WASHINGTON — After falling short of plans to begin launches in 2019, Virgin Orbit now expects to perform its first orbital launch attempt in early 2020, a key year for the burgeoning small launch vehicle industry.
In a Dec. 19 statement, Virgin Orbit says it is now in position to perform an “imminent orbital demo flight” some time in early 2020 as it completes rehearsals of launch preparations at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
In that statement, Virgin Orbit said it plans to perform a taxi test of “Cosmic Girl,” its modified Boeing 747 aircraft, with a LauncherOne vehicle attached. That will be followed by a captive carry flight where the rocket will remain attached to the plane throughout the flight. “Then, we’ll be ready to light this candle and conduct our launch demonstration,” the company said.
“In about six weeks, eight weeks, we will be firing the engines on the next drop test and heading at eighteen and a half thousand miles per hour around the Earth in orbit, beginning to drop off satellites,” Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, said in a Sept. 16 presentation at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber Symposium outside Washington.
The company didn’t disclose the reason the company missed that schedule for an orbital flight test. It alluded to development issues in its statement, noting there were “days where Murphy’s law taught us a few new lessons,” but wasn’t more specific.
If that initial flight is a success, Virgin Orbit would be ready to move into regular operations relatively quickly. The company said in its statement that it has flight hardware in its Long Beach, California, factory for a half-dozen rockets, and is developing automation “to help us build more.”
Virgin Orbit hasn’t disclosed a manifest for upcoming launches, but NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative website states that it will fly 10 cubesats on the second flight of LauncherOne, scheduled for no earlier than the middle of February. Another cubesat will fly on a later LauncherOne mission, scheduled for early in the second quarter of 2020, this time out of Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. Virgin Orbit announced in April 2019 it planned to perform flights out of Guam, citing the ability to perform launches to almost any inclination.
Virgin Orbit’s plans will start what’s likely to be a critical year for the small launch vehicle business, one where dozens of companies are seeking a foothold in a market that most observers believe can support no more than a few vehicles. One of those companies, Rocket Lab, is already regularly launching its Electron rocket, with six successful launches in as many attempts in 2019, a launch rate the company seeks to double in 2020.
Firefly Aerospace is working on its Alpha launch vehicle that the company once planned to launch by the end of 2019. Firefly now expects the first flight of that vehicle no earlier than the first quarter of 2020 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Relativity, which once planned a first launch of its Terran 1 vehicle in 2020, recently said that launch will take place no earlier than February 2021.
Small launch vehicle development extends beyond American startups. Several Chinese companies are working on small launch vehicles. The Indian space agency ISRO plans to perform the first flight of its Small Satellite Launch Vehicle, developed to compete for dedicated launches of small satellites, in 2020.
The large number of small launch vehicles under development — more than 100 by some estimates — has led to widespread speculation that a shakeout will take place in the near future given the lack of demand for that many vehicles. While one small launch vehicle developer, Vector, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Dec. 13, its problems have been linked to financial and managerial issues specific to the company and not part of a broader industry trend.
with one of the canaries, one of the devices, that are rapidly putting the canaries out of business, ... [+] as gas detectors in mines.. The gas detecting device, is called the "Drager" multi gas detector Feburary 1970 P018159 (Photo by WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)
Mirrorpix via Getty Images
The past isn’t always as distant as it seems. 20 years ago, British coal miners were still leading specially-bred ponies down into the darkness with them to haul coal, and as late as 1986, many of them were still relying on canaries to detect dangerous carbon monoxide fumes in the mines. The birds are a cliché now, but they were a practical reality within the lifetimes of many of you reading this. British legislation officially ordered miners to replace canaries with electronic carbon monoxide sensors on December 30, 1986, although miners had about a year to phase out the last 200 canaries still in use in Britain’s coal mines.
Coal miners face many constant dangers: cave-ins, explosions, fires, and dangerous gases like carbon monoxide. The gas is odorless, colorless, and tends to replace oxygen molecules in the bloodstream, which keeps actual oxygen molecules from reaching organs and tissues. At first, carbon monoxide poisoning just causes a mild headache, dizziness, and shortness of breath, but it can quickly become fatal. And because burning coal and wood is a perfect way to release carbon monoxide into the air, coal miners are especially at risk.
But canaries, it turns out, are much more sensitive to carbon monoxide and other poisonous gases than humans. Around 1911, miners started carrying canaries into the mines with them, and they quickly became a metaphor for warning signs – when the canary keels over, it’s time to evacuate the mine before you become the next victim.
By 1986, though, only about 200 canaries were still being carried into British coal mines. The new digital detectors were cheaper and more effective, but they seemed to lack something when it came to comfort and companionship.
“They are so ingrained in the culture miners report whistling to the birds and coaxing them as they worked, treating them as pets,” reported the BBC in 1986, describing miners “saddened” by the decision.
An artist's conception of a blazar, a galay powered by an active nucleus. Blazars are the most common sources detected by NASA's Fermi gamma-ray spacecraft. Astronomers have modeled the bright, variable emission from the blazar CTA102 between 2013-2017 using data taken from the gamma-ray to radio bands. They are able to explain the multiuwavelegnth variability observed using a geometrical model for the rapidly moving jets. Credit: M. Weiss/CfA
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies that are accreting material. These AGN emit jets of charged particles that move at speeds close to that of light, transporting huge amounts of energy away from the central black hole region and radiating across the electromagnetic spectrum. Blazars are extreme examples of AGN in which the collimated jets are coincidentally aligned towards us. Blazar jets have two peak emission wavelengths, one that spans the range from the radio to the X-ray, the result of charged particle acceleration, and one at extremely short wavelength, high energy gamma ray bands usually (and somewhat controversially) attributed to the charged particles scattering infrared "seed" photons from a variety of other sources. All these bands manifest strong and unpredictable variability. Simultaneous, long-term observations across multiple bands therefore, by modeling the relative timing of flares and other variable emission, offer a valuable way to investigate the numerous possible physical mechanisms at work.
