* 21 entries including: US Constitution (series), public security & data privacy (series), cosmic dawn, finding HIV reservoirs in tissues, precision definition of the second, Africa's baby glut, Greenland impact crater, making money off climate change, 536 CE was a terrible year, & Boeing MQ-25 Stingray drone.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR DECEMBER 2018: As discussed by an article from NBCNEWS.com ("Top Secret Report: North Korea Keeps Busting Sanctions, Evading US-Led Sea Patrols" by Courtney Kube & Dan De Luce, 14 December 2018), three top US officials told the news media about a secret US military report found that North Korea has become adept at evading international sanctions, obtaining oil by sea, and that US-led forces attempting to block the shipments have been unable to put a stop to it.
North Korean smuggling violates UN sanctions that strictly limit oil imports, a UN Security Council resolution in September 2017 having put a cap on refined imports at 500,000 barrels a year for North Korea. Having endured decades of economic sanctions, North Korea has refined techniques to skirt international prohibitions, using shell companies, illicit financing, stealthy shipping movements, and partners in China and Russia to smuggle in prohibited goods.
The secret US Pacific Command assessment found that the presence of warships and surveillance aircraft deployed by an eight-nation coalition since September 2018 has forced North Korea to adjust its tactics at sea, with tricks such as transferring oil further away from the Korean Peninsula, and often in other countries' territorial waters.
The North Koreans are also using smaller vessels that are harder to spot and recognize, and the presence of coalition forces has forced North Korea out of the East China Sea, and into more logistically troublesome areas to the north and south. Randy Schriver -- assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs -- said at a discussion in December at the University of Chicago:
BEGIN QUOTE:
It's a sustained effort, but I would tell you the North Koreans are learning, evolving, getting better so the ship-to-ship transfers are taking place further away from the peninsula. So they're getting better with their own attempts to evade, and we're evolving as well in terms of our sustained effort to disrupt that.
END QUOTE
At least, the North Koreans are having to work harder to get oil. Since the surveillance began in October 2017, there have been 30 instances when smugglers halted ship-to-ship transfers when spotted by coalition naval forces at sea, one of the three officials saying: "We've increased pressure and have been collecting information on these illicit transfers, and then feeding them back to our inter-agency partners for financial, law enforcement, and diplomatic action."
The coalition didn't move into high gear until September 2018, following a surge in ship-to-ship transfers, with North Korea obtaining black market fuel at sea -- often with the help of Chinese and Russian actors. The eight coalition nations, aside from the US, include Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand, with coalition members performing air and sea patrols.
Experts and foreign diplomats say Washington's "maximum pressure" campaign has faltered since President Donald Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June 2018, with China relaxing its enforcement of sanctions -- though Trump's hard line on China may well also have something to do with Chinese indifference to enforcement of sanctions. Even Trump has said he would prefer to drop the term "maximum pressure", given the positive tone of his discussions with Kim.
Nonetheless, The Treasury Department has continued to push ahead on sanctions against North Korea in recent months. Treasury has blacklisted more individuals, ships, and companies accused of violating US sanctions against North Korea, and issued warnings to businesses and insurance companies to stay away from vessels or organizations thought to be engaged in smuggling operations. Both China and Russia insist they are obeying UN Security Council resolutions on North Korea.
In any case, any movement towards a relaxation of pressure on North Korea came to a halt on 20 December, when North Korea announced it would never give up its nuclear weapons, unless the United States eliminated its nuclear threat first. The statement suggests that North Korea, unable to get relief from sanctions, is giving up the relatively soft approach to diplomacy pursued with the Trump Administration, and is now taking the hardball approach.
* As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The Producers", 18 October 2018), it's a truism that manufacturing jobs are in decline in the USA. US President Donald Trump's claims that he could turn things around in manufacturing were widely mocked -- but as of late, the number of jobs in US manufacturing is growing. After about two decades of decline, manufacturing jobs appear to have stabilized.
Between 1948 and 2008, manufacturing employment fell as a share of private non-farm employment by around 0.4% each year. Since January 2010, it has fallen by only 0.3 points in total. Put another way, the number of American manufacturing jobs has been rising almost in line with overall employment for the past eight years, defying both historical experience and expectations. In the recoveries from the recessions of the 1990s and the 2000s, manufacturing never regained its share of the jobs market.
In 2017, the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast that the number of manufacturing jobs would continue to fall at an average annual rate of 0.6% per year between 2016 and 2026. That's not happening. What's going on, and does Trump really have anything to do with it? Is this just a temporary stay of execution, with manufacturing jobs to go into decline again, once automation catches up?
Peter Schott of Yale University points out that the loss of manufacturing jobs in recent recessions is actually an anomaly -- that over the past 60 years, the norm has been for the number of manufacturing jobs to recover fully after downturns. The early 2000s was an exception because of a large increase in goods imported from China.
Another possibility is that we've reached diminishing returns on the automation of labor in manufacturing. Schott says: "It seems unlikely that the share of manufacturing employment will go to zero. Maybe we have hit the point where the share flattens off." Robert Lawrence of Harvard University believes, as do many other economists, that the shift away from manufacturing employment during the second half of the 20th century was mostly the result of gains in productivity, not competition from imports. More so than in other sectors, technological progress in manufacturing allowed fewer workers to make more product.
Since the recession, productivity growth in manufacturing relative to services has slowed. That may be temporary. Employment statistics show that manufacturing is one of the few sectors where the number of unemployed workers continues to exceed the number of job openings. That has damped wage growth, which may reduce the incentive of manufacturers to invest in automation.
Trump's economic nationalism is supposed to be persuading manufacturers to bring their factories back to the USA. Trump may be pressuring them to do so -- but tariffs on imported steel and aluminum could be pushing them in the opposite direction, by raising input costs for American factories. The same goes for tariffs on imported Chinese parts.
In any case, the manufacturing renaissance Trump is taking credit for does not mark a return to the past. Historically, the sector was seen as a gateway into the middle classes for Americans with only a high-school education -- but over time, the composition of employment has shifted towards managerial and professional roles, and away from production jobs that can be done by those with less schooling. Manufacturing workers today are also less likely to be unionized than they once were, so they have fewer benefits.
The type of work being done is changing, too. The rise since 2011 in manufacturing employment has been concentrated on production of food and transport equipment, which including car-making. Meanwhile, printing, computer-making, and the production of clothes each account for a smaller share of manufacturing jobs than they did seven years ago.
Jobs are also moving geographically. Since the recovery started, the East North Central region, which includes places like Michigan and Illinois, has captured a share of employment gains that exceeds its share of job losses from the recession. Meanwhile the Middle Atlantic region, which includes New York and Pennsylvania, has seen no net increase in manufacturing employment at all since 2011. The trick is that many of the places that are seeing manufacturing job growth went for Trump in 2016. Deserved or not, Trump gets the win -- at least for now.
* Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before Congress on 11 December, with members of Congress grilling him over the alleged bias of Google. Conservatives believe Google is biased against conservative media, while liberals believe it does too much to promote conservative media. Pichai proclaimed that Google was neutral in its searches, that its only concern was to provide the best service to customers, to give them what they wanted. There is no reason to doubt Pichai's sincerity in saying this -- but giving users what they want implies an unavoidable appearance of bias.
There was a time when Google wasn't all that selective about searches, simply ranking target web pages according to a set of rules, and displaying results of searches by descending rank. Unfortunately, spammers figured out the rules, and started tweaking web pages so they'd get high rankings, even though the pages had little or no useful content. Google accordingly tweaked its scheme to recognize the spam and cut it off.
Fast-forward to 2016, in which the internet was flooded with "fake news" -- misinformation, conspiracy theories, preposterous and malicious lies. None of that was new, it was normal for the internet, but to that time it had been in the background. Obviously, Google was not serving its users by handing them trash in response to queries, and so that meant cracking down on fake news. Since the fake news was predominantly, if not entirely, coming from the Right, that implicitly meant cracking down on the Right. A bias? Yes, against liars, fakes, and crooks. That's a bad thing?
The rise of the internet meant a fundamental change in the propagation of information around the world. Not only did it mean immediate transmission of information, it also meant that, to a considerable degree, anyone could play. The end result is that the mainstream media, which once had effective control over wide-area dissemination of information, has come under attack by the fake news media. Whatever the limitations of the mainstream media, the fake news media -- the "making stuff up" media -- is far worse.
What to be done? There's not much more to do than is already being done, to try to identify bad websites and drop their rankings accordingly. We can imagine that, in the near future, search engines like Google will have AI systems that can understand what a website is all about, spot misinformation and pseudoscience, then downgrade the site ranking accordingly.
Yes, that will mean accusations of bias, but there isn't any real alternative: a search engine following up a science question is not doing its job right if it takes a user to creationist website. Since users can search for creationist websites if they like, creationists are not being censored in any way. Creationist websites aren't science sites, and shouldn't be included in a response to a query about science.
In the same way, if people want to get news, they shouldn't get results including the rantings of Alex Jones -- but they can still find Alex Jones if they like. The smarter search systems of the near future may even be able to provide warnings about websites that are known to peddle fake news. Just as with porn filtering -- to which there is little or no objection -- users will be able to turn off the warnings.
Worries that have been expressed on mainstream media outlets like CNN and THE ECONOMIST on search engine bias have a hollow tone to them. After all, such outlets don't provide a platform themselves for fakes and crooks. They may have online comment sections, but many outlets and organizations have concluded they're much more bother than they're worth. Amazon.com ran online forums for some number of years -- but finally discarded them, because there was nothing in them but trash. Amazon literally had no business in running forums.
These days, outlets and organizations have Twitter feeds, and people can comment on Twitter all they like. It then becomes Twitter's problem -- and it is a problem, with Twitter under pressure to crack down on the bad actors. The bottom line is that the days of the wide-open internet are slowly coming to a close.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (41): Although the War of 1812 ended with no formal change to the status quo between Britain and the US, it did do much to secure America's borders, and also to crush resistance of the native tribes against white settlers on the frontiers. The fact that America had seemed on the road to disaster in the war, but came out intact, also lifted public spirits through sheer relief. James Monroe, yet another Virginian, was elected president in 1816, with his tenure in office being labeled an "Era of Good Feeling", in which the party system was on the fade and partisan politics not so evident. One of the reasons politics seemed tame was Monroe's low-key leadership style, in which he pushed for consensus by quiet discussion, out of public view -- historians later labeling him a "hidden hand" president.
While Monroe was a JDR, the war had demonstrated that Jefferson's preference for a weak central government was unrealistic -- and one of the reasons the Federalists died out was because the JDRs had become more like Federalists themselves. Unsurprisingly, without an opposition, the JDRs began to fall out among themselves. Partisan politics would quickly re-emerge.
In the aftermath, the government accepted the need for a standing army, if only a modest one; America would never again rely on militia in serious wars. In addition, although the charter of the First Bank of the United States lapsed in 1811 -- the Madison Administration approving its demise -- in the aftermath of the conflict, there were second thoughts. The painful difficulties in obtaining funding to support the war, and fiscal chaos following the conflict, led Madison to reconsider, with the "Second Bank of the United States" established in 1816.
