Featured Post

Tracking air pollution disparities -- daily -- from space

Studies have shown that pollution, whether from factories or traffic-snarled roads, disproportionately affects communities where economicall...

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

A Faked Kidnapping and Cocaine: A Montana Mine’s Descent Into Chaos

Just before 2 a.m. on April 18, 2018, Amy Price, the wife of the coal executive Larry Price Jr., called the police in Bluefield, Va., to report her husband missing. Police scoured Bluefield, a town of less than 10,000 people nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and soon discovered Mr. Price’s white Mercedes at a deserted parking lot.

Mr. Price, a 42-year-old father of six, was an industrious businessman who ran surface operations at an underground mine, one of the nation’s largest, near Roundup, Mont. He also ran a motorcycle shop, Hawg Pit Cycles, that traded used Harley-Davidsons. And he had promised several investors big returns in coal. Recently, some of them had confronted Mr. Price about their money.

As night fell, a driver traveling along a state road some 20 miles away from Bluefield noticed a man on the roadside: a disheveled Mr. Price, who was rushed to a hospital. He told investigators he had been abducted by an outlaw biker gang that drugged him and took him to his motorcycle shop where they robbed him before loading him into a van and dumping him on the roadside. When surveillance cameras showed there hadn’t been a robbery, he changed his story, saying that the gang had asked him for coal train schedules for a scheme to traffic methamphetamines by rail.

The truth was, Mr. Price hadn’t been kidnapped at all. As he later admitted in court, he had staged his own kidnapping, a last-ditch attempt to escape investors’ wrath for embezzlement schemes totaling more than $20 million that he’d hatched with the president of the Montana coal mine.

The embezzlement and fake kidnapping were part of the unraveling of a coal company called Signal Peak Energy that also involved bribery, cocaine trafficking, firearms violations, worker safety and environmental infringements, a network of shell companies, a modern-day castle, an amputated finger and past links to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

A man in jeans and a light blue shirt. His hair is cropped very short, almost to stubble. He is accompanied by a woman in a dark blue dress and jacket on his left. 
Larry Price, Jr., left, at the James F. Battin Federal Courthouse in Billings, Mont., in 2020.Larry Mayer/Billings-Gazette
A bulldozer moving coal tailings at the Signal Peak Mine.Louise Johns for The New York Times

Nine former Signal Peak executives, including Mr. Price, and their associates have been either convicted or charged as part of a broad federal investigation. Mr. Price is now serving time in a federal prison.Signal Peak’s former president and chief executive, Brad Hanson, who Mr. Price said was the mastermind behind the schemes, died at his home in Florida in 2020. The company itself was fined $1 million last year for failing to report worker injuries and for illegally dumping toxic slurry, chemicals and unprocessed soil containing heavy metals, arsenic and lead, into an abandoned section of the mine.

Attempts to reach Mr. Price in prison were unsuccessful. In written responses to questions, Signal Peak stressed that it had taken “swift and comprehensive remedial measures” after the misconduct came to light, terminating all employees involved, installing new executive leadership and revising its internal policies to prevent future wrongdoing.

Local ranchers and environmental groups that oppose the mine say Signal Peak Energy, which operates the Montana mine, 30 miles north of Billings, has become an extreme example of the opaque operators left behind in a declining industry as the biggest actors leave or go bankrupt. Coal use has shrunk by half from its peak in 2007 amid the shift to natural gas and renewables. Those left behind have an incentive to extract as much money as possible — and get out.

Last summer, a coalition of environmental groups petitioned both the federal government and the State of Montana to order the mine to cease operations pending a wider investigation, citing ongoing environmental and permit violations and its overall “destructive and lawless operations.”

That hasn’t stopped Signal Peak from planning a 7,000-acre expansion of the mine, though those plans have been repeatedly stopped by federal courts for failing to meet environmental standards.

Posted by at No comments:

Why Dolphins Help Fishermen in Southern Brazil

Bottlenose dolphins help Brazilian fishermen pull in their catch, and researchers have worked out what the marine mammals get from the cooperative hunting.

Video player loading
As dolphins move in, overhead video captures fishers casting their nets while hydrophones record the marine mammals’ echolocation clicks, which the fishermen say they can feel.Cantor et al.

Every summer in waters off the town of Laguna in Brazil’s southeast corner, fishers wade out into estuary canals to cast their nets in hopes of catching migratory mullet fish. The water is murky, and the fish are difficult to spot. However, the fishers have help from an unexpected quarter: bottlenose dolphins that push the prey toward the nets.

The two species of predators have coordinated their fishing for generations.

“The experience of fishing with dolphins is unique,” said Wilson F. Dos Santos, a Laguna fisherman who’s been casting nets alongside the dolphins for 50 years. He learned the practice when he was 15, taking his father coffee and food as he fished and watching the aquatic partners at work. He added that working with the dolphins “helps with our family income,” because human families eat what they catch.

