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VIEW: NASA TV's PLAY-by-PLAY JULY 4TH COVERAGE of Juno Spacecraft's Arrival at Jupiter --"New Answers to Ongoing Mysteries"

On July 4th, NASA Television aired live coverage of the solar-powered Juno spacecraft's arrival at Jupiter after an almost five-year journey. Juno is the first spacecraft to orbit the poles of our solar system's most massive planet. It will circle the Jovian world 37 times during 20 months, skimming to within 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) above the cloud tops, providing new answers to ongoing mysteries about the planet's core, composition and magnetic fields.

After an almost five-year journey to the solar system's largest planet, NASA's Juno spacecraft successfully entered Jupiter's orbit during a 35-minute engine burn. Confirmation that the burn had completed was received on Earth at 8:53 p.m. PDT (11:53 p.m. EDT) Monday, July 4.

“Independence Day always is something to celebrate, but today we can add to America's birthday another reason to cheer -- Juno is at Jupiter,” said NASA administrator Charlie Bolden. “And what is more American than a NASA mission going boldly where no spacecraft has gone before? With Juno, we will investigate the unknowns of Jupiter's massive radiation belts to delve deep into not only the planet's interior, but into how Jupiter was born and how our entire solar system evolved.”

Confirmation of a successful orbit insertion was received from Juno tracking data monitored at the navigation facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, as well as at the Lockheed Martin Juno operations center in Littleton, Colorado. The telemetry and tracking data were received by NASA's Deep Space Network antennas in Goldstone, California, and Canberra, Australia.

“This is the one time I don't mind being stuck in a windowless room on the night of the 4th of July,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “The mission team did great. The spacecraft did great. We are looking great. It's a great day.”

Preplanned events leading up to the orbital insertion engine burn included changing the spacecraft's attitude to point the main engine in the desired direction and then increasing the spacecraft's rotation rate from 2 to 5 revolutions per minute (RPM) to help stabilize it..

The burn of Juno's 645-Newton Leros-1b main engine began on time at 8:18 p.m. PDT (11:18 p.m. EDT), decreasing the spacecraft's velocity by 1,212 miles per hour (542 meters per second) and allowing Juno to be captured in orbit around Jupiter. Soon after the burn was completed, Juno turned so that the sun's rays could once again reach the 18,698 individual solar cells that give Juno its energy.

“The spacecraft worked perfectly, which is always nice when you're driving a vehicle with 1.7 billion miles on the odometer,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager from JPL. “Jupiter orbit insertion was a big step and the most challenging remaining in our mission plan, but there are others that have to occur before we can give the science team the mission they are looking for.”

Over the next few months, Juno's mission and science teams will perform final testing on the spacecraft's subsystems, final calibration of science instruments and some science collection.

“Our official science collection phase begins in October, but we've figured out a way to collect data a lot earlier than that,” said Bolton. “Which when you're talking about the single biggest planetary body in the solar system is a really good thing. There is a lot to see and do here.”

Juno's principal goal is to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter. With its suite of nine science instruments, Juno will investigate the existence of a solid planetary core, map Jupiter's intense magnetic field, measure the amount of water and ammonia in the deep atmosphere, and observe the planet's auroras. The mission also will let us take a giant step forward in our understanding of how giant planets form and the role these titans played in putting together the rest of the solar system. As our primary example of a giant planet, Jupiter also can provide critical knowledge for understanding the planetary systems being discovered around other stars.

One of Juno's primary missions is to peer deep inside the gas giant and unravel the mystery of how it generates its powerful magnetic field, the strongest in the solar system. One theory is that about halfway to Jupiter's core, the pressures and temperatures become so intense that the hydrogen that makes up 90 percent of the planet -- molecular gas on Earth -- looses hold of its electrons and begins behaving like a liquid metal. Oceans of liquid metallic hydrogen surrounding Jupiter's core would explain its powerful magnetic field.

The Juno spacecraft launched on Aug. 5, 2011 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. JPL manages the Juno mission for NASA. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

The Daily Galaxy via NASA/JPL

Puzzle of Saturn's "Great White Spots" Solved --"Water was the Missing Piece"

Destination: Jupiter! --One Year Left Till Juno Expedition's Capture Orbit

NASA: "The Milky Way and Universe is Awash in Water"

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Mystery of The Great Attractor --"Unknown Force Pulling Our Milky Way Galaxy Towards It With the Force of a Million Billion Suns" (Today's Most Popular)

Hundreds of hidden nearby galaxies have been studied for the first time, shedding light on a mysterious gravitational anomaly dubbed the Great Attractor, which appears to be drawing the Milky Way and hundreds of thousands of other galaxies towards it with a gravitational force equivalent to a million billion Suns. Despite being just 250 million light years from Earth--very close in astronomical terms--the new galaxies had been hidden from view until now by the Milky Way.

Using CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope equipped with an innovative receiver, an international team of scientists were able to see through the stars and dust of the Milky Way, into a previously unexplored region of space. Lead author Lister Staveley-Smith, from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said the team found 883 galaxies, a third of which had never been seen before. "The Milky Way is very beautiful of course and it's very interesting to study our own galaxy but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it," he said.

Staveley-Smith said scientists have been trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious Great Attractor since major deviations from universal expansion were first discovered in the 1970s and 1980s. "We don't actually understand what's causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it's coming from," he said.

The Milky Way resides in the outskirts of the Laniakea Supercluster, 500 million light-years in diameter and contains the mass of one hundred million billion Suns spread across 100,000 galaxies.. Within the boundaries of the Laniakea Supercluster, galaxy motions are directed inward, in the same way that water streams follow descending paths toward a valley. The Great Attractor region is a large flat bottom gravitational valley with a sphere of attraction that extends across the Laniakea Supercluster.

"We know that in this region there are a few very large collections of galaxies we call clusters or superclusters, and our whole Milky Way is moving towards them at more than two million kilometers per hour."

"Laniakea," which means "immense heaven" in Hawaiian. This discovery clarifies the boundaries of our galactic neighborhood and establishes previously unrecognized linkages among various galaxy clusters in the local Universe.The Milky Way resides in the outskirts of the supercluster, whose extent has for the first time been carefully mapped using these new techniques. This so-called Laniakea Supercluster is 500 million light-years in diameter and contains the mass of one hundred million billion Suns spread across 100,000 galaxies.

This study also clarifies the role of the Great Attractor, a gravitational focal point in intergalactic space that influences the motion of our Local Group of galaxies and other galaxy clusters. Within the boundaries of the Laniakea Supercluster, galaxy motions are directed inward, in the same way that water streams follow descending paths toward a valley. The Great Attractor region is a large flat bottom gravitational valley with a sphere of attraction that extends across the Laniakea Supercluster.

The Milky Way and its neighboring Andromeda galaxy, along with some 30 smaller ones, form what is known as the Local Group, which lies on the outskirts of a “super cluster”—a grouping of thousands of galaxies—known as Virgo shown in the image above, which is also pulled toward the Great Attractor. Based on the velocities at these scales, the unseen mass inhabiting the voids between the galaxies and clusters of galaxies amounts to perhaps 10 times more than the visible matter.

Even so, adding this invisible material to luminous matter brings the average mass density of the universe still to within only 10-30 percent of the critical density needed to "close" the universe. This phenomena suggests that the universe be "open." Cosmologists continue to debate this question, just as they are also trying to figure out the nature of the missing mass, or "dark matter."

It is believed that this dark matter dictates the structure of the Universe on the grandest of scales. Dark matter gravitationally attracts normal matter, and it is this normal matter that astronomers see forming long thin walls of super-galactic clusters.

Recent measurements with telescopes and space probes of the distribution of mass in M31 -the largest galaxy in the neighborhood of the Milky Way- and other galaxies led to the recognition that galaxies are filled with dark matter and have shown that a mysterious force—a dark energy—fills the vacuum of empty space, accelerating the universe's expansion.

Astronomers now recognize that the eventual fate of the universe is inextricably tied to the presence of dark energy and dark matter.The current standard model for cosmology describes a universe that is 70 percent dark energy, 25 percent dark matter, and only 5 percent normal matter.

We don't know what dark energy is, or why it exists. On the other hand, particle theory tells us that, at the microscopic level, even a perfect vacuum bubbles with quantum particles that are a natural source of dark energy. But a naïve calculation of the dark energy generated from the vacuum yields a value 10120 times larger than the amount we observe. Some unknown physical process is required to eliminate most, but not all, of the vacuum energy, leaving enough left to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe.

A new theory of particle physics is required to explain this physical process. The new "dark attractor" theories skirt the so-called Copernican principle that posits that there is nothing special about us as observers of the universe suggesting that the universe is not homogeneous. These alternative theories explain the observed accelerated expansion of the universe without invoking dark energy, and instead assume we are near the center of a void, beyond which a denser "dark" attractor pulls outwards.

In a paper in Physical Review Letters, Pengjie Zhang at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and Albert Stebbins at Fermilab show that a popular void model, and many others aiming to replace dark energy, don't stand up against telescope observation.

Galaxy surveys show the universe is homogeneous, at least on length scales up to a gigaparsec. Zhang and Stebbins argue that if larger scale inhomogeneities exist, they should be detectable as a temperature shift in the cosmic microwave background—relic photons from about 400,000 years after the big bang—that occurs because of electron-photon (inverse Compton) scattering.

Focusing on the “Hubble bubble” void model, they show that in such a scenario, some regions of the universe would expand faster than others, causing this temperature shift to be greater than what is expected. But telescopes that study the microwave background, such as the Atacama telescope in Chile or the South Pole telescope, don't see such a large shift.

Though they can't rule out more subtle violations of the Copernican principle, Zhang and Stebbins' test reinforces Carl Sagan's dictum that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Superclusters are among the largest structures in the known Universe. They are made up of groups, like our own Local Group, that contain dozens of galaxies, and massive clusters that contain hundreds of galaxies, all interconnected in a web of filaments. Though these structures are interconnected, they have poorly defined boundaries.

"We have finally established the contours that define the supercluster of galaxies we can call home," said R. Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "This is not unlike finding out for the first time that your hometown is actually part of much larger country that borders other nations."

To better refine cosmic mapmaking, the researchers are proposing a new way to evaluate these large-scale galaxy structures by examining their impact on the motions of galaxies. A galaxy between structures will be caught in a gravitational tug-of-war in which the balance of the gravitational forces from the surrounding large-scale structures determines the galaxy's motion.

By using the GBT and other radio telescopes to map the velocities of galaxies throughout our local Universe, the team was able to define the region of space where each supercluster dominates. "Green Bank Telescope observations have played a significant role in the research leading to this new understanding of the limits and relationships among a number of superclusters," said Tully.

The name Laniakea was suggested by Nawa'a Napoleon, an associate professor of Hawaiian Language and chair of the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at Kapiolani Community College, a part of the University of Hawaii system. The name honors Polynesian navigators who used knowledge of the heavens to voyage across the immensity of the Pacific Ocean.

The GBT is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope. Its location in the National Radio Quiet Zone and the West Virginia Radio Astronomy Zone protects the incredibly sensitive telescope from unwanted radio interference.

The new CSIRO research identified several new structures that could help to explain the movement of the Milky Way, including three galaxy concentrations (named NW1, NW2 and NW3) and two new clusters (named CW1 and CW2). The study involved researchers from Australia, South Africa, the U.S. and the Netherlands, and was published in the Astronomical Journal.

University of Cape Town astronomer Renée Kraan-Korteweg said astronomers have been trying to map the galaxy distribution hidden behind the Milky Way for decades. "We've used a range of techniques but only radio observations have really succeeded in allowing us to see through the thickest foreground layer of dust and stars," she said. "An average galaxy contains 100 billion stars, so finding hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way points to a lot of mass we didn't know about until now."

The Daily Galaxy via PhysRevLett.107.041301, International Center for Radio Astronomy Research and NRAO

Image credit: Top of page with thanks to artist Adam Dalton

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ExxonMobil May Have Friends In High Places, But Fraud Is Not Constitutionally Protected

"2016-07-01-1467408906-6910287-smithlamarGetty.jpg"

House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith is harassing state attorneys general investigating ExxonMobil for misleading investors about climate risks.

When a handful of attorneys general launched investigations of ExxonMobil for climate fraud, I wonder if they had any idea that they would be attacked for attempting to stifle the company's right of free speech.

After all, if ExxonMobil publicly downplayed warnings by its own scientists about the threat posed by burning fossil fuels in its communications with investors and the general public, it very well may have committed fraud, which is not protected by the First Amendment.

Legal experts have cited the case against the tobacco industry as an apt analogy. For years, tobacco companies emphasized uncertainty about their products' risks to stave off government regulations. ExxonMobil essentially has been doing the same thing.

Regardless, attorneys general from 13 states and more than a dozen members of the House Science Committee have entered the fray on ExxonMobil's behalf, all making the same indefensible First Amendment argument. And -- surprise, surprise -- most of them are climate science deniers who get significant campaign funding from fossil fuel companies and electric utilities.

'AGs United for Dirty Power' Strikes Back

In late March, 17 attorneys general announced the formation of the AGs United for Clean Power coalition to defend the new federal rule curbing power plant carbon emissions and investigate energy companies for fraud. So far, coalition attorneys general from California, Massachusetts, New York and the Virgin Islands have opened investigations of ExxonMobil, and more are likely in the offing.

In response, Attorneys General Luther Strange of Alabama and Ken Paxton of Texas filed an intervention plea in May in a Texas district court on behalf of ExxonMobil to quash one of the investigations. They then followed up with a June 15 letter to AGs United for Clean Power cosigned by 11 other state prosecutors calling for an end to the ExxonMobil probes. The group -- essentially "AGs United for Dirty Power" -- maintained "[u]sing law enforcement authority to resolve a public policy debate undermines the trust invested in our offices and threatens free speech."

Just whose interests are Strange et al. representing?

Strange has been Alabama's attorney general since 2010. In 2014, his reelection campaign contributors included the American Coal Association, American Gas Association and Koch Industries, but his biggest energy industry supporter was Alabama Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company, one of the nation's largest electric utilities. Three Southern coal-fired power plants are the biggest carbon emitters in the country.

Paxton, meanwhile, received more money from the oil and gas industry than any other sector when he first ran for attorney general in 2014. His benefactors included Chesapeake Energy, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Koch Industries, Marathon Oil and Phillips 66. ExxonMobil sat out Paxton's 2014 campaign, but the company contributed to his campaigns when he served in the Texas statehouse.

Eight other attorneys general who signed the Strange-Paxton letter also enjoy fossil fuel industry support. Jeff Landry of Louisiana and Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma pulled in the most contributions. Landry's 2015 campaign was funded by more than 40 oil and gas companies, including Halliburton, Hilcorp Energy, Koch Industries and Phillips 66. Pruitt's 2014 campaign, meanwhile, was backed by American Electric Power, Arch Coal, Chesapeake Energy, Devon Energy, Koch Industries, Marathon Petroleum and ... ExxonMobil.

Not surprising, AGs United for Dirty Power prosecutors are not only going to bat for ExxonMobil, they are running interference for the coal industry, too. Eleven of the 13 attorneys general on the letter, including Strange, Paxton, Landry and Pruitt, are among the more than two dozen AGs who have sued the Environmental Protection Agency to block the Clean Power Plan, the new federal power plant carbon emissions rule.

ExxonMobil-Funded Reps Defend ExxonMobil

House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith also leapt to the defense of the oil giant. In mid-May, Smith and 12 other committee members sent letters to the AGs United for Clean Power coalition and eight foundations and nonprofit groups, including 350.org, Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists, demanding they turn over all documents and communications related to their efforts to hold ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies accountable for climate science deceptions. Echoing the Strange-Paxton argument, their letters charged that the attorneys general and the nonprofits are trying to "silence speech."

Twelve of the 13 signatories -- including Smith -- received campaign contributions from ExxonMobil since the 2010 election cycle, and 10 of them got donations from Koch Industries.

The 17 AGs United for Clean Power members and other recipients of Smith et al.'s request refused to comply. In separate letters, they explained that the aim of the ExxonMobil investigations is to determine whether the company provided investors and the public with accurate information and reminded Smith and his colleagues that the First Amendment does not protect fraud. They maintained that Congress has no jurisdiction over state law enforcement activities and therefore has no right to demand documents and communications. Finally, they pointed out that -- ironically enough -- the committee's request threatens the nonprofit advocacy groups' First Amendment rights of free speech and association.

Indeed, the allegation that the attorneys general investigating ExxonMobil and the nonprofit organizations that have provided them information are somehow infringing on the company's free speech rights is absurd. No corporation has a First Amendment right to deliberately misinform about the harm associated with its product, and attorneys general have every right to investigate whether a company's actions amount to fraud. Likewise, attorneys general have the right to consult with experts either publicly or confidentially in the course of their investigations. Moreover, the nonprofits singled out by Smith et al. have the right and responsibility to provide information to state prosecutors when they have reason to suspect corporate wrongdoing.

How did Smith react to this resounding rejection? On June 17, he and 16 other House Science Committee members sent a second round of letters to AGs United for Clean Power, the foundations and the nonprofit groups, again asking for documents related to the investigations. And again the recipients said no.

What's next? Will Strange and Paxton intervene in court again to try to stop another ExxonMobil investigation? Will Smith, who has a history of harassing federal climate scientists with subpoenas, resort to that tactic to force compliance with his request? Just how far will fossil fuel industry-funded elected officials go to protect one of the biggest carbon polluters in the world?

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. All federal campaign contribution data came from the Center for Responsive Politics. All state campaign contribution data came from the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Science and Sustainability Management: Twenty Years of Columbia's Earth Institute
This fall, Columbia University's Earth Institute will mark its 20th anniversary. I have been reflecting on what we have accomplished in both research and education over these past twenty years. There were two central ideas that animated the creation of this university-wide institute. The first was to promote basic understanding of earth system science, and the second was to apply that knowledge to decisions made by governments and businesses around the world. To build the institute, we began the process of creating a community of environmental scientists, social scientists, lawyers, policy and management analysts, health experts, and engineers who came to know each other and together engage in scholarship. What we have twenty years later is a uniquely interdisciplinary institute and a world leader in the basic and applied knowledge required to achieve sustainability.

The Earth Institute seeks to match the complexity of the challenges of global sustainability with a holistic approach that transcends particular academic disciplines and the traditional intellectual boundaries of schools and departments. We now offer a model for the collaboration of faculty and researchers that is unique in its reach and effectiveness--not only within our university, but also globally. We have a long history of research focused on understanding the planet; at our core is the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which has been seeking fundamental knowledge about the natural world since 1949. Lamont is the scientific heart of the Earth Institute. Another key aspect of our work is our willingness to engage directly with stakeholders in practical efforts to improve environmental quality by introducing new approaches to addressing real-world problems. We evaluate the effectiveness of these strategies and try to learn from our successes and failures.

We also created a number of education programs that require students to learn environmental science and social science along with applied policy and management analysis: the Master of Public Administration (MPA) in Environmental Science and Policy, the undergraduate major in Sustainable Development, the Master of Science in Sustainability Management, the Master of Arts in Climate and Society, the MPA in Development Practice, and the PhD in Sustainable Development. Another new science-based master's degree is now under development by research faculty at our Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which will apply cutting-edge environmental science, observation, and analytic methods to the real-world sustainability challenges faced by government and industry.

Each of these educational programs requires master's students, undergraduates, and doctoral students to learn about the physical dimensions of sustainability. The curriculum of these programs recognizes the need for corporate and government decision makers to know enough science to manage the work of scientists. In a world that is constantly increasing its organizational and technological complexity, we need managers who understand both management and science. This requires education programs that emphasize the complex and systemic nature of sustainability issues and focus on the practical skills necessary to deal with such issues.

CEOs are expected to understand complex business models, finance, performance measures and supply chains, but now also need to learn more about the science and technology the modern global economy depends on. They also need to learn how to gauge the impact of their operations on the ecosphere and the risks posed by ecological disruption on their organizations. Our education programs are an effort to address the needs of the growing renewable resource-based economy and the important role of today's professionals in engaging, managing, and regulating sustainability practices.

This same theme of increased complexity also drives our interdisciplinary research agenda. We produce the science that's necessary to understand how the planet works and how human beings are affecting natural systems. From my perspective, this basic science must form the foundation for the actions that we take to safeguard the planet and to sustain our economy. The Earth Institute's research ranges from the basic science of paleoclimatology, in order to understand the long history of climate change, to hands-on work with local governments to help them improve their daily water supply. We develop earth system models and vulnerability assessments to help adapt to the climate change now underway, as well as forecasting tools that help us develop methods to mitigate climate change. Our research involves an ocean-going vessel that collects data on the ocean and the earth beneath it. We use big data analytics, social impact assessments, economic models, legal evaluations, and mobile applications. We measure arctic ice sheets, conduct fieldwork in rainforests, and strap air monitors on the backpacks of urban high school students. We study earthquake hazards in Bangladesh, melting ecosystems in the Antarctic Peninsula, conservation in Myanmar, forests in Puerto Rico, and sewage in the Hudson River.

But while environmental research is important, so too is the communication of what we learn. When I was in graduate school, the environmental disaster at Love Canal was underway and I observed New York State's health and environmental officials struggle to communicate toxicity data to the residents of Love Canal. When I went to EPA, I was charged with developing a program to manage citizen-government interaction at Superfund's toxic waste sites. We conducted dozens of case studies around the country, and everywhere we looked we observed miscommunication. The political, economic, scientific and emotional dimensions of toxic waste cleanup made reasoned conversation impossible. It was as if stakeholders spoke different languages and required a translator. Misunderstanding and conflict was rampant. As good bureaucrats, we created a new position to help bridge the gap between scientists and non-scientists: the Community Relations Coordinator. Their job was similar to that of a social worker, but instead of navigating the social service system to help people in need, Superfund Community Relations Coordinators would explain environmental science to non-scientists. They would also explain community concerns and values to scientific experts. This need to understand and communicate the basic science of environmental issues was important in the 1980s and is even more important today.

Many of the people leading our corporations and our governments do not have much background in science and technology. Economists, policy scholars, and lawyers who do not understand ecology or environmental science conduct much of the research on environmental policy issues. On the other side of the divide, while environmental science research often has profound implications for public policy or corporate management our scientists struggle to bring that information to bear on decision-making.

You can see that misunderstanding is a two-way street. Scientists are not experts at communicating with decision makers and decision makers are rarely scientific experts. Many scientists do not have a deep understanding of politics, economics, finance or management. Some scientists' lack of sophistication and understanding of how the world is governed has contributed to the denial of climate science by decision makers. When climate scientists present their information and projections on global warming, they often present it along with proposed solutions that are politically or economically infeasible. Before approaching decision makers with scientific results, we need to involve economists, political scientists, lawyers and management experts to develop realistic solutions.

The idea of the Earth Institute was to conduct research that integrates science, policy, and management, and to train students to understand enough science to communicate with scientists and manage their work more effectively. In twenty years we have had many successes and many failures in attempting to work across fields and integrate our efforts. We have also been joined by scores of similar schools and institutes around America and the world. We still have a long way to go, and this task seems more important to me than ever.

It is more important because there are several billion people who want to live like we do in the United States, but do not. Their demands create political pressure for rapid economic development. The World Wide Web has guaranteed that even the poorest people on the planet see the wealth of the developed world. And they want it; if not for them, for their children. So the pressure on the planet's finite resources and on the earth's ecosystems, climate, and water will only increase over the next several decades. To manage the increasing level of economic output without destroying the planet will require a sophisticated understanding of the planet's ecological and environmental dynamics. More importantly, it will also require that this knowledge influence and constrain management decision-making. The Earth Institute's central mission is to work with colleagues around the world to research and develop this base of knowledge. Related to that central mission is our goal of educating students to apply that knowledge in practical, day-to-day decision making.

As exciting as all of this is, our goal is to ensure that the type of questions we ask, the data we collect, the models we build, and the analyses we produce become routine parts of public, NGO, and corporate decision making all over the world. The less novel we become, the more successful we will be. My hope is that business schools, law schools, and public policy schools all over the world start adding science to their curricula. Our goal is for the sustainability offices in many organizations to be integrated into the regular functions of CEOs and COOs. In the 1990s many companies had "international desks" to help navigate the emerging global economy; by 2010 those offices were largely gone. Today, every desk is an international desk. In the next generation I believe that sustainability will become as routine as "international" is today. Managers will need science literacy along with knowledge of global finance, and all competent managers will be sustainability managers.

The key is not to focus on science, technology, engineering, and math in a vacuum. These fields must be connected to creative arts, communication, law, management, and policy analysis. The Earth Institute is trying to make those connections. It's not easy to do, but I believe we are succeeding, and if we are to make the transition to a renewable resource-based economy, we need to develop decision processes and social systems that are rooted in scientific reality.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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r0B0t: There's a Clear Difference Between Robot-Generated and Human-Generated Art

Accomplishments in artificial intelligence often suffer from the problem of moving goalposts: As soon as a machine or algorithm can accomplish something that has traditionally been the province of humans, we generally dismiss it. To replicate something with a machine is to show that it has always been mechanical, we just had the wrong machines. One aspect of human behavior that has reliably eluded mechanical reproduction is the creation of art. In the wonderful Spike Jonze movie Her, we are presented with a future in which A.I. is so advanced that it can produce an operating system that its hero falls in love with, but even that level of technological achievement is not enough to mechanize his job as a writer of romantic correspondence. Or as summarized more or less by many a person: “Sure, a computer can win at Go. But it could never write a poem or compose music that would make you weep!”

Well, we have some potentially disturbing news for those of you hanging your hats on those kinds of declarations. Google recently announced that their Magenta project, which makes use of new hot advances in machine learning called “deep neural nets,” has created a 90-second melody based on the input of four notes. (No word on whether it has made anyone cry, though.) A small competition we ran several weeks ago at Dartmouth College, the Turing Tests in Creative Arts, shows just how close we are to making robots who can make art. Our goal was to challenge the A.I.interested world to come up with software that could create either sonnets, short stories, or dance music that would be indistinguishable to a human audience from the same kinds of artistic output generated by humans. While we didn't get many submissions, those that did come in were very thoughtful, especially in the case of sonnets and dance music.

The dance music portion compared algorithmic DJ-ing to human DJ-ing. The human DJs were hidden from sight as students listened and danced. After each set, the dancers were asked to guess human or machine; two entries were statistically indistinguishable from the human DJs. This is interesting but perhaps not surprising. All of us, especially those who are college-age, have been listening (perhaps primarily) to computationally inflected and composed music for a long time. This artistic form is one that has already blended into computer-based production; our perception of the nature, and production, and attribution of art and culture evolves with acculturation.

In the case of the literary challenges, a panel of judges each reviewed a collection of sonnets or short stories and were asked to pick out those that were generated by a machine. While there were no winners for sonnets or stories (i.e., the judges were able to distinguish the machine-generated sonnets), in the case of the former, the programs were so smart and sophisticated that we couldn't help but wonder if in a future running of the competition we would have a winner.

The sheer number of sonnets an A.I. bot can generate is astounding (countably infinite if you want to get technical!). The winning entry, from a team at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute was fantastic, and the runner-up from University of California at Berkeley also produced interesting work.

Here is an example of what Berkeley's generator came up with:

Kindred pens my path lies where a flock of
feast in natures mysteries an adept
you are my songs my soft skies shine above
love after my restless eyes I have kept.

A sacrament soft hands that arch embowed
stealing from nature her calm thoughts which throng
their little loves the birds know when that cloud
anticipation is the throat of song.

I love you for in his glorious rise
on desert hills at eve are musical
the ancients knew a way to paradise
pulses of the mystic tale no fable.

With sudden fear when immortality
might be like joy the petty billows try.

And another (for more, see here):

Of reckless ones haggard and spent withdraws
like clouds that gather and look another
know that neer again the fierce tigers jaws
the universe which was either neither.

Bed the peasant throws him down with fetters
who could have guessed thine immortality
not alone that thou no form of natures
you for love hath stained if to have served by.

Random from the orient view unveils
I would I bind thee by its hostile threat
I sit beneath thy looks resigned that smiles
and many maiden gardens yet unset.

This shade of crimson hue rushed on the thin
alpine flood above the dune stood the grin.

So what if an art-producing machine could pass as human? Or more accurately, so what if the output of a program, created by humans, could produce art that an average person would accept as human-generated? This more detailed description is important, for cast in that manner, it reveals the artistic output for what it is—not the thoughtless and mechanistic production of an emotionless entity, but rather a natural next step in the already-rich collaboration between machine and human when it comes to producing art.

Yes, that's right: Machines and humans have been working together to make art for some time. The presence of machine has already been particularly influential in the realm of literary products. When the technology of writing came to be (requiring the invention or discovery of mark-making tools and surfaces to record and store meaningful signs), new possibilities in narrative form arose—narratives where perhaps memorization need not influence the product. Movable type and the printing press was another great influence, then the typewriter, democratizing forces in the creation of literature, bringing new voices and forms to the written medium. Most recently, consider the effects of word processing or “authoring” software on literary production. Who among us doesn't feel compelled to change things so that we will satisfy Microsoft Word and produce a document clean of its automatically determined infelicitous word choices! Don't kid yourself, for many of the documents we turn out are already collaborations with machines and, arguably, always have been.

Of course, some literary products lend themselves more readily to machine collaboration than others. Short narratives about the outcome of a baseball game can be readily created from a reasonably detailed box score. The same is true of certain financial reports. These kinds of products are in essence formulaic, but the same is true of some forms of poetry like the sonnet. A Shakespearean sonnet is basically a high-level algorithm: three four-line stanzas in iambic pentameter, each with rhyme scheme ABAB, ending with a rhyming couplet. It's just that for centuries, humans have been the ones executing the pattern. Now, with a good deal of thought and some creative applications of natural language processing principles, a smart team of information scientists can engage a machine as a collaborator. Part of the winning entry sifts through opening words as well as a database of near-rhymes, the latter a tacit acknowledgment that a signature of the human implementation is the ability to not always follow the rules. It's cleverer than the Microsoft Word Assistant, but is hardly a solitary poetry-creating automation. The human might not be in the loop after the input is given, but the human is surely deeply represented in the design. And that is why it is successful.

So what still remains for machines to conquer? One of the judges remarked that the sonnets he picked out as machine-made didn't seem to be about anything—even if the words all went together well and there were coherent phrases or even fully formed lines around a given subject. In short, what was lacking was a narrative. Narrative is difficult to articulate in an algorithm (but we'll continue to aim for it in next year's competition). In fact, as the essence of storytelling, it is arguably one of the most human of activities. Thus, while these experiments surely celebrate successes in the context of human creativity on the computer, in their failings, they ultimately may help us recognize and celebrate what it means to be human.

This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

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Playing a science-based video game? It might be all wrong

Playing 'Spore' is a good way to explore evolution.'Spore' screenshot

By Alex Leith, Michigan State University

You look down from the sky, manipulating the world and seeing how it responds to your changes. You are able to alter vegetation and climate while watching their effects on the surrounding organisms. In this way, and many others, digital games provide excellent opportunities for players to learn about complicated subjects, including the concept of evolution through natural selection. Even games designed for fun and not specifically for education can provide rich, concise, dynamic representations of complex science, technology, engineering and math topics.

Since I was young, digital games have successfully supplemented the educational process in a range of topics, including math, science and biology. Research shows that if these games are going to actually teach those concepts, they must represent them accurately. Games that include incorrect depictions teach the wrong lessons.

Since Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, evolution has been understood as a process based on genetic differences between individual organisms of the same species. There are three key principles:

Organisms with genetic advantages for their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce, while organisms whose genes make their bodies less suited will die more quickly and reproduce less effectively.
Because these characteristics are genetic, they are passed on to offspring.
Organisms with genes that improve their survival will have more successful offspring, which will in turn pass on their advantages to the next generation.

Some colleagues and I looked into how well current games could serve as educational tools, specifically about evolution. We examined how Darwinian evolution was represented in 22 games, which we located either through game databases like GameSpot or IGN, or through Google searches. Most games got evolution at least partly wrong. Only five accurately represented all three key principles of evolution.

The five that got it right

A screen-capture of a Norn interacting with its environment in 'Creatures 2,' developed by Creatures Labs and published by Mindscape.
Wikipedia

"Creatures" provides a rare example of the three principles. In that game, players create cartoon-like creatures called "norns," through a process that allows norns to be altered not just in terms of appearance, but at the genetic level. For the most accurate representation of evolution, the game offers a play mode called "wolfling run." In that mode, players cannot directly affect their norns, but can observe their relative fitness for a particular in-game scenario. The potential variations in both norn creation and the environment they must survive in provide for an astonishing number of evolutionary possibilities.

Maxis, best known for creating the "SimCity" game series, and its spinoff "The Sims" collection, also made a set of games called "SimEarth" and "SimLife." Like "SimCity," both give players top-down control of a world. "SimEarth" was designed for players to make major changes to the weather, landscape and animals to create an environment. Players were then able to see how the animals would fare in this created environment. "SimLife" was more specific: it has players engage with the animals (rather than merely creating them) to learn about the biology surrounding their survival.

A screen-capture of 'Who Wants to Live a Million Years,' playable on the Science Channel website.
from sciencechannel.com

We also found two academically oriented games that loosely presented the three mechanics of evolution: "Selection Game" and "Who Wants to Live a Million Years" (which was later renamed "Charles Darwin's Game of Survival"). The two games were designed to be simple tools that could be played quickly in places like museums. Despite the limited mechanics present in such games, they still clearly show each element of the evolution process.

Market success doesn't mean accuracy

The most commercially popular game we found didn't quite get evolution right. "Spore" left out something many other games did, too: Organisms' genetic differences didn't affect their survival rates. Instead, organisms whose genes were unfit for the environment would not necessarily die more often, in keeping with evolutionary principles. Rather, players could intervene and increase an organism's likelihood for success by, say, helping it move more intelligently and strategically, beyond the scope of its genetically predisposed movements.

Nevertheless, "Spore" does a reasonable job presenting the broader concept of evolution to players, and is the best such game made this century. ("Creatures," "SimEarth," and "SimLife" are all from the 1990s.) "Spore" is also still available for purchase, so it is the only game readily usable by the average educator or student.

But other findings were disappointing. Most games inaccurately portrayed evolution, usually in the same way Spore did - allowing player intervention to save organisms that were unfit for survival.

For these other games, evolution becomes more akin to mutation during a single organism's life than a process that occurs through generations. In "E.V.O.: Search for Eden" and "L.O.L.: Lack of Love," players earn points they can spend to modify their organisms. In "Eco," at the end of each level, the player arbitrarily changes an attribute, though not necessarily one that affects an organism's survival prospects. In each of these cases, what the game calls "evolution" is actually external genetic manipulation, rather than inheriting particular traits.

These inaccuracies may confuse those unsure of what evolution actually is. If other scientific subjects are similarly poorly depicted in video games, the potential educational benefits of these games could be lost. However, as game designers become more adept at modeling scientific themes, it could herald an educational revolution.

"The Alex Leith, Doctoral Candidate in Media and Information Studies, Michigan State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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'Hidden' Agenda of China's Mission to Unexplored Far Side of the Moon --"Site of Solar System's Largest Impact Crater"

China will launch a mission to land on the dark side of the moon in two years' time, state media reported, in what will be a first for humanity. The moon's far hemisphere is never directly visible from Earth and while it has been photographed, with the first images appearing in 1959, it has never been explored. Earlier reports from the Xinhua news agency hinted that China may be considering the construction of a pioneering radio telescope on the moons virgin far side, which will give it an unobstructed window on the Cosmos that was confirmed this June, 2016 when an agreement was announced between the Netherlands and China, that a Dutch-built radio antenna will travel to the Moon aboard the Chinese Chang'e 4 satellite and usher in a new era of radio astronomy allowing for the study of objects that might otherwise be invisible or hidden in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

“Radio astronomers study the universe using radio waves, light coming from stars and planets, for example, which is not visible with the naked eye," commented Heino Falke a professor of Astroparticle Physics and Radio Astronomy at Radboud University. "We can receive almost all celestial radio wave frequencies here on Earth. We cannot detect radio waves below 30 MHz, however, as these are blocked by our atmosphere. It is these frequencies in particular that contain information about the early universe, which is why we want to measure them.”

The Chang'e-4 probe -- named for the goddess of the moon in Chinese mythology -- will be launched to it in 2018, the official Xinhua news agency reported. "The Chang'e-4's lander and rover will make a soft landing on the back side of the moon, and will carry out in-place and patrolling surveys," according to the country's lunar exploration chief Liu Jizhong.

Beijing sees its military-run, multi-billion-dollar space program as a marker of its rising global stature and mounting technical expertise, as well as evidence of the ruling Communist Party's success in transforming the once poverty-stricken nation.

But for the most part it has so far replicated activities that the US and Soviet Union pioneered decades ago. "The implementation of the Chang'e-4 mission has helped our country make the leap from following to leading in the field of lunar exploration," Liu added.

In 2013, China landed a rover dubbed Yutu on the moon and the following year an unmanned probe completed its first return mission to the earth's only natural satellite. Beijing has plans for a permanent orbiting station by 2020 and eventually to send a human to the moon.

Space flight is "an important manifestation of overall national strength", Xinhua cited science official Qian Yan as saying, adding that every success had "greatly stimulated the public's... pride in the achievements of the motherland's development."

Clive Neal, chair of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group affiliated with NASA, confirmed that the Chang'e-4 mission was unprecedented. "There has been no surface exploration of the far side," he told AFP Friday. It is "very different to the near side because of the biggest hole in the solar system -- the South Pole-Aitken basin, shown above, which may have exposed mantle materials -- and the thicker lunar crust". The basin is the largest known impact crater in the solar system, nearly 2,500 kilometers wide and 13 kilometers deep.

The Daily Galaxy via NASA and Beijing (AFP) and Xinhua News Agency

Image of the Day: NASA Sizes Up Pluto and Its Moon Charon

"Earth May Have Experienced Dark-Matter Triggered Extinction Events" (Today's Most Popular)

"Signs of Alien Life" --Viewing Earth from an Extraterrestrial Spacecraft

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Small businesses could lose financial support following EU referendum

Small UK businesses could lose financial opportunities and support as a result of the EU referendum result, according to business lender Funding Circle.

£100 million for British businesses

On 20 June, prior to the EU referendum, it was announced that the European Investment Bank (EIB) would provide £100 million to support small British businesses, working with UK-based lender Funding Circle. Funding Circle provides loans of roughly £50,000 to businesses sized on average 30 people or less.

“It's very unlikely to happen now”

But following the majority Leave result on 24 June, co-founder at Funding Circle James Meekings told the Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Committee which assesses spending by governmental department BIS that the £100m funding project is now “at risk”.

“The deal with the EIB was a start to create a multi-billion pound programme for getting more funds into UK business,” Meekings says. “The programme is at risk. If I'm honest, it's very unlikely to happen now.”

According to Meekings, loans to Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) employ roughly 60% of people across the country.

Too soon to speculate

In a statement, the EIB says it is yet to come to any decisions about its ties with the UK.

It says: “At present, the EIB's shareholders have not requested the Bank to change its approach to operations in the UK.

“It is premature to speculate on the impact of the referendum result on the EIB, including the Bank's future relationship with the UK Government and its future engagement to support long-term investment in the UK without clarity on the timing, circumstances and conditions of a withdrawal settlement.”

Small businesses earn less than £8.4 million

The majority of design consultancy businesses fall under the SME category small businesses are defined by Europa as those with a staff count of maximum 50, and a turnover of maximum €10 million (£8.4 million), while a medium-sized business is one with maximum 250 staff, and a turnover of maximum €50 million (£42 million).

Government backing necessary

Meekings adds that with doubts around funding from Europe, UK-based banks like the British Business Bank will need to be utilised, and the UK Government should be “putting more money in” to help SMEs.

“To date, we have had £60 million from the British Business Bank,” he says. “During this time of uncertainty, the British government should be backing small businesses.”

“Our question is what are the programmes that the Government could put in place given this new world of uncertainty to help get public funds and encourage growth and money directly into small businesses?” he says.

Businesses need “certainty”

Marcus Stuttard, head of AIM, the London Stock Exchange's international market in place to help small companies grow, told the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee that the business community is looking for “certainty” so that they can “plan”.

“We would expect that companies will delay making investment decisions and therefore requesting finance as well,” he says. “The greatest thing we can all do is remain collaborative and provide as much certainty as quickly as possible.”

Samir Desai, chief executive officer at Funding Circle, says in a statement that investors are unlikely to be affected in the “short term”.

“Many of our UK small businesses do not trade with the European Union and are unlikely to be immediately affected,” says Desai. “Our small business customers have been trading for ten years on average, and have experienced economic volatility before. We have conducted rigorous stress tests on our loanbook which show that even in the most stressed conditions, investors will continue to earn positive returns.”

“The value design brings to the economy is undeniable”

Deborah Dawton, chief executive officer at the Design Business Association, says of the design industry following the referendum vote: “UK design is world leading UK design is still a potent business asset and a sound commercial investment.”

According to the UK Government, between 2013 and 2014 the creative industries' value to the economy grew at almost double the rate of other UK industries, with design including product, graphic and fashion increasing the most at 16.6%. It also states the value of the creative industries was £84 billion in 2014 and accounted for 5% of the UK economy.

“The value design brings to the economy is undeniable,” says Dawton. “It is fundamentally important that this continues to be recognised.”

Creative Industries Federation to host post-referendum events

Creative Industries Federation (CIF) adds that while access to regional and sector-specific funding is a key concern for those working in the industry following Brexit, as is access to markets, IP protection and freedom of movement of talent.

In reaction to the vote, the organisation has announced it will be holding a series of “practical” events around the UK which will aim to “bring the sector together”, “marshal opinions” and “come to decisions” about the future.

The first meeting takes place in London on 7 July. A venue is yet to be announced.

The post Small businesses could lose financial support following EU referendum appeared first on Design Week.

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Americans: 'Our Crown Jewel National Park System Worth $92 BILLION to Us!'
When America declared our independence from the British Crown 240 years ago today, we cut ourselves off from the "dowry" of Crown Jewels protected in the Jewel Vault in the Tower of London. Including the Imperial Crown of State -- adorned with the Second Star of Africa, part of the largest diamond ever mined in history, 2,783 other diamonds, 17 sapphires, 277 pearls, 11 emeralds and 5 rubies -- a total of 142 spectacular items are protected as Crown Jewels, "enduring symbols of 900 years of monarchy." Every year approximately 2 million Britons and foreign tourists gape at them from behind a glass partition.

When we took our independence from Britain we eschewed the trappings of monarchy including this Imperial Crown of State, and created a new system of government and a new system of Crown Jewels - National Parks.

In contrast, America's Crown Jewels are spread out across our country like a vast network of precious gems available for every American and millions of foreign visitors to enjoy . The system of living, breathing landscapes and historic sites to which President Abraham Lincoln made the first deposit of Yosemite Valley in 1864, now stands at 411 units valued at $92 billion, according to a recent study.

"2016-07-04-1467652133-4390643-Yosemitebierstdadt.jpg"

The ethereal vision of Yosemite Valley that Albert Bierstadt portrayed in his paintings inspired President Lincoln to set aside the valley as our fist state park, later expanded to become Yosemite National Park.

With the great man-made monuments of Europe behind them, Americans in the "new world" chose a system of values based on land, creating our Crown Jewels from the glorious swaths of nature they encountered as they pushed west. Today our "Crown Jewel" National Park System ranges from the diamond hard face of "the Great One" - Mount Denali in Denali National Park, Alaska to the welcoming turquoise waters of the US Virgin Islands National Park and archaeological records dating back to 800 BC. From Independence Hall in Philadelphia where the US Constitution was debated and signed to George Washington Carver's Secret Garden at his birthplace National Monument in Diamond, Missouri, our historical sites serve as guideposts, continually refining our progress towards a nation "with liberty and justice for all."

Last week President Obama added another jewel to our treasury, creating the Stonewall Inn National Monument in New York City as a tribute to the efforts of the LGBT community to have their human rights recognized. Our Crown Jewels support our lives by purifying our air and water, providing habitat for wildlife, absorbing storm surge and protecting us from the effects of climate change. As valuable as they are, Britain's crown jewels cannot lay claim to those qualities.

"2016-07-04-1467654506-6747506-carvertrail.png"

I can hardly wait to explore the trail to his Secret Garden at George Washington Carver National Monument in Diamond, Missouri when I speak at Carver Day on Saturday, July 9.

So today I rejoice in the knowledge that the American people truly recognize and prize our Crown Jewel National Park System. A study released last week by the National Park Foundation shows that Americans assign a value of $92 BILLION to the System and the services provided by its caretaker agency, the National Park Service. The study showed that even people who do not visit national parks value them highly and say they'd be prepared to pay higher taxes to protect them.

These results perfectly illustrate the complete unacceptability that our Congress assigns a meager annual budget of approximately $3 billion to the parks, resulting in a huge deficit of funds to adequately care for and protect them, to maintain the roads and restrooms (I learned that each stall at Grand Canyon south rim uses one mile of toilet tissue every day!) hire biologists and wildlife managers, and park rangers to tell the stories of history and nature. It is only appropriate that we create an endowment for the Park System that honors the park service's mission to protect them in perpetuity instead of having to depend on an anemic annual budget.

I am trusting that this report will spur a different conversation about the future of our Crown Jewels. I hope it exposes the Park Service's attempts to allow a greater corporate presence in our national parks in exchange for money, as proposed by the current director in a pending order. Like a poison pill that will go into effect after he leaves office at the end of this year, the order proposes a shift to commercialize our crown jewels in ways that have not been allowed in 152 years and was not intended by their 19th Century founders. If managers at the Tower of London suddenly decided to give corporations titular ownership of the Crown Jewels in exchange for money, today's uproar over the outcome of Brexit might seem comparatively mild.

"2016-07-04-1467652882-1408867-Bearlake.jpg"

Bear Lake - oh what a feeling!

In Estes/Rocky Mountains National Park a few weeks ago, I sat on a bench overlooking idyllic Bear Lake and watched visitors strolling by on the trail. From the youngest babies and eager young children clutching their Junior Ranger notebooks and making notes, to elderly family members walking with a cane, no one seemed rushed or stressed. Everyone smiled and said hello to me as I sat quietly enjoying the forest and the lake, the ambience of singing birds and quaking aspen leaves.

Seeing a young mixed couple going around for the second time, I asked what they'd think if they knew there was a move afoot to allow a greater corporate presence in our parks.

"What?!" they blurted simultaneously. "That's dumb. We come out here to get away from the corporate world."

Exactly.

As we celebrate our Independence from Britain and all other foreign powers today, let us remember the words of our founding father Thomas Jefferson, in one of his last letters:

". . . let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them," he said of Independence Day and the Declaration of Independence in June 1826. He died the following month.

Let us demand of Congress that they allocate the budget required by the Park Service to appropriately care for our Crown Jewels. I have no issue with corporations contributing to the support of our parks, but God forbid that they have an ego big enough or rude enough to want to impose their "brand" on our collective treasures. For shame! Whatever else happens, it is our patriotic duty to defend our parks "for the benefit of this and future generations."

Happy Independence Day!

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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How being Down Under helped me see Brexit the right way up
I've just arrived back from Australia, where I was sharing Forum for the Future's work at the first Sustainable Brands conference in the region.

I left London on the day that 52% of the UK population voted to leave the EU. I left with a very heavy heart, dumbstruck that such a body blow to one of the most important integration projects since World War 2 had been delivered. For the next few days I would wake (admittedly, at totally the wrong time for my UK-based body clock) with a profound sense of loss, which took a few seconds to pin-point to the outcome of the vote.

I now realise that travelling to the other side of the world has actually helped me begin to make sense of what's happened, and, critically, begin to understand what needs to happen next.

First: We ignore inequality at our peril. The voting demographics of the Referendum reflected a huge divide between the haves and have-nots, the urban and rural or ex-industrial populations, and age groups. London has become a prosperous, multi-cultural bubble, disconnected from other parts of the UK despite being the home of its national government.

Even though my family comes from the Midlands, where the Leave campaign romped home, I failed to really notice - by that I mean internalise - that the high street of the town I grew up in is now reduced to a string of charity shops, and that when a job is advertised in the new, local Costa Cafe, hundreds apply, and that job goes to someone with a Master's degree. I failed to notice that the digital revolution is just mumbo jumbo to a vast swathe of over-60s, and has delivered precisely nothing for them.

Contrast this with Australia, where huge efforts are now underway to deliver a meaningful reconciliation plan, designed to address the huge inequalities that exist between the native aboriginal people, and within the broader Australian society. Plans such as the one being delivered by Bupa, the global healthcare company. Australia is taking inequality very seriously.

Without facing inequality head on, any hope we have of delivering broader environmental progress is probably doomed.

What next? We need to ensure that action taken by business, NGOs, government and civil society is guided by goals that deliver simultaneously for all strata of society and the environment. Which is why in these turbulent times, the Sustainable Development Goals have never been more important.

Second: A functioning, progressive national government is useful, but not essential for progress towards sustainable development. Cut scene back to Australia, where for two years, from September 2013 to September 2015, it was governed by Tony Abbott, a climate denier who famously described the science around climate change as 'crap'. During this time, some of the passionate sustainability champions I met in Sydney, described how they didn't feel comfortable sharing their profession with 'non-susty' types, and just kept quiet about what they did for a living.

And yet, whilst they stayed under the political radar, they remained busy. Busy promoting renewable technology as the sensible transition pathway for a coal-dependent economy, busy innovating and testing sustainability solutions, such as bugs that turn waste into fuel. Busy creating a movement of sustainability advocates, who, now that Mr Abbott is gone, are unleashing their energy and passion with vigour on Australia's businesses and government.

The political vacuum that is emerging in the UK (which some may argue has been here for some time), is no reason not to push ahead with a powerful sustainable development agenda. Businesses remain committed, so is civil society (well, elements of it), and nothing has changed for the NGOs.

What next? We must harness the levers for change that remain as strong as they were before June 24th. To do this, we need to employ systems thinking and innovation to understand our sustainability challenges from the inside - examining the linkages and interactions between and among different actors to diagnose exactly where the barriers and opportunities for collaborative action lie, and how best to push those levers to accelerate change.

We will continue to push ahead with our global initiatives that bring stakeholders together to transform entire systems that we all depend on - these include the Protein Challenge 2040, Cotton 2040, the Living Grid and the Net Positive Project. We will harness the energy of business, civil society and others, and leave a spare seat for national government, hoping that sometime soon they may want to focus on progress, rather than each other.

Third: Even if, and maybe when, the button that triggers Article 50 is pushed, the UK is still part of a global economy. Here's my last reflection from Australia: It is a very long way away from anywhere. It has access to all the resources it needs. It could theoretically exist as an isolated outpost in the Southern Hemisphere.

But! We live in an interconnected society. An interconnected economy. As Forum's Futures work has demonstrated time and again, one decision made today has multiple long-term ramifications that echo across the world. Even if project globalisation halted tomorrow, there are global links that connect us in ways that didn't exist before. Perhaps these links will burst apart under isolationist-type pressures. I doubt it though.

For me, this is why the Leave campaign argument that leaving the EU would give the UK more control over its economic destiny was such piffle. The UK may well leave the EU, but its complex web of connections - societal, economic and environmental - don't recognise state borders and won't all get sucked into the waves of the English Channel. These connections are strong. What binds us unites us, and it's folly to think otherwise.

What next? Yes, the UK will feel the EU's wrath at this ridiculous vote, but the UK is part of a system. We don't exist in isolation. While elements that bind part of our system might weaken, others can grow stronger. At Forum we will be concentrating on harnessing the power of parts of the system that are passionate for progressive change. From citizen innovators to enlightened trusts and foundations, which happen to be in the UK but are certainly part of a global economy, these are individuals and organisations that won't let a miscalculated vote undermine the positive forces for change. And neither will Forum.

So, thank you Australia. Thank you to all the wonderful people I met. Being Down Under for a few days has definitely helped me see things the right way up, and I now face the challenging times ahead for the UK with a renewed sense of optimism.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Join The Fight to Defend Our Oceans

Interview: Scott Eastwood

Words: Lily Silverton

Today is officially World Oceans Day; a global, UN endorsed, annual celebration of our planet's most unexplored territory. Launched in 2003, it aims to raise awareness of the importance of the ocean and inspire us to change how we treat it.

Covering more than seventy percent of the planet, and providing more than half the oxygen we breathe and much of the food we eat (not to mention some of the best holidays of our lives), the ocean is essential to the health and survival of all life on Earth.

But it's in real trouble. Fourteen billion lbs. of rubbish is dumped in the ocean every year (most of it plastic), and projections reveal that in thirty years time it will contain more lbs of plastic than fish. Eighty-five percent of the world's ocean fisheries have been categorised as fully exploited or depleted, with dangerous practices such a bottom trawling - an industrial fishing method where a large net with heavy weights is dragged across the seafloor, scooping up everything in its path - are wiping out entire species and inflicting huge damage on the life-supporting seabed and coral.

This isn't some small hazard that is way off in the distant future. We are talking about a real, existential threat that is emerging right now. We need to affect change, and quick.

One brand trying to do so is Davidoff Cool Water (fitting, since the scent was originally inspired by the scent of the ocean). For the past four years they have partnered with the National Geographic Society's Pristine Seas project, an initiative that seeks to find, survey and protect the last wild areas of the ocean. Led by Dr. Enric Sala - a man with possibly the best job title ever: National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence - the project works towards a global goal of protecting 10% of the world's oceans by 2020.

National Geographic and Davidoff's "LoveTheOcean" campaign launched in 2012 and has since supported fourteen Pristine Seas expeditions across the globe, from the Galapagos to Mozambique, and helped protect a total of 1,713,518 sq. kilometres of the ocean.

Every year, from June to September, National they initiate social community projects to help further raise awareness and inspire action. So I travelled to the beautiful Black's Beach near San Diego to accompany actor Scott (son of Clint) Eastwood on a beach clean up. A keen surfer and swimmer, getting involved in LoveTheOcean was a "no brainer", he says.

"I grew up between California and Hawaii, so the ocean is my home. It's a really special place for me. You get in and everything else melts away - when I'm away from it I feel a little lost," he tells me, picking up a battered plastic water bottle from the sand. "It's harder for people that don't live by it to understand that all the plastics and trash get washed straight to the oceans. I see the impact on a daily basis."

Plastics are one of the leading causes of marine environment destruction and death - 1 million seabirds and 100,000 sea mammals are killed by ocean pollution from plastics every year. "The ocean is the giver of life," Scott says. "It's really important that we look at this as a global problem, not something we can ignore. We drink from it, we eat from it - we need to take action." And it's not just big companies and businesses that can impact change. "Every time you chose to not buy bottled water or to pick up a piece of trash, you're casting your vote," says Scott. "Of course big companies and big business need to make better, more positive choices, but we all have the power and we're all a part of this."

"It starts with one. Only one. We're only on this planet for a short time. How are you going to leave it? How are you going to make a difference?"

Join The Fight to Defend Our Oceans

1. Ditch the plastic

Carry a reusable water bottle, store food in non-disposable containers, bring your own cloth tote or other reusable bag when shopping and always remember to recycle when possible!