CfA astronomer Mark Gurwell was a member of a large team of astronomers that monitored variability of the blazar CTA102 from 2013-2017 spanning the electromagnetic spectrum from radio to gamma rays, in particular using the Submillimeter Array to measure crucial short (mm/submm) wavelength radio emission. Although this bright blazar had been under surveillance since 1978, it was only since the launch of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory in 1992 that its gamma-ray variability was discovered, and the launch of the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope mission 2008 enabled continued observations.
In 2016, CTA102 entered a new phase of very high gamma-ray activity, flaring for a few weeks with corresponding emission changes at all wavelengths. In December of that year a flare was spotted that was more than 250 times brighter than its usual faint state. Several detailed physical scenarios were proposed for that event, one of them based on changes in the geometrical orientation of the jets. In the new paper, the team notes that because the two emission peaks arise from two different processes with different geometrical characteristics, the geometrical scenario can be tested. The gamma-ray and optical fluxes arise from the same particle motions in the jets, for example, and should be strongly correlated. The astronomers undertook an analysis of all the available variability data from 2013-2017. They conclude that an inhomogeneous, curved jet modulated by changes in orientation can explain the long-term flux and spectral evolution of CTA102 in a straightforward way.
More information: F D'Ammando et al. Investigating the multiwavelength behaviour of the flat spectrum radio quasar CTA 102 during 2013–2017, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2019). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stz2792
Citation: Blazar variability (2019, December 31) retrieved 31 December 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-12-blazar-variability.html
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- In this Feb. 10, 2011 file photo, a flag is waved by anti-government protesters as they demonstrate in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, Egypt. Egypt's recent decision to transport ancient Pharaonic artifacts to Tahriri Square, the epicenter of Egypt's so-called Arab Spring uprising in 2011, has fueled fresh controversy over the government's handling of its archaeological heritage. Archaeologists and heritage experts fear vehicle exhaust will damage the ram-headed sphinxes and an obelisk, currently en route to their new home in Tahrir Square. (AP Photo/Tara Todras-Whitehill, File)
Egypt's recent decision to transport ancient Pharaonic artifacts to a traffic circle in the congested heart of Cairo has fueled fresh controversy over the government's handling of its archaeological heritage.
Cairo has some of the worst air pollution in the world, according to recent studies. Archaeologists and heritage experts fear vehicle exhaust will damage the four ram-headed sphinxes and an obelisk, currently en route to their new home in Tahrir Square.
Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has weighed in to say that similar obelisks are displayed in Western cities, according to a statement late Monday.
But Dr. Monica Hanna, a heritage expert, said Egyptian artifacts in cities like London, Paris and New York are themselves endangered by being outdoors.
"The sphinxes are made of sandstone, they are part of the dry environment in Luxor, when they would be moved to Tahrir Square with all the pollution, they will deteriorate as a result of the reactions with the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the air," Hanna told The Associated Press.
She and a member of parliament are part of a lawsuit to block the artifacts' move, filed recently by a local rights group.
Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the government "will do everything" to protect the artifacts.
Tahrir Square was the epicenter of Egypt's so-called Arab Spring uprising in 2011. The square also contains the Egyptian Museum.
The decision to move the artifacts as part of a larger renovation of Tahrir Square was taken without debate in parliament. The controversy only surfaced after archaeologists objected.
Since coming to power in 2013, el-Sissi has touted a number of megaprojects aimed at rebuilding and expanding infrastructure. Those include an expansion of the Suez Canal and a new Egyptian museum near the Giza Pyramids.
A centerpiece of the new museum is a towering statue of Ramses II. It once stood in a busy square near Cairo's main railway station, but was removed in the 1990s due to preservation concerns.
Waziri, the antiquities chief, said the four sphinxes are not part of the famed avenue of sphinxes in the city of Luxor. They were among several located behind the first edifice of the temple of Karnak.
The obelisk was recently moved to Cairo from the San el-Haggar archaeological site in the Nile Delta, the ministry said.
But Hanna, the heritage expert, stressed that the obelisks in Western capitals had been moved during the colonial era. "We really had no say in their shipment."
Citation: Egypt draws ire with artifacts' move to busy Tahrir Square (2019, December 31) retrieved 31 December 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-12-egypt-ire-artifacts-busy-tahrir.html
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A firefighter says asbestos, mold and toxic fumes inside a fire station in Alabama's largest city have sickened him and other firefighters.
Birmingham firefighter Gary Michael Horsley Jr. says in a newly filed federal complaint that Fire Station 27 is continuing to put firefighters and visitors at risk.
The city temporarily closed the station during the summer while an environmental company inspected it.
Horsley says in his lawsuit filed last week that the station has reopened despite the safety concerns.
"Fire Station 27 is currently a hazard to the health of anyone working or visiting there," Horsley's lawsuit states.
A representative of Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin didn't immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
But the city has said previously that it hired an environmental services company to assess conditions at Fire Station 27, which was built in 1956. The mayor in June ordered it temporarily closed, and firefighters were relocated while testing took place.
Some of the building materials in the station contain asbestos, Birmingham-based Bhate Environmental Associates Inc. said in its June 27 inspection report. But air sampling found that the indoor air "was not significantly affected" by the the asbestos-containing building materials, it found.
Based on the inspection, city officials said crews replaced damaged ceiling tiles, replaced floor tiles and would schedule thorough cleanings in the future. They declared the building safe in late December.
