Category Archives: Science

Cassini’s Last Moments In Space Before Landfall

For NASA’s Saturn explorer, the end will come all too quickly.

Cassini, NASA’s explorer of Saturn, remaining life is now measured in just a few days. Coming up on September 12, just three days before NASA’s veteran Saturn explorer takes a dive into the planet’s atmosphere, the spacecraft will whip around the hazy moon Titan in a slingshot maneuver that will seal its fate.

During these final days, Cassini will take one last look around. Onboard cameras will snap pictures of Titan and its hydrocarbon lakes, Saturn’s innermost rings, the bizarre hexagon-shaped jet stream at Saturn’s north pole, and other targets. On the evening of September 14, Cassini will send this last photo album to Earth, about 1.4 billion kilometers away, and the engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena will post them online.

After that, no more pictures will be taken. But seven other instruments will continue to gather data on the chemical composition of Saturn’s atmosphere, its gravity and magnetic fields, its innermost radiation belts, and its rings—for as long as they can. “We’ll be transmitting the science data back almost as fast as we gather it,” says Tom Burk, Cassini’s attitude control team lead.

Read more at http://www.airspacemag.com/

It rains solid diamonds on Neptune and Uranus

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Scientists forecast rain storms of solid diamonds on two of the solar system’s most interesting planets

The obvious question any entrepreneur might ask is how do you mine these diamonds? In short, you don’t. It would take highly advanced space drones, the likes of which not even SpaceX is ready for yet, let alone the cost of getting there and back.

But that doesn’t make the idea of diamonds raining down on a distant planet any less of a spectacular discovery, igniting space-nerd radars everywhere.

According to the scientists who ran the experiment, the diamonds form in hydrocarbon-rich oceans of “slush” found around the solid cores of these two gad giants. According to the Washington Post,

Scientists have long speculated that the extreme pressures in this region might split those molecules into atoms of hydrogen and carbon, the latter of which then crystallize to form diamonds. These diamonds were thought to sink like rain through the ocean until they hit the solid core.

Study Proves Exxon Spent Millions Misleading Public About Climate Change

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An academic study published Tuesday in the journal of Environmental Research Letters at IOPScience provides more evidence that oil giant ExxonMobil spent millions of dollars misleading the American public on climate change

While it’s not a new revelation that Exxon has intentionally misled the public regarding climate change, a Harvard team of climate scientists prove it beyond a doubt through a peer-reviewed study on Exxon’s role in swaying public opinion on climate change over the past 25 years, a first of its kind.

Although Exxon conducted their own research acknowledging both climate change and the human role in its increasing severity, the oil giant was not public about this internal research program and instead has been on the skeptical side of the climate change debate for decades. In 2015, Exxon issued a challenge on their website urging critics of their stance and communications regarding climate change to “read the documents”

In a study titled Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014), climate scientists Drs. Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University took Exxon up on their challenge and read the documents, only to find that Exxon did indeed mislead the public about climate change.

Supran painted an intense picture for the energy company, saying,

“The ExxonMobil corporation is under a lot of scrutiny right now, on at least five fronts — we’ve got the Attorneys General of Massachusetts and New York, we’ve got the securities exchange commission, and not to mention some of Exxon’s own shareholders and employees. Basically, they’re all asking roughly the same question and that’s has ExxonMobil in the past, through the way it’s communicated about climate change, misled its customers, its shareholders, or the general public?”

It turns out, they did.

While Exxon promoted skepticism about climate change through advertorials in large publications such as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Exxon had its own research team that acknowledged the danger of fossil fuels to the environment and its increasing risk and contribution to inducing global climate change, but kept it behind closed doors.

The study is published at http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f

Elon Musk Posts New SpaceX Space Suit To Instagram

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Eccentric billionaire Elon Musk posted an image of an astronaut in a SpaceX space suit to Instagram this week, saying it wasn’t just a mock-up and has actually been tested

“First picture of Spacex spacesuit. More in days to follow,” said Elon Musk on his Instagram account, following up with,

“Worth noting that this actually works (not a mockup). Already tested to double vacuum pressure. Was incredibly hard to balance esthetics and function. Easy to do either separately.”

While Tesla has been in what many are calling “production hell”, SpaceX has made some advancements in recent months with 2 successful launch landings, with another launch scheduled for this September.