2. Eat the right fish

Purchase MSC certified seafood to help to protect our marine environment and ensure that seafood can be enjoyed for many years to come.

3. Holiday tips

Explore and appreciate the ocean without interfering with wildlife or removing rocks and coral. Encourage your friends and family to respect the marine environment and participate in local beach cleanups. Join the movement!

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Meatless Monday: The Revolution Will Not Come With Meal Kits
Today we celebrate Independence Day, that time a few hundred years ago when our forefathers broke with British tyrants. Their revolution took nerve and hard work, but it turned out okay. So okay, in fact, it's time to try it again. This time, we're not taking aim at the Brits - they've got enough problems. We need to take aim at ourselves.

We're obese. Not pretty. Not healthy. Not cheap. The annual health costs are between $150 and $200 billion. Our forefathers didn't have a revolution in order for us to stuff ourselves to death. The new revolution needs to happen in the kitchen.

Don't believe me? Here's some more off-putting stats. According to a recent study:

-- Over 60 percent of overweight participants say their food portions are too large.

-- More than half say their family doesn't know how to choose healthy food.

-- Over 40 percent of respondents say they'd eat healthier, except fast food and food delivery make it easier not to.

-- The same number say they're too busy to eat healthy.

As a result, most Americans eat products, not food.

Spoiler alert -- the study was conducted and funded by Home Chef, the meal kit company, or rather one of many meal kit companies. Touted as the new great market disrupt, meal kit subscription markets itself as home cooking with the sourcing and sous cheffing done for you. You pay, and the components of your favorite foods come pre-portioned, made-to-measure, cleverly packaged and shipped to your door. Some assembly required. Combine the contents in the boxes and bags, simmer and voila, dinner.

Anything that gets you in the kitchen is good. Yet I'm conflicted about meal kits. I wonder about price point. Safe, accessible, healthy food should be accessible for all, not just those who can afford it. I wonder about other costs, too, including the amount of packaging waste it produces. When you factor in the carbon involved in shipping, I question sustainability.

Perhaps Mark Bittman has questions, too. The VB6 author and former Opinionator left the New York Times for the vegan meal kit startup Purple Carrot . . . only to leave it a few months later.

Most of all, though, I wonder about us. I can't think of anything more essential to our daily wellbeing and our overall humanity and socialization than cooking -- and we outsource it. Is it really so hard to open a can of beans that we have to pay someone else to do it for us?

Beautifully-styled food and celeb chefs make great entertainment but they're as far from real, everyday eats as meal kits are. Worse, they contribute to the lie that you're unqualified to cook. If you can read this, you've eaten enough food by now to get a good sense of it. You know more about making it than you think you do.

The revolution will not come with an app or a kit. Rather than outsourcing, empower yourself. Kitchen literacy, from sourcing your food to preparing it, is the real declaration of independence.

Fireworks Black Bean and Mango Salad

This salad is so quick and easy, it barely qualifies as a recipe. But it explodes with pizzazz, pairing the sweet summer burst mango (let's hear it for fresh, seasonal and local -- summer means mango season in South Florida) with a zing of chili. Black beans add fiber for fullness and protein because that's what your body wants. Besides, everything works with basic black. All this and it's fat-free, too.

Serve atop the fresh local farmers market greens of your choice.

1 jalapeno, minced (wear gloves when handling chilies -- really. Yes, even you.)
1 red pepper, diced
2 ribs celery, chopped fine
2 15-ounce cans black beans, rinsed and drained (or 4 cups cooked black beans)
1 teaspoon cumin
juice of 1/2 lime
2 mangos, peeled and diced
1 bunch cilantro, chopped
sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste
1/4 cup toasted pepitas (pumpkin seeds) for garnish, optional but adding fabulous crunch, not to mention goodly amounts of manganese and magnesium
3-4 cups fresh greens like spinach, arugula or frisbee

In a large bowl, gently mix together jalapeno, diced red pepper and celery. Add the black beans and combine well.

Add the cumin and the lime and toss to coat.

Just before serving, add the mangos and chopped cilantro. Season to taste. Place atop greens and serve at once, garnishing with toasted pepitas, if you like (and you will).

Serves 4 to 6.

More at soulfulvegan.com

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Kalevi Kull: Censorship & Royal Society Evo Event

"2016-07-03-1467578670-1931893-KaleviKull.JPG"

Founders of the Copenhagen-Tartu School of Biosemiotics at a Seminar in Estonia: (l-r) KALEVI KULL, Claus Emmeche, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Frederik Stjernfelt

Biosemiotics pioneer Kalevi Kull has sent the following letter to me in response to one of the organizers of the upcoming Royal Society public meeting on paradigm shift attempting to censor my coverage of the event.

Kalevi Kull plans to attend the November gathering in London.

Dear Suzan,

Well, I really interpret the letter you refer to in your article ["Censorpship & Upcoming Royal Society Evo Meeting"] as evidence that this IS a paradigm shift. Because it focuses not on the biological theory itself, but on social matters in academia. And this is a serious hint. Because if this kind of deep change happens, then very many scientists face a problem of how to survive this change because the new dominant model they would like to accept results in many of their previous writings losing much of their value. Nobody wants to belong to the party of losers. One of the best strategies in such a case is evidently an interpretation of the change as a gradual accumulation of knowledge while their work has always been at the cutting edge.

[Following is the censorship email Kull refers to above -- it was not written by Denis Noble:

"Could I request that you stop referring to the forthcoming RS-BA meeting ("New Trends in Evolutionary Biology: Biological, Philosophical and Social Science Perspectives"), and to the extended evolutionary synthesis, more generally, as in some way advocating a "paradigm shift". Such language is both misleading (the vast majority of scientists working towards an extended synthesis do not seek revolutionary change in neo-Darwinism) and counterproductive (such talk undermines calm scientific discussion by creating an unnecessarily emotive and antagonistic atmosphere). I view the Kuhnian model as superseded long ago: the data suggests that sciences rarely if ever change through "revolutions". Lakatos' framework of "research programmes" offers a more up-to-date, accurate and useful conceptualization of (gradual and progressive) scientific change. The extended evolutionary synthesis is best regarded as an alternative research programme, entirely complementary to orthodox evolutionary biology. Talk of "paradigm shift" gives the false impression that the differences amongst evolutionary biologists are far more extreme than they actually are. . . ."]

[Kalevi Kull's correspondence continues:] Is this a radical change in biology what is going on now? The contrast is quite clear, if we look at how evolutionary innovation is described. Either innovation begins from a new mutation, followed by newly behaving phenotype, which is amplified by natural selection (this is what the neo-Darwinian model suggests), or innovation begins from a change of function (with habitat choice, or resource choice, etc.) first stabilised by epigenetic or ecological inheritance and followed by fixation due to mutational noise (which is what the new model states, let us call it the post-Darwinan model).

That is: either a genetic change first, followed by functional change, or a functional (epigenetic, i.e., non-genetic) change first, followed by genetic changes.

The details of this contrast are described, for instance, in my work "Adaptive Evolution without Natural Selection" published in the Linnean Society journal. . . but there are many scholars who share this model. That paper provides a row of references. Isn't it a deep contrast, and a possible move from one to another, a radical change of the major model of evolution?

However, if indeed one knows all the dramatic history of the theory of evolution. . .
Here's a sketch. Estonia has been described as a country with one of the richest political experiences. We also see this in our history of Darwinism.

In the 19th century, Tartu University was one of the leading German-language universities, and one of the leading critics of Darwin was working at Tartu University -- Karl Ernst von Baer, the founder of developmental biology. Simultaneously, one of the very first courses in the world and best textbooks written about Darwin's-time Darwinism was provided by a professor at the same university, Georg Seidlitz.

Around the turn of the century, before WWI, Tartu University was a Russian-language university, and Darwinism was soon popularised as supporting early socialist ideas. Soon after, together with advances in genetics, evolutionary theory was interpreted as a basis for eugenics (also used in this way by national socialists in Germany before WWII).

Then Estonia was annexed by Russia, and after the WWII for more than a decade it meant the influence of vulgar Darwinism (also called 'creative Darwinism' at that time), as propagated by Lysenko (yes, he also praised Darwin, he just did not like genetics).

In the 1970s and 80s, all students in the Soviet Union had to learn how Darwinism goes hand in hand with Marxism, meaning a good connection with the 'synthetic theory of evolution', which was a synonym for neo-Darwinism. . .

Simultaneously, a radical non-Darwinism was also developing within certain circles of Soviet biologists, who took it from the theory of Nomogenesis of Lev Berg and his follower Alexander Lyubischev. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, an outgrowth of neo-Darwinism called sociobiology became a dominant view for many, particularly among zoologists. . .

If one has read all this and been able to understand why all these scholars had the views they had, it is hardly possible to describe this history as gradual improvement of a model, continuous extension of a synthesis. There have rather been different paradigms existing and developing in parallel. Most of the time just one of them was strongly dominant over the other. And since evolutionary theory has almost always been tied to some ideological battles, its changes were not limited by scientific discoveries.

Nevertheless, we have good friends and colleagues whose views about evolution we do not share. But should we therefore be less strict in our formulations about our views? No, that would mean giving up our understanding. Good teachers wouldn't do so.

Science, deeply speaking, is the mutual help in understanding. We should help each other as friends; nobody is understanding everything. Keeping this in mind, the best way to make our thoughts clear is to use formulations that do not hide meaning. A better understanding is not always an extension of the earlier model, sometimes it is an alternative.

In other words -- summarizing -- claiming that what is going on is just an ongoing extension of Darwinism would be equivalent to saying that Einsteinian physics is just an extended Newtonianism. Why not, one may describe it so. However, the Einsteinian change became a classic example of a paradigm shift, for Kuhn. . . .

I like very much your writings.

Warm wishes

Kalevi

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Mystery of Our Moon's Ancient Dynamo--"Generated a Powerful Magnetic Field 3.6 Billion Years Ago" (Weekend Feature)

Exactly what powered the dynamo remains a mystery. One possibility is that the lunar dynamo was self-sustaining, like Earth's: As the planet has cooled, its liquid core has moved in response, sustaining the dynamo and the magnetic field it produces. In the absence of a long-lived heat supply, most planetary bodies will cool within hundreds of millions of years of formation.

MIT's research on an ancient lunar rock in 2011 suggested that the moon harbored the long-lived dynamo — a molten, convecting core of liquid metal that generated a strong magnetic field 3.56 billion years ago. The findings point to a dynamo that lasted much longer than scientists previously thought, and suggest that an alternative energy source may have powered the dynamo.

The magnetic field existed until at least 3.56 billion years ago, an MIT study suggests — about 160 million years longer than scientists had thought. “It seems like the lunar dynamo lasted very late in the Moon's history,” says Benjamin Weiss, a palaeomagnetics expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. “That's a very surprising result.” Weiss and his colleagues, led by MIT planetary scientist Clément Suavet, report the findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.

“The moon has this protracted history that's surprising,” says Weiss, an associate professor of planetary science at MIT. “This provides evidence of a fundamentally new way of making a magnetic field in a planet a new power source.”

The MIT paper is the latest piece in a puzzle that planetary scientists have been working out for decades. In 1969, the Apollo 11 mission brought the first lunar rocks back to Earth — souvenirs from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's historic moonwalk. Since then, scientists have probed the rocky remnants for clues to the moon's history. They soon discovered that many rocks were magnetized, which suggested that the moon was more than a cold, undifferentiated pile of space rubble. Instead, it may have harbored a convecting metallic core that produced a large magnetic field, recorded in the moon's rocks.

A dynamo still exists within Earth because heat, produced by the radioactive decay of elements within the planet, maintains the core's convection. Models have shown that if a lunar dynamo were powered solely by cooling of the moon's interior, it would have been able to sustain itself only for a few hundred million years after the moon formed — dissipating by 4.2 billion years ago, at the very latest.

However, Weiss and his colleagues found some surprising evidence in a bit of lunar basalt dubbed 10020. The Apollo 11 astronauts collected the rock at the southwestern edge of the Sea of Tranquility; scientists believe it was likely ejected from deep within the moon 100 million years ago, after a meteor impact. The group confirmed previous work dating the rock at 3.7 billion years old, and found that it was magnetized — a finding that clashes with current dynamo models.

Weiss collaborated with researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the Berkeley Geochronology Center, who determined the rock's age using radiometric dating. After a rock forms, a radioactive potassium isotope decays to a stable argon isotope at a known rate. The group measured the ratio of potassium to argon in a small piece of the rock, using this information to ascertain that the rock cooled from magma 3.7 billion years ago.

Weiss and graduate student Erin Shea then measured the rock's magnetization, and found that the rock was magnetized. However, this didn't necessarily mean that the rock, and the moon, had a dynamo-generated magnetic field 3.7 billion years ago: Subsequent impacts may have heated the rock and reset its magnetization.

To discard this possibility, the team examined whether the rock experienced any significant heating since its ejection onto the moon's surface. Again, they looked to isotopes of potassium and argon, finding that the only heating the rock had experienced since it was ejected onto the lunar surface came from simple exposure to the sun's rays.

“It's basically been in cold storage for 3.7 billion years, essentially undisturbed,” Weiss says. “It retains a beautiful magnetization record.”

Weiss says the rock's evidence supports a new mechanism of dynamo generation that was proposed by scientists at University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC). This hypothesis posits that the moon's dynamo may have been powered by Earth's gravitational pull. Billions of years ago, the moon was much closer to Earth than it is today; terrestrial gravity may have had a stirring effect within the moon's core, keeping the liquid metal moving even after the lunar body had cooled.

Francis Nimmo, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at UCSC and one of the researchers who originally put forth the new dynamo theory, says Weiss' evidence provides scientists with a new picture of the moon's evolution.

“We generally assume that cooling is the main mechanism for driving a dynamo anywhere,” says Nimmo, who was not involved in the study. “This lunar data is telling us that other mechanisms may also play a role, not just at the moon, but elsewhere, too.”

The Daily Galaxy via Massachusetts Institute of Technology and nature.com

"Search Older Super-Earths for Detectable Life" --Their Oceans Can Last for Billions of Years

"A Galaxy of Earth-like Planets" --The Kepler Mission Revolution

Today's 'Galaxy' Insight --The Search for Habitable Planets

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LISTEN: Jupiter's Eerie 'Roar' as Juno Spacecraft Enters Gas Giant's Magnetic Field --"Strongest in Solar System"

Listen to Jupiter's strange voice as the robotic explorer moves into the magnetic field and enters into a polar orbit around the gas giant. "We have over five years of spaceflight experience and only 10 days to Jupiter orbit insertion," said Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "It is a great feeling to put all the interplanetary space in the rearview mirror and have the biggest planet in the solar system in our windshield."

In three days, July 4th, the spacecraft Juno will arrive at Jupiter, the culmination of a five-year, billion-dollar journey. It's mission: to peer deep inside the gas giant and unravel its origin and evolution. One of the biggest mysteries surrounding Jupiter is how it generates its powerful magnetic field, the strongest in the solar system.

One theory is that about halfway to Jupiter's core, the pressures and temperatures become so intense that the hydrogen that makes up 90 percent of the planet -- molecular gas on Earth -- looses hold of its electrons and begins behaving like a liquid metal. Oceans of liquid metallic hydrogen surrounding Jupiter's core would explain its powerful magnetic field.

But how and when does this transition from gas to liquid metal occur? How does it behave? Researchers hope that Juno will shed some light on this exotic state of hydrogen -- but one doesn't need to travel all the way to Jupiter to study it.

Four hundred million miles away, in a small, windowless room in the basement of Lyman Laboratory on Oxford Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there was, for a fraction of a fraction of a second, a small piece of Jupiter.

Earlier this year, in an experiment about five-feet long, Harvard University researchers say they observed evidence of the abrupt transition of hydrogen from liquid insulator to liquid metal. It is one of the first times such a transition has ever been observed in any experiment.

"This is planetary science on the bench," said Mohamed Zaghoo, the NASA Earth & Space Science Fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). "The question of how hydrogen transitions into a metallic state -- whether that is an abrupt transition or not -- has huge implications for planetary science. How hydrogen transitions inside Jupiter, for example, says a lot about the evolution, the temperature and the structure of these gas giants interiors."

In the experiment, Zaghoo, Ashkan Salamat, and senior author Isaac Silvera, the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences, recreated the extreme pressures and temperatures of Jupiter by squeezing a sample of hydrogen between two diamond tips, about 100 microns wide, and firing short bursts of lasers of increasing intensity to raise the temperature.

This experimental setup is significantly smaller and cheaper than other current techniques to generate metallic hydrogen, most of which rely on huge guns or lasers that generate shock waves to heat and pressurize hydrogen.

The transition of the liquid to metallic hydrogen happens too quickly for human eyes to observe and the sample lasts only a fraction of a second before it deteriorates. So, instead of watching the sample itself for evidence of the transition, the team watched lasers pointed at the sample. When the phase transition occurred, the lasers abruptly reflected.

"At some point, the hydrogen abruptly transitioned from an insulating, transparent state, like glass, to a shiny metallic state that reflected light, like copper, gold or any other metal," Zaghoo said. "Because this experiment, unlike shock wave experiments, isn't destructive, we could run the experiment continuously, doing measurements and monitoring for weeks and months to learn about the transition."

"This is the simplest and most fundamental atomic system, yet modern theory has large variances in predictions for the transition pressure," Silvera said. "Our observation serves as a crucial guide to modern theory."

The results represent a culmination of decades of research by the Silvera group. The data collected could begin to answer some of the fundamental questions about the origins of solar systems.

Metallic hydrogen also has important ramifications here on Earth, especially in energy and materials science. "A lot of people are talking about the hydrogen economy because hydrogen is combustibly clean and it's very abundant," said Zaghoo. "If you can compress hydrogen into high density, it has a lot of energy compacted into it."

"As a rocket fuel, metallic hydrogen would revolutionize rocketry as propellant an order of magnitude more powerful than any known chemical," said Silvera. "This could cut down the time it takes to get to Mars from nine months to about two months, transforming prospects of human space endeavors."

Metallic hydrogen could be used to make room temperature or even higher than room temperature super-conductors. The Juno mission goes hand-in-hand with laboratory experiments into metallic hydrogen, Zaghoo said."The measurements of Jupiter's magnetic field that Juno will be collecting is directly related to our data," he said. "We're not in competition with NASA but, in some ways, we got to Jupiter first."

In the Gemini Observatory image at the top of the page, white indicates cloud features at relatively high altitudes; blue indicates lower cloud structures; and red represents still deeper cloud features. The two red spots appear more white than red, because their tops hover high above the surrounding clouds. Also prominent is the polar stratospheric haze, which makes Jupiter bright near the pole. Other tiny white spots are regions of high clouds, like towering thunderheads. In visible light Jupiter looks orangish, but in the near-infrared the blue color is due to strong absorption features. The blue mid-level clouds are also closest to what one would see in a visual light image.

The Daily Galaxy via NASA and Harvard University

Puzzle of Saturn's "Great White Spots" Solved --"Water was the Missing Piece"

Destination: Jupiter! --One Year Left Till Juno Expedition's Capture Orbit

Dwarf Planet Ceres Mysterious Bright Spots Baffle NASA

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Enigma of Light in Our Universe --"Some of It Could Be Coming From an Unknown Exotic Source" (Weekend Feature)

"The most exciting possibility is that the missing photons are coming from some exotic new source, not galaxies or quasars at all," said Neal Katz of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "For example, the mysterious dark matter, which holds galaxies together but has never been seen directly, could itself decay and ultimately be responsible for this extra light. You know it's a crisis when you start seriously talking about decaying dark matter!"

"It's as if you're in a big, brightly-lit room, but you look around and see only a few 40-watt light bulbs," says Carnegie Institute's Juna Kollmeier. "Where is all that light coming from? It's missing from our census."

The vast reaches of empty space between galaxies are bridged by tendrils of hydrogen and helium, which can be used as a precise "light meter." In a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of scientists finds that the light from known populations of galaxies and quasars is not nearly enough to explain observations of intergalactic hydrogen. The difference is a stunning 400 percent.

"The great thing about a 400% discrepancy is that you know something is really wrong," commented co-author David Weinberg of The Ohio State University. "We still don't know for sure what it is, but at least one thing we thought we knew about the present day universe isn't true."

Strangely, this mismatch only appears in the nearby, relatively well-studied cosmos. When telescopes focus on galaxies billions of light years away (and therefore are viewing the universe billions of years in its past), everything seems to add up. The fact that this accounting works in the early universe but falls apart locally has scientists puzzled.

The light in question consists of highly energetic ultraviolet photons that are able to convert electrically neutral hydrogen atoms into electrically charged ions. The two known sources for such ionizing photons are quasars—powered by hot gas falling onto supermassive black holes over a million times the mass of the sun—and the hottest young stars.

Observations indicate that the ionizing photons from young stars are almost always absorbed by gas in their host galaxy, so they never escape to affect intergalactic hydrogen. But the number of known quasars is far lower than needed to produce the required light.

"Either our accounting of the light from galaxies and quasars is very far off, or there's some other major source of ionizing photons that we've never recognized," Kollmeier said. "We are calling this missing light the photon underproduction crisis. But it's the astronomers who are in crisis—somehow or other, the universe is getting along just fine."

The mismatch emerged from comparing supercomputer simulations of intergalactic gas to the most recent analysis of observations from Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. "The simulations fit the data beautifully in the early universe, and they fit the local data beautifully if we're allowed to assume that this extra light is really there," explained Ben Oppenheimer a co-author from the University of Colorado. "It's possible the simulations do not reflect reality, which by itself would be a surprise, because intergalactic hydrogen is the component of the Universe that we think we understand the best."

The Daily Galaxy via the Carnegie Institution.

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Mass Fish Deaths in Vietnam Highlight the Country's Press Freedom Problem
MELBOURNE, Australia -- The stink from Vietnam's fish kill scandal -- which left some 70 tons of dead fish scattered across the beaches of four of the country's provinces and fishermen out of work -- is symptomatic of something greater than worries about food security and the environment: access to information and the ability to distribute it.

On June 30, almost three months since the mass fish deaths began, Vietnam's newspapers all began printing the same story: Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Corp., a subsidiary of Taiwan's Formosa Plastics Group, blamed by many for the incident, had accepted responsibility for the industrial pollution that had caused the environmental fiasco and would pay $500 million in compensation. The government of Vietnam, which had been silent for much of this, also noted the company was responsible due to a toxic spill. Earlier in the month there was progress towards a verdict but no confirmation, as Tuoi Tre newspaper wrote:

On June 2, the government held a press meeting to announce that the cause behind the deaths had been identified, but it was being challenged by experts in order to ensure it was based on scientific, legal, and objective grounds before a final conclusion was confirmed.

While the public waited for answers and the tourism industry suffered, the press was also curtailed. As the New York Times mentioned in its reporting of the incident: "Officials said that it had been necessary to restrict news coverage of the disaster while the investigation was underway." This wasn't entirely unusual for the country whose journalists often face obstacles while doing their jobs, but it did highlight a situation that doesn't appear to be getting better anytime soon. Vietnam has consistently been ranked poorly for press freedom, and the fish death debacle shows recent changes in the Vietnamese press: environmental journalism is now more tightly watched as the public becomes more aware of problems -- and more likely to organize. In the wake of this scandal, the freedom to report thoroughly on environmental issues might be abating, just as it gains traction in the public commons in Vietnam.

In fact the reaction Thursday to the scandal served as a coup, of sorts, and a rarity in governmental response to similar offenses in the past. Going forward, the level of follow up reporting will determine more about how much press freedom will be allowed in these large-scale environmental cases with their mix of government oversight, foreign money and public anger at pollution. But for right now this new government line, and fine of half a billion in compensation, is encouraging in comparison to the wrist-slap fines of the past.

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Protesters in Hanoi demand cleaner water after mass fish deaths. (Nguyen Huy Kham/ Reuters)

Up to now environmental and food safety issues have been allowable investigative stalwarts of the press for a while, likely because they're much safer topics than tales of actual, detailed official corruption or government mismanagement. But once somewhat controversial issues get enough public attention, coverage often lessens or is at least more carefully managed. Such was the case with our fish kill story, which made international headlines as well as people took to the streets in protest for the lack of accountability and information for this disaster.

But this is nothing new. In fact, those critical of the government can be locked up under three different sections of the criminal code: 88, 79 and 258. Vietnam's press is state-owned, but each news outlet is owned by different government organizations, rather than by the Communist Party directly. Instead, directives are issued and there is also a good measure of self-censorship; editors and journalists tend to know when a story or topic is incendiary. This 2008 paper, written as social media was just taking off, covers how Vietnam's press operates quite well.

When Vietnam's fish kill protests began over two months ago, people were angry at the lack of government action, the cavalier response from a spokesman for Taiwanese company Formosa assumed responsible for the pollution and worried for both food security and the livelihoods of those affected. By early May, protesters in Ho Chi Minh City numbered in the many hundreds or more, and were not simply activists but ordinary people, too.

What, for journalists, was largely apolitical investigative work now has a stronger political background thanks to a growing number of young activists and a more general unease over both pollution and food security in the population.

Before the news of the chemical spill and the fine broke this week, Formosa built a 10.6 billion dollar steel mill in Ha Tinh, a small, poor province south of Hanoi where a large amount of the fish washed up. The building of the plant was a coup for the provincial government that had lobbied hard.

Back then it was said that the piles of fish washed ashore were apparently the result of a one-time accidental dump of pollution in the sea via an underwater pipeline several miles offshore, according to initial press reports. Formosa spokesman's initial statement at a press conference stating that Vietnam would have to "choose" between a steel plant and catching fish and seafood set off a social media storm of people "choosing" fish.

Throughout the ordeal, the government blocked much reporting on the issue, citing its "sensitive nature" and so people turned to other avenues to express their frustration and share information. As Vietnam Right Now wrote on June 11, "With demonstrations banned, and the media firmly under state control, frustration at the government's handling of the mass fish deaths in central provinces has increasingly been restricted to social media."

"vietnam

Protester displays picture of the mass of dead fish on the shores of Vietnam. (Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty)

In May, about a month after the fish stink began, I wrote on U.S. President Barack Obama's first visit to Vietnam for The WorldPost and Australia's Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based foreign policy think tank. The American leader received a rapturous welcome and the public rancor over the fish saga evaporated at a time when things could have been uncomfortable for the government -- and gave the country a boost in positive press. President Obama's dinnertime trip to eat bun cha, a pork dish with noodles, was the headline of the day. "They've taken a break from choosing fish, but even a president can't be a distraction forever," I wrote in Lowy's Interpreter blog,

Sure enough, on June 5, protests and arrests began again. Pham Doan Trang, a longtime journalist-turned-activist, chronicled the events in a group email to journalists and academics. Trang was one of the activists slated to meet Obama during his Vietnam trip, but was prevented from doing so after the car she was covertly traveling in from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi was stopped by police. She wrote that post-Obama protests were more sparsely attended, to the point that in HCMC police outnumbered protesters. She also noted that many protesters were dragged away, beaten and interrogated by police and security forces, who used methods she likened to old Soviet techniques.

This social media aspect of journalism can have the effect of distortion: untruths can be propagated in a blogosphere unrestricted by editorial standards. Even so, the reporting feels more honest than the official line printed in the papers.

Environmental sagas have made for compelling reporting in Vietnam over the past years, but as discourse moves into the civil society and social media realm, and interest in environmental issues increases, the government attitude towards them is changing and what, for journalists, was largely apolitical investigative work now has a stronger political background thanks to a growing number of young activists and a more general unease over both pollution and food security in the population.

Luong Nguyen An Dien, a Vietnamese journalist who recently returned after a stint at Columbia University's school of journalism, told me, "Now social media has boomed in Vietnam, and the authorities are increasingly wary of public sentiment there. To them, any environmental issue could be politicized. The fish kill is just an example."

Despite the crackdown from the government, reporters still usually report on sensitive issues until the subject gets too hot via social media. This social media aspect of journalism can have the effect of distortion: untruths can be propagated in a blogosphere unrestricted by editorial standards. Even so, the reporting feels more honest than the official line printed in the papers, which often go through screening and censorship by Ministry of Information and Communications.

"vietnam

A boy looks at a dead fish on a beach in Quang Trach district in the central coastal province of Quang Binh. (STR/AFP/Getty)

Online environmental organization started to gain traction in Vietnam in 2009, when disparate groups came together to criticize the government's plans for bauxite mines in the ecologically delicate Central Highlands region. That they were Chinese-run only made people angrier. Citizens organized a campaign via Facebook that took the government by surprise and the site was intermittently blocked (though never officially "banned") for some time after. The same year, The Committee to Protect Journalists named Vietnam in the top "10 Worst Countries to Be a Blogger," following the detention of a blogger for her coverage of territorial issues between China and Vietnam.

In the past few years young activists are doing more than talking but actually criticizing the government. When Hanoi's city government announced a tremendous cull of the city's beautiful old trees -- all made from valuable wood -- young people organized online, and protested. Some protests quickly turned violent.

Dien, the Vietnamese journalist, remembers the last Taiwanese environmental scandal, when in 2008, MSG producer Vedan left a 10 kilometer section of the Thi Vai River in Dong Nai province ecologically "dead." There was anger -- and the story was heavily reported by Vietnamese press -- but apart from those affected, there were few protests and not much online organizing.

As food safety becomes a strong preoccupation, the environmental movement is going to pick up steam. And the freedom to report on it might be waning -- for now at least.

"At the time, the purpose of covering the Vedan case was to sneak through a bigger story -- why the Taiwanese MSG maker could get away with such blatant violations for such a long time.The final outcome fell short of that expectation: Instead it was all about how Vedan finally agreed to compensate Vietnamese farmers out of fear they would face a massive boycott," he said.

Dien has reported on environmental issues in the country as well. Writing for Vietnam Express he questioned why Monsanto, the company responsible for Agent Orange, is receiving such a welcome back into Vietnam after the chemical deforested so much land and led to birth defects in subsequent generations of the Vietnamese population.

This topic has not yet reached the proportions of the fish kill scandal, partly as there are no direct effects: no tons of dead fish. Whether people begin to organize around less immediate threats remains to be seen, but as food safety in general becomes a strong preoccupation, the environmental movement is going to pick up steam. And the freedom to report on it might be waning -- for now at least.

Also on WorldPost:

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Weekend Roundup: Present at the Unraveling
"Present at the Creation" was the title Dean Acheson, the famed American secretary of state from 1949-1953, gave to his memoir, which recounts the vision and construction of the post-World War II institutions of global order such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the trade-opening precursor to the World Trade Organization, and NATO that followed on the heels of the United Nations. In that same era, French diplomat Robert Schuman, considered "the father of Europe," planted the seeds of European integration that have grown for the last several decades into a club of 28 countries with a population of 500 million. Both efforts, aimed at extinguishing the nationalism and protectionism seen as the root cause of world war, fostered the era of globalization now coming to an end. Brexit, like the Trump campaign in the U.S. and the rise of the anti-European Union right on the European continent, marks an historic turn of the tide. Today, we are present at the unraveling of those grand institutions that have outlived their capacity to deliver inclusively and lost the allegiance of their publics.

"Brexit is another demonstration," Craig Calhoun, director of the London School of Economics, writes, "that the big global institutions built in the wake of World War II are no longer able to maintain global order." Popular anger targeted distant and seemingly unaccountable cosmopolitan elites in charge of those institutions for failing to address pressing concerns over immigration and economic dislocation that are part and parcel of interdependence. "Brexit is a rejection of 'Cool Britannia,' the 1990s branding of a cosmopolitan, creative and united Britain as a part of a happy vision of globalization," Calhoun cuttingly quips.

The global order now waning has been the springboard for China's dramatic rise in recent decades. Writing from Beijing, He Yafei worries now that Brexit is only "the first wave of deglobalization" that will "rebalance in the domestic and EU-wide political landscape in favor of those anti-globalization and anti-EU forces." He might add the U.S. as well where Donald Trump this week lashed out at China and trade deals as the cause of America's woes.

The great historical question is what comes next -- a return to nationalism or a leap forward toward responsive new institutions with the capacity and competence to forge a deeper, more inclusive integration that can actually solve the problems at hand? Perpetual suspension in the purgatory between these historic options only fuels highly polarized discontent.

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer puts his finger squarely on the key contradiction behind chaos in Europe: for all the populist anger against "Brussels," the reality is that nation-states still run the show -- not least his own country whose insistence on protracted austerity policies in financially troubled southern Europe has destabilized politics there. "The EU institutions are blamed for all kinds of problems: globalization, immigration, welfare cuts and Thatcherism, youth unemployment, lack of democracy, and much more," he writes from Berlin. "In fact, by preventing the EU from addressing these issues, the national governments -- helpless to tackle them effectively on their own -- have made these problems worse." Also writing from Germany, Green activist Sven Giegold emphasizes Fischer's point. "Like the amputations practiced in medieval medicine," he says, "Brexit is not a cure. In the face of global challenges, European nation-states cannot secure self-determination and stability on their own. Cooperation with the European Union would make nation-states less vulnerable."

Writing from the dispassionate distance of New Delhi, Dhruva Jaishankar views Brexit as "the first major casualty of digital democracy." "Social media, rather than creating connections with people who possess differing points of view and ideologies," he observes, "tends to reinforce prejudice." Rather than being a force for consensus, the widespread use of social media during the Brexit debate spread misinformation and myths, feeding "polarization and gridlock." Writing from Paris, philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, too, sees Brexit as a victory "not of democracy[,] but of demagogy."

This week's horrific suicide attack at Atatürk Airport in Istanbul is yet another indication of how post-World War II institutions have outlived their purpose in the face of new realities. NATO, the defense alliance rooted in the Cold War that ties together Turkey with European states that have also recently been subject to terrorism, is a complete mismatch with the security challenges confronting these countries today. Writing from Istanbul, Behlül Özkan sees the main target of the so-called Islamic State as Turkey's secular democracy because it is the opposite of its idea of a caliphate. Turkish novelist Kaya Genc relates the enveloping mood after the series of recent attacks. "Istanbul as a bridge of cultures belonged to the noughties: the 2010s is the decade of ruptures."

WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones reports personal stories from on the ground in Istanbul about how local residents are reaching out to help the victims and follows the investigation by authorities into Islamic State suspects from post-Soviet states. Dean Obeidallah is upset that the American media does not give the same attention to terror attacks in Muslim-majority places like Istanbul as it does to similar attacks in Paris or Brussels.

"india

Digging for water in India's devastating drought. © Vivek Singh

While headlines from London and Istanbul grip the global attention, a drought in India affecting a staggering 330 million barely registers. Reporting exclusively for The WorldPost from Bundelkhand, a vast rural landscape in north-central India, photojournalist Vivek Singh chronicles the life and death struggle for drops of water in striking black and white images that convey the desperation leading to farmer suicide and mass migration in the country. "As the crisis deepens," Singh says, "the country that celebrated the 1960s agricultural revolution and a resulting boom in production of food grains is now seeing its farmers dying in debt and despair."

In our continuing series on Africa and China presented by Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden, a Nigerian living in Guangzhou asks, "why are Chinese people so racist towards black people?" The two also look at how Chinese ivory smugglers in Namibia are affecting that southern African nation's efforts to curb the illegal trade.

In a thoughtful riposte to a recent interview with "Sapiens" author Yuval Harari in The WorldPost, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains why we creative humans can't accept an algorithmic account of human life based only in intellectual processes. "The history of human cultures," he writes, "is in good part a narrative of our resistance to native algorithms by means of inventions not predicted by those algorithms." No algorithm could have designed the cultivated beauty of these Japanese gardens and landscapes captured by the sensitive aesthetic of photographer Hidenobu Suzuki. Finally, our Singularity series this week profiles a robot that can wash your dishes.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is the National Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's editorial coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

MISSION STATEMENT

The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.

We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.

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Give Zoos A Break And Pay Tribute To Harambe The Gorilla On The One Month Anniversary Of His Death
In my opinion, in regard to the death of Harambe a month after his untimely death, the Cincinnati Zoo made the best decision possible under horrible circumstances.

In the wake of the unfortunate and terribly tragic event at the Zoo, I was invited to participate in a radio interview with The Takeaway, a radio program affiliated with WNYC and Public Radio International.

Jack D'Isidoro, an award-winning freelance multimedia journalist and producer who contributes regularly to the New York Times, reached out to me on May 31st. Unfortunately, I was unable to share my thoughts with his intended audience. I was busy training dogs at my new boarding and enrichment facility in Los Angeles and had missed his email and phone call.

Yesterday, almost a month after Harambe's death, I discovered that I also missed an email alert regarding a post I published in Nat Geo's online editorial news publication on the future of zoos. The piece was cited in a Washington Post article concerning Harambe's fate, which reminded me that nearly a month has passed since we lost this great ape.

Although I did post an article about the tragedy on my public Facebook page hours after it was reported, I never got a chance to share my sentiment publicly. When I heard the news, I was immediately struck by the thought of a zoo having to make such a terrible sacrifice and was grieving for Harambe who I have never even met or knew of. I wanted to let colleagues and FB followers, zoo professionals and activists alike, know of this unfortunate news.

The Washington Post article (http://gmailnews.com/what-harambes-death-means-for-a-critically-endangered-species-of-gorilla-washington-post/) included commentary from a notable zoo historian who I once participated in a radio interview with and Dr. Michael Hutchins, my esteemed colleague and friend, and a prominent zoo and wildlife biologist.

These zoo experts addressed the big picture---the conservation relevance of losing a valuable zoo gorilla. They discussed the impact of the loss of this one animal's potential contribution to the reserve gene pool, which is essentially what a captive population of this critically endangered species represents.

Frankly, the fact that the gorilla is an endangered species still hasn't crossed my mind in regard to this loss of life. This was a beautiful and sentient creature who died at his prime, whether he was in a zoo or free-ranging or contributing to the captive gene pool or not.

I will never have a chance to read and process all the rumor and rhetoric surrounding Harambe that has been generated by the public and the responses from professional experts. However, I keep thinking about him and what a loss this must be for the zoo keepers and staff who cared for him. The staff had to make a horrible life and death decision on his behalf in less than a second. You can't wait for a tranquilizer to take effect when you have to respond in a moment's notice.

To put it in perspective, I once darted an orphaned, 300lb. subadult grizzly bear that I raised from a 9-month-old cub with a syringe pole (similar to a jab stick) while I was standing a few feet away from her at a wildlife sanctuary in Alaska. There was no barrier between us. As she looked the other way, I quickly injected her. I had time on my hands to prepare, no public distraction or interference, and my colleagues from Alaska Department of Fish & Game were on hand to monitor and assist if needed. An unusual and unique circumstance dictated that the animal be tranquilized on exhibit.

However, in a zoo setting far more resources and preparation would go in to such a scheduled chemical immobilization planned for a potentially injurious large animal and any chemical restraint would be conducted behind-the-scenes or before or after visiting hours. Nonetheless, I remember that it felt like a long time had passed before this bear was adequately sedated. In reality, it was at least several minutes.

In Harambe's case, this was an unscheduled and obvious emergency and darting the animal was really not a viable option. Waiting for a tranquilizer to take effect would add substantially more time to an already precarious situation for the boy even if Harambe was indeed protecting him. When an animal receives a remote dart injection, it is typically a surprise to them and they usually don't like it at all. They react as you might react if you were darted with a flying syringe from a great distance. What if he was holding the child and then collapsed on top of him due to the effects of a potent sedative? Anything could have happened. Regardless, I was touched by the public outcry and very much understand the emotions elicited and the public response.

Again, the Zoo made a very difficult choice, but I believe it was the right one. I very much like the Cincinnati Zoo, but I am in no way obligated to defend their actions. I do sit on a board of a zoo advocacy organization, but I'm not financially compensated by the non-profit organization. I just believe in the mission of zoos and I love charismatic creatures that receive exemplary human care in these conservation centers. I have been very fortunate to have interacted with many wonderful zoo animals over the years and the experiences have been tremendously gratifying and rewarding for me. I can only hope I enriched the lives of these animals in return.

I was moved after watching some of the footage as Harambe seemed to embrace the boy as he reached out to hold him. I can only speculate that he was not acting aggressively toward the child and had no such intention to do so. The scene is imprinted in my brain and it is unforgettable. I have a lot of thoughts on the tragedy as a former zookeeper and curator and as a conservationist. But first and foremost, I'm an animal lover like so many of my friends and zoo colleagues and the readership communities who follow Huffington Post. So this decision was hard to process even for someone like me who appreciates the challenges this precarious human-captive animal interaction created for the Zoo.

There are clearly mixed reviews on how the Cincinnati Zoo handled the situation even among some of my colleagues. Some just hope the story dies down. But I'm haunted by what transpired and I felt compelled to offer my perspective as a zoo patron and former zoo employee.

I think zoos do their very best to contain zoo animals and in recent years they have spent extra resources on making sure people can't breach perimeter barriers and get into zoo enclosures, but it is the public's responsibility to keep our children safe and that responsibility falls largely on parents.

In fact, I think that some exhibits should have age limitation restrictions for access. Children who are too young often can't even appreciate the magic of an intimate encounter with a majestic animal icon in a zoo setting like a silverback gorilla. More often than not they seem to incite animals unintentionally by pounding on glass or by running around screaming and crying.

Those are not ways of respecting or dignifying a zoo animal ambassador and their parents should know better. Hopefully teachers and other attendants will also learn from this.

Rather than enriching the experience for the animal, I'm pretty confident some of the behavior of young children leaves sentient zoo animals frustrated, if not demoralized. Anyone can see it is occasionally stimulating for the animals and from a gorilla's perspective, for example, it can be perceived as play when they get to interact with rambunctious kids through glass barriers. However, we should expect some etiquette from zoo visitors. They are guests at a public venue and these animal ambassadors deserve some respect from patrons.

In my opinion, the zoo was left with no choice but to dispatch a beautiful, healthy and robust adult male gorilla. And again, what a terrible predicament for the animal care team to find themselves in.

I recall an incident where a male gorilla broke his neck from a shallow fall in a freak accident in an indoor enclosure at another Ohio zoo. This was twenty years ago. I was in the building doing relief work as a zoo keeper in another animal unit. Unfortunately, no primate care staff member witnessed the incident and there were few helpful reports from patrons. Like the event with Harambe, the other gorilla death was quite unprecedented and has not happened before or since to my knowledge.

In the case of the fallen gorilla, one of our veterinary clinicians responded immediately and tried to resuscitate the animal after the public was ushered out of the building. His three other adult male companions were quickly lured off exhibit into their bedrooms with issued recall commands by a trained and responsive keeper staff. Relocating the other apes was necessary so the vet could access the unconscious animal. The veterinarian, who is board certified in zoo and wildlife medicine, was on the scene just minutes after the emergency was announced through our radio communication system, but sadly he was not able to revive the gorilla after several attempts to administer CPR.

In Harambe's case (based on what I saw in video footage), there was no time to recall him or perhaps other apes in close proximity because the child was already in the exhibit, having breached barriers.

Although Harambe may indeed have been protecting this little boy, the surface features of that gorilla enclosure are to some degree slightly unforgiving to even a much sturdier and more agile young gorilla of comparable age and size to the child. The boy is really lucky to have left the situation relatively unscathed. These enclosures are definitely designed for great apes and not little boys.

The child could have easily broken his neck or otherwise been seriously or fatally injured in all the commotion and all by mere accident. These are big, fast moving primates. Hence, the name "great ape" is an appropriate label for these, the largest of the non-human primates.

By just working around wild animals in captivity, including three species of great apes, provides me with enough insight into the potential hazards in a zoo enclosure. Even the exhibit void of animals can be dangerous for humans to navigate. Keepers are careful when they clean enclosures. It is easy to slip or fall or trip on enrichment items or artificial rock work.

Oddly enough, the barriers in high-rise shopping centers and other public attractions from Niagara Falls to walkway and automobile bypass structures around the country remain in conditions where barriers can be easily breached by unsupervised children. And we hear about tragedies when young children fall to their death or are left severely injured. Who can forget the devastating loss Eric Clapton faced when his young son fell to his death from a high-rise apartment building? And his son was at home with his mom and a maid.

I may be an exceptionally over-educated "retired" zookeeper and curator, but those are the thoughts that I would have shared had I not been training animals during the scheduled radio interview that I was invited to participate in. Rest in peace Harambe. You are missed.

We invite you to join Dr. Schaul's verified public facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/jordan.schaul

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What Economists Don't Know About Physics -- And Why It's Killing Us
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. -- Kenneth Boulding

(Spaceship Earth: NASA)

The mantra of classical economists is "growth." So fixated are they on growth that recessions are often referred to as periods of "negative growth."

The dominant economic paradigm: If we can keep growing the pie, everyone's piece will get larger. Never mind that, as the pie grows, the greedy cut monstrous pieces for themselves and slivers for the rest of us. The foundational assumption itself is flawed. The empty promise of perpetual growth is based on folly -- and on a fluke of evolutionary history that has allowed humankind to temporarily disregard the laws of physics.

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For most of the time humans have inhabited the earth, our numbers were small, and the growth rate of our species was nearly zero. In other words, we were more-or-less in equilibrium with the natural world, as were most species.

The doubling time of the human population just prior to the Industrial Revolution was about 500 years. Following the Industrial Revolution, England's growth rate shot to 1.6 percent, its population doubling every 43 years. What the hell happened?

In two words: fossil fuels. Fossil fuels propelled the Industrial Revolution, which in turn gave us mechanization, rapid transportation, the subjugation of nature, and industrial agriculture, all the ingredients for modern, urbanized, high-density societies. Powered first by coal, then oil, and now gas, the world's human population more than tripled between 1950 and 2010.

Fossil fuels have been a Faustian bargain. Civilization as we know it has been purchased by mortgaging the future. To understand why we need some physics.

Thermodynamicists refer to isolated, closed, and open systems. An isolated system is hermetically sealed: it can exchange neither matter nor energy with its surroundings. At the other extreme, an open system can exchange both. With a semi-permeable boundary, a closed system, can exchange energy but not matter.

Save for a stray meteorite that might increase our planet's mass by a tiny fraction, the earth's mass is static. However, it's surface is subject daily to an enormous flux of solar radiation (sunlight), most of which is re-radiated back to space. So, for all practical purposes, spaceship earth is a closed system.

Mainstream economists tend to think of the economy as an abstract, mathematical automaton independent of the physical world. But economic activity necessarily requires natural resources, which are in finite supply simply because spaceship earth is closed. Fallacy number one: The notion of perpetual economic growth is absurd on face value because it demands an unbounded supply of natural resources and thus an infinitely large earth.

Fallacy number two is more subtle and involves the thermodynamic idea of entropy. Entropy is a slippery concept requiring care. Most commonly, entropy is a quantitative measure of disorder within a thermodynamic system. For example, uncork a perfume bottle in a sealed room, and then watch and wait. After several hours the densely concentrated perfume molecules will have diffused and dispersed all throughout the room. They will not then spontaneously reassemble themselves back inside the perfume bottle. The simple vignette illustrates nature's most fundamental law -- the Second Law of Thermodynamics -- which states that entropy tends to increase over time in an isolated system.

On spaceship earth, the Second Law implies that the order and structure of the economy are purchased at the price of disorder and degradation of the ecosphere. Fortunately, the earth being a closed system (admitting energy), ecological degradation can be reversed, but only on a time scale that is long relative to a human lifespan.

With regard to energy, it is useful to think of entropy as quantifying the concentration (or availability) of the form of energy. Highly concentrated energy -- coal, for example -- has low entropy. Low-grade, diffuse energy -- say, waste heat -- has high entropy. Although energy is conserved, according to the Second Law, entropy tends to increase over time. For example, consider burning coal to produce electricity to power lights, stoves, and refrigerators. All the electrical energy used to power those devices eventually winds up as waste heat. Waste energy is not lost, but at high entropy, it is essentially unusable.

Think then of fossil fuels as concentrated sunlight, the products of millions of years of photosynthesis during the Carboniferous Period. Such dense, low-entropy energy is a fluke of the earth's evolutionary history. Fossil energy has allowed humans to proliferate and civilizations to sprout at an abnormally fast pace, and for the degradation of the earth's biosphere at a rate far beyond her natural ability to regenerate.

Our dependence on fossil energy therefore has us in a double bind. First, fossil fuels are in finite supply. If they run out before sufficient low-entropy replacements are found, civilizations will crash due to energy unavailability. But if we don't soon quit using them, atmospheric CO2 from burning fossils will crash the ecosphere. We're between a rock and a hard place.

The current economic paradigm of perpetual growth greatly exacerbates our dilemma. Having originated during the age of fossil fuels -- when abnormal growth was the rule -- classical economics ignores the fundamental role played by entropy in sustainability and suggests that we can simply continue business as usual into the future. Classical economic theory has thus placed on a trajectory toward catastrophe.

Fortunately, not all economists are blind to physical laws. As early as 1857, John Stuart Mill developed a non-growth "stationary-state" economic model. More recently, the Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding (1910-1993) proposed a theory of "evolutionary economics," which considers human economy as a subsystem of evolutionary biology. And in 1977, Herman Daly sounded the clarion call for "ecological economics" with the publication of Steady-State Economics. Daly, a 2014 recipient of the Blue Planet Prize, is currently on staff at the Center for the Advancement of the Steady-State Economy (CASSE).

"Economics for a Full World" -- Daly's 2014 address in Tokyo -- is lucid and accessible. It deserves to be read in entirety for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that he offers concrete and reasonable solutions for both our economic and ecological woes. Here are a few gems from Daly:

Because of exponential growth since World War II, we now live in a full world, but we still behave as if it were empty.

That richer (more net wealth) is better than poorer is a truism. The relevant question, though, is, does growth still make us richer, or has it begun to make us poorer by increasing "illth" faster than wealth?

Examples of "illth" are everywhere, even if they are still unmeasured in national accounts. They include things like nuclear wastes, climate change from excess carbon in the atmosphere, biodiversity loss, depleted mines, deforestation, eroded topsoil, dry wells and rivers, sea level rise, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, gyres of plastic trash in the oceans, and the ozone hole.

Their refusal to acknowledge [ecological limits] is why many economists cannot conceive of the possibility that growth in GDP could ever be uneconomic.

The economy should not be used as an idiot machine dedicated to maximizing waste.

Our vision and policies should be based on the integrated view of the economy as a subsystem of the finite and non-growing ecosphere.

And, quoting John Ruskin, "There is no wealth but life."

Hope remains, but only if humans transition quickly from an unsustainable economic paradigm to one in which "humans and markets are not exempt from the laws of nature."

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Juno Is Arriving At Jupiter On July 4
The national fireworks on July 4 this year will be joined by celestial fireworks as NASA's Juno mission arrives at Jupiter after five years of travel from Earth. Principals of the mission and its scientific experiments discussed the plans for the orbital insertion at a press conference at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, today, as Juno reached Jupiter's doorstep. Juno, in Roman mythology, was the wife of the king of the gods, Jupiter.

Juno's path is to thread a needle between Jupiter's radiation belts and its atmosphere. Starting at 11:18 pm EDT (8:18 pm PDT) on July 4's evening, the spacecraft will burn its main engine to slow it from its 165,000 mph speed with respect to Earth, one of the highest speeds ever reached. The burn should last 35 minutes, until 11:53 pm EDT (8:53 pm PDT). Eager scientists and engineers, joined by journalists and those watching on NASA TV around the world, will listen for a beep at the beginning of the engine burn and another beep at the end of the burn, hoping that the exact timing indicates a successful insertion into a polar orbit around Jupiter. All action actually took place 48 minutes earlier, since the radio signals from Jupiter currently take 48 minutes to travel to Earth at the speed of light. The last commands to Juno are being sent today; the spacecraft will then be on its own for a few days, though, of course, it will be monitored.

It will then take a couple of days before the instruments are turned on. The spacecraft has been made to spin faster than previously, 5 rpm, to improve its stabilization before the burn; it will be slowed to 2 rpm for its science observations. Not since the Pioneer spacecraft has rotation been used for stabilization, but this spacecraft is in one of NASA's smaller (and less expensive) spacecraft series, following on the very successful New Horizons spacecraft that flew by Pluto last year.

Most of the instruments deal with Jupiter's particles and magnetic field, which is 20,000 times more powerful than Earth's. The main instruments, to protect them, are in a vault made of 400 pounds of titanium to protect them from high radiation. The Junocam, its imaging camera, is outside that protection, and may not last as long as other instruments; further, it will give images as it rotates that will have to be transformed to the equivalent of steady views.

Juno's instruments will be powered by huge solar panels; end to end, the spacecraft would fill a basketball court from hoop to hoop. A boom at the end of one arm extends even further, to put the magnetic-field measuring equipment as far from the metal at the spacecraft's center as possible, to minimize distortions.

When the planets of our solar system formed about 5 billion years ago, Jupiter took up about half the leftover material besides the Sun. Juno's main goals include discovering what the inside of Jupiter is like, as part of understanding how the planets formed. One specific goal is to discover whether Jupiter has a rocky or ice core of elements heavier than helium. It has been estimated as being 10 to 20 times the Earth's mass; though dense, it is not necessarily solid, even under the huge pressure near Jupiter's center.

Juno will be in an extended elliptical orbit, coming as close as only 5000 miles above the cloudtops at its lowest point. Its 14-day elliptical orbit will be timed so that each time it comes close it passes a few degrees in longitude around the planet, so that by the time it completes three dozen orbits after about a year, it will have mapped the planet at high accuracy completely. But unlike previous spacecraft to Jupiter, it is concentrating on a layer under the visible cloud deck, where the magnetic field is apparently formed. That layer stays much steadier than does Jupiter's atmosphere above it.

Jupiter's magnetosphere is huge; if we could see it, it would appear as big as our Moon appears in our sky. We know from measuring radio signals from Jupiter that the magnetic field rotates like clockwork, even though the cloud deck rotates at different speeds at different latitudes. The magnetic field generates a huge, fairly steady aurora, over twice as large as Earth. The spacecraft has been traveling within Jupiter's magnetosphere, where the magnetic field dominates, for about a week.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Will NASA's Juno Mission Solve Mystery of Jupiter's Magnetic Field? --"Strongest in Our Solar System"

The results represent a culmination of decades of research by the Silvera group. The data collected could begin to answer some of the fundamental questions about the origins of solar systems.

The Daily Galaxy via Harvard University

"Our Early Solar System Harbored SuperEarths" (Weekend Feature)

"Up to 50% of Earth's Water is Older than Our Solar System" (Today's Most Popular)

"A Fine-Tuned Universe?" --Complex Organic Molecules Discovered in Infant Star System

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Discovery of a Magnetic Field Spanning the Universe --"Solves Mystery of the Missing Antimatter" (Today's Most Popular)

"Both the planet we live on and the star we orbit are made up of 'normal' matter," said Tanmay Vachaspati a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University working at the intersections of particle physics, astrophysics, general relativity, and cosmology. "Although it features in many science fiction stories, antimatter seems to be incredibly rare in nature. With this new result, we have one of the first hints that we might be able to solve this mystery."

