Wednesday, 31 July 2024

Unparalleled Insight – Ancient Fossil Discovery Shows How South America and Africa Drifted Apart

By SOUTHERN METHODIST U., JULY 29, 2024


A research team led by SMU discovered ancient rocks and fossils in Angola that provide the most complete geological record of the splitting of South America and Africa and the formation of the South Atlantic Ocean. These findings, dating back 130 to 71 million years, offer a unique view of the continents’ separation, with Angola’s coast showcasing each phase of this significant geological event.

Rocks and fossils found in Angola by an SMU-led research team offer an unparalleled view of the formation of the South Atlantic Ocean, illustrating the split of South America and Africa that began about 140 million years ago.

A research team led by Southern Methodist University (SMU) has discovered that ancient rocks and fossils of long-extinct marine reptiles in Angola provide clear evidence of a crucial event in Earth’s history: the separation of South America and Africa and the formation of the South Atlantic Ocean.

With their easily visualized “jigsaw-puzzle fit,” it has long been known that the western coast of Africa and the eastern coast of South America once nestled together in the supercontinent Gondwana — which broke off from the larger landmass of Pangea.

The research team says the southern coast of Angola, where they dug up the samples, arguably provides the most complete geological record ever recorded on land of the two continents moving apart and the opening of the South Atlantic Ocean. Rocks and fossils found date back from 130 million years ago to 71 million years.

“There are places that you can go to in South America, for instance, where you can see this part of the split or that part of it, but in Angola, it’s all laid out in one place,” said Louis L. Jacobs, SMU professor emeritus of Earth Sciences and president of ISEM. Jacobs is the lead author of a study published in The Geological Society, London, Special Publications.

“Before this, there was not a place known to go and see the rocks on the surface that really reflected the opening of the South Atlantic Ocean, because they’re now in the ocean or eroded away,” Jacobs said.


(From left) SMU paleontologists Diana P. Vineyard, Louis L. Jacobs, and Michael J. Polcyn, standing with fossils found in Angola. 
Credit: SMU, Hillsman S. Jackson



Angola rocks and fossils tell the whole story

Africa and South America started to split around 140 million years ago, causing gashes in Earth’s crust called rifts to open up along pre-existing weaknesses. As the tectonic plates beneath South America and Africa moved apart, magma from the Earth’s mantle rose to the surface, creating a new oceanic crust and pushing the continents away from each other. And eventually, the South Atlantic Ocean filled the void between these two newly-formed continents.

Scientists have previously found evidence of these events through geophysics and well cores drilled through the ocean floor.

But these tell-tale signs have never been found in one place, or been so clearly visible for anyone to see, said study co-author Michael J. Polcyn, research associate in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences and senior research fellow, ISEM at SMU.

“It’s one thing for a geophysicist to be able to look at seismic data and make inferences from that,” he said. “It’s quite another thing to be able to take a school field trip out to the rock formations, or outcrops, and say this is when the lava was spreading from eastern South America. Or this was when it was a continuous land.”

Essentially, Angola presents the opportunity for someone to easily walk through each phase of this geologically significant chapter in Earth’s history.

“That gives Angola major bragging rights,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs, Polcyn, and Diana P. Vineyard – who is a research associate at SMU – worked with an international team of paleontologists, geologists, and others to analyze both the rock formations they found in eight different locations on the coast and the fossils within them.

Fieldwork in Angola’s Namibe Province began in 2005. At that time, the research team recognized particular types of sediments, which gave them a good indication of what the western coast of Africa had been like at various stages millions of years ago. For instance, fields of lava revealed volcanic outpourings and faults or breaks showed where the continents were being rifted apart. Sediments and salt deposits showed ocean flooding and evaporation while overlying oceanic sediments and marine reptiles showed completion of the South Atlantic Ocean.

Paleontologists, meanwhile, discovered fossils in Angola from large marine reptiles that had lived late during the Cretaceous Period, right after the Atlantic Ocean was completed and while it grew wider.

By bringing together experts from a wide range of fields, “we were able to document when there was no ocean at all, to when there was a fresh enough ocean for those reptiles to thrive and have enough to eat,” Vineyard said.


