Oct. 24, 2013 — Human genes in immunity-related pathways are likely associated with the composition of an individual’s microbiome, which refers to the bacteria and other microbes that live in and on the body, scientists reported today, Oct. 24, at the American Society of Human Genetics 2013 annual meeting in Boston.
“These genes are significantly enriched in inflammatory and immune pathways and form an interaction network highly enriched with immunity-related functions,” said Ran Blekhman, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
The study is the first genome-wide and microbiome-wide investigation to identify the interactions between human genetic variation and the composition of the microbes that inhabit the human body.
The skin, genital areas, mouth, and other areas of the human body, especially the intestines, are colonized by trillions of bacteria and other microorganisms. “Shifts in the composition of the species of the microbes have been associated with multiple chronic conditions, such as diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease and obesity,” noted Dr. Blekhman.
Dr. Blekhman and his collaborators found evidence of genetic influences on microbiome composition at 15 body sites of 93 people surveyed. “We found in our study that genetic variation correlated with the microbiome at two levels,” he said.
At the individual level, the mathematical procedure known as principal component analysis demonstrated that genetic variation correlated with the overall structure of a person’s microbiome.
At the species level, potential correlations between host genetic variation and the abundance of a single bacterial species were identified, said Dr. Blekhman, who conducted much of the research while a scientist in the lab of Andrew G. Clark, Ph.D., the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Population Genetics in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Dr. Clark is the senior author of the abstract.
To identify the bacterial species that inhabited each human body site, the researchers mined sequence data from the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), an international program to genetically catalog the microbial residents of the human body.
Using a systems-level association approach, the researchers showed that variation in genes related to immune system pathways was correlated with microbiome composition in the 15 host body sites.
To shed light on the evolutionary history of the symbiosis between humans and their microbiomes, the researchers analyzed sequencing data from the 1000 Genomes Project, which is designed to provide a comprehensive resource on human genetic variation.
They found that the genes in the pathways linked to the composition of an individual’s microbiome vary significantly across populations. “Moreover, many of those genes have been shown in recent studies to be under selective pressure,” said Dr. Blekhman.
“The results highlight the role of host immunity in determining bacteria levels across the body and support a possible role for the microbiome in driving the evolution of bacteria-associated host genes,” he added.
Dr. Blekhman is currently investigating the combined role of host genetics and the microbiome in influencing an individual’s susceptibility to such diseases as colon cancer. His goal is to unravel the interaction between host genomic variation and the gut microbiome in colon cancer incidence, evolution and therapeutic response.
Oct. 24, 2013 — In Australia’s Western Desert, Aboriginal hunters use a unique method that actually increases populations of the animals they hunt, according to a study co-authored by Stanford Woods Institute-affiliated researchers Rebecca and Doug Bird. Rebecca Bird is an associate professor of anthropology, and Doug Bird is a senior research scientist.
Aboriginal hunters looking for monitor lizards as fires burn nearby. (Credit: Rebecca Bird)
The study, published today inProceedings of the Royal Society B, offers new insights into maintaining animal communities through ecosystem engineering and co-evolution of animals and humans. It finds that populations of monitor lizards nearly double in areas where they are heavily hunted. The hunting method — using fire to clear patches of land to improve the search for game — also creates a mosaic of regrowth that enhances habitat. Where there are no hunters, lightning fires spread over vast distances, landscapes are more homogenous and monitor lizards are more rare.
“Our results show that humans can have positive impacts on other species without the need for policies of conservation and resource management,” Rebecca Bird said. “In the case of indigenous communities, the everyday practice of subsistence might be just as effective at maintaining biodiversity as the activities of other organisms.”
Martu, the aboriginal community the Birds and their colleagues have worked with for many years, refer to their relationship with the ecosystem around them as part of “jukurr” or dreaming. This ritual, practical philosophy and body of knowledge instructs the way Martu interact with the desert environment, from hunting practices to cosmological and social organization. At its core is the concept that land must be used if life is to continue. Therefore, Martu believe the absence of hunting, not its presence, causes species to decline.
While jukurr has often been interpreted as belonging to the realm of the sacred and irrational, it appears to actually be consistent with scientific understanding, according to the study. The findings suggest that the decline in aboriginal hunting and burning in the mid-20th century, due to the persecution of aboriginal people and the loss of traditional economies, may have contributed to the extinction of many desert species that had come to depend on such practices.
The findings add to a growing appreciation of the complex role that humans play in the function of ecosystems worldwide. In environments where people have been embedded in ecosystems for millennia, including areas of the U.S., tribal burning was extensive in many types of habitat. Many Native Americans in California, for instance, believe that policies of fire suppression and the exclusion of their traditional burning practices have contributed to the current crisis in biodiversity and native species decline, particularly in the health of oak woodland communities. Incorporating indigenous knowledge and practices into contemporary land management could become important in efforts to conserve and restore healthy ecosystems and landscapes.
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Journal Reference:
R. B. Bird, N. Tayor, B. F. Codding, D. W. Bird. Niche construction and Dreaming logic: aboriginal patch mosaic burning and varanid lizards (Varanus gouldii) in Australia. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2013; 280 (1772): 20132297 DOI:10.1098/rspb.2013.2297
The material contained in this chapter is based on official government sources as well as information provided by research institutions, policy organizations, peer-reviewed journals and eye witness accounts.
The CTBTO remains neutral in any ongoing disputes related to compensation for veterans of the nuclear test programmes.
Nuclear weapons have been tested in all environments since 1945: in the atmosphere, underground and underwater. Tests have been carried out onboard barges, on top of towers, suspended from balloons, on the Earth’s surface, more than 600 metres underwater and over 200 metres underground. Nuclear test bombs have also been dropped by aircraft and fired by rockets up to 320 km into the atmosphere.
The National Resources Defense Council estimated the total yield of all nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1980 at 510 megatons (Mt). Atmospheric tests alone accounted for 428 mt, equivalent to over 29,000 Hiroshima size bombs.
Frigate Bird nuclear test explosion seen through the periscope of the submarine USS Carbonero (SS-337), Johnston Atoll, Central Pacific Ocean, 1962.
The first nuclear test was carried out by the United States in July 1945, followed by the Soviet Union in 1949, the United Kingdom in 1952, France in 1960, and China in 1964. The National Resources Defense Council estimated the total yield of all nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1980 at 510 megatons (Mt). Atmospheric tests alone accounted for 428 mt, equivalent to over 29,000 Hiroshima size bombs.
The amount of radioactivity generated by a nuclear explosion can vary considerably depending upon a number of factors. These include the size of the weapon and the location of the burst. An explosion at ground level may be expected to generate more dust and other radioactive particulate matters than an air burst. The dispersion of radioactive material is also dependent upon weather conditions.
Large amounts of radionuclides dispersed into the atmosphere
Levels of radiocarbon (C14) in the atmosphere 1945 – 2000. Image credit: Hokanomono.
The 2000 Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation to the General Assemblystates that:
“The main man-made contribution to the exposure of the world’s population [to radiation] has come from the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, from 1945 to 1980. Each nuclear test resulted in unrestrained release into the environment of substantial quantities of radioactive materials, which were widely dispersed in the atmosphere and deposited everywhere on the Earth’s surface.”
The first nuclear test was carried out by the United States in July 1945, followed by the Soviet Union in 1949, the United Kingdom in 1952, France in 1960, and China in 1964.
Different types of nuclear tests: (1) atmospheric test; (2) underground test; (3) upper atmospheric test; and (4) underwater test.
Concern over bone-seeking radionuclides and the first mitigating steps
Prior to 1950, only limited consideration was given to the health impacts of worldwide dispersion of radioactivity from nuclear testing. Public protests in the 1950s and concerns about the radionuclide strontium-90 (see Chart 1) and its effect on mother’s milk and babies’ teeth were instrumental in the conclusion of the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) in 1963. The PTBT banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, outer space and under water, but not underground, and was signed by the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. However, France and China did not sign and conducted atmospheric tests until 1974 and 1980 respectively.
Although underground testing mitigated the problem of radiation doses from short-lived radionuclides such as iodine-131, large amounts of plutonium, iodine-129 and caesium-135 (See Chart 1) were released underground. In addition, exposure occurred beyond the test site if radioactive gases leaked or were vented.
Scientist arranging mice for radiation exposure investigations around 1944. (While conducting these experiments, the carcinogenesis of urethane was discovered).
Gradual increase in knowledge about dangers of radiation exposure
Over the past century, there has been a gradual accumulation of knowledge about the hazards of radioactivity. It was recognized early on that exposure to a sufficient radiation dosage could cause injuries to internal organs, as well as to the skin and the eyes.
According to the 2000 Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation to the UN General Assembly, radiation exposure can damage living cells, killing some and modifying others. The destruction of a sufficient number of cells will inflict noticeable harm on organs which may result in death. If altered cells are not repaired, the resulting modification will be passed on to further cells and may eventually lead to cancer. Modified cells that transmit hereditary information to the offspring of the exposed individual might cause hereditary disorders. Vegetation can also be contaminated when fallout is directly deposited on external surfaces of plants and absorbed through the roots. Furthermore, people can be exposed when they eat meat and milk from animals grazing on contaminated vegetation.
Radiation exposure has been associated with most forms of leukaemia, as well as cancer of the thyroid, lung and breast.
girl who lost her hair after being exposed to radiation from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.
Studies reveal link between nuclear weapon testing and cancer
The American Cancer Society’s website explains how ionizing radiation, which refers to several types of particles and rays given off by radioactive materials, is one of the few scientifically proven carcinogens in human beings. Radiation exposure has been associated with most forms of leukaemia, as well as cancer of the thyroid, lung and breast. The time that may elapse between radiation exposure and cancer development can be anything between 10 and 40 years. Degrees of exposure regarded as tolerable in the 1950s are now recognized internationally as unsafe.
An article featured in Volume 94 of American Scientist onFallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests and Cancer Risksstates that a number of studies of biological samples (including bone, thyroid glands and other tissues) have provided increasing proof that specific radionuclides in fallout are implicated in fallout-related cancers.
It is difficult to assess the number of deaths that might be attributed to radiation exposure from nuclear testing. Some studies and evaluations, including an assessment by Arjun Makhijani on the health effects of nuclear weapon complexes, estimate that cancer fatalities due to the global radiation doses from the atmospheric nuclear testing programmes of the five nuclear-weapon States amount to hundreds of thousands. A 1991 study by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)estimated that the radiation and radioactive materials from atmospheric testing taken in by people up until the year 2000 would cause 430,000 cancer deaths, some of which had already occurred by the time the results were published. The study predicted that roughly 2.4 million people could eventually die from cancer as a result of atmospheric testing.
CHART 1 – EFFECTS OF RADIONUCLIDES
Radionuclide
Half-life*
Health hazards
Xenon
(Xe)
6.7 hours
Inhalation in excessive concentrations can result in dizziness, nausea, vomiting, loss of consciousness, and death. At low oxygen concentrations, unconsciousness and death may occur in seconds without warning.
Americium-241
(241Am)
432 years
Moves rapidly through the body after ingestion and is concentrated within the bones for a long period of time. During this storage americium will slowly decay and release radioactive particles and rays. These rays can cause alteration of genetic materials and bone cancer.
Iodine-131
(131I)
8 days
When present in high levels in the environment from radioactive fallout, I-131 can be absorbed through contaminated food. It also accumulates in the thyroid gland, where it can destroy all or part of the thyroid. May cause damage to the thyroid as it decays. Thyroid cancer may occur.
Caesium-137
(137Cs)
30 years
After entering the body, caesium is distributed fairly uniformly through the body, with higher concentration in muscle tissue and lower concentration in bones. Can cause gonadal irradiation and genetic damage.
Krypton-85
(85Kr)
10.76 years
Inhalation in excessive concentrations can result in dizziness, nausea, vomiting, loss of consciousness, and death.