The revival of the national bank led to a clash with States' Rights. In 1817, the Second Bank of the US opened a branch in Baltimore, Maryland. Early in 1818, the Maryland legislature passed an act imposing a tax on notes issued by banks not chartered by the state, including the Second Bank. The head of the Baltimore branch, James William McCulloch, refused to pay the tax. The Maryland courts found against McCulloch, stating that the Constitution did not authorize the Federal government to set up a bank, the Second Bank was unconstitutional, and the state was not bound to recognize an exemption from state taxes.
The case went up to SCOTUS, with the high court deciding in favor of McCulloch. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the opinion, arguing that the creation of the First Bank of the US, which was never declared unconstitutional, established a precedent supporting the Second Bank of the US. The fact that it had been created by the stellar Washington Administration further reinforced the precedent. It similarly followed that Congress had the authority to create the Second Bank of the US, under the cover of the Necessary & Proper Clause.
Most significantly, Marshall rejected the constitutional supremacy of the states, neatly commenting in the preamble to the decision:
BEGIN QUOTE:
In discussing this question, the counsel for the State of Maryland have deemed it of some importance, in the construction of the constitution, to consider that instrument not as emanating from the people, but as the act of sovereign and independent States. The powers of the general government, it has been said, are delegated by the States, who alone are truly sovereign; and must be exercised in subordination to the States, who alone possess supreme dominion.
It would be difficult to sustain this proposition. The Convention which framed the constitution was indeed elected by the State legislatures. But the instrument, when it came from their hands, was a mere proposal, without obligation, or pretensions to it. It was reported to the then existing [Confederation] Congress of the United States, with a request that it might "be submitted to a Convention of Delegates, chosen in each State by the people thereof, under the recommendation of its Legislature, for their assent and ratification."
This mode of proceeding was adopted; and by the Convention, by Congress, and by the State Legislatures, the instrument was submitted to the people. They acted upon it in the only manner in which they can act safely, effectively, and wisely, on such a subject, by assembling in Convention. It is true, they assembled in their several States ... Of consequence, when they act, they act in their States. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the measures of the people themselves, or become the measures of the State governments.
From these Conventions the constitution derives its whole authority. The government proceeds directly from the people; is "ordained and established" in the name of the people; and is declared to be ordained, "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and to their posterity."
... The government of the Union, then ... is, emphatically, and truly, a government of the people. In form and in substance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit.
This government is acknowledged by all to be one of enumerated powers ... But the question respecting the extent of the powers actually granted, is perpetually arising, and will probably continue to arise, as long as our system shall exist.
END QUOTE
In short, the people were sovereign, not the states. As for whether the Second Bank was really "Necessary and Proper", that was something of a matter of opinion; but it was the opinion of SCOTUS that it was, and there was no appeal to that opinion. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("IDF Building Ground-To-Ground Missile Unit", 27 August 2018), the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been acquiring antimissile defenses to protect Israeli citizens from rocket bombardments. Of course, the IDF is inclined to the offensive posture; and so the organization has set up a new surface-to-surface missile unit to deal with rocket and artillery attacks from beyond Israel's borders. The unit will be able to strike at targets at ranges of up to 250 kilometers (155). Previously, such long-range strikes had been performed by aircraft of the IDF Air Force.
The unit is to be armed with two types of missiles, both made by Israel Military Industries (IMI):
IMI also offers the substantially bigger "Predator Hawk" missile, with a range of up to 300 kilometers (186 miles). All the missiles have a "circular error probability" -- accuracy -- of less than 10 meters (33 feet). These missiles can be fired from an IMI Lynx 6-wheel launcher or, it seems, a US-type M270 tracked multiple-rocket launch system.
Although long-range tactical missiles are nothing new, the IDF hadn't set up a unit like this before, because the IDF-AF felt that such strikes were their job. However, using the latest IMI missiles, the cost of strikes is lower, and it seems likely response time is less as well.
* As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Liquid Battery Promises Safe Energy-Dense Power For Electric Aircraft" by Graham Warwick, 14 August 2018), airliners require battery packs, and have had some problems with lithium-ion ("Li-ion") -- which tend to be incendiary. The push towards electric aircraft means more reliance on batteries. Li-ion does work, but maybe there could be a better solution?
The US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) is investigating the usefulness of "flow batteries" for aeronautical applications. A conventional battery has an electrolyte, typically a liquid, in the battery that supports an electron-generating chemical reaction between the battery electrodes. A flow battery, in contrast, has two external tanks of electrolyte that are pumped through a reaction cell.
A flow battery is complicated, and only really useful for big battery installations. However, while the flow battery can be recharged to restore depleted electrolyte, the electrolyte can also be drained out, with the electrolyte tanks refilled with fresh electrolyte, making recharging as quick as filling the tanks. The depleted electrolyte can be restored elsewhere. Although batteries tend to degrade with repeated charge-discharge cycles, flow batteries show little cycle degradation. Flow batteries also potentially have good energy density -- that is, the amount of electric charge stored per battery volume -- with the electrolyte being nonflammable. In fact, the electrolyte can be used as a cooling fluid for aircraft systems.
NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center and the NASA Glenn Research Center are studying "nano-electrofuel (NEF)" flow battery technology under the "Aqueous Quick-Charging Battery Integration for Flight Research (AQUIFER) project. In an NEF battery, positively and negatively charged electrolytes, containing active nanoparticles in water, are pumped through a flow cell. Inside the cell, they flow on opposite sides of an ion-exchange membrane, producing an electric current in the same way a fuel cell does. Energy storage capacity is limited by tank volume, not cell size, with power a function of the membrane area.
The NEF flow battery is being developed by Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois Institute of Technology, and its spinoff startup Influit Energy. Prototype NEF flow batteries have poor energy density, but in maturity they should have twice the energy density of Li-ion, even given improvements in Li-ion technology. The NASA program is also investigating advanced electric motors for use with electric aircraft with flow batteries. No doubt the exercise is also considering the mundane but non-trivial issues of integration of the flow battery system with an airframe, and how ground support would be handled.
* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("Kalashnikov Unveils Latest AK Assault Rifle" by Miko Vranic, 24 August 2018), the legendary Russian Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle persists in the 21st century in the form of its refined descendants. The Kalashnikov organization has now unveiled the latest of the family, the "AK-308".
The AK-308 is chambered for the standard NATO 7.62x51 millimeter round. This round was derived from the commercial .308 round for the .308 Winchester rifle; Kalashnikov has been offering a commercial "Saiga 308" rifle on the civilian market for over a decade. The AK-308 is very similar to the AK-12 and AK-15 assault rifles, which are respectively based on the 5.45x39 millimeter round -- a Russian round, originally developed for the AK-74 in the 1970s -- and the 7.62x39 millimeter -- another Russian round, developed for the original AK-47.
The AK-308 differs from its stablemates in having a beefed-up barrel assembly, derived from that of the RPK 7.62x39 light machine gun, and its stablemates the 5.45x39 RPK-74 and RPK-16 light machine guns. The AK-308 is capable of semi-automatic, three-round burst, or full automatic fire; but it is not intended for use with the box or drum magazines of the RPK series.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* COSMIC DAWN: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Astronomers Detect Light From The Universe's First Stars" by Elizabeth Gibney, 28 February 2018), it is well-known that the Universe started out in the "Big Bang", about 13.8 billion years ago. Astronomers have now indirectly spotted light from the very first generation of stars, dating to about 180 million years after the Big Bang. Some of this light was absorbed by hydrogen, providing a signature that suggests the gas making up the early Universe was colder than estimated, suggesting the influence of dark matter.
The current thinking about the Big Bang is that it generated an ionized plasma, which cooled rapidly as the Universe expanded. About 370,000 years after the Big Bang, the plasma began to cool into neutral hydrogen atoms, plus a bit of helium and traces of lithium. The hydrogen gradually clumped together under the force of gravity, forming a first generation of stars -- an event called the "cosmic dawn".
Light from these stars would now be so faint as to be unobservable with conventional telescopes, but astronomers believed they could detect it indirectly. The Universe is filled with a cosmic microwave background (CMB) -- the afterglow of the Big Bang, the CMB being a pervasive microwave signal at a wavelength of 21 centimeters. Before the cosmic dawn, the hydrogen that filled the space between stars was in equilibrium with the microwave background, absorbing it and re-emitting it. The first light disturbed the hydrogen atoms, the result being that they absorbed more microwaves than they emitted, resulting in a dip in the intensity of the CMB.
A team under astronomer Judd Bowman of Arizona State University wanted to see what observations could say about the matter. They used a specialized instrument awkwardly named the "Experiment To Detect The Global Epoch Of Re-ionization Signature", or more conveniently "EDGES", which is an array of three small radio telescopes, sited at the Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory in Western Australia. Since our Galaxy and human-produced FM radio generate waves in the same band as the signal, that meant crunching through the observations obtained by EDGES to screen out confounding signals. Having done so, however, Bowman and his team then found predicted signal at about the frequency they expected.
It was only about a 0.1% drop in the radiation, but that was twice as much as had been anticipated. The results were so strong that the researchers spent two years making sure it wasn't due to noise or an instrumental effect. They went so far as to build a second antenna, pointing it at different patches of sky at different times. Bowman says: "After two years, we passed all of these tests, and couldn't find any alternative explanation. At that point, we started to feel excitement."
The expansion of the Universe stretches the wavelength of primordial radiation, with the stretch proportional to distance / time, and so the wavelength gives age. The researchers were able to pin down cosmic dawn to 180 million years after the Big Bang. The biggest first-generation stars quickly -- by cosmic terms at least -- burned through their lives and exploded as supernovas, emitting X-rays that raised the temperature of the gas and turned off the signal. Bowman's team estimates that event as around 250 million years after the Big Bang. Although the first generation of stars were effectively composed of hydrogen, with no heavy elements, the big stars that ended their lives in supernovas generated heavy elements and scattered them to the cosmos, leading to a second generation of stars.
As noted, Bowman's team was pleased to find the signal at the expected wavelength, but was startled at its strength. Rennan Barkana, a cosmologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, comments: "I was actually quite amazed." Barkana says the strength suggests that either there was more radiation than expected in the cosmic dawn, or the gas was cooler than predicted. Barkana believes that the gas was cooled by something -- which points to dark matter, theory suggesting it would have been cold in that era.
Barkana adds that the results obtained by Bowman's team also suggests dark matter particles are lighter than current theory envisions, no more than five times as massive as a hydrogen atom -- as compared to hundreds of times, which has been the general expectation. That may be one reason dark matter hasn't been detected yet. Barkana believes the results may lead to better approaches to detecting dark matter.
Astronomers using other observatories are now trying to duplicate the results, with an eye towards better characterization of dark matter interactions. Bowman is happy with the cross-checks on his team's finding: "We're eager for another instrument to confirm it."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* HIV HUNTERS: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Virus Detectives Test Whole-Body Scans In Search Of HIV's Hiding Places" by Sara Reardon, 19 October 2018), it's not necessarily easy to track the activities of a pathogen in the body, and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is particularly sneaky. While anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs can reduce the viral load until it can barely be spotted or is invisible, HIV doesn't go away: if a patient stops taking ARVs, the virus will bounce back, sooner or later.
That leads to the question: where is HIV hiding out in the body? New techniques are giving researchers an unprecedented ability to track how HIV travels though the bodies of people and animals, with researchers trying to find HIV's hideouts, to obtain targets for future therapies.
The troublesome thing about HIV is that it's a retrovirus: it integrates into the DNA of its host cells. Some researchers believe that the only true cure would be to hunt down and destroy all traces of HIV DNA in the host body -- but that goal is highly problematic. According to Sara Gianella, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD): "We are starting to realize that getting rid of all the HIV DNA is not completely realistic."