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Beyond Expectations: Reforestation Can Remove 10x More CO2 From the Atmosphere Than Previously Estimated

By DUKE U., JULY 30, 2024

Research indicates reforestation in low- and middle-income countries is highly effective for carbon sequestration, suggesting a dual approach of natural forest growth and tree planting can optimize results. Financial strategies, including carbon payments and timber sales, support the cost-effectiveness of these methods. 
Credit: SciTechDaily.com

A study in Nature Climate Change suggests that reforestation in developing countries can sequester up to ten times more carbon at lower costs than previously estimated.

The research advocates for a balanced approach using both natural regeneration and tree planting to optimize carbon capture. Economic incentives like carbon payments and timber sales can further enhance the viability of these reforestation efforts.

Global Impact of Reforestation in Developing Countries

Reforestation in low- and middle-income countries can remove up to 10 times more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at lower cost than previously estimated, making this a potentially more important option to fight climate change, according to a study published on July 24 in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Reforestation regrows trees on degraded lands where human activities removed original forests. Most current reforestation programs focus on tree planting alone, but the study estimates that nearly half of all suitable reforestation locations would be more effective at sequestering carbon if forests were allowed to grow back naturally.


Tree nursery in Madhesh Province, Nepal. 
Credit: Jeff Vincent



Economic Viability of Reforestation Methods

“Wood markets are one key to large-scale reforestation,” said co-author Jeff Vincent, professor of forest economics and management at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “In more than half the areas we studied, timber plantations sequester carbon at a lower cost than forests that grow back naturally.”

Carbon sequestration captures and stores carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which reduces greenhouse gases and helps combat climate change. It can be done naturally by plants or through technology. In countries that are among the most affected by deforestation, but least resourced to reforest, determining how to allocate scarce funding to sequester the most carbon can be a challenge.

Balancing Reforestation Approaches

“A mix of planted and naturally regenerated forests is often the best way to balance society’s many demands on forests,” said Vincent. “That’s what we find for the case of carbon.”

“This more biodiverse method of reforestation is vastly underutilized,” said Jonah Busch, lead author of the study, who conducted the research as a Climate Economics Fellow at Conservation International.

Financial Incentives for Carbon Sequestration

Using a mix of the two reforestation methods – replanting the forest in some locations, and letting nature take its course in others – could sequester more carbon than using only tree planting or natural regeneration alone, the researchers calculate.

Carbon payments made by companies and other organizations looking to offset, or cancel out, their own greenhouse gas emissions are one way to incentivize reforestation.

“Carbon payments can provide a sufficient reforestation incentive on their own in some places,” said Vincent. “While the net cost of carbon sequestration can be reduced in other places by earning income from sustainable wood harvests.”

Analysis of Reforestation Costs

That net cost is the total expense involved in capturing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, minus any savings or benefits gained from the process. If a project generates income from timber sales or wood products, for example, that brings down its net cost.

Which method is more cost-effective, natural growth vs. planting trees, in a given location depends on multiple factors. Variables include forest growth rates; proximity to natural seed sources for natural regeneration and wood-processing mills for plantations; the value of land in its current use, typically some form of agriculture; the costs of implementing each method, typically much lower for natural regeneration; and, for plantations, the frequency of timber harvests and the duration of carbon storage in wood products.

Strategic Mapping for Effective Reforestation

The research team modeled these factors for the two reforestation methods. The result is a world map showing which reforestation method is more cost-effective by location.

“We hope our map will help governments, companies, and other organizations use their forest restoration budgets more efficiently,” said Vincent.


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How much did pine beetles stoke conditions for the Jasper wildfire?

By T. Izri, Global News, Posted July 31, 2024 - Updated July 30, 2024

screenshot only 

A tiny pest leaving behind a graveyard of trees across Canadian forests may have helped stoke some of the conditions for the devastating fire in Jasper, but the biggest drivers were heat and dryness, climate and forest scientists say.

“So much of the forest had been impacted by mountain pine beetle outbreak, and we had those dead fuels accumulated and then down on the ground contributing to the intensity of the fire,” said Lori Daniels, a professor in the University of British Columbia’s department of forest and conservation sciences.

The mountain pine beetle has ravaged pine trees across Alberta and British Columbia for the past two decades, boring into bark, drying out needles, and transforming swaths of wilderness from green to rust.

More than 18 million hectares of Canadian forests have been affected “to some degree,” according to Natural Resources Canada.