Although this doesn’t mean that SpaceX astronauts will be sent out of the ships wearing these spacesuits, the suits are only meant to be worn for the ride through space to and from the International Space Station in SpaceX’s Dragon Capsule. The suit, however, definitely is a bit more futuristic than the spacesuit that Boeing revealed earlier this year for their CST-100 Starliner capsule travels.

Alternative currencies are the future: why it matters for development

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When I began to teach in 2012, I decided to start my course with an analysis of how money affects social order. What my students found particularly fascinating was the then-nascent world of cryptocurrencies, which I described at length as a crucial feature in the future of money.

Some colleagues criticised my approach. They accused me of indirectly encouraging students to invest in what they saw as a shady, crime-ridden financial underworld. But I was simply exposing young minds to a fast-evolving, complex phenomenon that in my view would have a major impact on power distribution in the global economy.

Behind most cryptocurrencies is a simple technology known as “blockchain”, a system residing in multiple computers that allows for peer-to-peer financial ledger recording of all transactions occurring in a network.

This results in a transparent open-access registry of monetary flows which makes the intermediation of banking authorities unnecessary. Thus it challenges the conventional belief that money can only work through central planning.

As I explain in my book, Wellbeing Economy: Success in a World Without Growth, money systems are undergoing an unprecedented transition from centralised authority to decentralised networks.

Conventional money is managed by states and banks, with users on the receiving end of monetary policy decisions. By contrast, most alternative currencies are peer-to-peer. That means they are managed by users themselves and do not require intermediaries. Some of them have global outreach thanks to digital technology, while others are locally based.

Take BitCoin, the most popular peer-to-peer currency in the world, with a market capitalisation above 40 billion US dollars. A person buying the equivalent of $1 in BitCoin in 2009 would now possess roughly $25 million. One BitCoin is currently equivalent in value to two ounces of gold. Other rising stars include Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple.

Taking the world by storm

Many of these currencies remain quite volatile in the short term. Their upward and downward swings reach over 10% of the value on a weekly basis. But the long-term trend is impressive. States are warming up to them.

In April 2017, Japan accepted BitCoin as a legal payment method for retail markets. After threatening digital currencies last year, the Russian government took a U-turn. President Vladimir Putin met the developers of Ethereum and committed to recognising cryptocurrencies in 2018.

Following an initial freeze, the People’s Bank of China readmitted withdrawals in BitCoin in June 2017, catapulting the currency to new heights. In the US, cryptocurrencies are becoming increasingly accepted as both a method of payment and store of value.

The Australian government will soon make it easier for new innovative digital currency businesses to operate, exempting traders and investors from goods and services tax.

It’s clear that cryptocurrencies will in the near future become much more common as methods of payment for a wide range of purchases, from online shopping to the local supermarket.

Developing countries are leapfrogging

Developing economies, too, are opening up to cryptocurrencies. In Venezuela, BitCoin has become the leading parallel currency. It provides millions of citizens with an opportunity to perform transactions and generate livelihoods, including buying food and other basic necessities in a country where official money is worth almost zero. It also allows them to purchase goods from overseas, overcoming ever-stricter capital controls.

In East Africa, local innovators have introduced cryptocurrency systems to support cross-border transactions, as exemplified by initiatives like BitPesa.

In South Africa, cryptocurrencies are becoming particularly popular. In Nigeria, local traders and activists believe this new money presents an opportunity to democratise the economy. This is propelled by the fact that people in Nigeria have been failed by conventional money.

According to my colleague Verengai Mabika, founder of BitFinance in Zimbabwe, the collapse of his country’s formal financial system has made BitCoin an attractive alternative. This is especially the case for online payments, which are restricted by banks, and for remittances, which constitute the backbone of the economy.

A growing number of Zimbabweans are also using cryptocurrencies as a saving mechanism (37% of all Bitfinance customers use it for that purpose), Verengai tells me. This is after the massive loss of personal savings during the hyperinflation period of 2008, which led to the collapse of the country’s banks.

Decentralisation and local economic development

The decentralisation of money is indeed at the core of this new trend, with potential repercussions in other fields. For instance, Ethereum is designed as a smart contract platform, that is a trading system completely based on peer-to-peer property rights. FairCoin was developed as the preferential currency for cooperatives, social economies and fair trade networks around the world.

Cryptocurrencies are just the tip of an iceberg. According to recent estimates, there are over 6,000 complementary currencies in the world, over 50 times the number of conventional money systems. Most of these are user-controllled and are interest-free. One cannot make money by simply trading in them.