In research published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, a team of Brazilian scientists reported that dolphins might benefit from the cooperation as much as their terrestrial mammal counterparts did. Those that fish with humans seem to live longer than other dolphins in the area do.

“Human-wildlife cooperation in general is a rare phenomenon at a global scale,” said Mauricio Cantor, a biologist at Oregon State University and an author of the paper. “Usually humans gain the benefit, and nature pays the cost. But this interaction has been happening for over 150 years.”

Humans have worked with other species to find food for millenniums, including honeyguides in southeast Africa and Indigenous American accounts of hunting alongside wolves. And net-casting fishers working with dolphins isn’t unique to Brazil — the practice has also been observed in Mauritania, Myanmar and India, but the bottlenoses of Laguna are the most famous. The local population of about five dozen cooperative dolphins has been systematically monitored since 2007, said Fábio G. Daura-Jorge, a biologist at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil and an author of the paper. In 2017, the team began surveilling both the fish and dolphins with GPS, drones and sonar.

A dolphin leaps from waters in the middle distance while a fisherman in the foreground looks on.
Dolphin and fishermen in league at Praia da Tesoura, in Laguna.Fábio G. Daura-Jorge/Federal University of Santa Catarina
Fishermen in the Laguna. The scientists found that the dolphins’ strategy had clear benefits. Those that hunted with humans were 13 percent more likely to survive to adulthood. Alexandre Machado/Federal University of Santa Catarina

The team found that the dolphins gave a cue — usually a sudden, deep dive — to signal that they’d driven prey within reach of fishers’ nets. Eighty-six percent of the successful catches during the study period came from fishers reading dolphins’ behaviors, Dr. Cantor said. Careful observation and timing were key: Those who cast nets too late or missed dolphin cues were less likely to catch anything.

The dolphins also time their foraging carefully. The team of researchers used hydrophones to measure the animals’ echolocation clicks, the rate of which increased as the nets hit the water. When a fisher made a successful cast, the dolphins homed in on disoriented mullet or plucked a few fish from inside the net. When fishers mistimed their cast or failed to respond to the dolphins’ cues, the dolphins didn’t strike.

“The dolphins know what they are doing,” Dr. Daura-Jorge said. “They’re taking advantage of the fishers’ actions to actively forage.”

The human participants proved to be keen observers, too. The fishers shared a wealth of experience with the researchers about how the dolphins and fish behaved, and they knew how to recognize the dolphins that made good fishing partners. The fishers identified their partners’clicking and told the researchers that they felt the buzz of the echolocation in their legs when the dolphins “cry out.”

The strategy has clear benefits for the dolphins, Dr. Cantor said: Those that hunted with humans were 13 percent more likely to survive to adulthood. Cooperative dolphins tended to linger near the fishing grounds that they shared with humans, while other dolphins that traveled more widely throughout the area’s water were three times more likely to end up tangled in illegal fish nets.

While this partnership helps both sides, the practice has been in decline over the last decade, Dr. Cantor said. Commercial operations overfish mullet stocks across southern Brazil. As fish numbers drop, individual dolphins and fishers hunt together less.

Because the whole system depends on both sides having a careful understanding of each other’s cues, Dr. Daura-Jorge said, it can easily break down. That could make Laguna’s bottlenose dolphins appear to be more competitors than partners, placing them under further threat.

“Safeguarding the cultural tradition of fishers and dolphins is critical to keep them cooperating and also important to conserve the population of dolphins,” he said.

Regulation of industrial mullet fishing and a crackdown on illegal fisheries could help to ensure that there are enough fish to go around, Dr. Cantor said. Many area participants like Mr. Dos Santos are also committed to the practice, which is a point of local pride and draws in tourists.

“It’s an interaction that goes beyond only the material benefits,” Dr. Cantor said. “Trying to preserve cultural diversity is an indirect way of preserving biological diversity, too.”





#Environment | https://sciencespies.com/environment/why-dolphins-help-fishermen-in-southern-brazil/
Posted by at No comments:

Why I Hunt for Sidewalk Fossils

These oft-overlooked records invite us to imagine what has been and what might be.

A paleontologist once told me that city sidewalks hold snapshots. If I trained my gaze toward my feet, he said, I would find evidence of all kinds of commutes: traces of hopping birds, the soles of humans’ shoes, restless leaves that fell and sank into wet concrete at just the right moment. I might see a smattering of little paw prints zigging, zagging, doubling back, evidence of important rodent business that didn’t often overlap with mine.

These marks are too recent to pass muster with scientific sticklers, but in all respects except age, they are fossils. There are many ways to make one. Some form when a creature is entombed in sediment: Water percolates through, flush with minerals, and over time the mixture infiltrates the bones, where it settles and forms stone. Other fossils are casts, made, for instance, when a shell dissolves and leaves behind a mold that eventually fills with sediment, which hardens into rock. But not all fossils involve remains; some catalog movements. These are the kind that stipple our sidewalks — nascent trace fossils, records of fleeting contact.