In recent years, the use of asbestos nationwide has dramatically decreased. However, it's still present in some residential and commercial buildings and continues to pose health risks to people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. It can cause lung diseases and cancer.
Asbestos in fire stations has prompted complaints by firefighters elsewhere in the country. In 2017, firefighters expressed concerns about asbestos in their fire station at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
In 2014, workers renovating an 1887 firehouse in Chicago were exposed to asbestos, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found after conducting an investigation.
Citation: Lawsuit: Asbestos, mold, fumes make fire station hazardous (2019, December 31) retrieved 31 December 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-12-lawsuit-asbestos-mold-fumes-station.html
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Composite image of the galaxy NGC 4631, the "Whale Galaxy," revealing large magnetic structures. Credit: Jayanne English of the University of Manitoba, with NRAO VLA radio data from Silvia Carolina Mora-Partiarroyo and Marita Krause of the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy
Using the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array radio telescope, a team of astronomers has captured for the first time an image of large-scale, coherent, magnetic fields in the halo of a faraway spiral galaxy, confirming theoretical modeling of how galaxies generate magnetic fields and potentially increasing knowledge of how galaxies form and evolve.
The international consortium, led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, and including astronomers from the NSF-funded National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, reported the results in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
"To understand how stars like the sun and planets like Earth came to be, we must understand how galaxies, such as our Milky Way, form and evolve," said Matthew Benacquista, a project director in NSF's division of Astronomical Sciences. "This project is an attempt to measure galactic magnetic fields and learn how they influence the way that interstellar gases are ejected from galaxy disks and contribute to galaxy formation and evolution."
The spiral galaxy, identified as NGC 4631 or the "Whale Galaxy," is seen edge-on in the image, with its disk of stars shown in pink. The field lines are shown in green and blue, extending beyond the disk into the galaxy's extended halo. Green indicates filaments with their magnetic field pointing roughly toward the viewer, and blue indicates filaments with their magnetic fields pointing away. This phenomenon, with the field alternating in direction, has never been seen before in the halo of a galaxy.
Citation: Giant magnetic ropes seen in Whale Galaxy's halo (2019, December 31) retrieved 31 December 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-12-giant-magnetic-ropes-whale-galaxy.html
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Researchers have confirmed the existence of three new planets in a class called ‘super-puffs', which as the name suggests, are planets with a very low mass to volume ratio. Or to put it simply, these planets have extremely low density, and essentially act as the celestial equivalents of cotton candy. First spotted by NASA's Kepler space telescope, these super-puff planets were discovered orbiting the Kepler 51, a young solar-type star. The three super-puff planets in the Kepler 51 system are heavier than Earth, but a much larger radius means their density is extremely low.
The discovery of these super-puffs was first highlighted in a research paper by scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder titled “The Featureless Transmission Spectra of Two Super-Puff Planets”, which is set be published soon in The Astronomical Journal. The three new super-puff planets are named Kepler-51b, Kepler-51c, and Kepler-51d, and have a density which is actually lower than cotton candy. As for the real figure, the press release says that these super-puffs have a density lower than 0.1 grams per cubic centimetre. With densities less than 0.1 g/cm3 , these are the lowest-density planets to date according to the NASA Exoplanet Archive.
“We knew they were low density. But when you picture a Jupiter-sized ball of cotton candy—that's really low density”, said Jessica Libby-Roberts, a graduate student in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences (APS) at the University of Colorado Boulder. But despite their low-density, these super-puffs appear to be covered by a high-altitude layer of something opaque, and there is no sign of water molecules either.
It has been theorised that Kepler 51 system super-puff planets are mostly composed of hydrogen and helium, which is covered on the outside by a thick haze made up of methane. While observing the Kepler-51b and Kepler 51d, scientists noted that the two super-puffs are exhaling gas at a rapid pace, releasing billions of tons of material into space every second. And at that rate, they are expected to shrink over time and might eventually lose their puffiness. In case you are curious, the Kepler 51 star system is about 2,400 lightyears away from Earth, which means even the fastest lightspeed starships you've seen in sci-fi flicks will take thousands of year to reach them.
On New Year’s Eve, 1969, Chip Yablonski called his father. Or at least, he tried to.
“The phone didn’t answer,” Yablonski recalled nearly a half-century later. “We thought [he] went out for the evening.”
Yablonski, at the time an attorney in Washington, D.C., didn’t think anything of it until a few days later, when his father, United Mine Workers (UMW) leader Joseph “Jock” Yablonski, didn’t show up for a swearing-in of elected officials in Washington, Pennsylvania, a small city about a half-hour south of Pittsburgh. Chip and his brother, Ken, had feared for their father’s safety since he announced the previous May that he would challenge W.A. “Tony” Boyle for the UMW presidency. He’d lost the election earlier that month but was challenging the results as fraudulent.
Ken, who lived in Washington, went to check on his father in his farmhouse in Clarksville, about 20 miles away in the heart of southwestern Pennsylvania’s coal country, where he found the results of a grisly execution.
Jock Yablonski was dead, as was his wife, Margaret, and their 25-year-old daughter, Charlotte. All had been murdered by gunshot. His dad’s Chevrolet and sister’s Ford Mustang had their tires slashed, and the phone lines to the house had been cut.
Even in the early stages of the investigation into the triple homicide, authorities believed that more than one person was involved. But investigators ultimately uncovered a conspiracy that stretched all the way to Boyle himself, and the ensuing criminal cases would lead to the UMW and to the labor movement overall changing how they operated.
“After Boyle was arrested, you have this moment when [the UMW] opens up, and it’s a critical moment,” says labor historian Erik Loomis. “In many ways, the modern leadership of the [UMW] comes out of that movement.”