The discovery of a 'left-handed' magnetic field that pervades the universe could help explain a long standing mystery the absence of cosmic antimatter. Planets, stars, gas and dust are almost entirely made up of 'normal' matter of the kind we are familiar with on Earth. But theory predicts that there should be a similar amount of antimatter, like normal matter, but with the opposite charge. For example, an antielectron (called a positron) has the same mass as its conventional counterpart, but a positive rather than negative charge.

In 2001 Vachaspati published theoretical models to try to solve this puzzle, which predict that the entire universe is filled with helical (screw-like) magnetic fields. He and his team were inspired to search for evidence of these fields in data from the NASA Fermi Gamma ray Space Telescope (FGST). Vachaspati has written extensively on cosmic strings, magnetic monopoles, black holes, and cosmological magnetic fields, and has authored the monograph "Kinks and Domain Walls: an introduction to classical and quantum solitons". He was a Rosenbaum Fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

In 2015, a group of scientists, led by Vachaspati, with collaborators at the University of Washington and Nagoya University, announce their result in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

FGST, launched in 2008, observes gamma rays (electromagnetic radiation with a shorter wavelength than X-rays) from very distant sources, such as the supermassive black holes found in many large galaxies. The gamma rays are sensitive to effect of the magnetic field they travel through on their long journey to the Earth. If the field is helical, it will imprint a spiral pattern on the distribution of gamma rays.

Vachaspati and his team see exactly this effect in the FGST data, allowing them to not only detect the magnetic field but also to measure its properties. The data shows not only a helical field, but also that there is an excess of left-handedness - a fundamental discovery that for the first time suggests the precise mechanism that led to the absence of antimatter.

For example, mechanisms that occur nanoseconds after the Big Bang, when the Higgs field gave masses to all known particles, predict left-handed fields, while mechanisms based on interactions that occur even earlier predict right-handed fields.

This discovery has wide ramifications, as a cosmological magnetic field could play an important role in the formation of the first stars and could seed the stronger field seen in galaxies and clusters of galaxies in the present day.

The image at the top of the page shows colliding matter and antimatter. Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss

The Daily Galaxy via RAS

Today's 'Galaxy' Insight --"Life in the Milky Way"

Today's 'Galaxy' Insight --"An ET Technology Beyond Matter?"

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On Climate, Corporations Need to Grow a Soul
Can you imagine the big banks saying: "Hey, Obama! Break us up! We need regulation!" Of course not. That's because corporations almost never take positions that threaten their short-term self-interest. Can you imagine a mainstream corporation leading the charge on, say, marriage equality twenty years ago? Nope. (Richard Socarides, a staffer in the Clinton White House, has written about how hard it was to get business leaders even to talk about the issue then.)

Businesses hate controversy: leadership just wants to keep their heads down and pump out widgets. "Shut up and ski," is what many tell the ski resort I work for when we delve into climate or social issues. Even recent activism by many firms in support of LGBT and transgender rights--which has been hugely effective--proves the point. Those actions weren't risky; rather, like taking a strong position on civil rights in the late seventies, they boarded a train that was leaving the station.

This innate cautiousness is a problem in a climate changed world. When respected organizations like NOAA report that we might see sea level rise of up to 9 feet by 2050-2060, we've got a crisis that's going to require rapid government response. How do you get there when even citizens who consider themselves "alarmed" about global warming take few public actions to drive change, as a new study in the Journal Nature Climate Change reports?

Two studies inform the question. Recent analysis by business school professors Michel Toffel and Aaron Chatterjee showed the strong influence CEO activism has on public views. If, for example, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, is reported to oppose a law, that fact increased the number of people who would themselves oppose the law. Second, a 2014 study of 20 years of public opinion data by two political scientists--Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page--showed that business leaders have far more influence on politicians than common citizens.

In short: in this post-Citizen's United world, voter opinions are both influenced by, and trumped by the corporate elite; and most people aren't taking public action on climate anyway. Business voice matters, big time.

That means to stave off nine feet of coastal flooding, we're going to need corporations to help. And to make a difference, they're going to have to take strong political positions that go against their short term self-interest. This type of action--particularly the use of their powerful voice--runs counter to the standard business approach to climate: keep your head down and cut your carbon footprint. The problem is that cutting carbon a little bit at one corporation doesn't solve climate change. And worse, it's an overt dodge of the harder, more controversial work of using voice and influence to drive change. But it's very effective, placating customers, shareholders and employees while freeing business of the need to take meaningful, but riskier, action.

Solving climate change by taking actions that don't solve climate change is a bad place to be. To drive real change, a corporation might have to go beyond , say, supporting a carbon tax in the abstract, which many businesses have already done, but instead demand a large carbon tax, which might hurt the short term bottom line; call out climate denying elected officials; or publicly endorse candidates based on their climate position.

Getting corporations to do any of these things is a big lift. It goes against their Buddha-nature. They move only when then need to, driven by profit. Compare soda manufacturer's nonexistent lobbying response on climate to their well-organized, rapid and well-funded reaction to proposed "obsesity" taxes on sugary drinks in multiple states, as documented in Marion Nestle's new book Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning.)

Not surprisingly, corporations are not bringing out similar knives on climate. Of course they haven't. Why would we expect these fundamentally amoral entities to behave ethically? Senator Sheldon Whitehouse wrote in Harvard Business Review that "Despite the statements emitted from oil companies' executive suites about taking climate change seriously and supporting a price on carbon, their lobbying presence in Congress is 100% opposed to any action." He also notes that "while Coke and Pepsi have been vocal behind the scenes on the need for climate action, here in Congress their lobbying agencies don't support their position." True, before the Paris climate conference, 365 corporations backed the EPA Clean Power plan, Obama's signature climate rule. But that's not altogether risky, given that the law, under the Clean Air Act, requires such a plan.

We're at a singular time in history. Solutions to the climate crisis, the greatest challenge facing humanity today, are advancing rapidly. Coal is in free fall; the cost of solar and wind energy is plummeting, along with the cost of batteries. In 100 years, we'll have solved the problem. But we don't have 100 years, and so we need to accelerate the process with a policy boost. In a short timeframe, only business voice and lobbying power can make this happen. And so for the first time in history, humans need corporations, their intentionally sociopathic Frankenstein's monster, to grow a soul.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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As Haunted As I Am By The Death Of Harambe The Gorilla, I Believe The Zoo Made The Best Decision At The Time
In my opinion, in regard to the death of Harambe a month after his untimely death, the Cincinnati Zoo made the best decision possible under horrible circumstances.

In the wake of the unfortunate and terribly tragic event at the Zoo, I was invited to participate in a radio interview with The Takeaway, a radio program affiliated with WNYC and Public Radio International.

Jack D'Isidoro, an award-winning freelance multimedia journalist and producer who contributes regularly to The New York Times, reached out to me on May 31st. Unfortunately, I was unable to share my thoughts with his intended audience. I was busy training dogs at my new boarding and enrichment facility in Los Angeles and had missed his email and phone call.

This week, a month after Harambe's death, I discovered that I also missed an email alert regarding a post I published in National Geographic's online editorial news publication on the future of zoos. The piece was cited in a Washington Post article concerning Harambe's fate, which reminded me that nearly a month has passed since we lost this great ape.

Although I did post an article about the tragedy on my public Facebook page hours after it was reported, I never got a chance to share my sentiment publicly. When I heard the news, I was immediately struck by the thought of a zoo having to make such a terrible sacrifice and was grieving for Harambe who I have never even met or knew of. I wanted to let colleagues and FB followers, zoo professionals and activists alike, know of this unfortunate news.

The Washington Post article included commentary from a notable zoo historian who I once participated in a radio interview with and Dr. Michael Hutchins, my esteemed colleague and friend, and a prominent zoo and wildlife biologist.

These zoo experts addressed the big picture -- the conservation relevance of losing a valuable zoo gorilla. They discussed the impact of the loss of this one animal's potential contribution to the reserve gene pool, which is essentially what a captive population of this critically endangered species represents.

Frankly, the fact that the gorilla is an endangered species still hasn't crossed my mind in regard to this loss of life. This was a beautiful and sentient creature who died at his prime, whether he was in a zoo or free-ranging or contributing to the captive gene pool or not.

I will never have a chance to read and process all the rumor and rhetoric surrounding Harambe that has been generated by the public and the responses from professional experts. However, I keep thinking about him and what a loss this must be for the zoo keepers and staff who cared for him. The staff had to make a horrible life and death decision on his behalf in less than a second. You can't wait for a tranquilizer to take effect when you have to respond in a moment's notice.

To put it in perspective, I once darted an orphaned, 300 lb. subadult grizzly bear that I raised from a 9-month-old cub with a syringe pole (similar to a jab stick) while I was standing a few feet away from her at a wildlife sanctuary in Alaska. There was no barrier between us. As she looked the other way, I quickly injected her. I had time on my hands to prepare, no public distraction or interference, and my colleagues from Alaska Department of Fish & Game were on hand to monitor and assist if needed. An unusual and unique circumstance dictated that the animal be tranquilized on exhibit.

However, in a zoo setting far more resources and preparation would go in to such a scheduled chemical immobilization planned for a potentially injurious large animal and any chemical restraint would be conducted behind-the-scenes or before or after visiting hours. Nonetheless, I remember that it felt like a long time had passed before this bear was adequately sedated. In reality, it was at least several minutes.

In Harambe's case, this was an unscheduled and obvious emergency and darting the animal was really not a viable option. Waiting for a tranquillizer to take effect would add substantially more time to an already precarious situation for the boy even if Harambe was indeed protecting him. When an animal recieves a remote dart injection, it is typically a surprise to them and they usually don't like it at all. They react as you might react if you were darted with a flying syringe from a great distance. What if he was holding the child and then collapsed on top of him due to the effects of a potent sedative? Anything could have happened. Regardless, I was touched by the public outcry and very much understand the emotions elicited and the public response.

Again, the Zoo made a very difficult choice, but I believe it was the right one. I very much like the Cincinnati Zoo, but I am in no way obligated to defend their actions. I do sit on a board of a zoo advocacy organization, but I'm not financially compensated by the non-profit organization. I just believe in the mission of zoos and I love charismatic creatures that receive exemplary human care in these conservation centers. I have been very fortunate to have interacted with many wonderful zoo animals over the years and the experiences have been tremendously gratifying and rewarding for me. I can only hope I enriched the lives of these animals in return.

I was moved after watching some of the footage as Harambe seemed to embrace the boy as he reached out to hold him. I can only speculate that he was not acting aggressively toward the child and had no such intention to do so. The scene is imprinted in my brain and it is unforgettable. I have a lot of thoughts on the tragedy as a former zoo keeper and curator and as a conservationist. But first and foremost, I'm an animal lover like so many of my friends and zoo colleagues and the readership communities who follow Huffington Post. So this decision was hard to process even for someone like me who appreciates the challenges this precarious human-captive animal interaction created for the Zoo.

There are clearly mixed reviews on how the Cincinnati Zoo handled the situation even among some of my colleagues. Some just hope the story dies down. But I'm haunted by what transpired and I felt compelled to offer my perspective as a zoo patron and former zoo employee.

I think zoos do their very best to contain zoo animals and in recent years they have spent extra resources on making sure people can't breach perimeter barriers and get into zoo enclosures, but it is the public's responsibility to keep our children safe and that responsibility falls largely on parents.

In fact, I think that some exhibits should have age limitation restrictions for access. Children who are too young often can't even appreciate the magic of an intimate encounter with a majestic animal icon in a zoo setting like a silverback gorilla. More often than not they seem to incite animals unintentionally by pounding on glass or by running around screaming and crying.

Those are not ways of respecting or dignifying a zoo animal ambassador and their parents should know better. Hopefully teachers and other attendants will also learn from this.

Rather then enriching the experience for the animal, I'm pretty confident some of the behavior of young children leaves sentient zoo animals frustrated, if not demoralized. Anyone can see it is occasionally stimulating for the animals and from a gorilla's perspective, for example, it can be perceived as play when they get to interact with rambunctious kids through glass barriers. However, we should expect some ettiquette from zoo visitors. They are guests at a public venue and these animal ambassadors deserve some respect from patrons.

In my opinion, the zoo was left with no choice but to dispatch a beautiful, healthy and robust adult male gorilla. And again, what a terrible predicament for the animal care team to find themselves in.

I recall an incident where a male gorilla broke his neck from a shallow fall in a freak accident in an indoor enclosure at another Ohio zoo. This was twenty years ago. I was in the building doing relief work as a zoo keeper in another animal unit. Unfortunately, no primate care staff member witnessed the incident and there were few helpful reports from patrons. Like the event with Harambe, the other gorilla death was quite unprecedented and has not happened before or since to my knowledge.

In the case of the fallen gorilla, one of our veterinary clinicians responded immediately and tried to resuscitate the animal after the public was ushered out of the building. His three other adult male companions were quickly lured off exhibit into their bedrooms with issued recall commands by a trained and responsive keeper staff. Relocating the other apes was neccessary so the vet could access the unconscious animal. The veterinarian, who is board certified in zoo and wildlife medicine, was on the scene just minutes after the emergency was announced through our radio communication system, but sadly he was not able to revive the gorilla after several attempts to administer CPR.

In Harambe's case (based on what I saw in video footage), there was no time to recall him or perhaps other apes in close proximity because the child was already in the exhibit, having breached barriers.

Although Harambe may indeed have been protecting this little boy, the surface features of that gorilla enclosure are to some degree slightly unforgiving to even a much sturdier and more agile young gorilla of comparable age and size to the child. The boy is really lucky to have left the situation relatively unscathed. These enclosures are definitely designed for great apes and not little boys.

The child could have easily broken his neck or otherwise been seriously or fatally injured in all the commotion and all by mere accident. These are big, fast moving primates. Hence, the name "great ape" is an appropriate label for these, the largest of the non-human primates.

By just working around wild animals in captivity, including three species of great apes, provides me with enough insight into the potential hazards in a zoo enclosure. Even the exhibit void of animals can be dangerous for humans to navigate. Keepers are careful when they clean enclosures. It is easy to slip or fall or trip on enrichment items or artificial rock work.

Oddly enough, the barriers in high rise shopping centers and other public attractions from Niagara Falls to walkway and automobile bypass structures around the country remain in conditions where barriers can be easily breached by unsupervised children. And we hear about tragedies when young children fall to their death or are left severely injured. Who can forget the devastating loss Eric Clapton faced when his young son fell to his death from a high rise apartment building? And his son was at home with his mom and a maid.

I may be an exceptionally over-educated "retired" zoo keeper and curator, but those are the thoughts that I would have shared had I not been training animals during the scheduled radio interview that I was invited to participate in. Rest in peace Harambe. You are missed.

We invite you to join Dr. Schaul's verified public facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/jordan.schaul

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To Connect with Nature, Live in the City

"We need density but we also need connections to nature," said University of Virginia professor Timothy Beatley, at an event at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) to celebrate D.C.'s successful inclusion in the Biophilic Cities Network, a group of leading cities pushing for rich, nature-filled experiences in daily urban life.

Beatley launched the network only a few years ago, but it already seems to have taken off. Building on the impact of his important books, Green Urbanism, Biophilic Cities, and Blue Urbanism, the network is designed to improve knowledge-sharing among cities who seek to merge the built and natural environments. Leading environmental cities -- such as Singapore; Portland; San Francisco; Wellington, New Zealand; and now, Washington, D.C. -- have joined, and another 20-30 cities are now exploring signing on.

Beatley explained how biophilic cities forge deeper, more meaningful connections to nature, which in turn increases social connections and community resilience. He then highlighted some biophilic urban innovations:

Singapore (see video at top) is now putting "nature at the heart of its planning and design process." Singapore's official tagline used to be "garden city," but now it's "the city in a garden." The idea, Beatley explained, is "not to visit a garden but to live in it; not to visit a park, but to live in it." To realize this concept, Singapore has issued a landscape replacement policy that ensures any greenery removed through the process of developing a lot be replaced on the building eventually found there. In reality, though, developers, architects, and landscape architects have doubled or tripled the amount of original green footprint in buildings' structures through the use of sky gardens. "There is now a competition among developers to see who can add more green." The city has also built nearly 300 kilometers of park connectors to create deeper connections between parks and neighborhoods.

"2016-06-23-1466691754-7468088-parkroyal.jpg"

Parkroyal on Pickering by WOHA and Tierra Design / Dezeen

Melbourne, Australia, has pledged to double its tree canopy by 2040. "They are re-imagining the idea of the city in a forest. It's a multi-scale investment in nature -- from the rooftop to the bio-region and everywhere in between." Individual trees are now being registered and made accessible via GIS maps. To further boost engagement, locals can also email love notes to a tree and the trees will write a note back.

"2016-06-23-1466691803-5902915-urbanforest.jpg"

The City of Melbourne's Urban Forest Strategy. Image by Anton Malishev / ArchitectureAU

A number of cities are forging deeper connections to urban wildlife, too. In Bangalore, there's the Slender Loris project that engages citizen scientists in noctural journeys through the city to meet these shy creatures. Austin, Texas has gone completely batty, in a good way. Underneath Congress Bridge, millions of bat fly out at dusk during the warmer months to feed. Above and below the bridge, people gather to watch the amazing exoduses and sometime-murmurations. "There are now bat-watching dinner cruises."

In St. Louis, there's Milkweeds for Monarchs, which has resulted in 250 new butterfly gardens. San Francisco will soon mandate the use of bird-friendly building facades. And in Wellington, city officials are investing in predator-proof fencing in many areas with the goal of "bringing birdsong back."

"Biophilic experiences are multi-sensory. Animal sounds can re-animate our cities. People want more nature; they want to hear birdsong in their neigborhoods," said Beatley.

Stella Tarnay, co-founder of Biophilic DC, wants D.C. to become even more nature-filled. Her group will monitor new city projects to ensure they actually integrate greenery and boost biodiversity. For example, in Adams Morgan, plans are underway to remake the Marie Reed Learning Center with a set of green roofs and gardens, but it will be important to guarantee none of those great landscape plans get cut at the last minute for budgetary reasons.

Also in the works: building more support for the city's wildlife action plan through expanded environmental education programs. As Maribeth DeLorenzo, deputy director of D.C.'s urban sustainability administration, explained, "there are now 270 species of birds in the district, 70 species of fish, 32 species of mammals, and hundreds of species of invertebrates." But greater awareness is needed of these species -- along with the biodiversity benefits of a clean and ecologically-healthy Anacostia River and the district goal of achieving a 40 percent tree canopy by 2032.

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Yes, Benzos Are Bad For You
WARNING: I will be saying very negative things about benzodiazepines in an effort to force doctors to think twice before prescribing them and to discourage patients from ever using them. However, because withdrawal symptoms can be severe and dangerous, individuals already taking benzos in significant doses on a regular basis should not try to stop or reduce their dose without careful medical supervision. More on this later.

Most new wonder drugs turn out to be not so wonderful once we get to know them better. The family of drugs known as benzodiazepines (commonly called "benzos" for short) were wonder drugs of the 1960s. I and many others welcomed their introduction and began prescribing Valium or Librium not just for anxiety, but also for all sorts of other clinical problems beyond this primary indication -- for instance, to soothe psychotic patients' symptoms, to help people with alcohol use disorders quit drinking, to take the edge off agitation in depression and dementia, and to aid sleep. Benzos were reputed to be safe, and initially we were pretty oblivious to the risk of addiction. Before long, benzos became among the most frequently prescribed medications in America.

A second benzo craze began in the1980s when Xanax became the new wonder drug. Its maker, Upjohn (then run by a former head of the NIH), fashioned a brilliant marketing strategy -- hiding the company's wolfish greed for profit under the sheep's clothing of research sponsorship. Upjohn was able to co-opt the top academic psychiatrists from all around the world by organizing the first large-scale international clinical trial of any psychiatric drug. The results were disturbing to me as an outside observer. By then I had wised up to the great risk of benzos and was not surprised to discover that the dose of Xanax needed to treat panic disorder was dangerously close to the dose needed to result in addiction. This should have scared off everyone from using Xanax, but it didn't. Xanax quickly became, and remains, a best seller.

The real wonder of the benzos is that sales continue to boom, despite their having so little utility and no push from pharma marketeering (because patents have run out - thereby decreasing costs and profits.) Between 1996 and 2013, the percentage of people in the U.S. using benzos jumped more than one-third from an already remarkable 4.1 to 5.6 percent. Especially troubling is that benzo use is ridiculously high (nearly one out of ten) in the elderly, the group most likely to be harmed by them. (See below.) And women are twice as likely as men to be given a prescription.

You would expect such a ubiquitous drug to have many clinical uses but you would be wrong -- the psychiatric indications for benzos can be counted on the fingers of one hand. While benzos do wonders for patients with catatonia, this disorder is rarely encountered. Benzos are also useful short-term for severe agitation in psychosis, mania, and depression. And they are sometimes helpful for patients with severe panic disorder who need instant relief in the several weeks before SSRI's kick in. Benzos would be fine for occasional "as needed" use in times of special stress or insomnia. But since you can't predict who will get hooked, it is wise not to try them at all for this purpose. In my opinion, all of the legitimate indications for benzos are very short term. However, in real life most people take them long term, in doses high enough to be addicting, and for the wrong reasons.

Benzo popularity derives from their ability to quickly relieve anxiety, reduce worry, help people relax, and lubricate social anxiety -- kind of like drinking alcohol but in a convenient pill form. Doctors love prescribing benzos because it's the most efficient way to get a complaining patient out of the office in the shortest possible time. The patient is very satisfied at the moment, but may go on to develop a devastating addiction. People love taking them but once hooked can't stop. In short, benzos are very easy to get on, almost impossible to get off.

Benzos harm in three ways -- most dramatic dangers are deadly overdoses. Between 1996 and 2013, the death rate from benzo overdoses exploded by more than 500 percent, from 0.58 per 100,000 people to 3 per 100,000. Benzos are now involved in more than 30 per cent of all overdose deaths, usually in combination with opioids or alcohol.

Second on the list of harms come the painful and dangerous withdrawal symptoms that foster addiction. Benzo withdrawal is a beast- often terrifying, sometimes dangerous, and almost always drawn out over a very long period of time. The anxiety and panic experienced by people stopping benzos is usually much worse than the anxiety and panic that initially led to their use. Other common symptoms are irritability, insomnia, tremors, distractibility, sweating, and confusion. At the extreme, if doses were high and discontinuation is quick, the symptoms resemble alcoholic delirium tremens with hallucinations, psychosis, seizures, and the risk of death. Withdrawal is made even more difficult if, as is common, benzo dependence is complicated by concomitant abuse of alcohol and/or opioids or other drugs. Most people fail in their first attempts at withdrawal. Success rates increase if the withdrawal is done very gradually over a period of many months. Careful medical supervision is always a must.

Third and most insidious, but still very damaging, are the day-to-day impacts on brain functioning. On-going benzo use can be devastating, especially in the elderly, who (bizarrely) are the group most likely to receive a benzo prescription. If you meet an elderly patient who seems dopey, confused, has memory loss, slurred speech, and poor balance, your first thought should be benzo side effects -- not Alzheimer's disease or dementia. Many elders begin their downward spiral to disability and death after a benzo-induced fall that results in broken hips, concussions, or subdural hematomas (a collection of blood outside the brain.) Benzos are also a major risk factor for car and machine accidents.

Easier said than done. Along with opioids and methamphetamine, benzos are the most seductive of drugs. The combination of benzos and opioids is especially seductive and especially deadly. In my book, no one with any history of substance abuse should ever be prescribed a benzo. It will most likely just get added to the mix.

Benzos should never be used as they are most typically used. While safe and effective in low doses for just a few days, they are ineffective and unsafe when taken, as they usually are, in increasing doses over a long period of time. If prescribed at all in someone who has never used them before, it should be cautiously and with warnings. The time period should be short, the dose low, and quantity very limited at any one time. Real world practice flagrantly violates all these concerns - 90 percent of benzo prescriptions are written, often carelessly, by primary care doctors, who can spend only seven minutes with the patient without giving serious thought to the considerable risk of addiction.

The bottom line is that there is only one way to confidently avoid addiction to benzodiazepines: never start taking them. Since we can't predict who will eventually get hooked, the short term gains are rarely worth the long term risks.

It has been more than 30 years since I last prescribed a benzo for anxiety. In my view, the only legitimate uses in psychiatry now are very short-term relief of catatonia, for severe agitation, and for detox from benzos. For everyone else, risk of addiction outweighs the potential benefit of use.

The tough question is what to recommend for those many unfortunates already suffering the tyranny of benzo addiction. Should they stay the course to avoid the rigors and risks of withdrawal or should they make the great effort to detox? This is an individual decision that can't be forced on someone. But the longer you are on them, the harder it gets to stop, and the cognitive side effects of benzos create more and more dysfunction as your brain ages. The best bet is to stick with a determined effort to detox, however long and difficult, under close medical supervision. On a hopeful note, some of the happiest people I have known are those who have overcome their dependence on benzos.

This article was originally published on Recovery Brands' Pro Talk/Pro Corner
http://www.rehabs.com/pro-talk-articles/yes-benzos-are-bad-for-you/

Allen Frances is a professor emeritus at Duke University and was the chairman of the DSM-IV task force.

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Declare Independence From Food Waste

The July 4 weekend marks our nation's birthday and the time when Americans celebrate -- not only with fireworks, but with picnics, backyard BBQs, pool parties. Sadly, one byproduct of these celebrations are the many tons of food that we will inevitably waste after these family gatherings. Today, 40 percent of food produced in the United States is thrown away each year (over two-thirds of that by consumers).

Ketchup with a date label that says it has expired." Salad dressings that are past their "use by" dates, chips and cheese with passed expiration dates. As a result of confusing date labeling policies, consumers regularly toss out foods that are perfectly safe, wholesome, and still taste good.

Our three organizations are actively involved in the national campaign to reduce food waste in America. High on our list of priorities is standardizing date labels on food; indeed it might be the most cost effective intervention to achieving the U.S. government's stated goal of reducing food waste by 50 percent by 2030. Solutions are on the horizon.

Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME) and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) have introduced the Food Date Labeling Act, (HR 5298) to address the confusion surrounding date labeling and tackle our nation's mounting food waste problem.

Our three organizations -- the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, the National Consumers League, and the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future -- performed a survey in April 2016 to learn more about what American consumers actually know about date labels. The findings? Consumers are confused and misled. Thirty-seven percent said they always throw away food close to or past the date on the package, and 84 percent reported at least occasionally doing so.

What many consumers don't know is that most food is still safe to eat after its expiration date. Date labels are placed on foods by manufacturers and retailers. Wording like "best by" or "freshest by," are simply estimates of when a food item will be at its peak quality, and not an indicator of how safe the food is. Consumers, however, fear that eating food past the date on the label puts them at risk of foodborne illness. In fact, only a few foods -- deli meat and unpasteurized cheeses, for example -- actually pose an increased safety risk if eaten after the expiration date. No one wants to throw out good food or waste the money spent on it. But, relying on today's date labels leads consumers to do just that.

A misunderstanding of who regulates date labels is contributing to the problem. One third of respondents in our survey thought that date labels are federally regulated, and 26 percent said they were unsure who put those labels on. In actuality, except for infant formula, there are no federally mandated date labeling rules. Each state has its own regulations for what the labels mean and what stores can do with food after the date passes. Research from the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) shows that 20 states currently restrict sales, and in certain cases, even donations of past-date foods, even if the label is an arbitrary quality estimate.

The Food Date Labeling Act aims to clear up this confusion by requiring manufacturers and retailers to stick with just two date labels: an optional "best if used by" to indicate the estimated date a product will no longer be at its peak quality (such as top flavor or texture); and a required "expires on" label for the few high-risk foods that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) find are actually less safe to eat after a certain date. Retailers would also be able to donate or sell foods after the "best if used by" date passes, which would encourage the distribution of otherwise discarded, but perfectly safe and still tasty food. The bill would have an educational mandate for the FDA and USDA aimed at raising awareness among consumers about what the new labels mean.

Research from the Center for a Livable Future suggests that many consumers are aware of the problem of wasted food and want to be part of the solution -- unfortunately, our nation's current date labeling system is getting in their way. Clearer date labels and more education about what they mean will inevitably help Americans save money, eat safely, and conserve natural resources. That's something worth celebrating.

Emily Broad Leib is the Director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, the nation's first food law school clinic, and is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Sally Greenberg is Executive Director of the National Consumers League, the nation's pioneering consumer and worker advocacy organization, founded in 1899.

Roni Neff, PhD, directs the Food System Sustainability and Public Health Program at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future and is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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Does Your Dog Dig? Exactly What You Should Do About It

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Dogs love to dig a lot like toddlers love to throw things. It's a great release. It's an accomplishment. And, for dogs anyway, it creates a wondrously cool resting spot.

But as you probably know, there are few drawbacks to digging, too. The torn-up yard and muddy footprints might come to mind.

If digging's got you down, remember: all is not lost. While you can't eliminate the thrill of digging altogether, there are many things you can do about it.

First, meet George - the Got Mud dog. He's my client's dog, and he wants for nothing. His family dotes on him morning and night. He gets the best food, a storage bin of toys, and his own pool.

Ask George what he lives for though and he'd show you the cavernous holes in his backyard. The one that burst the sprinkler system. The other one that unearthed a vole. The hole so large it toppled a boxwood bush and left a mud pit in its wake.

George is not a bad dog; he's a good dog and mighty pretty even when he's covered in mud. But George is an adolescent, and he gets bored easily when there's no one to play with.

Maybe your dog is a lot like George. Or perhaps your dog digs for different reasons. Digging is like chewing, jumping, barking, and any other activity -- there are many reasons why dogs do what they do.

Consider the choices below, then fill in the blank: My dog digs because...
a) He likes to create cool, shallow pits to rest in.
b) He has something he likes to bury.
c) He's after a mole, insect, or other creature.
d) He's left alone for long hours with nothing else to do
e) His dog-pal is digging, and hey--why not?
f) He's nervous or stressed, and digging is a great release
g) Digging is super fun

Most dogs dig as pups and adolescents - it's a fun, stimulating activity. For perspective, think back on what wild things you did as an adolescent: drive fast, take risks, do drugs... At least your dog won't do any of that.

Whatever the reason, asking your dog not to dig is like asking a kid to never pick up a ball or play with an iPhone. If you love your dog and your dog loves digging, find a way to guide his passion.

Here's a fresh approach to dealing with a digging dog:

1. Never shout, hit, or use an electronic collar.

Human anger doesn't make sense to dogs. Yes, we look scary and intimating, but dogs aren't human. While they may run away, they won't link your craziness to the fun they just had and might even mistake your screaming (aka barking) as entertainment.

As far as vibrating/shock collars, I'm going to come right out and say it: remote trainers ruin dogs. I see it way too often. Getting shocked or vibrated in the midst of fun leads to insanity. Digging is dog play like balls, mud, and water are kids' play. Play, anger, and electricity don't mix.

2. Discover another passion.

My dogs love to dig (as depicted in the 3-in-1 photo), but they also love to chew, tug, and race around. As costly as bones can be, I've found a few that last long and are quite satisfying. My dogs love puzzle toys, too. Spend a bit of time discovering your dog's other interests and capitalize on those by spending 10 minutes playing together or rewarding him with a fun new game.

3. Create a dig-fun zone.

If your dog's drawn to dirt, set your sites on redirecting the fun instead of thinking you can eliminate his passion altogether. If you've got a yard, designate your dig zone as all-out-activity area by tying down favorite chews (so they can't get carried off), placing a tunnel or water tub nearby, as well as create a digging feature. Your digging attraction might encircle a tree, be a pit filled with dirt, sand and mulch, or an actual sandbox. Whatever you do to satisfy your dog's digging dreams, help him form the habit: Say "Go Dig" as you head to your new spot, bury bones, and dig together.

4. Creative discouragements can help. My favorite being the Oregano oil trick:

Preparation Since dogs detest the smell of Oregano oil, prepare a 1x1"square of bread with 20 drops of full-on oregano oil. Discretely place the pre-soaked bread somewhere your dog will find it, preferably indoors and away from other distractions.
Dilute and Pour Once the smell is mapped in your dog's mind, add 10 drops (or more) to a gallon of water. Fill in one of his holes with dirt, then pour your concoction on top of it.

** While you can find inexpensive vials of oregano oil online, you may also try this method with dog spray deterrents, wasabi, or hot sauce.

5. Keep him inside.

Your home is your dog's den -- a safe place to rest and reconnect. If you notice that your dog is digging each time you leave him outside unattended, the message he may be sending is that he doesn't like being outside alone. That's understandable. Think how you'd feel if you got locked out of your home -- you'd probably be frantic, too. Fresh air is only good for dogs if you're out there, too.

Bonus Tip: If your dog seems obsessed with digging in one location, fill the holes with his own stool or large rocks, or place a screen 3" under the top layer of dirt or grass.

So --now that you better understand his reasoning-- there you have it! A new go-to plan for your delightful digger. Digging, chewing, nipping, jumping--young dogs are like young kids. It's always something!

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Are Venezuela's food shortages a sign that food security is still a risk?
From technological advancements in food production to our increasingly interconnected globe, many factors have reduced the risk of wide-scale famines. However, the current food shortages in Venezuela, which have plunged the nation into chaos, highlight that the threat of world hunger is not over for good. To discuss the future of food security, we talked to Stephen Devereux, a development economist from the University of Sussex.

ResearchGate: In this article, researcher Dr. de Waal argues that the time of famines may be over. What's your view on this?

Stephen Devereux: I think Alex de Waal is probably right that the time of catastrophic famines is over, meaning those famines that used to kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. But that doesn't mean that we won't have more minor and moderate scale famines in the future. It is important to remember that we have had quite a few famines since the last 'great famine' in Ethiopia in 1984 that Alex mentions in his article. Already in the 21st century there have been four famines - in Ethiopia, Malawi, Niger and Somalia - the last famine was in 2011 in Somalia. Right now we have serious food crises in other countries, including in Ethiopia again, so I think it is a bit premature to say we won't have any famines ever again.

RG: As climate change leads to more extreme weather, it is likely we will see more droughts in the future. What impact could this have on the risk of famines and food insecurity?

Devereux: Climate change has to be divided into two aspects. There's the extreme weather events like droughts, floods and tsunamis, and those obviously create emergencies and require short-term humanitarian relief, which I think we will be able to deal with. Then there's the long-term processes, like the gradual rise of sea levels or the gradual warming of temperatures, which have slower impacts on food security. In the long-term, in areas that are already marginalized, crop yields are going to decline, livestock will suffer because there will be less water, and people's livelihoods will be affected. But there is time to prepare for that.

RG: What are the most important factors in preventing famines?

Devereux: A good way to look at this issue is to see what has changed over time. Look at the countries that used to be famine-prone and examine how they overcame famine, why they don't have famine anymore. One important factor is the spread of democracy. There's no doubt that democratic governments that allow freedom of trade, movement, and information are more likely to prevent famines than countries with repressive or controlling governments that interfere too much in the market or stop people from moving, prevent trade, and suppress information.

Another factor is how well-developed the markets and infrastructure are. It is still the case that some of the areas worst affected by food crisis and famine are those that are very remote and isolated, so it is difficult to get food in - there is no transport infrastructure and people are living in small communities far away from markets. Where you have well developed markets and people can access food through shops and trade and imports, like in cities, you're much less likely to have famine.

"If famines happen, it is because the government or international community failed to respond because they didn't know about the problem, or they were in denial about the problem, or they were playing political games."

RG: Today, politics tend to play a leading factor in the cause of mass starvation. Do you believe that this is less of a threat today than in the past? If so, why?

Devereux: On the contrary, that is the main problem that is remaining. If you look at how famines happen, normally they start off with a disruption in food availability or production, so for example there is a drought and people no longer have enough food. They then turn to the market and try to buy food and if they are too poor to buy food, or if there is no food in the market to buy, they have a problem of access. At this point, you have to have some kind of response. Either the government has to step in and help people buy food, or subsidize the price of food, or, if the government can't do that, the international community has to step in.

That is where politics come in. In the past, when communities were completely isolated and they depended on their own production and local markets, a famine happened because there was no government or international community. Now that we have those institutions in place they should respond and there shouldn't be famines anymore. If famines happen, it is because the government or international community failed to respond because they didn't know about the problem, or they were in denial about the problem, or they were playing political games.

Image credit: Zialater

RG: Could you comment on the food shortages that are currently happening in Venezuela? What is causing this, and do you see a solution to the crisis?

Devereux: I am not an expert on Venezuela, but I think what is happening there is strikingly similar to what happened to countries like North Korea, which had a severe famine in the 90s, because the government intervened too much in the economy. Venezuela seems to have moved from being a free market economy to more like a controlled economy. There is a serious food crisis in Venezuela, because the government interfered in agricultural production and trade, and they are rationing electricity and water. All of these interventions in the economy made it difficult for people to access food. There was not enough being produced and people couldn't buy food as it is being imported at exorbitant black market prices that they can't afford, so people are now rioting to get access.

The obvious solution is to reverse some of the bad policy decisions they've made. For example, if you are forcing businesses to charge very low prices that are below cost for their product, then there is no incentive for producers or traders, so production and markets collapse. In the short term, the situation looks quite bad. The government has to admit that they need help. Venezuela may need to go through an emergency relief and recovery process until the economy can stabilize and the necessary policy changes can be made.

RG: Does globalization play a role in preventing the outbreak of famines?

Devereux: There are different aspects to globalization. The integration of trade is probably positive as it allows food to be moved from surplus areas to deficit areas, either through aid or trade. But another part of globalization that is more complicated is the relationship between donor agencies and organizations on the one hand, and governments and their people on the other. What often happens during a famine is that the relationship between governments and international donors is not good at the critical time, and donors don't respond to government requests for food aid, or governments prevent donors from bringing in food aid.

This happened in Somalia, for example, where Al Shabaab was really instrumental in stopping food aid moving around when there was a food crisis in 2011. It was also a problem in Malawi in 2002 as the donors accused the government of selling the grain reserve and didn't bring food aid in time. In Ethiopia in 1999-2000 the government was fighting a food war against Eritrea and donors didn't send food aid because they thought the government would use it to feed their army.

"We used to think that the global population would grow faster than food production and that this would eventually cause famine. No one talks like that anymore"

RG: What effect has modern technology and farming techniques had on food security?

Devereux: It is quite striking if you look back at the 1970s or 80s, a time when we had this fear that the world would run out of food. This has completely disappeared. We used to think that the global population would grow faster than food production and that this would eventually cause famine. No one talks like that anymore, as we have realized that is not the case. The famines in China and India last century did cause millions of people to die, but today their populations are far larger and yet nobody talks about the risk of famine anymore. This is partly because of massive investments in agricultural production and farming, which means that food production has increased greatly. They are able to feed far larger populations than they even have now. If the world population stabilizes at around 9-10 billion people, which is expected, the technology that we now have will feed these people.

In terms of other technology, one of the most significant improvements has been in telecommunications. You can be in a remote village in Sudan or Somalia and send a text message to the world saying "we are starving here", and that will likely mobilize an international response.

This article originally appeared on ResearchGate News.

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Shark Week, Baby: What We Learn Caring For Pregnant Sharks
It's amazing how much an animal can teach you.

That fact is very evident in my care for the eleven species of sharks at Shedd Aquarium, all of them fascinating, diverse and full of incredible biological traits that continue to give us the privilege of learning from. What's more amazing is caring for these animals as they carry out their natural reproductive cycle. With Shark Week in full swing, I want to shift the focus for a moment from the misunderstanding and sensationalized stories that sharks are dangerous, marauding predators laying wait just offshore to attack a human, and instead take a deeper dive into a subject I find infinitely more interesting- their capacity to be mothers.

Grasping the close relationship between sharks and the water in which they swim, whether at Shedd or in the wild, is important in understanding the type of pre-natal care we provide for them. Even as unborn babies, sharks are at one with the sea. When we think about shark babies, we have to respect how much diversity there is among shark species, as they all reproduce differently.

Whitespotted bamboo shark eggs. ©Shedd Aquarium/Brenna Hernandez

Some sharks are oviparous, or egg laying, like our bamboo sharks. These sharks typically deposit eggs containing a developing embryo in a case or shell. You might find these on a beach, which are commonly called a "mermaid purse." At Shedd, to monitor the health of these eggs before they hatch, we can shine a strong light through the case and actually see the developing embryo inside. The case or shell of the egg (which is quite tough) is actually not watertight, allowing the embryo to be bathed in the water around it. However, the resilient casing does help keep hungry or curious prey at bay in the wild, until the sharklette wriggles out.

Blacktip reef sharks. ©Shedd Aquarium/Brenna Hernandez

Different sharks, like the blacktip reef shark that recently gave birth to pups at the aquarium, are viviparous; meaning, like humans they give birth to live babies. When we monitor the health of these babies before birth we sometimes use an ultrasound - a portable machine we have on site in the A. Watson III Armor Center for Aquatic Health and Welfare -- to look at them much the same way an obstetrician does for a human mom. To monitor the health of these babies before they hatch, in addition to ultrasound, we can shine a strong light through the case and actually see the baby inside. Visitors to the aquarium can often see this in the Wild Reef exhibit where our aquarists have a really cool egg exhibit that includes the same sort of light behind the egg.

Seeing this type of development helps us learn about how many pups they have, how big they are and how they develop throughout their critical growth protected by mom.

So, as tempting as it is to make sharks out to be blood-thirsty predators keen on threatening humans during Shark Week, let's take some time to appreciate what they really are - important marine species that play a vital role in the top-down maintenance of ocean ecosystems around the world. Globally, sharks are threatened with extinction largely due to overfishing (targeted and by-catch) and other unsustainable practices. If you want to learn more about Sharks at Shedd Aquarium, we have a wealth of resources on our website. We also invite you to visit the aquarium - we would love to change your mind about these amazing animals.

Bill Van Bonn, DVM, is Shedd Aquarium's vice president of animal health. With more than 25 years of clinical veterinary experience, Dr. Van Bonn strengthens the aquarium's established animal care and health expertise, overseeing its diverse aquatic medicine initiatives as well as furthering innovative veterinary science at Shedd. Dr. Van Bonn specializes in preventive medicine and enhanced clinical veterinary services for aquatic animals, with a focus on marine mammals. At Shedd, he focuses on providing top-quality care and applying his knowledge of animal health to conservation of their counterparts in the wild. He also oversees the aquarium's Microbiome Project.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Doubling Down on Clean Energy in California

Last week, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. announced that it wants to retire California's Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant by 2025. If the California Public Utilities Commission accepts the utility's proposal, it will mean the end of the nuclear era in California. Beyond that milestone, though, it marks what is now an undeniable trend. Clean, renewable energy like wind and solar -- combined with energy efficiency and storage -- can compete with any dirty fuel, be it coal, gas, or nuclear power.

The Sierra Club has unequivocally opposed nuclear energy for more than three decades, and Diablo Canyon is a good illustration of why we do. From the beginning it was a reckless enterprise. Nuclear power plants are not just accidents waiting to happen -- they are mega-disasters waiting to happen. Diablo Canyon was especially risky owing to the discovery of nearby earthquake faults, but no nuclear plant can be guaranteed to be safe. The potential consequences of a nuclear disaster are so horrific by themselves that they overwhelm any risk analysis.

In spite of all that, PG&E would likely have attempted to keep Diablo Canyon open if it could have done so profitably. What's driving the closure of this and other nuclear plants is not the obvious risks they pose, but their inability to compete economically. In Nebraska, the Omaha Public Power District decided to decommission its Fort Calhoun nuclear plant this year not because it had to be shut down owing to flooding of the Missouri River in 2011 but because clean, renewable energy and energy efficiency have helped drive the cost of electricity to levels that the plant couldn't match.

In fact, renewable energy has gotten so cheap so quickly that PG&E says it intends to replace all of the power from Diablo Canyon with carbon-free clean energy. That's a big deal, because Diablo currently generates around 18,000 gigawatt hours per year or 8.5 percent of the state's power mix. It's important to hold PG&E to that commitment. Diablo needs to be replaced with additional clean energy -- above and beyond what it would otherwise have developed -- by the time the plant shuts down less than 10 years from now. How PG&E actually does that (solar, wind, energy efficiency, and storage could all play a role) is less important -- as long as greenhouse gas emissions do not increase as a result of Diablo Canyon's retirement.

The good news is that last year, clean and renewable sources accounted for almost two-thirds of new electrical generation in the U.S. Even so, replacing Diablo Canyon with 100 percent clean, renewable energy is an ambitious goal for both PG&E and the state of California. But the fact that PG&E believes it's possible to do that in less than a decade speaks volumes about how far renewables have come and how quickly it is expected to dominate the energy industry.

It also sets a new, higher bar nationally. If indeed it is possible to do this for the largest power plant in California, then there's no excuse not to attempt to do the same thing on a rapid and responsible timeline for every polluting plant in the United States. From now on, the burden of proof is on polluters to show that clean, renewable energy can't do the job. In our work on retiring coal plants, we've seen utilities repeatedly fail at making that case, and it's only going to get harder to do so going forward.

The Diablo Canyon announcement is more than just another setback for polluting power plants. It reaffirms in a big way that renewable energy will be first and foremost in our future.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Monsanto Fingerprints Found All Over Attack On Organic Food
When a reputable-sounding nonprofit organization released a report attacking the organic food industry in April 2014, the group went to great lengths to tout its independence.

The 30-page report by Academics Review, described as "a non-profit led by independent academic experts in agriculture and food sciences," found that consumers were being duped into spending more money for organic food because of deceptive marketing practices by the organic industry.

Trade press headlines blared: "Organics exposed!" (Brownfield News) and "Organic Industry Booming by Deceiving Consumers" (Food Safety Tech News), touting the findings by supposedly independent experts.

The findings were "endorsed by an international panel of independent agricultural science, food science, economic and legal experts from respected international institutions," according to the group's press release.

In case the point about independence wasn't clear, the press release ends on this note: "Academics Review has no conflicts-of-interest associated with this publication, and all associated costs for which were paid for using our general funds without any specific donor' influence or direction."

What was not mentioned in the report, the news release or on the website: Executives for Monsanto Co., the world's leading purveyor of agrichemicals and genetically engineered seeds, along with key Monsanto allies, engaged in fund raising for Academics Review, collaborated on strategy and even discussed plans to hide industry funding, according to emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know via state Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Monsanto's motives in attacking the organic industry are obvious: Monsanto's seeds and chemicals are banned from use in organic farming, and a large part of Monsanto's messaging is that its products are superior to organics as tools to boost global food production.

"2016-06-30-1467320334-9342522-fingerprintscopy.jpg"

Academics Carry Monsanto's Message

Academics Review was co-founded by "two independent professors ... on opposite ends of the planet," Bruce Chassy, Ph.D., professor emeritus at University of Illinois, and David Tribe, Ph.D., senior lecturer at University of Melbourne. They claim the group "only accepts unrestricted donations from non-corporate sources."

Yet two email exchanges in 2010 reveal plans to find corporate funding for Academics Review while keeping corporate fingerprints hidden.

In a March 11, 2010 email exchange with Chassy, Jay Byrne, former head of communications at Monsanto who now runs a PR and market research firm, offered to act as a "commercial vehicle" to help find corporate funding for Academics Review.

Chassy discussed his interest in attacking the organic industry in the emails. "I would love to have a prime name in the middle of the organic aura from which to launch ballistic missiles..." he wrote, "I sure don't have the money."

Byrne replied,

"Well, I suggest we work on the money (for all of us) first and quickly! I've proposed to Val [Giddings, former vice president of BIO, the biotech industry trade association] that he and I meet while I'm in DC next week so we can (not via e-mail) get a clear picture of options for taking the Academic Review project and other opportunities forward. The "Center for Consumer Freedom" (ActivistCash.com) has cashed in on this to the extreme."

The Center for Consumer Freedom is directed by Rick Berman, a lobbyist who has been called "Dr. Evil" and the "king of corporate front groups and propaganda" for his work to promote the tobacco industry and other corporate interests under the cover of neutral-sounding groups.

"I think we have a much better concept," Byrne told Chassy.

Byrne shared an "opportunities" list of targets comprised of people, groups and content critical of GMOs and Monsanto: Vandana Shiva, Andrew Kimbrell, Ronnie Cummins, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Michael Pollan's book "In Defense of Food," the movies "Food, Inc" and "The World According to Monsanto," and "topic cross-over on all the risk areas of ag-biotech (out crossing/ contamination, bees, butterflies, human safety, etc...)."

"All of these individuals, organizations, content items and topic areas mean money for a range of well heeled corporations, Byrne wrote, adding:

"I believe Val and I can identify and serve as the appropriate (non-academic) commercial vehicles by which we can connect these entities with the project in a manner which helps to ensure the credibility and independence (and thus value) of the primary contributors/owners... I believe our kitchen cabinet here can serve as gatekeepers (in some cases toll takers) for effective, credible responses, inoculation and proactive activities using this project platform..."

"Sounds good to me," Chassy replied. "I'm sure that you will let me know what you discuss."

In an email exchange with Chassy dated November 30, 2010, Eric Sachs, a senior public relations operative for Monsanto, discussed finding corporate support for Academics Review while "keeping Monsanto in the background."

Sachs wrote to Chassy:

"You and I need to talk more about the "academics review" site and concept. I believe that there is a path to a process that would better respond to scientific concerns and allegations. I shared with Val yesterday. From my perspective the problem is one of expert engagement and that could be solved by paying experts to provide responses. You and I have discussed this in the past. Val explained that step one is establishing 501(c)3 not-for-profit status to facilitate fund raising. That makes sense but there is more. I discussed with Jerry Steiner today (Monsanto Executive Team) and can help motivate CLI/BIO/CBI and other organizations to support. The key will be keeping Monsanto in the background so as not to harm the credibility of the information."

CLI/BIO/CBI refers to three industry trade groups -- Crop Life International, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization and the Council for Biotechnology Information -- that represent agrichemical corporations.

Chassy responded to Sachs, "Yes we should talk about Academics Review. I think we are on the same page."

When asked directly about funding, Chassy replied via email: "Academics Review does not solicit or accept funds from any source for specific research or any other activities associated with any products, services or industry. Academics Review only accepts unrestricted donations from non-corporate sources to support our work."

He said that Academics Review incorporated and reported no income in 2012 and he provided the IRS form 990s for 2013 and 2014 (now also posted on the website). Those documents report $419,830 in revenues but include no information about contributors. Chassy did not respond to requests to provide that information.

Press Covers "Independent" Attack on Organic

Academics Review released its organic marketing study in April 2014 to a robust round of trade press coverage describing the findings of "independent researchers":

• "The Organic Food Industry Has Been Engaged in 'Multi-Decade Public Disinformation Campaign' claims report" (Food Navigator)

• "Report: Organic Industry Achieved 25 Years of Fast Growth Through Fear and Deception" (Food Safety News)

• "A Scathing Indictment of Organic Food Marketing" (Hoard's Dairyman)

• "Using Fear as a Sales Tactic" (Food Business News)

In the New York Post, Naomi Schaffer Riley built a case against "tyranny of the organic mommy mafia" who are duped by disingenuous marketing tactics of the organic industry. Her sources included the Academics Review report and Julie Gunlock, author of a book about the "culture of alarmism."

Riley didn't mention that Gunlock, and also Riley herself, are both senior fellows at the Independent Women's Forum, a group heavily funded by Donors Trust, which has bankrolled corporate attacks on unions, public schools and climate scientists.

In the Des Moines Register, John R. Block, a former U.S. secretary of agriculture who now works for a law firm that lobbies for agribusiness interests, reported on the "blockbuster report" by Academics Review and its findings that the organic industry's secret to success is "black marketing."

The corporate front group American Council on Science and Health, which receives funding from the agrichemical industry and where Chassy serves as a scientific advisor, pushed the "black marketing" theme in articles by ACSH president Hank Campbell and Henry I. Miller, MD, a Hoover Institute fellow who served as the spokesmodel in commercials for the effort to kill GMO labeling in California, for which Monsanto was the lead funder.

Miller, who has a long history of making inaccurate scientific claims in support of corporate interests, also used the Academics Review report as a source for organic attacks in Newsweek and the National Review, and claimed in the Wall Street Journal that organic farming is not sustainable.

Similar anti-organic themes run through other agrichemical industry PR channels.

GMO Answers, a marketing website funded by the Big Six agrichemical companies (and where Chassy and Tribe serve as "independent experts"), promotes the ideas that organics are no healthier, no better for the environment and just a marketing program -- although, ironically, the PR firm that runs GMO Answers has launched a specialty group in San Francisco to try to cash in on the organic market.

Monsanto's top spokesperson, Robb Fraley, also repeatedly trashes the organic industry on his Twitter feed.

Money Flow Goes Public; Academics Review Goes Silent

In March 2016, Monica Eng reported for WBEZ on documents showing that Monsanto paid Professor Bruce Chassy more than $57,000 over a 23-month period to travel, write and speak about GMOs -- money that was not disclosed to the public.

According to Eng's investigation, the money was part of at least $5.1 million in undisclosed money Monsanto sent through the University of Illinois Foundation to university employees and programs between 2005 and 2015.

"Chassy did not disclose his financial relationship with Monsanto on state or university forms aimed at detecting potential conflicts of interest," Eng reported.

"Documents further show that Chassy and the university directed Monsanto to deposit the payments through the University of Illinois Foundation, a body whose records are shielded from public scrutiny. The foundation also has the ability to take in private money and disburse it to an individual as a 'university payment' -- exempt from disclosure."

In January 2016, Carey Gillam, research director of U.S. Right to Know, reported on emails showing that hundreds of thousands of dollars had flowed from Monsanto to the University of Illinois "as Chassy collaborated on multiple projects with Monsanto to counter public concerns about genetically modified crops (GMOs) - all while representing himself as an independent academic for a public institution."

"What you find when reading through the email chains is an arrangement that allowed industry players to cloak pro-GMO messaging within a veil of independent expertise, and little, if any, public disclosure of the behind-the-scenes connections," Gillam wrote.

The last post on the Academics Review site, dated Sept. 2, 2015, is a blog by Chassy explaining that some of his emails would be made public due to the FOIA requests of U.S. Right to Know, which he characterized as an assault on his 40 years of public science, research and teaching.

Financial support from the private sector for public sector research and outreach is "appropriate, commonplace and needed to further the public interest," Chassy wrote. "Such support should be, and in all my experiences has been, transparent and done under the strict ethical guidelines of the public institutions that are benefiting from private sector or individual financial contributions."

Three days later, some of Chassy's emails were first made public in a front-page New York Times article by two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Eric Lipton. Lipton reported that Monsanto gave Chassy a grant for an undisclosed sum in 2011 for "biotechnology outreach and education activities."

Chassy told Lipton that the money he received from Monsanto "helped to elevate his voice through travel, a website he created and other means."

Still Getting Press as an Independent Source

Despite the revelations in the emails and the disclosure of Chassy's financial ties to Monsanto, the Academics Review website and its report attacking the organic industry are still posted online with all the descriptions claiming independence.

And Chassy still enjoys press coverage as an "independent" expert on GMOs. In May 2016, two separate Associated Press stories quoted Chassy on that topic. Neither story mentioned Chassy's now-public financial ties to Monsanto.