Throughout the pandemic, I turned to nature to track time and step outside myself. I photographed the sweetgum tree outside my Brooklyn window, noting when it leafed into a bushy chlorophylled curtain or when it dropped fruit that fell to the ground like unshattered ornaments. Most afternoons of that first lonely spring, I roamed a cemetery. When magnolia blossoms smudged the scene pink, I stood under the canopies until wind splashed the petals against my shoulders.

I was lucky, of course, to be simply scared and lonely — not dead, not intubated, not choosing between peril and paycheck. But time was slippery, and I felt stuck in my own brain, a foggy, trembling ecosystem I had no interest in studying. By early 2022, I was cocooned in my partner’s Morningside Heights apartment. On weekend mornings, we shuffled around the neighborhood, and each volunteered to notice something new: a startling mushroom, the pale bellies of pigeons waterfalling down a facade before flocking skyward. I became fixated on sidewalk fossils. Fossil-finding outings were a relief — an invitation to crouch, touch, lose myself in evidence of skittering and scrabbling, tethering myself to a past and a future.

Once I started noticing these impressions, it was fun to imagine myself as a paleontologist of the urban present.

Because sidewalk fossils are essentially the same color as the surrounding concrete, they’re most visible when light rakes across them; a fossil that’s elusive at noon might announce itself at dawn or dusk. So I timed a second daily walk for the hour when the light fled. Late afternoons introduced me to tiny forked footprints that marked the scene of, perhaps, an avian skirmish. There were others: a dog’s paws, three-quarters of a shoe. Though ichnologists, who study trace fossils, might discount leaves, I marveled at those too: most of a London plane and a ginkgo, with its corrugated fan. Across from a closed-up snack cart, I knelt until the cold concrete prickled my knees. I wriggled out of my mitten and traced a leaf’s sharp, diagonal veins, its saw-toothed sides.

When scientists encounter a fossil, they often try to puzzle out an explanation of how it got there. Maybe an animal was stranded or washed off its feet or chased by predators. Once I started noticing these impressions, it was fun to imagine myself as a paleontologist of the urban present. A bonanza of bird feet made me wonder if someone had sprinkled seeds or dropped a bagel. How long ago? What kind? When a leaf didn’t seem to match any of the nearby trees, I wondered if it was an interloper, blown in from blocks away or if it testified to an ecological eviction — a tree yanked out and replaced with another species or swapped for sidewalk. The fossils fastened my attention to something tangible but also invited it to wander and to think about city streets as collages of past and present, about how our nonhuman neighbors are architects, too. How we all shed traces of ourselves, whether we know it or not.

Of course, there is more significant proof of the past. Mammoths sometimes turn up in farmers’ fields, their tusks curved like scythes abandoned in the dirt. Parades of dinosaur footprints still march along the banks or beds of some prehistoric rivers and seas. Those are awesome, showy and obvious. I line up to see them; I happily gawk. But it was a tiny thrill to encounter evidence of the past that was subtle and recent, proof that others were out there. The sidewalk fossils felt intimate — the paleontological equivalent of a raft of letters secreted away beneath a floorboard.

Only they’re not actually rare. When sidewalks are repaired, birds and other animals ignore attempts to keep them pristine. Leaves do whatever the wind demands. These fossils are easy to find, and we’re lucky to have them. When I was lingering in the worst parts of my brain, sidewalk fossils dislodged me. Unlike the many fossils that represent stillness, the moment when an animal died and the place it remained unless humans carved it free, sidewalk fossils are often peeks into lives that continued. The birds flew somewhere; the dogs, I hope, went on to wag over many sticks and smells. As the sun sank and I trudged home, the fossils — these little flukes, these interesting accidents — were reminders of small, exhilarating life.

Jessica Leigh Hester is a science journalist whose first book is “Sewer” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).





#News | https://sciencespies.com/news/why-i-hunt-for-sidewalk-fossils/
Posted by at No comments:

What Happened to All of Science’s Big Breakthroughs?

A new study finds a steady drop since 1945 in disruptive feats as a share of the world’s booming enterprise in scientific and technological advancement.

Miracle vaccines. Videophones in our pockets. Reusable rockets. Our technological bounty and its related blur of scientific progress seem undeniable and unsurpassed. Yet analysts now report that the overall pace of real breakthroughs has fallen dramatically over the past almost three-quarters of a century.

This month in the journal Nature, the report’s researchers told how their study of millions of scientific papers and patents shows that investigators and inventors have made relatively few breakthroughs and innovations compared with the world’s growing mountain of science and technology research. The three analysts found a steady drop from 1945 through 2010 in disruptive finds as a share of the booming venture, suggesting that scientists today are more likely to push ahead incrementally than to make intellectual leaps.

“We should be in a golden age of new discoveries and innovations,” said Michael Park, an author of the paper and a doctoral candidate in entrepreneurship and strategic management at the University of Minnesota.

