswoman for the company, in which they insisted the boat had “capsized”, not “sank”, but refused to clarify whether it was still afloat.
The newspaper said it had been told by the Marine Department that the company might have breached local regulations if it had not notified the authorities of a sinking incident within 24 hours.
Widespread reporting in both local and international media at the beginning of the week that Jumbo had sunk was not contradicted by the company.
AFP has requested a formal statement from Aberdeen Restaurant Enterprises on the status of Jumbo, as well as a detailed explanation of what happened.
The company previously said marine engineers had been hired to inspect the floating restaurant and install hoardings on the vessel before the trip, and that “all relevant approvals” had been obtained.
Financial woes
The tourist attraction closed in March 2020, citing the Covid-19 pandemic as the final straw after almost a decade of financial woes.
Operator Melco International Development said last month the business had not been profitable since 2013 and cumulative losses had exceeded HK$100 million ($12.7 million).
It was still costing millions in maintenance fees every year and around a dozen businesses and organisations had declined an invitation to take it over at no charge, Melco added.
It announced last month that ahead of its licence expiration in June, Jumbo would leave Hong Kong and await a new operator at an undisclosed location.
The restaurant set off shortly before noon last Tuesday from the southern Hong Kong Island typhoon shelter where it had sat for nearly half a century.
Opened in 1976 by the late casino tycoon Stanley Ho, in its glory days it embodied the height of luxury, reportedly costing more than HK$30 million to build.
Designed like a Chinese imperial palace and once considered a must-see landmark, the restaurant drew visitors from Queen Elizabeth II to Tom Cruise.
It also featured in several films — including Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion”, about a deadly global pandemic.
Hong Kong's iconic Jumbo floating restaurant, which hosted Queen Elizabeth & Tom cruise as guests, sinks in sea
This popular and unique restaurant had also featured in several films. The restaurant was reportedly making losses since 2013
ET Online Last Updated: Jun 22, 2022,
The iconic Jumbo Floating Restaurant of Hong Kong, that had been attracted celebrity guests like Queen Elizabeth II and Tom Cruise recently capsized in the South China Sea. The incident happened less than a week after it was towed away from the city. This restaurant was a very popular tourist destination in Hong Kong, and had over the years attracted over 3 million guests.
This popular and unique restaurant had also featured in several films. The most memorable of them is the James Bond film called ' The Man with the Golden Gun' in which Roger Moore, who plays the role of the British spy can be seen gambling. Apart from that, it also featured in the popular comedy 'The God of Cookery' that had Stephen Chow in the titular role of celebrity chef, cooking a bowl of “Sorrowful Rice”
The water entered the vessel, and it tipped.
The restaurant was reportedly making losses since 2013, but the final blow came with the pandemic. According to Associated Press, the restaurant encountered "adverse conditions" on Saturday as it was passing the Xisha Islands, also known as the Paracel Islands, in the South China Sea.
The water entered the vessel, and it tipped. Since the water depth at the place was over 1,000 meters, it made it extremely difficult to carry out salvage works.
The owner of the company said that "is very saddened by this accident."
The company was planning to move it to a lower-cost site where maintenance could be done more conveniently
AP states that the restaurant, which was almost 80 meters (260 feet) in length, had been a landmark in the city for over four decades. The restaurant, in its last days, had become a financial burden for all stakeholders and was therefore, towed last Tuesday.
The company was planning to move it to a lower-cost site where maintenance could be done more conveniently. The aforementioned media report claims that before being moved, marine engineers had inspected the ship, and found it to be in good condition.
The company is currently in the process of getting more information about the mishap from the towing company.
It is not transformation if nothing changes
A Frontiers white paper on the impact of transformative agreements in the transition to open access publishing
IMAGE: DR. FREDERICK FENTER CHIEF EXECUTIVE EDITOR, FRONTIERSview more
CREDIT: FRONTIERS
Executive summary
The substantial benefits of open access (OA) publishing are within our reach, but legacy publishers are employing commercial tactics to delay the necessary transition.
This paper exposes several of the negative, often unintended, consequences of “transformative agreements” (TAs). It argues that these agreements, sold as a pathway to open science, in fact reinforce the status quo. TAs maintain paywalled access as the standard financial model in publishing. They are negotiated in the absence of basic competition and procurement rules. And by concentrating resources into silos for a few incumbents only, they pose a threat to the diversity of the publishing ecosystem, locking out innovators, including the very players who demonstrate the benefits of OA publishing. Deployed as a commercial tactic, these agreements will stall the establishment of a transparent and competitive marketplace for professional editorial services.