*****
Reform—if not revolution—flowered in the 1960s and that extended to the maturing labor movement. The first generation of organizers was retiring, including John L. Lewis, who had spent more than 40 years as president of the UMW, which he called the “shock troops of the American labor movement.”
Lewis was a transformational figure in the American labor movement, founding the Congress of Industrial Organizations (the CIO, which later merged with the AFL) and serving as its first president from his offices in Washington, D.C. Lewis encouraged the growth of unionization nationwide, but was also an autocrat, purging anyone that disagreed with him. In fact, that’s how Jock Yablonski rose to prominence within the union.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1910, Yablonski went to work in the coal mines of southwestern Pennsylvania at the age of 15. A mine explosion killed his father in 1933, and for years after, mine safety was a key issue to him. Yablonski caught Lewis’ eye and soon received the titan’s backing: first to run for executive board in 1941 and then the following year for president of the district encompassing his home region of Pennsylvania. (Incumbent district president Patrick Fagan had drawn Lewis’ ire for supporting Franklin Roosevelt’s bid for a third term; Lewis favored Republican candidate Wendell Willkie.)
John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, ruled the union with a strong arm.
(Bettman / Contributor)
In 1960, Lewis retired and was succeeded as union president by Thomas Kennedy, but the real power behind the throne was Boyle, the vice president, who rose through the ranks in his native Montana before being brought to Washington by Lewis to be groomed as his true heir apparent. As Kennedy’s health failed, Boyle took over executive duties, and finally became president upon Kennedy’s death in 1963. Boyle shared Lewis’ dictatorial tendencies, but none of his acumen.
“Tony Boyle operated the United Mine Workers like John Lewis did, but he was not John Lewis, and did not achieve what he had,” says Chip Yablonski, now 78 years old and retired from his law practice. “It was a corrupt institution from top to bottom.”
Former United Mine Workers president, W.A. "Tony" Boyle enters the courthouse during his trial for masterminding the 1969 Yablonski murders.
(Bettman / Contributor)
The by-laws of the union stated that retirees retained full voting benefits, and Boyle had maintained power with what the younger Yablonski calls “bogus locals,” full of retirees and not necessarily enough representation of active members. Boyle also seemed to find high-paying jobs within the union for family members.
When Boyle spent lavishly on the union’s 1964 convention in Miami—the first outside of coal country, he met with opposition among the UMW. “If you try to take this gavel from me,” Boyle was quoted by United Press International as saying, “I’ll still be holding it when I’m flying over your heads.” In Miami, a group of miners from District 19, which encompassed Kentucky and Tennessee, physically assaulted anti-Boyle speakers.
The union also owned the National Bank of Washington (D.C., not Pennsylvania), a unique arrangement that had helped the union expand and purchase their own mines in fatter times, but by the 1960s had become rife with fraud and poor management. For years, the union improved the bank’s finances at the expense of union members’ benefits, a scheme that wouldn’t be exposed until later in the decade.
On top of that, Boyle had become too cozy with the mine owners, as evidenced by his tepid reaction to the Farmington mine disaster in West Virginia. Early on the morning of November 20, 1968, a series of explosions rocked the region. Of the 95 men working the overnight “cat eye” shift, 78 were killed. The remains of 19 remained in the shaft, which would be sealed off 10 days later with no input from miners’ families Boyle called it “an unfortunate accident,” praised the company’s safety record and didn’t even meet with the miners’ widows.
Jock Yablonski, meanwhile, was an unlikely revolutionary. In his 50s, he was part of the inner circle running the union, but he saw the problems within the union’s operation and was outspoken about it. “He’s no radical,” Loomis says of Yablonski. “He’s an insider, but he recognized what was happening among the rank and file, and the union wasn’t really serving its members well.”
Boyle had Yablonski removed from his position as district president in 1965, ostensibly for insubordination. But Yablonski’s son Chip saw another reason.
“Boyle saw my dad as a threat,” recalls Chip. “[My dad] stewed for a few years and decided to challenge Boyle [in May 1969].”
“From the moment he announced his candidacy, we were afraid goons from District 19 would be activated,” says Chip.
And that’s exactly what happened. After the murders, the criminal warrant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania stated that Boyle went to Albert Pass, a Boyle loyalist and president of District 19, and said, “Yablonski ought to be killed or done away with.” Shortly thereafter, District 19 received $20,000 for a research fund from the union. Checks were cut to retirees, who cashed them and kicked them back to Pass, who then used the money as payment to order the murder of Yablonski.
At the same time, the union newspaper, the Mine Workers’ Journal, became a house organ for Boyle during the campaign, publishing anti-Yablonski propaganda. Boyle had an additional 100,000 ballots printed up to stuff the ballot box and on Thanksgiving, two weeks before the election, Pass told Boyle the vote totals from District 19. Of course, Boyle won the district decisively, and just as unsurprisingly, he won the election.
Through it all, Yablonski and his attorneys beseeched the U.S. Department of Labor to get involved, to no avail. “The Department of Labor had no interest in investigating,” says the younger Yablonski. “The entire process was riddled with fraud. It was a flawed process from beginning to end. It had reversible error all through it.”
It took the murder of his father, mother and sister for the federal government to step in.
*****
The shocking brutality of the murders soon gave way to the startling ineptitude of the crime and cover-up. Within a month, federal investigators discovered the embezzlement to pay for the assassins, who were quickly arrested in Cleveland. A vital clue was a pad in Yablonski’s home with an Ohio license plate number on it. Apparently, the killers had been stalking him for some time – even missing several occasions to kill him when he was alone.