Strontium-90
(90Sr)
28 years
A small amount of strontium 90 is deposited in bones and bone marrow, blood and soft tissues when ingested. Can cause bone cancer, cancer of nearby tissues, and leukaemia.
Plutonium-239
(239Pu)
24,400 years
Released when a plutonium weapon is exploded. Ingestion of even a miniscule quantity is a serious health hazard and can cause lung, bone, and liver cancer. The highest doses are to the lungs, the bone marrow, bone surfaces, and liver.
Tritium
(3H)
12 years
Easily ingested. Can be inhaled as a gas in the air or absorbed through the skin. Enters soft tissues and organs. Exposure to tritium increases the risk of developing cancer. Beta radiation emitted by tritium can cause lung cancer.
* ( i.e. amount of time it takes for half of the quantity of a radioactive material to decay)
Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1911 for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium. The curie unit is named after Marie and Pierre Curie, who conducted pioneering research on radiation.
Measuring radiation doses and biological risks
Scientists use different terms when measuring radiation. The terms can either refer to radiation from a radioactive source, the radiation dose absorbed by a person, or the risk that a person will suffer health effects from exposure to radiation. When a person is exposed to radiation, energy is deposited in the body’s tissues. The amount of energy deposited per unit of weight of human tissue is called the absorbed dose. This is measured using the rad or the SI Gy. The rad, which stands for radiation absorbed dose, has largely been replaced by the Gy. One Gy is equal to 100 rad.
The curie (symbol Ci) is a unit of radioactivity. It has largely been replaced by the Becquerel, which is the unit of radioactivity. One Becquerel is defined as the number of atoms which decay per second in a sample. The curie unit is named after Marie and Pierre Curie, who conducted pioneering research on radiation.
A person’s biological risk (i.e. the risk that a person will suffer health effects from an exposure to radiation) is measured using the conventional unit rem or the SI unit Sv.
CHART 2. EFFECTS OF DIFFERENT LEVELS OF RADIATION
Radiation dose in rems
Health impact
5-20
Possible chromosomal damage.
20-100
Temporary reduction in number of white blood cells. Mild nausea and vomiting. Loss of appetite. Fatigue, which may last up to four weeks. Greater susceptibility to infection. Greater long-term risk of leukaemia and lymphoma is possible.
100-200
Mild radiation sickness within a few hours: vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue; reduced resistance to infection. Hair loss. In sufficient amounts, I-131 can destroy all or part of the thyroid gland, leading to thyroid abnormalities or cancer. Temporary male sterility.
200-300
Serious radiation sickness effects as in 100-200 rem. Body cells that divide rapidly can also be destroyed. These include blood cells, gastrointestinal tract cells, reproductive cells, and hair cells. DNA of surviving cells is also damaged.
300-400
Serious radiation sickness. Bone marrow and intestine destruction. Haemorraging of the mouth.
400-1000
Acute illness, possible heart failure. Bone marrow almost completely destroyed. Permanent female sterility probable.
1000-5000
Acute illness, nerve cells and small blood vessels are destroyed. Death can occur in days.
When subatomic particles smash together at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, they create showers of new particles whose signatures are recorded by four detectors. The LHC captures 5 trillion bits of data — more information than all of the world’s libraries combined — every second. After the judicious application of filtering algorithms, more than 99 percent of those data are discarded, but the four experiments still produce a whopping 25 petabytes (25×1015 bytes) of data per year that must be stored and analyzed. That is a scale far beyond the computing resources of any single facility, so the LHC scientists rely on a vast computing grid of 160 data centers around the world, a distributed network that is capable of transferring as much as 10 gigabytes per second at peak performance.
The LHC’s approach to its big data problem reflects just how dramatically the nature of computing has changed over the last decade. Since Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore first defined it in 1965, the so-called Moore’s law — which predicts that the number of transistors on integrated circuits will double every two years — has dominated the computer industry. While that growth rate has proved remarkably resilient, for now, at least, “Moore’s law has basically crapped out; the transistors have gotten as small as people know how to make them economically with existing technologies,” said Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Instead, since 2005, many of the gains in computing power have come from adding more parallelism via multiple cores, with multiple levels of memory. The preferred architecture no longer features a single central processing unit (CPU) augmented with random access memory (RAM) and a hard drive for long-term storage. Even the big, centralized parallel supercomputers that dominated the 1980s and 1990s are giving way to distributed data centers and cloud computing, often networked across many organizations and vast geographical distances.
These days, “People talk about a computing fabric,” said Stanford University electrical engineerStephen Boyd. These changes in computer architecture translate into the need for a different computational approach when it comes to handling big data, which is not only grander in scope than the large data sets of yore but also intrinsically different from them.
The demand for ever-faster processors, while important, isn’t the primary focus anymore. “Processing speed has been completely irrelevant for five years,” Boyd said. “The challenge is not how to solve problems with a single, ultra-fast processor, but how to solve them with 100,000 slower processors.” Aaronson points out that many problems in big data can’t be adequately addressed by simply adding more parallel processing. These problems are “more sequential, where each step depends on the outcome of the preceding step,” he said. “Sometimes, you can split up the work among a bunch of processors, but other times, that’s harder to do.” And often the software isn’t written to take full advantage of the extra processors. “If you hire 20 people to do something, will it happen 20 times faster?” Aaronson said. “Usually not.”
Researchers also face challenges in integrating very differently structured data sets, as well as the difficulty of moving large amounts of data efficiently through a highly distributed network.
Those issues will become more pronounced as the size and complexity of data sets continue to grow faster than computing resources, according to California Institute of Technology physicist Harvey Newman, whose team developed the LHC’s grid of data centers and trans-Atlantic network. He estimates that if current trends hold, the computational needs of big data analysis will place considerable strain on the computing fabric. “It requires us to think about a different kind of system,” he said.
Memory and Movement
Emmanuel Candes, an applied mathematician at Stanford University, was once able to crunch big data problems on his desktop computer. But last year, when he joined a collaboration of radiologists developing dynamic magnetic resonance imaging — whereby one could record a patient’s heartbeat in real time using advanced algorithms to create high-resolution videos from limited MRI measurements — he found that the data no longer fit into his computer’s memory, making it difficult to perform the necessary analysis.
Addressing the storage-capacity challenges of big data is not simply a matter of building more memory, which has never been more plentiful. It is also about managing the movement of data. That’s because, increasingly, the desired data is no longer at people’s fingertips, stored in a single computer; it is distributed across multiple computers in a large data center or even in the “cloud.”There is a hierarchy to data storage, ranging from the slowest, cheapest and most abundant memory to the fastest and most expensive, with the least available space. At the bottom of this hierarchy is so-called “slow memory” such as hard drives and flash drives, the cost of which continues to drop. There is more space on hard drives, compared to the other kinds of memory, but saving and retrieving the data takes longer. Next up this ladder comes RAM, which is must faster than slow memory but offers less space is more expensive. Then there is cache memory — another trade-off of space and price in exchange for faster retrieval speeds — and finally the registers on the microchip itself, which are the fastest of all but the priciest to build, with the least available space. If memory storage were like real estate, a hard drive would be a sprawling upstate farm, RAM would be a medium-sized house in the suburbs, cache memory would be a townhouse on the outskirts of a big city, and the register memory would be a tiny studio in a prime urban location.
Longer commutes for stored data translate into processing delays. “When computers are slow today, it’s not because of the microprocessor,” Aaronson said. “The microprocessor is just treading water waiting for the disk to come back with the data.” Big data researchers prefer to minimize how much data must be moved back and forth from slow memory to fast memory. The problem is exacerbated when the data is distributed across a network or in the cloud, because it takes even longer to move the data back and forth, depending on bandwidth capacity, so that it can be analyzed.
One possible solution to this dilemma is to embrace the new paradigm. In addition to distributed storage, why not analyze the data in a distributed way as well, with each unit (or node) in a network of computers performing a small piece of a computation? Each partial solution is then integrated to find the full result. This approach is similar in concept to the LHC’s, in which one complete copy of the raw data (after filtering) is stored at the CERN research facility in Switzerland that is home to the collider. A second copy is divided into batches that are then distributed to data centers around the world. Each center analyzes its chunk of data and transmits the results to regional computers before moving on to the next batch.
Alon Halevy, a computer scientist at Google, says the biggest breakthroughs in big data are likely to come from data integration.Image: Peter DaSilva for Quanta Magazine
Boyd’s system is based on so-calledconsensus algorithms. “It’s a mathematical optimization problem,” he said of the algorithms. “You are using past data to train the model in hopes that it will work on future data.” Such algorithms are useful for creating an effective SPAM filter, for example, or for detecting fraudulent bank transactions.
This can be done on a single computer, with all the data in one place. Machine learning typically uses many processors, each handling a little bit of the problem. But when the problem becomes too large for a single machine, a consensus optimization approach might work better, in which the data set is chopped into bits and distributed across 1,000 “agents” that analyze their bit of data and each produce a model based on the data they have processed. The key is to require a critical condition to be met: although each agent’s model can be different, all the models must agree in the end — hence the term “consensus algorithms.”
The process by which 1,000 individual agents arrive at a consensus model is similar in concept to the Mechanical Turk crowd-sourcing methodology employed by Amazon — with a twist. With the Mechanical Turk, a person or a business can post a simple task, such as determining which photographs contain a cat, and ask the crowd to complete the task in exchange for gift certificates that can be redeemed for Amazon products, or for cash awards that can be transferred to a personal bank account. It may seem trivial to the human user, but the program learns from this feedback, aggregating all the individual responses into its working model, so it can make better predictions in the future.
In Boyd’s system, the process is iterative, creating a feedback loop. The initial consensus is shared with all the agents, which update their models in light of the new information and reach a second consensus, and so on. The process repeats until all the agents agree. Using this kind of distributed optimization approach significantly cuts down on how much data needs to be transferred at any one time.
The Quantum Question
Late one night, during a swanky Napa Valley conference last year, MIT physicist Seth Lloyd found himself soaking in a hot tub across from Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page — any aspiring technology entrepreneur’s dream scenario. Lloyd made his pitch, proposing a quantum version of Google’s search engine whereby users could make queries and receive results without Google knowing which questions were asked. The men were intrigued. But after conferring with their business manager the next day, Brin and Page informed Lloyd that his scheme went against their business plan. “They want to know everything about everybody who uses their products and services,” he joked.
It is easy to grasp why Google might be interested in a quantum computer capable of rapidly searching enormous data sets. A quantum computer, in principle, could offer enormous increases in processing power, running algorithms significantly faster than a classical (non-quantum) machine for certain problems. Indeed, the company just purchased a reportedly $15 million prototype from a Canadian firm called D-Wave Systems, although the jury is still out on whether D-Wave’s product is truly quantum.
“This is not about trying all the possible answers in parallel. It is fundamentally different from parallel processing,” said Aaronson. Whereas a classical computer stores information as bits that can be either 0s or 1s, a quantum computer could exploit an unusual property: the superposition of states. If you flip a regular coin, it will land on heads or tails. There is zero probability that it will be both heads and tails. But if it is a quantum coin, technically, it exists in an indeterminate state of both heads and tails until you look to see the outcome.
A true quantum computer could encode information in so-called qubits that can be 0 and 1 at the same time. Doing so could reduce the time required to solve a difficult problem that would otherwise take several years of computation to mere seconds. But that is easier said than done, not least because such a device would be highly sensitive to outside interference: The slightest perturbation would be equivalent to looking to see if the coin landed heads or tails, and thus undo the superposition.
Data from a seemingly simple query about coffee production across the globe can be surprisingly difficult to integrate. Image: Peter DaSilva for Quanta Magazine
However, Aaronson cautions against placing too much hope in quantum computing to solve big data’s computational challenges, insisting that if and when quantum computers become practical, they will be best suited to very specific tasks, most notably to simulate quantum mechanical systems or to factor large numbers to break codes in classical cryptography. Yet there is one way that quantum computing might be able to assist big data: by searching very large, unsorted data sets — for example, a phone directory in which the names are arranged randomly instead of alphabetically.