Follow Stacy Malkan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/StacyMalkan

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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"Rogue Monsters of the Cosmos" --Supermassive Black Holes Detected Ejected from Their Galaxy

The central regions of many glittering galaxies, our own Milky Way included, harbor cores of impenetrable darkness -- black holes with masses equivalent to millions, or even billions, of suns. What's more, these supermassive black holes and their host galaxies appear to develop together, or "co-evolve." Theory predicts that as galaxies collide and merge, growing ever more massive.

Researchers have developed a new method for detecting and measuring one of the most powerful, and most mysterious, events in the Universe - a black hole being kicked out of its host galaxy and into intergalactic space at speeds as high as 5000 kilometers per second.

"When the detection of gravitational waves was announced, a new era in astronomy began, since we can now actually observe two merging black holes," said study co-author Christopher Moore, a Cambridge University PhD student who was also a member of the team which announced the detection of gravitational waves earlier this year. "We now have two ways of detecting black holes, instead of just one - it's amazing that just a few months ago, we couldn't say that. And with the future launch of new space-based gravitational wave detectors, we'll be able to look at gravitational waves on a galactic, rather than a stellar, scale."

The method, developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge, could be used to detect and measure so-called black hole superkicks, which occur when two spinning supermassive black holes collide into each other, and the recoil of the collision is so strong that the remnant of the black hole merger is bounced out of its host galaxy entirely. Their results are reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Earlier this year, the LIGO Collaboration announced the first detection of gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of spacetime - coming from the collision of two black holes, confirming a major prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity and marking the beginning of a new era in astronomy. As the sensitivity of the LIGO detectors is improved, even more gravitational waves are expected to be detected - the second successful detection was announced in June.

As two black holes circle each other, they emit gravitational waves in a highly asymmetric way, which leads to a net emission of momentum in some preferential direction. When the black holes finally do collide, conservation of momentum imparts a recoil, or kick, much like when a gun is fired. When the two black holes are not spinning, the speed of the recoil is around 170 kilometres per second. But when the black holes are rapidly spinning in certain orientations, the speed of the recoil can be as high as 5000 kilometres per second, easily exceeding the escape velocity of even the most massive galaxies, sending the black hole remnant resulting from the merger into intergalactic space.

The Cambridge researchers have developed a new method for detecting these kicks based on the gravitational wave signal alone, by using the Doppler Effect. The Doppler Effect is the reason that the sound of a passing car seems to lower in pitch as it gets further away. It is also widely used in astronomy: electromagnetic radiation coming from objects which are moving away from the Earth is shifted towards the red end of the spectrum, while radiation coming from objects moving closer to the Earth is shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum. Similarly, when a black hole kick has sufficient momentum, the gravitational waves it emits will be red-shifted if it is directed away from the Earth, while they will be blue-shifted if it's directed towards the Earth.

"If we can detect a Doppler shift in a gravitational wave from the merger of two black holes, what we're detecting is a black hole kick," said study co-author Davide Gerosa, a PhD student from Cambridge's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. "And detecting a black hole kick would mean a direct observation that gravitational waves are carrying not just energy, but linear momentum as well."

Detecting this elusive effect requires gravitational-wave experiments capable of observing black hole mergers with very high precision. A black hole kick cannot be directly detected using current land-based gravitational wave detectors, such as those at LIGO. However, according to the researchers, the new space-based gravitational wave detector known as eLISA, funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) and due for launch in 2034, will be powerful enough to detect several of these runaway black holes. In 2015, ESA launched the LISA Pathfinder, which is successfully testing several technologies which could be used to measure gravitational waves from space.

The researchers found that the eLISA detector above will be particularly well-suited to detecting black hole kicks: it will be capable of measuring kicks as small as 500 kilometres per second, as well as the much faster superkicks. Kick measurements will tell us more about the properties of black hole spins, and also provide a direct way of measuring the momentum carried by gravitational waves, which may lead to new opportunities for testing general relativity.

The Daily Galaxy via University of Cambridge and NASA/JPL

Image credit top of page: ligo.caltech.edu

Supernova Mysteries --Why Some Collaspe Into Black Holes to Form a Space-Time Singularity

ESO: "An Entire Spiral Galaxy Fell Through the Center of Massive Elliptical Galaxy M87"

The Vanishing Planet

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Scientists Shift Search for Alien Technological Civilizations to Ancient Red-Dwarf Stars --"Twice Age of Earth"

“Red dwarfs the dim bulbs of the cosmos have received scant attention by SETI scientists in the past,” SETI Institute engineer Jon Richard said last week in a news release announcing the initiative. “That's because researchers made the seemingly reasonable assumption that other intelligent species would be on planets orbiting stars similar to the sun.”

“This may be one instance in which older is better,” said astronomer Seth Shostak of California-based SETI, a private, non-profit organization which stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. “Older solar systems have had more time to produce intelligent species.” A super-Earth known as Kapteyn b that orbits an 11.5 billion-year-old red dwarf, for example, makes the star and the planet 2.5 times older than Earth (image below).

The srtistic representation shows the potentially habitable world Kapteyn b with the globular cluster Omega Centauri in the background. It is believed that the Omega Centauri is the remaining core of a dwarf galaxy that merged with our own galaxy billions of years ago bringing Kapteyn's star along. (PHL @ UPR Arecibo, Aladin Sky Atlas).

The SETI Institute belives that planetary systems orbiting red dwarfs — dim, long-lived stars that are on average billions of years older than our sun — are worth investigating for signs of advanced extraterrestrial life. The star that's closest to our sun, Proxima Centauri, is a red dwarf. A variety of observing efforts, including Cornell's Pale Red Dot initiative, are looking for habitable planets around Proxima Centauri (shown above).

The two-year project involves picking from a list of about 70,000 red dwarfs and scanning 20,000 of the nearest ones, along with the cosmic bodies that circle them using the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in the High Sierras of northern California, a group of 42 antennas that can observe three stars simultaneously.

“We'll scrutinize targeted systems over several frequency bands between 1 and 10 GHz,” said SETI scientist Gerry Harp. “Roughly half of those bands will be at so-called ‘magic frequencies' — places on the radio dial that are directly related to basic mathematical constants. It's reasonable to speculate that extraterrestrials trying to attract attention might generate signals at such special frequencies.”

For a long time, scientists ruled out searching around red dwarfs because habitable zones around the stars are small, and planets orbiting them would be so close that one side would be constantly facing the star, making one side of the planet very hot and the other quite cold and dark.

But more recently, scientists have learned that heat could be transported from the light side of the planet to the darker side, and that much of the surface could be amenable to life.

“In addition, exoplanet data have suggested that somewhere between one sixth and one half of red dwarf stars have planets in their habitable zones, a percentage comparable to, and possibly greater than, for Sun-like stars,” said the statement.

The brightest of Red Dwarfs are a tenth as luminous as the sun, and some are just 0.01 percent as bright, but account for three-quarters of all stars, with 6 percent or more of all red dwarfs having potentially habitable, Earth-sized planets.

The Daily Galaxy via SETI Institute, and AFP

Image credits: NASA/Chandra X-Ray Space Observatory

Unusual News --From Around the Planet & Beyond (Promoted Site)

Today's 'Galaxy' Insight --"The Dominant Intelligence in the Universe May Be Non-Biological"

Today's 'Galaxy' Insight --The Search for Habitable Planets

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Basque culture, California music thrill at 2016 Folklife Festival

Traditional Basque dancers at the 2016 Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (Flickr photo by Victoria Pickering)

On a bright, hot summer morning on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. the air was filled with more than just humidity. From inside the Smithsonian's Arts & Industries Building floated melodic strains of music from the diverse cultures of California and the Basque country, which is in the Pyrenees on the border between France and Spain.

Martha Gonzalez is doing double-duty during the Folklife Festival, playing with the band Quetzal and with the FandangObon group. Today she danced on the tarima platform with her son jarocho group. You can find them each day at the Sounds of California Stage & Plaza. (Photo by Walter Larrimore, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives)

Musicians were performing to kick off the 2016 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, with themes this year covering “Basque: Innovation by Culture” and “Sounds of California.”

Speakers at the opening ceremony alluded to ideas of inclusion, acceptance, and understanding. They often reminded the audience that we are all human, and much is shared among us despite superficial differences.

Salar Nader is a master of the tablas. He, along with rubâb player Homayoun Sakhi, performed in the opening ceremony and again in the afternoon at the Sounds of California Stage & Plaza. (Photo by Ronald Villasante, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives)

Michael Mason, Director of Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, opened the ceremony by paraphrasing a quote from American poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser. “The world is not made of atoms, but of stories,” Mason said. He encouraged the crowd to listen to the stories being told at the festival, and to be brave enough to share their own.

Demonstration of a rural Basque sportthe object is to cut 6 slices of no more than 3 centimeters thick, as fast as possible. At the 2016 Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall. (Flickr photo by Victoria Pickering)

Smithsonian Secretary David Skorton began his remarks, “When we open up the newspapers every day, don't we need to see more things like the Folklife Festival?” The audience responded with cheers and applause. “Every day of this festival is magic, and we need this magic right now,” he said.

Richard Kurin, Smithsonian acting provost and undersecretary for museums and research, also stressed the ideas of knowledge, respect, and diversity. He decried ignorance and echoed President Barack Obama's remarks on immigration reform when he said, “We've all come from somewhere.”

U.S. Representative John Garamendi (D-Calif.) talked about his grandparents immigrating to the U.S. from the Basque country. “That's the story of America,” he said.

Irati Anda and Xabier Paya are bertsolariak, Basque poets who improvise songs on given topics. In today's “Berto Workshop,” they sang about arriving in Washington, their favorite sports, and Xabi's amuma (grandmother). (Photo by Maureen Spagnolo, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives)

The Folklife Festival, located on the National Mall between 4^th and 7^th Streets, is filled with concerts, music performances, craftsmen, language workshops, and cuisine. The Arts & Industries Building is host to the Folklife Festival Marketplace, where visitors can buy artisan products, books and clothing, and get a break from the heat.

FandangObon got the audience circling around the Sounds of California Stage & Plaza with a mix of Japanese and Mexican dance traditions. Want to join in? You have no choice! Just dance! (Photo by Francisco Guerra, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives)

The 2016 Smithsonian Folklife Festival runs this year from June 29-July 4 and July 7-10. Admission is free. Festival hours are from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, with special evening events beginning at 6:30 p.m. For more information: http://www.festival.si.edu.

he day evening with an evening concert by Basque accordion virtuoso Kepa Junkera. Dancers from Aukeran and visitors joined in kalejira, the Basque festival tradition of “going around singing and dancing.” Photo by Josh Weilepp, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives

The post Basque culture, California music thrill at 2016 Folklife Festival appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

culture

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gaia

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Just Breathe (How I Became a Yogi)
I didn't go to The Ashram with the intention of becoming a yogi. I went to shed the remaining eight pounds I had gained after giving birth to my second son and to take a mini-break from Motherhood. With a handful of almonds and some modestly portioned vegetarian meals each day, the weight melted away quickly. In its place grew a love for yoga that I did not expect. And like most people and things with which we fall in love, my attachment to my practice happened quickly, altering the course of my life forever.

The Ashram is located in Calabasas in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains just a few miles from the beautiful Malibu beaches. There is nothing posh or luxurious about it; the lodging is modest save the spectacular views. A unique part of its program is for everyone to rise slightly before the sun and go to the meditation and yoga dome that sits atop a hill with a beautiful view of the mountains. There one of the counselors guides you through a one-hour yoga session.

Breathing Past The Resistance

As an exhausted new mother to my second child, with tight hamstrings from playing tennis and hiking, I was not particularly happy about this. But I was there for a reason, so that first morning, I entered the dome gritting my teeth and with a sleepy scowl on my face only to be greeted by a curly haired exuberant man who stood at six foot seven inches tall named JB. He proclaimed proudly to us all that after one week in his morning classes; he would turn us all into devoted yogis.

I didn't believe him. All I wanted to do was shed my weight and nurture my sleep deprived self. But again, I was there for a reason, and so I persevered through what seemed to be an endless series of sun salutations for the next hour.

On the way out, JB commended me on the wide variety of tense facial expressions that I had exhibited during class. He assured me that enlightenment comes from letting go and tonight's class would give me another opportunity to do just that. I still didn't believe him.

Finding Enlightenment

But somewhere in the middle of that food-deprived week, my aching body and stressed out spirit did find happiness in downward facing dog. I learned that there is peace in letting go and breathing into a cobra pose and through whatever resistance you encounter. The enlightenment that JB had promised me after that first morning and I didn't believe was possible from a standing forward bend had come to be.

That is not to say any of this is easy. To this day, sixteen years later, downward dog is still my most challenging and confronting pose. No matter how hot the room is or how little I've hiked, my hamstrings are always incredibly tight. Each time I stretch into that pose and wait for my heels to touch the ground, they still don't. But I continue to use my breath to push past that resistance.

A Life-Long Commitment

After a week of JB's voice guiding me through the poses, I took his number and followed up with him to continue my practices with a group of friends. Over the years, I have practiced various forms of yoga including Bikram, Flow, Yin Yoga, Iyengar, Ashtanga, and Hatha and am always discovering new ones. Last week I was introduced to a class by a friend taught by Suzanne Marlow at Yoga Soup. This practice called Insight Yoga, learned from her mentor Sarah Powers, combines the practices of Yoga, Buddhism, Taoism and Transpersonal Psychology with a Yin sequence of floor poses. Basically it took all of what I love about Yoga and meditation to create an appropriately named, insightful experience.

Like all practices, I now have my own unique formula, a little of this and a little of that, depending on the day and what my mind and body needs. I often go to group classes, but my regular practice is a private one that I do alone each morning and now combine with a thirty-minute meditation.

My commitment to my yoga practice is based on the fact that I need it to stay balanced in my life. Yoga keeps me grounded and focused and able to enjoy life no matter what challenges I am presented with simply by letting go and breathing into the stretches.

My Morning Practice Tips

When I start my practice, the first thing I do is to sit on my mat and thank my body for bringing me there. I write three things I am grateful for in my gratitude journal, and then I set an intention for my session, which usually comes from Mark Nepo's; The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have. As I go through my poses, I look for where my body is tight. When I find it, I breathe in and through the uncomfortableness. I know from years of practice that to get to the sweet spot, sometimes we have to go through the tough ones. Even the smallest bit of muscle release can open up a whole new cavern in my mind. Breathing through these places of resistance brings me to a sacred place, that place that JB promised that first day, a place of enlightenment.

Sixteen years later, my yoga and meditation practice are my life guides. They bring me happiness and refresh my soul. With so much uncertainty going on in our worlds, this has become a talisman for my life. If you've never practiced, I invite you to give it a try. Just learning to breathe may offer you a new perspective on life.

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Portion Size and Food Waste: A Growing Problem
Individually we are what we eat. Socially we are what we waste. We can apply Garrett Hardin's theory of the Tragedy of the Commons to this; individually we consider that our food choices benefit us alone, but the social cost of any waste is shared by everyone so we care about it less. However, if unchecked these negative externalities could lead to our demise.

When I moved to America from England, I was delighted by the beautiful, unblemished fruits and vegetables, and the huge portion sizes. Sandwiches particularly intrigued me. I imagined one would need jaws like a snake in order to open one's mouth sufficiently widely to take a bite from this exciting enormity.

I must admit that these generous portions excited me. But even then there were hints that all was not necessarily well in this beautiful food emporium of a country. I noticed how many people were seriously overweight. I also dined one night at a friend's house, who, when the meal was over, fed the very ample remains down the garbage disposal unit, rather than storing them in the refrigerator. What is worse; over-indulging with huge portion sizes? Or throwing away perfectly fresh, nutritious food? They are both a different way of wasting food. And the diminishing returns, exemplified through expanded waist lines and discarded foods are a tragedy.

There is much concern that now that our global population has climbed over seven billion, there is insufficient food to feed everyone. This is a justification for creating genetically modified food, and for factory farms using the Taylor model of assembly lines to maximize efficiency, only in this case it is sentient beings and not metal parts in the factory. Whereas both of these methods are praise-worthy for increasing the food supply, some dispute the view that we are running out of food, and say it's more a problem of distribution than of supply. People in inaccessible rural locations, or urban food deserts, have very poor access to fresh food, and means of distribution need to be improved to help alleviate this situation. But our problem of insufficient food is also clearly a matter of not wasting food in the first place. There is a finite amount of food in the pot; what we waste could have been distributed to others.

There are many stages at which food can be wasted; from fruits and vegetables left to rot in the fields possibly because they are bruised or blemished, to food wasted in supermarkets, especially because of confusion about "sell by" and "best by" dates, which leads many consumers not to select anything that seems too old, to food wasted at home. The American suburban lifestyle encourages us to drive to the supermarket, wheel an enormous cart down aisles of foods designed to tempt us by their bright colors, their labels claiming a variety of health benefits, their price incentives if we buy in bulk, and come away with bags upon bags of groceries as we stock up for a week for ourselves and our family. Inevitably some food gradually gets pushed to the back of the refrigerator, and when we later discover it, it is often too old and possibly moldy.

Some Strategies to Overcome Food Waste:
• Portion control: When we eat good quality food, and slow down and devote our attention to it, we often find we don't need to eat quite so much. Maybe our large consumption is because we don't focus on our food, distracted as we may be by electronic devices or TV or eating on the run, so we eat large amounts of food as a way to satisfy ourselves. Sitting down to a nice meal could surely be a way in which not only might we eat more appreciatively, but also we might waste less.

• Education: We need to educate the public, starting with children, about the sanctity of food. So many children think food originates in the supermarket, vacuum packed, or in colorful boxes, just waiting to be plucked off the shelf. All of us should develop a true respect for food; we should appreciate the richness of the soil, the glory of the sunshine and the clarity of the water that nourishes the crop. Farmers' markets are springing up in more communities, and it is a great way to shop for fresh local food, and learn a little from the farmers, too.

• Abolish Trays in Cafeterias: Trays enable us to carry many heaped plates of food. Without a tray we are less likely to get up and get more food. Rutgers, where I teach, abolished trays in their cafeterias a few years ago, and the overall reaction has been very positive and I see much less food wasted.

• Financial Consequences: Just as there are fines for industries which pollute, so too should we pay towards the costs of wasted food.

• Find Uses for Wasted Food: Feed any discarded food to animals with the appropriate digestive system, or use it as an energy source.

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This post is part of our "Reclaim" initiative, which showcases solutions to the issue of food waste and engages our readers to take action. You can find all the posts in this initiative, as well as feature pieces, investigative stories and video, here. Follow the initiative on Twitter at #Reclaim. And if you'd like to add your own thoughts to our series, sign up here for a HuffPost blog account.

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The Climate Post: North American Leaders Commit to Clean Energy Goal
At the North American Leaders Summit on Wednesday, Mexico, Canada and the United States pledged to generate 50 percent of their energy from clean sources by 2025. The joint commitment by the three countries, according to White House Adviser Brian Deese, is "an aggressive goal" but one that is "achievable continent-wide."

"The Paris Agreement was a turning point for our planet, representing unprecedented accord on the urgent need to take action to combat climate change through innovation and deployment of low-carbon solutions," the leaders said in a statement. "North America has the capacity, resources and the moral imperative to show strong leadership building on the Paris Agreement and promoting its early entry into force. We recognize that our highly integrated economies and energy systems afford a tremendous opportunity to harness growth in our continuing transition to a clean energy economy. Our actions to align climate and energy policies will protect human health and help level the playing field for our businesses, households, and workers."

Last year, 32 percent of North America's overall power came from clean energy sources. The White House cited renewable energy, nuclear plants, and carbon capture and storage technology as possible avenues to achieving the 50 percent goal in the next nine years. In addition, measures will be taken to reduce greenhouse gases in the economies of the three countries through deployment of clean vehicles in government fleets, conduct research to accelerate clean energy innovation, support cross-border transmission projects, and examine adding more renewables to the power grid with a joint study of renewables opportunities and impacts

Mexico will join Canada and the United States in reducing methane emissions by 40 to 45 percent by 2025. Reduction strategies are planned for the agricultural and waste management sectors.

Could Brexit Complicate EU Effort on Paris Agreement?

Although the full effects of the United Kingdom's decision, last week, to leave the European Union (EU)--the so-called Brexit--are still unclear, some think it could have far-reaching effects on Europe's commitment to last year's landmark Paris climate agreement to hold the global average temperature increase to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The impending departure of the EU's second largest emitter and a leading advocate of increased EU ambition ahead of the Paris Agreement complicates Brussels' plan to divide up the EU's pledge to cut emissions at least 40 percent compared with 1990 levels by 2030 (subscription). The United Kingdom would have contributed significantly to meeting that pledge--under a 2008 domestic law it is on a pathway to cut its emissions 57 percent by 2030.

Assuming the United Kingdom stays in the Paris Agreement, its contribution would likely be based on its Climate Change Act. To abandon its current emissions reductions commitments would mean repealing the act.

For now, the United Kingdom remains a supporter of the Paris Agreement, and in the short term no changes are slated in its domestic emissions reduction targets for 2030 and 2050. But the United Nations says that, once the United Kingdom leaves the EU, a "recalibration" of the Paris Agreement will be necessary.

"While I think the U.K's role in dealing with a warming planet may have been made harder by the decision last Thursday, our commitment to dealing with it has not gone away," said Amber Rudd, Britain's Energy Secretary. "Climate change has not been downgraded as a threat. It remains one of the most serious long-term risks to our economic and national security."

Studies Find Pink Snow Contributing to Climate Change; Humans Changing Vegetation Growth

A study in the journal Nature Communications links the pink-hued snow in higher altitudes in the Arctic to climate-change-related increases in algae blooms that are causing melting in the region at an unprecedented pace. The presence of red algae reduces the snow's ability to reflect light instead of absorbing it as heat (albedo), reducing albedo by as much as 13 percent in one season.

"The algae need liquid water in order to bloom," said the University of Leeds' Stefanie Lutz, lead author of the study. "Therefore the melting of snow and ice surfaces controls the abundance of the algae. The more melting, the more algae. With temperatures rising globally, the snow algae phenomenon will likely also increase leading to an even higher bio-albedo effect."

It is unclear how widespread these algae blooms can become, but based on her observations, Lutz said "a conservative estimate would be 50 percent of the snow surface on a glacier [will be covered by the algae] at the end of a melt season."

A separate study by NASA, which analyzed more than 87,000 satellite images, found extensive greening of land in Canada and Alaska while these area's Boreal regions were browning as a result of climate change.

"Whereas temperature limited tundra regions have almost ubiquitously increased productivity with warming temperatures ... trees in the boreal system do not respond well to high temperatures," said Scott Goetz, deputy director and senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. "It's not what most people typically think of as drought, related to soil moisture, but the effect is the same. Boreal trees are like living organisms anywhere, they will do what they need to do to survive... It's all finely tuned by centuries of evolutionary adaptation."

New research in the journal Nature Climate Change statistically attributes these changes human causes.

"Our findings reveal that the observed greening record is consistent with an assumption of anthropogenic forcings, where greenhouse gases play a dominant role, but is not consistent with simulations that include only natural forcings and internal climate variability," the authors write.

The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

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How Marijuana Can (Potentially) Help Fight Against Alzheimer's
For several years, researchers have been looking for a way to defer the early onset of Alzheimer's. As the only disease in the top 10 causes of death unable to be prevented, cured, or even slowed, Alzheimer's disease is a top priority for many researchers, scientists, and doctors. Several conclusions and proposals have been brought up in the past decades, and several of them slipped out of our reach or are still being tested and evaluated. However, Salk Institute scientists have found preliminary evidence that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and other compounds found in marijuana can promote the cellular removal of amyloid beta (Aβ), which happens to be a toxic protein associated with Alzheimer's disease. THC is the principal psychoactive constituent in marijuana and is the chemical responsible for most of marijuana's psychological effects.

In a news article from Salk Institute, Salk Professor David Schubert, the senior author of the paper, states that their study is the first to be able to demonstrate their conclusion.

"Although other studies have offered evidence that cannabinoids might be neuroprotective against the symptoms of Alzheimer's, we believe our study is the first to demonstrate that cannabinoids affect both inflammation and amyloid beta accumulation in nerve cells,"says Schubert.

Even though the studies were conducted on neurons grown in the laboratory, this discovery nonetheless offers insight on the role of inflammation in Alzheimer's disease and paves a pathway for developing novel therapeutics for the serious disorder.

The disease is induced by amyloid beta proteins that accumulate within nerve cells as the brain ages. The heaping of these toxic proteins leads to the formation of plaque deposits in the brain, which is a large characteristic of Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's disease is a grave progressive brain disorder, destroying nerve connections in the brain, which makes it continuously more difficult to perform simple and basic tasks such as moving around, swallowing, and feeding yourself. Although there are several complications in the brain, this alone does not kill you. What does, is the complications that stem from it -- some common examples being aspiration pneumonia, bedsores, malnutrition, and sepsis infections.

Salk researchers had found that high levels of amyloid beta (Aβ ) were heavily associated with cellular inflammation and higher rates of neuron death. They also successfully demonstrated that exposing the cells to THC reduced the amyloid beta protein levels and eradicated the inflammatory response from the nerve cells induced by the protein, allowing the nerve cells to survive.

"Inflammation within the brain is a major component of the damage associated with Alzheimer's disease, but it has always been assumed that this response was coming from immune-like cells in the brain, not the nerve cells themselves," states Antonio Currais, a postdoctoral researcher in Schubert's laboratory and first author of the paper. "When we were able to identify the molecular basis of the inflammatory response to amyloid beta, it became clear that THC-like compounds that the nerve cells make themselves may be involved in protecting the cells from dying."

To add, physical activity results in the production of endocannabinoids and some studies have successfully shown that exercise may slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease. In a separate but relevant research study led by Schubert, his lab had found an Alzheimer's drug candidate called J147 producing similar results. This study had led the scientists to discover the beneficial effect of endocannabinoids like THC.

Although these results are only the beginning to finding a way to successfully fight Alzheimer's, the data from other existing research involving marijuana and Alzheimer's support these findings and make this a plausible treatment in the near future.

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Continental Shift: North America Doubles Down on Cooperation
The world is breathless about Brexit. I get it. If the United Kingdom leaves the European Union it will be very bad news for the British, European and world economies. It will also create big question marks for the environment because of the long-standing role of EU environmental laws in Britain. And, of course, the root causes of the shocking result are lessons we need to quickly learn in the United States and around the world about economic justice, xenophobia and demagoguery.

But let's not forget about the other important events that also occurred this week which, unlike Brexit, sent strong signals to the rest of the world about the power and momentum of international cooperation. Yesterday, at the North American Leaders Summit, the United States, Mexico and Canada -- a regional economy larger than Europe -- doubled down on working together, setting joint goals and collaborating to achieve them. And, they did it on the mother-of-all global challenges: averting climate collapse. As President Obama said yesterday in addressing the Canadian parliament, "there is one threat that we cannot solve militarily and we cannot solve alone - climate change."

Yesterday was the first time that these three national governments met when all were aligned on the urgent need to face climate disruption. With this dawning truth and growing support for action among their people, the three leaders announced a set of joint actions.

At the core are two new lode stars for North America- powering the continent with at least 50% clean electricity in less than a decade, and cutting the super-pollutant methane by 40-45% - also by 2025. These are not small goals. Achieving them will require particularly strong leadership from the United States, which is by far the largest consumer of electricity and source of methane among the three countries.

A shared North American vision for both electricity and methane is important because power and pipeline infrastructure doesn't stop at national borders - and neither do climate change impacts. Think disappearing ice in the US and Canadian Arctic to mega-droughts and wildfires raging along the Canadian and American west to the super-storms that batter the US and the Mexican coastlines.

By developing content-wide energy goals, our leaders are building a foundation of solidarity, rather than division, on the biggest challenge the world has ever seen. And, we'll reap enormous benefits from this holistic approach: by managing our electricity supply together, North America can push even faster toward an economy powered by 100% renewable energy, creating new jobs and leaving nuclear and fossil fuels fully behind.

This collaborative approach builds on momentum generated in Paris last December when world leaders created the first truly global agreement to fight climate change. While this agreement catapulted climate to the top of the world's agenda, and created huge momentum that is still being felt in energy markets and public conversation, it was not enough. There is a major gap between the emissions cuts agreed to in Paris and the ambition we need to get on track to limit global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius - the new global goal set in Paris. This is partially because the Paris deal was mostly about what countries were willing to do on their own, rather than how to do more together.

The time has come for countries to work together to beat their targets by doing more cooperatively. Like moving your refrigerator or getting your car out of a ditch, confronting climate change is something individuals or countries cannot do alone. To avert climate collapse, we have no choice but to search high and low for ways to do more together.

Yesterday's agreement was a strong first step in that direction, but it should not be the last: there are more opportunities on the table for cooperation between US, Canada and Mexico. For example, in Paris, Mexico laid out plans to nearly double its proposed pollution reduction target with support from countries like its neighbors to the north. That wasn't included in yesterday's announcement. With the strong foundation established this week, North American leaders should take up this additional challenge of supporting Mexico in meeting its more ambitious goal.

By remembering our deep cultural connections, we can proudly step into the leadership position the world so desperately needs from Canada, Mexico and the United States of America. To paraphrase voices from Britain's wiser past, when it comes to averting climate collapse we can only get by with a little help from our friends.

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Our Renewable Future
Are we greens resigned to repeating a sad litany of the Arctic melting, wildfires raging, weather getting weird, of tipping points, new expressions of denial, and all the rest of it? Or are there any models of enormous beneficial changes at the last minute? I'm thinking of something bigger than the Montreal protocol that succeeded in shrinking the ozone hole and thus gave false hope that authorities would deal with other climate troubles.

Short of U.S. entry into World War Two, which was occasioned by a surprise attack, the closest example that I know was a near-agreement at the Reykjavik summit in early October 1986. I happened to be in Iceland on those days, on my way, as a "citizen diplomat,' to Moscow. The meeting of world leaders ended suddenly, with anger and disappointment evident of the faces of Gorbachev and Reagan.

However, the negative emotions were caused by the last-minute failure of a near-agreement to do something truly historical: to eliminate all nuclear weapons within a decade and thus end the standing threat of "mutual assured destruction."

I found out what had happened only when the National Security Archive released both the Soviet and U.S. "memoranda of conversations" recorded by official note-takers in the conference room. (To a remarkable degree, the two sets of notes agree.)

Apart from note-takers and translators, the two super-power leaders were meeting with no staff other than the Soviet foreign secretary and his counterpart, George P.Shultz, the U.S. secretary of state. When Gorbachev and Reagan agreed to eliminate all nuclear weapons, Shultz, who was nicknamed "the Buddha" for his implacable demeanor, nonetheless blurted out, "let's do it."

Because the nuclear system remains largely out of sight, many people do not realize how dangerous it's been. Well-informed U.S. observers such as a Secretary of State (Shultz), two Secretaries of Defense (Robert S. McNamara, William J. Perry), and a National Security Adviser (McGeorge Bundy), when separately asked why no nuclear war had occurred, gave the same answer using the same word, "luck."

What is interesting about the Reykjavik Summit is not the failure, but the near-agreement on a step of world-altering scale. The agreement was foiled only by Reagan's insistence that research on his program to achieve a defense against nuclear missiles be permitted not only in the laboratory but also outside. Scientific analysis at the time concluded that such a defensive system would be very hard to develop and easy to fool with, for example, fake warheads.

Why did Reagan otherwise agree to eliminate all nuclear weapons? Did he feel there ought to be a defense? Was he certain that the Soviets would never agree to his condition?

It's often forgotten that the summit came after three amazing events. In 1982 Knopf published Jonathan Schell's book, The Fate of the Earth, a call for nuclear abolition. Also in 1982, building on several years of widespread organizing across in U.S., the nuclear freeze movement, initiated by Randall Forsberg, held a huge rally in Central Park, the largest rally in U.S. history.

In November 1983, NATO ran a war game called "Able Archer." The Soviet leader (Andropov) suspected the exercise was cover for a surprise attack on the USSR and was ready to launch a preemptive attack on the West. All this would have been observed by Gorbachev who was elevated to General-Secretary in March 1985.In Moscow in late 1986 I learned about another nuclear near-accident from a man who'd been at Khrushchev's elbow during the Cuban missile crisis.

I am writing now not primarily about nuclear policy but rather about the equally difficult predicament of global warming. Of course it's easy to find differences between the two. Nuclear war ha always been a clear if hidden danger, while global warming seems like a future threat. Also, at the time of the Reykjavik meeting, the nuclear threat could have been settled by two leaders meeting around a small table in Hofdi House. In contrast, global warming is caused by greenhouse gases emitted all over the globe.

However, there are also big similarities. In both cases, a powerful lobby has an economic interest in the status quo. In the case of the nuclear "triad" (bombers, missiles, subs), that lobby was (and is) what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. In the case of global warming, it is the fossil fuel industries, here and abroad. Just as our civilization depends on coal, oil, and natural gas, so we relied (and still rely) on the nuclear threat for our security. This retaliation system yields benefits unless it fails.(If it ever fails, we would die.)

After the Orlando mass shooting, my local paper quoted people in the street as calling it "unimaginable." Of course the slaughter wasn't unimaginable; statistically it was almost predictable. But we humans don't have a very good record of envisioning what we don't want to see or what our ideologies can't deal with. In extreme form this reaction becomes denial. Toward this behavior it's tempting to feel superior: our side honors the evidence, we support science. Yes, but what do we do about it?

One of the organizations that has wrestled with this beast for years is the Post-Carbon Institute, started by Richard Heinberg and friends and located north of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Institute's new book, by Heinberg and his colleague David Fridley, is called Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy. The enormous value of this book derives from three qualities: (a) it vividly imagines a positive end-state, skipping over the well-known dangers hat could be avoided by achieving this state, (b) it realistically reduces the challenges to engineering problems, explained in some detail, and (c) it forthrightly calls for sacrifice in our form of life with less per capita energy.

"A point we have raised repeatedly," write Heinberg and Fridley, "is that possibly the most challenging aspect of this transition is its implication for economic growth: whereas the cheap, abundant energy of fossil fuels enabled the development of a consumption-oriented growth economy, renewable energy will likely be unable to sustain such an economy." Renewable sources won't replace all the services provided by fossil fuels. The Post-Carbon book deals with this not by re-imagining nuclear plenty (it calls the industry not so much unsafe and costly as "moribund").

Have we hesitated to deal with the lower energy output of renewables by focusing on the enormous harm that will eventually be caused by greenhouse gas emissions? If so, with what result? People are allowed to feel the crisis caused by global warming is far off, is somebody else's problem. Meanwhile, they worry about heating their homes, getting to work (and to vacations), having a steady supply of electricity, receiving goods from the "globalized" economy, getting food, and all the other tasks now performed with the help of fossil fuels. In any case, they feel powerless, especially in a system in which surveys show that large or very large majorities favor a policy but the government does nothing or not enough (for example, gun control, health care, cost of higher education, gross inequality).

Can we draw a loose analogy between Jonathan Schell's book and thoughtful studies such as Our Renewable Future? Between Randy Forsberg's "nuclear freeze" in the 1980s and the work now of Bill McKibben and many others on global warming? Between the near-agreement at Reykjavik and a future success that would lead to a transition to a renewable energy regime?
As citizen diplomats often said, "if the people, lead, leaders will follow." But it will take a mass arousal such as we've rarely seen, based on a vision of a successful transition.

I'm reminded of a job offer at lunch in 1984 with a wealthy man. He wanted to endow and help run a foundation with a single goal of helping to end the Cold War, and to prepare a book in support of that goal. When I gently observed that the goal was very difficult, he replied, "I know it seems impossible, Craig, but it is necessary."

One of our means then was citizen diplomacy, reducing the isolation between the two super-powers, focusing on shared values, imagining an era of peace. Now perhaps one need is for a citizen's movement based on the idea of a transition to a renewable energy system. That's what Heinberg and Fridley are offering.

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Local Food Won't Save The Planet
We are all concerned about the environment and about what life will be like for generations yet unborn. So the idea of local sourcing is becoming very popular, particularly in respect to organically grown food.

Intuitively Obvious but Practically Wrong
The notion of local sourcing seems to make sense. After all, it should require less energy to grow food locally in small quantities than to ship it in from distant states, or countries.

Yet, there are two variables in the energy equation that are not given due consideration. The first is that small-scale production in local market gardens is extremely inefficient in the sense that a great deal of energy is required per unit of harvested crop. The second is that modern transportation is extremely efficient so that bringing in a bag of apples from New Zealand costs a trivial amount of energy and if it didn't, New Zealand apples could hardly be sold here.

The simple economics of distant trade since the industrial Revolution has always suggested that moving goods around the world is not as futile as it might appear. So the British could bring in raw cotton from countries as distant as India, or the US, and produce cloth and garments cheaply enough to compete with locally made goods.

Gonna Build a Toaster
Large corporations build household items like toasters with fantastic efficiency thanks to the wonders of capitalist competition and resulting efficiency.

The inherent flaws in the local sourcing argument are illustrated by an amusing experiment in which artist Thomas Thwaites made his own toaster rather than buying it for the equivalent of less $10 in an English supermarket. He found it extremely difficult to get the necessary raw materials, copper, iron, plastic, and mica (an insulator). The project took several months, cost a lot of money and yielded an inferior product .

Similarly, Kelly Cobb of Drexel University decided to produce a man's suit from materials acquired within 100 miles of her home. She found that it took 20 craftsmen a total of 500 hours to make the suit that ended up costing about a hundred times more than the regularly produced item.

There is a cautionary tale built into this episode, when you produce something locally, you may save money on transportation, but this does not mean that the product is going to be efficiently produced or good for the environment. This fallacy is deeply embedded in the grow-local movement for food.

Why Local Food Is Not Green
When economists studied the energy costs of producing food, they found that the whole concept of "food miles" is deeply flawed as a sustainability indicator.
According to English writer Matt Ridley (pp. 41-42):

Getting food from the farmer to the shop costs just 4 percent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer traveling to the shops. A New Zealand lamb, shipped to England, requires one-quarter as much carbon to get on a London plate as a Welsh lamb; a Dutch rose grown in a heated greenhouse and sold in London, has six times the carbon footprint of a Kenyan rose grown under the sun using water recycled through a fish farm, using geothermal electricity and providing employment to Kenyan women.

Save Yourself, Not the Planet!
Growing food locally makes very little sense from either an environmental or an economic perspective. Yet there is a good argument for growing food locally that is much more experiential than economic, or environmental. Nothing tastes better than garden produce straight out of the earth, or off the vine.

Even more important, the gardener feels a deep connection with the natural world unlike any other, monitoring the progress of each plant from one day to the next.

The physical activity of working in a vegetable plot is very good for cardiovascular health. The psychological benefits are even more impressive. Gardening is likely to elevate a person's mood because it is forward-looking, active, nurturant, and productive. Growing one's own food gives a person a great sense of control over one aspect of their lives. Perhaps for these reasons, gardening programs in prisons are among the most effective ways of rehabilitating career criminals.

If you want to grow your own vegetables, do it to save yourself. You are not saving the planet.

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Solar-Energized Juno To Arrive At Jupiter On Independence Day
What NASA insisted for decades could not be -- a spacecraft using solar energy rather than nuclear power going beyond the orbit of Mars -- will be proven false on Monday, July 4th, Independence Day, when the solar-energized Juno space probe arrives at Jupiter.

NASA had maintained that to provide on-board power and heat on spacecraft in deep space, plutonium-powered systems were required -- despite the disaster if there were an accident on launch or in a fall back to Earth and the plutonium was released. I broke the story 30 years ago about how the next mission of NASA's ill-fated Challenger shuttle was to involve lofting a plutonium-powered space probe and I have been reporting in articles, books and on television on the nuclear-in-space issue ever since.

If the Challenger accident did not happen in January 1986 but the shuttle exploded on its next scheduled mission, in May 1986, with the plutonium-powered space probe in its cargo bay, the impacts could have been enormous. Plutonium is the most lethal of all radioactive substances.

Still, when NASA re-scheduled the two plutonium-powered missions it had planned for 1986 -- one the Galileo mission to Jupiter -- it not only publicly declared that plutonium systems to provide on-board power for space probes in deep space were necessary but swore to that in court.

Opponents of the Galileo mission brought suit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. in 1989 seeking to stop the nuclear-energized Galileo shot because of its public health danger in the event of an accident, and they pressed NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on the availability of a safe energy alternative. NASA and DOE officials swore that only nuclear power would do that far out in space, that solar energy could not be harvested beyond the orbit of Mars.

And now comes NASA's own Juno spacecraft energized by solar energy functioning in deep space. Indeed, NASA acknowledges, "This is the first time in history a spacecraft is using solar power so far out in space."

Says Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space: "All during out campaigns to oppose NASA plutonium launches during 1989, 1990 and 1997" -- when NASA launched its Cassini space probe with the most plutonium NASA ever used in a power system on a spacecraft -- "the space agency maintained in court and in the media that solar would not work as an on-board power source in deep space. Then, in part because of grassroots pressure from around the planet, NASA decided to use solar on the deep space Juno mission."

"To this day," Gagnon went on last week, "NASA still maintains that it must use deadly nuclear devices on some of its space missions -- further evidence that the nuclear industry maintains a stranglehold on the space agency. The nuclear industry mistakenly views space as a new market for its toxic product that so many have rejected back here on Earth."

Gagnon added: "We will continue to organize to stop the nuclearization of space -- and we will use NASA's own Juno mission as evidence that the bad seed of nuclear power is not essential for space exploration."

The Global Network -- www.space4peace.org -- established in 1992, is based in Maine.
Juno is not a minor space mission. As NASA states on its Juno mission web page-="The primary scientific goal of the Juno mission is to significantly improve our understanding of the formation, evolution and structure of Jupiter. Concealed beneath a dense cover of clouds, Jupiter, the archetypical 'Giant Planet,' safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes underlying the early formation of our solar system. Present theories of the origin and early evolution of our solar system are currently at an impasse. Juno will provide answers to critical science questions about Jupiter, as well as key information that will dramatically enhance present theories about the early formation of our own solar system."

Juno will, as of Monday, have flown nearly 2 billion miles to reach Jupiter. It was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on August 5, 2011. It did a "slingshot maneuver" or "flyby" of Earth in October 2013 to increase its velocity. It has been flying at 60,000 miles per hour. It will orbit Jupiter more than 30 times doing scientific observations.

And although sunlight at Jupiter is just four percent of what it is on Earth, Juno's solar panels, manufactured by Spectrolab, a division of Boeing, will be able to continue to harvest solar energy. Its passes will include bringing it closer to Jupiter than any mission before.

On its current "Where is Juno?" page, NASA reports: "The Juno spacecraft is in excellent health and is operating nominally."

The solar energy on 66-foot wide Juno is being generated by three large solar panels. They convert sunlight to electricity at a 28 percent efficiency rate. That's a little over the 25 percent efficiency rate of the better photovoltaic rooftop panels now being widely used for electric power on Earth. The cost of the mission is $1.1 billion.

Says NASA on its website: "To answer our fundamental questions about origins we especially need to know Jupiter's internal structure and global water abundance. Juno will map the internal structure by studying its influence on the planet's gravitational field with unprecedented accuracy. The water abundance will be determined by microwave radiometers that will detect thermal radiation from deep atmospheric layers, a completely new approach. Water ice brought most of the heavy elements to Jupiter. Knowing the water abundance will tell us the original form of that ice and hence help define the conditions and processes in the original cloud of dust and gas that led to the origin of Jupiter. Those same conditions and processes were forming other planets too. Because this enormous planet contains most of the water in the solar system we can expect this investigation to help us understand the origin of the life-giving water on Earth."

At the end of its mission NASA will send Juno diving into Jupiter and it will burn up.
"NASA going green with solar-powered Jupiter probe," was the headline of an Associated Press article in USA Today in 2011. "NASA's upcoming mission to Jupiter can't get much greener than this: a solar-powered, windmill-shaped spacecraft," the story began.

But it wasn't as if solar on Juno was NASA's first choice. The Associated Press piece described Scott Bolton, the principal investigator for the mission for the Southwest Research Institute, a NASA contractor, as maintaining "the choice of solar was a practical one... No plutonium-powered generators were available to him and his San Antonio-based team... so they opted for solar panels rather than develop a new nuclear source." The article quoted Bolton as saying: "It's nice to be green, but it wasn't because we were afraid of plutonium."

As bullish as NASA has been in using nuclear power on space probes, once it was as insistent in utilizing atomic energy to power space satellites, too. Then, in 1964, a satellite with a SNAP-9A plutonium system on board failed to achieve orbit and dropped to Earth, disintegrating as it fell, its plutonium fuel dispersing all over the Earth.

Long linking the SNAP-9A accident to an increase in lung cancer on Earth was the late Dr. John Gofman, an M.D. and Ph.D., discover of several radioactive isotopes who did extensive experiments with plutonium for the Manhattan Project, and was associate director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to using solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites -- and the International Space Station -- are solar powered.

"A Juno success would be a good sign for future solar-powered missions of all types," stated the Associated Press "NASA going green with solar-powered Jupiter probe" article.
Unfortunately, if NASA and the DOE have their way, rational energy decision-making won't necessarily follow a Juno success. "The United States has begun manufacturing nuclear spacecraft fuel for the first time in a generation," reported SpaceNews last month. SpaceNews said the Department of Energy is having its Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory join together to produce plutonium for NASA space missions. Some plutonium has been produced although "full production of the stuff is still seven years or so away," it said.

In space as on Earth, solar power works.

But, says Gagnon, "Just like here on Earth there is a tug-of-war going on between those who wish to promote life-giving solar power and those who want nukes. That same battle for nuclear domination is being taken into the heavens by an industry that wants more profit -- no matter the consequences. The Global Network will continue to organize around the space nuclear power issue by building a global constituency opposed to the risky and unnecessary nukes in space program."

With solar-energized Juno's arrival at Jupiter, this Independence Day should mark a blow for independence from dangerous nuclear power above our heads in space.

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Bioethics after Brexit
It is too soon to know how the crisis that has been created by Britain's vote to leave the European Union will play out. But it is worth considering that the field of bioethics has a grave stake in the outcome. Modern bioethics is to a great extent a product of the liberal international system put in place after World War II.

In 1945 the four Allied states conducted war crimes trials of the Third Reich's surviving political and military leaders. Though some advocated simple executions a decision was made instead to send a message about the post-war rule of law. In spite of widespread doubt that this would be anything but a "show trial" based on victor's justice, several of the defendants were acquitted. Although the other powers did not participate in subsequent trials in Nuremberg, the United States decided it was important to treat other ardent Nazis who were indicted for war crimes in a similar orderly fashion.

The most famous of the other trials was that of 23 Nazi doctors and bureaucrats who were implicated in human experiments in concentration camps. What was expected to be a case that could be completed in a few weeks took months, because the defense argued that there were no internationally recognized rules for the conduct of human experiments. Ultimately the court returned to the grounds for the prosecution case, which was murder and other outrages against human beings, not the violation of research ethics. As a result of the "doctors' case," the judges decided that part of their decision should be a corrective to the apparent absence of international rules. That document has come to be known as the Nuremberg Code.

The Code was only the first in a line of medical ethics documents that have come to be part of the post-war system, including the World Medical Association's code of ethics in 1949 and its Declaration of Helsinki, first promulgated in 1964. The Council on International Organizations of Medical Sciences first adopted its International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects in 1993. In 2005 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. Other international treaties and conventions bear on bioethics, including the Geneva Convention of 1949 and its annexes, the Biologic and Toxin Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention. The World Trade Organization, whose responsibilities include oversight of intellectual property rights like those involving drugs and devices, is the product of an agreement among 123 countries.

All of these standards and institutions have their faults and limitations. Many ethics-related guidelines are honored more in the breach than the reality and they are liable to be seen as favoring the "haves" over the "have nots." There are no enforcement mechanisms for guidelines like the Declaration of Helsinki and since 2008 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration no longer refers to them. The International Court of Justice in The Hague is plagued by jurisdictional questions and the U.S. has never joined the International Criminal Court. Nonetheless, these arrangements provide some frameworks for questions that involve sovereign states.

The post-war "European project" that is threatened by Brexit, one aimed at preventing repetition of the hundreds of years of bloodshed on the Continent, is of course only one part of the international order. But considering the political, financial, and cultural centrality of Europe it is a critical one. If as appears to be the case, the nationalist and populist sentiments roiling the Northern Hemisphere are implicitly rebellions against not only globalization but also the global elite and "expert" class that have promoted and directed it. That class very much includes the academics, advocates, policy wonks, and regulators who have a hand in bioethics.

One can't say what this all might mean. Over the next months and years the British might find a way to resolve enough of their differences with the EU to remain a quasi-partner and the other members might fend off nationalist movements in their own countries. In that case the crisis might have passed. But if Brexit is the first crack in the liberal international system to be followed by a more general breakdown, some of the central tenets that underlie post-war biomedical ethics might be at risk, including the authority of some of those conventions and institutions and even assumptions about values like universal human equality.

The point is that modern bioethics is very much a creation of the era after World War II, one dominated by the U.S. and Western Europe. As such it is far from immune to the threats to that international system, though the implications may take years to become evident.

(First published on the Hastings Bioethics Forum)

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Why The Haitian Cholera Victims Deserve Their Day In Court
The battle between victims of the cholera epidemic in Haiti and the United Nations may resemble a classic David and Goliath story, except in this case Goliath hasn't even shown up to fight.

The reason is that the United Nations is granted "immunity from every form of legal process" -- even though public health experts believe UN peacekeeping troops are responsible for the cholera outbreak in Haiti, which has infected more than 750,000 people and killed more than 9,000 since October 2010. (Though a recent paper from Médecins Sans Frontières researchers suggests that there may be "a substantially higher cholera mortality rate than previously reported.")

Nevertheless, on Jan. 9, 2015, US District Court Judge J. Paul Oetken dismissed a class action lawsuit brought by the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. But in March the Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to review the District Court's ruling. The decision of the three judges is pending.

The United Nations should not be able to invoke immunity in order to foreclose on justice. The 1946 convention that granted them immunity also charged them with a responsibility. They aren't to be accountable to no one. Rather, according to the convention, the UN "shall make provisions for appropriate modes of settlement." But the UN has refused to do so in this case.

The United Nations should account for their role in one of the deadliest outbreaks of cholera in recent history. Some argue that time is better spent on halting the epidemic and not trying to point fingers at who started it. But while that trade may satisfy members of elite organizations, it is unlikely to satisfy people like Lisette Paul, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Her brother, Fritznel, became sick while working in the fields. He vomited and had diarrhea for seven days straight until he died. His medical and funeral expenses plunged his family into debt. Soon, they could no longer afford to send his daughter to school. The suffering of Fritznel, Lisette, and those like them shouldn't be pitted against the prevention of future pain. They should have a forum to air their claims and the UN should provide it.

No one doubts that the ongoing cholera epidemic in Haiti is a man-made disaster. The debate is who, or what, was responsible. Cholera is a bacterial infection that causes diarrhea and vomiting and, unstopped, eventually dehydration and sometimes death. People can catch it from contaminated water. But it hadn't been in Haiti for 100 years at least. So how did it wind up there in October 2010?

The short answer is human activity from South Asia. One team of public health experts matched the strain of cholera to a South Asian type. Another made a circumstantial case that the disease came from a camp of UN peacekeeping troops from Nepal. Before the troops were deployed to Haiti, there had been a cholera outbreak in Kathmandu, Nepal. Less than two weeks after the first cases, the Associated Press reported an overflowing septic tank, the "stench of excrement," and "a reeking black flow" from the camp's pipes to the Artibonite River, which 1.5 million Haitians use.

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The UN doesn't deny all of these claims. In fact, they rounded up an independent panel that reached many of the same conclusions. They also found that the cholera strain matches the South Asian type and the outbreak happened "as a result of human activity."

But the UN panel report arrives at a different conclusion. Though they agree someone must have brought cholera to Haiti, they say no one should be blamed. This is because, they argue, there was a "confluence of circumstances." These circumstances include the environmental conditions, the role that Haitians played in spreading the disease, an especially deadly strain of cholera, and the country's poor sanitation and water conditions. Indeed, by the time the cholera outbreak hit, a mere 17% of Haitians had access to facilities that separate human waste from human contact.

The "confluence of factors" argument amounts to little more than victim blaming. If only Haiti had better water and sanitation, the argument goes, then cholera would not have spread.

But does that mean someone should be able to leak contaminated raw sewage with impunity? "From a legal perspective that stuff is all totally irrelevant," counters Brian Concannon, the executive director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. "If the UN negligently introduced this disease into an environment they knew was weak, then legally it's still responsible."

Still, this isn't an open-and-shut case. Daniele Lantagne and the rest of the UN panel give two reasons why not. First, there is no hard scientific link between the peacekeepers and the outbreak. Someone else from South Asia could have been in Haiti at the time and, however miniscule the possibility, they could have carried the strain. Second, the introduction of cholera undoubtedly was an accident and not a deliberate act.

But this only raises more questions that the UN should answer. No one argues that the peacekeepers contaminated the water supply on purpose. If they had the disease, they may have had no idea. In fact, it is possible to be totally asymptomatic. But this doesn't answer why they weren't screened for the disease. After all, a cholera outbreak was reported on September 23, 2010, in Kathmandu, which is where the peacekeepers trained for three months. They received a medical examination before traveling to Haiti. Why weren't they tested for cholera? A recent article in PLOS Medicine reports that the rapid diagnostic test only costs $2.54 per person and a single-dose prophylaxis on the higher end runs $1.32 per person.

Even if they were definitively singled out as the cause, it would be unfair to punish the peacekeepers. They weren't experts. Peacekeeping troops are hired out, largely from poor countries, to the UN for $1,028 per soldier per month of duty.

But that doesn't mean no one could have foreseen harm. Just two days after the January 2010 earthquake, the US National Center for Medical Intelligence wrote that it "expects damage to urban water and sewage infrastructure will increase rates of diarrheal disease, possibly to include cholera." Even if an accidental act and a confluence of factors spread cholera, the important ethical questions are when those factors were known, and by whom.

It isn't only outsiders like Brian Concannon and the IJDH who are calling on the UN to hear claims from the victims of cholera. In his first report as the UN's independent expert on the situation of human rights in Haiti, Gustavo Gallón called for a "reparation commission for cholera victims." Given that the UN proclaimed that victims of human rights violations must be able to seek remedies and reparations, Mr. Gallón reminds us, anything less would be hypocritical.

In October 2015, four UN Special Rapporteurs joined Gallón to argue that "the victims of cholera have access to a transparent, independent and impartial mechanism that can review their claims and decide on the merits of those claims in order to ensure adequate reparation, including restitution, compensation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition."

More recently, Jan Eliasson, the Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, wrote a letter that the "Secretary General and I are fully committed to ensuring that the Organization fulfills its human rights obligations." Yet the letter doesn't mention financial compensation nor does it mention any "transparent, independent and impartial mechanism" to review claims.

One out of every fourteen Haitians has been infected with cholera. They deserve an official forum to examine why this happened and who is responsible. People like Claudine, another client of IJDH, who spent her life savings to bury her father should be made financially whole. As of today, none of this will happen.