In 2018, an influential group of research funders, recognizing the superior value proposition of OA publishing, came together under the banner of cOAlition S. With their Plan S, they declared they would mandate immediate and universal access to all the articles that resulted from the research they funded. Pressure from legacy subscription publishers subsequently led to concessions that have weakened that founding mission. The most damaging of these concessions was the acceptance of the “hybrid” model. This option granted “transformative” status to paywalled access as long as it was accompanied by the publication of some open access content.
This hybrid concession is a loophole that large traditional publishers are exploiting to prolong and validate their current business model and practices. The TA thus represents the offspring of the existing “Big Deal” of bundled services, but now with a costly additional channel for OA publication.
As the COVID pandemic has so powerfully shown, the effective dissemination of validated scientific knowledge is at a critical stage in the research-innovation cycle – and vital if we are to overcome the challenges we face as a society. Plan S intended to “shock” the system into a logical state of affairs with the backing of research funders. However, for as long as the “Big Deal” approach is maintained, legacy publishers will continue to negotiate conditions that guarantee their market share, with consortia paying high prices to a small number of publishers (and offering, in effect, a massive subsidy).
To tackle climate change, technologies such as solar panels, fuel cells and electric vehicles have benefited from a policy of subsidies, pushing society away from the dangerous status quo of fossil fuel consumption. By contrast, and analogy, we see that TAs are incentivizing pernicious behavior, supporting the paywalled status quo, hindering positive change and suppressing the innovative models that offer true fully open solutions.
If initiatives such as Plan S are to make full OA a reality, then funders, institutions and libraries must tackle monopoly legacy models which hinder innovation. We believe the signatories of Plan S, institutions and libraries should:
Ensure their funding allocations meet the needs and requirements of authors and the academic community.
Negotiate conditions such that all published research is truly, immediately and fully open according to a binding timeline; with a minimum schedule in which at least 75% of content is OA across a publisher’s full portfolio by the end of 2024.
Insist on agreements that are transparent and visible to all stakeholders, with a clear attribution of costs to products and services, allowing a credible assessment of value and unbundling.
Establish a truly fair competitive landscape by applying the principles of common commercial conditions and basic rules of public procurement.
Fully OA publishers already offer quality and innovation at scale, with better value for money and greater impact than legacy publishers. They are driving efforts to meet the political and societal need for truly open science. At Frontiers, we stand ready to work with all stakeholders to meet this call to action, to share our knowledge and data in doing so, and to see Plan S delivered.
Dr. Frederick Fenter Chief Executive Editor, Frontiers
Population bottlenecks that reduced genetic diversity were common throughout human history
Analysis shows that more than half of historical groups experienced founder events
IMAGE: FROM CONTEMPORARY AND ANCIENT DNA, UC BERKELEY RESEARCHERS ESTIMATED WHEN POPULATION BOTTLENECKS OCCURRED FOR SEVERAL HUNDRED GROUPS AROUND THE WORLD AND THROUGHOUT RECENT HUMAN HISTORY. THE COLORS INDICATE THE NUMBER OF GENERATIONS THE BOTTLENECK OR FOUNDER EVENT PRECEDED THE INDIVIDUALS WHOSE DNA WAS SEQUENCED.view more
CREDIT: RÉMI TOURNEBIZE, UC BERKELEY
Human populations have waxed and waned over the millennia, with some cultures exploding and migrating to new areas or new continents, others dropping to such low numbers that their genetic diversity plummeted. In some small populations, inbreeding causes once rare genetic diseases to become common, despite their deleterious effects.
A new analysis of more than 4,000 ancient and contemporary human genomes shows how common such “founder events” were in our history. A founder event is when a small number of ancestral individuals gives rise to a large fraction of the population, often because war, famine or disease drastically reduced the population, but also because of geographic isolation — on islands, for example — or cultural practices, as among Ashkenazi Jews or the Amish.
More than half of the 460 groups represented by these individuals had experienced a population bottleneck somewhere in their past that decreased their genetic diversity and likely increased the incidence of recessive hereditary diseases.
The analysis by population geneticists at the University of California, Berkeley, is the first comprehensive look at founder events across a broad swath of human populations over the past 10,000 years or so of human history and pinpoints when these events occurred.
According to the authors, the findings will be useful not only to archeologists and historians tracking the movement and mixing of populations around the world, but also to scientists and doctors studying human genetic variation. The genetic diseases of inbred populations have helped scientists find many disease-causing mutations in the human genome and discover the causes of numerous genetic and inherited diseases.