It is certainly possible to do so with sheer brute force, using a massively parallel computer to comb through every record. But a quantum computer could accomplish the task in a fraction of the time. That is the thinking behind Grover’s algorithm, which was devised by Bell Labs’ Lov Grover in 1996. However, “to really make it work, you’d need a quantum memory that can be accessed in a quantum superposition,” Aaronson said, but it would need to do so in such a way that the very act of accessing the memory didn’t destroy the superposition, “and that is tricky as hell.”
In short, you need quantum RAM (Q-RAM), and Lloyd has developed a conceptual prototype, along with an accompanying program he calls a Q-App (pronounced “quapp”) targeted to machine learning. He thinks his system could find patterns within data without actually looking at any individual records, thereby preserving the quantum superposition (and the users’ privacy). “You can effectively access all billion items in your database at the same time,” he explained, adding that “you’re not accessing any one of them, you’re accessing common features of all of them.”
For example, if there is ever a giant database storing the genome of every human being on Earth, “you could search for common patterns among different genes” using Lloyd’s quantum algorithm, with Q-RAM and a small 70-qubit quantum processor while still protecting the privacy of the population, Lloyd said. The person doing the search would have access to only a tiny fraction of the individual records, he said, and the search could be done in a short period of time. With the cost of sequencing human genomes dropping and commercial genotyping services rising, it is quite possible that such a database might one day exist, Lloyd said. It could be the ultimate big data set, considering that a single genome is equivalent to 6 billion bits.
Lloyd thinks quantum computing could work well for powerhouse machine-learning algorithms capable of spotting patterns in huge data sets — determining what clusters of data are associated with a keyword, for example, or what pieces of data are similar to one another in some way. “It turns out that many machine-learning algorithms actually work quite nicely in quantum computers, assuming you have a big enough Q-RAM,” he said. “These are exactly the kinds of mathematical problems people try to solve, and we think we could do very well with the quantum version of that.”
The Future Is Integration
“No matter how much you speed up the computers or the way you put computers together, the real issues are at the data level.”
Google’s Alon Halevy believes that the real breakthroughs in big data analysis are likely to come from integration — specifically, integrating across very different data sets. “No matter how much you speed up the computers or the way you put computers together, the real issues are at the data level,” he said. For example, a raw data set could include thousands of different tables scattered around the Web, each one listing crime rates in New York, but each may use different terminology and column headers, known as “schema.” A header of “New York” can describe the state, the five boroughs of New York City, or just Manhattan. You must understand the relationship between the schemas before the data in all those tables can be integrated.
That, in turn, requires breakthroughs in techniques to analyze the semantics of natural language. It is one of the toughest problems in artificial intelligence — if your machine-learning algorithm aspires to perfect understanding of nearly every word. But what if your algorithm needs to understand only enough of the surrounding text to determine whether, for example, a table includes data on coffee production in various countries so that it can then integrate the table with other, similar tables into one common data set? According to Halevy, a researcher could first use a coarse-grained algorithm to parse the underlying semantics of the data as best it could and then adopt a crowd-sourcing approach like a Mechanical Turk to refine the model further through human input. “The humans are training the system without realizing it, and then the system can answer many more questions based on what it has learned,” he said.
Chris Mattmann, a senior computer scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and director at theApache Software Foundation, faces just such a complicated scenario with a research project that seeks to integrate two different sources of climate information: remote-sensing observations of the Earth made by satellite instrumentation and computer-simulated climate model outputs. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would like to be able to compare the various climate models against the hard remote-sensing data to determine which models provide the best fit. But each of those sources stores data in different formats, and there are many different versions of those formats.
Many researchers emphasize the need to develop a broad spectrum of flexible tools that can deal with many different kinds of data. For example, many users are shifting from traditional highly structured relational databases, broadly known as SQL, which represent data in a conventional tabular format, to a more flexible format dubbed NoSQL. “It can be as structured or unstructured as you need it to be,” said Matt LeMay, a product and communications consultant and the former head of consumer products at URL shortening and bookmarking service Bitly, which uses both SQL and NoSQL formats for data storage, depending on the application.
Mattmann cites an Apache software program called Tika that allows the user to integrate data across 1,200 of the most common file formats. But in some cases, some human intervention is still required. Ultimately, Mattmann would like to fully automate this process via intelligent software that can integrate differently structured data sets, much like the Babel Fish in Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” book series enabled someone to understand any language.
Integration across data sets will also require a well-coordinated distributed network system comparable to the one conceived of by Newman’s group at Caltech for the LHC, which monitors tens of thousands of processors and more than 10 major network links. Newman foresees a computational future for big data that relies on this type of automation through well-coordinated armies of intelligent agents, that track the movement of data from one point in the network to another, identifying bottlenecks and scheduling processing tasks. Each might only record what is happening locally but would share the information in such a way as to shed light on the network’s global situation.
“Thousands of agents at different levels are coordinating to help human beings understand what’s going on in a complex and very distributed system,” Newman said. The scale would be even greater in the future, when there would be billions of such intelligent agents, or actors, making up a vast global distributed intelligent entity. “It’s the ability to create those things and have them work on one’s behalf that will reduce the complexity of these operational problems,” he said. “At a certain point, when there’s a complicated problem in such a system, no set of human beings can really understand it all and have access to all the information.”
A new system could make space exploration robots faster and more efficient by predicting where they will be in the very near future.
The engineers behind the program hope to overcome a particular snarl affecting our probes out in the solar system: that pesky delay caused by the speed of light. Any commands sent to a robot on a distant body take a certain amount of time to travel and won’t be executed for a while. By building a model of the terrain surrounding a rover and providing an interface that lets operators forecast the how the probe will move around within it, engineer can identify potential obstacles and make decisions nearer to real-time.
“You’re reacting quickly, and the rover is staying active more of the time,” said computer scientist Jeff Norris, who leads mission operation innovations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Ops Lab.
As an example, the distance between Earth and Mars creates round-trip lags of up to 40 minutes. Nowadays, engineers send a long string of commands once a day to robots like NASA’s Curiosity rover. These get executed but then the rover has to stop and wait until the next instructions are beamed down.
Because space exploration robots are multi-million or even multi-billion-dollar machines, they have to work very carefully. One day’s commands might tell Curiosity to drive up to a rock. It will then check that it has gotten close enough. Then, the following day, if will be instructed to place its arm on that rock. Later on, it might be directed to drill into or probe this rock with its instruments. While safe, this method is very inefficient.
“When we only send commands once a day, we’re not dealing with 10- or 20-minute delays. We’re dealing with a 24-hour round trip,” said Norris.
Norris’ lab wants to make the speed and productivity of distant probes better. Their interface simulates more or less where a robot would be given a particular time delay. This is represented by a small ghostly machine — called the “committed state” — moving just ahead of a rover. The ghosted robot is the software’s best guess of where the probe would end up if operators hit the emergency stop button right then.
By looking slightly into the future, the interface allows a rover driver to update decisions and commands at a much faster rate than is currently possible. Say a robot on Mars is commanded to drive forward 100 meters. But halfway there, its sensors notice an interesting rock that scientists want to investigate. Rather than waiting for the rover to finish its drive and then commanding it to go back, this new interface would give operators the ability to write and rewrite their directions on the fly.
The simulation can’t know every detail around a probe and so provides a small predictive envelope as to where the robot might be. Different terrains have different uncertainties.
“If you’re on loose sand, that might be different than hard rock,” said software engineer Alexander Menzies, who works on the interface.
Menzies added that when they tested the interface, users had an “almost game-like experience” trying to optimize commands for a robot. He designed an actual video game where participants were given points for commanding a time-delayed robot through a slalom-like terrain. (Norris lamented that he had the highest score on that game until the last day of testing, when Menzies beat him.)
The team thinks that aspects of this new interface could start to be used in the near future, perhaps even with the current Mars rovers Curiosity and Opportunity. At this point, though, Mars operations are limited by bandwidth. Because there are only a few communicating satellites in orbit on the Red Planet, commands can only be sent a few times a day, reducing a lot of the efficiency that would be gained from this new system. But operations on the moon or a potential asteroid capture and exploration mission – such as the one NASA is currently planning – would likely be in more constant communication with Earth, providing even faster and more efficient operations that could take advantage of this new time-delay-reducing system.
The blurriness at the edge of the photos represents the area of peripheral vision in humans (20 degrees, top) and cats (30 degrees, bottom).
No one ever talks about what the world looks like if you’re a cat. Instead, we speak of the bird’s-eye view and use fish-eye lenses to make things look weird.
But we rarely consider how the internet’s favorite subject sees the world. Luckily, artist Nickolay Lammhas volunteered to act as cat-vision conduit. Here, Lamm presents his idea of what different scenes might look like if you were a cat, taking into consideration the way feline eyes work, and using input from veterinarians and ophthalmologists.
For starters, cats’ visual fields are broader than ours, spanning roughly 200 degrees instead of 180 degrees, and their visual acuity isn’t as good. So, the things humans can sharply resolve at distances of 100-200 feet look blurry to cats, which can see these objects at distances of up to 20 feet. That might not sound so great, but there’s a trade-off: Because of the various photoreceptors parked in cats’ retinas, they kick our asses at seeing in dim light. Instead of the color-resolving, detail-loving cone cells that populate the center of human retinas, cats (and dogs) have many more rod cells, which excel in dim light and are responsible for night-vision capability. The rod cells also refresh more quickly, which lets cats pick up very rapid movements — like, for example, the quickly shifting path a marauding laser dot might trace.
Lastly, cats see colors differently than we do, which is why the cat-versions of these images look less vibrant than the people-versions. Scientists used to think cats were dichromats — able to only see two colors — but they’re not, exactly. While feline photoreceptors are most sensitive to wavelengths in the blue-violet and greenish-yellow ranges, it appears they might be able to see a little bit of green as well. In other words, cats are mostly red-green color blind, as are many of us, with a little bit of green creeping in.
A pair of common marmosets. Image: Bart van Dorp/Flickr
The sounds of marmoset monkeys chattering may hint at the mysterious origins of human language.
A new study shows that marmosets exchange calls in a precisely timed, back-and-forth fashion typical of human conversation, but not found in other primates. The monkeys don’t appear to have a language, but the timing suggests the foundations of our own.
“That could be the foundation of more sophisticated things, like syntax,” said psychologist Asif Ghazanfar of Princeton University, co-author of the study, which was published today in Current Biology. “You can’t have any of those other really cool aspects of language without first having this.”
‘If you went back 10 million years, you’d be hard-pressed to predict that an ape would end up with the planet’s most complex vocal communication.’
How language, so complex and information-rich, evolved in Homo sapiens and, as far as we know, no other species, is one of anthropology’s outstanding questions. The traditional, seemingly intuitive answer is that it arose from the vocalizations of ancestors who were capable of a few rudimentary noises and wanted to say more.
Confounding that narrative, though, is the comparatively less-vocal nature of many other primates, including our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. They do vocalize, of course, and even say some interesting things, but not with the same flow expected of some proto-human linguistic capability.
That conundrum has led researchers to propose another possible origin of language, one rooted not in our voices but rather our bodies, and in particular our hands. According to this narrative, gesture would have been as important to our ancestors as sound. Indeed, neurological processes underlying speech and language are also intimately linked with motor skills, raising the possibility that language formed on the cognitive scaffold of gesture — and chimpanzees do have a large repertoire of hand movements.
But many scientists, including Ghazanfar and the study’s lead author, fellow Princeton psychologist Daniel Takahashi, aren’t convinced. If human language did follow on gesture, they wonder, why don’t chimps talk more? There’s also no evidence in chimpanzees for vocal turn-taking, or waiting for another person to finish speaking before replying, which is universal in human languages. “If we don’t take turns, if we’re overlapping, it’s very difficult to understand each other,” said Ghazanfar. “Turn-taking is foundational.”