This blog originally appeared at PLOS Public Health Perspectives.

Photo Credit: V. cholerae on TCBS. Via Flickr VeeDunn CC BY 2.0.

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Day 300: Virtually There

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Until we get really good at transgressing the laws of physics, we live under the thumb of certain hard facts. One of the hardest is this: we can't physically be in two places at once. Happily, through miracles of modern technology like speakerphones, Skype, and virtual reality, as long as we're on the same planet as an event, we can virtually attend. At least, our likenesses can. Our voices, faces, and/or avatars can appear in our places. Using these work-arounds, our essences can sort of exist in two or more places at once. Virtually near-infinite versions of ourselves, some more robust than others, can experience elements of distant locations and the people -- with a catch.

"Distant" here is "less than or equal to the maximum circumference of the Earth and nearby orbits." This modus operandi does not function at an interplanetary level. In fact, it starts to break down as soon as you get to the Moon. The delay -- 1 second each way -- is barely perceptible, but nonetheless palpable. Send a command -- wait for it, wait for it -- then get a reply. "Hello!"... 1... 2 -- "Hello!" It's ALMOST like being there, but not quite. It's more like awaiting an echo.

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The further out we go in the Universe, the more protracted these conversations become. By the time you get to Mars, delay could be as short as 4 minutes -- like being placed "on a brief hold while we find someone to serve you" -- or as long as 20 minutes each way; like Mars is telling you, "Go on a lunch break. Your reply will be waiting when you return."

This is not a complaint by any means. Compared to the good folks running the Juno mission to Jupiter (due to arrive on 7/4!) a call to Mars represents a rapid turn-around. Juno's controllers currently wait 1.5 hours for a reply from their spacecraft. The folks listening to signals from Voyager 1 stay on hold for more than 37 hours. Still, our lag, however tiny on the scale of the solar system, means that we on simulated Mars are never quite there on Earth: for the people we care about, or for ourselves.

To be fair, even when I stayed put on one planet, in the course of more than thirty solar revolutions I missed an event or two. Due to residency training, I was absent during my only sibling's wedding. I missed the funeral of one of my best friends from high school because it occurred on the same day as my cousin's wedding. These circumstances aside, I've made every attempt to be there -- virtually if not physically -- for marriages, births, deaths, anniversaries, chemotherapy, and just about every important happening in the world where my presence could make a difference. That is, until my presence was requested on a different world.

It's been a little over 300 days since I was physically present for anyone back on Earth. Now seems like a good time to acknowledge the things that I have missed.

Two friends began and completed chemotherapy. Survival looks promising! Good job, guys.
My only niece began school.
A colleague who spent her life removing cancers from women's reproductive systems was forced to stop working... because she has cancer.
My husband's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, turned 90.
My father was assaulted in his own home and had to undergo surgery to stabilize his arm.
My best friend since childhood had twins (Full-sized twins!)
On Monday, at the age of 88, my beautiful grandmother passed away peacefully in her sleep.

On Earth, we cannot always be there for these moments. Future space explorers will not be there for these moments. As much as we all accept this as part of the job, the fact that we cannot be there however much we wish to be might take a toll on future missions to asteroids, other planets, and other stars.

To mitigate the potential damage from this rift, we've begun studying how our presences back home (and our family's absence in space) can best be substituted. Based our experiences during the last 10 months, I can report that sending videos back-and-forth satisfies some basic needs. We can see and hear people. They can see and hear us. Everyone walks away knowing that everyone else basically OK. What else does one need, really?

Before yesterday, I couldn't have answered that question. Now it's clear that there's something more that we space travelers might need from time to time -- something that regular video cannot supply.

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The HI-SEAS crew goes on VR trips in the airlock: one of the few places in the hab where it's large enough (and quiet enough) to set up the system.

The news of my grandmother's passing arrived in the morning via an email from my mother. The crew had a full day of studies ahead (there's really no day off in space). Coincidentally, I was at the helm for that particular day's experiment. So I set to work getting everything ready. When my turn came, I hooked myself up to all of the gadgets and gizmos, started the recorder, and hit "Go" button on the 3D virtual reality system. I had done this before, many times. This time, however, the experience was different.

The city that appeared before me was one in which I used to live. By happenstance, the high-resolution 3D images were taken in the early summertime, which is taking place right now on that continent on Earth. They were taken around the same time of day when I was watching the video in the hab: early afternoon. The images were of places that I had visited frequently. In an unexpected twist, people walking past the camera rig would occasionally stop and peer at it. Sometimes, they would even point and gesture to it. I experienced the satisfying sensation that life was going along back at home just as it should have been -- not without me, but with me present as a sort of spectral spectator. Though you might not expect it, that part of the VR experience -- being noticed by people on Earth -- was the most moving. The visual cues told my brain, if not my mind, that I was home.

Being able to give future space explorers this experience on demand may be critically important. As our crew architect recently pointed out: if this were really Mars, we would have just arrived. Since mankind's smallest target area on Mars is a few kilometers at best, we would have spent much of these last few weeks running around looking for our stuff. Hopefully, we would have found all or most of it by now. Hopefully, all or most of it would be functional (or would be after some intrepid astronaut intervention). Then those first human visitors to Mars may discover, as we have, that missing Earth is not a regular occurrence. Here, the vistas here are grand and strange. We appreciate them for their beauty and oddity. The scenery is more than good enough. No scenery can substitute for people, though: we miss people and their lives, if not life on Earth, persay.

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Being gone for three years, not just one, means that each man and woman on that journey will miss everything about people's lives that we've missed, times three. In a way, it's a frustrating experience. There was nothing I could do when my father was attacked. It's also a sort of relief: because I could not be there, a friend of the family stepped up and is living with him now -- done and handled. In that way, being in space is both a sacrifice and a ticket to ride. I told my grandmother that I loved her and thanked her for being in my life over delayed video. That was hard. On the other hand, in my last memory of her, my grandmother is standing by her white sink washing green grapes. She's on her own two feet in her own home. She's smiling. I have that image of her, happy and healthy, because I was here, not there, for the end.

I've come to realize that like most of life, this whole space thing is a give and take. In a recent interview (by delayed audio signal) I was asked, "How are you handling the stress of isolation?" My reply was: "How are you all on Earth handling the stress of waking up every day, getting to work through traffic, racing to get everything done so that you can get the kids to soccer practice or play league volleyball with your friends, then shopping, cooking, and fixing the house?" I seem to recall that on Earth the demands on one's time and the places from which those demands might emanate are nearly limitless. Here, the demands on our bodies and minds are highly limited by the simple fact that we aren't on Earth. Our commute is remarkably short. Though we're busy growing the radishes under LEDs, there is no shopping or insuring to be done, no phones to answer, no snow to shovel off the driveway. I truly believe that the average stress in space and on Earth is equal in magnitude if differently distributed -- with one notable exception.

Difficulty with long distance -- really long distance -- arises when there's a part of our lives that cannot be assigned to someone else, or something particular about Earth that cannot be replicated in space. One of those non-replicable things is being there for your friends and family in their moments of triumph and grief. Another is the sheer mass of humanity. By virtue of infinite diversity in infinite combinations, while on Earth we know that there's someone nearby going through the exact same thing that we are going through. We might not know who they are or where they are, but we know that they are out there: by the dozens if not hundreds or thousands. The five other people here all know what it's like to look for a certain type of volcanic rock while experiencing intermittent radio failure. (Thankfully.) None of them are going through the loss that I'm going through right now. It's me alone. Or rather, it was. In an unexpected moment of relief, I stepped back into a familiar city on Earth and was suddenly surrounded by other people -- people who might be and are experiencing anything, from extreme joy to extreme defeat, loss and gain and everything in between. In spite of the distance, I was virtually there with them and they were there with me -- if only for a moment.

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Climate Change This Week: Climate Emergency, Pope Francis Inspires Divestment, and More!
Today, the Earth got a little hotter, and a little more crowded.

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Saving BUB - beautiful unique biodiversity, like this furry Javanese beetle, is another benefit of conserving carbon-storing forests. Source gbohne at www.flickriver.com

Forests: the cheapest way to store carbon

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Locals Know Best such as these Amazonian Awa forest people, when it comes to conserving forests. Source pinterest

OO Indigenous Rights, Private Funding Key To Slowing Deforestation,
Says Norway Minister - Efforts to save the world's forests hinge on securing private sector funds and ensuring indigenous communities in tropical forests are more involved in protecting their environment.

A Lethal Landslide, and More Rain in a Javanese village. Courtesy of @Sutopo_BNPB

OO Java, Indonesia: Massive Deforestation, Heavy Rain Create
Lethal Landslides - Takeaways:

64 died in recent landslides;
1800s to present: Java forests declined from 10 to 0.4 million hectares.
Since 2005: 2000+ people have died from landslides.

Forests anchor soil; remove them, add heavy rain, and landslides result.

When we harm forests, we harm ourselves.

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2016: THE YEAR CLIMATE SHATTERED

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An Extreme Mosaic: Heat waves, droughts, and flooding have already broken records in 2016.

OO Shattered Records Show Climate Change Is An Emergency Today,
Scientists Warn - May was the 13th month in a row to break temperature records, say recent data.

It's the latest in a string of climate records this year -- from vanishing Arctic sea ice, to carbon dioxide levels in the air, to drought in India and the vast bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef -- records that scientists have described as a bombshell and an emergency.

Noted UK Meteorologist Adam Scaife, "Including this year so far, 16 of the 17 warmest years on record have been since 2000 - it's a shocking statistic." Fast-rising CO2 levels are "almost entirely" the reason for the record-busting year, with some help from El Nino.

This year's high temperatures so far mean 2016 almost certainly will be the hottest year on record.

Related Headline:

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That's Bleached Coral, Not Snow in this aerial view of the Great Barrier Reef, where massive amounts of coral have bleached and died, just one of several record-breaking climate events that have occurred so far in 2016. Source The Centre of Excellence, Coral Reef Studies

OO Seven Climate Records Set So Far In 2016 - a sampler:

Warmest Arctic winter
Last 9 months are hottest on record
India's hottest day: 51C (128 F)
Alaska warmest spring on record
Increase in CO2 levels far more than in previous years
Australia's hottest autumn (US spring) yet
Record massive bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef

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SPEAKING OUT

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Not Just The Public, But Scientists All Over Agree - no Arctic drilling. Credit Joshua Trujillo at seattlepi.com

OO Scientists Urge Obama to Halt Oil Leasing in the Arctic - 400+ scientists from over a dozen countries signed the letter, urging him to do so, because of the significant environmental and climate risks associated with further fossil fuels exploration there.

OO Obama At Yosemite Attacks 'Lip Service' To Natural Beauty Amid Climate Inaction - he warned that climate change could ravage many of America's vaunted national parks, and criticized political opponents who "pay lip service" to areas of natural beauty but oppose efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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@@ Climate Change 101: Why Care?
What You Need to Know - Bill Nye tells it all in five minutes amid graphic, dynamic, engaging, compelling imagery. Check it Out!

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HOT NEWS

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Hot Times

OO May 2016: One More Record-Hot Month for the World says NASA, with record-breaking warm temperatures for the globe; So far this year, every month has been record warm.

February and March set consecutive records for the most anomalously warm month (ie, deviating the most from average temperatures), show data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

OO 370 Months And Counting...
Global Warming Is Causing A 'Fundamental Change' In The World's Weather the UN warns, as NASA reports the hottest spring in history for the northern hemisphere, accompanied by unusually high rainfall recently in parts of the US and Europe.

World Meteorological Organization global climate director Dr. David Carlson said the new data showed 370 straight months of warm or warmer-than-average temperatures worldwide.

He noted, "The state of the climate so far this year gives us much cause for alarm...Exceptionally high temperatures. Ice melt rates ... Once-in-a-generation rainfall events."

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The Heat Is On... Source NSF Centra lArizona Phoenix LTER site

Scientists warn of regular record breaking global temperatures within 50 years without dramatic reductions of carbon emissions, researchers find. By 2061-2080, summers around the world are likely to exceed the warmest on record today, affecting health and food production.

Why Climate Change Makes Stronger Storms -- it's the added heat. Just add heat, and watch things stir.

"We have no choice but to address climate change, or it will address us." -- Michael Mann

@@ Coal Country Clobbered by Climate-fueled Cataclysm

The sad fact about the working class people who have supported right wing politics historically in the US, is that they are themselves so often the victims of the policies their political heroes advocate.

This is certainly true in areas of environment and climate, and yet another of those increasingly common "one in a thousand year" events in West Virginia illustrates vividly.

OO Greenland Was Hotter Than New York City Recently - Greenland, the Arctic nation that is basically one huge ice cube, is feeling rather balmy lately.

OO 120+ F Expected As Monster Heat Wave Hits Southern California

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Credit Matt Granz

OO Dangerous Fires, Extreme Heat Causes Misery Across Southern California with 100+ temperatures across a wide area that are fueling dangerous fires.

OO What Would A Global Warming Increase Of 1.5 Degrees Be Like? The difference in temperature of 1.5 or 2 degrees C is marginal.

But what about rises of 1.5 C and 2 C?
The effect on more extreme weather - think floods, droughts, storms, and heatwaves -- is not:
Research suggests that a 1.5 C rise would double the risks of the extremely heat waves and droughts that were once rare but now occurring more often - yeah, we'd likely get twice as much as the present.

Now, add another 0.5 C rise - and the risks double again.

And the probability of even more extreme events increases even faster.

What does a 2 C rise mean for life on Earth?

Parts of the Middle East would become uninhabitable without permanent air conditioning.
Some experts predict a massive decline in the food crops critical for human survival:
Parts of Africa would see their corn crops cut in half, for example.

Two degrees, says Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Center, "contains significant risks for societies everywhere; 1.5 looks much more scientifically justifiable."

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FIXING CLIMATE CHANGE

@@ A Simple And Smart Way To Fix Climate Change given by Dan Miller in 2014 at a Ted talk suggests a way to profit as we tackle climate change, by finally charging those who sell and use fossil fuels - and distributing the revenues back to all of us.

The strategy is sure to speed transition to clean renewable energy. What's not to like? Check it out!

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BURNING UP

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Burning Up: 31 large (1,000+ acres) US wildfires are now burning in the west; the wildfire season has grown 100+ days longer. Source Climate Central at wxshift.com

OO Everything You Need to Know About Wildfires in One Map - the new US wildfire tracker map at Climate Central keeps you updated on all, and puts it in the context of our changing climate.

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UP, UP, AND AWAY

OO Atmospheric CO2 Levels Forecast To Pass Grim 400 Ppm Milestone -
And Won't Fall Below It In Our Lifetimes says the UK Meteorological (Met) Office, the national meteorological government agency.

Related Headline:

OO Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 ppm For First Time In 4 Million Years and is the last CO2 monitoring station on Earth to do so.

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An Increasingly Common CO2 Generator with help from El Nino, which has helped spark wildfires worldwide. Source softpixel.com

OO El Niño Likely To Boost CO2 In 2016 which has warmed and dried the tropics, limiting the ability of forests to take up CO2 from the atmosphere and triggering huge fires around the globe.

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AGRICULTURE EMISSIONS IMPACTING CLIMATE MORE

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Climate-Changing Cows are the main culprits, emitting methane as they burp and fart; their numbers increase as the world's appetite for meat does. Source opensourcevegan.com

OO Climate Impacts From Farming Are Getting Worse say new United Nations figures.

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GOOD IDEAS

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Beautiful Good Food Source Fully Raw at pinterest.com

OO Going Vegetarian Can Cut Your Food Carbon Footprint In Half says a big recent study on diets in the United Kingdom.

OO China Aims To Halve Meat Eating and has issued guidelines to help wean its citizens onto a more vegetarian diet − offering huge potential health gains and cuts in greenhouse gases. The country consumes 28% of the world's meat due to its population size.

The Chinese health ministry has published new dietary guidelines recommending that people should eat from 40g to at most 75g (1.5- 2.5 oz) of meat a day, which is close to the level recommended by British health authorities to limit the risk of developing bowel cancer.

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A Green Way for Wildlife Source firstforwildlife.wordpress.com

OO Natural Corridors Could Help Wildlife Survive Climate Change - Linking up natural areas with migration corridors could help wildlife keep pace with climate change.

OO It's The Economy That Needs To Be Integrated Into The Environment -
Not The Reverse - BP's call for a 'meaningful carbon price' is the latest example of wrongly trying to apply economic theories and tools to the environment.

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Source Green MPs on Flickr

OO UK: Retailer Crowd Funds Solar Panels For Its Stores to Help Communities - Marks & Spencer is partnering with Energy4All, a not-for-profit group that helps community groups set up energy co-ops, with the aim of raising £1.23 million to put panels on nine large stores.

Investors will be guaranteed a 5% yearly return, M & S will buy the energy it needs, and further profits will be invested in community energy projects. Triple Win!!!

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MELTDOWN

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The River Below - a massive subsurface river of ice may be speeding the flow of ice into Antarctic waters, and speeding sea rise. Source Hubbard et al., 2016

OO An Antarctic River of Ice Might Hasten
Ice Shelf Collapse & Sea Level Rise - as ice collapses into the sea. The discovery of the 300 ft thick moving layer of ice beneath a major ice shelf, the Larsen C, might be speeding its collapse into the sea, says a new study.

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It's Melting, Melting... and as permafrost dries, releasing even more climate changing CO2.

OO As Permafrost Melts and Dries,
Its Carbon Emissions Will Double - under a 10C rise in temperature, says a new study that mimicked such warming in the arctic permafrost. In real time, this will happen when the rest of the world heats just 5C, since the Arctic is warming about twice as fast.

As the soil warms and dries, microbial activity increases and starts using oxygen, increasing emissions. Using oxygen results in releasing more CO2, which lasts far longer in the air than the methane released by anaerobic microbes in waterlogged permafrost.

Doubling the release of climate changing emissions will further accelerate climate change and accelerate even greater releases of these emissions.

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GOOD CLEAN NEWS

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OO Renewables Will Replace Gas as Top U.S. Power Source in 2031 a Bloomberg New Energy Finance analysis shows, becoming the dominant source of electricity generation in the U.S. in 2031, even without subsidies, as wind and solar costs plunge.

Solar and wind capacity will become cheaper than gas or coal without any incentives after 2020.

OO Solar, Wind Costs Could Fall Up To Nearly 60 % By 2025, a study by the International Renewable Energy Agency says, if governments create the right policies that minimize transaction costs and streamline administrative procedures and approval processes.

OO Scotland Exceeds Emissions Targets--Six Years Early - beating out much larger countries.

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CORAL REEF CATASTROPHE CONTINUES

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Beautiful, But Can It Reproduce? Healthy looking Carribean elkhorn coral have been found that cannot reproduce. Source www.mnn.com

OO 'Zombie Corals' Pose New Threat To World's Reefs - as if massive die-off from heat bleaching, ocean acidification, and pollution weren't bad enough threats to reefs , scientists have discovered the existence of 'zombie corals' which look healthy but cannot reproduce - they are essentially walking dead, and useless for any hopes of repopulating dead reefs.

Researchers also found a common sunscreen ingredient is killing and mutating corals in tourist spots.

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When A Reef Dies, Its Fish Disappear such as this Palauan Mandarin fish in Palau, Micronesia. Source www.palaudiveadventures.com

OO Another Season of Bleaching Predicted for Northern Coral Reefs - Takeaways:

current global coral bleaching event started in 2014;
It is the longest-lasting and largest such event ever recorded;
It is expected to last til the end of 2016, at least.
.
Northern hemisphere reefs can expect another season of bleaching.
Micronesia reefs face the biggest threat;
Micronesia depends on reefs for food and tourism revenue.

OO Australia: Prime Minister Unveils £500 Million Plan
To Save The Great Barrier Reef - to pursue solutions such as solar panel projects, improved sewage treatment, and helping farms and businesses to prevent pollutants and fertilisers entering waterways.

Sounds good (except he really can't do anything about the damage already inflicted), but this is an election campaign pledge .... need I say more?

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CLIMATE LEADERSHIP

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Four Australian Catholic Orders are jointly and publicly divesting from coal, oil and gas:
'We believe the Gospel asks no less of us.'

OO Australia: Catholic Orders Take Their Lead From The Pope
And Divest From Fossil Fuels

OO White House Commits To Boosting US Energy Storage capacity, as it rolled out a suite of executive branch and private sector commitments to do so.

This will assist President Barack Obama's goals of fighting climate change and modernizing the grid by smoothing the integration of renewable energy and creating resilient backup systems.

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ELECTION YEAR:

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If You Don't Vote For Climate Action, You Can Forget The Rest - in a climate-changing world of famine, drought, rising seas, giant storms and heat waves, there will be no security in jobs, health, wealth, or national safety. There will be chaos ensuing from increasing crises and disasters. Vote.

OO Global Warming Policies We Set Today Will Determine The Next 10,000 Years - of global warming, a new study shows -- and whether our civilization survives or not: history shows that harmful climate change has destroyed civilizations before.

This time, it could be worldwide. Let's keep "The Hunger Games" in the realm of fiction.

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NATURAL REPERCUSSIONS

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The Carbon Cycle - how it flows from air to plants to soil to air to... Source Kirk et al, 2016, Fig1

OO Alpine Soils Losing Up To A Third of Their Carbon
As Summers Warm Takeaways:

The top meter of the world's soils holds 3x the carbon in the entire atmosphere;
Losing that soil carbon will speed up climate change;
The Alps are already losing carbon as summer temperatures rise;
German alpine soils have lost an average 14 % of their carbon, up to 32 % in places.

The Warming Meadow - has been heating since 1991, and showed over a few years what global warming can do to ecosystems over decades. It continues to serve as a field climate change lab. Credit John Harte

MEH: SIMILAR US RESULTS occurred in the first and longest running climate change field experiment (FD: John Harte, my husband, started it in 1991) in a subalpine meadow in the Colorado Rockies.

From 1991-1996, the soils lost 20-25 % of their carbon, and then slowly rebounded. Now, unheated plots are starting to show this same effect, albeit far more slowly, as real world global warming sets in.

OO First Mammal Species Wiped Out By Human-Induced Climate Change - sea level rise did in an endemic island rat.

An interesting sidenote, but a drop in the bucket compared to the mass extinction of animals and plants humans are causing as they continue to spread, and destroy natural habitat for their own purposes.

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A SWEET SPOT IN CREATING SUSTAINABLE POPULATIONS

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Triple Win: Using Profits to Provide Needed US Family Planning - Medicines360.org is key to creating a sustainable US population and bright futures for women - AND saving taxpayers many billions yearly in community costs by preventing unintended pregnancies. Source medicines360.org

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SOCIAL REPERCUSSIONS

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The New Venice, Like It Or Not - just one of several Texas towns that recently flooded. Source Texas Climate News

OO US Flooding Costs Will Soar In A Warming World,
Economic Analysts Say - Damage from Texas flooding in 2015 and 2016 have reached into the billions. Expect more.

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Drought Dries Up the Promise of Food for this Vietnamese farmer. Credit Kham at Reuters

OO Vietnam Drought Leaves One Million In Urgent Need Of Food - the worst drought in 90 years coupled with seawater intrusion into Mekong River delta have destroyed fruit, rice and sugar crops.

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FOSSIL FUEL FOLLIES

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OO Power Plants Are No Longer America's Biggest Climate Problem -
Transportation Is. Takeaways:

US cars, trucks, and airplanes now emit more carbon dioxide than its power plants do;
The US has made remarkable progress in cleaning up its electricity sector since 2005;
Power plants account for only about one-third of America's CO2 emissions;
.
Transportation, another third (and now the biggest source);
Transportation remains much tougher to address;
And since 2013 transport emissions have been creeping upward again.

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Credit Michael Lukovich

OO Biggest US Coal Company Funded Dozens Of Groups Questioning Climate Change

OO Oil Bust Leaves States With Massive Well Cleanup as the recent oil bust is putting oil producing states on the hook for thousands of newly abandoned drilling sites at a time when they have little money to plug wells and seal off environmental hazards.

OO Exxon Sues a Second Attorney General to Fight Off Climate Fraud Probe - following the ancient tradition of killing the messenger if the message threatens you.

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If we do not grow sustainably,
Our children will die inhumanely.

@@ The Cost of Unintended Pregnancy: Too Young

Teen childbearing cost US taxpayers $9+ Billion in 2010
And the costs of raising a child usually ensures decades, if not a life, of poverty for its mother.
- US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Help prevent unintended pregnancies in your community:
publicize where women can access affordable contraception.

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Find locations here:

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And there are many more actions you can do, right here.

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SOLAR KEEPS FLYING

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OO Investments in Solar Energy Grow to $9.4 Billion in 2015, Says World Bank
Private infrastructure investment was 72% higher than the average of the previous five years.

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WHY WE SHOULD ACT NOW: RISING RISKS

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Daily Climate Change: Global Map of Unusual Temperatures, June 28, 2016

How unusual has the weather been? No one event is "caused" by climate change, but global warming, which is predicted to increase unusual, extreme weather, is having a daily effect on weather, worldwide.

Looking above at recent temperature anomalies, much of the US and the waters surrounding it are experiencing warmer than normal temperatures: the eastern Pacific warm spot continues and so does the drought in California, where wildfires rage even as an extreme heat wave occurred.

Much of the areas surrounding the North Pole are experiencing much warmer than normal temperatures - not good news for our Arctic thermal shield of ice. Hotter than usual temperatures continue to dominate human habitats.

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There is, of course, much more news on the consequences and solutions to climate change. To get it, check out this annotated resource list I've compiled, "Climate Change News Resources," at Wordpress.com here. For more information on the science of climate change, its consequences and solutions you can view my annotated list of online information resources here.

To help you understand just what science does and does NOT do, check this out!

Every day is Earth Day, folks, as I was reminded by this wild flower I photographed one spring. Making the U.S. a global clean energy leader will ensure a heck of a lot more jobs, and a clean, safe future. If you'd like to join the increasing numbers of people who want to TELL Congress that they will vote for clean energy candidates you can do so here. It's our way of letting Congress know there's a strong clean energy voting bloc out there. For more detailed summaries of the above and other climate change items, audio podcasts and texts are freely available.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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8 Breakthrough Innovations Saving Our Ocean

By Matthew Mulrennan

This post by Matt Mulrennan originally appeared in National Geographic's Ocean Views.

Our ocean remains the greatest mystery on planet Earth. The ocean takes up 70% of our blue planet, yet we've only explored 5% of it. The ocean suffers from many urgent grand challenges - we don't know enough about the ocean, too much pollution is going in, and too many fish and other animals are coming out.

Thankfully, ocean-related technology is riding the innovation wave, and we're seeing some really amazing breakthroughs in ocean health and exploration.

This World Oceans Day, we're celebrating eight amazing innovations that are helping to save our ocean.

Please share your favorite ocean innovations with #TeamOcean.

8. Snotbot

The "Snotbot" can hover above a whale to collect mucus from a whale's blow to gain valuable biological information like stress hormones, without stressing the animal.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and drones are improving biological research, monitoring coastal waters to scan for illegal activity and enforcing marine protected areas. They can also be used to make epic videos of a stampeding 'megapod' of dolphins.

7. Fishface

Fishface by the Nature Conservancy is an affordable fish identification tool being used for population assessments in Indonesia.

The technology that automatically tags you in a picture on Facebook is being applied to counting and describing fish stocks. Facial recognition and visual computing software are revolutionizing the process of counting fish and fisheries managers are using this information to make fisheries more sustainable.

6. Whale Alert App

The Whale Alert 2.0 App alerts mariners about the potential presence of whales to avoid deadly ship strikes, a leading cause of death for these protected species.

Whale Alert provides recommended routes to avoid whales and allows you to report when whales are in distress, such as being entangled in fishing gear. New innovative apps allow people to track marine debris, check fisheries regulations, visualize pollution and contribute observations to citizen science.

5. SkySails

Cargo ships with high altitude sails, like SkySails, can save 10-30% on daily fuel use.

About 90% of all global trade uses large cargo ships. The fuels burned by the global shipping fleet are a major contributor to climate change and ocean acidification, which are already harming marine life. But green shipping initiatives are saving fuel through improved hull design, breakthrough propellers, and simply slowing down ships.

4. Global Fishing Watch

Global Fishing Watch is a platform to monitor global fishing activity run by SkyTruth, Oceana and Google. It pools together historical data from a satellite-based vessel monitoring system and uses an algorithm to assess where fishing has occurred.

With advancement in tools like this for global fisheries monitoring, the writing is on the wall for taking down lots of illegal 'pirate' fishers. Argh.

3. Saildrone

Saildrone is an autonomous wind-propelled sailing vessel that can conduct scientific missions independently in rough weather for months.

95% of the ocean is still largely unexplored, and unmanned vessels are transforming oceanography by cutting down on expensive research ships that cost upwards of $50,000 per day to operate. Increasing autonomy for ocean exploration is a goal of the $7 million Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, and team registration is still open!

2. Edible Six-Pack Rings

Saltwater Brewery has developed an edible and biodegradable six-pack ring out of wheat and barley from their brewing process. Nom.

There are 5 trillion pieces of plastics in the ocean causing $13 billion per year in damage to marine ecosystems. To solve ocean plastic pollution globally requires disruptive "moonshot" technologies in materials design for more benign packaging products, a circular economic approach that never allows plastics to become waste, as well as basic waste management in more cities and countries to stop the leakage of plastics into the ocean.

1. Live Dives

The Fish Eye Project is broadcasting a live SCUBA dive online today June 8th. You can tune in and submit questions to the diver via #LiveDive.

We are the first humans that can watch things happening live in the ocean from our computers or phones, and interact with the divers and robots. This is great for ocean exploration, and expanding access to the ocean to exponentially more people. The cutting edge in this field is high-definition, 360-degree cameras propelling footage immediately into virtual reality headsets from hard to reach habitats like the deep-sea. These interactive technologies will hopefully usher in a wave, better yet a tsunami, of new ocean explorers and innovators.

Matthew Mulrennan is the lead of the Ocean Initiative at XPRIZE - a commitment to conduct five ocean XPRIZE competitions, and put us on a path to making the ocean healthy, valued and understood.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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A Time To Choose
In the new documentary Time To Choose, director Charles Ferguson posits that there is a way to change the trajectory of climate change. The tools for arresting a dismal future are already in play, being pushed forward by innovators and thinkers who recognize the pressing need.

For me, the biggest takeaway from the information-packed narrative was the unvarnished greed of a select few. Their agenda keeps the majority mired in poverty, lacking energy equity, and sick with chemically induced illnesses.

The movie is predicated on a breakdown of the prime engines of climate change:

• Burning coal, oil, and natural gas
• Urban sprawl
• Deforestation and industrial agriculture

Even novices to the subject of climate disruption are aware that the earth's temperature has risen, due to the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. The frequency and intensity of hurricanes, droughts, and heat waves are part of the story. Supplies of fresh water are in danger, as are coral reefs and ocean life. Global sea levels have risen eight inches. If the ice sheets of Greenland totally melt, sea levels will rise twenty-three feet -- with cities from New York to Tokyo being submerged.

Estimates predict that by 2050 we will have reached the tipping point. Ferguson drives home the theme that the "next six to 10 years are crucial."

Two-thirds of global warming is the result of burning fossil fuels. A shift to renewables is essential, leaving untapped fuels in the earth.

As California Gov. Jerry Brown points out, "There will be a lot of adversaries."

Fossil fuel oligarchs, in America and abroad, have not accepted the premise. The energy industry expended $650 billion in 2013 for "exploration to identify new reserves." Currently, the annual global revenue of the six largest oil corporations amounts to $2 trillion. (The film extended invitations to company titans for interviews, but no one responded.)

"2016-06-29-1467168039-3173678-SocialApp.rivercontrast2.jpg"

Ferguson traveled to five continents to tell the stories of how average people are impacted.

Goldman Prize winner, Maria Gunnoe, who has been fighting the coal industry in West Virginia, is interviewed about the deadly consequences of mountaintop coal mining in Boone County. First, a mountain is deforested and then it is detonated spewing lead, mercury, and arsenic into the air. Over five hundred mountains in Appalachia have been destroyed this way, with a million acres leveled. Pockets of bronchus and lung cancers, as well as brain tumors, have been evidenced. In addition to local streams becoming polluted, Appalachia is the source for headwaters serving the eastern United States.

In America, coal kills tens of thousands of people. In Asia, it kills millions of people. Coal serves as the primary source of China's energy. They consume the same amount as the rest of the world, combined. Like those who live in Appalachia, rural workers are poor. They have little resources or protections against those with political power, often corrupt officials who ensure that mining deaths go unreported. Those who work in underground Chinese mines have life spans of 49 years old, ten years less than surface coal miners and twenty-six years less than the average Chinese citizen.

Yet, China is a top innovator in the renewable energy production of solar panels. Electric vehicles are also being rolled out in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. It's predicted that by 2025, electric cars will be both competitive and cheaper to operate.

Nobel Prize winner in Physics and previous U.S. Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, emphasizes that the cost of renewable energy is dropping and is poised to become the low-cost option. Lyndon Rive, co-founder of SolarCity, sees solar as the route to "disrupt" climate change.

While solar and wind are growing rapidly in Europe, there are over a billion people around the world who have never accessed electricity. Kumi Naidoo, of Greenpeace International, is on hand to connect the dots between the lack of electricity and global poverty, education deficits, and climate change. Pointing to Kenya, he references the use of solar power in that country as "revolutionary."

A look at how Nigeria became a "centralized petrostate" is particularly unsettling. Chevron and Shell, among others, have exploited the Niger Delta; the country became rife with corruption and inequality as "85 percent of the government revenues were dominated by crude oil." Environment lawyer and activist, Oronto Douglas, speaks about a "deeply unequal society," built on violence and environmental destruction, alongside widespread poverty. Since 1960, Nigerian oil revenues have hit the $600 billion mark. Douglas notes, "90 percent of of these dollars went to 1 percent of the population."

Architect and Urban Designer, Peter Calthorpe, has been working on sustainable urban development since 1976. "The energy the planet needs is defined by how we live," he states. He asks rhetorically if we will design sustainable cities, or continue with "high-density sprawl?"

Reevaluating how we eat and use land and natural resources cannot be overlooked. Growing grain to feed livestock for meat now takes up 30 percent of the earth's land. Deforestation in the Amazon has led to Brazil suffering water shortages. Indonesian forests are being destroyed to make way for oil palm plantations -- displacing animals and exploiting local labor for less than 4 dollars a day.

Dr. Jane Goodall exclaims, "It's pretty shocking when you think of the vast destruction of the forests."

Founder of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program, Ian Singleton, sums it up succinctly. "The battle is not to just save orangutans. It's a battle to save everything." In Singleton's view, it's the forests, animal species, and indigenous communities vs. the "bank accounts of the super-rich."

Citizens of the world will have to decide if they have the moral will to push back against entrenched powers and mindsets, while rethinking their own personal lifestyles.

Contact Your Governor to Protect the Clean Power Plan from Big-Money Polluters!

This article originally appeared on the website Moms Clean Air Force

Photos: Courtesy of Time To Choose

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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First Alien Planet Discovered Photographed in 1917! (Today's Most Popular)

Sorry NASA, but it turns out that a 1917 image on an astronomical glass plate from the Carnegie Institute Observatories' collection shows the first-ever evidence of a planetary system beyond our own Sun. This unexpected find was recognized in the process of researching an article about planetary systems surrounding white dwarf stars in New Astronomy Reviews.

Here's what happened: about a year ago, the review's author, Jay Farihi of University College London, contacted our Observatories' Director, John Mulchaey. He was looking for a plate in the Carnegie archive that contained a spectrum of van Maanen's star (shown above), a white dwarf discovered by Dutch-American astronomer Adriaan van Maanen in the very year our own plate was made.

The 1917 photographic plate spectrum of van Maanen's star from the Carnegie Observatories' archive is shown below. The pull-out box shows the strong lines of the element calcium, which are surprisingly easy to see in the century old spectrum. The spectrum is the thin, (mostly) dark line in the center of the image. The broad dark lanes above and below are from lamps used to calibrate wavelength, and are contrast-enhanced in the box to highlight the two "missing" absorption bands in the star.

Stellar spectra are recordings of the light emitted by distant stars. Spectra spread out all of the component colors of light, like a rainbow from a prism, and they can teach astronomers about a star's chemical composition. They can also tell them how the light emitted by a star is affected by the chemistry of the things it passes through before reaching us on Earth.

Stellar spectra images allowed 19th century astronomers to develop a system for classifying stars that is still used today. Modern astronomers use digital tools to image stars, but for decades, they would use glass photographic plates both to take images of the sky, and to record stellar spectra.

As requested, the Observatories located the 1917 plate, made by former Observatories Director Walter Adams at Mount Wilson Observatory, which was then part of Carnegie. Other than a notation on the plate's sleeve indicating that the star looked a bit warmer than our own Sun, everything seemed very ordinary.

However, when Farihi examined the spectrum, he found something quite extraordinary.

The clue was in what's called an "absorption line" on the spectrum. Absorption lines indicate "missing pieces," areas where the light coming from a star passed through something and had a particular color of light absorbed by that substance. These lines indicate the chemical makeup of the interfering object.

Carnegie's 1917 spectrum of van Maanen's star revealed the presence of heavier elements, such as calcium, magnesium, and iron, which should have long since disappeared into the star's interior due to their weight.

Only within the last 12 years has it become clear to astronomers that van Maanen's star and other white dwarfs with heavy elements in their spectra represent a type of planetary system featuring vast rings of rocky planetary remnants that deposit debris into the stellar atmosphere. These recently discovered systems are called "polluted white dwarfs." They were a surprise to astronomers, because white dwarfs are stars like our own Sun at the end of their lifetimes, so it was not at all expected that they would have leftover planetary material around them at that stage.

The image at the top of the page shows Camelopardalis, a binary star system with a white dwarf and its companion star, surrounded by shells of ionised gas (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

"The unexpected realization that this 1917 plate from our archive contains the earliest recorded evidence of a polluted white dwarf system is just incredible," Mulchaey said. "And the fact that it was made by such a prominent astronomer in our history as Walter Adams enhances the excitement."

Planets themselves have not yet been detected orbiting van Maanen's star, nor around similar systems, but Farihi is confident it is only a matter of time.

"The mechanism that creates the rings of planetary debris, and the deposition onto the stellar atmosphere, requires the gravitational influence of full-fledged planets," he explained. "The process couldn't occur unless there were planets there."

"Carnegie has one of the world's largest collections of astronomical plates with an archive that includes about 250,000 plates from three different observatories--Mount Wilson, Palomar, and Las Campanas," concluded Mulchaey. "We have a ton of history sitting in our basement and who knows what other finds we might unearth in the future?"

The Daily Galaxy via Carnegie Institute

Image credit: van Maanen's star H. Bond (STSci), R. Ciardullo (PSU), WFPC2, HST, NASA

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"Recycling the Hidden Universe" --Forging Cosmic Dust Into Stars

The Universe is becoming gradually cleaner as more and more cosmic dust is being mopped up by the formation of stars within galaxies, an international team of astronomers has revealed. Peering back 12 billion years using the Herschel space telescope to produce far-infrared images of the sky, the team led by researchers at Cardiff University has been able to observe the very early formation of galaxies and compare them to galaxies that have formed much more recently.

The results showed that stars were forming inside galaxies much faster in the past compared to today, and that this rapid star birth is using up more and more of the cosmic dust that is ubiquitous in the Universe. The image above is a small glimpse of one region, a tenth of the full area of the Herschel ATLAS images. Everything in this image, apart from the picture of the moon, which has just been placed there to show the area of sky covered by the survey and the small square that shows the area covered by the Hubble Deep Field, consists of far-infrared emission from cosmic dust.

Cosmic dust is comprised of tiny solid particles that are found everywhere in space between the stars. The dust and the gas in the universe is the raw material out of which stars and galaxies form. Though this blanket of material is key to the formation of stars and galaxies, it also acts as a sponge, absorbing almost half of the light emitted by stellar objects and making them impossible to observe with standard optical telescopes.

With the launch of the Herschel space telescope in 2009, researchers were provided with the perfect tool for probing this hidden universe. Owing to a collection of sensitive instruments, mirrors and filters, the Herschel telescope had the capacity to detect the dust through the far-infrared emission it emits, revealing the existence of stars and galaxies hidden by the dust.

Professor Steve Eales, a co-leader of the project from Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy, said: "We were surprised to find that we didn't need to look far in the past to see signs of galaxy evolution. Our results show that the reason for this evolution is that galaxies used to contain more dust and gas in the past, and the universe is gradually becoming cleaner as the dust is used up."

Professor Haley Gomez, also of the School of Physics and Astronomy, presented the team's results today, 29 June, at the National Astronomy Meeting in Nottingham. After seven years of work analysing the images from the Herschel telescope, the team of over 100 astronomers have released a large catalogue of the sources of far-infrared radiation in this 'hidden universe'.

The team's survey of the sky, called the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (Herschel ATLAS), has revealed the details of over half a million galaxies, many of which have been viewed as they were over 12 billion years ago, just shortly after the big bang.

The team are hopeful that this unprecedented catalogue of sources will be vital tools for astronomers wishing to understand the detailed history of galaxies and the wider cosmos.

"Before Herschel we only knew of a few hundred such dusty sources in the distant universe and we could only effectively 'see' them in black and white," said Loretta Dunne, a co-leader of project from Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy, said: Herschel, with its five filters, has given us the equivalent of technicolour, and the colour of the galaxy tell us about their distances and temperatures. So we now have half a million galaxies we can use to map out the hidden star formation in the universe."

The Daily Galaxy via Cardiff University

First Galaxies of the Universe --"Revealed By Glowing Carbon"

"Beyond Hubble" --A New 3-D View of the Earliest Galaxies in the Universe

Big-Bang Theory: "The Universe has Slowed Down and Speeded Up Seven Times"

Image of the Day: New Supernova Explosion --Origin of Stardust in the Universe?

Cosmic Dust --"Ancient Galaxy from the Early Universe Yields an Unexpected Discovery"

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"Yes, Robots Dream!" --RobERt: Deep Belief Neural Network To Search for Habitable Planets

"Robots really do dream. We can ask RobERt to dream up what he thinks a water spectrum will look like, and he's proved very accurate," says Ingo Waldmann of University College London. "This dreaming ability has been very useful when trying to identify features in incomplete data. RobERt can use his dream state to fill in the gaps."

Machine-learning techniques that mimic human recognition and dreaming processes are being deployed in the search for habitable worlds beyond our solar system. A deep belief neural network, called RobERt (Robotic Exoplanet Recognition), has been developed by astronomers at UCL to sift through detections of light emanating from distant planetary systems and retrieve spectral information about the gases present in the exoplanet atmospheres.

"Different types of molecules absorb and emit light at specific wavelengths, embedding a unique pattern of lines within the electromagnetic spectrum," explained Dr Waldmann, who leads RobERt's development team. "We can take light that has been filtered through an exoplanet's atmosphere or reflected from its cloud-tops, split it like a rainbow and then pick out the 'fingerprint' of features associated with the different molecules or gases. Human brains are really good at finding these patterns in spectra and label them from experience, but it's a really time consuming job and there will be huge amounts of data.

A neural network's dream of Earth, is shown above. Similar to RobERt dreaming of exoplanet spectra, this neural network was trained to dream in the style of a Monet painting.

We built RobERt to independently learn from examples and to build on his own experiences. This way, like a seasoned astronomer or a detective, RobERt has a pretty good feeling for what molecules are inside a spectrum and which are the most promising data for more detailed analysis. But what usually takes days or weeks takes RobERt mere seconds."

Deep belief neural networks, or DBNs, were developed more than a decade ago and are commonly used for speech recognition, Internet searches and tracking customer behaviour. RobERt's DBN has three layers of unit processors, or 'neurons'. Information is fed into a bottom layer of 500 neurons, which make an initial filter of the data and pass a subset up to the second layer. Here, 200 neurons refine the selection and pass data up to a third layer of 50 neurons to make the final identification of the gases most likely to be present.

To prepare RobERt for his challenge, Waldmann and colleagues at UCL created a total of 85,750 simulated spectra, covering five different types of exoplanet ranging from GJ1214b, a potential "ocean planet," to WASP-12, a hot Jupiter orbiting very close to its star. Each spectrum in the training set contained the fingerprint of a single gas species. RobERt's learning progress was tested at intervals during the training with 'control' spectra. At the end of the training phase, RobERt had a recognition accuracy of 99.7%.

"RobERt has learned to take into account factors such as noise, restricted wavelength ranges and mixtures of gases," said Waldmann. "He can pick out components such as water and methane in a mixed atmosphere with a high probability, even when the input comes from the limited wavebands that most space instruments provide and when it contains overlapping features."

RobERt's DBN can also be reversed so that instead of analysing data fed into the system, he can enter a 'dreaming state' in which he can generate full spectra based on his experiences.

The James Webb Space Telescope, due for launch in 2018, will tell as more about the atmospheres of exoplanets, and new facilities like Twinkle or ARIEL will be coming online over the next decade that are specifically tailored to characterising the atmospheres of exoplanets. The amount of data these missions will provide will be breathtaking. RobERt will play an invaluable role in helping us to analyse data from these missions and find out what these distant worlds are really like."

The Daily Galaxy via Royal Astronomical Society (RAS)

Image credit: Waldmann/UCL/Gatys

The First Alien Planet Detected in Visible Light

NASA's Quest for Water on Alien Worlds --"The Holy Grail?"

Transit of Venus --"A Model for Exo-Planet Detection"

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"We Can Now Send Light Signals Across the Cosmos" --Revolutionizes Possible Alien Contact (Wednesday's Most Popular)

“Suppose there is a civilization like ours and suppose — unlike us, who are skittish about broadcasting our presence — they think it's important to be a beacon, an interstellar or extragalactic lighthouse of sorts,” says University of California Santa Barbara physicist, Philip Lubin.. “There is a photonics revolution going on on Earth that enables this specific kind of transmission of information via visible or near-infrared light of high intensity."

magine if we sent up a visible signal that could eventually be seen across the entire universe. Imagine if another civilization did the same. Recent photonics advances now allow us to be seen across the universe, with major implications for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, says Lubin.

Looking up at the night sky — expansive and seemingly endless, stars and constellations blinking and glimmering like jewels just out of reach — it's impossible not to wonder: Are we alone? For many of us, the notion of intelligent life on other planets is as captivating as ideas come. Maybe in some other star system, maybe a billion light years away, there's a civilization like ours asking the exact same question.

The technology now exists to enable exactly that scenario, according to Lubin, whose new work applies his research and advances in directed-energy systems to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). His recent paper “The Search for Directed Intelligence” appears in the journal REACH Reviews in Human Space Exploration.

“If even one other civilization existed in our galaxy and had a similar or more advanced level of directed-energy technology, we could detect ‘them' anywhere in our galaxy with a very modest detection approach,” said Lubin, who leads the UCSB Experimental Cosmology Group. “If we scale it up as we're doing with direct energy systems, how far could we detect a civilization equivalent to ours? The answer becomes that the entire universe is now open to us.

“Similar to the use of directed energy for relativistic interstellar probes and planetary defense that we have been developing, take that same technology and ask yourself, ‘What are consequences of that technology in terms of us being detectable by another ‘us' in some other part of the universe?'” Lubin added. “Could we see each other? Can we behave as a lighthouse, or a beacon, and project our presence to some other civilization somewhere else in the universe? The profound consequences are, of course, ‘Where are they?' Perhaps they are shy like us and do not want to be seen, or they don't transmit in a way we can detect, or perhaps ‘they' do not exist.”

The same directed energy technology is at the core of Lubin's recent efforts to develop miniscule, laser-powered interstellar spacecraft. That work, funded since 2015 by NASA (and just selected by the space agency for “Phase II” support) is the technology behind billionaire Yuri Milner's newsmaking, $100-million Breakthrough Starshot initiative announced April 12.

Lubin is a scientific advisor on Starshot, which is using his NASA research as a roadmap as it seeks to send tiny spacecraft to nearby star systems.

In describing directed energy, Lubin likened the process to using the force of water from a garden hose to push a ball forward. Using a laser light, spacecraft can be pushed and steered in much the same way. Applied to SETI, he said, the directed energy system could be deployed to send a targeted signal to other planetary systems.

“In our paper, we propose a search strategy that will observe nearly 100 billion planets, allowing us to test our hypothesis that other similarly or more advanced civilizations with this same broadcast capability exist,” Lubin said.

“As a species we are evolving rapidly in photonics, the production and manipulation of light,” he explained. “Our recent paper explores the hypothesis: We now have the ability to produce light extremely efficiently, and perhaps other species might also have that ability. And if so, then what would be the implications of that? This paper explores the ‘if so, then what?'”

Traditionally and still, Lubin said, the “mainstay of the SETI community” has been to conduct searches via radio waves. Think Jodie Foster in “Contact,” receiving an extraterrestrial signal by way of a massive and powerful radio telescope. With Lubin's UCSB-developed photonics approach, however, making “contact” could be much simpler: Take the right pictures and see if any distant systems are beaconing us.

“All discussions of SETI have to have a significant level of, maybe not humor, but at least hubris as to what makes reason and what doesn't,” Lubin said. “Maybe we are alone in terms of our technological capability. Maybe all that's out there is bacteria or viruses. We have no idea because we've never found life outside of our Earth.

The Daily Galaxy via ucsb.edu

Image credit top of page, NASA-WMAP

"The Habitable Planet Sweet Spot" --Kepler Mission Yields Eight Candidates

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Innovations In Science: Pursuing Another Giant Leap For Mankind
According to the American Cancer Society, in 2016 there will be an estimated 1.6 million new cancer cases diagnosed and over half a million cancer deaths in the US. While much has been achieved in the detection and treatment of cancer, it's clear that this disease in all its various forms, will be with us for a long time.

Regardless of who you are, where you live, or your personal circumstances, chances are you've been touched by cancer in some form. And you don't have to have cancer to be affected by it. All illness is the story of one. Speak to anyone who has had to care for a loved one with cancer and you'll quickly know the emotional, physical and financial toll it takes on everyone involved.

Last year, Vice President Joe Biden lost his son Beau Biden, to brain cancer. This bright, enigmatic young man who was the Attorney General for Delaware was only 46. His death was tragic, but if there is a silver lining in all of this, it's the announcement by President Obama during the State of the Union address on January 12, 2016, establishing the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative to accelerate cancer research, led by Vice President Biden. Its goal is to make more therapies available to more patients, improve early detection methods and, ultimately, prevent this insidious disease.

Make no mistake, finding a cure for all the types of cancer we currently know about will be hard, but sending someone to the moon was a pretty ambitious goal as well. When John F. Kennedy announced on May 25, 1961 America's goal to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, there was no reason to think it couldn't be done. Billions of dollars were invested, and there were plenty of failures along the way, but for anyone who remembers when Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the dusty surface of the moon and said his immortal words "that's one small step..." it was a seminal moment.

Cancer is a global health issue and, as people live longer, one that will continue to grow. From a research standpoint it's also exceptionally cross-discipline covering a broad scope of medical specialties such as neurology, gynecology, pulmonology, gastroenterology and hematology, as well as related factors such as the environment, pharmacology, public health awareness and nutrition. Curing cancer will therefore require intensive collaboration from the scientific community at large.

Economics is another major factor in treating cancer. Most patients will need long-term, on-going care which has enormous implications for family finances as well as the social and psychological impact for the care-givers. Developing treatments, finding cures and, ultimately, preventing cancer, will require the commitment of tremendous resources from government as well as the private and academic sectors. America's moonshot was largely financed by the U.S. government. But in today's economic climate and greater scrutiny of public spending, economic support from the private and philanthropic sectors will be a factor in supporting more cancer research.

Technology, especially the internet, social scientific networks such as Social Science Research Network, an online open-access repository, as well as collaboration platforms such as Mendeley, will allow research teams worldwide easier ways to share knowledge and leverage expertise regardless of location and affiliation.

There's certainly no shortage of work already accomplished. According to ScienceDirect more than 1.5 million research papers about cancer have been published in the past five years; a huge amount of data. Scopus data reveals Europe leads in overall cancer research output, but there have been significant increases from institutions in North America and Asia Pacific during the same period, most notably by China and the United States.

Thanks to the dedication of millions of anonymous researchers tirelessly engaged in cancer research, there have been tremendous strides made in the past decade. The dreaded "c-word" is no longer an automatic death sentence. People are now better educated about high risk behaviors that should be avoided such as smoking and exposure to certain chemicals, as well as the importance of annual physical tests. Sophisticated diagnostic imaging such as ultrasound, MRI and CT scans as well as blood tests can help with early detection of small growths and masses which means early intervention and better chances for a complete cure.

Cancer is a tremendously complex disease and new strains are discovered every day. We may never eradicate it completely, but if it is possible to send a man to the moon and bring him safely home in less than a decade, we stand a pretty good chance of securing a "giant leap for mankind" in reducing cancer's impact on our society.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Top 5 Reasons To Ban Oil Trains Immediately
On Friday, June 3rd, a crude oil train traveled through the scenic Columbia River Gorge, a national treasure and one of the most beautiful spots in a country blessed with some of the most stunning places on Earth. It went slowly through the small town of Mosier, Ore. Children sat in class, no doubt looking forward to the weekend, people stopped by the post office, enjoying the rituals of small town life. Then the ground shook. Explosions rocked the area and a plume of thick black smoke snaked its way into the sky. The oil train had derailed a few hundred yards from that school, a few hundred yards from the city center. Four railcars spilled and caught fire -- and tens of thousands of gallons of burning North Dakota Bakken crude created an inferno.

This disaster occurred as Stand and our many allies in the Crude Awakening Network were preparing for the third annual Stop Oil Trains Week of Action, planning dozens of events across the US and Canada between July 6-12 to mark the solemn anniversary of the tragic Lac Megantic oil train disaster on July 6, 2013. The Mosier derailment drove home, once again, why oil trains are too dangerous for the rails. And why Stand is asking President Obama for an immediate ban on oil trains.

Here are the top five reasons Stand, joined by hundreds of groups, community leaders, and elected officials, are calling for a ban on deadly oil trains.

1. 25 million Americans live in the oil train "blast zone".
The US rail system was built to connect population centers, not move millions of gallons of toxic, flammable crude oil. But the oil industry is doing exactly that, sending explosive crude down the tracks right through our cities and by the homes of 25 million Americans. At Stand, we have mapped oil train routes with our Blast Zone map. You can use the map to see if your home, school, or office is inside the dangerous one-mile evacuation area. One clear finding from analyzing America's blast zone: vulnerable populations like environmental justice communities and school children are clearly in harm's way.

2. Oil trains can't be operated safely.
Federal safety standards won't improve oil train safety. Federal legislation, promises by the railroads, and federal regulations- weakened by years of interagency battles between the Federal Railroad Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board -- have all come to very little. Former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board Jim Hall, in a June 2016 op-ed advocating a ban on crude oil trains, put it simply: "Carrying crude oil by rail is just not a good idea." That's because it cannot be done safely. Period.