Hoarding makes no sense in this new world. This is because value is not in the accumulation but in the exchange.

The scope is often limited to certain territories or types of transactions (for example, personal care, sustainable mobility and local trade). This creates an incentive to support local economic development and forms of exchange that are valued by communities of users.

Regiogeld, a network of local currencies which I studied when I was a researcher in Germany, has proliferated throughout the country. It has become the world’s largest system of local currencies, supporting small businesses and empowering communities.

In the near future, we will have a variety of money with different qualities and different purposes. This will make economies more resilient against shocks and will support more equitable and sustainable development, by putting users in the driver seat and reinforcing local economic development.

As my research demonstrates, a combination of regional, national and local currencies could also be the best way forward for the European Union, engulfed by its monolithic and unsustainable euro, and for any other process of regional integration, from Africa to other continents.

Lorenzo Fioramonti, Full Professor of Political Economy, University of Pretoria

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

When I grow up, I want to be a researcher…

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Jérémy Filet, Université de Lorraine and Lisa Jeanson, Université de Lorraine

“So what’s your PhD topic again?”…

Nowadays, this is the question most commonly asked to early-career researchers, and the answer is becoming more and more complex. While an interdisciplinary approach is favoured in English-speaking world, the French academic system often keeps doctoral students within methodological limits.

So why maintain such an inflexible, discipline-focused system? How can young researchers make their fields and the scientific foundation on which the build their work their own?

Breaking down boundaries: the end of labels

A basic trend: The longstanding boundaries between classic disciplines are breaking down or, at least, being blurred, and many academics feel disoriented. One explanation for this radical shift is probably the development of new media. While “traditionalists” try to hold on to their “specialties”, open-minded researchers use new technologies to break down the walls between disciplines. Indeed, since the 1980s, the English-speaking research world has witnessed the birth of new fields of multidisciplinary research. A model from which France and other countries have begun to draw inspiration in the last decade.

For 21st-century PhD students – the first generation of “digital natives” – the web has been a simple fact for their entire lives. They tend to refuse labels, and unlike their predecessors, early career researchers do not want to choose between specialties, methodologies, schools of thought or countries. They want to embrace them all.

And why would they have to choose, anyway? Thanks to the Internet they have access to almost unlimited knowledge, through MOOCs, TED talks, online publications… In a nutshell, open sources. Many doctoral candidates have graduated with two or three masters and followed several transdisciplinary pathways already. They are thus entitled to diversify their experience, and they wish to keep this privilege, and even cultivate it, when writing their thesis.

“Y generation” researchers

The training of the current generation of researchers – strewn with pitfalls and migrations – is not so “unusual” anymore. In a sense, their professional lives will be that way as well. For “Y generation” researchers, a certain volatility becomes necessary, if not essential, to fully comprehend new nomadic objects of research. Why not dissect a Latin text in the same way we examine DNA? Could a philosopher learn something from an examination of African tax systems?

For the 2016 Early Career Researchers conference at the University of Lorraine, PhD students discussed their take on interdisciplinarity and its potential benefits. The 2017 edition takes place on June 16 this year returns with a new theme: “Which questions for what research? The Humanities at the crossroads of disciplines”.

Asking the right questions

In 2017 we need to discover what kinds of questions are being asked in research. What are the purposes of research? Which questions best correspond to which types of research? What is our take on fundamental research? What is the split between social-science research, applied research, or interventionist research? With the multiplication of ground-breaking concepts, should research fields be restructured?

How particular disciplines are mastered is clearly defined by French institutions, such as the National Counsel of Universities or the competitive exams for secondary-school teaching in the French national education system. Therefore, we should question the legitimisation of new fields of research within a given academic institutional system. As such, cultural studies have often been strongly criticised in France, whereas their popularity within the English-speaking world is easily understandable considering their interdisciplinary nature.

Certain disciplines taught at universities also have their equivalent in the secondary-school system, and many research departments limit their recruitment of lecturers to candidates who have passed the secondary-school exam. Notwithstanding the many differences between teaching in secondary school and conducting research at university, should academics in France continue this historical mode of recruitment? Can research fields be as easily delimited as the disciplinary knowledge one needs to teach in secondary schools? This issue is all the more pressing as new technologies bolster the constant evolution of research questions. Can they enable the Y generation of researchers to free themselves from the ancient methods of “mastering” disciplines and go beyond the more “traditional” fields of research?