The new finding of Mr. Park and his colleagues suggests that investments in science are caught in a spiral of diminishing returns and that quantity in some respects is outpacing quality. While unaddressed in the study, it also raises questions about the extent to which science can open new frontiers and sustain the kind of boldness that unlocked the atom and the universe and what can be done to address the shift away from pioneering discovery. Earlier studies have pointed to slowdowns in scientific progress but typically with less rigor.

Mr. Park, along with Russell J. Funk, also of the University of Minnesota, and Erin Leahey, a sociologist at the University of Arizona, based their study on an enhanced kind of citation analysis that Dr. Funk helped to devise. In general, citation analysis tracks how researchers cite one another’s published works as a way of separating bright ideas from unexceptional ones in a system flooded with papers. Their improved method widens the analytic scope.

“It’s a very clever metric,” said Pierre Azoulay, a professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship and strategic management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I was giddy when I saw it. It’s like a new toy.”

Researchers have long sought objective ways to assess the state of science, which is seen as vital to economic growth, national pride and military strength. It became more difficult to do so as published papers soared in number to more than one million annually. Each day, that’s more than 3,000 papers — by any standard, an indecipherable blur.

Defying the surge, experts have debated the value of incremental strides versus “Eureka!” moments that change everything known about a field.

The new study could deepen the debate. One surprise is that discoveries hailed popularly as groundbreaking are seen by the authors of the new study as often representing little more than routine science, and true leaps as sometimes missing altogether from the conversation.

For instance, the top breakthrough on the study’s list of examples is a gene-splicing advance that’s poorly known to popular science. It let foreign DNA be inserted into human and animal cells rather than just bacteria ones. The New York Times referred to it in a 1983 note of four paragraphs. Even so, the feat produced a run of awards for its authors and their institution, Columbia University, as well as almost $1 billion in licensing fees as it lifted biotechnology operations around the world.

In contrast, the analysts would see two of this century’s most celebrated findings as representing triumphs of ordinary science rather than edgy leaps. The mRNA vaccines that successfully battle the coronavirus were rooted in decades of unglamorous toil, they noted.

So too, the 2015 observation of gravitational waves — subtle ripples in the fabric of space-time — was no unforeseen breakthrough but rather the confirmation of a century-old theory that required decades of hard work, testing and sensor development.

“Disruption is good,” said Dashun Wang, a scientist at Northwestern University who used the new analytic technique in a 2019 study. “You want novelty. But you also want everyday science.”

The three analysts uncovered the trend toward incremental advance while using the enhanced form of citation analysis to scrutinize nearly 50 million papers and patents published from 1945 to 2010. They looked across four categories — the life sciences and biomedicine, the physical sciences, technology and the social sciences — and found a steady drop in what they called “disruptive” findings. “Our results,” they wrote, “suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.”

Their novel method — and citation analysis in general — gets analytic power from the requirement that scientists cite studies that helped to shape their published findings. Starting in the 1950s, analysts began to tally those citations as a way to identify research of importance. It was a kind of scientific applause meter.

But the count could be misleading. Some authors cited their own research quite often. And stars of science could receive lots of citations for unremarkable finds. Worst of all, some of the most highly cited papers turned out to involve minuscule improvements in popular techniques used widely by the scientific community.

The new method looks at citations more deeply to separate everyday work from true breakthroughs more effectively. It tallies citations not only to the analyzed piece of research but to the previous studies it cites. It turns out that the previous work is cited far more often if the finding is routine rather than groundbreaking. The analytic method turns that difference into a new lens on the scientific enterprise.

The measure is called the CD index after its scale, which goes from consolidating to disrupting the body of existing knowledge.

Dr. Funk, who helped to devise the CD index, said the new study was so computationally intense that the team at times used supercomputers to crunch the millions of data sets. “It took a month or so,” he said. “This kind of thing wasn’t possible a decade ago. It’s just now coming within reach.”

The novel technique has aided other investigators, such as Dr. Wang. In 2019, he and his colleagues reported that small teams are more innovative than large ones. The finding was timely because science teams over the decades have shifted in makeup to ever-larger groups of collaborators.

In an interview, James A. Evans, a University of Chicago sociologist who was a co-author of that paper with Dr. Wang, called the new method elegant. “It came up with something important,” he said. Its application to science as a whole, he added, suggests not only a drop in the return on investment but a growing need for policy reform.

“We have extremely ordered science,” Dr. Evans said. “We bet with confidence on where we invest our money. But we’re not betting on fundamentally new things that have the potential to be disruptive. This paper suggests we need a little less order and a bit more chaos.”





#News | https://sciencespies.com/news/what-happened-to-all-of-sciences-big-breakthroughs/
Posted by at No comments:

Monday, January 30, 2023

How to Grow a Food Forest

Not your typical garden, they can help us reimagine how we produce food in a warming world.

I am writing today from my apartment in New York City, on a windy winter’s day. Not a leaf is green on our roof garden. There is no canopy. Only skyscrapers.