Gianella says that the best researchers can hope for is to keep HIV under control after infection. Her team has been investigating where the virus hides out in the body. Anti-retroviral therapy (ART) using ARVs can suppress the virus in immune cells in the blood, but early results from Gianella's research suggests that HIV can lurk within immune cells in dozens of types of tissue.
The project -- appropriately named "Last Gift" -- is examining bodies donated by people with HIV who enroll when they are within six months of death from other conditions. All participants are on ART when they sign up for the study, but some are asked to stop taking the drugs. Gianella's team collects blood samples while donors are alive, and about 50 different types of tissue after death. The samples from people who stopped ART show where HIV has rebounded, while samples from people who stayed on the drugs can provide information about the virus's reservoir. The researchers did not find HIV in the blood of their first donor, who continued taking ARVs until his death -- but they did find viable virus in nearly all of the 26 tissues they examined after he died.
Janice Clements, a pathobiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, is very impressed by the study, nobody having so methodically searched for HIV in the recently-deceased, under controlled conditions. Clements has found that HIV tends to linger in the brain and cause neurological problems, because most ARVs can't cross the blood-brain barrier. The brain becomes a "safe haven" for HIV. Her research team has also found that macaques infected with the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a close cousin of HIV, will respond to ARVs -- but SIV hides out in the spinal cord, and bounces back when the ARVs are withdrawn.
Researchers are only scratching the surface of the subject. One particularly disturbing thought is that the HIV hiding out in different tissues in the body of a single host might be different strains, further complicating treatment. Researchers also need to be able to track the migrations of HIV in a host body in living patients. A team under Thomas Hope -- a cell biologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois -- has injected macaques that bind to the virus, and are visible in positron-emission tomography (PET) scans of the monkeys' bodies.
The procedure shows that SIV spreads through mucosal cells in the animals' guts and lymph nodes within hours of infection. The research team is now treating infected macaques with ART to find out where and how quickly the drugs lower their levels of SIV. After six months of treatment, the researchers plan to stop ART treatment and scan the monkeys to see where the virus has rebounded. Later in 2018, a team under Timothy Henrich -- an infectious disease researcher at the University of California, San Francisco -- plans to begin similar PET studies on humans.
Hope believes that further progress in fighting HIV means going beyond simply finding the virus, saying that immune cells in the blood are "going to be a more minor player compared to the dark matter reservoir which we haven't really defined yet. We know it's there."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DATA SLEUTHS (5): The mobile data revolution has not just revolutionized police detective work; it has also revolutionized incarceration. Karl, for example, is a Swedish small businessman who lives in Stockholm. He went out one night and got into an altercation, to be given a sentence of six months for assault.
Under Swedish law, anyone sentenced to six months or less can apply to the Prison & Probation Service (PPS) to serve that sentence at home, under electronic monitoring (EM). Karl applied; he was 45, ran a painting firm with 23 employees, and had no previous convictions. He was allowed to serve his sentence under EM. Karl says: "It would have been a disaster if they had put me into jail -- financially, economically, and I don't know what would have happened to my marriage ... This works pretty good for me."
EM works pretty good for Sweden too, since EM costs only 15% per day of what it costs to keep people in lockup -- while gainfully employed people such as Karl continue to work, contributing to the economy, instead of draining it. EM can also be used to reduce costs at low-security lockups, where it replaces guards: an alarm sounds if a prisoner tries to walk out.
The tech for a rubber anklet with a radio-frequency identification (RFID) transmitter that sends a signal to fixed units in his home and workplace is not new, going back to the 1980s. There have been innovations, however. Some offenders are now given GPS trackers which tell police precisely where the subject is, that log and store the subject's movements, and can also be used to "geofence" restricted areas -- alerting police when, say, a sex offender gets too close to a school, or a domestic abuser to his victim's home or office.
EM sentences in Sweden come with strict schedules. Except for agreed-upon free hours for errands or family, the offender must either be at home or at work. Karl, for instance, has designated working hours of 6 AM to 5 PM, so he must leave his house at 0545 AM every morning. Officers with mobile RFID trackers drive or walk randomly past offenders' homes and places of work to ensure that they are where they should be. They also make unannounced visits to test offenders for drugs and alcohol, both of which are off-limits.
In addition to offering EM as a replacement for prison time, Sweden also allows long-term prisoners -- those who have served at least six years -- to use it to complete the last six months of their sentence at home. Although few violent criminals get "front-end" EM, rapists or murderers are still allowed to go home to serve out the last part of a sentence. One probation officer explains: "The system knows them. They have good behavior [in prison] ... They understand schedules. And they have a goal: 'I want to go home with my family and go to work'."
At least 27 countries in Europe employ EM, as well as all 50 American states. There's considerable variation in how it is used. Other Scandinavian countries use it as Sweden does, to reduce imprisonment for the many short sentences their judicial systems impose. Britain uses it to impose curfews on probationers; to let prisoners serve the last parts of their sentences at home; and as a condition of bail. Parts of Britain have also used EM with transdermal drug and alcohol monitors -- as opposed to the Swedish in person drug-testing model.
The Germans have much more mixed feelings about EM. Prosecutors tend to see EM as too soft, while many in the probation system see house arrest and the conditions imposed by monitoring with RFID as too harsh. The bottom line is that the judicious use of EM across Europe has been associated long-term reductions in prison populations and imprisonment rates.
In the USA, EM is relatively rare, accounting for only 2% of all of those under correctional control. It is not used as a form of imprisonment, instead being used to monitor those on probation and on parole, as well as for pre-trial monitoring. However, use of EM in America is on the rise: it grew by 140% in 2005-2015. Many European countries might balk at the restraint of people who haven't been convicted of a crime, but in America it happens all the time, jails being full of pre-trial detainees.
EM is likely to become well more popular in the USA. Despite Donald Trump's campaign claims of an America going to hell, the US prison population is falling, even in Republican-controlled states. The authorities are realizing that jailing people is just an expensive way to make them into nastier criminals. EM is much cheaper and much more effective in rehabilitating criminals.
However, Mats Johanssen, a senior officer with Sweden's PPS, cautions: "If you want to change someone, EM alone won't do it." In Sweden, only 17% of Swedes sentenced to EM re-offend within a year, compared to over half of those who do six months or less behind bars. That's partly because EM isn't granted to harder criminals, but also because EM is coupled to interventions such as counseling and job training. The focus of the Swedes is that rehabilitation is more important than punishment, and want to make sure people who go to prison do not go back.
Even the US custom of using EM to control people awaiting trial can have big benefits. A study from Harris County, Texas, found that defendants that had to sit in jail before trial are more likely to plead guilty, serve longer sentences and re-offend than those who are released. That could just mean the harder cases go to jail, but defense lawyers say that people jailed before trial are hobbled in putting up a good defense, and may plead guilty just to avoid a long pre-trial wait in jail. EM has also shown benefits on the other end. A study from Florida found that it reduced the risk of released felons failing to meet their parole terms by 31% -- with another analysis in Washington DC, reaching similar conclusions.
A study from Argentina even suggests that, although supportive measures like counseling obviously enhance the good results of EM, it is still effective in itself. The study looked at detainees accused of serious offenses who received EM more or less at random, and found that it cut the risk of re-offending nearly in half, compared with a prison sentence. In addition, the offenders received no counseling, education, training, or other assistance. It seems the best way to keep people out of prison may be not to send them there in the first place. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (40): The Twelfth Amendment was the last modification of the Constitution for over half a century, but how the Constitution worked in practice continued to be worked out. Indeed, even as MARBURY V. MADISON was being decided, Thomas Jefferson was working on one of the biggest exercises in presidential power in American history: the Louisiana Purchase.
The city of New Orleans and the colony of Louisiana were established by France in 1682, with the region ceded to Spain in 1762, and the Spanish then ceding it back to France in 1800 -- though control of Louisiana remained under Spanish control for the time being. The Americans were very concerned with rights of access to the Mississippi, and access to the Gulf of Mexico through New Orleans. Jefferson had not been too concerned over Spanish control over Louisiana and New Orleans, but he wasn't happy with the prospect of French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte obtaining control over the region. Spain was weak, unaggressive, and might well be willing to make a deal with the United States for purchase of Louisiana; Napoleon was strong, aggressive, and posed a military threat to the United States. French control of Louisiana would drive America into the hands of Britain -- an idea that the pro-France Jefferson did not like much.
In early 1803, Jefferson sent a delegation to Paris to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans from France. Napoleon, however, was too focused on Europe to want to be distracted by the New World, and needed money to fund his campaigns; he offered to sell all of Louisiana to America for $15 million, the purchase price including cancellation of American debts to France, meaning the USA would only have to pay $11,250,000. The purchase would almost double America's land area, Louisiana as it was then defined stretching from New Orleans up through present-day Montana.
Despite the attractiveness of the deal, there was considerable political resistance against it. Federalists weren't happy with it, one reason being that they were pro-British, and didn't like the idea of America funding France to pursue a war against Britain -- the British, of course, didn't like the idea either. Advocates of the original 13 states also were not happy with the prospect of the creation of new states, and the dilution of their influence. There was a further complication that Spain didn't like being left out of the loop, when the French hadn't yet formally taken over Louisiana.
There were also questions that Jefferson had a constitutional right to order the purchase of Louisiana, there being nothing in the Constitution that authorized the executive to acquire new territories -- but Jefferson replied that the right was implied as part of his ability to make treaties, with James Madison, his secretary of state, making a persuasive case that it was. Privately, Jefferson admitted it was a stretch, but the Constitution certainly didn't rule it out, and the proposal was more popular than not. All objections having fallen down, the treaty making the purchase was signed in Paris on 30 April 1803, with the Senate affirming the treaty on 20 October, with the Americans then taking formal control of Louisiana.
Of course, the government conducted surveys of the new territory, including the famous journey of explorers Lewis and Clark to the shores of the Pacific. The Louisiana Purchase presented America with a problematic choice: should the new states be all free? Southern slaveholders didn't like that idea. Should slavery be allowed in all of them? Anti-slavery Northerners didn't like that idea, either. The issue wasn't resolved for the moment.
Madison was elected president in 1808, to continue the policies of Jefferson. The major issue confronting Madison was the continued deterioration of relations with Great Britain. American foreign trade was caught in the middle of the protracted war between Britain and Napoleon Bonaparte's revolutionary France; both sides stepped on American toes, but the British were regarded as the worst offenders. American foreign policy had been from the start, and would continue to be, support for freedom of navigation, of the right of Americans to trade freely around the world.
In addition, the British in Canada were friendly with some of the native tribes on the western American frontier -- with the inevitable result that Britain was seen as backing the tribes in clashes with American settlers, and so became the target of resentment by Westerners.
The frictions finally grew to the point that America declared war on Britain in June 1812. This was the first American declaration of war -- and also the least enthusiastic such declaration, the vote being only about 60% in favor. Federalists were largely opposed to the war, and the military campaigns that followed were marked by fiascos and disasters; the Jeffersonian distaste for standing armies had come home to roost. Militias sometimes fought well, but too often they proved incapable of fighting effectively. Volunteer regiments, raised by the states but serving under US Army command, fought more professionally, and the Navy acquitted itself very well -- though the Navy could never do much more than harass British shipping, being no match in scale for Britain's Royal Navy.