Towards enhanced research

While fields of research are increasingly changing, should they all intersect and perfectly match taught disciplines, or could they be much more enriched and flexible? A good example is gender studies, which combines history, psychology, sociology and even medicine. Similarly, shouldn’t we consider research fields within the context and needs of society? It is only logical to question the axiological positioning of the researcher with regard to political militancy or societal debates, especially when their research deals with current affairs.

Moreover, an increasing number of companies and other organisations are now proposing collaborations and partnerships with researchers. Industrial agreements for training through research (for example, the French CIFRE program) establish a partnership between a partner – most often a firm – a research department, and a PhD student. What methodologies can be applied in such collaborations? How do we reconcile the researcher’s methods and the partners’ expectations? We also need to question the uses and the limits such cooperative efforts. Concisely put: how do we distinguish between disciplines? Should we talk about a disciplinary area or should we replace it with the definition of a research domain? Is the creation of inter- and/or trans-disciplinary research teams always necessary? Are they really beneficial?

Facing the multiplication of such questions, early-career researchers need to develop innovative research practices and find ways to address the position of today’s researchers.

Novel practices, new questions

For its 2017 edition, the organisers of the Early Career Researchers conference invite PhD students of all disciplinary backgrounds to reflect on the following axes:

What epistemological and deontological approaches should researchers adopt today?
What are the implications of the human factors behind research?
Which methodolog(y/ies) for what research: where are the boundaries between disciplines?
Inter/transdisciplinarity and the contributions of research and new technologies to society: how can different perspectives be reconciled?
How does research interact with its foundations?

Far from being an isolated initiative, those considerations are beginning to be tackled at international congresses. These include the 2017 PhD colloquium of the French Society for the Study of English (SAES), to be held June 1-3 in Reims, and “Designations of Disciplines and Their Content: The Paradigm of Studies”, which took place at Paris 13–USPC in January 2017.

It is with this in mind that the early-career researcher conference will be held June 16, 2017, in Metz, France. For more information, visit the conference website.

Jérémy Filet, Doctorant en civilisation Britannique du XVIIIème siècle, Université de Lorraine and Lisa Jeanson, Doctorante en Ergonomie Cognitive, Université de Lorraine

Japanese space agency’s mission aims to uncover how moons of Mars formed

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The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has announced a mission to visit the two moons of Mars and return a rock sample to Earth. It’s a plan to uncover both the mystery of the moons’ creation and, perhaps, how life began in our Solar System.

The Solar System’s planets take their names from ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Mars is the god of war, while the red planet’s two moons are named for the deity’s twin sons: Deimos (meaning panic) and Phobos (fear).

Unlike our own Moon, Phobos and Deimos are tiny. Phobos has an average diameter of 22.2km, while Deimos measures an even smaller 13km. Neither moon is on a stable orbit, with Deimos slowly moving away from Mars while Phobos will hit the Martian surface in around 20 million years.

The small size of the two satellites makes their gravity too weak to pull the moons in spheres. Instead, the pair have the irregular, lumpy structure of asteroids. This has led to a major question about their formation: were these moons formed from Mars or are they actually captured asteroids?

Impact or capture?

Our own Moon is thought to have formed when a Mars-sized object hit the early Earth. Material from the collision was flung into the Earth’s orbit to coalesce into our Moon.

A similar event could have produced Phobos and Deimos. The terrestrial planets were subjected to a rain of impacts during the final throes of Solar System formation.

Mars shows possible evidence of one such major impact, as the planet’s northern hemisphere is sunk an average of 5.5km lower than the southern terrain. Debris from this or other impacts could have given birth to the moons.

Alternatively, Phobos and Deimos could be asteroids that were scattered inwards from the asteroid belt by the looming gravitational influence of Jupiter. Snagged by Mars’s gravity, the planet could have stolen its two moons. This mechanism is how Neptune acquired its moon, Triton, which is thought to have once been a Kuiper belt object, like Pluto.

There are compelling arguments for both the #TeamImpact and #TeamCapture scenario.

The orbits of the two moons are circular and in the plane of Mars’s own rotation. While the chance of this happening during a capture event are extremely low, observations of the moons suggest they may have a composition similar to that of other asteroids.

Definite determination of the moons’ composition would act as a fingerprint to distinguish the two models. A collision event should result in moons made from the same rock as Mars. But if the moons were captured, they would have formed in a different part of the Solar System with distinct minerals.