Yet even if chimps don’t take turns, Ghazanfar and Takahashi found that marmosets do. In the new study, they placed pairs of marmosets in the opposite corners of a room, separated by a curtain that allowed them to hear but not see each other, and recorded the ensuing chatter.
These proved to follow turn-taking patterns, with a pause of several seconds between the completion of one monkey’s whistles and the other’s beginning. And unlike the duets of birds, which are often highly synchronized, the exchanges had nothing to do with mating or territoriality. The monkeys were conversing.
Monkey Conversation:
Whistles encoding information about the caller’s identity are exchanged back and forth according to rules of timing also found in human conversation.
Audio: Takahashi et al./Ethology
As for what they said, marmoset whistles are thought to encode information about a caller’s identity, age, gender and location. Ghazanfar thinks the conversations are a sort of “vocal grooming,” a way of easing stress or conveying affection, but delivered at a distance. It only works when monkeys know they’re being addressed individually, which is conveyed by the turn-taking form.
“It could be a pre-adaptation for language,” said evolutionary biologist Thore Bergman of the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the study. Bergman’s own research involveshuman-sounding lip smacks made by monkeys called geladas.
As for why marmosets and humans take turns, but not chimpanzees, Ghazanfar suspects it’s a function of our social systems. Marmosets are cooperative breeders: Group members take care of offspring unrelated to them, creating community-oriented dynamics of behavior and communication. Ancestral humans may have lived the same way.
Without a time machine, of course, questions about the origin of human language won’t ever be settled. As Bergmann noted, the findings don’t exclude the possible importance of gesture. It’s possible that human language arose from the fortuitous interactions of gesture, vocalization and social structure with evolutionary pressure.
Indeterminacy aside, though, it’s fun to speculate, and also to wonder whether the seeds of complex language now exist in animals other than ourselves. Many whales and dolphins, along with syntax-using monkeys and even prairie dogs, communicate in very sophisticated ways.
“If you went back 10 million years, you’d be hard-pressed to predict an ape would end up with the planet’s most complex vocal communication system,” said Thore Bergman. “Why that happened is a really big puzzle.”
Citation: “Coupled Oscillator Dynamics of Vocal Turn-Taking in Monkeys.” By Daniel Takahashi, Darshana Narayanan and Asif Ghazanfar. Current Biology, 17 October 2013.
After eight years spent studying a 1.8-million-year-old skull uncovered in the Republic of Georgia, scientists have made a discovery that may rewrite the evolutionary history of our human genus Homo.
A Simpler Family Tree?
A skull discovered in the Republic of Georgia may indicate that early species in the genus Homo, right, are actually more closely related members of a single evolutionary lineage.
An artist’s rendition of what the original owner of Skull 5 may have looked like.
Skull 5, which was discovered alongside the remains of four other hominids in Dmanisi, Georgia. Courtesy of Guram Bumbiashvili, Georgian National Museum
An aerial view of the Dmanisi excavation site (foreground) and a medieval town. Fernando Javier Urquijo
It would be a simpler story with fewer ancestral species. Early, diverse fossils — those currently recognized as coming from distinct species like Homo habilis, Homo erectus and others — may actually represent variation among members of a single, evolving lineage.
In other words, just as people look different from one another today, so did early hominids look different from one another, and the dissimilarity of the bones they left behind may have fooled scientists into thinking they came from different species.
This was the conclusion reached by an international team of scientists led by David Lordkipanidze, a paleoanthropologist at the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi, as reported Thursday in the journal Science.
The key to this revelation was a cranium excavated in 2005 and known simply as Skull 5, which scientists described as “the world’s first completely preserved adult hominid skull” of such antiquity. Unlike other Homo fossils, it had a number of primitive features: a long, apelike face, large teeth and a tiny braincase, about one-third the size of that of a modern human being. This confirmed that, contrary to some conjecture, early hominids did not need big brains to make their way out of Africa.
The discovery of Skull 5 alongside the remains of four other hominids at Dmanisi, a site in Georgia rich in material of the earliest hominid travels into Eurasia, gave the scientists an opportunity to compare and contrast the physical traits of ancestors that apparently lived at the same location and around the same time.
Dr. Lordkipanidze and his colleagues said the differences between these fossils were no more pronounced than those between any given five modern humans or five chimpanzees. The hominids who left the fossils, they noted, were quite different from one another but still members of one species.
“Had the braincase and the face of Skull 5 been found as separate fossils at different sites in Africa, they might have been attributed to different species,” a co-author of the journal report, Christoph Zollikofer of the University of Zurich, said in a statement. Such was often the practice of researchers, using variations in traits to define new species.
Although the Dmanisi finds look quite different from one another, Dr. Zollikofer said, the hominids who left them were living at the same time and place, and “so could, in principle, represent a single population of a single species.” He and his Zurich colleague, Marcia Ponce de León, conducted the comparative analysis of the Dmanisi specimens.
“Since we see a similar pattern and range of variation in the African fossil record,” Dr. Zollikofer continued, “it is sensible to assume that there was a single Homo species at that time in Africa.” Moreover, he added, “since the Dmanisi hominids are so similar to the African ones, we further assume that they both represent the same species.”
But what species? Some team members simply call their finds “early Homo.” Others emphasized the strong similarities to Homo erectus, which lived between two million and less than one million years ago. Tim D. White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, called it “the most primitive H. erectus yet known,” noting that “it is more similar than any other yet found to early Homo from eastern Africa,” a group of hominids estimated to have lived 2.3 million years ago.
All five of the skulls and skeletal bones were found in underground dens, suggesting grisly scenes from the perilous lives these early Homos led. They resided among carnivores, including saber-toothed cats and an extinct giant cheetah. All five of the individuals had probably been attacked and killed by the carnivores, their carcasses dragged into the dens for the after-hunt feast, with nothing left but dinner scraps for curious fossil hunters.
Dr. White and other scientists not involved in the research hailed the importance of the skull discovery and its implications for understanding early Homo evolution. In an article analyzing the report, Science quoted Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York as saying that the skull “is undoubtedly one of the most important ever discovered.”
A few scientists quibbled that the skull looks more like Homo habilis or questioned the idea that fossils in Africa all belong to Homo erectus, but there was broad recognition that the new findings were a watershed in the study of evolution. “As the most complete early Homo skull ever found,” Dr. White wrote in an e-mail, “it will become iconic for Dmanisi, for earliest Homo erectus and more broadly for how we became human.”
Dr. White, who has excavated hominid fossils in Ethiopia for years, said he was impressed with “the total evidentiary package from the site that is the really good news story here.” Further, he said, he hoped the discovery would “now focus the debate on evolutionary biology beyond the boring ‘lumpers vs. splitters’ ” — a reference to the tendencies of fossil hunters to either lump new finds into existing species or split them off into new species.
In their report, the Dmanisi researchers said the Skull 5 individual “provides the first evidence that early Homo comprised adult individuals with small brains but body mass, stature and limb proportions reaching the lower range limit of modern variation.”
Skeletal bones associated with the five Dmanisi skulls show that these hominids were short in stature, but that their limbs enabled them to walk long distances as fully upright bipeds. The shape of the small braincase distinguished them from the more primitive Australopithecus genus, which preceded Homo and lived for many centuries with Homo in Africa.
Leafcutter ants, native to Central and South America, can’t digest the leaves they rely on for food, so they cultivate these gardens of fungi and bacteria to break down plant matter for them. Photo courtesy of Alex Wild; used with permission.
In the lobby of the Microbial Sciences building at the University of Wisconsin, leafcutter ants in adisplay colony hike back and forth. Improbably large leaf fragments wobble on their backs as the ants ferry them between a dwindling pile of oak leaves and a garden of fungus studded with leaves in assorted states of decay.
Made up of a single species of fungus and a handful of bacterial strains, the fungus garden breaks down the ants’ leafy harvest through an efficient natural process. It’s a process that researchers believe could be a model for producing biofuel in a more sustainable way.
As we transition away from petroleum dependence, ethanol-based biofuel has risen to the forefront as one of the most accessible sources of renewable energy. It’s produced by fermenting plant sugars, which are strung together into long chains called polysaccharides. Before the fermentation process can begin, these chains have to be snipped apart, a process that varies in difficulty depending on the type of plant being used.
Polysaccharide chains found in corn kernels — the primary biofuel crop in the U.S. — are relatively simple to break up. But corn depletes the soil and guzzles water and fertilizer, and using it for fuel siphons calories from the food supply to gas tanks.
On the other hand, perennial grasses and agricultural “waste” like cornstalks offer a biofuel source that has a lighter impact on the environment. But these woodier fibers — referred to as“cellulosic” biomass — are a tangle of robust polysaccharides that are trickier to deconstruct. Further complicating this problem, the molecular structure of plant biomass isn’t uniform. What breaks down the polysaccharides near the surface of a cornstalk or blade of grass might not work at all on those buried more deeply.
University of Wisconsin researcher Frank Aylward peers into one of the lab’s many leafcutter ant colonies.
But finding efficient ways to extract energy from plants and other forms of biomass is not a new problem. In fact, it’s a problem that Earth’s plant eaters solved millions of years ago. And according to University of Wisconsin researcher Frank Aylward, if you’re looking for a model system, you can’t do better than leafcutter ants.
They may not have the imposing mien of herbivores like giraffes or elephants, but in Central and South America, leafcutter ants dominate, munching through more of the region’s foliage than any other organism.
But the ants can’t digest leaves by themselves — they have to rely on the garden’s microbes. “We sort of think of the fungus gardens as being an external gut,” Aylward explains. The garden digests biomass and reconstitutes its molecules in little nutrient packets holding a cocktail of carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins.
“The ants are essentially doing what we want to do with biofuel,” says Aylward. “They’re taking all of this recalcitrant plant biomass that’s full of all of these really complicated polymers and they’re degrading it and converting it into energy.” The transformation from leafy greens to energy source is mediated by hundreds of enzymes produced by the fungus garden’s microbes. If these enzymes chow down so efficiently on the leaves of Central America, Aylward and his coworkers wondered, could they be just as effective at breaking apart the sugars of cellulosic biomass in an industrial setting?
One model for a commercial biofuel process patterned after the fungus garden could entail splicing the genetic codes for the garden’s most effective enzymes into other microbes, prompting them to churn out biomass-digesting proteins.
But first, scientists needed to identify which enzymes the garden uses to digest leaves for the ants and which microbial residents produce them. By sequencing the genomes of the fungus and bacteria and comparing that data to the garden’s enzyme soup, Aylward and his coworkers were able to identify a fungus called Leucoagaricus gongylophorus as the garden’s biomass-degrading workhorse.
Aylward extracts a fragment of the fungus garden. This segment was near the surface, and still shows visible leaf matter; the biomass in the garden sinks as it’s broken down.
They also found that the fungus calibrates its enzyme cocktail for different stages of leaf decay. The biomass profile changes at each level in the garden — the freshest leaves sit near the top and the mostly decomposed waste material at the bottom. And Aylward found that the garden’s enzymes changed, too. That insight could provide the biofuel industry with some clues about which enzymes might excel early in the polysaccharide-decomposition process and which ones to apply later on.
Incidentally, this division of labor also reveals which enzymes the garden deploys together at each level. This is a huge boon to anyone designing industrial applications, since enzymes tend to work much better in specific combinations — and the garden has had 50 million years of symbiosis with the ants to find the most efficient combinations.
Aylward has already been approached by companies interested in synthesizing some of the garden’s enzymes and using them in biofuel production.
“It’s difficult to think that we can actually find a process that improves on nature,” Aylward points out, “so it probably makes sense to learn from it.”