“Genomic data is really powerful because it not only tells us about where we come from, it tells us about our history at various different time scales, and you can look at how closely related different individuals are to each other,” said senior author Priya Moorjani, an assistant professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley. “But also, it tells us about bits of DNA that are functionally important and can cause diseases. So, they become quite important to study from a biomedical perspective.”
Many of the populations represented by individuals in the sample were or are much more inbred than ethnic Ashkenazi Jews, who some scientists have estimated once dwindled to a population of less than a couple of thousand individuals about 1,000 years ago. The Onge, a group in the Andaman Islands of the Indian Ocean, underwent a population bottleneck 10 times more extreme than that of Ashkenazi Jews, and today it numbers only about 100 individuals.
The researchers found that many Native American populations and groups from Oceania and South Asia also suffered severe population bottlenecks. Some coincide with known historical events — for instance, the residents of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) underwent a founder event about 260 years ago, coincident with the migration of Europeans to the island.
Others correlate well with the known movement of peoples into an area and with changing cultural artifacts and practices. For example, Anatolian farmers and Eurasian steppe pastoralists moved into Europe between about 4,000 and 10,000 years ago, and the groups intermingled with existing European hunter-gatherers.
“The first surprise was that over half the groups we surveyed had evidence for founder events,” Moorjani said. “So, it's not just Ashkenazi Jews or Finns that have a unique history, but many populations living today have had strong founder events — in fact, stronger founder events than these two groups, like several contemporary South Asian groups, hunter-gatherers or populations living on islands. And many of these groups would be really important for prioritizing functional studies. We have learned so much about genetic variation from groups like Ashkenazi Jews and Finns that the potential for discovery is really high if we can expand these studies to other worldwide populations.”
Population bottlenecks reduce genetic diversity (IMAGE)
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - BERKELEY
CAPTION
A founder event impacts the genetic diversity of a population. In this graphic, individuals in a population have genomes containing various genomic segments (colored bars at top) that are inherited ‘identical-by-descent’ from a common ancestor. A bottleneck, however, reduces the diversity of segments. Because of recombination events over time, the lengths of these segments gradually shorten (moving clockwise around clock). Together, these tell researchers about the founder strength and age, respectively.
The analysis was made possible by a genomics analysis program called ASCEND (Allele Sharing Correlation for the Estimation of Non-equilibrium Demography), which was created by Tournebize and Moorjani specifically to analyze partial genome sequences — in particular, ancient DNA. This DNA is generally sequenced from bones or teeth that are hundreds to thousands of years old and represent not only our Homo sapiens ancestors, but other human groups, like Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Such DNA is typically damaged so that only a portion of the individual’s genome can be sequenced. But since human genomes contain about 3 billion base pairs of DNA, even a mere 100,000 base pairs can provide information about that person’s heritage, Moorjani said. Many genome analysis programs today work only with nearly complete genome sequences, primarily from contemporaneous peoples.
“While ancient DNA is really powerful, one of the challenges is that it has much lower quality compared to data from living people, because once an individual dies, the DNA starts degrading, and it's very hard to recover very high quality data compared to present-day individuals,” Moorjani said. “But the majority of the demographic inference methods are built thinking that you can get large numbers of samples from populations and high-quality data across the genome. Our methods were developed to leverage this low-coverage, highly degraded DNA to really understand our evolutionary history.”
ASCEND measures the sharing of DNA between individuals within and across populations. When a population undergoes a founder event, its size dwindles to a few individuals. The offspring of these founder individuals, in turn, share long blocks in their genome that are inherited “identical by descent” from these few ancestors. As time passes, these blocks will become smaller due to crossover events that occur during meiosis, when chromosomes duplicate and mix before segregating to egg and sperm cells. The rate of crossovers is well characterized and provides a kind of molecular clock. The ASCEND program compares how large the shared blocks are within individuals in a population to infer when the individuals might have shared a common ancestor, i.e., when a founder event occurred in the population’s history. A large-scale, pair-wise statistical comparison of genomic DNA allows an estimation of when and how intense the bottleneck was.
The genome data came from the Allen Ancient DNA Resource, a database created by David Reich and collaborators at Harvard University, with whom Moorjani earned her Ph.D. The public database currently includes available present-day and ancient genomes from more than 14,000 individuals and more than a million common mutations or variants — single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs — within those DNA sequences. At the time Moorjani started her study, the database held fewer ancient and modern genomes. She and Tournebize focused on the genomes of 2,310 present-day individuals from 184 groups, then expanded their study to look at an additional 1,947 individuals representing 164 worldwide ancient populations.