This is where the new mission comes in. JAXA’s Martian Moon eXploration Mission (MMX) is due to launch in September 2024 and arrive at Mars in August 2025. The spacecraft will then spend the next three years exploring the two moons and the environment around the red planet.

During this time, MMX will drop to the surface of Phobos and collect a sample to return to Earth in the summer of 2029.

Due to their weak gravity, collecting a sample from small rocky bodies is a difficult challenge. But this is JAXA’s speciality. The space agency has previously returned samples from asteroid Itokawa in 2010. The sequel to that mission, Hayabusa2, is due to arrive at asteroid Ryugu next year.

International collaborations

The excitement for a Mars moon mission has led to strong international involvement in MMX. On April 10, JAXA president Naoki Okumura met his counterpart from France’s Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), Jean-Yves Le Gall.

The meeting cemented a collaboration between the two space agencies. CNES will provide an instrument for MMX as well as combining expertise on flight dynamics for the tricky encounter with the Martian moons.

The French instrument will combine a high-resolution infrared camera and spectrometer, a technique that analyses the composition of each image pixel. This will allow the rocks of the Martian moons to be investigated down to a few tenths of a metre.

With a pixel size an order of magnitude smaller than that of similar instruments on missions such as NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ESA’s Mars Express, the spectrometer will also be able to help MMX select the best landing site on Phobos and take the sample.

CNES will also explore the possibility of building a rover to explore the surface of Phobos. A decision will be taken in November this year.

In addition to the collaboration with France, MMX will carry an instrument from NASA. While the CNES spectrometer will examine the type of minerals on the moons, the NASA instrument will pick out individual chemical elements. This is done by analysing the high-energy Gamma rays and neutrons that are produced during the bombardment of cosmic rays from the Sun or more distant sources.

Together, these instruments will reveal a more thorough composition of Mars’s mysterious satellites.

Both #TeamCapture and #TeamImpact offer fantastic science. Moons formed from collisional debris would be preserved time capsules of conditions on the young Mars. In this early epoch, Mars and the Earth are expected to have been far more similar than now. A sample from this time could reveal how a planet becomes habitable.

But moons captured from the asteroid belt would be kin to the meteorites that rained down on the young Earth. These are thought to be the deliverers of our oceans and even our first organic molecules. A sample from Phobos would be a taste of the package that was flung around the early Solar System.

Phobos’s ever decreasing distance to Mars also means that the top layer of the moon’s soil should be littered with meteorites scattered from the planet. Such a short journey would allow much lower-density material to survive the trip, unlike the Martian meteorites that manage to reach Earth.

This transferred material will also be from all over Mars, rather than the small patch that rovers have examined. And it might result in a more complete picture of Mars, as well as of its moons.

MMX is an exciting mission, bringing information about moon formation, Mars and water delivery around our Sun. As we wait for 2024, are you voting for #TeamImpact or #TeamCapture?

Elizabeth Tasker, Associate Professor, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)

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

Why Mexican immigrants are healthier than their US-born peers

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Anna Waldstein, University of Kent

Supporters of Donald Trump’s wall might have us believe that Mexicans who enter the US illegally carry disease and take advantage of America’s healthcare system. But several large public health surveys suggest that most Mexican immigrants are healthier than the average American citizen. So what can Americans learn about health from their Mexican neighbours?

The “Hispanic health paradox” was first identified in 1980, in the Hispanic health and nutrition examination survey. Results of the survey were compared with a second part of the survey, which looks at all Americans. Of all Hispanic groups, people from Mexico have some of the best health compared with the rest of Americans. For example, Mexicans have lower rates of high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and most cancers than the general US population.

But, by the second or third generation, people of Mexican descent do not seem to have any health advantage over other Americans. This suggests that the paradox depends on cultural factors, such as physical activity, eating habits and family support.

I conducted research for my PhD thesis in “Los Duplex,” one of the first Mexican immigrant neighbourhoods in the city of Athens, in Georgia. I wanted to know if traditional medical practices migrated with people from Mexico to the US.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines traditional medicine as “the sum total of the knowledge, skills, and practices based on the theories, beliefs, and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness”. Traditional medicine is recognised and promoted by the WHO as an important healthcare resource.