SAMPLES extracted from Greenland’s two-mile-deep ice cap have yielded evidence that ancient Carthaginian and Roman silver miners working in southern Spain fouled the global atmosphere with lead for some 900 years.
The Greenland ice cap accumulates snow year after year, and substances from the atmosphere are entrapped in the permanent ice. From 1990 to 1992, a drill operated by the European Greenland Ice-Core Project recovered a cylindrical ice sample 9,938 feet long, pieces of which were distributed to participating laboratories. The ages of successive layers of the ice cap have been accurately determined, so the chemical makeup of the atmosphere at any given time in the past 9,000 years can be estimated by analyzing the corresponding part of the core sample.
Using exquisitely sensitive techniques to measure four different isotopes of lead in the Greenland ice, scientists in Australia and France determined that most of the man-made lead pollution of the atmosphere in ancient times had come from the Spanish provinces of Huelva, Seville, Almeria and Murcia. Isotopic analysis clearly pointed to the rich silver-mining and smelting district of Rio Tinto near the modern city of Nerva as the main polluter.
The results of this study were reported in the current issue of Environmental Science & Technology by Dr. Kevin J. R. Rosman of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and his colleagues there and at the Laboratory of Glaciology and Geophysics of the Environment in Grenoble, France.
One of the problems in their analyses, the authors wrote, was the very low concentrations of lead remaining in ice dating from ancient times — only about one-hundredth the lead level found in Greenland ice deposited in the last 30 years. But the investigators used mass-spectrometric techniques that permitted them to sort out isotopic lead composition at lead levels of only about one part per trillion.
Dr. Rosman focused on the ratio of two stable isotopes, or forms, of lead: lead-206 and lead-207. His group found that the ratio of lead-206 to lead-207 in 8,000-year-old ice was 1.201. That was taken as the natural ratio that existed before people began smelting ores. But between 600 B.C. and A.D. 300, the scientists found, the ratio of lead-206 to lead-207 fell to 1.183. They called that ”unequivocal evidence of early large-scale atmospheric pollution by this toxic metal.”
All ore bodies containing lead have their own isotopic signatures, and the Rio Tinto lead ratio is 1.164. Calculations by the Australian-French collaboration based on their ice-core analysis showed that during the period 366 B.C. to at least A.D. 36, a period when the Roman Empire was at its peak, 70 percent of the global atmospheric lead pollution came from the Roman-operated Rio Tinto mines in what is now southwestern Spain.
The Rio Tinto mining region is known to archeologists as one of the richest sources of silver in the ancient world. Some 6.6 million tons of slag were left by Roman smelting operations there.
The global demand for silver increased dramatically after coinage was introduced in Greece around 650 B.C. But silver was only one of the treasures extracted from its ore. The sulfide ore smelted by the Romans also yielded an enormous harvest of lead.
Because it is easily shaped, melted and molded, lead was widely used by the Romans for plumbing, stapling masonry together, casting statues and manufacturing many kinds of utensils. All these uses presumably contributed to the chronic poisoning of Rome’s peoples.
Adding to the toxic hazard, Romans used lead vessels to boil and concentrate fruit juices and preserves. Fruits contain acetic acid, which reacts with metallic lead to form lead acetate, a compound once known as ”sugar of lead.” Lead acetate adds a pleasant sweet taste to food but causes lead poisoning — an ailment that is often fatal and, even in mild cases, causes debilitation and loss of cognitive ability.
Judging from the Greenland ice core, the smelting of lead-bearing ore declined sharply after the fall of the Roman Empire but gradually increased during the Renaissance. By 1523, the last year for which Dr. Rosman’s group conducted its Greenland ice analysis, atmospheric lead pollution had reached nearly the same level recorded for the year 79 B.C., at the peak of Roman mining pollution.
The former ski bum built open-access tools that convert raw data from radar databases into formats that climate modelers can use to better predict climate change.
By Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross
Posted 10.16.2013 at 3:00 pm
Scott Collis (by Joel Kimmel)
Each year, Popular Science seeks out the brightest young scientists and engineers and names them the Brilliant Ten. Like the 110 honorees before them, the members of this year’s class are dramatically reshaping their fields–and the future. Some are tackling pragmatic questions, like how to secure the Internet, while others are attacking more abstract ones, like determining the weather on distant exoplanets. The common thread between them is brilliance, of course, but also impact. If the Brilliant Ten are the faces of things to come, the world will be a safer, smarter, and brighter place.–The Editors
Scott Collis
Argonne National Laboratory
Achievement
Harnessing new data to improve climate models
Clouds are one of the great challenges for climate scientists. They play a complex role in the atmosphere and in any potential climate-change scenario. But rudimentary data has simplified their role in simulations, leading to variability among climate models. Scott Collis discovered a way to add accuracy to forecasts of future climate—by tapping new sources of cloud data.
Collis has extensive experience watching clouds, first as a ski bum during grad school in Australia and then as a professional meteorologist. But when he took a job at the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, he realized there was an immense source of cloud data that climate modelers weren’t using: the information collected for weather forecasts. So Collis took on the gargantuan task of building open-access tools that convert the raw data from radar databases into formats that climate modelers can use. In one stroke, Collis unlocked years of weather data. “We were able to build such robust algorithms that they could work over thousands of radar volumes without human intervention,” says Collis.
When the U.S. Department of Energy caught wind of his project, it recruited him to work with a new radar network designed to collect high-quality cloud data from all over the globe. The network, the largest of its kind, isn’t complete yet, but already the data that Collis and his collaborators have collected is improving next-generation climate models.
Click here to see more from our annual celebration of young researchers whose innovations will change the world. This article originally appeared in the October 2013 issue of Popular Science.
Well, here’s something either very discouraging or very exciting for crowdfunding hopefuls: a Swiss team can predict, with about 76 percent accuracy and within only four hours of launch, whether a Kickstarter project will succeed.
The team, from the university École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, laid out a system in a paper presented at the Conference on Online Social Networks. By mining data on more than 16,000 Kickstarter campaigns and more than 1.3 million users, they created a prediction model based on the project’s popularity on Twitter, the rate of cash it’s getting, how many first-time backers it has, and the previous projects supporters have backed.
A previous, similar model built by Americans could predict a Kicktarter project’s success with 68 percent accuracy–impressive, but the Swiss project has another advantage: it’s dynamic. While the American model could only make a prediction before the project launched, the Swiss project monitors projects in real time. They’ve even built a tool, called Sidekick, that monitors projects and displays their chances of success.
Other sites, like Kicktraq, offer similar services, but the predictions aren’t as accurate as the Swiss team claims theirs are. If you peruse Sidekick, you can see how confident the algorithm is in its pass/fail predictions: almost all of the projects are either above 90 percent or below 10 percent. Sort of scary, probably, if you’re launching a project. Although there’s always a chance you could pull yourself out of the hole, it’s like a genie asking if you want to know how you die: Do you really want that information?
Oct. 16, 2013 — Animal populations can have a far more significant impact on carbon storage and exchange in regional ecosystems than is typically recognized by global carbon models, according to a new paper authored by researchers at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES).
In fact, in some regions the magnitude of carbon uptake or release due to the effects of specific animal species or groups of animals — such as the pine beetles devouring forests in western North America — can rival the impact of fossil fuel emissions for the same region, according to the paper published in the journal Ecosystems.
While models typically take into account how plants and microbes affect the carbon cycle, they often underestimate how much animals can indirectly alter the absorption, release, or transport of carbon within an ecosystem, says Oswald Schmitz, the Oastler Professor of Population and Community Ecology at F&ES and lead author of the paper. Historically, the role of animals has been largely underplayed since animal species are not distributed globally and because the total biomass of animals is vastly lower than the plants that they rely upon, and therefore contribute little carbon in the way of respiration.
“What these sorts of analyses have not paid attention to is what we call the indirect multiplier effects,” Schmitz says. “And these indirect effects can be quite huge — and disproportionate to the biomass of the species that are instigating the change.”
In the paper, “Animating the Carbon Cycle,” a team of 15 authors from 12 universities, research organizations and government agencies cites numerous cases where animals have triggered profound impacts on the carbon cycle at local and regional levels.
In one case, an unprecedented loss of trees triggered by the pine beetle outbreak in western North America has decreased the net carbon balance on a scale comparable to British Columbia’s current fossil fuel emissions.
And in East Africa, scientists found that a decline in wildebeest populations in the Serengeti-Mara grassland-savanna system decades ago allowed organic matter to accumulate, which eventually led to about 80 percent of the ecosystem to burn annually, releasing carbon from the plants and the soil, before populations recovered in recent years.
“These are examples where the animals’ largest effects are not direct ones,” Schmitz says. “But because of their presence they mitigate or mediate ecosystem processes that then can have these ramifying effects.”
“We hope this article will inspire scientists and managers to include animals when thinking of local and regional carbon budgets,” said Peter Raymond, a professor of ecosystem ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
According to the authors, a more proper assessment of such phenomena could provide insights into management schemes that could help mitigate the threat of climate change.
For example, in the Arctic, where about 500 gigatons of carbon is stored in permafrost, large grazing mammals like caribou and muskoxen can help maintain the grasslands that have a high albedo and thus reflect more solar energy. In addition, by trampling the ground these herds can actually help reduce the rate of permafrost thaw, researchers say.
“It’s almost an argument for rewilding places to make sure that the natural balance of predators and prey are there,” Schmitz says. “We’re not saying that managing animals will offset these carbon emissions. What we’re trying to say is the numbers are of a scale where it is worthwhile to start thinking about how animals could be managed to accomplish that.”
Journal Reference:
Oswald J. Schmitz, Peter A. Raymond, James A. Estes, Werner A. Kurz, Gordon W. Holtgrieve, Mark E. Ritchie, Daniel E. Schindler, Amanda C. Spivak, Rod W. Wilson, Mark A. Bradford, Villy Christensen, Linda Deegan, Victor Smetacek, Michael J. Vanni, Christopher C. Wilmers.Animating the Carbon Cycle. Ecosystems, 2013; DOI:10.1007/s10021-013-9715-7
Oct. 16, 2013 — Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed software that allows them to map unknown environments — such as collapsed buildings — based on the movement of a swarm of insect cyborgs, or “biobots.”
Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed software that allows them to map unknown environments — such as collapsed buildings — based on the movement of a swarm of insect cyborgs, or “biobots.” (Credit: Image by Edgar Lobaton.)
“We focused on how to map areas where you have little or no precise information on where each biobot is, such as a collapsed building where you can’t use GPS technology,” says Dr. Edgar Lobaton, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and senior author of a paper on the research.
“One characteristic of biobots is that their movement can be somewhat random,” Lobaton says. “We’re exploiting that random movement to work in our favor.”
Here’s how the process would work in the field. A swarm of biobots, such as remotely controlled cockroaches, would be equipped with electronic sensors and released into a collapsed building or other hard-to-reach area. The biobots would initially be allowed to move about randomly. Because the biobots couldn’t be tracked by GPS, their precise locations would be unknown. However, the sensors would signal researchers via radio waves whenever biobots got close to each other.
Once the swarm has had a chance to spread out, the researchers would send a signal commanding the biobots to keep moving until they find a wall or other unbroken surface — and then continue moving along the wall. This is called “wall following.”
The researchers repeat this cycle of random movement and “wall following” several times, continually collecting data from the sensors whenever the biobots are near each other. The new software then uses an algorithm to translate the biobot sensor data into a rough map of the unknown environment.
“This would give first responders a good idea of the layout in a previously unmapped area,” Lobaton says.
The software would also allow public safety officials to determine the location of radioactive or chemical threats, if the biobots have been equipped with the relevant sensors.
The researchers have tested the software using computer simulations and are currently testing the program with robots. They plan to work with fellow NC State researcher Dr. Alper Bozkurt to test the program with biobots.