“They kind of look like pickup sticks in the forest. They’re very flammable in these hot, dry summers,” said Daniels, who has studied the history of Jasper National Park.

The mountain pine beetle population dropped after last year’s particularly cold winter in Alberta, but began to rebound in recently warmer temperatures, says Chris Bone, a geography professor at the University of Victoria, who has researched the pine beetle extensively.

“With climate change (and) warmer conditions, their populations increase, and up goes tree mortality,” Bone said in an interview with Global News.

The fire in Jasper spread with lightning speed and destroyed 30 per cent of the townsite, including more than 300 buildings.

Parks Canada has faced questions about whether it could have done more to prevent the fire’s explosive spread, including mitigating the effects of the mountain pine beetle.

The federal agency says since 1996 it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars fighting the insect, including carrying out “prescribed burns.”

“Pine beetle is through hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest. Short of bulldozing all of that or burning all of it, or mechanically removing all of it, we work to minimize risk,” Parks Canada president and CEO Ron Hallman said at a news conference Monday.

“There is nothing any human on earth or any piece of equipment could have done standing in front of that wall of fire that would have allowed them to stop it.”

Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault also defended the federal government’s fire prevention efforts.

“To think that over all those decades, we would not have deployed all of the resources necessary to try and do everything that is humanly possible to protect a town from a forest fire is simply, simply not true.”

Bone says he is not “convinced” Parks Canada could have done much to slow the fire down.

“Mountain pine beetle has definitely contributed to the increase in wildfires over the years. However, I think that picture gets muddied a lot now given how hot and how dry conditions are becoming,” he said.

“If you were to ask that question 15 years ago, I think you’d probably get a different response…. Climate is such a main driver of these fires right now, whether they’re occurring in mountain pine beetle areas or not.”


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Tuesday, 30 July 2024

Cannibal CME Is About to Deliver Spectacular Auroras to Earth's Atmosphere

30 July 2024, By M. STARR

An X-class solar flare that erupted on 29 July. (NASA SDO)

Rampant solar shenanigans are about to slam Earth and make some real purty lights in the sky.

In recent days our Sun has erupted repeatedly, unleashing several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and solar flares in Earth's direction. It's unclear when exactly the blasts of CME material will arrive at Earth, but the next few nights are forecast to come alive with dancing auroras.

The reason? There's a cluster of sunspot regions speckling the solar equator, currently rotating right past Earth as it belches out fire and fury.

At time of writing, the past 24 hours had seen six M-class flares and one X-class flare erupt from the Sun. These are bright flashes of light that appear on the surface of the Sun, which coincide with emissions of X-rays and ultraviolet radiation that can cause brief communications blackouts here on Earth.

X-class flares are the most powerful flares the Sun can produce; M-class flares are the category just below X-class.

In addition to the solar flares, the Sun has been spewing out huge eruptions of solar plasma tangled with magnetic fields that propagate through the Solar System. These are CMEs, and they sometimes occur with solar flares. Both are strongly associated with sunspot regions, where the solar magnetic field becomes tangled, snaps, and reconnects, unleashing huge bursts of energy.

Sunspots across the solar disk at time of writing. 
(NASA SDO)



Here on Earth, such activity is unlikely to interfere much with day-to-day life, but CMEs can cause geomagnetic storms when they slam into Earth's magnetosphere. The exchange of energy can cause major disturbances in Earth's magnetic field, upper atmosphere, and plasma environment.

And, of course, there are the auroras. Particles from the CME and solar wind smack into Earth's magnetic field, and get diverted and accelerated along the magnetic field lines to the poles, where they are dumped into Earth's upper atmosphere. There, interactions with particles within the ionosphere creates beautiful glowing lights, with different colors depending on the particles involved.

Earlier this year, we saw the most powerful geomagnetic storms in decades, categorized at the G5 "extreme" level. The incoming storms are not expected to be quite that powerful, but they are still forecast to be pretty amazing with some reaching G3, classified as "strong", thanks to a phenomenon called a cannibal CME that produces an enhanced delivery of solar material.

A cannibal CME occurs when two CMEs occur in relatively quick succession. If the second CME is traveling faster than the first, it will catch up and 'swallow' the slower one, becoming, in effect, one huge rolling wave of solar material heading through the Solar System.