In any case, the war was a muddle, raising sectional stresses on the Union that threatened to break it apart, the nation hitting bottom when the British temporarily seized and then burned Washington DC in 1814. The Madison Administration was saved at the last moment by a success against a British force on Lake Champlain; a peace treaty was signed in Europe, to be sent to the USA for ratification. The treaty made no real concessions to the Americans, and represented a humiliation for the Madison Administration. However, while the treaty was in transit, American forces under volunteer General Andrew Jackson scored a lopsided and bloody victory against the British at New Orleans -- allowing the Madison Administration to exit the conflict on a high note, and also tar the Federalists as defeatist, even treasonous. The Federalists faded away. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* November was a busy month for launches:
-- 01 NOV 18 / BEIDOU 3 -- A Chinese Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1557 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Beidou 3 G1" navigation satellite into orbit. It had a launch mass of 1,014 kilograms (2,235 pounds) each, and was placed in a geostationary orbit. The Beidou system is being developed and deployed in three phases:
The new Phase 3 satellites had a launch mass of 1,014 kilograms (2,235 pounds). They featured with a phased array antenna for navigation signals, plus a laser retroreflector for orbital tracking.
-- 03 NOV 18 / GLONASS M (COSMOS 2529) -- A Soyuz 2.1b booster was launched from Plesetsk at 2017 UTC (local time - 3) to put a GLONASS M navigation satellite into orbit. It was assigned the series designation of "Cosmos 2529".
-- 07 NOV 18 / METOP C -- A Soyuz ST-B booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 0047 UTC (previous day local time + 3) to put the "Metop C" weather satellite into Sun-synchronous orbit for the European Space Agency and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT).
The satellite was built by Airbus Defense & Space, and had a launch mass of 4,084 kilograms (9,004 pounds). Metop C was based on the SPOT Mark 3 satellite bus, a platform originally developed for France's SPOT imaging spacecraft. Metop C was the third member of the Metop constellation, joining the Metop A and Metop B satellites, launched in 2006 and 2012 respectively. While each Metop satellite was designed to operate for five years, both Metop A and Metop B remain in service. The three spacecraft were of the same design.
-- 11 NOV 18 / SMALLSATS x 6 -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from a facility on the Mahia Peninsula on New Zealand's North Island at 0350 UTC (local time - 11) on its third test flight, titled "It's Business Time". It carried six payloads, including:
The upper stage also carried a de-orbit dragsail technology demonstration payload named NABEO for High Performance Space Structure Systems GMBH.
-- 14 NOV 18 / GSAT 29 -- An ISRO Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark 3 booster was launched from Sriharikota at 1138 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the ISRO "GSAT 29" geostationary comsat satellite into space. GSAT 29 was built by ISRO, had a launch mass of 3,423 kilograms (7,546 pounds), and a design life of ten years. It had a payload of Ku / Ka-band transponders, with four spot beams in each band, plus an additional steerable Ka-band beam.
It also carried experimental Q-band and V-band payloads, operating at higher frequencies, and not widely used by current satellites; plus an optical communications experiment, the "Optical Communications Technology Demonstrator (OCT)". It was placed in the geostationary slot at 55 degrees east longitude to provide communications services to rural and remote parts of India.
-- 15 NOV 18 / ES'HAIL 2 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2046 UTC (local time + 5 ) to put the "Es'hail 2" geostationary comsat into orbit for Es'hailSat, Qatar's national satellite communications company. The satellite was built by Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; it has a launch mass of 5,300 kilograms (11,700 pounds) and a payload of Ku / Ka-band transponders -- including secure military communications capabilities.
The satellite was placed in the geostationary slot at 26 degrees east longitude to to provide television broadcasts, broadband connectivity, and government services to Qatar and neighboring parts of the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Es'hail 2 also carried an amateur radio payload, named "AMSAT Phase 4A (AMSAT P4A)", flown as a result of a partnership between Es'hailSat, the Qatar Amateur Radio Society (QARS) and Germany's AMSAT DL, part of the global amateur satellite radio community.
AMSAT-P4A consisted of two transponders: a narrowband transponder for conventional analog communications, and a second wideband transponder, to be used for digital communications including the first spaceborne Digital Amateur Television (DATV) beacon. Es'hail-2 was the first geostationary satellite to carry an amateur radio relay. The Falcon 9 first stage performed a soft landing on the SpaceX recovery barge in the Atlantic. This was the second recovery of the stage.
-- 16 NOV 18 / PROGRESS 71P (ISS) -- A Soyuz FG booster was launched from Baikonur at 1814 UTC (local time + 6) to put a Progress tanker-freighter spacecraft into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) supply mission. It docked with the ISS Zvezda module two days after launch. It was the 71th Progress mission to the ISS.
-- 17 NOV 18 / CYGNUS 10 (NG 10) -- An Orbital Sciences Antares booster was launched from Wallops Island off the coast of Virginia at 0901 UTC (local time + 5) to put the 11th operational "Cygnus" supply capsule, designated "NG 10", into space on an International Space Station support mission. It docked with the station two days after launch. On the way up, it released three nanosatellites:
The booster was in the Antares 230 configuration, with two RD-181 first stage engines and a Castor 30XL second stage.
-- 18 NOV 18 / BEIDOU 3 x 2 -- A Chinese Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1800 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Beidou 3 M17" and "Beidou 3 M18" navigation satellites into orbit. They had a launch mass of 1,014 kilograms (2,235 pounds) each, and were placed in a medium Earth orbit with an altitude of 21,500 kilometers (13,350 miles) and an inclination of 55 degrees. They were third-generation satellites.
The Beidou system is being developed and deployed in three phases:
The new Phase 3 satellites had a launch mass of 1,014 kilograms (2,235 pounds). They featured with a phased array antenna for navigation signals, plus a laser retroreflector for orbital tracking.
-- 19 NOV 18 / SHIYAN 6, SMALLSATS x 4 -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Jiuquan at 2340 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Shiyan 6" satellite into Sun-synchronous orbit. It was apparently a secret military payload, vaguely described as to be "used for conducting space environment exploration experiments".
Shiyan means "experiment" in Chinese, and previous satellites in the series included Shiyan 7 -- which gained attention in 2013 when it flew very close to another Chinese spacecraft, apparently testing close-in navigation and rendezvous techniques, and demonstrating a robotic arm. Other Shiyan satellites have tested digital stereo Earth-imaging technology in orbit.
The launch also included four smallsats:
[21 NOV 18] EU KR / VEGA / MOHAMED VI-B -- A Vega booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 0142 UTC (previous day local time + 3) to put the "Mohammed VI-B" optical surveillance satellite into Sun-synchronous orbit for the government of Morocco. It was one of two such satellites obtained from a collaboration of Thales Alenia Space and Airbus Defense & Space, intended for both civil and military observations.
Details of the satellites are secret, but it is believed they are based on the Airbus AstroSat 1000 bus, also used with France's two Pleiades Earth observation satellites, and two Falcon Eye spacecraft ordered from Airbus by the United Arab Emirates. The Pleiades satellites, which provide imagery for civil and military purposes, were launched in 2011 and 2012. Each had an imaging resolution of 70 centimeters (2.3 feet). The Falcon Eye satellites will be launched no earlier than 2019.
-- 29 NOV 18 / HYSIS -- An ISRO Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) was launched from Sriharikota at 0428 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the ISRO "Hyperspectral Imaging Satellite (HySIS)" Earth observation satellite into Sun-synchronous orbit. Hysis was built by ISRO and was based on the constructed by ISRO around the Indian Mini Satellite 2 (IMS 2) bus.
HySIS had a launch mass of 380 kilograms (838 pounds), and carried a hyperspectral imaging payload, consisting of two imaging spectrometers: the first operating in the visible and near-infrared parts of the spectrum, the second operating in shortwave infrared. HySIS could image the Earth in 55 spectral bands, with a maximum resolution of 30 meters (98 feet) across a 30-kilometer (18.6-mile) swath of the surface. HySIS had a design of five years. It was intended for both civil and military surveillance.
The launch also included 30 smallsats, mounted around two circular plates attached to the rocket below its own payload adapter. The biggest was "Global 1", the first element of an Earth-imaging constellation being deployed by American company BlackSky Global. Global 1 was constructed by Spaceflight Services, and had a launch mass of 56 kilograms (123 pounds). Its payload was a 24-centimeter (9.4-inch) telescope to image the Earth's surface at resolutions of up to 90 centimeters (35 inches). BlackSky plans to deploy a constellation of up to sixty satellites.
The remaining 29 smallsats were all CubeSats, including:
The PSLV was in the "core alone (CA)" configuration, with no solid rocket boosters. PSLV CA is one of three PSLV variants: the original version of the rocket, PSLV G, features six additional solid rocket motors clustered around the first stage, while the PSLV XL uses larger SRMs. This was the 45th flight of the PSLV.
-- 30 NOV 18 / RODNIK x 3 -- A Rockot booster was launched from Plesetsk Northern Cosmodrome in Russia at 0227 UTC (local time - 4) to put three "Rodnik" military store-&-forward communications satellites into orbit. The Rodniks are secret, but are believed to be militarized versions of the "Gonets M" civil comsats, which have a launch mass of 280 kilograms (617 pounds) and are built by ISS Reshetnev.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIVE ME A SECOND: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("With Better Atomic Clocks, Scientists Prepare To Redefine The Second" by Edwin Cartlidge, 1 March 2018), current atomic clocks used as time standards lose one second every 200 million years. However, for metrologists, that's still unsatisfactory. A further-refined time standard could help improve spacecraft navigation, or assist physicists in measurements of fundamental constants. The main push for a better clock in the present is to replace current clocks, tuned to a specific microwave frequency, with clocks tuned to higher-frequency visible light.
A paper released in early 2018 by a research group set by the International Bureau of Weights & Measures (BIPM) in Sevres, France, laid out the agenda. Physicists at the US National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) Boulder Laboratories in Colorado have already claimed a hundred-fold improvement in accuracy over the best microwave clocks, using a pair of optical clocks.
The grandfather clock, the most stereotypical mechanical clock, keeps time by counting the regular swings of a pendulum; the original definition of the second was defined in terms of the length of the day. Contemporary atomic clocks instead generate a microwave beam at the precise frequency to excite atoms of cesium-133; the second was defined in 1967 as 9,192,631,770 cycles of that beam. The best operational cesium clocks are accurate to 1.6 parts in 10^16.
The frequency of visible light is on the order of 100,000 times greater than that of microwaves, with visible light promising a comparable improvement in precision. However, the lasers needed to "cool" (immobilize) atoms so they can be a stable reference at visible-light frequencies are challenging to build. Encouraged by advances in laser technology, a few years ago BIPM began a review of optical clock technology, with the paper the group released defining five milestones in the development of operational optical clocks.
The first milestone may have been met by Andrew Ludlow and colleagues at NIST. The NIST team set up two optical clocks, using several lasers to cool and trap a few thousand ytterbium atoms in an "optical lattice", and then excite a particular energy transition in those atoms. They got the cross-checking clocks to tick at within 1.4 parts in 10^18, over 100 times better than the best cesium clocks.