“Applying this method, we uncovered founder events that had not been identified previously, for instance, in populations from ancient Morocco or Siberia,” Tournebize said. “As a French guy, I was really surprised to discover a founder event in Basque people, dated around the 1st century BCE and possibly related to Roman colonization of this region. We'll need more genetic data, especially from ancient samples, and collaboration with social scientists to understand the detailed historical events that might be associated with this bottleneck.”
To test the ASCEND program in other species, Moorjani and Tournebize turned to dogs. The genome sequences of about 40 modern dog breeds are available, so the researchers ran them through the program to determine how long ago founder events occurred in breeds ranging from African village dogs — the least inbred — to breeds like boxers, dobermans and rottweilers, the most inbred. Consistent with the establishment of many dog breeds during Victorian times, they confirmed extreme founder events in most breeds within the last 25 generations, that is, 75 to 125 years.
“Dogs are so interesting that it was exciting to expand the analysis to another species, but it was really sad to see how strong the founder events are,” she said. “Most dogs these days have so many more problems than village dogs. Their rates of cancers and congenital diseases are pretty high. And that's largely because of these very severe founder events in their history during breed formation.”
CAPTION
Using ASCEND, UC Berkeley researchers determined the intensity and timing of founder events in 40 breeds of dogs. The most intense, with the greatest inbreeding, are labeled purple at upper right, with less intense founder events moving clockwise. African village dogs are the least inbred. The inner (gray) rim represents the founder age (in generations before present), with the bar height proportional to the founder age. The width of the bars is inversely proportional to the number of breeds within each role category.
In another recent paper, Moorjani and her colleagues described a different genomics analysis program that analyzes a single individual’s genome, whether complete or partial, and estimates the amount of admixture of other populations over time. The researchers used this program, called DATES (Distribution of Ancestry Tracts of Evolutionary Signals), to analyze about 1,100 ancient genomes and reconstruct major gene flow events in Europe since about 10,000 BCE.
One surprising finding was that the genomes of Anatolian farmers, who lived in what is today Turkey, show admixture of genes from Iranian Neolithic farmers long before the advent of agriculture in Anatolia. This suggests that farming did not originate in Anatolia, as many archeologists have suggested.
“We had samples of Anatolian hunter-gatherers who don't have Iranian ancestry and samples of Anatolian early farmers who have Iranian ancestry, but we didn't know when this mixture occurred,” she said. “In our case, we were able to actually figure out the key time point when this group formed, which predates agriculture in the region. And based on that, we are able to tell that farming must have spread through cultural diffusion, rather than having originated in Anatolia.”
Another discovery was the timing for the formation of Bronze Age steppe pastoralists. These groups made a large impact, both genetically and demographically, in Eurasia during the Bronze Age and, according to some studies, are responsible for the spread of Indo-European languages. Archeological studies suggest these groups inhabited regions of the steppe in present day Russia and Ukraine from 3,300 to 2,600 BCE. Using the genetic dating method, the researchers found these groups were genetically formed between 4,400 and 4,000 BCE, predating previous findings by over a half a millennium.
“Our study emphasizes the power of dating population mixtures and formation, rather than just using temporal sampling and tracking the presence or absence of a particular ancestry in ancient samples, which is highly dependent on sampling choice and density,” said UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Manjusha Chintalapati, first author of the paper.
Moorjani plans to use ASCEND and DATES to take a closer look at many ancient populations, in particular those in India, that have strong founder events that suggest the possibility of many unrecognized recessive diseases that could help to reduce disease burden in the group and shed light on the basic functions of human genes.
“In our analysis, we find that 64% of South Asian populations have very strong founder events, so we are trying to do targeted sample collection in these groups to characterize some of the deleterious variants due to the founder events,” she said.
DATES, for example, suggests that each isolated population in South Asia has admixtures of local indigenous hunter-gatherers, Near Eastern farmers and Steppe pastoralists or herders, but in different proportions that remained the same for many hundreds of generations. Strikingly, most European populations also derive ancestry from similar three groups, though the groups have continued to freely mix with each other after the initial mixture.
“It's really exciting to do this work at Berkeley, where Allan Wilson's lab came up with the idea of a molecular clock, and to continue on his path to use genomic data for learning about the timing of different evolutionary events,” Moorjani said, referring to the late biochemist and pioneer of molecular evolution, who died in 1991.
The two studies were funded by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a Sloan Research Fellowship and the National Institutes of Health (R35GM142978).