The brunt of this impact is expected to be felt on 30 July, with aurora seen in the Northern Hemisphere as low as Pennsylvania to Iowa to Oregon, as well as Scotland, and the southernmost parts of mainland Australia in the Southern Hemisphere, as well as most of the South Island of New Zealand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i3e6KU0xAE

Even more excitingly, these currently incoming CMEs are from a glancing blow. At the time they were released, the sunspots were not quite aligned in the direction of Earth.

The rotation of the Sun has brought the spots into the middle of the solar disk, where they are positioned for maximum impact should the solar rampage continue.

With the Sun's activity peak in full swing, there's no reason to believe that it won't. So get out there, and enjoy the show.


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New reconstruction shows low Arctic sea ice cover in mid-20th century

JULY 29, 2024, by Chinese Academy of Sciences

September Arctic SIE averaged for the period 1935–45 according to 
(a) HadISST1.1, (b) SIBT1850, and (c) IAPICE1. 
Credit: Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1007/s00376-024-3320-x

An international research team presented a new reconstruction of past Arctic sea ice that revealed low levels of sea ice coverage in the 1940s.

Their results were published on July 26 in a special issue of Advances in Atmospheric Sciences commemorating the life work of Professor Yongqi Gao who passed away in July 2021. The new reconstruction can help climate scientists adjust expectations of future sea ice coverage.

"Understanding the range of sea ice multi-decadal variations in the past, when the anthropogenic forcing was several times weaker than in the present day, is key for assessing mechanisms of climate variations and predicting future changes of the Arctic sea ice," said study co-author Vladimir Semenov from the A.M. Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences.

The shrinking Arctic sea ice area in recent decades is a striking manifestation of ongoing climate change. This rapid transformation of the cryosphere has important consequences for Arctic ecosystems, society and economy, with impacts that extend to the mean surface temperature of the entire globe.

Since the late 1970s, satellites have been continuously observing seasonal variations of Arctic sea ice over decades. Sea ice variations have been relatively well monitored since the 1950s, but due to a lack of observations, there are no reliable estimates of the Arctic sea ice area in the middle of the 20th century. This period was characterized by a strong warming, known as the Early 20th Century Warming.

Previous studies established the link between surface air temperature and sea ice, which implies that the early 20th Century warming interval was accompanied by a concurrent reduction of Arctic sea ice, but the magnitude and extent of the decline were unclear.

The research team set out to understand the mystery surrounding sea ice anomalies during the 1940s, a period that instrumental observations indicate was almost as warm as today, according to study co-author Noel Keenlyside.

"Surprisingly, previous reconstructions of sea ice do not indicate a large reduction of sea ice," said Keenlyside from the Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research.

The team reconstructed the sea ice patterns in the period with poor data, before 1953, using established co-variability patterns between sea ice, sea surface temperature, and sea level pressure patterns. Constructing distinct regression models for three geographically separated regions—the Arctic Ocean, Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk—improved the fit of the models and reduced uncertainty.

"Our reconstruction using independent data provides the first strong evidence for a large decline of sea ice in the 1940s," Keenlyside said. "This is exciting, because unlike the present warming, emitted anthropogenic greenhouse gases were relatively low."

The reconstruction, called the Institute of Atmospheric Physics sea ICE reconstruction version 1, provides a new baseline for assessing internal climate variability. According to the study, the ongoing sea ice area decline is already significantly beyond the level of internal climate variability—even assuming that the Early 20th Century Warming of the Arctic was primarily caused by internal climate variability. This indicates the importance of anthropogenic forcing.

"Our data can be used as boundary conditions for atmospheric models and reanalyses," Semenov said. "Performing atmospheric model simulations for the 20th century using our sea ice reconstruction may help to identify mechanisms of the Early 20th Century Warming anomaly."

Other contributors of the research include Tatiana A. Aldonina from the Institute of Geography Russian, Academy of Sciences, Fei Li from the Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research and Lin Wang from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.


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Health and Wellness News: Tel Aviv researchers enable artificial speech for paralyzed patients using thought power

 Tel Aviv researchers enable artificial speech for paralyzed patients using thought power


Imagine speaking without using your mouth. Tel Aviv University researchers have made this possible for paralyzed individuals through a groundbreaking technology, turning thoughts into words.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH, Jerusalem Post, July 28, 2024

https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-812107

A PARTICIPANT in the experiment of the speech neuroprosthesis (speech brain-computer interface) is completely silent, with his mouth closed, imagining saying a syllable. The laptop ‘says’ the syllable for him  (photo credit: TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY)


It sounds like science fiction. People who are completely paralyzed due to brain injury, brainstem stroke, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease), and express words with their mouths can “speak” artificially using only the power of thought.