The sons of slain UMW official Joseph A. Yablonski, shown at press conference here, demanded prompt criminal prosecution of UMW officials who-they charge-"Have stolen money from the miners of this nation." Left to right: Kenneth J. Yablonski, Joseph A. Yablonski.
(Bettman / Contributor)
Silous Huddleston, a retired miner in District 19, enlisted his son-in-law Paul Gilly, charitably described as a house painter, for the job. He, in turn, roped in Claude Vealey and Buddy Martin, two other itinerant criminals. There wasn’t a high school diploma between the three of them.
Like most people in Pennsylvania, attorney Richard Sprague read about the murders and the initial arrests in the newspaper. But he was about to become intimately involved. Washington County, like many less populous counties in Pennsylvania at the time, only had a part-time district attorney. Washington County’s D.A., Jess Costa, knew the case would be far bigger than anything he’d ever handled so he asked Sprague, who worked for future U.S. senator Arlen Specter in Philadelphia, to be special prosecutor.
Sprague brought to bear an investigation that was already shaping up to be one of the largest in state history, with local law enforcement working with the Pennsylvania State Police and FBI. “All the law enforcement agencies worked like a clock,” says Sprague, who at 94 still comes to work daily at the Philadelphia law practice he founded. “There was no jealousy.”
Ultimately, the prosecution reached Boyle, who in a moment of bittersweet satisfaction, was arrested for the murders in 1973 while he was being deposed in a related civil lawsuit by Chip Yablonski. By then, Boyle had already been convicted of embezzlement, and the following year, he was convicted of murder, one of nine people to go to prison for the Yablonski killings.
“It was really a feeling of total satisfaction that justice had fought its way through,” Sprague says. “It was a long, long road.”
The road would be just as long – and the satisfaction short-lived – to reform the union.
*****
When news broke of Yablonski’s murder, thousands of miners in western Pennsylvania and West Virginia walked off the job. Before his death, he was a reformer. Now he was a martyr to the cause.
In April 1970, Miners for Democracy was formed to continue the reform efforts with Yablonski’s campaign – and also to continue Yablonski’s efforts to have the 1969 election invalidated. Ultimately, a judge threw out those election results and set new elections in 1972. This time, Boyle was challenged by (and lost to) Arnold Miller, a West Virginia miner whose diagnosis of black lung disease led to him becoming an advocate for miners stricken by the disease.
The year after Miller’s election, the union – with Chip Yablonski as its general counsel – rewrote its constitution, restoring autonomy to the districts and eliminating the bogus locals Boyle had used to consolidate power. But the district leaders weren’t as reform-minded as the staff, many of whom were taken from the Miners for Democracy movement, and worse yet, Miller was ill and ineffectual as president. “A lot of movements in the 1970s thought more democracy would get a better outcome, but that isn’t the case, because some people aren’t prepared to lead,” Loomis says.
The labor landscape is vastly different than it was at the time of Yablonski’s assassination. The nation has moved away from manufacturing and unionized workforces. Twenty-eight states have right-to-work laws that weaken the power of unions to organize. In 1983, union membership stood at 20.1 percent of the U.S. workforce; today it’s at 10.5 percent.
That, coupled with the decline of coal use,and the rise of more efficient and less labor-intensive methods of extracting coal, has led to a decline in the coal mining workforce. “The UMW is a shell of its former self, but it’s not its fault,” Loomis says. “I’m skeptical history would have turned out differently” if Yablonski himself had made changes.
Chip Yablonski believes his father would have served just one term had he survived and become UMW president. But in death, Yablonski’s legacy and the movement his death helped inspire, lives on. Richard Trumka, who like Yablonski was a coal miner in southwestern Pennsylvania, came out of the Miners for Democracy movement to follow the same path as John L. Lewis, serving as UMW president before being elected president of the AFL-CIO, a role he still holds today.
“[Trumka] helped restore things to the way they should have been,” Yablonski says.
Eastern California's Mono Lake has no outflow, allowing salts to build up over time. The high salts in this carbonate-rich lake can grow into pillars. Credit: Matthew Dillon/Flickr
Life as we know it requires phosphorus. It's one of the six main chemical elements of life, it forms the backbone of DNA and RNA molecules, acts as the main currency for energy in all cells and anchors the lipids that separate cells from their surrounding environment.
But how did a lifeless environment on the early Earth supply this key ingredient?
"For 50 years, what's called 'the phosphate problem,' has plagued studies on the origin of life," said first author Jonathan Toner, a University of Washington research assistant professor of Earth and space sciences.
The problem is that chemical reactions that make the building blocks of living things need a lot of phosphorus, but phosphorus is scarce. A new UW study, published Dec. 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds an answer to this problem in certain types of lakes.
The study focuses on carbonate-rich lakes, which form in dry environments within depressions that funnel water draining from the surrounding landscape. Because of high evaporation rates, the lake waters concentrate into salty and alkaline, or high-pH, solutions. Such lakes, also known as alkaline or soda lakes, are found on all seven continents.
The researchers first looked at phosphorus measurements in existing carbonate-rich lakes, including Mono Lake in California, Lake Magadi in Kenya and Lonar Lake in India.
This 2007 photo shows Lake Magadi in Kenya, a carbonate-rich lake whose bed is made of volcanic rock. The lake's salty water is rich in microbes and it attracts other life, including these flamingoes and zebras. Credit: Stig Nygaard/Flickr
While the exact concentration depends on where the samples were taken and during what season, the researchers found that carbonate-rich lakes have up to 50,000 times phosphorus levels found in seawater, rivers and other types of lakes. Such high concentrations point to the existence of some common, natural mechanism that accumulates phosphorus in these lakes.