At the time of my study, about 75% of the 131 homes in Los Duplex were occupied by Mexican tenants. Most were recent immigrants who worked in a nearby poultry processing plant. As part of my research, I collected family health histories and self-assessments of health, which were generally positive. I also found that Mexicans in Los Duplex approached health and healing by drawing on both traditional and mainstream medicine.

Living well in Los Duplex

Mexican immigrants in Los Duplex cared for and supported each other physically, emotionally and financially. Strong social networks help migrants cross the border and find jobs in the US. They also help spread knowledge of medical resources and traditional practices, which together form a holistic system of healthcare.

The Mexican families in my study had a relatively easy time accessing the mainstream medical system of Athens. But mainstream medicine was seen as a last resort. Immigrants reported that traditional Mexican health practices can often prevent or resolve problems before they require medical attention. Such practices promoted keeping calm, staying active and maintaining a positive attitude, to consuming traditional foods and herbal remedies.

Most Mexican women routinely cooked meals for their families made with beans and corn tortillas (the traditional Mexican staple foods), as well as meat and vegetables. Food was prepared fresh with a variety of seasonings, like onion, garlic, mint, chillies, cumin, and oregano. These add micronutrients and antioxidants, as well as flavour. Although children consumed sweets and fizzy drinks, which could be bought in the neighbourhood, meals were usually served with homemade drinks made from fresh fruit.

Mexican migrants in Los Duplex also used a variety of medicinal plants, as well as other home remedies. They generally used these medicines for the health problems they experienced most frequently in Georgia: respiratory tract infections and digestive disorders. And there is some evidence for these traditional remedies. For example, the herb gordolobo (Gnaphalium spp.), which is used in Los Duplex for coughs and chest congestion, has been shown to have anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties that are useful in preventing and treating respiratory disease. And manzanilla (Matricaria recutita), which is used to relieve stomachache and menstrual cramps, has antimicrobial and antispasmodic properties.

Mexican immigrants use a variety of medicinal plants, but also eat well.
13Smile/Shutterstock

Mexican women described herbal remedies as inexpensive, natural and safe. But they were wary of most pharmaceuticals, even though they sometimes used them. Reasons for mistrusting pharmaceuticals related to their side effects. Drugs to counteract the side effects of other drugs were seen as especially problematic.

Too much, too little, just right

I asked people in Los Duplex why they thought Mexican immigrants were healthier than Americans. They attributed this to Americans’ overconsumption of fast foods, as well as the consumption of too many “pastillas” (pills). Most Americans do indeed rely heavily on pharmaceutical drugs, even for relatively minor conditions. Overmedication may in fact be undermining the health of many Americans.

Of course, under-medication is also a problem for uninsured Americans and other groups with limited access to medical care, including some Mexican migrants. For example, undocumented Mexican farm workers earn so little they can lack the means to see a doctor or pay for medicine. This is particularly problematic as these migrants often live in makeshift housing, with limited facilities for cooking or making herbal remedies. For these and other reasons (such as pesticide exposure), Mexican migrant farm workers have worse health than Americans.

My research on Mexican immigrants suggests that both too much and too little mainstream medicine is a potential threat to health. Because of their traditional medical knowledge, the Mexicans of Los Duplex were able to achieve the right balance between complementary and mainstream medicine. Their holistic approach to health and healing provides a valuable lesson for American citizens.

Anna Waldstein, Lecturer in Medical Anthropology, University of Kent

The state of US forests: Six questions answered

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Thomas J. Straka, Clemson University

Editor’s note: The first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, catalyzed a wave of laws to protect the environment and natural resources. Here Thomas Straka, a professor of forest economics and management and former industrial forester, answers questions about the current state of U.S. forests.

1. How forested is the United States? Here’s a surprising fact about our increasingly urbanized nation: About one-third of it is forested. Forests have an enormous impact on our water resources, economy, wildlife, recreational activities and cultural fabric. They also are major economic assets: The forest products industry manufactures more than US$200 billion worth of products yearly, and is one of the top 10 manufacturing employers in 47 states.

2. Who owns U.S forests? About 58 percent of the nation’s forestland is privately owned, mostly by families and other individuals. The public owns the rest. About three-quarters of the public forestland is owned by the federal government, mostly in national forests, with the rest controlled by states, counties and local governments. Forests in the eastern United States are mostly private; in the West, they are mostly public.

National forests were created to protect our watersheds and timber supply. Much of the water that ends up in rivers, streams and lakes comes from forested watersheds that filter the water naturally as it flows through. Forests also help control soil erosion by slowing the rate at which water enters streams.