 Loss of speech due to injury or disease is devastating. Now, this scientific breakthrough by researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) and Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (TASMC) has shown the potential for speech by a silent person using the power of thought only. In an experiment, such a patient imagined saying one of two syllables. Depth electrodes implanted in his brain transmitted the electrical signals to a computer, which then vocalized the syllables.


The study was led by Dr. Ariel Tankus of TAU’s School of Medical and Health Sciences and the medical center, together with Dr. Ido Strauss of TAU’s School of Medical and Health Sciences and director of the hospital’s functional neurosurgery unit. 


The results of this groundbreaking study have just been published in the prestigious journal Neurosurgery, which is the official publication of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, under the title “A speech neuroprosthesis in the frontal lobe and hippocampus: decoding high-frequency activity into phonemes.”



                                           Tel Aviv University (credit: Courtesy)

The novel speech neuroprosthesis (a speech brain-computer interface) artificially articulates building blocks of speech based on high-frequency activity in brain areas – the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortices, and hippocampus – that had never been harnessed for a neuroprosthesis before. 


The achievement offers hope for making it possible for people who are completely paralyzed to regain the ability to speak voluntarily.


85% accuracy

“The 37-year-old patient in the study is an epilepsy patient who was hospitalized to undergo resection of the epileptic focus in his brain,” explained Tankus. He has intact speech and was implanted with depth electrodes for clinical reasons only. During the first set of trials, the participant made the neuroprosthesis produce the different vowel sounds artificially with 85% accuracy. In the following trials, performance improved consistently. We show that a neuroprosthesis trained on overt speech data can be controlled silently,” Tankus and colleagues wrote. 


 “To do this, of course, you need to locate the focal point, which is the source of the ‘short’ that sends powerful electrical waves through the brain. This situation involves a smaller subset of epilepsy patients who don’t respond well to medication and require neurosurgical intervention and an even smaller group of epilepsy patients whose suspected focus is located deep within the brain, rather than on the surface of the cortex.”


To identify the exact location, electrodes are implanted into deep structures in their brains. They are then hospitalized, waiting until they suffer from another seizure. When it occurs, the electrodes will tell the neurosurgeons and neurologists where the focus is, thereby allowing them to perform a precise operation. 


From a scientific perspective, this provides a rare opportunity to get a glimpse into the depths of a living human brain, the researchers said. Fortunately, the epilepsy patient hospitalized at TASMC agreed to participate in the experiment that could ultimately help completely paralyzed individuals to express themselves again through artificial speech.”


How it works

In the experiment’s first stage, with the depth electrodes already implanted in the patient’s brain, the team asked him to say two syllables out loud: /a/ and /e/. They recorded the brain activity as he articulated these sounds. Using deep learning and machine learning, the researchers trained artificial intelligence models to identify the specific brain cells whose electrical activity indicated the desire to say /a/ or /e/. 


Once the computer learned to recognize the pattern of electrical activity associated with these two syllables in the patient’s brain, he was asked to only imagine that he was saying /a/ and /e/. The computer then translated the electrical signals and played the pre-recorded sounds of /a/ or /e/ accordingly.


“My field of research deals with the encoding and decoding of speech –how individual brain cells participate in the speech process – the production and hearing of speech, and the imagination of speech, or ‘speaking silently,’” Tankus continued. 


“In this experiment, for the first time in history, we were able to connect the parts of speech to the activity of individual cells from the regions of the brain from which we recorded. This allowed us to differentiate among the electrical signals that represent the sounds /a/ and /e/. At the moment, our research involves two building blocks of speech, two syllables. Of course, our ambition is to get to complete speech, but even two different syllables can enable a fully paralyzed person to signal ‘yes’ and ‘no.’”


They believe that in the future, it will be possible to train a computer for an ALS patient in the early stages of the disease, when they can still speak. The computer would learn to recognize the electrical signals in the patient’s brain, making it possible for the computer to interpret these signals even after the patient loses the ability to move their muscles. “And that is just one example. Our study is a significant step toward developing a brain-computer interface that can replace the brain’s control pathways for speech production, allowing completely paralyzed individuals to communicate voluntarily with their surroundings once again.”