The NIST work hasn't been validated yet, and validation is tricky: if a clock is developed with a level of precision well above that available on existing clocks, what could be used to prove it's really that precise? That's why the NIST researchers used dual clocks, to crosscheck each other. Jerome Lodewyck, a physicist working on strontium lattice clocks at the Paris Observatory's Time-Space Reference Systems laboratory, believes the NIST result "is probably correct," but that when it comes to changing the second, "probably correct is not good enough." Any sort of confounding influence, such as a stray electric field, could throw off two clocks together, and wouldn't be noticed.
Of course, the BIPM road map calls for crosschecks with separate labs -- and also for crosschecks between different types of clocks. The NIST researchers and workers at JILA, a research institute nearby in Boulder, are actually working on alternative clocks, comparing the ytterbium clocks to others that rely on strontium atoms and aluminum ions. Ludlow claims the measurements are not far off the desired accuracy, and that once they've finished, they can compare results with labs in Europe or Asia.
Ludlow's team is focused on clocks based on lattices of neutral atoms, since they only have to run for a few hours before stabilizing at their desired accuracy. Rival clocks based on single trapped ions might take weeks to stabilize -- though he admits that single-ion clock technology has been improving rapidly.
Patrick Gill, a laser physicist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington UK, believes the switchover to optical clocks shouldn't take place while the technology is advancing so quickly. Gill suggests that officials might agree on a new clock, and a new definition of the second to go along with it, when the world's top metrological body -- the General Conference on Weights and Measures -- meets in 2026. The organization meets every four years, with the 2018 conference also addressing updates to other metric base units: the kilogram, ampere, kelvin, the mole.)
Ekkehard Peik, head of the time and frequency group at Germany's National Metrology Institute in Braunschweig, is even more cautious. He points out that current cesium clocks are very good, and there's not that much need at present for better clocks. Of course, every metrologist wants better tools, but he judges that it might be better to wait until the early 2030s to select a new time standard. The research community doesn't need to shave seconds to come up with a much better clock.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AFRICA'S BABY GLUT: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Africa's High Birth Rate Is Keeping The Continent Poor", 22 September 2018), Africa has a problem of too many babies -- but not all Africans see it as a problem. John Magufuli, president of Tanzania, announced in 2016 that state schools would be free, and so women could throw away their contraceptives. More recently, he denounced birth control as a marker of parental laziness, stating that Tanzania shouldn't suffer from a shrinking labor force.
No worries about that, since Tanzania's fertility rate is estimated to be 4.9, meaning the average woman will have that many children. Europe's rate is 1.6. Africa's population is exploding. In 1950, sub-Saharan Africa had just 180 million people, a third of Europe's population. By 2050, it will have 2.2 billion people, three times as as Europe. UN forecasts suggest sub-Saharan Africa will have 4 billion people in 2100.
Citizens imply both a national resource and an overhead. Too few people, then productivity suffers; too many people, then it's impossible to care for or educate them. Europe has a "dependency ratio" -- that is, the ratio of non-working children and retirees versus working folk -- of 65%, skewed towards retirees. However, sub-Saharan Africa's dependency ratio of 129%, skewed toward children.
Bill Gates -- along with his wife Melinda, head of the Gates Foundation -- points out that humanity, overall, is getting wealthier, but it's the poorer parts of the world that have the highest birth rates, which makes poverty and sickness hard to eradicate. Gates says: "Kids are being born exactly in the places" where it is hardest to get schooling, health, and other services to them.
It is not inevitable that Africa will continue to have high birth rates. Botswana's fertility rate is 2.6, down from 6.6 in 1960, while South Africa's rate is 2.4. Sudden baby busts in countries like Brazil, Iran, and Thailand confounded UN estimates. Might Africa also spring a surprise?
UN's demographers project that fertility will fall in all mainland African countries over the next few decades -- but project that the decline will be much slower than it was in Asia or Latin America. It took Asia 20 years, from 1972 to 1992, to go from a fertility rate above five to below three. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to complete the same journey in 41 years, ending in 2054. Its fertility rate is not expected to fall below 2 this century.
The UN expects the decline in Africa to be slow, because it has been slow, and estimates can only be based on experience. Three things might still drive the curve drastically downward:
Progress on all three fronts falls overwhelmingly to African leadership, who need to set up more and better schools, provide security for their people, and invest in family planning. The era of Big Man leadership and kleptocracies is not quite over in Africa, but responsible and competent leadership is growing. What progress is made remains to be seen.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DATA SLEUTHS (4): Smartphones have become an extension of one's self -- personalized, crammed with personal information. Police have found them extremely useful, with desktop systems that help them bypass password protection, and then download data from the smartphone for assessment. The police can perform "logical extraction" to obtain immediately accessible data: stored text messages, emails, pictures, and instant messages. With more time and effort, they can perform a deeper "physical extraction", revealing more information, including data that may have been deleted. The desktop system neatly organizes the extracted data so that it can then be viewed, saved, shared, filtered and searched.
Police officers can also hand-carry a tablet-type device that does a basic device search, allowing them to determine if a deeper search is merited. Crime scenes were once about fingerprints and footprints; today evidence is obtained from mobile devices and connected cars.
The wide use of such intrusive technologies by the police of course raises privacy concerns. Most countries have laws protecting homes from intrusive searches; but such laws were established before the days of smartphones, and their applicability to modern digital tech is unclear. Cloud computing makes the issue even foggier. According to Adam Ghetti, a cyber-security entrepreneur: "The law and the constructs that it was built on were written at a time when everything you had was near you and could be touched." That's not true any more: "The average human in a developed country has more data that they created in a faraway place than in a tactile place at home."
One of the inevitable consequences has been the spread of encryption technology. During the course of this decade, it's gone from optional and occasional, to an effective necessity. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger offer end-to-end encryption, meaning that messages can be read only by the sender and the receiver. While it's still possible to know who sends and receives -- metadata -- only the sender and receiver can read it. Even the companies handling the message transfer can't read the messages.
That means law enforcement has to get their hands on the phones of the sender or receiver to read the messages -- which, of course, means breaking into the phones. Breaking into smartphones has been getting ever harder as vendors improve security. Apple's iPhone is notably hard to break into, and Apple is always looking for ways to make the iPhone even harder to crack. Android phones are softer targets, but they're improving as well. In the USA, police cannot compel a suspect to divulge a password, that being private information, but they can compel a suspect to log into a phone with a thumbprint or face recognition -- fingerprints and faces being unconcealed, and so not private.
Police don't have the same problems with hauling in metadata. They can use surrogate mobile-phone relays, known as "Stingrays", that will trick mobile phones into hooking up to them, instead of a real mobile-phone tower. Via the metadata, police can find out which websites a user visited, the people the user texted and called, as well as the "International Mobile Subscriber Identity", a unique number associated with the phone. It can also give the police a user location.
According to the ACLU, at least 73 agencies in 25 states in America use Stingrays, though that's almost certainly an underestimate. Not surprisingly, Stingray users try to keep them under wraps. Privacy advocates see two problems with Stingrays:
Although police claim they use Stingrays to catch suspected terrorists and drug kingpins, they are more often used in routine police work, without warrants or oversight.
Police also monitor what people do on their mobile phone through social-media analytics. Most users expect their postings and preferences to be tracked and analyzed -- but in 2016 Geofeedia, an analytics firm, had its access to Facebook and Twitter yanked after revelations that it marketed itself to law enforcement as a way to monitor "overt threats" such as unions and activist groups. Shortly after they obtained the Geofeedia service, police in San Jose, California, used the service to check out Sikh and Muslim protesters.
Social media, of course, is open to the world, and so it clearly isn't entitled to the same privacy protections as a user's smartphone. If anybody can read a Facebook posting, how can the police be excluded? One might as well post onto a public billboard -- the only difference being that the billboard wouldn't get as much exposure.
Nonetheless, users of social media don't like the idea of police reading their postings. This reality points to the deep confusions over privacy in the digital age. The privacy customs and laws established for the landline and newspaper age are outmoded. Laws are changing; the European Court of Justice ruled in 2016 that blanket metadata collection and retention violates privacy laws, and America's Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that police need a warrant to search an individual's mobile phone.
However, the laws are not keeping up. Our lives are increasingly dominated by digital data that tells everything about us. We want access to ever more information; but we don't want access to information to be used against us. Nobody has an absolute right to privacy, with privacy necessarily balanced against a public need for transparency. How privacy and transparency can be balanced is going to take a generation to work out. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (39): The election of 1800 had another consequence of constitutional significance. While John Adams was a lame-duck president, waiting to replaced by Thomas Jefferson, he made a number of judicial appointments, which became known as the "midnight judges". One William Marbury of Georgetown was appointed a justice of the peace in Washington DC -- but hadn't received his commission before Adams left office. Jefferson decided the commission was null and void, and so Marbury, along with three other "midnight judges", sued James Madison, Jefferson's secretary of state, to obtain his commission, with the case going to the Supreme Court.
The case of MARBURY V. MADISON was heard and decided in early 1803, with the court unanimously deciding against Marbury, and Chief Justice John Marshall writing the decision for the court. Although Marshall stated in the decision that the plaintiffs were entitled to their commission, he concluded that SCOTUS had no authority to issue a "writ of mandamus" -- a court order demanding appropriate action from officials -- to the Jefferson Administration. Marshall believed the court lacked authority because the Judiciary Act of 1789, which supposedly granted such authority, was judged unconstitutional in part. Marbury never got his commission.
The exact details of the legal reasoning by which the Marshall court partially struck down the Judiciary Act of 1789 are obscure; the short form is that the court judged the act gave SCOTUS broader jurisdiction than was supported by the Constitution. Many legal scholars since that time have disagreed with the Marshall court on that issue, with the suggestion that the rationale was disingenuous, that SCOTUS was trying to dodge the bullet in a no-win situation:
The Marshall court sidestepped the issue, saying Marbury was in the right, but there was nothing SCOTUS could do about it. That hardly makes MARBURY V. MADISON seem like a masterpiece of jurisprudence; worse, Marshall had been John Adams' secretary of state, and had failed to deliver Marbury's commission. Under modern rules, Marshall would have been forced to recuse himself.
The significance of MARBURY V. MADISON is that it established the right of SCOTUS to perform judicial review. The court did not invent that right, it had been seen as a necessary right of the Supreme Court in the framing of the Constitution, Hamilton writing in FEDERALIST #78:
BEGIN QUOTE:
A constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges, as a fundamental law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought, of course, to be preferred; or, in other words, the Constitution ought to be preferred to the statute, the intention of the people to the intention of their agents.
END QUOTE
However, the right of judicial review was not formally granted by the Constitution, and it was a bold step for the court to lay claim to it -- Marshall writing in the decision for MARBURY V. MADISON: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." This was a neat play of the cards -- taking an essentially petty case, tapdancing around it, and then using it to assert the power of SCOTUS. It ended up being the first major judgement by John Marshall in his long tenure with SCOTUS, which would leave him permanently regarded as one of the greatest chief justices. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: Moment INC -- a maker of camera-oriented smartphone accessories -- has now come out with an "anamorphic" lens that attaches to the company's case for the iPhone and other supported smartphones. The lens, which is snapped to one of Moment's smartphone cases, is rectangular in configuration, not round as in conventional lenses, with a cylindrical surface that "stretches" the scene being photographed to a wide-screen format, a third more of the scene being squeezed into the image.