Environmental pressure has caused timber production to become less of a priority in national forests. Since 1960, national forests have been managed under multiple use policy, which calls for balancing timber yield with other values like wildlife, recreation, soil and water conservation, aesthetics, grazing and wilderness protection.

Click to zoom.
U.S. Forest Service/Wikipedia

3. How are forests regulated? The U.S. Forest Service is the largest agency within the Department of Agriculture, with a $6 billion budget and 35,000 employees. It manages 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands – an area equivalent to that of the state of Texas – spread across 44 states and Puerto Rico.

Starting in the 1970s, laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act created a new regulatory environment for forestry. As an example, listing northern spotted owls in the West and red-cockaded woodpeckers in the South as endangered species had major impacts on timber production because the law requires land managers to identify and protect “critical habitat” for listed species.

Government policies also affect private forests. The federal tax code provides for capital gains treatment for timber, allowing income from timber sales to be taxed at lower rates. Almost all states have a property tax classification program to encourage active forest management. Most of them value forestland based on its current use when they assess it, rather than its potential value if it were developed, as a way to keep trees on land.

4. Are any national forests still in their natural state? Yes. Congress can designate wilderness areas in national forests, national parks and other public lands. Road-building and other development are barred in these areas, but they are open for hiking and camping. There are 37 million acres of wilderness areas in national forests.

Wilderness designation offers a high level of environmental protection, but it also can cause resentment. Barring timber harvesting and mining and restricting recreational activities (for example, prohibiting off-road vehicles) can affect the economies of nearby communities. Debates about wilderness protection are part of a broader, long-standing controversy over federal control of land in the West.

5. What are the most serious stresses on U.S. forests? Climate change, insect infestations and decreased logging in national forests are making wildfires larger and more frequent. The Forest Service currently spends more than half of its budget on controlling wildfires.

Hotshot crews head out to fight the Happy Camp Complex fire in California’s Klamath National Forest in 2014. The fire was started by lightning strikes and burned 134,000 acres.
Kari Greer, US Forest Service/Flickr, CC BY

For family forest owners, parcelization and fragmentation are major issues. Forestlands are being broken into smaller and smaller tracts over time, which can impact forest management, wildlife populations and water quality. One in six family forest owners plans to sell or transfer his or her forestland in the next five years, and smaller forests are likely to result. Owners of smaller tracts are less likely to produce timber or actively manage their forest.

In my home state of South Carolina, the forest industry used to own 2.7 million acres of timberland. Today it owns 170,000 acres, controlled mainly by timberland investment groups and real estate investment trusts. They manage it well, but they also tend to buy and sell it on a regular basis, and often chop off parcels that are better suited for development.

6. How may forests fare under the Trump administration? The new administration has a clear utilitarian focus, so I expect it to encourage land use and development. Wilderness areas are also likely to be an area of contention. If Congress amends major laws such as the Endangered Species Act, it could affect forest management.

Changes in the tax code or in cost-share programs that encourage reforestation and forest management could impact private forests, especially family forests. Investing in rural infrastructure, which was one of Trump’s campaign priorities, could benefit private forests.

Conservation groups are worried that Sonny Perdue, President Trump’s nominee for secretary of agriculture, may increase logging in national forests and has questioned mainstream climate science. As governor of Georgia, a major timber state, Perdue supported commercial timber harvesting. At USDA he will choose deputies to oversee the Forest Service.

President Trump’s first budget proposal proposes a 21 percent cut in USDA’s funding, including unspecified cuts to the national forest system, although it also pledges to maintain full funding for wildland firefighting.

Thomas J. Straka, Professor of Forestry and Environmental Conservation (Forest Resource Management and Economics), Clemson University

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

We need to get rid of carbon in the atmosphere, not just reduce emissions

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Eelco Rohling, Australian National University

Getting climate change under control is a formidable, multifaceted challenge. Analysis by my colleagues and me suggests that staying within safe warming levels now requires removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The technology to do this is in its infancy and will take years, even decades, to develop, but our analysis suggests that this must be a priority. If pushed, operational large-scale systems should be available by 2050.

We created a simple climate model and looked at the implications of different levels of carbon in the ocean and the atmosphere. This lets us make projections about greenhouse warming, and see what we need to do to limit global warming to within 1.5℃ of pre-industrial temperatures – one of the ambitions of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

To put the problem in perspective, here are some of the key numbers.