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Inside the political struggle at the IPCC that will determine the next six years of climate science

JULY 29, 2024 by H Hughes, The Conversation

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The UN's climate science advisory group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is currently meeting in Bulgaria to decide on a timeline for its next "cycle" of reports over the rest of this decade. That decision should have been taken in January, but government divisions arose over aligning IPCC outputs with UN climate negotiations, at a meeting that the IPCC chair described as "one of the most intense" he had experienced.

Political struggle over the final wording of IPCC reports is well known, but this division at the start of the process reflects the organization's achievements. The more successful it becomes in disseminating climate knowledge, the more deeply imbued in climate politics it becomes.

I have studied the IPCC for 15 years and think these political factors are often overlooked. For instance, though the reports are written by scientists, governments play an integral role throughout the process. The IPCC is after all an intergovernmental body—it's governments that decide to produce the reports and give the final approval, not scientists.

Most notably, this involves the final line-by-line approval of a report's key findings in the "summary for policymakers" (the only bit most people read). Media reporting and accounts by IPCC authors frequently reveal the extent of negotiation over how the latest knowledge of climate change is presented to the public. This has lead to whole sections being deleted and open conflict between scientists and government delegates.

However, decisions made at the start of an assessment cycle are equally fraught with politics. These include electing the bureau and approving the report outline. The politics sometimes come to light, as it did when Wikileaks revealed US maneuvering to secure the election of the US co-chair candidate for a previous round of reports which were published in 2013 and 2014.

These struggles indicate the impact that IPCC reports can have on official UN climate negotiations, where its reports provide the knowledge base to inform a collective response.

Climate negotiations are characterized by major divisions between developed and developing countries and these same political issues have shaped the IPCC too. For developing countries, climate change has never been a purely scientific issue. It is a question of development, and participation in the IPCC reflects levels of economic development.

Economic resources and long-term investment are required to produce the sort of globally-recognized climate research that leads to a country becoming an influential member of the IPCC.

Although the IPCC funds the travel of some developing country authors and one government representative, developing countries remain dramatically underrepresented. At the same time, the IPCC's reports and global climate policymaking dramatically shape how a country can develop in future.

IPCC reports can also support the goals of climate negotiators and accelerate climate action. This was evident in the IPCC's special report on 1.5°C, which made world headlines when it was published in 2018, and which had challenged scientists to investigate a lower temperature target than the 2°C they had been working with.

The report legitimized the lower temperature goal and applied further pressure on governments to decarbonize faster. Concerned that their collective approval of the IPCC report would signal official endorsement of the 1.5°C goal, the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait prevented official recognition of the report at COP24 in Poland later that year.

A direct input into negotiations

The political stakes have also been raised by the IPCC being specified as a source of the "best available science" for the global stocktake as part of the Paris agreement. The global stocktake, first completed at COP28 in Dubai in 2023, is the mechanism to assess progress on climate change and increase ambition as necessary.

Serving as a direct input into the negotiations increased the political wrangling over every word in the approval of the IPCC reports' summary for policymakers. This was particularly the case for the report on mitigation, where the approval meeting ran over by two days and was branded as the longest session in the IPCC's history. The summary for policymakers grew substantially through government attempts to elaborate and re-word the report's key findings.

As co-chair of the mitigation working group, it was Professor Jim Skea that chaired most of this approval session. This is a man that knows intense meetings. This makes his comment over his experience at the IPCC meeting in January (which he also chaired) particularly noteworthy.

The success of the IPCC's previous assessment cycle (its sixth) is already marking the seventh. At the current meeting in Bulgaria, which runs until August 2, governments need to decide a timeline for the seventh assessment cycle—its next major round of reports. The reports will need to be completed by 2028 at the latest to inform the second global stocktake.

If the timeline is delayed, and the seventh assessment cycle does not inform the international response to climate change and increase collective ambition, what is its purpose? Establishing this in Bulgaria will be central to determining the success of the IPCC in future.