Of course, this requires the camera software to expand the recorded image appropriately, a scheme known as "desqueezing". Moment's own app does the desqueezing; using of the default camera app will require massaging later. Moment has posted sample videos using the lens to Youtube, and they are cinematic eye candy. Currently, Moment supports a number of iPhone models, Google Pixels, as well as Samsung Galaxy and Note devices. The company has cases that provide a boost battery or a shutter button. Pricing for the anamorphic lens is $150 USD.
* In local gimmick news from Loveland CO, residents Alan and Amy Franklin have set up a nonprofit named "Farms For Orphans" -- which, at the moment, is focusing on improving food supplies for orphanages in the Congo. The orphanages don't have any land to grow food; however, they can grow palm beetle larvae, AKA grubs, the palm beetle being a native of the Congo.
All that's needed is plastic containers, with sugar cane as a feedstock, kept under temperature control. It takes about two weeks to grow them to harvest size, with a fraction set aside to produce a next generation of grubs. The grubs are fried, or stir-fried with vegetables, and are said to taste like breakfast sausages. Congolese already like to eat them, with the grubs commanding a good price in markets. They are nutritious, being rich in protein.
The Johnsons got interested in the project after adopting two Congolese kids in 2013. They are now setting working beetle farms in the Congo.
* In other gimmick news of Loveland CO, in an echo of the article on the adoption of aerial cablecar transport networks in Latin America -- as discussed here last year -- a local entrepreneur is proposing such a transport system for the local area.
Interstate 25 runs south to north through eastern Colorado, in the flatlands east of the Rockies. In northeast Colorado, the cities of Loveland and Fort Collins are offset to the west of I-25, with State Highway 34 running east from Loveland to intersect I-25. At that junction, there are shopping malls / commercial complexes straddling the intersection, with the Loveland-Fort Collins Regional Airport to the north on the west side of the freeway.
The scheme, being pushed by developer Martin Lind, is to link the two mall complexes and the airport with an aerial cablecar system. The gondolas would be able to handle up to 15 people, and would attain top speeds of 6 meters per second -- about 13 MPH. The cars would be automatically parked during periods of low demand. Lind envisions that ultimately, the cablecar network would extend to central Loveland and Fort Collins, with maximum length of runs being about 13 kilometers (8 miles).
The scheme appears to be mostly intended as a promotional gimmick, and its practical feasibility is of course a good question -- but, on the encouraging side, if it can be sensibly done in Loveland CO, it can be done almost anywhere.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CRATER UNDER THE ICE: As discussed by an article from NEWYORKTIMES.com ("Ice Age Asteroid Crater Discovered Beneath Greenland Glacier" by Nicholas Saint Fleur, 14 November 2018), every now and then an asteroid smashes into the Earth, producing a impact crater. The craters tend to weather and be covered up, so they're not always obvious. Now researchers have found an impact crater buried under the Greenland ice that is big enough to swallow up Washington DC.
Kurt Kjaer, a geologist at the Center for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, led the research team that found the crater. In 2015, Kjaer and a colleague were inspecting a NASA map of Greenland, when they noticed an enormous circular depression on the Hiawatha Glacier at Greenland's northwest tip. Kjaer recollects: "There was a hidden landscape starting to take shape. We looked at it, and said: WHAT IS THAT?"
Kjaer thought about the car-size meteorite on display in the courtyard near his office in Copenhagen, which had coincidentally been recovered from the northwest of Greenland. The two men joked that maybe the depression was a meteor crater -- and then wondered it might just be a meteor crater. Kjaer says: "There's only so many ways you could create a circular feature beneath an ice sheet."
Kjaer's team got in touch with Joseph MacGregor, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who dug up archival radar data. MacGregor found that NASA aircraft often flew over the site on their way to survey Arctic sea ice, and the instruments were sometimes turned on, in test mode, on the way out. The radar images showed what looked like the rim of an impact crater, but could have been produced by a volcanic caldera as well. However, impact craters contain central peaks and peak rings, which form at the center of a newborn crater when -- like the splash of a stone in a pond -- molten rock rebounds just after a strike.
For three days in May 2016, his team flew over the area of interest in a Basler BT-67 -- a rebuilt turboprop conversion of an elderly Douglas DC-3 / C-47 airliner. The BT-67 carried ice-penetrating radar, tracing grid lines across the surface. Funding for the survey was provided by Carlsberg Foundation, which uses profits from its global beer sales to finance science. MacGregor lobbied to allow the Germans to operate out of the US Air Force's Thule Air Base in Greenland.
The aerial survey confirmed that the ice sits on top of a huge pit with an elevated, circular rim and uplifting structures in the center, all signs of an impact crater. The team's analysis showed that the Hiawatha crater is nearly 300 meters (1,000 feet) deep and 32 kilometers (20 miles) in diameter, making it one of the Earth's 25 biggest impact craters -- though it's much smaller than the 145-kilometer (90-mile) Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan, left by the asteroid impact that marked the end of the age of dinosaurs.
The bowl of the crater presses right against the edge of the Hiawatha glacier, its semi-circular appearance hinting at the crater. Emerging from the semicircle is a white tongue of ice, a large river containing sediments from the bottom of the ice sheet. Kjaer flew to the floodplain by helicopter and collected sediment. The samples included pieces of highly shocked quartz, clear signs of a violent impact they had occurred at some time in the area's history. The sediments also had high concentrations of nickel, cobalt, chromium, gold, and platinum, an indicator that the meteorite was made of iron.
Currently, the researchers believe the impact was of an iron meteor almost a kilometer across. From a few hundred kilometers away, the fireball of its downward passage would have been four times bigger and three times brighter than the Sun. The impact would have released energy equivalent to 700 one-megaton hydrogen bombs, penetrating into the bedrock. Rock debris could have reached as far away as Europe and America, with the released steam, a greenhouse gas, locally warming Greenland, and melting more ice.
The team has not yet searched for traces of ejected material from the impact in Greenland ice cores, and so don't know yet exactly when the impact took place, other than it was less than a few million years ago. There are features of the crater that are still jagged, suffering little erosion by water drain out of the glacier, and so it may be less than 100,000 years old.
It is tempting to think the impact occurred at the start of the "Younger Dryas", 12,800 years ago, when temperatures dropped by 8 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, and stayed that way for a millennium. However, available core samples don't back up that idea. The researchers intend to obtain more samples. Kjaer says: "Even though we have looked into the planet's surface so much, with every type of equipment, the Age of Discovery is not over yet."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* PROFITING FROM CLIMATE CHANGE: Climate change threatens major changes on the world, generally not for the better. However, as discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("Climate Change Will Get Worse -- These Investors Are Betting on It" by Christopher Flavelle, 8 October 2018), it inevitably presents opportunities as well.
In a 2018 note to clients, Michael Cembalest -- an official of JPMorgan Asset Management -- described the threat, in particular noting that sea level rise (SLR) could threaten the 40% of Americans who live in coastal regions. He then pointed out the investment opportunity: "A storm surge barrier system protecting New York City and parts of New Jersey could cost $2.7 million per meter." That comes out to a lot of money, with governments forced to turn to bonds or privatization to cover the cost.
2018 was another year of record hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. A small but growing number of hedge funds, pension plans, and other investors are now exploring strategies to take advantage of those signs of climate change. The investments include storm and flood protection along the coast, desalination plants in drought-prone regions, new approaches to agriculture, and even land far from the ocean for when rising seas shift the real estate market.
There's a certain necessary fatalism to the calculations, the assumption being that the world is not going to head off the worst effects of climate change. James Everett -- partner and co-founder at Ecosystem Integrity Fund, a venture capital investor in San Francisco -- comments: "There is no way at this point to stop climate change. Pretty much every system is going to have to change. We're going to have to adapt to this."
Traditionally, investors who are thinking about climate change have been interested in technologies that reduce emissions, such as renewable power and electric vehicles. Mitigation and adaption require a more pessimistic outlook. Climate change, for example, means more stress on food production and fisheries. Very well, that gives opportunities for alternative crops, indoor farming, and fish farming.
In some cases, there's been a quick payoff for people who can think on their feet. Rod Hinze is a portfolio manager at Key Point Capital in Dallas, Texas. A week before Hurricane Harvey pounded Houston, Hinze invested in hotels -- whose prices were soft, because of fears the storm would keep visitors away. However, after the storm hit, there was a huge demand for housing. Hinze says: "We saw occupancy go to 100% in a lot of those hotels,"
Climate change has also meant more demand for innovative insurance schemes to protect against what Barney Schauble -- managing principal at Nephila Advisors LLC -- labels "weather risk." Schauble says his company recently helped a water utility that was worried about increasingly unpredictable precipitation patterns, devising a scheme to protect the utility. Since 2017, the money coming in for weather-risk protection has doubled.
David Vogel, founder and chief executive officer of the Florida-based Voloridge Investment Management LLC, says he believes rising seas and worsening storms and droughts will create opportunities in health care, insurance, and agriculture. He didn't comment on the firm's plans, but said he had purchase land around Asheville NC, on the expectation that property values will rise as the sea level does. Vogel says: "It's 2,000 feet above sea level. Living in Florida, that's where I see a lot of people moving."
The municipal bond market also interacts with climate change. Jonathan Bailey of Neuberger Berman Group LLC, says his company analyzes the climate risk facing different cities, the goal being to find out which ones are more or less exposed. Credit rating firms have been slow to factor climate risk into bond ratings. As a result, Neuberger can buy and hold bonds issued by cities with lower climate risk without paying a premium over bonds issued by cities facing greater threats from storms and other disasters. Bailey says: "If the market then changes its perception of those relative risks, then that can create an opportunity for us to then sell."
Schauble adds that the general public's failure to appreciate the risks of climate change is part of what makes it such a good area for investing. He says that's especially true in the USA: "There is not a single other country where anybody smart isn't a believer in these things. If you can see something that other people just refuse to see, and you can make decisions on that basis, I suspect over the longer term that is going to put you in good stead."
None of the fund managers and advisers interviewed for this story had any doubts about climate science. Some, however, worried that they could be perceived as exploiting a slow-motion catastrophe. That would be along the lines of shooting bearers of bad news, but nonetheless Vogel says: "I would love to give up these investment opportunities in a second if people would listen and stop polluting the environment." He consoles himself by suggesting his investment activities help alert the public to the threat: "If people are making money off it, that gets attention."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DATA SLEUTHS (3): Bodycams are relatively new; closed-circuit TV (CCTV) surveillance cameras are well-established. London has one fixed camera for every 20 people, while Washington DC has about one for every 22. However, in the past, surveillance cameras have left much to be desired: their imagery tends to be low quality, they may be poorly sited, they have incompatible video formats, and trying to sort through floods of imagery is time-consuming. After the terrorist bombing of a concert hall in Manchester in 2017, British police had to wade through more than 16,000 hours of CCTV footage.
Nick Neville, an experienced veteran of the London Metropolitan Police and now boss of his own forensic facial-recognition firm, says that police find usable CCTV images in only 2% of reported crimes in London. He says: "That's because they don't have systems in place. There are too many cameras; too many formats; maybe they're working; maybe not."
In short, CCTV is of limited use without consistency, technical effectiveness, and a system to exploit it. Artificial intelligence -- machine learning -- is making surveillance much more powerful. With AI, cameras can recognize faces, while AI in the system can watch out for suspicious incidents and flag them, or sift through thousands of hours of video to pick the relevant components. Although China is a leader in surveillance tech, there's plenty of activity in the field in the West as well.