Today these carbonate-rich lakes are biologically rich and support life ranging from microbes to Lake Magadi's famous flocks of flamingoes. These living things affect the lake chemistry. So researchers did lab experiments with bottles of carbonate-rich water at different chemical compositions to understand how the lakes accumulate phosphorus, and how high phosphorus concentrations could get in a lifeless environment.
The reason these waters have high phosphorus is their carbonate content. In most lakes, calcium, which is much more abundant on Earth, binds to phosphorus to make solid calcium phosphate minerals, which life can't access. But in carbonate-rich waters, the carbonate outcompetes phosphate to bind with calcium, leaving some of the phosphate unattached. Lab tests that combined ingredients at different concentrations show that calcium binds to carbonate and leaves the phosphate freely available in the water.
"It's a straightforward idea, which is its appeal," Toner said. "It solves the phosphate problem in an elegant and plausible way."
Phosphate levels could climb even higher, to a million times levels in seawater, when lake waters evaporate during dry seasons, along shorelines, or in pools separated from the main body of the lake.
Colored dots show the level of phosphorus measured in different carbonate-rich lakes around the world. Existing carbonate-rich lakes can contain up to 50,000 times the levels of phosphate found in seawater, with the highest levels measured in British Columbia's Goodenough and Last Chance lake system (yellow dots). Credit: Toner et al/PNAS
"The extremely high phosphate levels in these lakes and ponds would have driven reactions that put phosphorus into the molecular building blocks of RNA, proteins, and fats, all of which were needed to get life going," said co-author David Catling, a UW professor of Earth & space sciences.
The carbon dioxide-rich air on the early Earth, some four billion years ago, would have been ideal for creating such lakes and allowing them to reach maximum levels of phosphorus. Carbonate-rich lakes tend to form in atmospheres with high carbon dioxide. Plus, carbon dioxide dissolves in water to create acid conditions that efficiently release phosphorus from rocks.
"The early Earth was a volcanically active place, so you would have had lots of fresh volcanic rock reacting with carbon dioxide and supplying carbonate and phosphorus to lakes," Toner said. "The early Earth could have hosted many carbonate-rich lakes, which would have had high enough phosphorus concentrations to get life started."
Another recent study by the two authors showed that these types of lakes can also provide abundant cyanide to support the formation of amino acids and nucleotides, the building blocks of proteins, DNA and RNA. Before then researchers had struggled to find a natural environment with enough cyanide to support an origin of life. Cyanide is poisonous to humans, but not to primitive microbes, and is critical for the kind of chemistry that readily makes the building blocks of life.
More information: Jonathan D. Toner el al., "A carbonate-rich lake solution to the phosphate problem of the origin of life," PNAS (2019). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1916109117
Citation: Life could have emerged from lakes with high phosphorus (2019, December 30) retrieved 30 December 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-12-life-emerged-lakes-high-phosphorus.html
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Eastern California's Mono Lake has no outflow, allowing salts to build up over time. The high salts in this carbonate-rich lake can grow into pillars. Credit: Matthew Dillon/Flickr
Life as we know it requires phosphorus. It's one of the six main chemical elements of life, it forms the backbone of DNA and RNA molecules, acts as the main currency for energy in all cells and anchors the lipids that separate cells from their surrounding environment.
But how did a lifeless environment on the early Earth supply this key ingredient?
"For 50 years, what's called 'the phosphate problem,' has plagued studies on the origin of life," said first author Jonathan Toner, a University of Washington research assistant professor of Earth and space sciences.
The problem is that chemical reactions that make the building blocks of living things need a lot of phosphorus, but phosphorus is scarce. A new UW study, published Dec. 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds an answer to this problem in certain types of lakes.
The study focuses on carbonate-rich lakes, which form in dry environments within depressions that funnel water draining from the surrounding landscape. Because of high evaporation rates, the lake waters concentrate into salty and alkaline, or high-pH, solutions. Such lakes, also known as alkaline or soda lakes, are found on all seven continents.
The researchers first looked at phosphorus measurements in existing carbonate-rich lakes, including Mono Lake in California, Lake Magadi in Kenya and Lonar Lake in India.
This 2007 photo shows Lake Magadi in Kenya, a carbonate-rich lake whose bed is made of volcanic rock. The lake's salty water is rich in microbes and it attracts other life, including these flamingoes and zebras. Credit: Stig Nygaard/Flickr
While the exact concentration depends on where the samples were taken and during what season, the researchers found that carbonate-rich lakes have up to 50,000 times phosphorus levels found in seawater, rivers and other types of lakes. Such high concentrations point to the existence of some common, natural mechanism that accumulates phosphorus in these lakes.
Today these carbonate-rich lakes are biologically rich and support life ranging from microbes to Lake Magadi's famous flocks of flamingoes. These living things affect the lake chemistry. So researchers did lab experiments with bottles of carbonate-rich water at different chemical compositions to understand how the lakes accumulate phosphorus, and how high phosphorus concentrations could get in a lifeless environment.
The reason these waters have high phosphorus is their carbonate content. In most lakes, calcium, which is much more abundant on Earth, binds to phosphorus to make solid calcium phosphate minerals, which life can't access. But in carbonate-rich waters, the carbonate outcompetes phosphate to bind with calcium, leaving some of the phosphate unattached. Lab tests that combined ingredients at different concentrations show that calcium binds to carbonate and leaves the phosphate freely available in the water.
"It's a straightforward idea, which is its appeal," Toner said. "It solves the phosphate problem in an elegant and plausible way."
Phosphate levels could climb even higher, to a million times levels in seawater, when lake waters evaporate during dry seasons, along shorelines, or in pools separated from the main body of the lake.