It’s a far cry from the garden that Ana Gaspar Aguerri and her husband, Ian Macaulay, showed me in the tropical rainforest of Costa Rica a few weeks ago.

Theirs is a garden that imitates the architecture of a natural forest, one that they say produces all the food they want to eat. There are towering breadfruit trees, ginger as tall as me, sweet potato vines, spinach, taro under the ground. All perennial plants.

I visited Gaspar and Macaulay in late December. It was pouring rain that morning. I snaked uphill on an unpaved winding road in a rental. My teenager was with me, singing Janelle Monáe at the top of her lungs (again). We sat for a while in Gaspar’s kitchen, drinking tea and waiting for the rain to subside. Finally, when it did, I borrowed rain boots from Gaspar and we went walking. The ground was muddy. Heat rose from the wet earth. Howler monkeys leaped through the trees. A toucan had left a half-eaten papaya under a tree. Gaspar didn’t mind. There was enough for humans and wildlife.

Fine, I thought. A food forest in a rainforest. Fascinating. But niche.

Only when I got back home and started poking around did I realize that food forests aren’t niche at all. They’ve been around forever, mainly in the tropics, though enterprising gardeners have created food forests in very different habitats across the United States, from vacant city lots in Philadelphia, public parks in Seattle and Asheville, to schoolyards in South Florida.

The reason I want to tell you about food forests is that they can be useful in reimagining how we grow food in a warming world.

That’s one of my goals for Climate Forward this year. To help us reimagine how to do things. With or without toucans.

A food forest is neither wilderness nor an orchard.

“A food forest is what it sounds like — a forest you can eat,” said Cara Rockwell, a Florida International University professor who studies food forests.

It stems from the multilayered, multispecies gardens that have existed for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years, in the tropics, she said. Often, they served as kitchen gardens. Women tended to them.

Like a wild forest, they have trees both short and tall, shrubs and vines, ground cover and fungi. They can have animals, too. Even cattle can graze among fruit trees. The idea is to build healthy soils, create shade, allow beneficial insects to thrive. The idea is not to produce the highest yields possible of one crop, which is the goal of modern industrial farming. Nor are they exactly backyard or neighborhood gardens, with rows of annual crops and flowers. They have several layers, from underground tubers to vines to shrubs to short and tall trees. All play different roles. All, or most, are perennials.

There are many food forests today in the United States, including on public land. I haven’t found anyone who tracks their numbers, though researchers told me that it’s become ever more popular in the last 15 years.

Can it feed us?

That depends.

Gaspar insists that it’s possible to produce enough food for two people on 2,000 square meters, or about half an acre, at least in their part of the world where crops grow year-round. She and Macaulay teach their techniques — based on the principles of permaculture (short for permanent agriculture, which relies on perennial crops) — on their farm, called Finca Tierra. If you go, be prepared to stay in bamboo cabins open on two sides. (They provide mosquito nets over the beds.)

Gaspar, who is Costa Rican, ditched her career as a human rights lawyer to work on Finca Tierra. Macaulay, an American, grew up in Ohio and trained to be an urban planner. Growing food is only part of their goal. Gaspar says the farm eased the pressures of making money to buy food. It freed up more of her time. “It’s about creating a sustainable lifestyle,” she said.

Food forests can meet other goals.

Elaine Fiore has a different mission. She has helped to create 24 food forests on school grounds in Broward County in South Florida. They give children a place to sit still, she said, and learn about how things grow. “I’ll pull a leaf off a plant and I’ll eat it,” she said, “and they think it’s crazy!”

Elaine Fiore, who helped to create 24 food forests at schools in South Florida, at Park Ridge Elementary.Eva Marie Uzcategui for The New York Times

She is planting soursop, jackfruit, cranberry hibiscus, mint. It’s her second year doing it, so the trees are still young. Kids sometimes do yoga in the food forest. They learn about microclimates. They decorate the grounds with toy dinosaurs. At one school, they learned how much iguanas love young sweet potato vines. The reptiles decimated a third of their garden, Fiore said.

Eventually, she said, she hopes the fruits of the food forests can be used in the school cafeterias. In the long run, that can persuade kids to eat a more varied, more nutritious diet, she hopes.

Food forests are no walk in the park.

They don’t need a lot of land, but they need that land for a long time, long enough for trees to grow and mature. They also need to be weeded and mulched — a lot, especially in the beginning — and then, trees need to be pruned to keep fruits within reach. They need caretakers. And managers to figure out who gets to harvest, how to staff, whether paid or not.

Nature can impose its own limits. Jose Ramirez, a Los Angeles-based artist and gardener, has devoted his yard to fruit trees — mango, avocado, fig — with some perennials in the understory, like nettles. But it’s Los Angeles. The earth is dry. There’s not enough water to mimic a forest of the tropics.