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Monday, 29 July 2024

Could Your Anxiety Lead to Dementia? Here’s the Latest Research

By WILEY, JULY 28, 2024

A study from the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society indicates a strong link between chronic and new onset anxiety and an increased risk of dementia, showing 2.8 to 3.2 times higher risks respectively. 
Credit: SciTechDaily.com



Research highlights a significant correlation between persistent and newly developed anxiety and a higher dementia risk in older adults, suggesting that effective anxiety management could help mitigate this risk.

In a study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, both chronic and new anxiety were associated with an increased risk of dementia. However, where anxiety had resolved, there was no association with dementia risk.

The study included 2,132 individuals with an average age of 76 years who were participating in the Hunter Community Study in Australia and who were followed for an average of 10 years. The presence of chronic anxiety and new onset anxiety were associated with 2.8- and 3.2-times higher risks of having dementia, respectively. Even higher risks were seen in adults with anxiety before the age of 70 years. People whose anxiety resolved did not have a higher dementia risk than people without current or past anxiety.

“While this sort of question cannot be subject to a randomized controlled trial, this prospective cohort study used causal inference methods to explore the role of anxiety in promoting the development of dementia,” said corresponding author Kay Khaing, MMed, of the University of Newcastle. “The findings suggest that anxiety may be a new risk factor to target in the prevention of dementia and also indicate that treating anxiety may reduce this risk.”


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Ancient Viruses May Have Given Our Ancestors The Edge to Evolve

28 July 2024, By J. COCKERILL

(Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)

Scientists have found the remnants of genomes left by ancient, giant viruses within the DNA of a single-celled organism with which complex organisms like ourselves share a common ancestor.

The discovery suggests viruses may have played a greater role in our evolution than we realized, contributing genes that may have given cells like the ancestor of the symbiotic eukaryote Amoebidium an edge in survival.

This new research comes from a team led by Queen Mary University of London evolutionary biologist Alex de Mendoza Soler.

"It's like finding Trojan horses hiding inside the Amoebidium's DNA," he says. "These viral insertions are potentially harmful, but Amoebidium seems to be keeping them in check by chemically silencing them."


Amoebidium appalachense stained with phalloidin to reveal F-actin (green) and Hoescht to reveal DNA (blue). 
(Sarre et al., Science Advances, 2024)



"Here, we show how a unicellular eukaryote closely related to animals undergoes a recurrent process of mixing its genome with that of its giant virus predators," the authors write.

Such rampant attacks on the very blueprint of the self should have a lethal outcome for the Amoebidium, but the microbes seem to have found a way to cope by silencing these foreign genes by modifying one of the four letters in the DNA alphabet using a mechanism called 5-methylcytosine (5mC).

The base cytosine, or 'C', is modified by an enzyme called DNMT1, which is found in all multi-celled organisms. The researchers wanted to find the enzyme's pre-animal roots, leading them to a protist called Amoebidium appalachense, which was first discovered hiding in the exoskeletons of freshwater insects.

They found that not only do these single-celled organisms produce DNMT1, they've used it to maintain a surprising amount of genetic material from giant viruses that have since been lost to history.

"These findings challenge our understanding of the relationship between viruses and their hosts," says de Mendoza Soler.

While viruses are traditionally seen as invaders, he says his team's study suggests a more complex story.

The researchers propose that this coping mechanism allows the microbes to not only survive the influx of giant virus DNA, but to incorporate it into their lineage.

To see if this phenomenon might be more widespread, they compared the genomes of a variety of isolated Amoebidia. They found a high level of diversity across the viral material, suggesting the process is ongoing and dynamic.

"Viral insertions may have played a role in the evolution of complex organisms by providing them with new genes. And this is allowed by the chemical taming of these intruders' DNA," de Mendoza Soler says.

And because A. appalachense is an animal relative, these findings may help us better understand a similar phenomenon going on inside our own bodies.

Humans and other mammals also have the remnants of ancient viruses entwined in their DNA. Referred to as endogenous retroviruses, they're believed to be the leftover bits and pieces of viruses that didn't manage to kill us.

Once assumed to be nothing more than inactive trophies of a failed invasion, it's increasingly thought many may have provided some benefit to still be preserved in our DNA.


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Artificial Sweetener May Be Wreaking Havoc on Microorganisms

28 July 2024, By D. NIELD


Cyanobacteria under a microscope.
 (Ed Reschke/Stone/Getty Images)



We have a problem with sucralose.