Thorough reporting by DeSmog Blog on the weak existing federal regulatory standards and the oil and rail industry's failure to meet them demonstrates there have been no improvements on the safety of the 100,000 unsafe tank cars in the US fleet. Only a few hundred of these 100,000 dangerous tank cars have been retrofitted, and cars updated to the newest tank car standard will still puncture at just a few miles an hour faster than the current tank cars.

After 2025, there may be marginal improvements in the tank cars and procedures associated with oil trains. But trains will still derail, and crude will still leak and ignite.

3. Oil train fires can't be controlled.
When an oil train derails at any speed over the puncture velocity of roughly 10 miles an hour a dozen or so cars typically come off the tracks, decouple and are thrown from their wheels. Tank cars are easily punctured, and the crude (either Bakken or diluted tar sands, both highly volatile) can either self-ignite or be sparked by a nearby ignition source.

Once the spilled oil from an oil train disaster ignites, the primary task of emergency responders is to evacuate the area due to toxic plumes, fire, and potential explosions. We write more about the difficulties here, but Bruce Goetsch, a county emergency manager in Iowa, had this advice: "Make sure your tennis shoes are on and start running." Or listen to the Washington State Council of Fire Fighters, which delivered a letter to Washington Governor Inslee on June 8 demanding an immediate halt to crude rail movement and stating that, "these fires are exceedingly difficult to extinguish, even under unusually ideal circumstances."

4. We don't need the oil these dangerous trains carry.
Oil trains in North America carry extreme fracked crude oil from the Bakken formation in North Dakota and Saskatchewan, or diluted bitumen from tar sands deposits in Alberta. We don't need any of this crude oil. According to the most recent information from the US Energy Information Administration, shipments of crude by rail represent only 2.5 percent of the 19 million barrel daily US oil demand. At the same time, the US exports more than five million barrels of oil per day. So the US is exporting ten times more than the 513,000 barrels of crude that is moving by rail each day. The crude moving by train contributes nothing to our energy supply. If we stopped all oil trains tomorrow Americans would never notice the difference at the gas pumps - but we would all be safer, especially the 25 million Americans living in the blast-zone.

5. Oil trains are taking us in the wrong direction.
The dangerous, unnecessary, carbon-intensive crude oil moving by train through North American cities and towns is a new phenomenon. Before 2008, crude oil rarely, if ever, moved by train. Oil companies see this oil as the future. We see a future where we leave extreme crude oil in the ground and use decreasing amounts of conventional oil as we transition to 100 percent clean energy.

The climate accords in Paris followed by the April 2016 United Nations resolution put the United States and the rest of the world on a clear, inevitable path toward reducing fossil fuels from our energy supply. These dangerous oil trains carrying extreme oil are, quite simply, not part of that future: they fail the public safety test, the energy security test, and the climate test.

Forty-seven people died in the Lac Megantic oil train disaster three years ago. Only incredible luck prevented Mosier, OR from being another Lac Megantic. It was a dead-calm day in one of the windiest part of the US, otherwise the fire could have spread quickly to more derailed cars, to surrounding forests, homes, and even to the nearby school. This was another close call, one of more than a dozen major oil train disasters over the last three years that could have been much worse. We need to end this unnecessary and unacceptable threat before our luck runs out.

This is not a radical request. In fact, the Governors of Oregon and Washington have asked for a moratorium on oil trains. Join them -- and Stand: Please join us in asking President Obama for an immediate ban on oil trains.

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The New Landscape Declaration: Visions For The Next 50 Years

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India's water crisis / National Geographic

Over the next 50 years, landscape architects must coordinate their actions globally to fight climate change, help communities adapt to a changing world, bring artful and sustainable parks and open spaces to every community rich or poor, preserve cultural landscape heritage, and sustain all forms of life on Earth. These were the central messages that came out the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF)'s New Landscape Declaration: Summit on Landscape Architecture and the Future in Philadelphia, which was attended by over 700 landscape architects.

The speakers used declarations and short idea-packed talks, and attendees used cards, polls, and an interactive question and commenting app to provide input into a new declaration -- a vision to guide the efforts of landscape architects to 2066.

As the 50th anniversary of the original declaration in 1966, many landscape architects looked back to see what has been achieved over the past 50 years. At the same time, through a series of bold statements, they created an ambitious global vision moving forward. As Barbara Deutsch, FASLA, president of LAF, believes: "We are now entering the age of landscape architecture."

While not a comprehensive review of all the declarations, here are some highlights of the visions of what landscape architects must work to achieve over the next 50 years:

Landscape architects must address the "serious issues of air, water, food, and waste" in developing countries

Alpa Nawre, ASLA, assistant professor of landscape architecture, Kansas State University, called for landscape architects to focus their efforts on the developing world, where the bulk of the current population and most of the future population growth will occur. Today, of the 7.2 billion people on Earth, some 6 billion live in developing countries. There, some 100 million lack access to clean water. The global population is expected to reach 9.6 billion in coming decades, with 400 million added mostly to the cities of the global south. "To accommodate these billions, we must design better landscape systems for resource management."

Gerdo Aquino, FASLA, CEO of the SWA Group, echoed that sentiment, arguing that "in the future, there will be much more stringent regulations on natural resources" as they become rarer and more valuable. Landscape architects will play a larger role in valuing and managing those resources.

Christophe Girot, chair of landscape architecture, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, similarly saw the need for "new topical landscapes" for the 9.6 billion who will inhabit the Earth. We must "react, think creatively, and find solutions."

Landscape architects must improve upon urbanization-as-usual

Instead of pursuing idealized visions of parks that may result in "tidy little ornaments of green that make liberals feel good," Chris Marcinkowski, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and partner at PORT Urbanism, said landscape architects must "work with the underlying systems of urbanization and adapt them," softening them in an era when 1 billion people live in cities.

James Corner, ASLA, founder of James Corner Field Operations, pushed for accelerating urbanization in order to protect surrounding nature. "If you love nature, live in the city." He called for landscape architects to "embed beauty and pleasure in cities" in the forms of parks and gardens, because we need to make it "so that people should want to live in cities." Landscape architects must envision a denser urban world as well, and "shape the form of the future city." His vision of the future city is a "garden city" that takes advantage of the "landscape imagination." And Charles Waldheim, Hon. ASLA, chair of landscape architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and Henri Bava, founding partner, Agence TER, similarly made the case for a new "landscape-led urbanism" rooted in ecological processes.

David Gouverneur, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, called for applying novel approaches to the informal communities in which he works in Venezuela, where the conventional planning and design process fails. He proposed retrofitting these places through his "informal armature approach," which can create both pathways and communal nodes but also areas of flexible growth that allows "locals to invade and occupy." He argued that new forms of planning and design can better meet the needs of the hundreds of millions living in informal communities in the world.

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Informal armature / David Gouverneur

And Kate Orff, ASLA, founder of SCAPE, explained how her community-centric approach "creates a scaffolding for meaningful participation that is an active generator of social life." For her, it's all about "linking the social to the ecological and scaling that up for communities."

Carl Steinitz, Hon. ASLA, professor emeritus of landscape architecture and planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, also called for all landscape architects to get more active at the urban and regional scales. "That's where society needs us the most."

Landscape architects must create a future for wild nature

"The landscape has been broken into fragments. We need a more inclusive approach, a new philosophical relationship between humanity and nature," said Feng Han, director, department of landscape studies, Tongji University in Shanghai. That new approach must be rooted in "just landscape planning and design."

Randolph Hester Jr., FASLA, director, Center for Ecological Democracy, and professor emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, made a similar and compelling argument, saying that "justice and beauty must be found together in the landscape." The landscape itself is a "community, with the ecological and cultural being indivisible."

A central part of achieving that just landscape planning and design approach is to better respect the other 2.5 million known species on the planet, argued Nina-Marie Lister, Hon. ASLA, professor at Ryerson University. "We must think of the quality of being for them, too." To protect their homes, landscape architects must lead the charge in "re-establishing the role of the wild." E.O. Wilson, in his most recent book, Half Earth, calls for preserving half of the planet for the other species. "That kind of goal is a blunt instrument. Now we need to design what that looks like. We need a planetary strategy that connects remnant fragments. We can create a global mosaic that will be the foundation of a next wave of conservation."

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Projective Ecologies / ACTAR, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

A key part of those mosaics will be designed sustainable landscapes, said Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, FASLA, who argued that "sustainability needs to be addressed in every landscape" moving forward. "We must keep every scrap of nature" by certifying projects with systems like SITES.

And in case anyone forgot the essential message: Laurie Olin, FASLA, founder of OLIN, argued that "everything comes from nature and is inspired by nature."

Landscape architects must dramatically increase in number

Given landscape architects relatively small numbers -- there are estimated to be less than 75,000 worldwide -- Martha Fajardo, International ASLA, CEO, Grupo Verde, said each must "become ambassadors for the landscape," speaking loudly wherever they go.

But Mario Schjetnan, FASLA, Mexico's leading landscape architect, said that may not be enough and more numbers are needed. For example, while there are more than 150,000 architects in Mexico, there are only 1,000 landscape architects.

He said: "There are not enough landscape architects in the developing world. And we need a global perspective. The U.S. and Euro-centric perspective must change. More landscape architects from the developing world studying in the U.S. and Europe need to return to their countries and help."

Landscape architects must diversify themselves fast

"Minorities are woefully underrepresented" in the field of landscape architecture, argued Gina Ford, ASLA, a partner at Sasaki. "The black and Hispanic populations in the U.S. are growing." How can we address this? Ford called for the highest levels of academic and firm leadership to bring in and hire minorities. "It's not about getting warm, fuzzy feelings; it's about innovation. Diversity begets innovation. Diverse staff resonate with diverse clients. We must diversify to create a shared vision for the future."

Landscape architects must get even more political

Patricia O'Donnell, FASLA, founder of Heritage Landscapes, who is active in UNESCO, ICOMOS, and other international organizations, said the first step is for landscape architects to "show up" and engage in political debates. Then, they must "collaborate to be relevant." Working within these complex international fora, O'Donnell herself pushes for "connecting biological diversity with cultural diversity" and encouraging these organizations to value cultural landscapes. To be more relevant, she said, landscape architects should further align their efforts with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Kongjian Yu, FASLA, founder of Turenscape, may be the epitome of the political landscape architect. His work spans planning and design across mainland China, but he spends a good amount of his time and energy on persuading thousands of local mayors and senior governmental leaders alike on the value of "planning for ecological security." He called for landscape architects to "think big -- at the local, regional, and national scales" -- and to influence decision-makers.

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China ecological security plan / Turenscape

Martha Schwartz, FASLA, founder of Martha Schwartz Partners, who is an active advocate and commentator in the UK, where she now lives, threw down the gauntlet, calling for landscape architects to form a political wing that will urge policymakers to fund bold research into geo-engineering techniques that can stave off the planetary emergency caused by climate change. At the same time, "we need to start a political agenda for a Manhattan project to reduce carbon emissions." Schwartz sees ASLA pushing for climate rescue over the next 50 years, helping us to "buy the time for a second chance to live in balance with the Earth." For her and others, climate action is the platform for landscape architecture for the next five decades.

And Kelly Shannon, chair of landscape architecture at the University of Southern California, International ASLA, made the case for "changing the unsustainable status quo and inspiring new social movements." Landscape architects must become "essential game changers."

Landscape architects must better leverage green infrastructure to achieve broader goals

Using their knowledge of systems, nature, and people, landscape architects must find new opportunities to regenerate poor communities that have been left out. Tim Duggan, ASLA, Phronesis, called for using green infrastructure as a wedge for creating opportunities. "In consent decree communities, green infrastructure can be leveraged to create wider urban regenerative processes." Green infrastructure, as Duggan has shown, can become the catalyst for community development.

But to make this happen in New Orleans and Kansas City, he had to "lobby change at the decision-maker level and string together innovative financing mechanisms." In other words, he had to wade into the broader economic and governmental systems to make change happen.

Landscape architects must keep design central to the human experience

Charles Birnbaum, FASLA, founder of The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), said a "holistic view" was needed, and that landscape architects can't foresake the important role of art and design in the experience of landscape architecture by focusing exclusively on ecological values. "We need to put the value of landscape architect on the level of the artist." Harriet Pattison, FASLA, helped him make the point in this segment of her TCLF oral history project:

https://youtu.be/iGdpe2tPukA

Blaine Merker, ASLA, Gehl Studio, argued for "making humanism physical and celebrating the human condition" through well-designed space for people. "Plazas and parks increase social connection. This leads to deep sustainability and happiness that reinforce each other."

Landscape architects must generate new fields of research and design to stay relevant

A fascinating idea: what is on the margins today may be at the center tomorrow. Dirk Sijmons, co-founder, H+N+S Landscape Architects, argued for landscape architects to get more deeply involved in what may be a marginal area for them now: the transition to clean energy. He showed his work animating the energy flows of off-shore wind farms in the North Sea. "We must develop new centers for the discipline."

Landscape architects educators must "revolutionize the landscape architecture education system" and become more pragmatic

Kongjian Yu also called for the educational system to teach the aesthetic value of ecology and sustainability. "We need deep forms rooted in ecology, not shallow forms. Nature is the bedrock." Yu calls landscape architecture an "art of survival" that will become increasingly relevant as the world's problems only multiply. "We need to teach how landscapes can fight flooding, fire, drought, and produce food. We need to generate pragmatic knowledge and basic survival skills to open up new horizons."

Marc Treib, professor of architecture emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, added that "the sustainable is not antithetical to the beautiful. We can elevate the pragmatic to the level of poetry."

While these bold ideas do push the landscape architecture agenda forward, what was missing from the LAF event was some critical discussions on how to better collaborate with scientists, ecologists, developers, architects, urban planners, and engineers on forging a common vision that can increase their collective impact in the halls of power; the coming explosion of aging populations; the health benefits of nature -- and how the desire for better health could become a central driver of demand for landscape architecture; and sustainable transportation and the future of mobility. Hopefully, we'll see more on these as LAF continues to hone its vision.

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The Emotional Challenge of Advocating for Eco-Eating

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Image Credit: Huffington Post Images

I struggle. I struggle to inform my friends, my colleagues, students, and the "masses" about human interference with wildlife, climate change, and how our diet contributes to both these problems.

I have been a practicing dietitian for over 12 years now. I already understand how difficult it is for individuals to make relatively-simple changes in their diet. For example, to switch from white bread to whole-wheat.

So, asking people to make bigger changes such as reducing their consumption of animal products seems to be a truly daunting task, one that is overwhelming, and one that so far, seems to mostly evoke blank stares and inaction.

I know there are myriad of reasons why people don't change; and, I know, it's an even bigger challenge to change eating habits.

After all, "If it were easy, everyone would do it" - Tom Hanks in "A League of Their Own"

For starters, people are creatures of habit.
We like to eat what we like to eat. Diet is ingrained in us from childhood, it's culture, it's personal. So, change can feel like we are giving up a part of our self.

Another challenge may be pure ignorance.
Since there are always fish at the supermarket or the fish market, it seems impossible to believe or understand that certain fish stocks are severely in decline, or have even been decimated.

Moreover, the oceans are so far removed from our daily existence, and we don't see all the hundreds of thousands of animals that are killed as by-catch from fish nets or from fish-farms; for example, it takes 2-4 pounds of wild-fish to grow one pound of certain farmed fish!

In some parts of the world, hundreds of thousands of dolphins, sea birds, and other sea mammals drown every day from fish nets, fishing practices - including finning, or are brutally murdered by being viewed as competition for fish.

On land, if 100 animals were "accidentally" killed by accident for every five that come to market, this would likely be viewed as unethical, and completely unacceptable.

But in the ocean This. Is. Exactly. What. Happens. ALL. THE. TIME.

To make matters worse, nets and fishing gear are often left - illegally - in the ocean killing a wide-array of marine wildlife; and, plastic, is being consumed en-mass by animals, crowing out room for food, and normal behaviors.

But I just truly don't know how to make people understand or aware that these oceanic/sea-life problems exist, in a way that is meaningful to THEM.

A third possible challenge can be apathy.
Why should I change what I eat when no one else in changes what they eat?
I don't make any difference I'm just one small person.

What I've told myself is, instead of feeling that way, perhaps it would be more useful to lead by example and educate others.

However, as I have discovered, this comes with a lot of downfalls, mostly emotional; where truly you want to scream at the top of your lungs, "stop eating that fish, stop eating that beef, it damages the planet!"

A fourth challenge I sometimes come across is "pride."
Patients sometimes tell me "I've heard it all, I don't need more information."

Which brings me back to my earlier points, then why aren't you doing it? What are you waiting for?

So, what does this mean for me?

On the one hand, I look around me at the beauty of our Earth and how it is disappearing bit by bit by bit, and that we humans have a hand in this; and it makes me want to work that much harder to educate, to speak, to write, to help, to fight for the animals of our planet.

On the other hand, I am frustrated, angry, sad, and sometimes hopeless; because, I can speak until I am blue in the face, but I cannot make people change their behaviors. Only THEY CAN DO THAT.

Therein lies the rub.

I see that we need to change our ways. But we need the will to do it. We need to have the desire.
We need to have the knowledge.

And, I can do THAT. I can impart knowledge. That is my role.

To educate.
To advocate.
To support Earth.

Unfortunately however I cannot give desire, I cannot give motivation, it has to come from within.

If anyone has the recipe to make all these necessary attributes come together, please, let me know your secret.

In the mean time, I will continue to educate, advocate, and provide a "recipe" for taking that first step, that first eco-friendly bite.

See, I'm not asking you to become vegan overnight, but I am asking that you show concern, acknowledge that there is a problem, and be willing to be a part of the solution. Not just live in apathy.

For more specific meal suggestions and recipes, please refer to my previous post: "Why Plants are This Summer's "Coolest" Diet."

Contact Dana at: recipe.for.survival@gmail.com
Twitter: recipe4survival
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RecipeForSurvival/
blog: recipeforsurvival.wordpress.com

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Becoming Naturalists at the E.O. Wilson Biophilia Center

"biophilia,

At the E.O. Wilson Biophilia Center in East Freeport, Florida, children are learning about nature by experiencing it firsthand.

Developed by Walton County conservationist M.C. Davis in 2009, the Center sits on the 50,000-acre Nokuse Plantation. Paul Arthur, president of Nokuse Education Inc. and director of E.O. Wilson Biophilia Center for the past five years, describes it as an environmental education center.

“Our ultimate goal is to teach future generations about the importance of conservation, preservation, and restoration of the ecosystem,” Arthur says. “We want every student to leave a little bit of a naturalist.”

Through two- or four-day programs, the Center provides children with a “complete learning experience” that aims to give them an in-depth understanding of the Florida Panhandle's longleaf pine ecosystem, while also exposing them to the idea of conservation more broadly.

The Center's lesson plan aligns with Florida state standards and is adjusted yearly. With over 700 pages of curriculum written by its staff, the Biophilia Center targets 4^th and 7^th grade students, as standardized testing occurs in 5^th and 8^th grade. The students come to the Center from schools in its five surrounding counties—Okaloosa, Walton, Bay, Holmes, and Washington.

Each year the Center educates 5,200 students and averages more than 100 students every school day. It places a lot of emphasis on experiential learning; over 20 hands-on activities comprise 75 percent of the overall curriculum. These activities—led by team members with nicknames like Bluegill Jill, Tree Frog Tess, and Pine Tree Paul (Arthur)—include surveying with lasers to analyze topography and slope, water quality testing, and a gopher tortoise simulation class.

"biophilia,

“My number one goal is to get students outside,” Arthur says. “We want to immerse them into the environment out here so they get excited about it.”

Their methods are working. In 2014, Columbus State University doctorate candidate Michael Dentzau conducted a two-year study on the effectiveness of the Biophilia Center. Dentzau had 4^th grade students draw pictures of Florida's environment before and after they went. According to Arthur, before visiting the Center, students had a warped view of the outdoors, drawing “snow-peaked mountains with giraffes, elephants, and gorillas.” Following their visits to the Center, the students' drawings changed drastically.

“Not only did they draw it [accurately], they started labeling it: loblolly pine, gopher tortoise, eastern indigo, wire grass, turkey oak,” Arthur explains. “That's what really blew us away.”

Dentzau also interviewed students five months after the visit. Much to the Center's delight, they still remembered what they had learned.

“These kids were rattling off information to him that was amazing,” Arthur said. “It was amazing to hear that what we do is effective.”

The Center continues to serve students in northwestern Florida and promote the values of conservationism to the local community as a whole. Arthur notes that the Center hopes to provide a “complete learning experience” so students learn more than just facts.

“People don't understand that when you mess with the food web it affects everything,” he says. “We want the students to understand how important it is that we maintain that balance for the biodiversity of the planet.”

"jaime

Jaime Gordon is a sophomore at Duke University. She plans to declare a major in Cultural Anthropology and a minor in Political Science, while also working on a minor in Japanese and a certificate in Policy Journalism. Born in Jamaica, but raised in the United States, Jaime has always had an interest in how the human experience differs across cultural lines. She wants to travel as much as possible in between her semesters as a full-time student. Though her particular interests are in East Asia and Francophone Europe, Jaime hopes to visit all seven continents in pursuit of novel experiences, artsy photos, and the world's best ice cream.

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The Jon Stewart Problem

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The heart of the progressive point of view is the idea that government has a role to play in solving some of our toughest problems. The private sector, for all the prosperity and innovation it brings, cannot do everything well.

No individual or business can clean the nation's air, protect civil rights, or keep our food supply safe, among many other tasks. And even if they could, there are many problems without a direct economic benefit to the problem solver - say, reducing poverty or stopping terrorism - so the private sector is not going to invest time and money trying to accomplish them.

That means that gaining support for progressive programs requires the public to believe government can do some things well. The more that confidence erodes, the less reason voters have to support action. Why pass a bill to clean up toxic waste or improve health care if government can't do anything right?

If you stop to think about it, there are plenty of successful government programs to support that idea: Centers for Disease Control, Medicare and Social Security, NASA, or DARPA (the agency that created the Internet), to name a few.

The best examples might be environmental laws like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, which have made our country dramatically cleaner and healthier -- with benefits outweighing costs by 30 to 1 in the case of clean air programs.

Focus on those examples and you're reminded that many big challenges require organized national action, and that the federal government often carries them out to great effect.

But confidence in government is always on an uncertain footing. Part of that is the result of political arguments from those who want smaller government, or see political advantage in attacking "bureaucracy." Some of it comes from genuinely wasteful government programs that are, rightly, held up for public scrutiny. And some of it is the media, looking for a sensational story. We are, after all, a country built on an ideology of anti-government revolution.

So how do we ask the public to support the kind of bold policies we'll need to address big challenges like climate change -- which can't possibly be solved without government action?

First, we have to be open to making government more efficient. Some programs don't work; others can be improved. We can also insure that regular public interactions with the government leave people feeling impressed -- not frustrated. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's proposal to dramatically simplify the process of filing your taxes would remove an annual public service announcement for those who think government can't work well.

There's one more important thing we can do: stop reflectively accusing all institutions of being corrupt. It is so much a part of modern life that we hardly notice it. We assume institutions are weak or corrupt. It's a trend that was accelerated by the Daily Show and continues with its many spin-offs.

To be clear, I think Jon Stewart - like a long line of political commentators going back to Will Rogers and Mark Twain -- was funny, usually right, and very often helped push positive change. But the pressure to be entertaining forces every show like his to drop most nuance. A balanced description of government policies is not going to get much traffic on Hulu.

Critiquing government programs is absolutely vital to democracy, but blanket cynicism both is wrong and counter-productive. The truth is all people - and by, extension, all institutions they create -- are flawed. So it's always easy to find something to criticize about them. That's valuable, as long you don't judge them against an impossible standard.

If you belief something can be improved, of course you should continue to make your case. But it's not necessary to say everything is terrible to push for more reform.

You can admit the Affordable Care Act has pushed the uninsured rate below 10% for the first time while still arguing for single payer, if that's your position. You can recognize that our air is dramatically cleaner, while at the same time fighting for new mercury and smog standards to save even more lives. And acknowledging that Congress just passed a strong reform of our chemical safety system doesn't require you to stop pushing to limit hazardous chemicals.

We sometimes think we've got to paint the bleakest picture of government failure to make the case for strong policies. But because bolder programs in a democracy require a belief in government, we may be undermining our own most important goals.

On Twitter @RealKeithGaby

photo credit: Cliff

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Chevron's Garbage Fire Sale

"Chevron's

Photo credit: @JeremyJ_Miller

[Reposted from the Eye on the Amazon]

Chevron sending up massive flares in Richmond is not the only sign things are getting hot for the oil giant on the run from a $11 billion verdict.

On June 19th, Chevron's Richmond refinery erupted a torrent of flames and black smoke into the air and terrified local residents. The community remembers all too well when 15,000 people were sent to the hospital when that same refinery exploded in 2012. Unfortunately, since then the public hospital in Richmond has closed. They can't afford another explosion as the closest public emergency room services are now thirty to forty minutes away in Oakland.

But that's not the only thing "on fire" at Chevron lately. Similar to the company's claims that it needs massive flares to burn off excess gas, Chevron claims there's "nothing to see here" as it tries to sell off US $5 billion in assets in its Burnaby oil refinery in British Columbia. But the company's actions and track record tell a different story. Realizing it was going to lose in its legal battle and be forced to accept responsibility for deliberately dumping 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon, Chevron instead sold off all its assets and fled that country. It's been a corporate criminal on the run ever since, but the law is finally catching up with Chevron in Canada.

In September, the Ecuadorian plaintiffs bolstered by a unanimous decision in their favor by Canada's Supreme Court will begin their trial to seize Chevron's Canadian assets to cover its US $11 billion debt to the affected communities in Ecuador.

Chevron currently holds approximately US $15 billion of assets in Canada, almost all of which is at risk due to this enforcement action. Chevron refuses to acknowledge its full liability to the SEC and to its shareholders, and this latest move may give a clue as to why. Unable to replicate its customary racist attacks against Ecuador's judiciary and legal system, Chevron has to dream up new methods in Canada.

The Ecuadorians have defeated Chevron in every single legal contest which has considered the evidence of their crimes in Ecuador (Chevron's singular victory a retaliatory RICO SLAPP suit in the US notoriously forbade any evidence of contamination in its proceedings and is still under appeal). The writing is on the wall in Canada, and Chevron is trying to slip out quietly and escape justice once again.

To make matters worse for the oil giant, a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on the use of RICO may preemptively doom its defense before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. As respected appellate attorney Deepak Gupta wrote, the Supreme Court decision "further limits private RICO actions by requiring proof of a quantifiable, redressable and domestic injury something Chevron has steadfastly refuse to identify." The decision also made clear that the RICO statute could not be used to attack a final judgment from a foreign court, as Chevron has tried to do in the Ecuador case. Aaron Page, a U.S. lawyer for the Ecuadorians called it a "nail in the coffin" of Chevron's RICO case. He added, "Now, the Supreme Court has ruled you can't bring a RICO case, even a legitimate one, based on harm that took place abroad. This is another example of why Chevron's RICO case should have been thrown out on day one."

Bottom line on these developments: no matter how desperate it gets, Chevron can't hide its actions in Canada or its pollution in Ecuador or Richmond.

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Why Sustainable Development Makes Good Business Sense
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the fundamental cornerstone to secure future economic and business growth by eradicating poverty in an inclusive way, while protecting the environment.

It is not possible to have a strong, functioning business in a world of increasing inequality, poverty and climate change. Business has the unique opportunity to embrace the SDG agenda and recognize it as a driver of business strategies, innovation and investment decisions. Doing so makes business sense and will give them an edge over their competitors.

The SDGs offer the greatest economic opportunity of our lifetime. With an estimated investment of $2-3 trillion a year, the potential value that can be unlocked for society will be immense. In some sectors it is estimated to be worth hundreds of billions, and even more in others. This is a very high payout for this global agenda and markets are already starting to react.

We have seen this on climate action, which influence 13 of the 17 SDGs, where business that actively take into account this issue enjoy 18 percent higher returns on investment. The 2015 Paris Agreement sent a clear sign that the governments of this world are committed to decarbonize our economies and this is felt in banks, stock exchanges, and boardrooms. It is a sign that the private sector is starting to embrace the business case for a rapid transition to a low carbon world, which will be discussed this week at the Business & Climate Summit in London, but more needs to be done. This is the spirit we also need for the SDGs.

Unilever set out on that journey in 2010 with the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, is our blueprint for sustainable growth whose goals mirror those of the SDGs. The USLP is proving that there is no trade-off between sustainability and profitable growth. We now see, for example, that our Sustainable Living brands are growing 30 percent faster than the rest of the company. These brands have integrated sustainability into both their purpose and products, and are thereby contributing to driving critical progress against the SDGs.

To give you one example -- simply by developing innovative washing products that require less water, women in developing countries need to spend less time collecting water, and have more free time for education, jobs and child care. This is especially true in parts of Africa and Asia where they can walk up to six kilometers a day to the nearest water source.

The path to get where we stand today has not been easy. We had to convince our shareholders and investors that sustainability was the way forward and could generate real value for Unilever.

Part of this process meant doing away with quarterly annual reports. Why? Because the issues we are trying to confront with our business model and through partnerships -- food security, sanitation, employment, climate change -- cannot be solved by quarterly reporting. They require longer-term solutions and value creation, and not 90-day pressures.

Not everyone was happy with that approach at first, but 85 percent of our investors now see the USLP as a driver of long-term value creation and 70 percent of our investors have held shares for more than three years -- at a time when global holding periods have become shorter and shorter. This was unthinkable a few years ago.

Purpose has always been part of Unilever's DNA. Our founder William Lever built a business around the sale of Lifebuoy soap that was not only profitable and sustainable, but also helped transform the health of the poor in Victorian Britain. It was time to re-embed this to the heart of the company.

Fortunately, we are not alone. More and more businesses are seeing the potential of a more sustainable business model, driven both by the firm belief that business can be a force for good, and by the realization that the cost of inaction often exceeds the cost of action -- notably when it comes to the growing threat of climate change and water scarcity.

Sustainability after all is no longer a niche issue. 54 percent of consumers want to buy more sustainably. Many already are. Consumers in both emerging and developed markets want it all -- high-performing products, the right price and a purpose that they can connect with.

Regrettably, however, we are not yet seeing the scale and speed we need. There is still too much reluctance by business leaders and investors to fully embrace the change to this new type of business model. The focus still tends to be on occasional corporate social responsibility (CSR), rather than embedding sustainability at the core of their business. They need to realize that the potential gains from working sustainably are huge, and that this approach needs to be more than a simple CSR exercise.

That is why the role of the Business & Sustainable Development Commission is so important. The Business Commission will quantify the enormous rewards to business that take a lead in sustainable development in all major sectors. This will help drive action at scale and speed by business, accelerating the contribution the private sector can bring to a more equitable, sustainable and inclusive world.

This is a time, like no other in history, when business needs to show the courage to adopt strategies that create long-term value for their companies and for the societies they serve. This is the time to create a brighter future for all.

This blog piece was originally written for the Business & Sustainable Development Commission website, published on 29th June 2016.

Paul Polman is CEO of Unilever and Chairman of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. You can follow Paul on Twitter @PaulPolman and on LinkedIn.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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How Food Can Save the World
Just two weeks ago today, I was leaving one of the most enormous feasts of my lifetime. Engorged and almost bursting, I was finishing a two-day Nordic intellectual smörgåsbord at the 2016 EAT Stockholm Food Forum. A gathering of 500 of the planet's leaders in the fields of food, health and sustainability from the worlds of science, civil society, the private sector and policy -- this was a two day banquet of ideas, solutions and points of action.

The third iteration of this worldwide gathering, the concept is simple genius -- my favourite kind. Bring together innovators, leaders and forward thinkers who usually never meet but are working on interrelated, global challenges -- food systems, climate change, food security, global health and sustainable development. Put them in one room and get them to share ideas, share stories and hopefully reshape the broken systems driving our planetary shortcomings.

Jamie Oliver talked of a Food Revolution; Michael Pollan challenged the culture of food waste; Dr Francesco Branca of the World Health Organization called on the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition; Mark Watts presented a new urban blueprint for planetary and human health; and of course EAT Founder Dr. Gunhild Stordalen challenged the entire globe to step up, step out of our comfort zone, and cook up something new.

To summarize this two-day long lunch in a thousand words is impossible -- but instead I will provide a tasting menu of take-aways.

Here are just four game-changing ideas from Eating in Stockholm.

1. Accept complexity.

The world is complex -- beyond imagination. As someone who works at the global level in health, it is clearer every day that I know less and less. The world is more complex and interconnected than I had ever thought -- or could even imagine. Whether it's health, or food systems, or cities, or climate change -- each of these is a lifetime of understanding and yet each of these are evolving every day, and interconnected in every way.

We cannot try to understand everything, or even understand the complexity itself. We must simply accept this and instead of talking about complexity, or worse being paralyzed by it, embrace it, thrive on it, be fascinated by it -- and look beyond it.

Because the challenges might be endlessly complex, but the macro solutions can be very simple.

2. Seek simplicity.

Here is the exciting part: The complexity of connections and seemingly endless noise become manageable as "super wicked" problems converge toward solutions.

Whether it is climate change, food shortages, the global obesity epidemic, water crises, ocean sustainability, even geopolitical conflicts -- many or most are interlinked and therefore present common opportunities for co-mitigation.

The best part: many of these powerful links culminate at our food system. The way we subsidize, grow, trade, cook, process, waste, and eat food is where many of these challenges are born, amplify, globalize -- and where their solutions also lie.

In this context, we must seek these converging solutions and scale them.

Simple messages like "zero waste." We throw away or lose one-in-three mouthfuls of food each day, worldwide. Food that takes money to grow that could otherwise drive economic development and pull millions out of poverty. Food that takes water to thrive, that could otherwise stay in our aquifers and support biodiversity. Food that produces carbon to make, process and transport, carbon from a food system that already produces more emissions than any other sector, driving dangerous climate change. Seafood that could continue to sustain the ecosystems of the planet's oceans. And food that could be feeding the half a billion on our planet that go hungry each day.

The message is not about solving the 10 greatest challenges, it is simple: Zero waste. The rest will then come. And this is just one example.

3. Leverage connections.

From overwhelming complexity, to converging and focused solutions. Building on the macro links, we must next find points and platforms for driving implementation. At the EAT forum, three came through loud and clear.

The first is cities. More than half the world now lives in cities, for the first time in human history. While they may be a driver for many of the aforementioned problems, having large numbers of humans in a small space also presents profound opportunities. Through the C40 network, EAT is launching an urban food network. The idea is to connect forward-thinking cities from around the planet to share ideas, drive innovation and keep each other accountable to implementing food-focused solutions. Ensure cities become hubs of delicious health, not nutrition-driven diseases.

The second is the food system itself. We might think this means farmers -- and they are at the epicenter -- but it actually means much more. Bringing together those charged with setting trade and investment policies, those that produce food including the half a billion small-holder farmers on the planet, those that process and market and sell foods, those that transport it, those that cook and even us -- those that eat it. Thinking across the food chain from field to fork, or even fiscal to fork if you include the actors responsible for commodifying our food, is essential to making our food systems healthier, and sustainable. An action done in one link of the chain will have effects elsewhere, and so taking a "whole of food system" approach is key.

The last is the connection between the food system and ourselves -- diets. Through something we all did up to three times today, across 7.4 billion plates on this planet, we have an unprecedented opportunity for collective impact and positive change. One gram less of meat, or waste, or carbon might become 21 billion over a single daytime. We might feel like the quick fixes to our biggest challenges are beyond our reach, but maybe they're actually on our plates. Governments, organizations and individuals around the world are working overtime to find ways to build solutions into our diets, and to nudge consumers to think, talk, cook and eat more sustainably.

4. Take action today.

The final morsel of food for thought was to move from contemplation to action. It's time to quit perusing the menu, and go straight to the main course. As the United Nations declares a Decade of Action on Nutrition, as our global population moves from 50% urban to 70% urban over the coming decades, as food systems and diets become the leading risks to our planet's health, and the health of all mankind, there has never been a better -- or more crucial -- time to act.

Whether it's as an individual, an organization or a population, so much can be done today. By each of us.

Vote with your fork -- eat thoughtfully, waste less, buy food not products, limit your meat and eat a diverse range of colorful fruit and veg. Eat as a family, make time to cook with your kids, provide a flexible workspace for your employees to be able to breastfeed with confidence or finish in time to make dinner with children, encourage and support good food at the schools and workplaces around you, and use food to connect with others -- starting with your neighbors.

Finally, don't just vote with your fork -- but vote with your vote. Think about food, food policy and how food can be leveraged for collective gain when next you're at the polls. If those you can vote for aren't yet talking sustainable, healthy diets -- they soon will be. The biggest change will come through strong, effective policy to change the food environments and dietary determinants.

Food is our most powerful narrative.

When we look across our major global challenges -- and we have some very serious ones -- it can seem overwhelmingly complex to the point we lose our appetites for action. Climate change is happening around us. Water shortages affect 330 million people in India. Two billion of us wake up every day overweight and yet half a billion continue to go hungry. The Great Barrier Reef is under severe stress. Some estimate we have more plastic in our world's oceans than fish. War and conflict seem a daily presence in our media.

The world is a buzz of depressing, seemingly hopeless, diverging challenges.

But I challenge you.

Look beyond the buzz. Don't be distracted from the micro, look at the bigger picture. What becomes clear?

All of these challenges relate back to something simple. Something many of us enjoy every day. Something we all seek, obsess over, photograph and devour.

Food.

Over-consumed, often wasted, poorly managed and needlessly unhealthy. We cannot solve the world's problems, without first solving food. Or another view: food is our best opportunity for getting our planet back on track.

Bon appétit.

This column post was written by Dr Alessandro Demaio in his personal capacity. The views, opinions and positions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the views of any third party. Additionally, those providing comments on this blogs are doing so in their personal capacity, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or positions of the author.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Smithsonian celebrates Panama Canal expansion!

Smithsonian staff scientist, Carlos Jaramillo (shown here), and Bruce McFadden from the Florida Museum of Natural History led a 5 year project to collect fossils from and understand the geology of the Panama Canal expansion earthworks. (Photo by Sean Mattson, STRI staff photographer)

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) celebrated with Panama the completion of the Panama Canal expansion project on June 26, 2016. The $5.6 billion engineering effort allows ships with triple the carrying-capacity of current vessels to transit the canal. The enterprise gave Smithsonian scientists unique opportunities to study two global-scale experiments: a natural, intercontinental land bridge bisected by a man-made, inter-oceanic pathway. They studied fossils, invasive species, whale migration routes, environmental services and changing climate.

STRI staff scientist Carlos Jaramillo along with Bruce McFadden, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, led the five-year Panama Canal Paleontology Project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation to salvage fossils uncovered by the earthmovers. The fossils reveal ancient migrations of flora and fauna between North and South America and include new species such as Panamacebus transitus, the earliest monkey found in North America. Excavations expose an unusually complete view of the geology of the isthmus' formationthis record of global transformation of ocean currents, weather patterns and ecosystems would otherwise have remained buried under rock and rainforest.

The canal expansion reopens questions about whether exotic species will cross the freshwater corridor to establish themselves on the other side, potentially disrupting the existing ocean ecosystems. Former STRI director Ira Rubinoff argued in the 1960s that maintaining a freshwater bridge between oceans sharply reduced the risk of invasions likely with a sea-level canal, since most marine organisms cannot withstand abrupt changes in salinity. Staff scientist Mark Torchin asks if exotic speciesand their parasites — will be helped or hindered by increased ship traffic arriving daily from around the world.

Nearly 17,000 commercial vessels cross the Gulf of Panama each year. Staff scientist Hector Guzman's studies of humpback whale migration led the government of Panama to propose a “traffic separation scheme” to the International Maritime Organization. Ships in the Bay of Panama now reduce their speed and come into the Pacific entrance to the Canal through a narrow shipping lane. Researchers expect this to reduce the probability of collisions between ships and whales by 95 percent.

Catalina Pimiento was able to do her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Florida, excavating teeth of the largest shark ever, from the Panama Canal expansion earthworks. (STRI photo)

To study the Canal's freshwater heartbeat scientists turn to its source — the surrounding forests. The Republic of Panama established Soberania National Park and additional protected areas to conserve the forested watersheds that supply the canal with its lifeblood. At the Agua Salud project located near Soberania, staff scientist Jefferson Hall and colleagues ask how native tree species in lowland tropical forests regulate water flow through soil, help maintain biodiversity and store carbon. The project recently collaborated with the BIO Program of the Inter-American Development Bank to produce the free, online publication, Managing Watersheds for Ecosystem Services in the Steepland Neotropics.

“Climate change increases the likelihood of extreme weather, such as intense storms and droughts,” said Matthew Larsen, director of STRI. “We don't fully understand how the hydrologic and other natural systems in the Panama watershed will respond. STRI's ongoing scientific investigations help the Panama Canal Authority and land-use managers to better understand the range of future conditions.”

Last year's El Niño put the risk of water shortages in the canal into sharp relief. STRI monitoring stations throughout the region contribute to understanding such events. STRI maintains more than a dozen research facilities throughout Panama, including the Punta Galeta Marine Education Center near the Caribbean entrance to the canal and the Pacific-side Punta Culebra Nature Center. Both are open to the public, offering exhibits and educational tours.

STRI's presence in Panama has always been intertwined with the canal. From 1910 to 1912, the Smithsonian's Panama Biological Survey resulted in the first inventory of species and assessment of environmental conditions across the canal watershed. Panama's President Pablo Arosemena encouraged scientists to extend their survey throughout the country, creating an important baseline for understanding the wealth and diversity of the region's natural resources. The Barro Colorado Island research station was established in Lake Gatun, then newly flooded, in 1923. In 2016, along with Panama and the world, STRI looks forward to the fresh pulse that marks the completion of the canal expansion project.

The post Smithsonian celebrates Panama Canal expansion! appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

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Stealth Black Holes Detected in Milky Way --"Closer to Earth Than We Previously Thought"

By combining data from Chandra and several other telescopes, astronomers have identified the true nature of an unusual source in the Milky Way galaxy. This discovery implies that there could be a much larger number of black holes in the Galaxy that have previously been unaccounted for. For about two decades, astronomers have known about an object called VLA J213002.08+120904 (VLA J2130+12 for short). Although it is close to the line of sight to the globular cluster M15, most astronomers had thought that this source of bright radio waves was probably a distant galaxy.

Thanks to recent distance measurements with an international network of radio telescopes, including the EVN (European Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network) telescopes, the NSF's Green Bank Telescope and Arecibo Observatory, astronomers realized that VLA J2130+12 is at a distance of 7,200 light years, showing that it is well within our own Milky Way galaxy and about five times closer than M15. A deep image from Chandra reveals it can only be giving off a very small amount of X-rays, while recent VLA data indicates the source remains bright in radio waves.

This new study indicates that VLA J2130+12 is a black hole a few times the mass of our Sun that is very slowly pulling in material from a companion star. At this paltry feeding rate, VLA J2130+12 was not previously flagged as a black hole since it lacks some of the telltale signs that black holes in binaries typically display.

"Usually, we find black holes when they are pulling in lots of material. Before falling into the black hole this material gets very hot and emits brightly in X-rays," said Bailey Tetarenko of the University of Alberta, Canada, who led the study. "This one is so quiet that it's practically a stealth black hole."

This is the first time a black hole binary system outside of a globular cluster has been initially discovered while it is in such a quiet state.

Hubble observations identified VLA J2130+12 with a star having only about one-tenth to one-fifth the mass of the Sun. The observed radio brightness and the limit on the X-ray brightness from Chandra allowed the researchers to rule out other possible interpretations, such as an ultra-cool dwarf star, a neutron star, or a white dwarf pulling material away from a companion star.

In the graphic below, the images on the left show X-rays from Chandra and an optical image from Hubble of a large area around the source VLA J2130+12, including M15. The images on the right show the source VLA J2130+12 that is bright in radio waves, but can only be giving off a very small amount of X-rays. These pieces of information indicate the source contains a black hole with a few times the mass of the Sun.

Because this study only covered a very small patch of sky, the implication is that there should be many of these quiet black holes around the Milky Way. The estimates are that tens of thousands to millions of these black holes could exist within our Galaxy, about three to thousands of times as many as previous studies have suggested.

"Unless we were incredibly lucky to find one source like this in a small patch of the sky, there must be many more of these black hole binaries in our Galaxy than we used to think," said co-author Arash Bahramian, also of the University of Alberta.

There are other implications of finding that VLA J2130+12 is relatively near to us. "Some of these undiscovered black holes could be closer to the Earth than we previously thought," said Robin Arnason, a co-author from Western University, Canada "However there's no need to worry as even these black holes would still be many light years away from Earth."

Sensitive radio and X-ray surveys covering large regions of the sky will need to be performed to uncover more of this missing population. If, like many others, this black hole was formed in the plane of the Milky Way's disk, it would have needed a large kick at birth to launch it to its current position about 3,000 light years above the plane of the Galaxy.

The Daily Galaxy via International Center for Radio Astronomy Research

Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Alberta/B.Tetarenko et al; Optical: NASA/STScI; Radio: NSF/AUI/NRAO/Curtin Univ./J. Miller-Jones) and ALMA Observatory

Newly Detected Radio Burst Appears to Come from Far Beyond Our Galaxy

"The Great Migration" --10,000 Black Holes and Neutron Stars Swarm at Milky Way's Center (Today's Most Popular)

New Hubble Discovery --Supermasssive Black Hole at Center of a Dwarf Galaxy 1/500th Size of Milky Way

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Precursor to Life? --"Ring of Organic Molecules Discovered Around Newborn Star"

Astronomers have long known that organic molecules form in diffuse gas clouds floating between stars. It is thought that as the Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago, some of these organic molecules were transported from interstellar space to the planet forming disk. Later, these molecules played important roles in the chemical evolution resulting in the emergence of life on the Earth.

However, it is still unknown what kinds and quantities of organic molecules were actually supplied from interstellar space. Although radio astronomy observations during the last decade showed that saturated complex organic molecules, such as methanol (CH3OH) and methyl formate (HCOOCH3) [1], exist around Solar-type protostars, their distributions were too compact to be resolved with the radio telescopes available at the time.

With ALMA, an international team lead by Yoko Oya, a graduate student of Department of Physics, The University of Tokyo, and Nami Sakai, an associate chief scientist of RIKEN, studied the distribution of various organic molecules around a Solar-type protostar IRAS 16293-2422A at a high spatial resolution. They discovered a ring structure of complex organic molecules around the protostar. The radius of the ring is 50 times wider than the Earth's orbit. This size is comparable to the size of the Solar System, and the ring structure most likely represents the boundary region between infalling gas and a rotating disk structure around the protostar.

The observations clearly showed the distribution of large organic molecules methyl formate (HCOOCH3) and carbonyl sulfide (OCS). Apparently the distribution of methyl formate is confined in a more compact area around the protostar than the OCS distribution, which mainly traces the infalling gas. "When we measured the motion of the gas containing methyl formate by using the Doppler effect," said Oya "we found a clear rotation motion specific to the ring structure." In this way, they identified the rotating ring structure of methyl formate, although it is not resolved spatially. A similar ring structure is also found for methanol.

These saturated organic molecules are formed in interstellar space and are preserved on the surfaces of dust grains. Around the outer boundary of the disk structure, they evaporate due to shock generated by collisions of the disk and infalling material, and/or due to heating by the light from the baby star. This result is the first direct evidence that interstellar organic materials are indeed fed into the rotating disk structure that eventually forms a planetary system.

In 2014, the team found a similar ring structure of SO (sulfur monoxide) around another Solar-type protostar L1527. In this source, unsaturated complex organic molecules such as CCH and cyclic-C3H2 are very abundant in the infalling gas, while SO preferentially exists in the boundary between the infalling gas and the disk structure. Although the physical structure in L1527 is similar to that found in IRAS 16293-2422A, the chemical composition is much different. Saturated complex organic molecules are almost completely absent in L1527.

The present result, taken together with previous results on L1527, clearly demonstrates for the first time that the materials delivered to a planetary system differ from star to star. A new perspective on chemical composition is thus indispensable for a thorough understanding of the origin of the Solar System and the origin of life on the Earth.

The Daily Galaxy via National Institutes of Natural Sciences

The Vanishing Planet

ESO: "An Entire Spiral Galaxy Fell Through the Center of Massive Elliptical Galaxy M87"

Trio of Ancient Galaxies Formed Shortly After the Big Bang (Weekend Feature)

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Most Mysterious Star in the Milky Way --"We Still Have No Idea What's Causing It to Dim" (A 'Galaxy' Update)

"The dips found by Kepler are real. Something seems to be transiting in front of this star and we still have no idea what it is!" confirms German astronomer Michael Hippke. Even if aliens are not involved, Tabby's star remains "the most mysterious star in the universe" as Yale astronomer Tabetha Boyajian described it in a TED talk she gave last February.

The results of a new study make it far less likely that KIC 8462852, popularly known as Tabby's star, is the home of industrious aliens who are gradually enclosing it in a vast shell called a Dyson sphere. Media interest went viral last October when a group of astronomers from Pennsylvania State University released a preprint that cited KIC 8462852's "bizarre light curve" as "consistent with" a swarm of alien-constructed megastructures.

Public interest in the star, which sits about 1,480 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, began last fall("Tabby") Boyajian and colleagues posted a paper on an astronomy preprint server reporting that "planet hunters" - a citizen science group formed to search data from the Kepler space telescope for evidence of exoplanets - had found unusual fluctuations in the light coming from the otherwise ordinary F-type star (slightly larger and hotter than the sun).

The most remarkable of these fluctuations consisted of dozens of uneven, unnatural-looking dips that appeared over a 100-day period indicating that a large number of irregularly shaped objects had passed across the face of the star and temporarily blocked some of the light coming from it.

The top panel of the graphic below shows four years of Kepler observations of the 12th-magnitude star KIC 8462852 in Cygnus. Several sporadic dips in its light output (normalized to 100%) hint that something is partially blocking its light. The portion highlighted in yellow, recorded in February to April 2013, is shown at three different scales along the bottom. The random, irregular shape of each dip could not be caused by a transiting exoplanet. (T. Boyajian & others / MNRAS).

The attention caused scientists at the SETI Institute to train its Alien Telescope Array on the star to see if they could detect any radio signals indicating the presence of an alien civilization. In November it reported finding "no such evidence" of signals with an artificial origin.

Then a study released in January by a Louisiana State University astronomer threw even more fuel on the fire of alien speculation by announcing that the brightness of Tabby's star had dimmed by 20 percent over the last century: a finding particularly difficult to explain by natural means but consistent with the idea that aliens were gradually converting the material in the star's planetary system into giant megastructures that have been absorbing increasing amounts of energy from the star for more than a century. That study has now been accepted for publication in the peer reviewed Astrophysical Journal.

However, a new study - also accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal - has taken a detailed look at the observations on which the LSU study was based and concluded there is no credible evidence that the brightness of the star been steadily changing over this period.

When the LSU study was posted on the physics preprint server ArXiv, it caught the attention of Vanderbilt doctoral student Michael Lund because it was based on data from a unique resource: Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard. DASCH consists of more than 500,000 photographic glass plates taken by Harvard astronomers between 1885 and 1993, which the university is digitizing. Lund was concerned that the apparent 100-year dimming of Tabby's star might just be the result of observations having been made by a number of different telescopes and cameras that were used during the past century.

Lund convinced his advisor, Professor of Physics and Astronomy Keivan Stassun, and a frequent collaborator, Lehigh University astronomer Joshua Pepper, that the question was worth pursuing. After they began the study, the Vanderbilt/Lehigh group discovered that another team - German amateur astronomer Michael Hippke and NASA Postdoctoral Fellow Daniel Angerhausen - were conducting research along similar lines. So the two teams decided to collaborate on the analysis, which they wrote up and submitted to the Astrophysical Journal.

"Whenever you are doing archival research that combines information from a number of different sources, there are bound to be data precision limits that you must take into account," said Stassun. "In this case, we looked at variations in the brightness of a number of comparable stars in the DASCH database and found that many of them experienced a similar drop in intensity in the 1960's. That indicates the drops were caused by changes in the instrumentation not by changes in the stars' brightness."

The planet hunters first detected something unusual in the star's light curve in 2009. They found a 1 percent dip that lasted a week. This is comparable to the signal that would be produced by a Jupiter-sized planet passing in front of the star. But planets produce symmetric dips and the one they found was decidedly asymmetric, like something that would be produced by an irregular-shaped object like a comet.

The light from the star remained steady for two years, then it suddenly took a 15 percent plunge that lasted for a week.
Another two years passed without incident but in 2013 the star began flickering with a complex series of uneven, unnatural looking dips that lasted 100 days. During the deepest of these dips, the intensity of the light coming from the star dropped 20 percent. According to Boyajian it would take an object 1,000 times the area of the Earth transiting the distant star to produce such a dramatic effect.

"The Kepler data contains other cases of irregular dips like these, but never in a swarm like this," said Stassun.

Boyajian and her colleagues considered a number of possible explanations, including variations in the star's output, the aftermath of an Earth/Moon type planetary collision, interstellar clumps of dust passing between the star and earth, and some kind of disruption by the star's apparent dwarf companion. However, none of their scenarios could explain all of the observations. Their best explanation was a giant comet that fragmented into a cascade of thousands of smaller comets. (This hypothesis took a hit when the LSU study was announced because it could not explain a century-long dimming.)

The Kepler telescope is no longer collecting data in the Cygnus region, but Hippke reports that the mystery has captured the imagination of amateur astronomers around the world so thousands of them are pointing their telescopes at Tabby's star, snapping images and sending them to the American Association of Variable Star Observers in hopes of detecting further dips that will shed new light on this celestial mystery.

The Daily Galaxy via Vanderbilt University

"Unusual News" --From Around the Planet & Beyond (Sponsored Site)

Kepler Mission Data --"Reveals Alien Planet Weather Cycles"

Kepler Space Telescope Finds Three Nearly Earth-Size Planets Orbiting Nearby Star

"Search for Double Sunsets" --The Undetected Planets of the Milky Way's Binary Stars

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Scientists Seek Dark Force of the Universe --“It's Totally Beyond Anything We Understand" (A 'Galaxy' Insight)

Scientists have been trying to puzzle out for decades why the universe seems to weigh more than it should, and so far the answer points to dark matter—an invisible substance that they still don't clearly understand and is thought to exist in clumps throughout the universe. Dark matter, believed by physicists to outweigh all the normal matter in the universe by more than five to one, is by definition invisible. But, scientists at MIT and elsewhere have developed a new tool that could test to see if dark matter is detectable.

However, an exotic particle -a "dark photon"- that resembles a photon, but with mass, has been proposed by some theorists to explain dark matter — whose nature is unknown but whose existence can be inferred from the gravitational attraction it exerts on ordinary matter, such as in the way galaxies rotate and clump together.

“We're looking for a massive photon,” explains MIT physics professor Richard Milner. That may seem like a contradiction in terms: Photons, or particles of light, are known to be massless. If it does exist, that would represent a major discovery, Milner says. “It's totally beyond anything we understand about the physical world. A massive photon would be totally different” from anything allowed by the Standard Model, the bedrock of modern particle physics. "It's a tiny effect,” Milner adds, but “it can have enormous consequences for our theories and our understanding. It would be absolutely groundbreaking in physics.”