There are many models. Seattle’s Beacon Food Forest is open to public picking. The Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill is owned and managed by the city of Atlanta. The Philadelphia Orchard Project works with community groups to manage each orchard. (Some are designed as food forests, while others contain only fruit trees.)

They can be hardy.

Rockwell, the professor who studies food forests, says they are especially well-suited to a climate-changed era, including in Miami, where she lives, where early summer can be scorching hot and dry.

In her own yard, she has 10 edible species in a six-square-foot patch. There’s taro in the ground, longevity spinach close to the ground, passion fruit vines that climb up a trellis, shrubs of mint and chaya. She allows herself one annual crop: collard greens. A mulberry tree filters the sun. On the edge of the yard is a star fruit and a dwarf mango. Both provide shade. Compared to a row of annuals, a food forest like hers can withstand higher temperatures and longer dry spells. “For providing protection from heat, it’s really a no-brainer,” she said.

Food forests can include nonnative species, she said. But they should steer clear of invasive species that can displace native plants. Consult your state or local environmental agency for a list of invasive species.

Garden gnomes are passé at Park Ridge Elementary.Eva Marie Uzcategui for The New York Times

Want to learn more?

Catherine Bukowski produced this guide in 2019: “The Community Food Forest Handbook: How to Plan, Organize, and Nurture Edible Gathering Places”

Cara Rockwell published tips for South Florida.

The shore of Lake Powell in Page, Ariz. Along with Lake Mead, it provides water and electricity for Arizona, Nevada and Southern California.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The shrinking Colorado: States that depend on the river are nowhere near a deal for reductions in water use. The federal government may be forced to impose painful cuts.

Trade wars on the horizon: As countries pursue new solutions to mitigate climate change, policy clashes point to a future of more frequent cross-border trade fights.

Alaska’s rainforest: The Biden administration banned logging and new roads on millions of acres in Tongass National Forest, North America’s largest temperate rainforest.

Minnesota’s lakes: The administration also said it would set a 20-year moratorium on mining upstream from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Sacred land: Indigenous groups are fighting a copper project in Arizona that companies say is crucial for producing batteries and reducing the use of fossil fuels.

Rats and recycling: New York’s mayor said the city would expand composting programs and improve trash collection. The plan is supposed to get rid of rats, too.

You call that snow? Some big American cities are experiencing some of their least snowy seasons in 50 years.

Ben Jealous, a civil rights activist, author, investor and nonprofit leader, is the new leader of the Sierra Club.Jason Andrew for The New York Times

The Sierra Club, the largest environmental group in the United States, was convulsed by the 2020 murder of George Floyd and forced to confront painful questions about its mission and history, including whether its founder, John Muir, was biased against people of color. Now, after three years of turmoil, the organization has appointed Ben Jealous, a civil rights activist and nonprofit leader, to be its executive director

Thanks for being a subscriber. We’ll be back on Friday.

Manuela Andreoni, Claire O’Neill and Douglas Alteen contributed to Climate Forward. Read past editions of the newsletter here.

If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.

Reach us at climateforward@nytimes.com. We read every message, and reply to many!





#Environment | https://sciencespies.com/environment/how-to-grow-a-food-forest/
Posted by at No comments:

Galaxy clusters are smashing together to form 'flaming cosmic narwhal'





Six of the most powerful astronomical observatories have captured a stunning image of Abell 2256, which is made of multiple galaxy clusters smashing together







Space



30 January 2023



By Leah Crane


Abell 2256

Abell 2256 or the ‘flaming cosmic narwhal’

X-ray: Chandra: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Bolonga/K. Rajpurohit et al.; XMM-Newton: ESA/XMM-Newton/Univ. of Bolonga/K. Rajpurohit et al. Radio: LOFAR: LOFAR/ASTRON; GMRT: NCRA/TIFR/GMRT; VLA: NSF/NRAO/VLA; Optical/IR: Pan-STARRS


Hundreds of millions of light years away, a group of galaxy clusters are locked in a deadly dance. At least three clusters are in the process of smashing together, forming a single colossal cluster called Abell 2256.


Some astronomers have taken to calling it the “flaming cosmic narwhal” because of the horn-like appearance of some of the jets in the system and the glowing tufts of radio waves at the top of the image. Researchers have used six of the most powerful observatories to unravel what’s going on in the wisps and whorls of this chaotic mega-cluster.


Each telescope captured a different part of the strange and complex structure. Two X-ray observatories imaged the hot gas, which glows blue in this image. Stars, shining white and yellow in the image, were caught in optical and infrared wavelengths of light.

Advertisement



Radio waves are shown in red in the picture, and they come from a variety of different sources. The straight slashes of red are jets blasting away from the supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies, whereas the red swirls and squiggles come from jet material smashing into the surrounding gas. The filaments near the top of the image – the “flames” of the cosmic narwhal – stretch across about two million light years, and most likely come from the cosmic collision itself, which created shock waves that roiled through the cluster.