CHICAGO – New guidance published today in Anaesthesia provides actionable steps to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from inhaled anesthetics, particularly desflurane, which is commonly used in general anesthesia, and nitrous oxide (laughing gas).
Over the past two decades, substantial evidence has emerged on the environmental footprint inhaled anesthetics have, but there has been insufficient progress to translate this information into actionable steps to mitigate the problem. While some hospitals and providers have made environmental improvements, more are considering it and require direction, the authors report.
“Inhaled anesthetics are a significant contributor to health care-related greenhouse gas emissions. However, it is very achievable for the health care community to minimize their impact on the climate through intervention,” said Jodi Sherman, M.D., co-author, chair of the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Committee on Environmental Health, and associate professor of anesthesiology at Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut. “The guidance summarizes the latest actions health care professionals involved in the administration of inhaled anesthetics can take to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, while maintaining quality outcomes and patient safety, and potentially saving costs.”
Anesthesiology is a carbon-intensive specialty, involving the routine use of inhaled agents that are potent greenhouse gases. These gases are exhausted directly to the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. Inhaled anesthetic agents have been estimated to be responsible for 0.01-0.10% of the total global carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions contributing to global warming. Based on atmospheric sampling of volatile anesthetics, their accumulation is increasing. Inhaled anesthetics account for 5% of acute hospital CO2e emissions and 50% of perioperative department emissions in high-income countries.
Relevant inhaled volatile anesthetics include desflurane, sevoflurane, isoflurane, and halothane, which are used in general anesthesia, as well as nitrous oxide. While the environmental impacts of all these agents should be mitigated, desflurane and nitrous oxide are several times greater in clinically relevant quantities, making them an even greater priority for intervention. In fact, the global warming potential of desflurane, scaled by clinical potency, is approximately 40-50 times that of sevoflurane and isoflurane over a 100-year period, the authors note. Desflurane is also significantly more expensive than other volatile anesthetics, with little evidence of clinical benefit justifying its use, and avoiding its use may have a cost savings benefit. Nitrous oxide is less potent than other inhaled anesthetics and must be used in high concentrations. It has a very long atmospheric life and its global warming impacts are similar to desflurane in clinically relevant doses.
The authors used a clinical action template to develop the guidance document. The template was obtained from Coda, a medical education and health promotion charity that seeks to provide achievable and sustainable actions to reduce health care’s carbon footprint, and provides individual action templates, authored by small groups of clinical experts, to distill mitigation actions supported by scientific evidence.
The evidence-based recommendations provided in the guidance document include:
Providers should avoid inhaled anesthetics with disproportionately high climate impacts, such as desflurane and nitrous oxide.
The lowest possible fresh gas flow should be selected when using inhaled anesthetics.
Regional anesthesia and intravenous anesthesia should be prioritized and used when appropriate, since they have less of a negative environmental impact.
The majority of nitrous oxide is lost, pre-use, and released into the air though leaks in central piping systems that should no longer be used. Portable canisters should be substituted and closed between uses to avoid continuous leaks.
More research is needed before recommending investment in the use of technological solutions for capturing or destroying inhaled anesthetic waste, and they should not be considered high mitigation priorities.
The document also includes guidance on how to measure and review progress, along with a means to share successes.
“Considering the impact that inhaled anesthetics have on the climate and with the practical, evidence-based interventions we have relayed, we are hopeful our guidance document contributes to the much-needed global transition toward environmentally sustainable anesthesia,” said Jessica Devlin-Hegedus, M.D., lead author and consultant, Department of Anesthesia, Wollongong Hospital, NSW, Australia. “Nitrous oxide is commonly used by non-anesthesia providers as well, such as in the labor suite, dental offices and emergency care. We are working to educate diverse groups of health professionals on the deleterious impact inhaled anesthetics have on the environment and to consider safe, environmentally preferable alternatives.”
THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF ANESTHESIOLOGISTS Founded in 1905, the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) is an educational, research and scientific society with more than 55,000 members organized to raise and maintain the standards of the medical practice of anesthesiology. ASA is committed to ensuring physician anesthesiologists evaluate and supervise the medical care of patients before, during and after surgery to provide the highest quality and safest care every patient deserves.
For more information on the field of anesthesiology, visit the American Society of Anesthesiologists online at asahq.org. To learn more about the role physician anesthesiologists play in ensuring patient safety, visit asahq.org/madeforthismoment. Like ASA on Facebook and follow ASALifeline on Twitter.
# # #
JOURNAL
Anaesthesia
ARTICLE TITLE
Action guidance for addressing pollution from inhalational anaesthetics