 Found in many zero-calorie foods and drinks, the artificial sweetener doesn't get broken down by the body, and as a new study shows that means it's potentially damaging the microorganisms at the very bottom of aquatic food webs.

"We can't break down sucralose, and a lot of microorganisms can't break it down, either, because it's a really tough molecule that doesn't degrade easily," says marine bioscientist Tracey Schafer, from the University of Florida.

"So there are a lot of questions about how it is affecting the environment and whether it's something that could impact our microbial communities."

The research team collected samples from both a freshwater and a brackish water site in Marineland, Florida, and exposed them to a variety of sucralose concentrations in the lab.

Sample measurements of cyanobacteria and diatoms were taken across a five-day period, revealing the artificial sweetener clearly had an impact.

Compared to control groups, cyanobacteria concentrations increased in freshwater when exposed to sucralose, and spiked and then crashed in brackish water.

As for diatoms, the broad trend across freshwater and brackish water was a reduction in populations after sucralose was added. The impact was more noticeable in the freshwater experiments, the researchers found.

"There is the potential that the freshwater communities might be mistaking sucralose for a nutrient, for a sugar that they can use as food," says chemist Amelia Westmoreland, from the University of Florida.

While this study doesn't go into detail in terms of what the long-term effects might be, it's obvious that very finely balanced natural ecosystems could be disrupted, depending on how much sucralose makes it through wastewater treatment and into the environment.

Diatoms under a microscope.
 (G Taylor, Stony Brook University/Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons)



In the case of diatoms, there's the risk that the populations might be killed off entirely. Diatoms are one of the ocean's main primary producers, and vital regulators of carbon and oxygen cycles. Their decline could significantly impact the entire food web from the bottom up.

With cyanobacteria, they could overwhelm everything else in the microbial community. Future research will be needed to look more closely at what could potentially happen.

Artificial sweeteners like sucralose have been deemed safe in standard doses in food and drink, though some studies suggest they can interfere with gut bacteria and even damage the DNA inside cells.

As with the impact on natural ecosystems, scientists are working on getting results over the longer term. It may be that reducing both sugar and artificial sweetener intake is what's best for both us and the planet in general.

"I think this study was a good first step in starting to look at how sucralose could impact our aquatic communities, and hopefully it will drive more research forward," says Schafer.


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Sunday, 28 July 2024

Archaeology News: Archaeologists uncover mural of ‘Westerner’ blond trader in ancient Tang dynasty tomb in China

Archaeologists uncover mural of ‘Westerner’ blond trader in ancient Tang dynasty tomb in China

Archaeologists in northern China uncovered a Tang dynasty tomb with well-preserved murals depicting daily life and a Sogdian trader.

By Jerusalem Post Staff, July 26, 2024

https://www.jpost.com/archaeology/article-811998


                             Han Tomb Mural, Luoyang. (photo credit: WIKIMEDIA)


Archaeologists in northern China have uncovered an ancient Tang dynasty tomb (A.D. 618-907) with remarkable murals depicting everyday life, Livescience reported mid-July.


In 2018, during road construction on a hillside near Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province in northern China, archaeologists discovered an ancient tomb. The excavations of this tomb were recently completed, and the findings were reported in June.




A Chinese Eastern Han Dynasty (25–220 AD) tomb chamber with wall decorations of nature scenes and people. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The tomb dates back to the Tang dynasty and belonged to a 63-year-old man who passed away in 736, along with his wife, LiveScience cited an article from China’s state news agency Xinhua. This discovery sheds light on the Tang dynasty which ruled much of central and eastern China from CE 618 to 907.


Vivid murals of everyday life

Inside the tomb, archaeologists found murals vividly portraying scenes of daily life during the Tang period, including men threshing grain, making noodles, and engaging in other everyday activities. However, one mural includes a “Westerner” figure with blond hair and a beard, likely from Central Asia, according to the report.


The unique mural depicts a blond man, not of Han descent, leading camels. His clothing and features suggest he is a Sogdian from Central Asia, who were known for their role as traders along the Silk Road between Asia and Europe.


The murals in the tomb are well-preserved, LiveScience noted in their report, and mainly show human figures under trees, a theme that dates back to the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE), with similar murals been found in regions like Xinjiang, Shandong, Shaanxi, and Gansu.



Stunning Tang Dynasty Mural in Tomb Unearthed in China may Portray a 'Westerner' Man with Blond Hair





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