But despite all this stunning detail, there are questions about Abell 2256 that remain unanswered: there is a faint halo of radio waves near the centre of the cluster that hasn’t been fully explained yet, and it contains more galaxies that emit radio waves than we’d expect. Researchers are still working to analyse the smorgasbord of data and figure out the details of how enormous clusters like this one are formed.


Sign up to our free Launchpad newsletter for a voyage across the galaxy and beyond, every Friday



More on these topics:





#Space | https://sciencespies.com/space/galaxy-clusters-are-smashing-together-to-form-flaming-cosmic-narwhal/
Posted by at No comments:

Eight Thousand Years of Bog Bodies Reveal a Grim Burial Tradition

When Roy van Beek was a teenager in the Netherlands in the early 1990s, he made a field trip to a local museum to see an exhibit of bog bodies: ancient human remains, both skeletal and naturally mummified, interred in the wetlands and spongy turf of northern Europe. He recalled one cadaver on display that was remarkably intact and oddly disorienting. The contorted body of a female about his age, roughly 4 feet 6 inches tall, who had lived in the first century A.D. “She had been left in a shallow mire south of the modern-day village of Yde,” said Dr. van Beek, now an archaeologist at Wageningen University & Research. Her skin had been tanned in the dark tea of the bog.

The Yde Girl, as she became known, was unearthed in 1897 by peat diggers so spooked by their gruesome discovery that they reportedly chorused “I hope the Devil gets the man that dug this hole” and fled the scene. The corpse was wearing a much-darned woolen cloak, which concealed a stab wound near her collarbone. A seven-foot-long strip of cloth, perhaps a waistband, was wound around her neck three times and its slipknot indented below her left ear. “The cloth was probably used to strangle her,” Dr. van Beek said. Most of the bog mummies that have turned up also show signs of multiple traumatic injuries and are presumed to be murder victims.

This month, Dr. van Beek was the lead author of the first comprehensive survey of bog bodies — a burial tradition believed to span 7,000 years. The multidisciplinary study, published in the journal Antiquity, created a database of more than 1,000 such bog people, some arrestingly lifelike, from 266 historical bog sites across a swath of northern Europe, from Ireland to the Baltic States.

Relying on recorded folklore, descriptions and depictions, newspaper reports and antiquarian records, a team of Dutch, Swedish and Estonian researchers focused on the rise of bog burials starting around 5200 B.C., in the Neolithic period and into the Bronze Age. The team took particular interest in the tradition’s efflorescence from 1000 B.C. to 1500 A.D., from the Iron Age to the medieval period.

“While a number of bog scholars have been arguing that we need to reconceptualize bog bodies to include the skeletonized remains from more alkaline bog lands and wetlands, this is the first major study to do it systematically,” Melanie Giles, a British archaeologist not involved in the study, said in an email. “The results are really quite important, showing a formal burial phase in the Bronze Age and a rise in violent deaths during the time in which these bogs, within certain hot spots, grow exponentially.”

A wooden boardwalk extends through a green, watery bog under low, gray skies.
The raised bog of Abbeyleix, Ireland, one of the sites included in the recent study of bog bodies.Roy van Beek
Tollund Man, a bog body dating to the fifth century B.C. and recovered in 1950, at the Museum Silkeborg in Denmark.Tim Graham/Getty Images

Cases are divided into three main categories: bog mummies, whose skin, soft tissue and hair are preserved; bog skeletons, with only the bones surviving; and a third group composed of the partial remains of both. “Many finds have been lost in the distant past or are only known through published sources,” Dr. van Beek said. “These ‘paper’ bog bodies are documented with varying degrees of detail and reliability.” Before the 19th century, bodies pulled out of bogs were often given a Christian reburial.

The cadavers owe their state to the natural chemistry of bogs. Layers of sphagnum moss and peat help pickle bodies by saturating the tissue in a cold, immobilizing environment that is highly acidic and almost devoid of oxygen. The decaying mosses release humic acids and sphagnan, a complex sugar, that make life difficult for the microorganisms that would normally cause rotting and decay. Sphagnan also leaches calcium from bones, eventually softening, breaking and warping them.

Bog-mummified people are mainly found in raised bogs — discrete, dome-shaped masses of peat that typically form in lowland landscapes and reach depths of 30 feet or more. (Blanket bogs are generally shallower and spread out widely over wet or upland areas.)

The first recorded body emerged from Schalkholz Fen in Holstein, Germany, in 1640. Since then, the cold-weather swamps of northern Europe have yielded such regional curiosities as Windeby Girl, Haraldskjaer Woman, Lindow Man, Clonycavan Man, Old Croghan Man and Koelbjerg Man. The bones of Koelbjerg Man, recovered in 1941 on the Danish island of Funen, date to 8000 B.C. Seamus Heaney’s melancholy “Bog Poems” include a lament for Grauballe Man, whose throat was slit in the third century B.C.:

The cured wound

opens inwards to a dark

elderberry place.