The paper, “Topological Mapping of Unknown Environments using an Unlocalized Robotic Swarm,” will be presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems being held Nov. 3-8 in Tokyo, Japan. Lead author of the paper is Alireza Dirafzoon, a Ph.D. student at NC State. The work was supported by National Science Foundation grant CNS-1239243.
Oct. 16, 2013 — Researchers from the University of Maryland and a leading university in Spain demonstrate in a new study which sectors could put the entire U.S. economy at risk when global oil production peaks (“Peak Oil”). This multi-disciplinary team recommends immediate action by government, private and commercial sectors to reduce the vulnerability of these sectors.
The figure above shows sectors’ importance and vulnerability to Peak Oil. The bubbles represent sectors. The size of the bubbles visualizes the vulnerability of a particular sector to Peak Oil according to the expected price changes; the larger the size of the bubble, the more vulnerable the sector is considered to be. The X axis shows a sector’s importance according to its contribution to GDP and on the Y axis according to its structural role. Hence, the larger bubbles in the top right corner represent highly vulnerable and highly important sectors. In the case of Peak Oil induced supply disruptions, these sectors could cause severe imbalances for the entire U.S. economy. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Maryland)
While critics of Peak Oil studies declare that the world has more than enough oil to maintain current national and global standards, these UMD-led researchers say Peak Oil is imminent, if not already here — and is a real threat to national and global economies. Their study is among the first to outline a way of assessing the vulnerabilities of specific economic sectors to this threat, and to identify focal points for action that could strengthen the U.S. economy and make it less vulnerable to disasters.
Their work, “Economic Vulnerability to Peak Oil,” appears inGlobal Environmental Change. The paper is co-authored by Christina Prell, UMD’s Department of Sociology; Kuishuang Feng and Klaus Hubacek, UMD’s Department of Geographical Sciences, and Christian Kerschner, Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
A focus on Peak Oil is increasingly gaining attention in both scientific and policy discourses, especially due to its apparent imminence and potential dangers. However, until now, little has been known about how this phenomenon will impact economies. In their paper, the research team constructs a vulnerability map of the U.S. economy, combining two approaches for analyzing economic systems. Their approach reveals the relative importance of individual economic sectors, and how vulnerable these are to oil price shocks. This dual-analysis helps identify which sectors could put the entire U.S. economy at risk from Peak Oil. For the United States, such sectors would include iron mills, chemical and plastic products manufacturing, fertilizer production and air transport.
“Our findings provide early warnings to these and related industries about potential trouble in their supply chain,” UMD Professor Hubacek said. “Our aim is to inform and engage government, public and private industry leaders, and to provide a tool for effective Peak Oil policy action planning.”
Although the team’s analysis is embedded in a Peak Oil narrative, it can be used more broadly to develop a climate roadmap for a low carbon economy.
“In this paper, we analyze the vulnerability of the U.S. economy, which is the biggest consumer of oil and oil-based products in the world, and thus provides a good example of an economic system with high resource dependence. However, the notable advantage of our approach is that it does not depend on the Peak-Oil-vulnerability narrative but is equally useful in a climate change context, for designing policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. In that case, one could easily include other fossil fuels such as coal in the model and results could help policy makers to identify which sectors can be controlled and/or managed for a maximum, low-carbon effect, without destabilizing the economy,” Professor Hubacek said.
One of the main ways a Peak Oil vulnerable industry can become less so, the authors say, is for that sector to reduce the structural and financial importance of oil. For example, Hubacek and colleagues note that one approach to reducing the importance of oil to agriculture could be to curbing the strong dependence on artificial fertilizers by promoting organic farming techniques and/or reducing the overall distance travelled by people and goods by fostering local, decentralized food economies.
Peak Oil Background and Impact
The Peak Oil dialogue shifts attention away from discourses on “oil depletion” and “stocks” to focus on declining production rates (flows) of oil, and increasing costs of production. The maximum possible daily flow rate (with a given technology) is what eventually determines the peak; thus, the concept can also be useful in the context of other renewable resources.
Improvements in extraction and refining technologies can influence flows, but this tends to lead to steeper decline curves after the peak is eventually reached. Such steep decline curves have also been observed for shale gas wells.
“Shale developments are, so we believe, largely overrated, because of the huge amounts of financial resources that went into them (danger of bubble) and because of their apparent steep decline rates (shale wells tend to peak fast),” according to Dr. Kerschner.
“One important implication of this dialogue shift is that extraction peaks occur much earlier in time than the actual depletion of resources,” Professor Hubacek said. “In other words, Peak Oil is currently predicted within the next decade by many, whereas complete oil depletion will in fact occur never given increasing prices. This means that eventually petroleum products may be sold in liter bottles in pharmacies like in the old days. ”
Journal Reference:
Christian Kerschner, Christina Prell, Kuishuang Feng, Klaus Hubacek. Economic vulnerability to Peak Oil. Global Environmental Change, 2013; DOI:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2013.08.015
Dried cockroaches are ready to be sold to pharmaceutical companies from a farm in Jinan, China. One farmer says the insects are easy to raise and profitable.
Farmers are pinning their future on the often-dreaded insect, which when dried goes for as much as $20 a pound — for use in Asian medicine and in cosmetics.
This squat concrete building was once a chicken coop, but now it’s part of a farm with an entirely different kind of livestock — millions of cockroaches.
Inside, squirming masses of the reddish-brown insects dart between sheets of corrugated metal and egg cartons that have been tied together to provide the kind of dark hiding places they favor.
Wang Fuming kneels down and pulls out one of the nests. Unaccustomed to the light, the roaches scurry about, a few heading straight up his arm toward his short-sleeve shirt.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” Wang counsels visitors who are shrinking back into the hallway, where stray cockroaches cling to a ceiling that’s perilously close overhead.
Although cockroaches evoke a visceral dread for most people, Wang looks at them fondly as his fortune — and his future.
People laughed at me when I started, but I always thought that cockroaches would bring me wealth.”
— Zou Hui, cockroach farmer
The 43-year-old businessman is the largest cockroach producer in China (and thus probably in the world), with six farms populated by an estimated 10 million cockroaches. He sells them to producers of Asian medicine and to cosmetic companies that value the insects as a cheap source of protein as well as for the cellulose-like substance on their wings.
The favored breed for this purpose is the Periplaneta americana, or American cockroach, a reddish-brown insect that grows to about 1.6 inches long and, when mature, can fly, as opposed to the smaller, darker, wingless German cockroach.
Since Wang got into the business in 2010, the price of dried cockroaches has increased tenfold, from about $2 a pound to as much as $20, as manufacturers of traditional medicine stockpile pulverized cockroach powder.
“I thought about raising pigs, but with traditional farming, the profit margins are very low,” Wang said. “With cockroaches, you can invest 20 yuan and get back 150 yuan,” or $3.25 for a return of $11.
China has about 100 cockroach farms, and new ones are opening almost as fast as the prolific critters breed. But even among Chinese, the industry was little known until August, when a million cockroaches got out of a farm in neighboring Jiangsu province. The Great Escape made headlines around China and beyond, evoking biblical images of swarming locusts.
Big moneymaker
Business is booming at the Shandong Xin Da Ground Beetle Farm.
Only the prospect of all those lost earnings would faze Wang, a compact man with a wisp of a mustache and wire-rim glasses who looks like a scientist, but has no more than a high school education. After graduating, he went to work in a tire factory.
“I felt I would never get anywhere in life at the factory and I wanted to start a business,” he said.
As a boy he had liked collecting insects, so he started with scorpions and beetles, both used in traditional medicine and served as a delicacy. One batch of his beetle eggs turned out to be contaminated with cockroach eggs.
“I was accidentally raising cockroaches and then I realized they were the easiest and most profitable,” he said.
The start-up costs are minimal — Wang bought only eggs, a run-down abandoned chicken coop and the roofing tile. Notoriously hearty, roaches aren’t susceptible to the same diseases as farm animals. As for feeding them, cockroaches are omnivores, though they favor rotten vegetables. Wang feeds his brood with potato and pumpkin peelings discarded from nearby restaurants.
Cockroaches are survivors. We want to know what makes them so strong.”
— Li Shunan, professor of traditional medicine
Killing them is easy too: Just scoop or vacuum them out of their nests and dunk them in a big vat of boiling water. Then they’re dried in the sun like chile peppers.
Perhaps understandably, the cockroach business (“special farming,” as it is euphemistically called) is a fairly secretive industry. Wang’s farm, for instance, operates in an agribusiness industrial park under an elevated highway. The sign at the front gate simply reads Jinan Hualu Feed Co.
Some companies that use cockroaches don’t like to advertise their “secret ingredient.” And the farmers themselves are wary of neighbors who might not like a cockroach farm in their backyard.
“We try to keep a low profile,” said Liu Yusheng, head of the Shandong Insect Industry Assn., the closest thing there is to a trade organization. “The government is tacitly allowing us to do what we do, but if there is too much attention, or if cockroach farms are going into residential areas, there could be trouble.”
Liu worries about the rapid growth of an industry with too many inexperienced players and too little oversight. In 2007, a million Chinese lost $1.2 billion when a firm promoting ant farming turned out to be a Ponzi scheme and went bankrupt.
“This is not like raising regular farm animals or vegetables where the Agricultural Ministry knows who is supposed to regulate it. Nobody knows who is in charge here,” he said.
The low start-up costs make raising cockroaches an appealing business for wannabe entrepreneurs, who can buy cockroach eggs and complete how-to kits from promoters.
“People laughed at me when I started, but I always thought that cockroaches would bring me wealth,” said Zou Hui, 40, who quit her job at a knitting factory in 2008 after seeing a television program about raising cockroaches.
Wang Fuming, at his farm in Jinan, is the largest cockroach producer in China (and thus probably in the world), with six farms populated by an estimated 10 million cockroaches.
It’s not exactly a fortune, but the $10,000 she brings in annually selling cockroaches is decent money for her hometown in rural Sichuan province, and won her an award last year from local government as an “Expert in Getting Wealthy.”
“Now I’m teaching four other families,” Zou said. “They want to get rich like me.”
But inexperienced farmers can get into trouble, as Wang Pengsheng (no relation to fellow roach farmer Wang) found out after his cockroaches staged the Great Escape.
He had opened his farm just six months earlier in a newly constructed building that municipal code officials complained was too close to protected watershed land. At noon on Aug. 20, while workers were out for lunch, a demolition crew knocked down the building. The roaches made a run for it.
“They didn’t know I had cockroaches in there. They wouldn’t have demolished the building like that if there were cockroaches that would get out,” Wang Pengsheng said in a telephone interview.
After discovering the flattened building and homeless roaches scurrying among the rubble, he tried to corral the escapees but was unsuccessful. He called in local health officials, who helped him exterminate the roaches. Wang said he has received about $8,000 in compensation from local government and hopes to use the money to rebuild his farm elsewhere.
At least five pharmaceutical companies are using cockroaches for traditional Chinese medicine. Research is underway in China (and South Korea) on the use of pulverized cockroaches for treating baldness, AIDS and cancer and as a vitamin supplement. South Korea’s Jeonnam Province Agricultural Research Institute and China’s Dali University College of Pharmacy have published papers on the anti-carcinogenic properties of the cockroach.
Li Shunan, a 78-year-old professor of traditional medicine from the southwestern province of Yunnan who is considered the godfather of cockroach research, said he discovered in the 1960s that ethnic minorities near the Vietnamese border were using a cockroach paste to treat bone tuberculosis.
“Cockroaches are survivors,” Li said. “We want to know what makes them so strong — why they can even resist nuclear effects.”
Liu Yusheng, head of the Shandong Insect Industry Assn. eats fried cockroaches. Liu worries about the rapid growth of an industry with too many inexperienced players and too little oversight.
Li reels off an impressive, if implausible, list of health claims: “I lost my hair years ago. I made a spray of cockroaches, applied it on my scalp and it grew back. I’ve used it as a facial mask and people say I haven’t changed at all over the years.