The potential for abuse is obvious. It is estimated that roughly half of all American adults, most of them not criminals, have images of their faces stored in FBI-accessible databases, with similar biometric databases in other countries -- and all of them are growing. People from minority groups with disproportionately high arrest rates are more likely to be in such databases, and so disproportionately likely to be targeted by dragnet surveillance.
* Although the police are acquiring much more sophisticated means of surveillance, in an age of smartphones citizens can stare back at the police. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has released an app through which citizens can automatically send it recordings of police interactions, while mobile-phone cameras have recorded the deaths of a number of African-Americans killed by police. Footage of the death of one, Walter Scott, led to the indictment of the officer who shot him.
However, the police have a one-sided advantage with ALPRs, which allow them to drive around, indiscriminately logging via license-plate numbers the whereabouts of cars belonging to people not suspected of crimes. Vigilant Solutions, an ALPR firm, has a database of at least 7 billion data points from license plates, most of them presumably belonging to the innocent. Using a license-plate number of a suspect, police can then inspect the ALPR database to track their past movements.
It is reality that license plates are intended as a surveillance and identification measure; supporters saying they're only sorting through readily-available data, and that the data are securely stored. However, there are no widely-accepted standards for storage and information sharing. In 2015 a journalist in Boston found the city's entire license-plate database online, including the addresses of everyone with a city parking permit, and the names of thousands of people suspected -- not convicted, suspected -- of being terrorists or gang members.
There's also the problem of unscrupulous individuals misusing the data. A policeman in Washington DC, was convicted of extortion for blackmailing the owners of cars parked near a gay bar. ALPR firms say what they do is constitutional, since in the US public photography is seen as compatible with the First Amendment, which protects free speech. However, just because something is constitutional doesn't mean it deserves an unlimited free pass. Even the International Association of Chiefs of Police has admitted that ALPRs could have an impact on freedom by recording vehicles going to political gatherings, abortion clinics, or other sensitive venues.
Those suspicious of surveillance technologies suggest that ALPRs, and CCTV with facial recognition, give the authorities a time machine. If they identify a suspect, they can go back through the data archives and get a detailed history of what the suspect had been doing. A suspect, of course, has not been convicted, and that sort of intrusiveness can be seen as overbearing for a person who may not have actually have committed a crime.
Police argue that they always dig into a suspect's history, and always have. The new technology just makes it easier to do it better, and sometimes deeper. On the same side of that coin, doesn't it also make it easier to abuse? [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (38): The Twelfth Amendment is more or less straightforward, and defines the way things are done in a US presidential election today: two parties select their presidential and vice-presidential candidates as a pair, or "ticket", with the vice-presidential candidate now a "running mate", not a likely rival. The Constitution, as originally ratified, was blind to political partisanship; the Twelfth Amendment altered the Constitution to both recognize and promote the roles of political parties.
Given that the Constitution is always more complicated than it looks -- no matter how hard one looks -- on close inspection, the 12th Amendment doesn't seem so simple:
The Twelfth Amendment was a big improvement on what came before -- a tribute to the recognition of the Framers that the Constitution had to be, and would be, adapted -- but it would prove no cure-all. It would suggest that, when it comes to constitutional law, there's no such thing as a cure-all.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Island Living Can Shrink Humans" by Ann Gibbons, 2 August 2018), biologists are familiar with the evolutionary "island effect", which states that when food and predators are scarce, big animals shrink and little ones grow. On Cyprus, hippos shrank to the size of sea lions; on Flores in Indonesia, extinct elephants were about as big as a large hog, while rats grew as big as cats.
However, nobody was sure as to whether the same principle explains the most famous example of dwarfing on Flores: the extinct hominin called the hobbit, which lived 60,000 to 100,000 years ago and stood about a meter tall. Now, genetic studies of modern pygmies on Flores -- not related to the hobbit confirms that humans are also subject to island dwarfing.
An international team of researchers found that that modern Flores pygmies differ from their closest relatives on New Guinea and in East Asia in carrying more gene variants that are markers of short stature. The genetic differences testify to recent evolution, meaning the island effect at work. That gives a big hint that the same evolutionary forces drove the short stature of the hobbits.
Princeton postdoc Serena Tucci set out to study the Rampasasa pygmies of Flores, who average just 145 centimeters (57 inches) tall. The late Indonesian paleoanthropologist Teuku Jacob had controversially proposed that the Rampasasa people inherited some traits from the hobbit, which he judged a modern human. Tucci and Ed Green of the University of California at Santa Cruz went to Flores and, with the permission of the pygmies, obtained spit and blood from 32 of them. The team, which included Indonesian researchers, performed partial DNA sequencing of all the test subjects, and full sequencing of ten of them.
They uncovered no archaic DNA that could be traced to the hobbit, instead finding the pygmies were most closely related to other East Asians. The DNA suggested that their ancestors came to Flores in several waves: in the past 50,000 years or so, when modern humans first reached Melanesia; and in the past 5,000 years, when settlers came from both East Asia and New Guinea.
The pygmies' genomes also reflect an environmental shift, carrying an ancient version of a gene that encodes enzymes to break down fatty acids in meat and seafood. It seems the underwent a big change in diet after arriving in Flores, eating more marine foods and possibly pygmy elephants. Of course, the pygmies' genomes are also loaded with alleles linked to short stature. Other East Asians have the same height-reducing alleles, but at much lower frequencies. The implication is that the genomes of the ancestors of the modern pygmies were screened by selection to reduce height.
* As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Project That Spots City-Killing Asteroids Expands To Southern Hemisphere" by Traci Waton, 14 August 2018), over the past few decades, astronomers have been setting up telescopes to track asteroids, the primary objective being to spot one that is going to hit Earth. Major asteroid strikes don't happen very often, but they can be cataclysmic when they do. "Spacewatch" networks, as a secondary objective, also spot comets, supernovas, and other less threatening celestial objects.
The US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) has operated a spacewatch system, and now plans to expand it into the Southern Hemisphere, which currently doesn't have such a capability. NASA will provide $3.8 million USD over the next four years to support the construction and operation of two asteroid-hunting observatories south of the Equator. One facility will be South Africa; the location for the second is under discussion.
The observatories will join two existing telescopes on the islands of Maui and Hawaii, which are part of the "Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS)", run by the University of Hawaii. The two robotic 50-centimeter (20-inch) ATLAS telescopes are focused on picking out small objects that are close to Earth, within 7.5 million kilometers (4.7 million miles) of the planet. They conduct rapid scans of the entire sky, with software picking out fast-moving objects.
In June 2018, ATLAS was able to provide data on the trajectory of a 1.8-meter (5.9-foot) diameter asteroid designated "2018 LA" that swept over Africa. Researchers were subsequently able to find fragments of this space rock in Botswana. Since it began observations in 2015, ATLAS has discovered 171 asteroids whose path brings them close to Earth's orbit.
Three Northern Hemisphere observatories, including ATLAS, spotted more than 95% of the 2,057 near-Earth asteroids discovered in 2017. However, about 30% of the southern sky is not currently being monitored. According to Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer for NASA in Washington DC, adding two relatively inexpensive will allow astronomers "to cover the entire night sky every day or two to provide as much warning as we can."
A southern presence for ATLAS is also attractive to astronomers because the southern sky is interesting in its own right. Matthew Holman, director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, comments: "If you want to look at the Galactic center, that's where you want to be." He adds that the new telescopes could provide data across the entire range of astrophysics.
* As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("Invasion Of Big, Voracious Lizards Threatens US South" by Jon Herskovitz, 3 August 2018), Florida is noted for invasive species, most notably pythons that have been spreading through the swamplands. Now South America tegu lizards, which can grow to a length of 1.2 meters (4 feet), have established two large colonies, after being brought to the state as pets.
A new study suggests they could expand from the Carolinas to central Texas. Lee Fitzgerald -- a professor at Texas A&M University, curator of its Biodiversity Research & Teaching Collections, and one of the co-authors of the study -- comments: "They are voracious, omnivorous predatory lizards that can live in a variety of habitats, but we can't know what is going to happen or how intense this invasion is going to become until the effects are upon us."
In South America, the hefty lizards range widely east of the Andes and include species such as the Argentine black and white tegu. They have strong jaws and tails that they can use as bludgeons. Tegu owners describe their pets as big, calm, and occasionally affectionate lizards that like sunning themselves, and are unfussy about what they eat. However, they can also be antagonistic and troublesome to handle.
The lizards living free in Florida eat the eggs of American alligators and ground-nesting birds; they also like insects, fruit and birds. Nobody has a good handle on the size of the free-living populations, but clusters of tegu lizards are found in at least two counties -- Miami-Dade and Hillsborough, home to Tampa. There have been sightings in other parts of the state, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
On private lands, hunters can kill tegus as long as they don't use excessively cruel means to do it. On public lands, the state is trying to get rid of the lizards using traps. A commission official pleads with owners of exotic pets: "Don't let it loose."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* YEAR OF TWILIGHT: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Why 536 Was 'The Worst Year To Be Alive' by Ann Gibbons, 15 November 2018), when medieval historian Michael McCormick -- chair of the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past -- is asked what the worst year in human history was, he doesn't mention the pandemic years of 1349 or 1918, instead replying: "536." He adds: "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year."
In that year, a mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into days of twilight and starless nights, for 18 months, with Byzantine historian Procopius writing: "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year."
Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell by 1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit), resulting in the coldest decade for over two millennia. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. In 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt, with the "Plague of Justinian" spreading rapidly, to kill off one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire.
Exactly where the killer clouds came from was long a mystery, but now an ultra-precise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski -- at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono -- has zeroed in on the source. The team reports that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536, in much the same way that the eruption of the Icelandic volcano of Laki overwhelmed Europe in 1783 -- as discussed here in 2008.
The 536 event was worse, however, since two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice -- a spike in airborne lead -- indicates a resurgence of silver mining.
Ever since tree ring studies in the 1990s suggested the summers around the year 540 were unusually cold, researchers have hunted for a cause. In 2015, polar ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica provided a clue. When a volcano erupts, it spews sulfur, bismuth, and other substances high into the atmosphere, resulting in an aerosol veil that reflects the Sun's light back into space, cooling the planet. By matching the ice record of these chemical traces with tree ring records of climate, a team led by Michael Sigl, now of the University of Bern, found that nearly every unusually cold summer over the past 2,500 years was preceded by a volcanic eruption. A massive eruption -- possibly in North America, the team suggested -- stood out in late 535 or early 536; another followed in 540.
Mayewski and his interdisciplinary team decided to look for the same eruptions in an ice core drilled in 2013 in the Colle Gnifetti Glacier in the Swiss Alps. The 72-meter (235-foot) long core entombs more than 2000 years of fallout from volcanoes, Saharan dust storms, and human activities right in the center of Europe. The team probed the core using a new ultra-high-resolution method, in which a laser carves 120-micron slivers of ice, representing just a few days or weeks of snowfall, along the length of the core. Each of the samples -- about 50,000 from each meter of the core -- is analyzed for about a dozen elements. The approach enabled the team to spot storms, volcanic eruptions, and lead pollution down to the month or even less, going back 2000 years.
In an ice sample from the spring of 536, UM graduate student Laura Hartman found two microscopic particles of volcanic glass. By bombarding the shards with x-rays to determine their chemical fingerprint, she and volcanologist Andrei Kurbatov found they closely matched glass particles previously earlier in lakes and peat bogs in Europe and in a Greenland ice core -- which in turn resemble volcanic rocks from Iceland. It's a suggestive connection, though it doesn't rule out an eruption in, say, North America.