The experiment known as DarkLight, developed by MIT physics professor Peter Fisher and Milner in collaboration with researchers at the Jefferson National Accelerator Laboratory in Virginia and others, will look for evidence a massive dark photon with a specific energy postulated in one particular theory about dark matter, Milner says. If the planned experiment detects the A' particle, says Roy Holt, a distinguished fellow in the physics division at Argonne National Laboratory says, “it would signal that dark matter could actually be studied in a laboratory setting.”

Meanwhile, team of physicists at the University of California have uploaded on Arvix (the e-print archive with over 100,000 articles in physics) work done by a team in Hungary in 2015 that might have revealed the existence of this fifth force of nature. The Hungarian team, led by Attila Krasznahorkay, examined the possible existence of dark photons that work with dark matter. The Berkeley team has challenged the findings, suggesting that the new particle found by the Hungarian team was not a dark photon, but possibly a protophobic X boson, which might carry a super-short force which acts over just the width of an atomic nucleus.

To prove the existence of the theorized particle, dubbed A' (“A prime”), the Darklight experiment will use a particle accelerator at the Jefferson Lab that has been tuned to produce a very narrow beam of electrons with a megawatt of power. That's a lot of power, Milner says: “You could not put any material in that path,” he says, without having it obliterated by the beam. For comparison, he explains that a hot oven represents a kilowatt of power. “This is a thousand times that,” he says, concentrated into mere millionths of a meter.

The Jefferson Lab's Free Electron Laser, in Virginia, will bombard an oxygen target with a stream of electrons with one megawatt of power. This will be able to test for these massive photons at a mass-energy of up to 100 MeV. It is hoped that this hugely powerful beam of electrons will hit the target and create this theorized form of dark matter (A' particles). The dark matter, if it's created, will then immediately decay into two other particles that can be easily detected.

The MIT paper confirms that the new facility's beam meets the characteristics needed to definitively detect the hypothetical particle — or rather, to detect the two particles that it decays into, in precise proportions that would reveal its existence. Doing so, however, will require up to two years of further preparations and testing of the equipment, followed by another two years to collect data on millions of electron collisions in the search for a tiny statistical anomaly.

While DarkLight's main purpose is to search for the dark photon A' particle, it also happens to be well suited to addressing other major puzzles in physics, Milner says. It can probe the nature of a reaction, inside stars, in which carbon and helium fuse to form oxygen — a process that accounts for all of the oxygen that now exists in the universe.

“This is the stuff we're all made of,” Milner says, and the rate of this reaction determines how much oxygen exists. While that reaction rate is very hard to measure, Milner says, the DarkLight experiment could illuminate the process in a novel way: “The idea is to do the inverse.” Instead of fusing atoms to form oxygen, the experiment would direct the powerful beam at an oxygen target, causing it to split into carbon and helium. That, Milner says, would provide an indirect way of determining the stellar production rate.

In 2012, Simona Vegetti, a physics fellow at MIT, discovered an entire galaxy made of dark matter just outside the Milky Way. The dark galaxy may host a luminous galaxy made invisible by the dark matter. “The thing people like about dark matter is that it's been able to explain so many observations,” Vegetti said.

Because dark matter reflects no light, the galaxy is elusive. Vegetti worked with an international team of scientists including three from the U.S. and two from the Netherlands. Using the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, they detected the galaxy by studying ripples in the patterns of light rays from the Milky Way, a method known as gravitational lensing.

“It's a dark matter-dominated object,” Vegetti said, “So there might be stars but very little.”

There are thought to be more than 10,000 satellite galaxies attached to our Milky Way galaxy, but only 30 of them are visible, she said. The image above shows the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, named for the constellation in which it is seen from the earth, in the process of colliding and merging with our own Milky Way. “The question becomes are these satellites missing because they don't exist or because they are purely dark? And that's one question we're trying to answer,” she said.

In the image at the top of the page, the bright source in the upper left is an active galaxy in the cluster, Abell 2142, six million light years across that contains hundreds of galaxies and enough gas to make a thousand more. It is one of the most massive objects in the universe.

The Daily Galaxy via MIT, Northwestern, and Physical Review Letters

"Hidden Supersymmetry?" --Debate Over a New Physics Intensifies (The Weekend Feature)

Friday's 'Galaxy' Insight --"Why the Universe Exists"

Today's 'Galaxy' Insight -- "The Cosmos Five-Billion Years in the Future"

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A Lethal Landslide, and More Rain in a Javanese village. Courtesy of @Sutopo_BNPB

OO Java, Indonesia: Massive Deforestation, Heavy Rain Create
Lethal Landslides - Takeaways:

64 died in recent landslides;
1800s to present: Java forests declined from 10 to 0.4 million hectares.
Since 2005: 2000+ people have died from landslides.

Forests anchor soil; remove them, add heavy rain, and landslides result.

When we harm forests, we harm ourselves.

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2016: THE YEAR CLIMATE SHATTERED

Warmest Arctic winter
Last 9 months are hottest on record
India's hottest day: 51C (128 F)
Alaska warmest spring on record
Increase in CO2 levels far more than in previous years
Australia's hottest autumn (US spring) yet
Record massive bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef

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SPEAKING OUT

What does a 2 C rise mean for life on Earth?

Parts of the Middle East would become uninhabitable without permanent air conditioning.
Some experts predict a massive decline in the food crops critical for human survival:
Parts of Africa would see their corn crops cut in half, for example.

current global coral bleaching event started in 2014;
It is the longest-lasting and largest such event ever recorded;
It is expected to last til the end of 2016, at least.
.
Northern hemisphere reefs can expect another season of bleaching.
Micronesia reefs face the biggest threat;
Micronesia depends on reefs for food and tourism revenue.

The Carbon Cycle - how it flows from air to plants to soil to air to... Source Kirk et al, 2016, Fig1

OO Alpine Soils Losing Up To A Third of Their Carbon
As Summers Warm Takeaways:

The top meter of the world's soils holds 3x the carbon in the entire atmosphere;
Losing that soil carbon will speed up climate change;
The Alps are already losing carbon as summer temperatures rise;
German alpine soils have lost an average 14 % of their carbon, up to 32 % in places.

OO Power Plants Are No Longer America's Biggest Climate Problem -
Transportation Is. Takeaways:

US cars, trucks, and airplanes now emit more carbon dioxide than its power plants do;
The US has made remarkable progress in cleaning up its electricity sector since 2005;
Power plants account for only about one-third of America's CO2 emissions;
.
Transportation, another third (and now the biggest source);
Transportation remains much tougher to address;
And since 2013 transport emissions have been creeping upward again.

Find locations here:

And there are many more actions you can do, right here.

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SOLAR KEEPS FLYING

OO Investments in Solar Energy Grow to $9.4 Billion in 2015, Says World Bank
Private infrastructure investment was 72% higher than the average of the previous five years.

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WHY WE SHOULD ACT NOW: RISING RISKS

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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A Strong EPA Delivers Protection, Justice, And Pathways To A Cleaner Future
Clean air is a national asset and personal right that must be protected and vigorously defended.

When Americans see images of blinding smog and choking pollution in cities from Beijing to Mumbai, they should remember that before the Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970, and landmark laws like the Clean Air Act were enacted, some of our own cities suffered similar fates. If not for the importance our country has placed on protecting public health and our environment, many of our own hometowns would still look that way today.

These protections don't just happen. They require cutting edge science, technology, ambitious yet careful policy making, and legal mandates to execute, enforce, and defend. That's the job of the EPA. We use the authorities granted to us by Congress to protect the environment and public health in a common sense way. And that includes setting and enforcing limits on pollution from our vehicles.

We Americans love our cars. We've doubled our collective driving mileage nearly every generation. But science tells us that certain vehicle emissions help form pollutants that aggravate asthma and make it hard to breathe for kids, the elderly, and those with heart and lung disease. That's why EPA has set standards for tailpipe emissions--standards that automakers can, and are expected, to meet.

Last September, EPA announced that Volkswagen, the world's largest automaker, was using "defeat devices" on its two-liter diesel engine cars to circumvent EPA's vehicle emissions standards. VW sold nearly half a million cars in the United States that emit pollution up to 40 times the legal limit. This violation is both a breach of consumer trust and a serious threat to public health.

In one of the most creative and ambitious environmental enforcement settlements in U.S. history, we are addressing the immediate pollution issue VW caused and, at the same time, setting a new precedent for long term benefits that can be achieved under the Clean Air Act.

Working with our partners at the Department of Justice and in the state of California, our first priority is to get these dirty cars off the road and illegal pollution out of the air. Our agreement requires VW to give all consumers a choice: sell back their cars to the company, terminate their leases, or, if an emissions modification gets approved by EPA and California, have their cars modified to reduce harmful emissions.

But it doesn't stop there. The settlement also requires VW to spend $2.7 billion to cut health threatening air pollution across America, and make an additional $2 billion in transformative investments in clean transportation and innovation.

The pollution reduction funding will be used by states and tribes to slash emissions from highly polluting diesel vehicles and improve air quality in communities across the country. The clean transportation investments will support the construction of charging stations, public information programs, and steps to improve access to zero-emission vehicles - all designed to lay the foundation for a cleaner transportation future in the United States.

EPA has turned a pollution crisis into a major opportunity to advance cleaner, greener vehicles of all kinds. This is the EPA that Americans depend on - one that is serious about protecting public health, tough in enforcing legal limits on pollution, and innovative in supporting the advancement of our green economy over the long term.

Since EPA first started regulating in 1970, we have seen consistent, simultaneous trends of decreasing pollution, increasing fuel efficiency, and unprecedented economic growth. In that time, we've cut air pollution by 70 percent while our economy has tripled. Since 1980, national average ozone levels have gone down 33 percent. From 1990 to 2011, emissions of harmful air toxics declined by over 60 percent as a result of EPA pollution standards for industrial facilities, vehicles, and fuels.

Meanwhile, thanks to both EPA and the California Air Resources Board, fuel-economy standards for passenger vehicles are now the toughest in U.S. history and demand for electric vehicles is on the rise.

EPA is the strongest line of defense Americans have against the health threats from pollution. And we are the only entity that can enforce clean air protections nationally when the air we breathe is put at risk.

But an empowered EPA does more than address harm and deliver justice when rules are broken. Our actions promote innovation and consumer choice, and we provide concrete health and economic benefits that improve people's lives - today and down the road.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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What is the Value of a Species?

Let's be honest, these are challenging times to be a conservationist, animal lover, nature fan, outdoorsman…a human. No matter the label, one thing that we all share in common is a desire to feel wonder: a wonder that often arises from experiences in the natural world.

Somehow, just knowing that incredible creatures are out there, moving through landscapes that revolve unperceivably slowly on their own dials, without regard or subservience to man's hand, connects us to something deeper. It allows us to believe that it will all be okay. That life was here before, and so will it be in the future. Eternity.

As such, it somehow seems like a sacrilege to validate the worthiness of nature—of a species—by weights and measures, dollars and cents. Too often we impatiently demand to know what good it does for us, the conquerors, the victors, to whom the spoils go daily. As if a row of decimal points could ever serve as the demarcation line between gold and garbage, your own mother on auction like a prize pig at the county fair.

I first discovered the rusty-patched bumble bee in a box on a museum shelf at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I was there to look at the spectral array of bees that were native to the region. While I quickly scanned the collection like an eager child on Christmas morning, Becky Nichols, the park entomologist, drew my attention to one species that hadn't been seen in the Smokies for years.

It wasn't flashy or particularly outstanding in appearance. Even amongst bumble bees it seemed rather dull and unassuming. Only a hint of a fading rusty band, an oxidized kiss of orange on its abdomen, gave a clue to the origin of its common name. It was a species that was once abundant throughout the eastern US and into the upper Midwest, but then it wasn't; nearly winking out before most people even knew it existed.

There was a stuffed passenger pigeon in the same room, staring off into space with its glass eyes. This was once the most numerous bird on the continent, but we eliminated it before we even suspected such a thing was possible. I wondered if the rusty-patched bumble bee, like the passenger pigeon, was another ghost in the making.

It was at that moment that I knew that I had to see a living rusty-patched bumble bee. I wanted to hear the deep thrum of its wings and know, really know, what it was like to behold its presence. If there was ever a precious natural commodity, this was the currency that held the most value to me. This pivotal moment sent me off along the path of an incredibly journey, which culminated in many unexpected, insightful experiences, and a short film that will hopefully give others a sense of what we stand to lose if this species fades into extinction.

In the film, University of Wisconsin entomologist Dr. Claudio Gratton sites a provocative paper that looks at the economic value of native bees. Pollination services are often used as a reason to protect bees and other native pollinators. However, this paper suggests that a core group of bees are responsible for the majority of crop pollination. We have nearly 4,000 species of native bees in North America, none of which are protected under the Endangered Species Act. If crop pollination is our only justification for which species get graced with our approval to continue to exist, what happens to those that have no obvious value to us? Perhaps, as Dr. Gratton so elegantly puts it, this says more about how we value life in general than anything else.

If you'd like to speak up for the protection rusty-patched bumble, a species that has declined 87 percent in the past 15 years, please consider signing our petition requesting that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service place it under the care of the Endangered Species Act.

We spend so much time and effort trying to make life better for ourselves. The least we can do is make life possible for this bee.

Learn more at www.rustypatched.com.

Clay Bolt holds a Coast Garter Snake at Tennessee Valley, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, California. Photo © Neil Losin / Day's Edge Productions

Clay Bolt is a Natural History and Conservation Photographer specializing in the world's smaller creatures. He regularly partners with organizations such as the National Geographic Society, National Wildlife Federation, and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. He is an Associate Fellow in the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP), president-elect of the North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA), and co-founder (2009) of the international nature and biodiversity photography project, Meet Your Neighbours. His current major focus is on North America's native bees and the important roles that they play in our lives. Clay lives in Bozeman, Montana where he is the communications lead for WWF's Northern Great Plains Program. Visit www.claybolt.com to learn more.

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Climate Change: The Large Scale Impact of Small Scale Change

"2016-06-28-1467141421-4832906-williamk.JPG"

William Kamkwamba presents at the EF Global Student Leaders Summit last March in Iceland. The conference focused on the future or energy.

By Nisha Chandra

The reporter's voice blares through the television, impassioned by a need for change and an anger at the world's stubborn ignorance. Sea levels rising at an alarming rate. A global surface temperature that won't stop increasing. Warmer oceans. Shrinking ice. Ocean acidification. A teenager sits reclined, listening to the broadcast with an open but weary mind. "I know", they think. "I know. But what do you want me to do about it?"

For many, the often discussed task of 'combating climate change' seems like a distant and intimidating goal. A goal detached from any concrete change that we, as young people, believe we are able to make. But for a mind like William Kamkwamba, a mind so given to small acts of progress, such a goal becomes an easy reality. As I sat transfixed at the EF Global Student Leaders Summit in Iceland last March, listening to him speak of his work with an unmistakable fervor, I watched about 700 teenagers begin to contemplate the idea that combating climate change does not always need to occur through grand acts of scientific invention or profound discovery, but instead can often stem from making small scale changes with large scale impacts.

As a young boy growing up in Malawi, Mr. Kamkwamba witnessed firsthand what life was like without energy and clean water. During an exceptionally long and harsh drought, people were dying in his village. He says that "they were dropping down to nothing," and that "it was a future he could not accept." At age 14, with a mind fueled by creativity, he was able to create a windmill using scraps and spare parts from a junkyard to power his family home. This dream, to bring power to his home, soon became a dream for the village, to bring electricity to the whole community. With growing confidence and an unshakable tenacity, Mr. Kamkwamba built more windmills out of old spare parts and materials to light all of the homes in his compound, going from generating 12 watts to 200. His next projects would focus on clean water, malaria prevention, and solar power lighting for all of the homes in his compound. His work required a stubborn dedication to learning about and implementing clean energy. And much more than that - a dedication to making sure that his community would never have to suffer that way again. This incredible story is detailed in his best-selling book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

While at the Global Student Leaders Summit, I had the chance to introduce Mr. Kamkwamba on stage. But as I stood up there, making fleeting eye contact with the sea of teenagers who had likely heard about the potential impact of their actions so many times that it risked losing its meaning, I wondered if I myself knew what exactly this "impact" meant. For many devoted to energy sustainability, global impact is undoubtedly the end goal. But I began to realize that such progress comes about by a series of smaller scale impacts, carried out by those who want to see concrete change not just in the world at large, but in the world at their fingertips. Hearing Mr. Kamkwamba address all 700 of us, and later getting a chance to speak with him one-on-one, it became clear that I was underestimating the potential impact of smaller-scale change - and all of a sudden my perspective on "impact" became so much clearer.

Mr. Kamkwamba stressed the point that when it comes to the environment around you, "you can't just wait for someone else to come in and solve your problems." Nobody knows your community better than you, and nobody understands what is needed for its improvement better than you. Although the idea of innovation is universal, some of the most far reaching projects "start off specific to each community" he said, wanting every student to understand where local solutions come from. A solution may arise from a scientist experimenting with fusion, but it may also arise from a young boy sitting in his room creating a windmill out of bicycle parts and old pipes.

Several months after departing from Iceland, Mr. Kamkwamba's words have stayed with me. As I returned to school, I carried with me the reluctance of leaving behind an incredible experience along with the conviction that I must now lend myself to "starting small." Since then, I've been working with two other students in my class (who also attended the EF Iceland Summit) to convert our school campus to renewable energy by the means of a windmill. For students who spend the majority of their days in our school building, this project is about as local as it gets. We researched the markets, vendors, and feasibility of such a process, hoping to make the same kind of concrete change Mr. Kamkwamba praised.

Unfortunately, we were recently told that the installation of a windmill would be both impractical and unlikely, effectively ending that pursuit. But, as was mentioned countless times over the two days at the conference, true strides in clean energy would not be possible without failing, and failing fast. We hope to continue pushing, until our school community benefits from renewable energy just as Mr. Kamkwamba's village did so many years ago.

When it comes to combating climate change, no special qualifications are needed. In fields of continuous innovation such as sustainable energy, there are countless big ideas. But just as important are the small ideas, the ones that bud in your mind and gradually turn into small actions. These often may seem irrelevant, but they truly are essential. William Kamkwamba claims that "challenges are opportunities waiting for you to explore them." So go explore!

Nisha Chandra is a rising high school senior from Connecticut

This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post and EF Educational Tours about the recent EF Global Student Leaders Summit, which explored the future of energy from Iceland. The Summit Series combines educational travel with a two-day leadership conference, and asks students to tackle global challenges in places where those challenges are notably present or well-addressed. To view all posts in the series, visit here.

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Why Should A Jaguar Be Displayed As A Mascot To Begin With?
Yet again we face a tragedy involving captive animals. After an Olympic torch lighting event in Manaus, Juma a 17-year-old jaguar was shot and killed.

According to a statement issued by the military, the jaguar escaped as she was being returned to her cage shortly after the event. After being shot with tranquilizers, ineffectively, the animal eventually moved towards a soldier, at which point the jaguar was shot in the head and killed -- in order to preserve human life, according to the military.

This is a shameful incident, and reactions have been reverberating across the globe, mainly because the species is the symbol for the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this August.

We must discuss two issues. We should begin by addressing this specific case, and then talk about the confinement of wild animals.

"juma

Although we don't have detailed information about what happened, one thing is clear: If the jaguar did in fact escape, someone made a huge mistake. We are talking about a predator that poses risks to human life under stressful situations. An event involving fireworks and excessive noise isn't a suitable environment for a wild animal of this size. How did she escape the enclosure?

The main line of inquiry should not focus on why the animal was shot, but rather what happened leading up to that unfortunate moment.

Regarding the shooting, despite the controversy, if there was actually a risk to human beings, sadly there was nothing else to do. I strongly believe that the decision was a tough and painful one, because the military men seem quite fond of their animals. But the main line of inquiry should not focus on why the animal was shot, but rather what happened leading up to that unfortunate moment.

What sequence of mistakes led to this tragic ending? We must have more detailed information about what happened during its chase. A tranquilizer shot could cause more stress to the animal. We must find out if the person responsible for preparing the chemical mix used the right dosage, and if the soldiers had been prepared for this type of incident. We must also find out if the safe distance between the military men and the animal was respected when the jaguar was shot. We would like to believe that both answers are affirmative, but military agencies must give us further information.

This tragedy joins a list of other incidents, such as the case of Harambe, the gorilla who died in the Cincinatti Zoo, and the lions shot dead in Chile after a man had entered the cage to commit suicide.

"juma

Some of these incidents have raised a heated debate about whether or not zoos are necessary. First of all, we must say that zoos fulfill a very important function for the conservation of wildlife. Apart from the obvious function of environmental education, the breeding programs and the genetic studies done on animals in captivity result in material of immeasurable value for the reintroduction of species and fauna recovery programs. In addition, zoos are responsible for funding wildlife conservation projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Backing the extinction of zoos comes as a result of a mix of romanticism and total misinformation. We obviously need to discuss the practices of many establishments, but that does not justify the complete elimination of this activity.

I can't help but wonder: What is the message conveyed by exposing a live animal as a mascot in front of a crowd?

In the case of Juma, however, the debate must go way beyond that. Although Brazil's Jungle Warfare Instruction Center (CIGS) keeps a zoo for animals rescued from hunting and trafficking, many of which cannot be reintroduced into nature, I can't help but wonder: What is the message conveyed by exposing a live animal as a mascot in front of a crowd?

Could it be a message of environmental education or protection? I don't think so. For me, the message conveyed is that of the domination of human beings over animals, clearly illustrated by the picture of the two military men holding Juma by a chain. We must reconsider, and decide if this kind of conduct is appropriate.

I am not saying that to keep these species domesticated or in captivity is always a mistake. Not all "domination" is bad. The Onça Pintada Institute (Jaguar Institute), coordinated by Dr. Leandro Silveira, is an exemplary institution that, besides conducting field research, leads excellent activities for captive jaguars, most of them orphaned due to hunting practices. The Jungle Warfare Instruction Center itself keeps wild animals for protection purposes and is therefore praiseworthy -- but that is not enough. Public display, especially in these conditions, does not seem appropriate. If one must take further actions, the most important would be to enable CIGS to reintroduce such species into nature.

I hope this sad incident can inspire change. Ideally, all this uproar about a single animal should also be used to mobilize society at large to protest against the reduction of the population of this species. In just 30 years, we have lost 27 percent of our jaguars. Many Jumas, sadly, remain invisible.

This post first appeared on HuffPost Brazil. It has been translated into English and edited for clarity.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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The Melting Arctic Ice Calls For Protecting What I Love
Last week I visited the Svalbard archipelago in the northern Barents Sea to bear witness to the rapid changes occurring in the Arctic. In many ways, the Arctic is the frontline of dramatic environmental changes that will impact everyone.

Until recently, the northern Barents Sea, one of Earth's last pristine environments, had been safely protected with ice cover. However, this is no longer the case. Due to the effects of climate change, sea ice is melting, the area is changing dramatically, and a new ocean is opening up. This enables the oil and fishing industries to expand into the far North.

This far away land and its seas are no longer what they used to be and are surprisingly not protected. Norway, due to its role in deciding what happens in these waters, has a key part to play. If we are to retain what we have left, and make the area more able to be resilient in the face of the changing climate, the Norwegian government must make the waters a marine protected area. Up to now, however it has shown a lack of political will to do so.

Giant Fishing Trawlers Bulldozing The Sea

Having spent 20 plus years as a climate campaigner, I didn't travel to the Arctic with rose-colored glasses. I knew the ice was melting. The Earth's 2015 surface temperatures were the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1880, according to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NASA reports that spring 2016 was the hottest recorded in the Northern hemisphere.

With the Arctic warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, the ancient glaciers of Svalbard are retreating. Witnessing the ice melt--with my own eyes in my new role as Executive Director, Greenpeace International--I imagined the day in just a short few decades when the Arctic will have ice-free summers and it petrified me.

Climate change is opening up the northern Barents Sea and the fishing industry is advancing further to the North each year. Which means previously untouched areas are turning into a new hunting ground. Dozens of giant trawlers are already above the 78th parallel, a historic development.

This industry is using bottom trawling as part of their practice. Bottom trawling does not mean just taking cod; it is like clear-cutting forests but underwater. The trawlers carry 100-metres long nets weighing with heavy metal rollers that smash everything in their path. They are like bulldozers of the sea. Fragile seabed communities of sea pens and corals that need decades to grow can be wiped out in seconds. And with the industry, comes trash.

Arctic Islands Are Covered With Trash

Probably like most people who don't live here, I imagined this part of the Arctic as a land of ice and snow with limited traces of human beings. I expected to see more glaciers and more majestic ranges covered in white. Instead our Greenpeace crew, campaign team and the three winners of our poster competition, found trash.

I wasn't sure how much trash we would find, but at the end of day one we had collected a large mound of trash--buoys, fishing nets, rope, glass, plastic bottles and more. The recurring piece of trash though was shoes--was this a message about our human footprint?

For Svalbard, it is estimated that about 80 percent of the trash washed ashore comes from industrial fishing. In annual Barents Sea fisheries surveys the highest litter counts coincide with areas of intensive fishery and shipping.

These items are not only a blight on the landscape, they are dangerous. Reindeer, polar bears and other animals get entangled in old fishing nets and suffocate. Birds consume toxic particles of plastic. Plastics can carry pollutants that, if ingested, may also accumulate through the food chain.

As part of our 'Protect What You Love' campaign, the team decided to organize a beach clean up to raise awareness about the consequences of bottom trawling and the trash left behind by the fishing industry.

According to UNESCO, globally, up to 1 million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die each year from eating plastic or getting entangled in plastic debris.

Urgent Need for Legal Protection

This unequivocal destruction of the underwater ecologies is legal. The current protected areas cover just a small part of unique marine habitats, and the rest is open for destructive oil production and industrial fishing.

For now, some of the world's largest seafood and fishing companies have committed to not expand their search for cod into large, previously un-fished areas in the northern Barents Sea in the Norwegian Arctic.

The initiative, brokered by Greenpeace, marks the first time an entire industry has collectively called for Arctic protection--in the absence of legal protection in these areas.

The agreement states that any fishing company expanding into the agreed to Arctic waters will not be able to sell their cod to a number of major seafood brands and retailers. But the agreement, though in good faith, is voluntary.

Our environment--whether it is the Arctic or the Amazon--needs protecting. I believe the Arctic waters are crucial for the life of our planet and should be protected.

The Norwegian government needs to act fast to ensure these previously untouched areas of the northern Barents Sea are protected and any expansion of fishing is stopped.

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TransCanada Files $15 billion NAFTA Case Against The U.S. Demonstrating Corporate Trade Deal Threats

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TransCanada, the company behind the infamous Keystone XL pipeline, just demonstrated the dangers that corporate trade pacts pose to communities and to our air, water, and climate.

On June 24, the Canadian oil company filed a trade case against the U.S. seeking more than $15 billion in damages from American taxpayers as compensation for the rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline that spared us the threat of increased climate disruption and spills of dirty tar sands oil.

TransCanada is able to bring this case thanks to rules in the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) -- rules that would be expanded in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pact -- that give foreign corporations, including big polluters, expansive rights to challenge environmental protections in unaccountable trade tribunals. In fact, TransCanada's case against the U.S. will be heard before a private trade tribunal with no accountability to our domestic legal system.

Here are 4 key pieces of information you should know in order to fully understand the implications of this case.

1) TransCanada's case is not an anomaly. Foreign investors -- including Shell, BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil -- have already launched nearly 700 of these so-called "investor-state cases" against the policies of more than 100 governments. These cases have challenged for example, a moratorium on fracking in Quebec, a court order to pay for oil pollution in Ecuador, an environmental panel's decision to reject a mining project in Canada, and a decision to phase out nuclear energy in Germany.

And while all sorts of public interest policies are at risk, environmental policies have been a favorite target of corporations. Half of the new investor-state cases in 2014 targeted policies affecting power generation, mining, or oil and gas extraction. In the first five months of this year, mining corporations used private trade and investment tribunals every 2.5 weeks on average to launch, advance, or win cases against mining restrictions in Latin America alone.

2) The Trans-Pacific Partnership could mean an explosion of new cases. While investor-state cases are being used far too often to challenge policies to protect our air, water, and climate, what we've seen so far could be just the tip of the iceberg if the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a new proposed trade agreement, were approved by the U.S. Congress.

The TPP would expand nearly the same exact corporate tribunal system that TransCanada is using more than any past U.S. trade deal, roughly doubling the number of corporations that could follow TransCanada's example and could challenge U.S. climate and environmental safeguards in private tribunals. That includes big polluters like the U.S. subsidiaries of BHP Billiton, one of the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters and one of the U.S.'s largest foreign investors in fracking and offshore drilling.

In fact, the TPP would nearly double the number of foreign fracking corporations that could challenge new U.S. fracking restrictions in unaccountable tribunals, and it would enable oil and gas corporations with nearly one million acres' worth of U.S. offshore drilling leases to use this private tribunal system to try to undermine new offshore drilling restrictions.

3. TransCanada's case has implications beyond the KXL pipeline. TransCanada's NAFTA case will not reverse the Keystone XL decision: Keystone is dead, thanks to years of organizing by a diverse and dogged movement. However, the case could put taxpayers--to the tune of $100 per each individual tax return -- on the hook for the Keystone XL rejection.

Equally troubling, however, is the signal that this case may send to our or other governments considering rejection of a dirty fossil fuel project. And, as we noted in our report, Climate Roadblocks, law firms specializing in these cases are now explicitly advising "foreign investors operating in the energy sector" that they could use these tribunals "as a tool to assist lobbying efforts to prevent wrongful regulatory change."

This is another powerful reason why we can't expand this system of corporate rights through the TPP.

4. You can join the growing fight against corporate trade deals. Opposition to the TPP is steadily growing. Last month, more than 450 environmental, landowner, Indigenous rights, and allied organizations sent a letter to Congress warning that pending trade deals like the TPP threaten efforts to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Passionate activists and diverse partners came together to defeat the Keystone XL pipeline, and we can defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership - with your help. Take action here to ask your members of Congress to commit to vote no to the TPP, and join the growing movement calling for a new model of trade that puts the health and safety of people before the profits of big corporations that are already polluting our air and water.

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A Comprehensive And Fair Solution To The Price Of Medicines
After a long dry spell, the pharmaceutical research industry has brought to market a spate of innovative treatments that can extend life and often have fewer side effects than older treatments. But these medicines are not affordable to most of the people who need them. Recent treatments for hepatitis C and cancer - both widespread conditions globally - can cost from $50,000 annually to well over $150,000.

At the other end of the spectrum, the generic pharmaceutical industry is losing interest in manufacturing older, off-patent medicines because the market price has been slashed to a level that it no longer provides an incentive to produce them. The result is either low-quality medicines, or no medicines at all. Two clear examples of this phenomenon are Benzathine penicillin, the antibiotic of choice for certain bacterial infections, and methotrexate, used to treat arthritis, psoriasis, and certain cancers. These products, still needed and often prescribed, are frequently unavailable in health systems.

These recent trends represent a two-fold setback: on the one hand, new medicines are out of reach of even the wealthiest countries, on the other, older medicines are in great shortage.

A study published in PLOS Medicine at the end of May shows that the prices of two new medicines for treating hepatitis C vary greatly between countries worldwide, raising serious concerns about the viability of reducing the global hepatitis C burden. After adjusting for average 2015 exchange rates and purchasing power, the study reveals that the cost of treating the entire hepatitis C infected population in each of the 30 countries examined would range from 10.5% of total pharmaceutical expenditure in the Netherlands to 190.5% in Poland.

Some governments have found national solutions to high prices, like Australia, where the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme is the single negotiator and purchaser of drugs for the country and makes medicines available at fixed prices.

Others are seeking solutions for specific medicines, like Colombia's recent plan to allow a generic copy of the cancer drug Imatinib. The current price of the branded medicine for one year of treatment per patient is more than double the nation's per-capita income.

Others still have put in place mechanisms to address drug shortages. In the United States, which has been experiencing increasing drug stock-outs, the Food and Drug Regulatory Authority has established a fast-track review process for medicines in short supply to incentivise companies to keep producing them.

But from the point of view of global public health the way forward must be comprehensive and sustainable if we are to eradicate treatable infectious illnesses, effectively address the upsurge of non-communicable and chronic diseases and care for our aging populations.

Amid public outcry, political battles and media articles, no one seems to understand how, exactly, medicines prices are set. For years, pharmaceutical research companies have cited the large investment of time and resources that go into bringing a drug to market. More recently, they argue that their medicines are actually saving money by preventing expensive medical interventions like surgery and hospitalization.

But whatever the argument used, the price setting mechanisms for commodities that are inextricably linked to people's health and survival must be made more transparent so that we can, as a global community, devise effective solutions.

To that end, the World Health Organization is planning to convene governments, patient groups and industry stakeholders to develop a fair pricing model that can affordably deliver the medicines needed by patients while keeping companies interested in developing new and better treatments and producing generic treatments. That model will need to hinge on greater transparency in industry's research and development and marketing approaches; it will also need to understand what the inputs are into price setting, as well as the barriers companies face in bringing new products to market.

In late 2015 we entered the era of sustainable development, with universal health coverage at the center of global health efforts. That means that by 2030, the deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals, all countries must be able to provide full coverage for quality health services to their entire populations. The only way we can reach that objective is to enter a social contract between the public and private spheres so that innovation and generic production can respond effectively to global public health needs - both in the quality and effectiveness of the treatments, their availability, and their affordability.

Marie-Paule Kieny,
Assistant Director-General, Health Systems and Innovation
World Health Organization
kienym@who.int

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We Must Not Accept an Algorithmic Account of Human Life
One remarkable development of twentieth century science is the discovery that both physical structures and the communication of ideas can be assembled on the basis of algorithms that make use of codes. The genetic code helps living organisms assemble the basics of other living organisms and guide their development. Verbal languages provide us with alphabets (with which we can assemble an infinity of words that name an infinity of objects, actions, relationships and events) and with grammatical rules that govern the sequencing of the words so as to construct sentences and stories that narrate events or explain ideas.

Many aspects of the assembly of natural organisms and of communication depend on algorithms and on coding, as do all aspects of computation as well as the enterprises of artificial intelligence and robotics. These solid and interesting facts, however, have given rise to the sweeping notion that natural organisms would be reducible to algorithms or fully explainable by algorithms.

The worlds of artificial intelligence, biology and even neuroscience are inebriated with this notion. The thoughtful historian Yuval Harari echoed it in a recent interview published in the The WorldPost. Asked to pick one idea that would prove most influential in the next 50 years, Harari responded, "It's definitely the algorithm" and added that current biology can be summarized in three words: "Organisms are algorithms." Not only that, biology and computer science are converging because the "basic insight that unites the biological with the electronic is that bodies and brains are also algorithms." The fact that "we can write algorithms artificially" enables the convergence.

Needless to say, I am not blaming Harari for voicing ideas that have gained currency in technology and science circles. I am only interested in the merit of the ideas and because ideas do matter, this is an opportunity to consider if they conform to scientific fact and how they fare in human terms. From my perspective, they are not scientifically sound, and they suggest a problematic account of humanity. Why so?

Saying that living organisms are algorithms is, in the very least, misleading and in strict terms, false.

Saying that living organisms are algorithms is, in the very least, misleading and in strict terms, false. Algorithms are formulas, recipes, enumerations of steps in the construction of a predicted result. As noted, living organisms, including human organisms, use code-dependent algorithms such as the genetic machinery. But while, to a certain extent, living organisms are constructed according to algorithms, they are not algorithms themselves. They are consequences of the engagement of algorithms. The critical issue, however, is that living organisms are collections of tissues, organs and systems within which every component cell is a vulnerable living entity made of proteins, lipids and sugars. They are not lines of code.

The idea that living organisms are algorithms helps perpetuate the false notion that the substrates of organism construction are not relevant. This is because embedded within the label "algorithm" is a notion of context and substrate-independence. Applying the same algorithm to new contexts, using different substrates, is presumed to achieve similar results. But this is simply not so. Substrates count. The substrate of life is organized chemistry, a servant to thermodynamics and the imperative of homeostasis, and to the best of our current knowledge, that substrate is essential to explain who we are. Why so?

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A model of the human brain constructed of wires and ports.

First, because the particular chemical substrate of life is necessary for the phenomena of feeling, and, in humans, reflection and elaboration on the experience of feelings is the basis for much that we hold as humanly distinctive and admirable, including moral and aesthetic judgments as well as the experience and notions of being and transcendence. While there is plenty of evidence that artificial organisms can be designed so as to operate intelligently and even surpass the intelligence of human organisms, there is no evidence to date that such artificial organisms can generate feelings without an actual living substrate (I note that the counterhypothesis, i.e. that certain designs might allow artificial organisms to simulate feelings, is well worth investigating).

In brief, there is no evidence that pure intellectual processes, which lend themselves well to an algorithmic account and which do not appear to be as sensitive to the substrate, can form the basis for what makes us distinctly human. Throw away the chemical substrate and you throw away feelings along with the values that humanistic cultures, from the axial ages forward, have been celebrating in the form of arts, religious beliefs, justice and fair governance. Once we remove suffering and flourishing, for example, there is no natural grounding for the logical conclusion that human beings deserve dignity. Of note, none of this implies that the higher functions of living organisms are not amenable to scientific investigation. They certainly are, provided the investigations take into account the living substrate and the complexity of the processes.

The implication of these distinctions is not trivial as we contemplate a new era of medicine in which the extension of human life will be possible by means of genetic engineering and the creation of human-artificial hybrids.

There is no evidence that pure intellectual processes can form the basis for what makes us distinctly human.

Second, the abundant presence of conscious feeling and creative intelligence in humans guarantees that the execution of the native algorithms can be thwarted. Our freedom to run against the impulses that the good or bad angels of our natures attempt to impose on us, is limited; but the fact remains that we can act against such impulses. The history of human cultures is in good part a narrative of our resistance to native algorithms by means of inventions not predicted by those algorithms. One can argue that all of these departures from native algorithms are in turn open to an algorithmic account. The scope of an algorithm may be expanded to capture a system at an arbitrary level of detail, but by then, what are the advantages of using the term algorithm?

Third, accepting an algorithmic account of humanity is the sort of reductionist position that often leads good souls to dismiss science and technology as demeaning and bemoan the passing of an age in which philosophy, complete with aesthetic sensibility and a religious response to suffering and death, made humans soar above the species on whose biological shoulders they were riding. But of course, denying the value of science as a reaction to problematic accounts of humanity is not acceptable either.

Science and philosophical inquiry can proceed side by side, not always in synchrony but often feeding off each other. Science needs to continue, in spite of the enthusiasts who reduce the sublime power of life to engineering and entrepreneurial successes, and in spite of the nervous Jeremiahs who are afraid that science will not honor the humanist traditions of the past. Both science, as honest knowledge-seeking, and philosophy, as serious debate and love of honest scientific knowledge, will not only endure but prevail.

Earlier on WorldPost:

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From Cannoli in South Philly to Brain Mapping in Geneva
As a scientific conference approaches, I always think back to my first science fair: I stood next to my homemade presentation of graphs and tables glued to a poster board positioned next to hundreds of others made by fellow elementary school students. An overweight Paisan from rural New Jersey, I was more looking forward to my post-presentation reward of cannoli from my favorite bakery in South Philly than I was to standing for hours on end answering questions from the judges.

Conferences these days are pretty similar to the science fairs from decades ago, just on a grander scale with better technology. For example, every year the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) brings together thousands of scientists who work with brain imaging data from around the world to share hot off the press findings that they just published or are preparing to publish. This year, 4,391 presentations will be on hand in Geneva for our annual conference. While there, thousands of us will stand next to posters as I did so many years ago, and a few lucky ones will be given the opportunity to present their work in front of a larger audience.

Most of these presentations are 12-15 minute bite-sized versions of a neuroimaging research project, which could easily be expanded to a 45-60 minute lecture. At the OHBM conferences, we have longer lectures too. Our Program Committee chooses outstanding speakers to summarize their own work in the context of the diverse field of brain mapping. This diversity is reflected in the wide range of topics at the conference spanning spatial scales (from single neurons to entire systems), behaviors (our senses, decision making, aging, consciousness, development, etc.), populations (healthy typical humans, populations with different clinical or psychiatric disorders, etc.) and of course, applications (computational models, artificial intelligence, etc).

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Brain mappers looking at posters this afternoon during this year's Organization for Human Brain Mapping meeting in Geneva.

For me, I'm a huge fan of the fusiform gyrus - so much so that at 33, I've already spent a third of my life staring and measuring this spindle-shaped brain structure. It's probably unsurprising then that I'm looking forward to learning about new ways to measure and quantify the fusiform in the living human brain at this year's meeting. The fusiform is interesting because it's involved in human-specific aspects of cognition such as reading and functional and structural abnormalities of the fusiform have been linked to disorders like autism.

The fusiform aside, conferences aren't all about being bombarded with data. Instead, they are also about re-connecting with people from the field who you know and setting foundations for new collaborations over a coffee or a pint or even a hike. Discussions of future collaborations also happen between organizations. For example, as Geneva is the home base for the World Health Organization (WHO), both organizations took the opportunity to set up a jointly held symposium between OHBM and WHO. Representatives from the major international brain initiatives will speak to raise awareness about current research projects that impact the staggering burden of brain disorders, and what we all might be able to do to reduce these burdens in the future. After all, understanding how the brain works is a team effort - no one can do it alone.

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This is a cortical surface reconstruction of a right hemisphere averaged across 39 adults. This image is from FreeSurfer, which is an open source software package that you can download here. You are looking at the underside of the brain, which is rotated so the back is in the left of the image and the front in the right of the image. The fusiform gyrus (FG) is outlined in red. Fusiform is latin for spindle-shaped. Emil Huschke labeled this structure in 1854 because it is wider in the middle and tapers off at the ends like a spindle.

We also can't expect every single researcher at the meeting to blog about their presentations. And that's where Kat, Tzipi, Brendan, Emma, and I come in. As members of the OHBM Communications Committee, our boots (or for me, flip flops) are on the ground as we listen to the poster presentations. Our butts are in the chairs as we listen to the lectures. All the while, our fingers - the same ones that write the code to analyze our own data and that write our own empirical papers - will be typing away to come back and report to you what happened at the OHBM conference and at the meetings between OHBM and WHO.

And it's not just the five of us. There's a whole team of us. For example, we have already begun to post interviews with a subset of this year's speakers on our blog with more to come. Additionally, content from this year's meeting will soon be uploaded to our main site, which already contains lectures and courses from past meetings.

We are energized by the science and the thrill of discovery, and we love sharing these discoveries with all of you. And that's the main reason why we write and blog - to provide you with foundational information and up-to-date findings about the brain at the click of a button. We hope our posts give you insight into how your brain works and how to become informed consumers of neuroimaging news.

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The Freakonomics Of Gun Control

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At 11 AM on the morning of June 15, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut began a filibuster on the Senate floor in the wake of the Orlando mass shooting that claimed 49 lives. The objective of Senator Murphy's marathon speech was to secure Senate votes on two gun control measures: a ban on gun sales to suspected terrorists -- the so-called "No fly, no buy" measure, as well as an expansion of background checks to include gun shows and Internet sales.

By the time Senator Murphy ended his filibuster 15 hours later, an additional 12 Americans had been shot to death.

There was no national media coverage of those 12 victims, so the circumstances of their deaths are not widely known. Were they:

A: Murdered by Islamic jihadists
B: Shot by assault rifles
C: Killed in mass shootings
D: None of the above

The correct answer is "D: None of the above."

Though mass shootings like Orlando are shocking and grab headlines, the reality is that a very small percentage of American victims of gun violence die in mass shootings. Though the 49 who died in Orlando have the country's full attention, it is the actually 12 who died during Senator Murphy's 15-hour filibuster that hold the skeleton key to gun violence in America.

Depending on their political stripes, most Americans' short list of solutions to gun violence includes either: a) a ban on assault weapons, b) expanded background checks, or c) an end to the radical Islamic threat.

None of these solutions speak to directly to the causes that enabled those 12 people to die.

If a magic wand could instantly rid the U.S. of all assault rifles, Islamic terrorists and mass shootings, it would scarcely move the needle on the gauge of American gun homicides -- a trifling 7 percent of the more than 11,000 people who are shot to death every year in this country:

The majority of American gun homicide victims share the following in common:

• They are killed by handguns, not assault rifles
• They are killed by fellow Americans
• Their killers were not the gun owners of record

It is this last item that is the key to solving gun violence in America.

All guns used to kill people in the U.S. were purchased legally at some time, though few of those guns are in the possession of their original owners at the time they kill. The problem that dwarfs the issues of assault rifles and terrorists is that all firearms may be transferred in America without detection or accountability.

Though the sale of an automobile in America requires an official transfer of title, the sale of a firearm does not. Many, if not most, guns used to kill people in America are acquired through straw purchases -- purchases made on behalf of another person.

Herein lies the elegant solution to gun violence in America: simply hold the owner of record accountable for crimes committed with their guns -- that's it.

If gun owners are forced to assume responsibility for their guns, they will be far less likely to sell their guns without a formal title transfer. They will be more likely to secure their guns in a gun safe. And they may be less eager to carry their guns when they dine out at their local Pizza Hut.

Not surprisingly, the NRA is hostile to the concept of a national gun registry -- this despite the fact it in no way infringes on 2nd Amendment rights. Though the Constitution may allow you to own a gun, it doesn't say anything about prohibiting the government from knowing that you own a gun. If this seems like a scary notion to those who await the federal invasion of Texas scheduled for any day now, well, perhaps paranoia should count as one of the mental defects that disqualifies people from owning firearms.

Making gun owners accountable for their guns instantly freezes the supply of fresh arms into criminal hands. For the 300 million-plus guns already in circulation, buy back programs, such as those implemented in Australia, would siphon many of these off the streets, reducing supply and driving up the price of illegal guns.

The pushback excuses on a gun registry include: "what if my gun is stolen?" My recommendation is this: if you can demonstrate that thieves got your gun by blowing the hinges off your steel gun safe that was bolted to the foundation of your house, then you should get a pass. However, if your gun was taken out of a glove compartment or a glass display case, well, you're screwed. If that seems unfair, perhaps you can complain to the loved ones of the victim that was killed with your gun.

This simple solution speaks directly to the fundamental problem of guns in America: it is the victims, not the gun owners, that bear the full responsibility for gun violence -- this despite the fact that victims don't have a say regarding the choices gun owners make with their guns that result in innocent people becoming victims. Victims don't ask gun owners to sell their guns to killers and they certainly don't ask to die. Though some believe the rights conferred by the Constitution regarding gun ownership are boundless, this is false. The notion that the deaths of innocent Americans are simply an unfortunate byproduct of the unlimited privilege afforded to gun owners to be reckless and irresponsible with their guns is as far outside the Constitution as it is obscene.

In the time it took me to write this article, seven more Americans were shot to death.

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Giving Ugly Fruits And Vegetables A Chance Will Make Us Better Citizens
Ugliness has always been linked to nastiness and perversion. We've all seen the typecasts of the handsome good guy and the unattractive bad guy in Hollywood movies over the years. (Somehow, this formula is not as straightforward when it comes to the representation of female characters -- evil or malicious women can also have seductive attributes.)

Ugly fruits and vegetables are morally discriminated against. That is, they are treated with prejudice because of their unattractive appearance. As a result, 1.3 billion tons of food are tossed in the trash around the world every year.

These ugly fruits and vegetables can't compare with the dominant canon of fruits and vegetables. The latter look beautiful, and with their appearance comes an expectation for succulent tastes. As a result, millions of food items are pushed aside and thrown in dumps because they do not meet the aesthetic criteria of shape and color. Such aesthetic requirements are dictated by consumers and by retailer prerequisites. It is therefore more profitable to have identical merchandise that is easier to pack and store. For this reason, large-scale harvesters automatically get rid of vegetables and fruits that fall from grace.

There's an assumption that beauty and quality are connected by an unbreakable bond.

In my view, the criteria for what is ugly or beautiful is controversial. Some vegetables deviate from the required criteria -- these may include: An attractive carrot with two heads, a tomato with a horn, a twisted pepper, a gigantic and crooked cucumber or zucchini, sunburned Swiss chard or some spinach with tips weakened and rendered pale by the harsh sunlight.

"ugly

But what is or is not acceptable is a cultural matter, and therefore can be changed. The differences we see in shape and color within one plant group (among apples, for example) makes us believe that ugly and beautiful fruits and vegetables will taste differently; the ugly ones will not be as tasty and may even be harmful for your stomach and health. There's an assumption that beauty and quality are connected by an unbreakable bond. Ugly fruits and vegetables are surrounded by negative stereotypes that breed fear and suspicion.

More and more people are becoming aware of this absurd discrimination against ugly vegetables, and the associated waste of tons of produce. For example, a well-known European supermarket chain has taken on the challenge of giving authentic rights to unattractive fruits and vegetables by offering them at more attractive prices. They are giving vegetables the right to be consumed, independently of their color or shape, and to be enjoyed without prejudice or discrimination. This initiative is undoubtedly inspired by the efforts of the European Union (2014 was the European year against food waste).

In my opinion, awareness, the feeling of self-efficiency, and responsibility are necessary ingredients for action and therefore for citizens' political participation.

There is a similar project run by the Portuguese company Fruta Horrible (Horrible Fruit), which uses ugly foods to help families who cannot pay full prices at the supermarkets.

It's obvious that the initiative by the supermarket chain mentioned above is based on commercial interests; interests that, without a doubt, we consider as legitimate. We look at this project from a pragmatic point of view: If it expands, if many other chains join this commercial adventure, many people around the world would have the opportunity to eat fruits and vegetables on a daily basis, and not only every once in a while.

Movements emerging in major cities, such as the ugly food movement, are very inspiring. This countercultural gesture subverts the relationship between the attractiveness of the food and its ability to nourish. If this movement grows, it would have obvious consequences for food, but it would also have a significant impact on the beliefs and attitudes of many human beings.

In my opinion, awareness, the feeling of self-efficiency, and responsibility are necessary ingredients for action and therefore for citizens' political participation.

Maybe our country would like to participate and launch campaigns so that consumers, distributors and sellers modify their beliefs and give ugliness a chance.

This post first appeared on HuffPost Spain. It has been translated into English and edited for clarity.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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New NASA Curiosity Discoveries --"Reveal an Ancient Earthlike Mars"

The discovery of manganese oxides in Martian rocks might tell us that the Red Planet was once more Earth-like than previously believed. A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters reveals that NASA's Curiosity rover observed high levels of manganese oxides in Martian rocks, which could indicate that higher levels of atmospheric oxygen once existed on our neighboring planet. This hint of more oxygen in Mars' early atmosphere adds to other Curiosity findings--such as evidence of ancient lakes--revealing how Earth-like our neighboring planet once was.

"The only ways on Earth that we know how to make these manganese materials involve atmospheric oxygen or microbes," said Nina Lanza, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author on the study published in the American Geophysical Union's journal. "Now we're seeing manganese-oxides on Mars and wondering how the heck these could have formed."

Lanza uses the Los Alamos-developed ChemCam instrument that sits atop Curiosity to "zap" rocks on Mars and analyze their chemical make-up. This work stems from Los Alamos National Laboratory's experience building and operating more than 500 spacecraft instruments for national defense, giving the Laboratory the expertise needed to develop discovery-driven instruments like ChemCam. In less than four years since landing on Mars, ChemCam has analyzed roughly 1,500 rock and soil samples.

Microbes seem a far-fetched explanation for the manganese oxides at this point, said Lanza, but the idea that the Martian atmosphere contained more oxygen in the past than it does now seems possible. "These high-manganese materials can't form without lots of liquid water and strongly oxidizing conditions," said Lanza "Here on Earth, we had lots of water but no widespread deposits of manganese oxides until after the oxygen levels in our atmosphere rose due to photosynthesizing microbes."

In the Earth's geological record, the appearance of high concentrations of manganese is an important marker of a major shift in our atmosphere's composition, from relatively low oxygen abundances to the oxygen-rich atmosphere we see today. The presence of the same types of materials on Mars suggests that something similar happened there. If that's the case, how was that oxygen-rich environment formed?

"One potential way that oxygen could have gotten into the Martian atmosphere is from the breakdown of water when Mars was losing its magnetic field," said Lanza. "It's thought that at this time in Mars' history, water was much more abundant."

Yet without a protective magnetic field to shield the surface from ionizing radiation, that radiation started splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Because of Mars' relatively low gravity, it wasn't able to hold onto the very light hydrogen atoms, but the heavier oxygen atoms remained behind. Much of this oxygen went into the rocks, leading to the rusty red dust that covers the surface today. While Mars' famous red iron oxides require only a mildly oxidizing environment to form, manganese oxides require a strongly oxidizing environment. These results suggest that past conditions were far more oxidizing (oxygen-rich) than previously thought.

"It's hard to confirm whether this scenario for Martian atmospheric oxygen actually occurred," Lanza added. "But it's important to note that this idea represents a departure in our understanding for how planetary atmospheres might become oxygenated." So far, abundant atmospheric oxygen has been treated as a so-called biosignature, or a sign of existing life.

The next step in this work is for scientists to better understand the signatures of non-biogenic versus biogenic manganese, which is directly produced by microbes. If it's possible to distinguish between manganese oxides produced by life and those produced in a non-biological setting, that knowledge can be directly applied to Martian manganese observations to better understand their origin.

The high-manganese materials were found in mineral-filled cracks in sandstones in the Kimberley region of Gale crater, which the Curiosity rover has been exploring for the last four years. But that's not the only place on Mars that abundant manganese has been found. The Opportunity rover, which has been exploring Mars since 2004, also recently discovered high-manganese deposits in its landing site thousands of miles from Curiosity, which supports the idea that the conditions needed to form these materials were present well beyond Gale crater. The ,image at the top of the page is an artist's concept of how the "lake" at Gale Crater on Mars may have looked millions of years ago. (credit Kevin Gill).

The Daily Galaxy via Los Alamos National Laboratory

Zap! NASA's Curiosity Lasers Mars' Rock to Assess Ancient Habitable Potential

"Mars' Gale Crater on Earth" --The Extreme Life of Chile's Atacama Desert

NASA's Mars Science Lab Yielding History of Gale Crater --Search for Signs of Ancient Life Continues

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Juno Spacecraft Nearing Jupiter Orbit on July 4th --"We'll Have Polar Auroras & Great Red Spot in Our Windshield!"

Over the past two weeks, several milestones occurred that were key to a successful 35-minute burn of its rocket motor, which will place the robotic explorer into a polar orbit around the gas giant. "We have over five years of spaceflight experience and only 10 days to Jupiter orbit insertion," said Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "It is a great feeling to put all the interplanetary space in the rearview mirror and have the biggest planet in the solar system in our windshield."