Of the 57 bog people whose cause of death could be determined in Dr. van Beek’s study, at least 45 met violent ends, and quite a few were bludgeoned or suffered mutilation and dismemberment before they died. Tollund Man, dating to the fifth century B.C. and dredged from a Danish peat bog in 1950, was hanged. Bone arrowheads were found embedded in the skull and sternum of Porsmose Man, recovered from peat elsewhere in Denmark. Seven victims appear to have been slain by several means, a practice that scholars call overkilling. Almost all of the overkills in Dr. van Beek’s study occurred from 400 B.C. to 400 A.D.

While most sites held just a single deceased person, some were used repeatedly, with one Danish bog, Alken Enge, estimated to hold the disarticulated remains of more than 380 ancient warriors killed in a brutal conflict and left in open water. The bones, exclusively male and predominantly adult, date to early in the first century A.D., when Germanic tribes engaged in intratribal warfare. Researchers believe that the dead were cleared from the battlefield and dumped into the bog with their weapons and personal ornaments.

This would have been one of the lesser indignities that befell bog people. Many were hastily extracted or improperly conserved; in the Netherlands of the late 18th century, four bog corpses were even ground into mumia — mummy powder — and sold as remedies.

A fundamental question about these Iron Age victims is why. Were they murdered? Executed? Sacrificed to the gods, perhaps as fertility offerings? Miranda Aldhouse-Green, emeritus professor of archaeology at Cardiff University and author of “Bog Bodies Uncovered,” has argued that ritual sacrifices may have been undertaken at times of crisis in a community: famine, extreme weather, war threats, the perceived need to kill foreign hostages.

Grauballe Man’s throat was slit in the third century B.C. He was discovered in Denmark in 1952.Moesgaard Museum
Grauballe Man on display at the Moesgaard Museum in Aarhaus, Denmark.Christina Gascoigne/Robert Harding, via Alamy

Two features recur among Iron Age bog bodies: youth and disability. Many bodies were those of adolescents, at the cusp between childhood and adulthood. “In some traditional societies, such individuals were perceived to have shamanic powers, enabling them to segue between the material and spirit worlds, just as people at puberty contain elements of childhood and adulthood,” Dr. Aldhouse-Green said in an email.

The Yde girl had severe scoliosis, a twisting of the spine that meant her growth was stunted and she would have walked with a lurch. Dr. Aldhouse-Green has proposed that disabled people may have been perceived to be “touched” by divinity.

“Ceremony was key to keeping communities bound together, and ritual killing would provide spectacle similar to Roman gladiatorial shows,” she said. Recent findings from Denmark and north Germany suggest that the people chosen may sometimes have been of high status and had therefore undertaken long journeys in the months before their deaths.

Disease was the likely culprit in a few instances, and from 1100 A.D. on, there were six possible suicides and four accidental deaths. In 1674, a man and a woman died in a snowstorm on the upland peat bog of Hope Woodland in Derbyshire, England. Far to the north in Shetland, during a cold spell late in the same century, the so-called Gunnister Man is believed to have succumbed to exposure. In 1828, a German traveling salesman and falconer named Johann Spieker died in Lower Saxony,probably by drowning.

“His grave was marked with a wooden cross and a fence that remained visible for a long time,” Dr. van Beek said. “During the excavation, only his cloak, some coins and a prayer book apparently were found.”

Arguing against suicide theories, Dr. Aldouse-Green noted that many ancient bog bodies were naked, some found with clothes placed beside them. “Leather and linen survive in bogs due to the presence of sphagnum moss,” she said. Dr. van Beek countered that “nakedness is a very difficult factor to take into account” and that other fabrics can degrade without a trace even when a body is preserved.

The bog site of Aschener Moor in Germany.Roy van Beek

The growth of boglands was stimulated more than 10,000 years ago by the collapse of the Eurasian Ice Sheet and release of freshwater, which abruptly raised sea levels and groundwater tables. Plant decomposition is slowed to such an extent in these areas that dead vegetation accumulates to form peat, effectively storing carbon dioxide. As a result, preserving bog lands is considered a powerful tool to help mitigate climate change.

“Many bogs across Europe are currently protected nature reserves, often with attempts to restore and expand them,” Dr. van Beek said. He added, with chagrin, that in the Irish Midlands, the Baltic States and parts of Germany, peat is still being cut.

“Never before have we needed to care as much about peatlands,” said Dr. Giles, whose book “Bog Bodies: Face to Face With the Past” explores what she calls “the black hole of the peat pool.” “Yet for hundreds of years we’ve told awful tales about these maligned landscapes, encouraging people to steer clear, to drain and damage those precious places.”

Yde Girl and Tollund Man are a reminder that humans once had very different and more respectful relationships with the bog, she said: “Bog bodies — and artifacts and eco-facts — become strange kinds of ambassadors from deep time. They re-enchant us with these landscapes through their stories.”





#News | https://sciencespies.com/news/eight-thousand-years-of-bog-bodies-reveal-a-grim-burial-tradition/
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)