Either way, the winds and weather systems in 536 were just right to channel the eruption plume southeast across Europe and, later, into Asia, casting chilly gloom over the land as the volcanic fog spread misery. The researchers are now hunting for more particles from this eruption in lakes in Europe and Iceland, in order to nail down its location in Iceland and figure out why it was so devastating.
Of course, the record of the Swiss ice core didn't stop there. Since silver is smelted from lead ore, the lead spike of 640 suggests the metal was in demand, following almost a century of economic depression. A second lead peak, in 660, marks a major infusion of silver into the medieval economy. According to archaeologist Christopher Loveluck of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, the silver smelting suggests gold had become scarce as trade increased, forcing a shift to silver as the monetary standard. Loveluck says: "It shows the rise of the merchant class for the first time."
Much later, in 1349 to 1353, lead disappeared from the atmosphere, while the Black Death ravaged Europe -- as discussed here in 2005. Loveluck is enthusiastic about the new ice-core analysis method: "We've entered a new era with this ability to integrate ultra-high-resolution environmental records with similarly high resolution historical records. It's a real game changer."
[ED: The fascination with the new tool only partly masks the unease of considering what would happen if a similar eruption took place in the near future.]
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* BOEING WINS STINGRAY AWARD: US aerospace giant Boeing seems to be on a roll these days, having won the US Air Force's "T-X" competition for an advanced trainer -- and now the firm has won an award from the US Navy, for the "Carrier-Based Aerial-Refueling System (CBARS)", with the Boeing "MQ-25 Stingray" drone.
The Stingray has complicated roots. The story more or less began in 2006, when the Navy initiated the "Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance & Strike (UCLASS)" program, which was to develop a stealthy carrier-based combat drone to perform strike missions. In 2012, the strike mission was de-emphasized, with UCLASS being refocused on the "intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR)".
In 2016, the program did what looked like a full turnaround, to be focused on the carrier-based tanker role, with ISR and communications relay as possible secondary missions, and strike being put off as a future. That was the origin of CBARS. Four companies entered proposals, the competitors including General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing. Northrop Grumman dropped out early, company officials saying they didn't believe they had a good fit to requirements.
Although Boeing MQ-25 benefited from the company's "Phantom Ray" drone demonstrator, the Stingray is clearly a different design. While the Phantom Ray was a flying wing, the MQ-25 has a pumpkin-seed shaped fuselage, with an engine intake on the back, with slightly-swept wings set well back, and a shallow vee tail. There's a stores pylon under each wing, the prime function being to carry a fuel tank or tanker pod. The MQ-25 has tricycle landing gear, the main gear tucking into the fuselage, the nose gear retracting backward.
The nose gear has twin wheels and a catapult attachment; there's an arresting hook under the rear fuselage. The drone has an estimated length of 19 meters (62 feet) and wingspan of 12 meters (39 feet). The aircraft is powered by a single Rolls-Royce AE 3007N turbofan engine delivering 44.1 kN (4,500 kgp / lbf) thrust. Boeing will build four MQ-25 developmental prototypes, with first flight in 2021, and introduction to service no earlier than 2024. The initial buy is expected to be up to 72 machines.
It may seem a bit baffling that with the MQ-25, the Navy started out with a request for a drone strike aircraft, with ISR capabilities, and ended up with a tanker drone instead. On reflection, it does make sense: the Navy has a requirement for more tanker capability, and buying relatively cheap drones is much more cost-effective for the job than buying more expensive Super Hornets. While the MQ-25 is more or less a stealthy design, that's really a plus for a tanker, since it allows it to operate in hostile airspace. In addition, by focusing on the tanker mission, the MQ-25 will get into service well faster.
In short, the Navy will acquire a fleet of useful and capable drones that will pay their own way, and allow the Navy to experiment with using them in other roles, such as strike or ISR. The notion floating around when UCLASS was begun was that drones would replace crewed aircraft -- but now the image is that crewed aircraft will remain on the top of the pyramid, with drones assisting them. Imagine a Super Hornet directing a strike, one fighter flying with three drones, the pilot being a mission commander. Robots are not replacing humans; they are instead making humans more capable.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: Dutch police discovered a cache of money amounting to 350,000 euros, or about $400,000 USD, hidden in an old washing machine. A 24-year-old man was arrested; the charge was -- and I am not making this up -- money laundering.
* As for the Real Fake News for November 2018, the Big Thing was the mid-term election on 6 November. There was some hope that the Democrats would win by a "Big Blue Wave", but the results weren't spectacular. They were, however, good for the Democrats:
The most interesting thing was that the election went pretty much as forecasted, suggesting that we've reached a "new normal", and aren't likely to get nasty surprises in future elections like we did in 2016. The Democrat loss in the Senate was disappointing, but it wasn't surprising; the ratio of Democrat to Republican seats up for grabs was about 2:1, and there was some relief among Democrats that the losses weren't worse. Indeed, after the 2016 election, the GOP held 52 seats, so the net loss from that perspective was only one seat. The ratio switches to 1:2 in the next two elections, so the Democrats can be expected to do better. Retaking the Senate in 2020, however, is a toss-up. Overall, the Democrats had much to be happy about.
One of the Senate races, involving a Texas seat contested between incumbent GOP Senator Ted Cruz and Democrat Beto O'Rourke, who had done three terms in the House, ended in defeat for O'Rourke -- but it brought him national attention. Although he wasn't expected to win, he gave Cruz a tough run for his money; Texas is a deep Red state, Barack Obama didn't get a single electoral vote there in 2008 or 2012, losing by a stiff margin. O'Rourke doesn't have good opportunities in the next elections in Texas, so now he has clearly become a presidential contender. Enthusiasm for O'Rourke is starting to grow, since he's young, charismatic, not too far Left, but far Left enough. The battle for the Texas seat was bitterly contested, and so it is clear O'Rourke has no skeletons in his closet; they would have been discovered and dragged out otherwise.
Nancy Pelosi, the current House minority leader, will become majority leader and Speaker of the House. Some of the newcomers said they wouldn't vote for her as Speaker, saying a new face is required. The protest was a clearly theatrical exercise, since the newcomers weren't able to propose an alternative. When the House Democrats voted for their candidate for Speaker late in the month, Pelosi won hands down, though the rebels wouldn't vote for her. It remains to be seen if they will all refuse to vote when the entire House votes for Speaker. It would certainly look absurd for them to allow the House Republicans to select the Speaker.
The day after the election, 7 November, Trump fired his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Trump had long complained about Sessions' refusal to interfere in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian tampering in the 2016 election; it's nothing unusual for the White House to have a shake-up after mid-terms, and Trump decided to give Sessions the boot. He is being temporarily replaced by Matthew Whitaker of the Justice Department.
Whitaker has criticized the Mueller investigation in the past, and his appointment was seen as a lever to sideline the exercise. There were objections from the Senate because he hadn't been vetted by Congress, and may not remain as attorney general for long. If Trump was trying to derail the investigation, he appears to be too late in any case, rumor having it that Mueller is now writing up his final report. Nobody knows what it will say, but the litter of indictments and convictions that have taken place in the course of the investigation are suggestive.
* In any case, the election gave Donald Trump little to boast about. As might be expected, he complained about election fraud, saying trash like the Democrats had recruited large numbers of illegal aliens to vote the Democrat ticket. There was some fuss about rigged elections on the Left too, but all of Trump's fans managed to drown that out. Commenters suggested this may a template for Trump in 2020, should he fail in his re-election bid.
Trump then went to France to attend a ceremony with European leaders to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I, on 11 November. The trip did not go well for him. He canceled a visit to a cemetery of American soldiers because of rain, which led to loud hoots of derision from his critics. More substantially, French President Emmanuel Macron used a speech at the commemoration ceremony to blast the resurgent spirit of nationalism in the world, as an implicit rebuke to Trump:
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Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. By putting our own interests first, with no regard for others, we erase the very thing that a nation holds dearest, and the thing that keeps it alive: its moral values.
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On his return to the USA, Trump then ran into another squall at home on 13 November, when a spokesperson for his wife Melania issued a statement all but demanding the removal of Assistant National Security Advisor Mira Ricardel. That was a surprise, coming from Melania, who avoids controversy; what made it particular startling was that she went public with it, which is most unusual for a first lady, hinting that was the only way she could think of to get her husband's attention. It appears that Ricardel was much like her boss, National Security Advisor John Bolton, being bullying and abrasive; when she was abusive to Melania's staff, Melania put her foot down, with Ricardel being reassigned to another job.
On top of this, the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in October has left the Trump Administration in an extremely difficult position, not made better by Trump's public statements that the matter wasn't important -- what was important was Saudi Arabia's economic significance to the USA.
Reports came out of the White House that Trump, not usually the most pleasant person to work for, was in an unusually beastly mood. During most of 2018, Trump engaged in various grandstand plays, mostly attempts to shoot down Obama's legacy -- but now he's exhausted them all, and all he's got is the same old tricks, and he's running out of steam. A Gallup poll released late in the month shows his public disapproval rating has reached 60%.
To add to the noisiness, a petty flap blew up in the media about Ivanka Trump using private email for government business. It was all great nonsense -- but given how Trump had made a staggeringly overblown fuss about Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, it's impossible to think that the Democrats would pass up the opportunity to shoot back.
And finally, near the end of the month, the government released a document on climate change, saying that it was likely to become frightfully tough to deal with as the years went by. The White House blew it off. That was no surprise at all; the fun part is that the House Democrats are unlikely to let the matter ride. Trump has placed himself in a compromised and vulnerable position by arbitrarily rejecting a report put together by his own administration. The House Democrats are sure to exploit it, calling administration officials to testify, indirectly encouraging lawsuits against administration policy -- and Trump's contempt for material facts will not play well with the judiciary.
As a late-breaking note, Trump has pushed back on the Democrats, threatening to declassify "devastating" documents if they want to "play rough". To the extent that any attention was paid to such theatrics, the response was amusement. If Trump really had something, why hasn't he used it? Releasing secret documents might well backfire on the administration, since it may have more to hide.
Trump also started making noises -- again -- about a government shutdown. If he does it, he's likely to shoot himself in the foot in the process: "It's not gonna happen, deal with it, Donald." In addition, he also threatened to kill off the NAFTA trade treaty unless Congress ratifies his revised NAFTA treaty. That was obviously a bluff; Trump is inclined toward hostage-taking to try to pressure Congress into knuckling under, but it's never worked. It never will work.
The second season of the Trump show was different from the first, and the third promises to be different again. Things were not going smoothly for the White House even when the GOP had control of both houses of Congress; they're going to get rougher now.
* I might add that local Colorado elections went generally well. Unfortunately, state measures to raise funds for such tasks as infrastructure repair didn't fly, but a Loveland school levy passed -- it's about time! A state initiative to assign districting to an impartial commission, in principle eliminating gerrymandering, did fly. It's not clear gerrymandering was a real problem in Colorado, but as more states move against it, that should increase pressure on states that do gerrymander to clean up their act.
Finally, we elected Jared Polis -- previously the representative in Washington DC for my congressional district -- as governor. He's the first openly gay governor in the history of the state. OK, whatever; that wasn't why I voted for him. Nonetheless, I find it amusing, particularly since it flames off the troglodytes.
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