On June 11, Juno began transmitting to and receiving data from Earth around the clock. This constant contact will keep the mission team informed on any developments with their spacecraft within tens of minutes of it occurring. On June 20, the protective cover that shields Juno's main engine from micrometeorites and interstellar dust was opened, and the software program that will command the spacecraft through the all-important rocket burn was uplinked.

One of the important near-term events remaining on Juno's pre-burn itinerary is the pressurization of its propulsion system on June 28. The following day, all instrumentation not geared toward the successful insertion of Juno into orbit around Jupiter on July 4 will be turned off.

"If it doesn't help us get into orbit, it is shut down," said Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "That is how critical this rocket burn is. And while we will not be getting images as we make our final approach to the planet, we have some interesting pictures of what Jupiter and its moons look like from five-plus million miles away."

The mission optical camera, JunoCam, imaged Jupiter on June 21, 2016, at a distance of 6.8 million miles (10.9 million kilometers) from the gas giant. In the image, just to the right of center is Jupiter, with its distinctive swirling bands of orange, brown and white. To the left of Jupiter (from right to left) are the planet's four largest moons -- Europa, Io, Callisto and Ganymede. Juno is approaching over Jupiter's north pole, affording the spacecraft a unique perspective on the Jovian system. Previous missions that imaged Jupiter on approach saw the system from much lower latitudes, closer to the planet's equator.

JunoCam is an outreach instrument -- its inclusion in this mission of exploration was to allow the public to come along for the ride with Juno. JunoCam's optics were designed to acquire high-resolution views of Jupiter's poles while the spacecraft is flying much closer to the planet. Juno will be getting closer to the cloud tops of the planet than any mission before it, and the image resolution of the massive gas giant will be the best ever taken by a spacecraft.

All of Juno's instruments, including JunoCam, are scheduled to be turned back on approximately two days after achieving orbit. JunoCam images are expected to be returned from the spacecraft for processing and release to the public starting in late August or early September.

"This image is the start of something great," said Bolton. "In the future we will see Jupiter's polar auroras from a new perspective. We will see details in rolling bands of orange and white clouds like never before, and even the Great Red Spot.

Stunning new images and the highest-resolution maps to date of Jupiter at thermal infrared wavelengths shown above give a glowing view of Juno's target, a week ahead of the NASA mission's arrival at the giant planet. The maps reveal the present-day temperatures, composition and cloud coverage within Jupiter's dynamic atmosphere, and show how giant storms, vortices and wave patterns shape the appearance of the giant planet. The observations will be presented on Monday 27 June at the National Astronomy Meeting in Nottingham by

The high-resolution maps and images were created from observations with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, using a newly-upgraded thermal imager called VISIR. The observations were taken between February and June 2016 to characterise Jupiter's atmosphere ahead of Juno's arrival.

"We used a technique called 'lucky imaging', whereby individual sharp frames are extracted from short movies of Jupiter to 'freeze' the turbulent motions of our own atmosphere, to create a stunning new image of Jupiter's cloud layers," explained Leigh Fletcher of the University of Leicester. "At this wavelength, Jupiter's clouds appear in silhouette against the deep internal glows of the planet. Images of this quality will provide the global context for Juno's close-up views of the planet at the same wavelength."

Fletcher and his team have also used the TEXES spectrograph on NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) in Hawaii regularly to map Jupiter's changing appearance. The team made observations at many different wavelengths, optimised for different features and cloud layers in Jupiter's atmosphere, to create the first global spectral maps of Jupiter taken from Earth.

"These maps will help set the scene for what Juno will witness in the coming months. We have seen new weather phenomena that have been active on Jupiter throughout 2016.

These include a widening of one of the brown belts just north of the equator, which has spawned wave patterns throughout the northern hemisphere, both in the cloud layers and high above in the planet's stratosphere," said Dr Fletcher from the University of Leicester's Department of Physics and Astronomy. "Observations at different wavelengths across the infrared spectrum allow us to piece together a three dimensional picture of how energy and material are transported upwards through the atmosphere."

Both sets of observations were made as part of a campaign using several telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, as well as contributions from amateur astronomers around the world, to understand Jupiter's climate ahead of Juno's arrival. The ground-based campaign in support of Juno is led by Dr Glenn Orton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Once in orbit around Jupiter, Juno will skim just 5000 km above Jupiter's clouds once a fortnight - too close to provide global coverage in a single image. The Earth-based observations supplement the suite of advanced instrumentation on the Juno spacecraft, filling in the gaps in Juno's spectral coverage and providing the wider global and temporal context to Juno's close-in observations.

"The combined efforts of an international team of amateur and professional astronomers have provided us with an incredibly rich dataset over the past eight months," said Dr Orton. "Together with the new results from Juno, this dataset will allow researchers to characterise Jupiter's global thermal structure, cloud cover and distribution of gaseous species. We can then hope to answer questions like what drives Jupiter's atmospheric changes, and how the weather we see is connected to processes hidden deep within the planet."

The Daily Galaxy via NASA and ESO

Image of the Day: Dusty Cloud at Milky Way Core Survives Supermassive Black Hole Encounter

The Anthropocene Epoch --The Impact of Earth's Growing 'Technosphere'

Image of the Day --Star Clusters Orbiting a Ghostly Galaxy

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Hacking the Cosmos --"Gravitational-Wave Clues to First Black Holes After Big Bang"

Scientists led by Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology ran the huge cosmological simulations that can be used to predict the rate at which gravitational waves caused by collisions between the monster black holes might be detected. The amplitude and frequency of these waves could reveal the initial mass of the seeds from which the first black holes grew since they were formed 13 billion years ago and provide further clues about what caused them and where they formed, the researchers said.

The research is being presented today (Monday, June 27, 2016) at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Nottingham, UK. It was funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, the European Research Council and the Belgian Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme.

The study combined simulations from the EAGLE project - which aims to create a realistic simulation of the known Universe inside a computer - with a model to calculate gravitational wave signals.

Two detections of gravitational waves caused by collisions between supermassive black holes should be possible each year using space-based instruments such as the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA) detector (image below) that is due to launch in 2034, the researchers said.

In February the international LIGO and Virgo collaborations announced that they had detected gravitational waves for the first time using ground-based instruments and in June reported a second detection.

As eLISA will be in space - and will be at least 250,000 times larger than detectors on Earth - it should be able to detect the much lower frequency gravitational waves caused by collisions between supermassive black holes that are up to a million times the mass of our sun.

Current theories suggest that the seeds of these black holes were the result of either the growth and collapse of the first generation of stars in the Universe; collisions between stars in dense stellar clusters; or the direct collapse of extremely massive stars in the early Universe.

As each of these theories predicts different initial masses for the seeds of supermassive black hole seeds, the collisions would produce different gravitational wave signals.

This means that the potential detections by eLISA could help pinpoint the mechanism that helped create supermassive black holes and when in the history of the Universe they formed.

Lead author Jaime Salcido, PhD student in Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology, said: "Understanding more about gravitational waves means that we can study the Universe in an entirely different way. These waves are caused by massive collisions between objects with a mass far greater than our sun. By combining the detection of gravitational waves with simulations we could ultimately work out when and how the first seeds of supermassive black holes formed."

Co- author Professor Richard Bower, of Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology, added: "Black holes are fundamental to galaxy formation and are thought to sit at the centre of most galaxies, including our very own Milky Way.
Discovering how they came to be where they are is one of the unsolved problems of cosmology and astronomy. Our research has shown how space based detectors will provide new insights into the nature of supermassive black holes."

Gravitational waves were first predicted 100 years ago by Albert Einstein as part of his Theory of General Relativity.The waves are concentric ripples caused by violent events in the Universe that squeeze and stretch the fabric of space time but most are so weak they cannot be detected.

LIGO detected gravitational waves using ground-based instruments, called interferometers, that use laser beams to pick up subtle disturbances caused by the waves. eLISA will work in a similar way, detecting the small changes in distances between three satellites that will orbit the sun in a triangular pattern connected by beams from lasers in each satellite.

In June it was reported that the LISA Pathfinder, the forerunner to eLISA, had successfully demonstrated the technology that opens the door to the development of a large space observatory capable of detecting gravitational waves in space.

The image at the top of the page, shows gas and stars in a slice of the EAGLE simulations at the present day. The intensity shows the gas density, while the color encodes the gas temperature. Researchers used the EAGLE simulations to predict the rate at which gravitational waves caused by collisions between supermassive black holes might be detected.

The Daily Galaxy via Durham University

Image credit: The EAGLE project/Stuart McAlpine

Image of the Day: Dusty Cloud at Milky Way Core Survives Supermassive Black Hole Encounter

Five 'Buried' Supermassive Black Holes Detected --"Huge Number Exist Throughout Universe"

Peering Back 13-Billion Years to Glimpse Quasars Powered by Supermassive Black Holes

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New facets of Martin Puryear's inspiration explored in ‘Multiple Dimensions' at American Art

Martin Puryear, “Drawing for Untitled,” 2009, about 2009, compressed charcoal on paper, Courtesy of the artist. © Martin Puryear, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

From the repetition of vaguely familiar human shapes to his copious use of warm-colored woods and matte metals, Martin Puryear's sculptures are known for their high attention to craft and allusions to a common human experience.

Yet rarely has this Washington, D.C. native's art been displayed as a collection and never has it been shown together with the paper-based prints and sketches he still produces as part of his creative process.

Martin Puryear, “Maquette for Bearing Witness,” 1994, pine, Courtesy of the artist. © Martin Puryear, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. (Photography by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics)

A new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) changes that dynamic, covering 50 years of the artist's labors for the first time in a way that gives a glimpse into his artistic approach and influences.

The Smithsonian is the final venue of “Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions,” an exhibition that opened first at its organizing museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and then the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.

For SAAM, Karen Lemmey, the museum's curator of sculpture, chose to focus on the importance of Puryear's public art. Several of Puryear's most recent works happen to be public sculptures—“Big Bling” in New York's Madison Square Park, “Memorial to Slavery” commissioned by Brown University, and a monument for the Deichman Library in Oslo. All three, along with his older monument “Bearing Witness” for Federal Triangle, are referenced in the exhibition at SAAM.

Puryear's maquettes, which are small-scale models of a full-sized work, and drawings for “these monumental outdoor sculptures are never just preparatory models. Each one stands alone as a finished artwork while adding to our understanding of his creative process,” Lemmey says. “Seeing these models and drawings together in our exhibition gives us an opportunity to recognize continuities in commissions he completed at different times for sites around the world. His work often invites thought and discourse on important civic concerns, and what better place to do this than through public sculpture?”

Martin Puryear, “Maquette for Big Bling,” 2014, birch, plywood, maple, and 22k gold leaf, Courtesy of the artist. © Martin Puryear, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. (Photograph by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics)

Puryear may be best known in his hometown of Washington, D.C. for “Bearing Witness,” a 40-foot-tall sculpture made of panels of hammered bronze standing guard outside the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. The exhibition features maquettes and drawings for several of his major outdoor public sculptures, including “Bearing Witness,” and the artist's new 40-foot-tall “Big Bling,” which debuted May 16 in Madison Square Park in New York City. That colossal work features a large, gold-leaf shackle and is on display throughout 2016.

Another large-scale work featured in the exhibition is “Vessel,” created from curving ship-sized timbers.

Puryear earned his undergraduate degree in fine arts at Catholic University in 1963, then joined the Peace Corps as a volunteer in Sierra Leone from 1964 to 1966. Without a camera in Sierra Leone, Puryear instead produced faithful drawings of villages and their inhabitants, which he sent along with letters home to family.

“For someone who is known for his public monuments, this exhibition is a rare opportunity to see some early drawings from the artist's personal collection made while he was in Sierra Leone, works he created for himself or for his family,” Lemmey says.

After the Peace Corps, Puryear began his training at the Swedish Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm. His works shift to become less of a mirror, and more of a lens through which he projects experiences in a way that evokes his memories and encounters.

“These prints show Puryear's origins before he became a sculptor,” says Joann Moser, who helped bring the exhibition to SAAM before she retired as the museum's senior curator of graphic arts and deputy chief curator. Despite a fire in 1977 that damaged or destroyed many of his early works, the pieces that survive show how some of Puryear's ideas got started.

“Bower,” a bent-wood object from SAAM's collection on display only in Washington, echoes the shape of a Phrygian cap, a garment that dates from the fourth century B.C. that became popularized as a symbol of liberty during the French and American revolutions and at times was also a symbol adopted by abolitionists. While “Bower” was made in 1980, Puryear revisited the shape again nearly 20 years later, from 2001 to 2003, on three untitled prints, and again in 2012.

“This exhibition provides an exciting look at the persistence and evolution of ideas in Puryear's work going back to the early 1960s,” Lemmey says. “I am particularly delighted to see ‘Bower,' one of Puryear's acknowledged masterpieces from the museum's collection, situated with works on paper from other collections so we can see how Puryear returned to latticework forms and ideas about shelter across the decades.”

Another form repeated often throughout Puryear's art is a kidney-shaped ellipse, sometimes looking more like a human head and neck, sometimes more like a teardrop. “Bearing Witness” and “Vessel” both recall this shape, as does “Big Bling” and a smaller, all-iron work, “Shackled,” where the shape appears as a negative space.

Martin Puryear, “Vessel,” 19972002, eastern white pine, mesh, and tar, Courtesy of the artist. © Martin Puryear, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Through the familiarity of the forms and materials he uses, Puryear aims to open up discourse about the meaning of the shapes he uses without dictating any concrete meaning.

“I tend not to tell people what they're looking at when they're in the presence of my work,” Puryear said at the dedication of his Madison Square Park piece. “I trust people's eyes. I trust their imagination. I trust my work to declare itself to the world.”

“Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions” is on view through Sept. 5, 2016.

The post New facets of Martin Puryear's inspiration explored in ‘Multiple Dimensions' at American Art appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

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Sustainable Fisheries: OneHealth of Future Food

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As a benefit to human and environmental health, sustainable and not linear fisheries must be employed to feed a shrinking world. We must utilize economic stimulus, more regulation in developing world fisheries, and a higher barrier to entry for susceptible categories of farm raised fish to preserve sea protein as a cornerstone of survival. The window to act lies squarely in our laps despite the recourse, potentially catastrophic, being primed for adoption by our kids.

2.9 Billion people around the Globe are reliant on seafood as a main source of nourishment. Now, fished at unmitigated scale - the same practices used in harvesting this crop from once bountiful Oceans are depleting stocks and biodiversity at an alarming rate. The backlash to this will have drastic impact on us in the United States whether you like it or not! This production model of food is not much different than the hunter-and-gather approach employed by our a primal ancestors. Not many give thought as they wolf down their sashimi that fishing the Oceans has seen limited large scale systems innovation, and is based the falsehood that Oceans are an inexhaustible resource. Modern fishing technologies focus on easier and faster methods to take, but not replenish a required ecosystem balance that depleting practices have greatly disrupted.

VIDEO: Sustainable Fisheries: Part 1

Overexploitation is a constant for in global fisheries for how long? In 2012, 80 million tons of sea protein was landed, and but a fraction was replenished through our assistance. The solution is pretty straightforward - despite being a monumental task. We must partake in being part of natural order by giving back to the sea simply so it can continue to sustain our species, and more broadly, to maintain a stable environment. Long horizon economics present a pretty clear value proposition. And, similarly to addressing climate change and sea level rise (directly correlated initiatives to sustainable fisheries), if we do not heed the warnings we're destined catastrophic backlash of epic proportion. But, there's opportunity to better connect immediate impact to economic stimulus through focus on a Blue economy streamlined in the developed world. The only future for future fisheries is a more sustainable one, and that must now be instigated by us; it's mankind's duty and opportunity.

In 2010, a significant threshold was crossed when more than 50% of total fish consumed was farm raised. With total volumes doubling since the mid-90s - the virtue of this is a bit of a falsehood often used to justify broader unsustainable methods in all sea protein production. A large portion of farm-raised come from pillaging natural fish stocks of young and/or roe without replenishment with diverse ecological footprint. What's proving worse, the vast majority of feedstuff provided to these farm raised fish, especially those higher on the food chain, come from detrimental fishing practice with no mind of sustainable practice in feeding carnivore, omnivore or herbivore alike. Furthermore, the vast majority of fisheries and hatcheries farm raising sea proteins employ deplorable and unhealthy living conditions for the fish they raise.

VIDEO: Sustainable Fisheries: Part 2

Equivalent to terrestrial animal CAFO (feedlot environments) conditions, fish live in disease infested waters teeming fecal matter and no biomimetic method of cleaning. Instead of evolving the system to make living conditions better and healthier for the animals - fisheries and material providers have instead focused on using antibiotics or genetic engineering to build resistance to current unhealthy farm environments. Similar to the concept of OneHealth discussed in the Resilient Agriculture section, even if the inhumane treatment of fish is not top on your priority list - since we are what we eat - you should care about the integrity of the stock, and equally how that protein is raised as it has immediate impact on your wellbeing.

Embracing our mounting waste-streams and that of the imprint on planetary boundaries through changing shortcut practices putting us in harm's way in the first place, we must adopt an evolution in fishery practice as a necessity. If not, markets reaching globally will lay witness to the impact of diminishing ecological capacity and environmental instability on polluted or sterilized waters. With this as an inevitable reality to be incurred within the next few decades, and probably expedited if generations to come continue with our business-as-usual approach, it's nearly impossible to call the current broadly used sea-caught and farm raised models a sound economic play.

Hailing from the Northeast United States, I live in a bellwether of global sustainable fisheries. But even there, where only 10% of seafood consumed in the region comes from local waters, there's immediate opportunity to decommoditize sea proteins coming from the thriving waters of the North Atlantic. Ripe and ready for new business and technology, focus on a better and future Blue Economy that services the 35mm populous of New England and New York already increasingly engaged in the provenance of the food they consume is a pragmatic model to gain more attention to the importance of sustainable fisheries. Methods of sharing best practices and developing greater mindshare through economic development affords insight in dealing with the inevitability on a shared horizon. Effectively, how we sustain ourselves on a shrinking planet needs numerous perspectives, but creative economic drivers now will have broad impact on future sustainable seafood production continuing to feed half the world's population.

www.AaronNiederhelman.com

Photo credits: Melissa DiPalma and Byron Niederhelman

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Brexit Of Champions: If You Don't Set The Menu, You're On The Menu
Our poor British comrades, caught between nostalgia and exasperation, democracy and inequity (sound familiar?). The Brexit vote shows why politicians who call for these referendums try to avoid actually holding them: people tend to see it as a chance to punish the otherwise unaccountable political class. The new global normal of mass migrations, debt, low wages, stagnant economies and the steady hemorrhaging of the middle class might be easier for voters to bear if the pain was not accompanied by the greatest concentration of wealth in the history of capitalism.

The masses are pissed off.

Ever since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher teamed up to destroy our public sphere, liberals and conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have doggedly obeyed the neoliberal measures called for by the massive monopolies controlling the world's "free trade." This has earned politicians the distrust and disgust of most of the citizenry, pretty much everywhere. Far right parties are on the rise, offering up an intoxicating cocktail of bigotry and nationalism to blunt the hangover from a three decade binge on globalization. The day of the Brexit, Donald Trump channeled Europe's far-right discourse:

People want to take their country back. They want to have independence, in a sense. You see it with Europe, all over Europe. You're going to have more... many other cases where they want to take their borders back, they want to take their monetary back, they want to take a lot of things back. They want to be able to have a country again. So I think you're going to have this happen more and more... I think it's happening in the United States.

Trump supporters tend to see career politicians and big government as keeping America from being "great again." Those supporting Bernie Sanders see the entire plutocracy as the problem. Clinton's supporters are mostly scared of Trump.

What does all this men for the food insecurity now affecting 1 in 7 people?

Because the root cause of hunger and food insecurity is poverty it means that the candidate that has the most coherent anti-poverty platform will do the most to end hunger in the richest, most productive country in the world. Of course, neither Trump, Bernie nor Hillary is campaigning on a pro-poverty platform. But how will their policies (or lack of them) affect the poor?

For a Trump presidency, the indicator is Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. Despite his bluster, it is very unlikely that Donald Trump has the congressional connections or political acumen to do anything structurally original once he's in the White House. Even if Trump actually does convince the Mexican government to pay for a Great Wall, the policy default will be Ryan, whose regressive views on welfare, healthcare and the poor are well known. Hillary has, well, a spotty record on these issues. While she is backing away now, her support for free trade agreements has done little to support local economies. It is unlikely she will advance a pro-poverty agenda if it means compromising her Wall Street connections. Bernie Sanders is clearly pro-poor and anti-rich. However, none of the candidates has specifically addressed the issue of hunger or food.

There is a campaign to address the plight of the US's food insecure called Plate of the Union that petitions the next president to ensure healthy food access to all people living in the US. While the petition does not indicate what specific food policies the president should pursue--nor does it indicate which policies are pro-poor--it is an important initiative because it calls for citizens to engage politically in the food system. Why is this important?

Because despite its stridence, the populism of the far right is essentially against politics--thus leaving our society open to even more manipulation by the plutocracy. If, we want to end hunger, political engagement is essential. This is true for a Trump presidency (that will greatly increase the power of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan), or a Clinton presidency (that will require enormous pressure to keep her compass firmly on the poor rather than on Wall Street). Because Sanders is basically out of the running, his value is in politicizing the issues--especially poverty and food.

Unless we "set the menu" by engaging politically to change our food system, we will find ourselves on the menu of either the regressive politics of the far right or the neoliberal politics of the established Democratic party. Let the Brexit be warning.

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Juno, Jupiter And The Battery Dude
** HOO-RAY! JUNO ARRIVING AT JUPITER ON JULY 4th !!! **

What's all the jubilation about? Well, for one of the last people who touched the little spaceship's battery before it left the earth in 2011, it's a time for joyous celebration. That would be Mike Surline, a guy who knows batteries. He makes, breaks and tests them. Batteries are the power that makes rocket science go. Without the best-tested batteries, space vehicles would not be able to sustain long missions, like Juno's.

"2016-06-26-1466902663-6617656-JunoJupiter.jpg"

Arthur C. Clarke (author of 2001: A Space Odyssey) said: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Well, what is a battery? People may not consider the skills and time it takes to create one, or they may think of a battery as a vague, magic box. If the latter, Clarke might have likened Mike to a magician.

He performs his magic in a giant laboratory of the highest hi-tech nature. It's got all the bells & whistles and electronic gadgets that any battery guy or gal could wish for, including environmental test chambers, cabling, coolers, and crane operations. For Mike, it's like Christmas every day, opening up his boxes of tinker-toy tricks.

On Independence Day while Americans are enjoying barbecues and fireworks, Juno - the spacecraft designed by NASA and Lockheed Martin Corporation - will insert itself into polar orbit to study the composition, gravity and magnetic field of the solar system's largest planet. Juno's purpose is to uncover secrets about Jupiter's formation, including whether it has a rocky core, the amount of water present in the atmosphere, how its mass is distributed, and its ferocious winds. Mike and his band of battery experts will be looking forward to celebrating Juno as another success story in their team's long list.

A multi-million dollar spacecraft without battery power is simply several hundred pounds of junk. Today's interplanetary spacecraft require between roughly 300 watts and 2.5 kW of electrical power to supply all the computers, radio transmitters and receivers, motors, valves, thrusters, data storage devices, instruments, hosts of sensors and other devices. The batteries must weigh as little as possible and be able to sustain varying temperature extremes. So they're packed in boxes made of beryllium, a lightweight metal used in cell phones and aircraft.

Juno, on its 5-year cruise to Jupiter, will travel nearly two billion miles. "Mike's battery" will power the orbit insertion burn, on July 4th, to slow the spacecraft enough to allow capture into the planet's gravity. It will do two 53-day orbits before a subsequent burn in October that will lower it into a 14-day polar orbit.

In the polar orbit, the battery will power the infrared and microwave instrumentation to measure thermal radiation emanating from Jupiter's atmosphere. From this data, combined with that from previous missions, will come insight into the mysteries of the planet's origins.

Because Jupiter lacks a solid surface, Juno won't end up there, to live for eternity like a flag planted on the moon. It will be de-orbited and burned up in Jupiter's outer atmosphere to avoid any contamination, or impact with one of Jupiter's moons. However, Mike did admit that one of his batteries - he wouldn't say which - is now (or will be) out there in space somewhere, forever, with this message carved inside the box: "MIKE WAS HERE". How utterly cool is that?

"2016-06-26-1466902738-4402086-batteryphoto.jpg"

In addition to Juno, Mike has worked on the Mars Odyssey, Phoenix, Orion, Space-Based Infrared Radar, Joint Strike Fighter Raptor, Advanced High-Frequency and other military satellite programs. Although Juno was one of his most challenging, he said his favorite was the Odyssey - a Mars lander, one of the first to test for water on the Red Planet. In 2001 he worked on its power sequencer board, wiring components every day for nine months - and it worked, the very first time. Amazing!

Mike isn't the only rocket scientist in his family, a bunch of space cadets. His father worked as a manager on Titan rocket programs, the Space Shuttle, and before that, the first Mars lander, the Viking. His mother worked on satellite programs, warfighter tactical communications and space defense studies. Mike's step-father was a computer engineer on the first Apollo mission to the moon, as well as Venus Radar Mapper, and other rocketry and planetary science projects, including Viking. His uncle developed Orion rocket propulsion hardware and parts of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. His brother-in-law supported enterprise data systems. Maybe the whole family is extra-terrestrial and they're trying to 'go home'.

Mike's mom said he started young in electronics, always tinkering in his room with wires and tiny radio or flashlight batteries. She would wake up in the night and see his light on and knew he was trying out some new experiment. Mom wished he would sleep more, like other boys, but didn't think much about his obsession - until he came home from high school one day saying a fellow student in auto mechanics had blown off a finger and lost an eye in an exploding battery accident. Because of that, she doesn't worry much about him now that he works with more complex batteries. He learned great appreciation and respect for battery safety.

Mike configures and tests all kinds, but primarily lithium batteries. I asked him why lithium ion batteries are so ubiquitous now. He said: "They're lighter, low maintenance, small, with high-energy density power that delivers more payload." Yes, we all need to deliver more payload - in our rockets, planes, cars, phones, computers, drones and personal robots!

Batteries were invented in 1800, and they're still a bit mysterious. They have their own "charisma" and eccentricities. Building these magic boxes of energy requires a person with a passion for detail and a brave soul, one who understands them. The payoff? That person will be thrilled to gaze into outer space and know their work is there, helping discover answers about our Last Frontier. Mike is all these things, including being a single parent of two boys for much of his demanding career. His mother is very proud of him, The Battery Dude.

"2016-06-26-1466902927-9861311-Mikephoto.jpeg"

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Complete Gardening Guide For First Time Gardeners
So, one fine morning you decided to set up a garden on your own. To do so you are now looking for some good gardening tips to start with. Gardening is not all about growing plants. If you don't know how to nourish your plants then they can die. You certainly don't want to pour some cold water on your hard work. It is not that gardening is very tough. Gardening can be most rewarding if you do it right.

If you want to maintain good garden, then you should follow some tips. Gardening is not a simple task. You should have gardening as a hobby so that you can maintain garden in best mannerism. You need to invest your time on gardening for few hours daily in such a way that you can use some new methods to improve their presence or growth. When you follow several methods for their growth, you will be resulted in good garden. When you bring down best implementation to improve the garden's presence, you can see them and their growth in impressive way. Here are few easy but effective tips for you to begin with your new hobby.

Tips To Maintain Your Garden:

Check the type of soil: Soil is the important part of gardening. Different kinds of soil grow different plants. You should test the type of soil of your garden so that you can grow suitable plants there. If you know that the soil is clay soil or silty soil then you can plan your gardening likewise. You can use a soil test kit to test the soil as well.

Choosing plants for garden: After knowing the soil type, you need to decide the kinds of plant you want to grow. If you love flowers to beautify your garden then you can go for perennials. Plants like Garden phlox, Blue Lobelia, Virginia Blue Bells are few excellent perennials to grow in gardens. You can also grow vegetables in your garden to make it more useful for your kitchen. It is best start with easy to harvest vegetable plants like tomato, carrot, beans, radish, and few more salad greens like Lettuce.

Prepare a layout: You should have good plan to grow a good plan. You need to select the space for gardening; buy pots, plants or seeds, pots, equipments, fertilizers, and other ingredients. One should know which place is suitable for which plant. To know all these important facts you should read and research to shape up your thoughts. Keep a scrapbook or a simple notebook to take notes. This will help you to prepare a plan.

Create No Stick Shovel: Shovel is a great tool for gardening. You can dig soil or can move stuffs using it. A Non stick shovel is very easy to use. Spray your favorite garden shovel with a silicone lubricant to make it a non stick one. A good coating will make any kind of soil right off the shovel.

Lighten Heavy Pots: You should take step to reduce the strain. When you are using pots, you can fill pots as one third to one half full with peanuts. You should ensure to place a piece of landscape fabric on the top of packing peanuts and then layer on your potting soil. In order to reduce weight of pot further, you can use potting mix with lot of vermiculite and peat miss.

Transfer Your Plants: If you are planning your next trip to local nursery, then you should line them back of your car with a plastic tarp and place a small step ladder on top of tarp. The slots between the rungs of ladder will serve as perfect compartments to protect your fragile plants during driving. You don't need to worry about spilled plants.

Easy Read Rain Gauge: You can do this trick with your rain gauge. Just use a dye and during next rainfall, the water will combine with dye and water level will obtain bright red and so they will be easy to read.

Limit Aggressive Plant: Aggressive plants grow with a rapid speed hence they are tough to control them. First of all identify them and then in order to limit their rapid growth, you should cut down the bottom with a knife.

Guide Your Root Bounded Plants: One issue associated with buying potting plants is that they will often goes bounded with their root. The problem is this will prevent water and essential nutrients from moving to leaves and also to other portion of plant. In order to solve this issue quickly, you should help the roots to go outward by using your fingers. If they are really tough, you should carefully make vertical cuts in the root ball with a knife.

Protect Your Bulbs: You should maintain bulbs by staking netting over bed of flowers. During spring season, you should remove netting in cloth and let plants grow through.

Use these tips and jump into it. Gardening is a great hobby and you should nourish this hobby for good.

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A sea slug changed my life

This underwater photo of a sea slug was captured with a close-up lens in Monterrey, Calif., by my first SCUBA instructor, Thomas Chapin circa 1985.

At 8 p.m. after a long day of work in the Houston humidity, Derek Rutavic, manager of the NASA Gulfstream-III that will head back to Greenland this fall, and I were in the back of the plane singing One Direction's "Drag Me Down" over the high frequency radio system. It was stifling hot, getting dark and we were tired and hungry.

But Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) Principal Investigator Josh Willis and Project Manager Steve Dinardo, too busy to take off their sweaty fire retardant flight suits, were troubleshooting electronics at two racks of computers, and they'd asked Rutavic to get on the headset to find out if the headset noise was interfering with the high radio frequency data signal the ocean science probes were sending back to the plane. Rutavic sat on an empty science probe container, while I lounged on one of the sofas singing along in awe of the amount of hard work this team was putting in.

We'd been up early, flown multiple test flights, worked through lunch. And all of this after days and days of maintenance, and weather delays, and more hard work after more hard work. Earlier in the day, NASA T-38 supersonic jet pilot Bill Rieke flew mind-bogglingly close to the G-III to photograph the science probe deployment and determine if the technique of launching the probes through a hole in the bottom of the plane would succeed. And yes, it did. But that success merely signaled the OMG team to continue working.

And I understood exactly why this team kept going, kept moving, kept pushing on into the evening, regardless of being tired and hot and hungry. I knew exactly why they decided to keep working on the challenge. They chose to push through because they'd found something to care about, and that's always more important than our difficulties and problems. When we focus on what we really care about, we get busy doing something, even in the face of trouble. And that's how science works.

Lessons from a sea slug

I first learned to care about the natural world around me during my junior year in college. I was in an oceanography course and we were studying sea slugs. (Yes, sea slugs.) A sea slug changed my life. Before then, I'd been, like many people, disengaged and uninterested in science. In third grade, someone came to our classroom and told us we could be the first female astronaut, and I remember thinking, "No, I couldn't, not me."

And now? Even though I have a job at NASA, I still feel like I don't belong in the world of science. I feel more comfortable around athletes and artists than I do with a bunch of Ph.D.s. Maybe it's some poorly defined stereotype that I've somehow bought into or some preconceived notion of how someone who does science is supposed to behave.

But those sea slugs taught me that I cared more about the natural world than I cared about the struggle of not fitting in or the challenge of the work. They appeared so delicate, small and defenseless, and I identified with that. They helped me feel connected. Noticing them forced me to wonder what else I'd start to notice if I slowed down enough to pay attention. And that connection to the natural world helped me stay committed to science, even when it was hard, even when there were problems, even when I felt like running away.

Sure, scientific experimentation, just like much of real life, includes problems, troubles, obstacles and difficulties almost every day. And while it's true that someone, somewhere has to troubleshoot something every step of the way, we can also be excited about the effort. The OMG team understands that problems and hard work are not the exception, they are the norm. They are part of accomplishment. And it's totally possible to thrive on these difficulties and challenges.

Look, we could be setting the world on fire right now, not by burning fossil fuels, but by our burning desire to understand our environment. Because the whole point of this experimental mission is to find out how quickly the warmer waters around Greenland are melting the second-largest ice sheet on the planet. It's major; it's dire; it's intense. It's one of the most important issues of our time.

And sitting there in the back of that plane made me think about how we, as individuals and as a society, have to find something in this world to care about. We have to find something in this world that is more important than our challenges and problems.

And you? I hope you decide to find something to care about. I hope you find something that's important enough that you're willing to push through your struggles, your fears and your problems to just do the work.

Find out more about Oceans Melting Greenland.

View and download OMG animations and graphics.

Thank you,
Laura

Oceans Melting Greenland is part of NASA Earth Expeditions, a six-month field research campaign to study regions of critical change around the world.

This post originally appeared on NASA's Earth Right Now blog.

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Why Every Society Needs a Cartman
South Park is on the threshold of its 20th season: what is the source of its staying power? As with most universal human behaviors, satire can be productively understood in light of the adaptive problems faced by our ancestors--in this case, the challenges presented by cooperation. One thing that distinguishes humans as a species is the degree to which we help each other. Our ancestors didn't just hunt and gather wild foods, they brought them back to camp and shared them. This behavior ensured that a person who had a run of bad hunting luck or couldn't go foraging due to sickness or injury would still get something to eat. Our ancestors also cooperated to build shelters, raise children, provide health care, engage in trade, arrange marriages, form political alliances, and share information. By pooling their labor, they reduced their risk of dying from hunger, illness, injury, exposure, and predation. In short, humans are designed to make a living by cooperating: our survival depends on being part of a society.

Thus, it's in everyone's interest to maintain harmony among their group members. Conflict jeopardizes group cohesion because, when two members fight, others take sides, and the group may fission. Fissioning reduces the size of the cooperative network, which in turn increases risk: the smaller your cooperative network, the fewer people you can call on in time of need. In ancestral environments, smaller groups would have been more vulnerable to starvation, predation, and attack. Alas, cooperation is difficult to sustain. Inevitably, someone will put their own interests before those of others, which incites anger and fighting. Our ancestors thus needed effective means of mitigating conflict.

Enter storytelling. In modern hunter-gatherer societies and, presumably, ancient human groups, storytelling is used as a means of discouraging antisocial behavior and consequent conflict. The Trickster character is a prime example: across forager cultures, he is widely regarded as a model of bad behavior. Lazy, stingy, and gluttonous, he always wants something for nothing. He thus uses deception rather than cooperation to accomplish his ends: he fools people into to helping him, but never returns the favor. Impulsive and irresponsible, he doesn't think about the possible consequences of his actions, which often end up hurting him and others. He is also callous and incorrigible: he never learns from his mistakes, never heeds warnings, and when others suffer as a result of his rash behavior, he doesn't care. Unscrupulous and exploitative to the point of being a sociopath, he uses people and will do anything to get what he wants. In short, Trickster is unremittingly selfish: he always puts his needs before those of others, and holds himself above the rules. In so doing, he perpetually jeopardizes the security of his fellow group members, thereby destabilizing the cooperative network. He is the embodiment of behaviors that tick people off and lead to conflict.

If this sounds familiar to South Park fans, it should: Eric Cartman is a modern incarnation of the trickster. Greedy, lazy, unscrupulous, and manipulative, Cartman cares only about himself and will stop at nothing to get what he wants. So why have we tuned in for twenty years to watch him?

The answer is social sanctioning. Trickster stories discourage antisocial behaviors by vividly modeling the bad things that happen to people who engage in them. Trickster is sanctioned using a variety of tactics, chief of which is ridicule: his tricks typically backfire on him, making him an object of scorn. Although seemingly mild, this punishment packs a big punch, because in forager societies people dread public disapproval. For example, as anthropologist Frederica de Laguna notes, the Dena people "are very sensitive to what others may say . . . [and] the unwritten laws of the people are enforced through the strength of public opinion." Shaming works because it's a veiled threat: it hints that, if the behavior doesn't stop, more forceful sanctions will follow. Sterner sanctioning takes the form of ostracism: when people discover that Trickster has been free riding, they punish him by refusing to cooperate with him anymore. In extreme cases, he's kicked out of the group. Because the sanctioning tactics used against Trickster mirror those used in real life, the genre serves as a means of moral strong-arming: "straighten up and fly right, or what happened to Trickster will happen to you." In hunter-gatherer societies, expulsion from the group is a death sentence. In modern environments, it bodes a friendless existence. No one likes Cartman: he survives socially by bullying people into associating with him.

Trickster stories--and satire in general--are an important means of policing society. If the audience bears in mind the consequences of Trickster's antisocial behavior, they will be less inclined to behave inappropriately themselves. Storytelling is thus used proactively to discourage proscribed behavior and lessen the risk of conflict. It's also used post hoc to discipline those who stray. Punishing transgressors is tricky because a person confronted with his/her crime may become angry and aggressive. Storytelling enables discipline to be effected non-confrontationally by making a character rather than the wrongdoer the target of judgement. A pointed story told in a public forum enables people to criticize the transgression without revealing the identity of the transgressor, which reduces the risk of conflict. David Sedaris uses this tactic in Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. As he explains: "There was something liberating about writing a story about a squirrel and a chipmunk because I didn't have to worry about the chipmunk coming to me and saying, 'Thanks a lot for telling the world about me and that squirrel.'" The key to satire's effectiveness as a policing tactic is humor: Trickster's schemes typically backfire on him in comical fashion. His humiliation is thus served with a heaping helping of laughter, making the pill of shame easier to swallow for the target of the story, and reminding the rest of the audience to keep their inner Cartman in check, or they too might find themselves the butt of society's joke.

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THE SINGAPORE RESEARCH STORY
THE SINGAPORE RESEARCH STORY: edited by Hang Chang Chieh, Low Teck Seng, and Raj Thampuran; World Scientific Publishing, Inc. 2016

Reviewed by Don C. Reed

Disclaimer: World Scientific published one of my books, "STEM CELL BATTLES: Proposition 71 and Beyond", so I am perhaps biased on their behalf.

Question: could a small island nation, endowed with few natural resources or financial backing-- become a world leader in biomedical research?

Answer: "In little more than a decade, Singapore established a thriving biomedical industry from scratch...In 2000, it started to invest in a Biomedical Sciences initiative... by 2012, this industry had grown to more than...$24 billion (US) dollars ...."

"Many leading ...companies (including Pfizer, Abbott, GlaxoSmithKline, Lonza, MSD, Novartis, and Sanofi-Aventis) have made Singapore their global manufacturing base..."

When Singapore became independent in 1965, it was a third world country with few advantages. It could easily have been a country with cheap labor as its only edge, taken advantage of by other nations. Instead, it became a prosperous country whose population is well-educated, and with an economy based on information, science--and jobs.

Today, Singapore's unemployment rate is less than 2%.

In a series of densely-packed chapters, we see the transformation of a nation.

A key policy was a willingness to seek out information from outside experts first, and then adapt their suggestions to fit Singapore.

For instance, in 1970, an Israeli scientist, Dr. Meir Ben Zvi, offered a detailed plan to develop Singapore's "qualified scientific... personnel" by sending students overseas to study.

A civil servant, Philip Yeo, developed that concept, which he called "guppies and whales", sending out "guppies", students to learn, and bringing in "whales", international experts.

Yeo worked closely with the visionary Finance Minister Goh Keng Swee, who gave him considerable leeway.

Look anywhere in Singapore's research world, and you will see both men's fingerprints. Yeo brought change, the Finance Minister backed him up. If anyone complained, Goh Keng Swee would say "What can I do? That's Philip!"

A small but telling example: Yeo changed the name of Singapore's biomedical division, from something people could not remember, the National Science and Technology Board (NSTB) to Agency for Science, Technology and Research-- A*STAR-- because A*STAR is the top grade every student can achieve in a Singapore school.

One tragic but inspirational story concerned a brilliant young scientist, Tsao Chieh, who developed a life-threatening disease. Yeo arranged for therapy from outside Singapore to be brought in--but Tsao had an immunity to the cure itself, and died.

"Here I was, watching a young life die before my eyes," said Philip Yeo, "And there was nothing I could do..."

In 1983, Nobel laureate Dr. Sydney Brenner gave a hugely influential series of lectures about biomedicine. Goh Keng Swee arranged for those lectures, and worked to make their message become real. Working with Dr. Brenner, Philip Yeo made a list of 100 top scientists and tried to bring them to Singapore.

"The first top scientist he attracted to Singapore to be Genome Institute of Singapore's founding executive director was Dr. Edison Liu...

Remember the bird flu epidemic? Called SARS, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, "It was a global epidemic...controlling the spread of this highly communicable disease became paramount."

Dr. Liu mobilized the scientists.

"I am calling on everyone to drop what they are doing to work on this problem.... In the morning we met with the team leaders and said, 'Okay, what are you going to do today?' At the end of the day, we met with the team leaders again and said, 'What happened today?' The gene sequencing team worked 24/7. I mean, they slept in the hallway."

Singapore developed a testing kit for SARS, and was "cited by the World Health Organization as an exemplary country in its response.

"...that experience made it obvious to all the decision-makers that their investment in the biomedical sciences was not just to get cash return in the stock market, it was (also) for national security..."
Hepatitis B? Thanks to Singaporean efforts, that condition can now be diagnosed in two days instead of two weeks.
Another biomed champion is A*STAR Chairman Lim Chuan Poh, formerly a Lieutenant General in the Singapore military.

At the agency's 20th anniversary, he said:

"...In the biomedical effort, we (built) capabilities for one big industry cluster. This was a new approach, a new strategy. That was how the research landscape changed...conceptually."

The visual reality of the "one big industry cluster" was a series of 13 incredible buildings, Biopolis and Fusionopolis, designed by one of the world's greatest architects, the late Iraqi-Brit designer Zaha Hadid.

"2016-06-25-1466856083-9201983-biopolispic.jpg"

Two million square feet of shining steel, seeming to touch the sky, but designed to both meet the needs of science and to be inviting as a living space; so that scientists could get up in the morning, have breakfast, kiss the family goodbye--and be at work in 30 minutes!

Like Biopolis, "The Singapore Research Story" is both practical and visionary: it belongs on the shelves of college, governmental, and public libraries, wherever students want to know: what can happen to a country, when science is respected.

Don C. Reed is the author of "STEM CELL BATTLES: Proposition 71 and Beyond: How Ordinary People Can Fight Back Against the Crushing Burden of Chronic Disease--with a Posthumous Foreword by Christopher Reeve".

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SETI, Imagining Extraterrestrial Civilizations, and War
I've often thought it interesting that when SETI scientists imagine extraterrestrial civilizations, they usually think in terms of unified worlds that have one civilization. The image is very much unlike our world, in which we have multiple civilizations that are fractured and in conflict with other societies. The Brexit event of the past couple of days is a good example of just how fractured our world is as well as representing some solid data not in support of the idea that humans are becoming increasingly unified.

When we imagine other worlds, we tend to take a distant view and create images that reflect a fictionalized, romanticized representation of life right here on Earth. Rather than fractured worlds with many civilizations like the one on which we actually live, many SETI scientists think in terms of what I call the Star Trek Imaginary, in which each world forms a civilization equivalent to a geopolitical unit on Earth. In other words, we think of alien worlds as unified political states or countries.

There is a good chance that this is an inaccurate view of civilizations on other planets, but it still may be a useful way to think about extraterrestrial intelligence if only to deconstruct our assumptions about life on other worlds. Indeed, one way to use this image is to turn it around and think about Earth from the perspective of an alien world. This makes for an interesting thought experiment.

Suppose ET planted some sort of observational device near Earth, say, 6,000 years ago. Somehow, they had noticed that there seemed to be an emerging civilization and thought it would be interesting to study how things evolved. ET doesn't have a lot of time to spend on watching Earth and the observational device isn't sensitive enough to show all the nuances of political machinations throughout human history. So the data are limited in detail. The result is a wide-angle picture of Earth throughout history that gives a general sense of what cultural evolution on Earth is like. ET will have learned quite a bit, actually, about how humans evolve and form societies over time, but a lot of the detail will be left out. They probably won't get the nitty-gritties about the Brexit.

So what would such a device tell ET? As I thought about this, I realized there would be one overwhelming image ET would get about Earth. And it's an image we here--with our close-up picture of our own history--don't usually associate with civilization on this planet.

I think what ET might conclude is that Earth has been at war for about 5,000 years--pretty much non-stop. The first war in recorded history seems to have been in Mesopotamia around 2,700 BCE between Sumer and Elam, and from the outside it might look like it never stopped. Since that time, if one were to stand back a bit from Earth, there is a pretty good chance that warfare would be the dominant feature of human civilization. There is always war going on somewhere on Earth. It ebbs and flows in intensity. Sometimes it's regional; sometimes it covers most of the planet. But it is always there and it might look like one long war from an outside perch. If you didn't know all of the political and historical details, there would be no reason to assume that our history had been an endless string of wars rather than simply one really long one.

From our perspective, this would not be a very accurate picture. Different societies have had on-and-off periods of war and peace. And we don't tend to think about our civilization(s) as being characterized by a single war lasting 5,000 years, because we understand the geopolitical details in which there have been lots of wars over that time, not just one war. But if you look at Earth from the outside and treat human societies as a civilization, then it's probably a reasonable conclusion about us. From the external--or in anthropology what we would call etic--perspective, human civilization might appear to be based on and characterized by a single war that has spanned almost 5,000 years.

This raises the importance of seeing the difference between proximate and distant perspectives and the difficulties in imagining intelligent life and civilizations on other worlds when we don't have a lot of data to work with (or in our current situation, without any data at all). SETI scientists often tend to impose their own assumptions about intelligence and civilization on imagined extraterrestrial worlds and those assumptions are shaped by ideas about the way our world is that: 1) may not be empirically accurate, and 2) are unlikely to reflect how we would look to outsiders.

The devil is in the details, and we don't have any of those, since we have no evidence of alien intelligence. But even if we do get evidence sometime, we probably won't have much detail and we will need to be very careful to avoid imposing the Star Trek Imaginary--or any other set of assumptions--on what little data we receive. Standing back and trying to imagine what our world would look like to distant outsiders is a useful way of trying to control this tendency to imagine alien others in terms of romanticized images of ourselves.

Perspective is important. It may well be that characterizing our world as being at war for 5,000 years is accurate, but it isn't how we see ourselves and that, too, is an important piece of data about humans. Recognizing the potential disjuncture between how we see ourselves and how others might see us is a key component of trying to deflect, to the extent possible, our tendencies to infuse assumptions about intelligence and civilization drawn from our proximate understanding of and imagination about life on Earth into our speculations about intelligent life on other worlds.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Weekend Roundup: When Politics Fails, Look to Unifiers Like Pope Francis and Yo-Yo Ma
When politics divides instead of unites, walls off instead of embraces, what, or who, can bind fractured societies? Spiritual authority and the arts step into the breach when political leaders fail.

Pope Francis has become, in effect, the planet's pastor and reconciler-in-chief, washing the feet of the poor and incarcerated, taking in refugees at the Vatican, meeting with Muslim clerics, venerating China's long civilizational heritage and declaring that climate change and inequality are moral issues. Above all, his humility challenges the example of power through the power of example, exhibiting a reverence for human dignity in all its diversity.

The cellist Yo-Yo Ma is the pope's spiritual cousin in this cause, sounding the healing chord of fellowship instead of enmity. More than a musician, he, too, is a guiding spirit who rises to the challenge of a world unraveling. His Silk Road Project, started in 1998, brings "the music of strangers" -- also the title of his just-released documentary -- together to show the common humanity of diverse traditions from around the globe.

The film is about art for life's sake, as Yo-Yo Ma likes to say. It doesn't shy away from political turmoil -- the Syrian civil war and refugee camps, the Iranian Revolution, China's Cultural Revolution -- that turns the lives of musicians, like everyone else, upside down, but shows how the human spirit perseveres in the face of tribulation. As one of the musicians says in "The Music of Strangers," the Silk Road Ensemble reveals the possibility of a profound correspondence behind differences -- and where there is possibility, there is hope.

There could be no more urgent message today than this. And no one puts it better than Yo-Yo Ma himself. "To be able to put oneself in another's shoes without prejudgment is an essential skill," he once told The WorldPost. "Empathy comes when you understand something deeply through arts and literature and can thus make unexpected connections. These parallels bring you closer to things that would otherwise seem far away. Empathy is the ultimate quality that acknowledges our identity as members of one human family."

The historic rupture of the Brexit vote this week, in which the "leave" camp closely defeated the "remain" camp, typifies the split societies we see today across Europe as well as in the U.S. and elsewhere. WorldPost Fellow Jesselyn Cook outlines how immigration and the fear of losing control of borders is a core concern of British voters, a reminder that empathy is just a starting point that is only a meaningful value when matched with a realistic capacity to integrate newcomers. World Reporter Charlotte Alfred outlines what's next for the U.K. after Brexit.

Writing from Paris, Geoffroy Clavel describes how the French National Front sees the Brexit vote as proof that the European Union will, and should, "disintegrate." And, indeed, as Anne Sinclair also writes from Paris, the Brexit is likely only the first in a series of defections from the European Union. Writing from Germany, Konstantin Kuhle argues that the EU must immediately take steps to reassure voters on the continent, including moving toward direct election of the EU Commission president. Howard Fineman worries that the Brexit vote presages the victory of Trump populism in the United States. In a losing appeal to voters ahead of the referendum, Richard Branson, the Virgin entrepreneur who is in many ways the face of a globally-oriented Britain, warned that jobs and investment opportunities that depend on the link with Europe would be at risk if the U.K. left the EU.

Turning to another instance of political paralysis in another divided country, Guillermo Rodriguez reflects on the situation in Spain ahead of elections Sunday. "Spanish people are drained," he writes from Madrid. "It feels like Spain is the main character in the movie Groundhog Day: Everything starts fresh with each new round of elections."

Writing from Beirut, former MI6 agent Alastair Crooke sees all the hopeful agreements of recent months among Russia, the U.S. and Iran unwinding, particularly with respect to the Syrian cease-fire, which he now sees as having "failed." In a special series launched this week on female journalists in Afghanistan -- "Sahar Speaks" -- we profile 12 women and the challenges they've faced in that country's male-dominated culture. Writing from Bisada, Uttar Pradesh in India, Betwa Sharma chronicles the breakdown of decades of conviviality between Hindus and Muslims after a villager was lynched for allegedly slaughtering a cow.

Writing from Cape Town, South Africa, gay imam Muhsin Hendricks says that, after the Orlando massacre, it is time for Muslims to reassess their stance on sexual orientation: "The orthodox belief that homosexuality is a sin -- based on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah -- is what leads to the nuances of homophobia around the massacre in Orlando."

Writing from Vladivostok, Artyom Lukin and Rens Lee argue that Russia can play a key role alongside the U.S. and China in helping curb North Korea's nuclear program. A ruling is due soon from a tribunal under the aegis of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea on a territorial dispute over islands between the Philippines and China. China's high profile ambassador to the United Kingdom, Liu Xiaoming, argues the court has no proper jurisdiction, the issue should be resolved bilaterally and that China has no intention of "ruling the waves." Writing from Manila, Richard Javad Heydarian calls the case before the tribunal the "trial of the century." "What is at stake here," he says, "is no less than protecting global commons under the auspices of international law. The alternative is the tragedy of great power politics and the rule of the jungle in high seas."

Tensions also mounted further in the South China Sea this week when the U.S. sent two aircraft carriers to patrol the zone between China and the Philippines. Just when it is most needed, the region has lost one of its leading voices for restraint and reconciliation. Wu Jianmin, among China's most prominent senior diplomats and a partner in the Berggruen Institute's "Understanding China" dialogues, was killed this week in a car accident near Wuhan, sparking a debate over the direction of China's foreign policy.

"wu

Wu Jianmin (left) with Mohamed el-Erian (right) at the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council meeting in Paris, October, 2011. (Berggruen Institute)

"Recently, nationalism and populism have been expanding around the world, becoming a global phenomenon," Wu said in a speech on June 6. "....Nationalism has two connotations. First, love for your own country, which is not wrong. Second, exclusion of others and pushing the blame for your country's problems onto other countries. I am good, others are bad. This is problematic. ... Nationalism and populism are also very dangerous in China. Nationalism often flies under the banner of 'patriotism,' which is innocent. Populism can dress up as 'appealing on behalf of the people.' But both are very deceptive. We need to see that the essence of populism goes against reform, and the essence of nationalism goes against opening up."

Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden ask whether China's heavy investment in South Sudan is "naked imperialism in pursuit of the country's vast oil reserves or a genuine effort to bring peace to help end a brutal conflict." This amazing video was taken by a drone flying around inside a Byzantine-era church in France. These dazzling photos display the diversity of Mexico's indigenous cultures.

Writing from Tambopata, Peru, Next Gen Scientist's Aaron Pomerantz discovers a remarkable collaboration between ants and butterflies in bamboo stalks in the remote Amazon jungle. In a separate video post, he also explains something we've all wondered about: how do butterflies create color in their wings? Finally, our Singularity series this week explores how understanding human learning can make artificial intelligence smarter.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is the National Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's editorial coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

science

Start	Artist	Track Title	Label
00:00	rhythm doctor	intro	truelove
00:39	grand larceny	body workin	b2
03:32	rich pinder	hat play	d-vine
07:26	man without a clue	morning funk mix	clueless
11:01	roter lewis	get out of my life	nite grooves
14:21	juliet sikora	larry's garage	kitt ball
19:15	clio	dangerous	truesoul
25:40	be as deep	music makes me happy	plastic people
32:22	disk nation	saxophonists	cruise
35:09	rene amesz	like it deep	tiger
41:34	diskode	burp	moulton
44:46	move d	jus house	uzuri
49:07	lenny kiser	this time	moulton
53:37	soledrifter	soul groove	large
57:35	joi resh	here we go	kaleydo
64:38	rafa barrios	daledalehey	intec
67:43	alan de lanier	dance	mycrazything
71:49	soul divine	secret love	stereo flava
74:54	manuel sahagun	the 3rd advice	development
81:13	kerri chandler	mommy whats a record	downtown
86:16	kink	pocket piano	running back
91:39	x-press 2	give it	skint

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