“Cockroaches are very tasty too.”
Many farmers are hoping to boost demand by promoting cockroaches in fish and animal feed and as a delicacy for humans.
Chinese aren’t quite as squeamish as most Westerners about insects — after all, people here still keep crickets as pets.
In Jinan, Wang Fuming and his wife, who run the farm together, seem genuinely fond of their cockroaches and a little hurt that others don’t feel affection.
“What is disgusting about them?” Li Wanrong, Wang’s wife, asked as a roach scurried around her black leather pumps. “Look how beautiful they are. So shiny!”
Over lunch at a restaurant down the block from his farm, Wang placed a plate of fried cockroaches seasoned with salt on the table along with more conventional cuisine, and proceeded to nibble a few with his chopsticks. He expressed disapproval that visiting journalists refused to sample the roaches.
On saying goodbye at the end of the day, he added a final rejoinder.
“You will regret your whole life not trying them.”
Nicole Liu in The Times’ Beijing bureau contributed to this report.
FOR THE RECORD:Wednesday’s Column One story about cockroach farming in China misstated the value of 150 Chinese yuan as $11. It is equal to $24.
Especialista da Fiocruz considera equívoco invasão ao Instituto Royal (Jornal da Ciência)
Para Marco Aurélio Martins, o ataque de ativistas aos experimentos científicos é uma tentativa de desinformar “irresponsavelmente” a população
É preocupante a invasão “equivocada” de grupos defensores de animais ao Instituto Royal, levando 178 cães da raça beagle, além de outras cobaias científicas. A afirmação é do pesquisador chefe do Laboratório de Inflamação da Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), Marco Aurélio Martins. “É preocupante pelo discurso equivocado sobre a importância que a pesquisa tem”, diz ele, em entrevista ao Jornal da Ciência. A invasão aconteceu na madrugada da última sexta-feira (18), na instituição instalada em São Roque, a 51 km de São Paulo.
Para ele, o ataque de ativistas aos experimentos científicos é uma tentativa de desinformar “irresponsavelmente” a população em geral, leiga dos conhecimentos científicos. “Passar para população de que a experimentação animal é algo simplesmente cruel, que agride os animais, que só faz mal a eles sem nenhum benefício nem para os seres humanos, nem para os próprios animais, é desinformar”, declara.
Martins reforça que o uso de animais nos experimentos científicos ainda é necessário para estudar várias áreas da saúde pública,desde as doenças tropicais, como malária e outras mais graves, como câncer, asma e hipertensão. “Como podemos abrir mão de estudar esses problemas tão complexos se não tivermos ferramentas experimentais?”, pergunta. “Todos os medicamentos disponíveis nas prateleiras das farmácias e no mercado veterinário dependeram da experimentação animal, em algum momento.”
O pesquisador insiste em dizer que todos os testes científicos com animais obedecem às normas nacionais, previstas na Lei Arouca Nº 11.794, em vigor há três anos. De acordo com ele, o uso de animais nos experimentos científicos não é exclusividade do Brasil. Conforme entende o biólogo, todos os países avançados em ciência e tecnologia permanecem usando os animais em experimentação. “Não é verdadeiro dizer que não se faz mais uso de animais na Europa e nos Estados Unidos”, diz. A restrição é maior (apenas) para primatas, como macacos e chimpanzés.”
JC – O senhor conhece a política do Instituto Royal aplicada nos experimentos científicos de animais?
Martins – Sou ligado a um instituto nacional de ciência e tecnologia de fármacos, INCT-Inofar, do qual o Royal é um dos colaboradores. Conheço a reputação e a seriedade do Instituto. Mas nunca o visitei e nunca utilizei o centro como prestador de serviços.
Qual a sua avaliação sobre a invasão dos ativistas ao Instituto Royal?
Vejo com muita preocupação. É uma radicalização. Já tivemos iniciativas semelhantes no Brasil no passado, mas nada tão veemente. Na própria Fiocruz, por volta de 2000, houve uma invasão, quando pesquisadores foram processados pelo fato de gambás serem encontrados fora da caixa deles. Mas nunca vi algo tão radical, como agora, de ver o pessoal entrar e liberar os animais. Me preocupa muito este momento, no qual o Brasil vive uma tensão social, de manifestações, como os Black Blocs. Já vimos esse filme em outros países, em que esse ativismo levou a problemas enormes, de agressividade.
Esse cenário preocupa a área científica?
Preocupa pela desinformação irresponsável. Passar para a população em geral, leiga, de que a experimentação animal é algo simplesmente cruel, que agride aos animais, que só faz mal aos animais sem nenhum benefício para os seres humanos e nem para os próprios animais. Isso é desinformar. Não é difícil sensibilizar, sobretudo, as pessoas que não sabem como as pesquisas são realizadas. Ou informar, equivocamente, de que apenas o Brasil é o único país que utiliza os animais em experimentos científicos. Preocupa o discurso equivocado sobre a importância que a pesquisa tem. Os profissionais da ciência do Brasil se deparam hoje com uma responsabilidade muito grande. Temos de ser muito hábeis e contar com a colaboração da imprensa para que as palavras não sejam deturpadas. É preciso ter cuidado de passar para a população em geral, de tranquilizá-la, de que os centros de pesquisas estabelecidos no Brasil são de excelência, não são centros de terror.
Quais os benefícios que o experimento cientifico com animal traz para a população e para os próprios animais?
Todos os medicamentos disponíveis nas prateleiras das farmácias e no mercado veterinário dependeram da experimentação animal, em algum momento. O risco de não fazermos isso, de não fazer os experimentos é enorme para a população na hora de disponibilizar os potenciais medicamentos.
Os experimentos científicos com animais precisam atender à legislação interna…
Claro que a comunidade científica sabe que precisa seguir as regras. Somos obrigados a obter licenças, existem leis que controlam a experimentação animal, tanto no Brasil como no mundo. No Brasil, a legislação é a Lei Arouca, em vigor há três anos. No caso, se houvesse uma denúncia de maus tratos na Fiocruz ou mesmo no Instituto Royal, o Concea [Conselho Nacional de Controle de Experimentação Animal] tem o papel de receber a denúncia, de avaliar e investigar para tomar as atitudes. Os maus-tratos de animais de experimentação são passíveis de criminalização. Se tiver acontecendo irregularidade, isso tem de ser exemplarmente punido. O que não pode é autorizar que as pessoas saiam invadindo o local e liberando animais de experimentação. Isso trará prejuízos não apenas para o andamento das pesquisas científicas, mas para a credibilidade do desenvolvimento de novos fármacos no país, para a população e para os próprios animais. Se é que existem maus tratos aos animais que isso seja levado aos órgãos competentes e que se puna quem tiver agindo de maneira errada.
É o caso do Instituto Royal?
Não acredito que seja. Pelo que conheço sobre a reputação das pessoas responsáveis não tenho razão nenhuma para acreditar que tivesse ocorrendo algum tipo de irregularidade interna. Se tivesse acontecendo, numa hipótese terrível, hoje a nossa sociedade já dispõe de um canal, que é Concea.
As pesquisas ainda são necessárias com os animais?
Claro que são, porque precisamos de mecanismos para avançar nas formas de tratamento (de saúde) que temos hoje, na terapia. Ainda temos problemas enormes em várias áreas da saúde pública, desde as doenças tropicais, como malária e outras mais graves, como câncer, asma e hipertensão. Como podemos abrir mão de estudar esses problemas tão complexos se não tivermos ferramentas experimentais? Como impedir cientistas e especialistas, dentro das condições de boas práticas e de boa conduta ética, de entender as doenças e buscar uma forma de controlá-las? Isso seria interromper a investigação científica. Não se pode passar para a opinião pública a ideia de que não se pode mais usar os animais em experimentos científicos.
Outros países ainda usam animais em experimentos científicos?
Claro que usam. Todos os países considerados avançados em ciência e tecnologia continuam usando os animais em experimentação. Não é verdadeiro dizer que não se faz mais uso de animais na Europa ou nos Estados Unidos. A restrição é maior (apenas) para primatas, como macacos e chimpanzés.
Os protocolos proíbem a crueldade nos animais?
Não pode haver crueldade. Isso é crime. Ao montar um protocolo experimental o pesquisador tem de garantir que o animal esteja dentro das condições de bem estar, para que possa, inclusive, acreditar nos resultados a serem obtidos da experimentação.
(Viviane Monteiro – Jornal da Ciência)
Outras matérias sobre o assunto:
Revista Galileu
‘Um dia reduziremos. Mas acabar com testes em animais agora é impossível’
Retirada de cães de instituto afeta teste anticâncer, diz cientista (Folha de S.Paulo)
JAIRO MARQUES e RAFAEL GARCIA
DE SÃO PAULO
A retirada de 178 cães da raça beagle de um laboratório em São Roque (a 66 km de São Paulo) comprometeu experimentos avançados de um medicamento para tratamento contra câncer –além de fitoterápicos para usos diversos.
A informação é do médico Marcelo Marcos Morales, um dos secretários da Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência e coordenador do Concea (Conselho Nacional de Controle de Experimentação Animal), ligado ao Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia.
“Um trabalho que demorou anos para ser produzido, que tinha resultados promissores para o desenvolvimento do país, foi jogado no lixo”, disse ele, em referência à invasão do Instituto Royal por ativistas na semana passada.
“O prejuízo é incalculável para a ciência e para o benefício das pessoas”, afirmou.
O cientista não revelou o nome do medicamento desenvolvido, que é protegido por contrato, nem para qual tipo de câncer ele seria usado. Mas informou que se tratava de um tipo de remédio produzido fora do país e que teve a patente quebrada.
Sala é encontrada com objetos revirados no Instituto Royal, em São Roque (SP)
O Royal também não detalha os experimentos alegando restrição contratual.
Os fitoterápicos eram baseados em plantas da flora nacional e poderiam ser usados, por exemplo, para combater dor e inflamações.
Ativistas dizem que os cães sofriam maus-tratos. O instituto nega. Ontem ele disse que, quando recuperados, receberão tratamento e podem “ser colocados para doação”.
Doutor em biofísica, Morales afirma que os cientistas “também não querem trabalhar com animais”, mas que o método é ainda o mais eficaz para testes de tratamentos médicos e vacinas.
“Seria possível não nos alimentarmos mais com carne? Com pesquisa é a mesma relação. Deixamos de usar animais e vamos testar vacinas em nossas crianças?”
Para Morales, as pessoas estão “confundindo” animais domésticos com cães que nasceram dentro de biotérios, sob condições controladas e rígidas para o uso científico.
“O apelo do cão é muito grande, tanto é que levaram todos os beagles, mas deixaram todos os ratos.”
A autoridade brasileira responsável por aprovar pesquisas com humanos, a Conep (Comissão Nacional de Ética em Pesquisa), não avaliza projetos de drogas que não tenham passado por testes de segurança em animais.
Cachorros estão em uma parcela pequena de experimentos científicos –nos quais os camundongos respondem por 74% dos animais. A maioria dos cães é usada para averiguar a toxicidade de medicamentos.
Around the world, bees are dying in unprecedented numbers. While scientists hypothesize pesticides and habitat loss are to blame, the exact causes are still unclear. Gardeners and farmers are concerned about the fate of their bee-pollinated food and looking to the scientific community for information about how and why the bee populations are declining.
Unfortunately, money is tight as scientists struggle to gain the funding and resources for extensive bee studies.
Marie Clifford and Susan Waters, graduate researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle, have found a way to get around scarce research funding: citizen scientists. The Urban Pollination Project (UPP), co-founded in 2011, takes Seattle community gardeners and trains them to collect data on local bees. Tapping into citizen scientist efforts, Clifford and Waters can gather data from 35 Seattle community gardens – a scale of research otherwise outside of their resources and funding capabilities.
“Citizen science,” Clifford says, “allows scientists to address much broader scale questions than they might be able to address themselves.”