Humans have emitted 1,540 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide gas since the industrial revolution. To put it another way, that’s equivalent to burning enough coal to form a square tower 22 metres wide that reaches from Earth to the Moon.

Half of these emissions have remained in the atmosphere, causing a rise of CO₂ levels that is at least 10 times faster than any known natural increase during Earth’s long history. Most of the other half has dissolved into the ocean, causing acidification with its own detrimental impacts.

Although nature does remove CO₂, for example through growth and burial of plants and algae, we emit it at least 100 times faster than it’s eliminated. We can’t rely on natural mechanisms to handle this problem: people will need to help as well.

What’s the goal?

The Paris climate agreement aims to limit global warming to well below 2℃, and ideally no higher than 1.5℃. (Others say that 1℃ is what we should be really aiming for, although the world is already reaching and breaching this milestone.)

In our research, we considered 1℃ a better safe warming limit because any more would take us into the territory of the Eemian period, 125,000 years ago. For natural reasons, during this era the Earth warmed by a little more than 1℃. Looking back, we can see the catastrophic consequences of global temperatures staying this high over an extended period.

Sea levels during the Eemian period were up to 10 metres higher than present levels. Today, the zone within 10m of sea level is home to 10% of the world’s population, and even a 2m sea-level rise today would displace almost 200 million people.

Clearly, pushing towards an Eemian-like climate is not safe. In fact, with 2016 having been 1.2℃ warmer than the pre-industrial average, and extra warming locked in thanks to heat storage in the oceans, we may already have crossed the 1℃ average threshold. To keep warming below the 1.5℃ goal of the Paris agreement, it’s vital that we remove CO₂ from the atmosphere as well as limiting the amount we put in.

So how much CO₂ do we need to remove to prevent global disaster?

Are you a pessimist or an optimist?

Currently, humanity’s net emissions amount to roughly 37 gigatonnes of CO₂ per year, which represents 10 gigatonnes of carbon burned (a gigatonne is a billion tonnes). We need to reduce this drastically. But even with strong emissions reductions, enough carbon will remain in the atmosphere to cause unsafe warming.

Using these facts, we identified two rough scenarios for the future.

The first scenario is pessimistic. It has CO₂ emissions remaining stable after 2020. To keep warming within safe limits, we then need to remove almost 700 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere and ocean, which freely exchange CO₂. To start, reforestation and improved land use can lock up to 100 gigatonnes away into trees and soils. This leaves a further 600 gigatonnes to be extracted via technological means by 2100.

Technological extraction currently costs at least US$150 per tonne. At this price, over the rest of the century, the cost would add up to US$90 trillion. This is similar in scale to current global military spending, which – if it holds steady at around US$1.6 trillion a year – will add up to roughly US$132 trillion over the same period.

The second scenario is optimistic. It assumes that we reduce emissions by 6% each year starting in 2020. We then still need to remove about 150 gigatonnes of carbon.

As before, reforestation and improved land use can account for 100 gigatonnes, leaving 50 gigatonnes to be technologically extracted by 2100. The cost for that would be US$7.5 trillion by 2100 – only 6% of the global military spend.

Of course, these numbers are a rough guide. But they do illustrate the crossroads at which we find ourselves.

The job to be done

Right now is the time to choose: without action, we’ll be locked into the pessimistic scenario within a decade. Nothing can justify burdening future generations with this enormous cost.

For success in either scenario, we need to do more than develop new technology. We also need new international legal, policy, and ethical frameworks to deal with its widespread use, including the inevitable environmental impacts.

Releasing large amounts of iron or mineral dust into the oceans could remove CO₂ by changing environmental chemistry and ecology. But doing so requires revision of international legal structures that currently forbid such activities.

Similarly, certain minerals can help remove CO₂ by increasing the weathering of rocks and enriching soils. But large-scale mining for such minerals will impact on landscapes and communities, which also requires legal and regulatory revisions.

And finally, direct CO₂ capture from the air relies on industrial-scale installations, with their own environmental and social repercussions.

Without new legal, policy, and ethical frameworks, no significant advances will be possible, no matter how great the technological developments. Progressive nations may forge ahead toward delivering the combined package.

The costs of this are high. But countries that take the lead stand to gain technology, jobs, energy independence, better health, and international gravitas.

Eelco Rohling, Professor of Ocean and Climate Change, Australian National University

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