Colored dots show the level of phosphorus measured in different carbonate-rich lakes around the world. Existing carbonate-rich lakes can contain up to 50,000 times the levels of phosphate found in seawater, with the highest levels measured in British Columbia's Goodenough and Last Chance lake system (yellow dots). Credit: Toner et al/PNAS
"The extremely high phosphate levels in these lakes and ponds would have driven reactions that put phosphorus into the molecular building blocks of RNA, proteins, and fats, all of which were needed to get life going," said co-author David Catling, a UW professor of Earth & space sciences.
The carbon dioxide-rich air on the early Earth, some four billion years ago, would have been ideal for creating such lakes and allowing them to reach maximum levels of phosphorus. Carbonate-rich lakes tend to form in atmospheres with high carbon dioxide. Plus, carbon dioxide dissolves in water to create acid conditions that efficiently release phosphorus from rocks.
"The early Earth was a volcanically active place, so you would have had lots of fresh volcanic rock reacting with carbon dioxide and supplying carbonate and phosphorus to lakes," Toner said. "The early Earth could have hosted many carbonate-rich lakes, which would have had high enough phosphorus concentrations to get life started."
Another recent study by the two authors showed that these types of lakes can also provide abundant cyanide to support the formation of amino acids and nucleotides, the building blocks of proteins, DNA and RNA. Before then researchers had struggled to find a natural environment with enough cyanide to support an origin of life. Cyanide is poisonous to humans, but not to primitive microbes, and is critical for the kind of chemistry that readily makes the building blocks of life.
More information: Jonathan D. Toner el al., "A carbonate-rich lake solution to the phosphate problem of the origin of life," PNAS (2019). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1916109117
Citation: Life could have emerged from lakes with high phosphorus (2019, December 30) retrieved 30 December 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-12-life-emerged-lakes-high-phosphorus.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Distant bushfires light up the skies in the coastal town of Bermagui in New South Wales state
Thousands of holidaymakers and locals were forced to flee to beaches in fire-ravaged southeast Australia Tuesday, as blazes ripped through popular tourist areas leaving no escape by land.
Four thousand people were trapped on the foreshore of the town of Mallacoota and many others sought refuge on beaches in fire-encircled seaside towns up and down a 200-kilometre (135-mile) strip of coast.
Some residents with boats even took to the sea, hoping for refuge from one the worst days yet in Australia's months-long bushfire crisis.
Dozens of properties were feared to have been destroyed since late Monday and at least seven people were unaccounted for in New South Wales and Victoria states as flames reached well-populated towns like Batemans Bay.
In some places the blazes were so intense, the smoke so thick and the fire-provoked dry lightning storms so severe that aerial reconnaissance and waterbombing had to be halted, the New South Wales Rural Fire Service said.
In Mallacoota, smoke turned day to night and the authorities said nearby fires were causing extreme thunderstorms and "ember attacks".
"We've got a fire that looks like it's about to impact on Mallacoota," Victoria's Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp told public broadcaster ABC, adding that firefighters had been deployed to protect the group.
In some places the blazes were so intense, the smoke so thick so severe that aerial reconnaissance and waterbombing had to be halted
Authorities had for days been warning tens of thousands of tourists enjoying Australia's summer holidays to leave the area but for thousands it was now too late to leave.
"We've got three strike teams in Mallacoota that will be looking after 4,000 people down on the beach there," Crisp said. "We're naturally very concerned about communities that have become isolated."
Preparations were reportedly under way for an evacuation by sea or air if needed.
On social media, residents said they fled on boat or were putting on life jackets in case they need to seek refuge from the fire in the water.
'Last resort'
Temperatures in bushfire areas can hit hundreds of degrees Celsius (Fahrenheit) killing anyone nearby long before the flames reach them.
Fleeing into the ocean is a "last resort option" according to Victoria's emergency management agency.
Residents and firefighters have been hosing down homes and land to stop the fires from spreading
Local radio journalist Francesca Winterson said she was watching the fire approach the town and her own home while she tried to broadcast emergency warnings amid a powercut.
"I'd rather be alive than have a house," she told ABC Gippsland.
Australia's unprecedented bushfires have been burning for months, but the latest in a series of heatwaves and high winds have wrought new devastation.
The crisis has hit cities like Sydney and Melbourne, home to several million people.
On Monday, around 100,000 people were urged to flee five Melbourne suburbs as the spiralling bushfire crisis killed a volunteer firefighter battling a separate blaze in the countryside.
Authorities in the country's second-biggest city downgraded an earlier bushfire emergency warning but said residents should steer clear of the blaze, which has burned through 40 hectares (nearly 100 acres) of grassland.
Map of Victoria state of Australia showing the active fires as of December 31.
Local media showed images of water bombers flying over neighbourhoods, and families hosing down their homes in the hope of halting the fire's spread.
A volunteer firefighter died in New South Wales state and two others suffered burns while working on a blaze more than five hours southwest of Sydney, the Rural Fire Service said.
"It's believed that the truck rolled when hit by extreme winds," the agency said, adding that the man left behind a pregnant wife.
Ten others, including two volunteer firefighters, have been killed so far this fire season.
The blazes have destroyed more than 1,000 homes and scorched more than three million hectares (7.4 million acres)—an area bigger than Belgium.
The mercury reached 47 degrees Celsius (117 Fahrenheit) in Western Australia and topped 40 degrees in every region—including the usually temperate island of Tasmania.
Bushfires have ravaged the town of Bilpin, west of Sydney
A helicopter dumps water on a bushfire in the outer suburbs of Melbourne
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has acknowledged a link between the fires and climate change but has continued his support of Australia's lucrative coal mining industry
The crisis has focused attention on climate change—which scientists say is creating a longer and more intense bushfire season—and sparked street protests calling for immediate action to tackle global warming.
While conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison belatedly acknowledged a link between the fires and climate change, he has continued his staunch support of Australia's lucrative coal mining industry and ruled out further action to reduce emissions.
Sydney was again shrouded in toxic bushfire haze Tuesday. City officials said Sydney's New Year's Eve fireworks would go ahead, but a similar event has been cancelled in Canberra and several regional towns.
Citation: Thousands trapped on Australia beaches encircled by fire (2019, December 31) retrieved 31 December 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-12-thousands-australia-beaches-encircled.html
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Adult American coots are mostly black and gray, but their chicks sport bright orange and red coloring. Credit: Bruce Lyon
The American coot is a somewhat drab water bird with gray and black feathers and a white beak, common in wetlands throughout North America. Coot chicks, however, sport outrageously bright orange and red feathers, skin, and beaks. A new study explains how the bright coloring of coot chicks fits in with the reproductive strategy of their less colorful parents.
Previous research had shown that coot parents preferentially feed the brightly ornamented chicks over those whose plumage has been manipulated to be less colorful, giving the ornamented chicks a survival advantage. This parental preference within families can drive the evolution of ornamentation in the offspring, just as female mate choice can result in ornamented males in the context of sexual selection (peacocks being the classic example of that).
Left unresolved by the earlier research, however, was why coot parents would have a preference for ornamented chicks in the first place, and whose fitness interests are served by the ornamentation, said Bruce Lyon, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz and first author of the new study, published December 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"It's an interesting question, because there are theories about conflicts of interest between parents and offspring suggesting that it could be the chick manipulating the parents to get more food," Lyon said. "Having shown that the parents really care about the ornamentation, we focused in this study on the natural variation in chick coloring."
At their field sites in British Columbia, Lyon and coauthor Daizaburo Shizuka from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln were already conducting studies that involved collecting eggs from coot nests and hatching them indoors. Using a photospectrometer, they were able to get precise color measurements of almost 1,500 coot chicks. For every chick, they knew the family it came from, the egg laying and hatching order, and in many cases whether or not it was a parasitic egg.
Lyon has spent years studying birds that lay eggs in the nests of other birds. Called brood parasitism, this practice is rampant among coots, with most females laying some eggs in the nests of other coots in addition to laying a clutch in their own nest.
A newly hatched American coot chick shows off its colorful ornamental plumes, beak, and naked head. The bright colors of coot chicks help their parents choose favorites, according to a new study. Credit: Bruce Lyon
"We thought the parasitic chicks might be more colorful to gain an advantage," Lyon said. "Instead, we found that the parasites are actually less colorful. That was a bit of a shock."
A key finding came from looking at the chicks' coloring in relation to the order in which they hatched. Coots lay about ten eggs, one per day, and the eggs hatch in the order in which they were laid. It turns out that the later a chick hatches the more colorful it is.
"That tells us the chicks can't be controlling their coloration, because they don't know where they are in the laying order. This is a maternal effect, presumably due to the mom putting more carotenoid pigments in the later eggs," Lyon said.
So why would coot mothers want to mark their chicks in this way? The answer has to do with the American coot's brutally harsh reproductive strategy. Coots lay a lot of relatively small eggs, producing more chicks than the food supply can support in most years. As a result, chick mortality is extremely high, with about half of each brood dying of starvation.
"It's very efficient for coots, because their eggs are not very costly to produce. By laying an optimistic clutch size and then culling the brood to bring it in line with the food supply, they're always raising as many chicks as they can," Lyon said.
The culling takes place mostly during the first ten days after the eggs hatch, when the parents do not show any feeding preferences and feed whichever chick reaches them first when they have food. The first chicks to hatch get a head start on growth, so most of the mortality is among the later hatched chicks.
The ornamental plumage in newly hatched American coot chicks is associated with a higher feeding rate for the youngest surviving chicks. Credit: Bruce Lyon
Everything changes, though, at about ten days after the last chick hatches. At that point, the parents start controlling food allocation to make sure the remaining runts in the brood get enough food to survive. Each parent chooses a favorite who gets preferential feeding, and these favored chicks are the most colorful, later-hatched chicks. Their larger, early-hatched siblings, meanwhile, endure a form of parental aggression called tousling (shaking them by the back of the neck) to keep them from hogging too much food. The favored chicks are initially much smaller than their siblings, but the extra feeding allows them to catch up and sometimes exceed the others in body mass.
"The male and female divide up the brood, with each parent exclusively feeding their half of the brood, and each parent also picks a favorite. Color predicts which one they choose, so the ornamentation may serve as a signal to tell them which chick needs the most help," Lyon explained. "They start by creating an uneven playing field, which allows them to cull the brood, and then they intervene to level the field. The orange plumage seems to be a feature that helps them do that."
The effect of laying order on coloring also explains why the parasitic eggs are less colorful. The eggs a female lays in a stranger's nest are the first ones in her laying sequence, so they get the least pigment. The parasitic egg-laying behavior is opportunistic, so the female may not know when she's forming an egg whether she will be laying it in her own nest or someone else's.
"They're complicated birds. For over 20 years, we've been chipping away at understanding their reproductive behavior, and this is another interesting aspect of that," Lyon said. Lyon described parental preferences for ornamented chicks in a 1994 Nature paper, and he and Shizuka described coot parents' food allocation strategies in a 2013 Ecology Letters paper.
More information: Bruce E. Lyon el al., "Extreme offspring ornamentation in American coots is favored by selection within families, not benefits to conspecific brood parasites," PNAS (2019). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1913615117
Citation: The mysterious case of the ornamented coot chicks has a surprising explanation (2019, December 30) retrieved 30 December 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-12-mysterious-case-ornamented-coot-chicks.html
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