The citizen scientist gardeners at the Urban Pollination Project measure, count, and weigh tomatoes to understand how varying degrees of pollination affect tomato growth. They also pollinate the tomato flowers using a tuning fork, and are trained in bee identification. Their observations provide insight into what species of bees visit various Seattle community gardens.
Observations like these led to a sighting of the Western Bumblebee — a native bumblebee thought to be extinct– by bee enthusiast, Will Peterman. With citizen scientists performing observations around the city, Clifford and Waters hope to better understand which bees are pollinating our cities.
In about five years, Clifford and Waters hope to have enough data to make conclusions about what bumblebees need to survive in urban environments, like how much and what kind of habitat availability is required. As the project continues, Clifford and Waters want to get more gardeners involved.
Both bumblebees and a 128 Hertz tuning fork vibrate at the perfect frequency to pollinate tomato plants. The vibration can literally “shake” the pollen out of tomato plant flowers. Photo credit: Sarah Vaira.
While UPP works with Seattle gardeners to track where bumblebees nest and forage, other citizen projects such asiNaturalist andeBird, allow anyone with a smartphone or digital camera to help identify plants and animals. These kinds of identification projects can help scientists predict animal and plant behavior.
“[With citizen science] you can achieve things that you would never be able to achieve with a more standard set of funds and time and energy,” says Waters, “[This is] a kind of knowledge that is ultimately really useful … and it connects people to their local environment.”
Oct. 10, 2013 — Thirty-eight U.S. national parks are experiencing “accidental fertilization” at or above a critical threshold for ecological damage, according to a study published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physicsand led by Harvard University researchers. Unless significant controls on ammonia emissions are introduced at a national level, they say, little improvement is likely between now and 2050.
The environmental scientists, experts in air quality, atmospheric chemistry, and ecology, have been studying the fate of nitrogen-based compounds that are blown into natural areas from power plants, automobile exhaust, and — increasingly — industrial agriculture. Nitrogen that finds its way into natural ecosystems can disrupt the cycling of nutrients in soil, promote algal overgrowth and lower the pH of water in aquatic environments, and ultimately decrease the number of species that can survive.
“The vast majority, 85 percent, of nitrogen deposition originates with human activities,” explains principal investigator Daniel J. Jacob, Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). “It is fully within our power as a nation to reduce our impact.”
Existing air quality regulations and trends in clean energy technology are expected to reduce the amount of harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) emitted by coal plants and cars over time. However, no government regulations currently limit the amount of ammonia (NH3) that enters the atmosphere through agricultural fertilization or manure from animal husbandry, which are now responsible for one-third of the anthropogenic nitrogen carried on air currents and deposited on land.
“Ammonia’s pretty volatile,” says Jacob. “When we apply fertilizer in the United States, only about 10 percent of the nitrogen makes it into the food. All the rest escapes, and most of it escapes through the atmosphere.”
The team of scientists — comprising researchers from Harvard SEAS, the National Park Service, the USDA Forest Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the University of California, Irvine — presents evidence that unchecked increases in nitrogen deposition are already threatening the ecology of federally protected natural areas.
In many previous studies, environmental scientists have identified the nitrogen levels that would be ecologically harmful in various settings. The new Harvard-led study uses a high-resolution atmospheric model called GEOS-Chem to calculate nitrogen deposition rates across the contiguous United States, and compares those rates to the critical loads.
The findings suggest that many parks may already be suffering.
In Eastern temperate forests, like those in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most sensitive elements of the ecosystem are the hardwood trees, which start to suffer when nitrogen deposition reaches approximately 3 to 8 kilograms per hectare, per year. According to the new study, the actual rate of deposition — 13.6 kg/ha/yr — far exceeds that threshold. In the forests of Mount Rainier National Park, it’s the lichens that suffer first; their critical load is between 2.5 and 7.1 kg/ha/yr, and the deposition rate there is at a troubling 6.7 kg/ha/yr.
“The lichens might not be noticed or particularly valued by someone walking around a national park, but they’re integral for everything else that’s dependent on them,” explains lead author Raluca A. Ellis, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard SEAS. She now directs the Climate and Urban Systems Partnership at the Franklin Institute.
Jacob, Ellis, and their collaborators predict that NOx emissions from the United States will decrease significantly by 2050 (globally, those decreases may be offset to some extent by increases in industrialization overseas). But for ammonia, the story is different. The team predicts significant increases in the amount and density of agricultural land in the Midwest and the West — to feed a growing population and to meet an anticipated demand for biofuels — requiring more and more fertilizer.
“Even if anthropogenic NOx emissions were globally zero, avoiding [critical load] exceedance at all national parks would require a 55% reduction of anthropogenic NH3 emissions,” their report states.
How such a reduction would be achieved is a matter for further study.
“Air quality regulations in the United States have always focused on public health, because air pollution leads to premature deaths, and that’s something you can quantify very well. When you try to write regulations to protect ecosystems, however, the damage is much harder to quantify,” says Jacob. “At least in the national parks you can say, ‘There’s a legal obligation here.'”
The project was funded by the NASA Applied Sciences Program through the Air Quality Applied Sciences Team, which is led by Jacob at Harvard and includes 23 researchers from numerous institutions. The National Park Service has been studying nitrogen deposition for some time now, typically in focused studies such as those at Rocky Mountain National Park and Grand Teton National Park. The new collaboration has enabled many different research teams to unify their efforts and benefit from shared resources like the GEOS-Chem model, which was first developed at Harvard and has become an international standard for modeling atmospheric chemistry over time.
Actual levels of future nitrogen deposition will depend on a complex interplay of economic, legal, and environmental factors.
“The point is, in the decades ahead, the problem in our national parks is not going to be solved by the reduction of NOxemissions alone,” explains Ellis. “It will require a targeted effort to control ammonia.”
“It’s a national issue, and I think that’s why having the national perspective was so important,” Jacob adds. “We’ve shown that most of the nitrogen deposition to parks in the United States is coming from domestic sources. It’s not coming from China; it’s not coming from Canada — it’s something we can deal with, but we need to deal with it at the national level.”
Journal Reference:
R. A. Ellis, D. J. Jacob, M. P. Sulprizio, L. Zhang, C. D. Holmes, B. A. Schichtel, T. Blett, E. Porter, L. H. Pardo, J. A. Lynch. Present and future nitrogen deposition to national parks in the United States: critical load exceedances. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 2013; 13 (17): 9083 DOI: 10.5194/acp-13-9083-2013
Oct. 10, 2013 — More punishment does not necessarily lead to less crime, say researchers at ETH Zurich who have been studying the origins of crime with a computer model. In order to fight crime, more attention should be paid to the social and economic backgrounds that encourage crime.
People have been stealing, betraying others and committing murder for ages. In fact, humans have never succeeded in eradicating crime, although — according to the rational choice theory in economics — this should be possible in principle. The theory states that humans turn criminal if it is worthwhile. Stealing or evading taxes, for instance, pays off if the prospects of unlawful gains outweigh the expected punishment. Therefore, if a state sets the penalties high enough and ensures that lawbreakers are brought to justice, it should be possible to eliminate crime completely.
This theory is largely oversimplified, says Dirk Helbing, a professor of sociology. The USA, for example, often have far more drastic penalties than European countries. But despite the death penalty in some American states, the homicide rate in the USA is five times higher than in Western Europe. Furthermore, ten times more people sit in American prisons than in many European countries. More repression, however, can sometimes even lead to more crime, says Helbing. Ever since the USA declared the “war on terror” around the globe, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide has increased, not fallen. “The classic approach, where criminals merely need to be pursued and punished more strictly to curb crime, often does not work.” Nonetheless, this approach dominates the public discussion.
More realistic model
In order to better understand the origins of crime, Helbing and his colleagues have developed a new so-called agent-based model that takes the network of social interactions into account and is more realistic than previous models. Not only does it include criminals and law enforcers, like many previous models, but also honest citizens as a third group. Parameters such as the penalties size and prosecution costs can be varied in the model. Moreover, it also considers spatial dependencies. The representatives of the three groups do not interact with one another randomly, but only if they encounter each other in space and time. In particular, individual agents imitate the behaviour of agents from other groups, if this is promising.
Cycles of crime
Using the model, the scientists were able to demonstrate that tougher punishments do not necessarily lead to less crime and, if so, then at least not to the extent the punishment effort is increased. The researchers were also able to simulate how crime can suddenly break out and calm down again. Like the pig cycle we know from the economic sciences or the predator-prey cycles from ecology, crime is cyclical as well. This explains observations made, for instance, in the USA: according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, cyclical changes in the frequency of criminal offences can be found in several American states. “If a state increases the investments in its punitive system to an extent that is no longer cost-effective, politicians will cut the law enforcement budget,” says Helbing. “As a result, there is more room for crime to spread again.”
“Many crimes have a socio-economic background”
But would there be a different way of combatting crime, if not with repression? The focus should be on the socio-economic context, says Helbing. As we know from the milieu theory in sociology, the environment plays a pivotal role in the behaviour of individuals. The majority of criminal acts have a social background, claims Helbing. For example, if an individual feels that all the friends and neighbours are cheating the state, it will inevitably wonder whether it should be the last honest person to fill in the tax declaration correctly.
“If we want to reduce the crime rate, we have to keep an eye on the socio-economic circumstances under which people live,” says Helbing. We must not confuse this with soft justice. However, a state’s response to crime has to be differentiated: besides the police and court, economic and social institutions are relevant as well — and, in fact, every individual when it comes to the integration of others. “Improving social conditions and integrating people socially can probably combat crime much more effectively than building new prisons.”
Journal Reference:
Matjaž Perc, Karsten Donnay, Dirk Helbing. Understanding Recurrent Crime as System-Immanent Collective Behavior. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (10): e76063 DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0076063
As armadilhas são instrumentos instalados nas casas de alguns moradores da área do experimento. As ovitrampas, como são chamadas, fazem as vezes de criadouros para as fêmeas. Foto: Coletivo Nigéria
Com a promessa de reduzir a dengue, biofábrica de insetos transgênicos já soltou 18 milhões de mosquitos Aedes aegypti no interior da Bahia. Leia a história e veja o vídeo.
No começo da noite de uma quinta-feira de setembro, a rodoviária de Juazeiro da Bahia era o retrato da desolação. No saguão mal iluminado, funcionavam um box cuja especialidade é caldo de carne, uma lanchonete de balcão comprido, ornado por salgados, biscoitos e batata chips, e um único guichê – com perturbadoras nuvens de mosquitos sobre as cabeças de quem aguardava para comprar passagens para pequenas cidades ou capitais nordestinas.
Assentada à beira do rio São Francisco, na fronteira entre Pernambuco e Bahia, Juazeiro já foi uma cidade cortada por córregos, afluentes de um dos maiores rios do país. Hoje, tem mais de 200 mil habitantes, compõe o maior aglomerado urbano do semiárido nordestino ao lado de Petrolina – com a qual soma meio milhão de pessoas – e é infestada por muriçocas (ou pernilongos, se preferir). Os cursos de água que drenavam pequenas nascentes viraram esgotos a céu aberto, extensos criadouros do inseto, tradicionalmente combatidos com inseticida e raquete elétrica, ou janelas fechadas com ar condicionado para os mais endinheirados.
Mas os moradores de Juazeiro não espantam só muriçocas nesse início de primavera. A cidade é o centro de testes de uma nova técnica científica que utiliza Aedes aegypti transgênicos para combater a dengue, doença transmitida pela espécie. Desenvolvido pela empresa britânica de biotecnologia Oxitec, o método consiste basicamente na inserção de um gene letal nos mosquitos machos que, liberados em grande quantidade no meio ambiente, copulam com as fêmeas selvagens e geram uma cria programada para morrer. Assim, se o experimento funcionar, a morte prematura das larvas reduz progressivamente a população de mosquitos dessa espécie.
A técnica é a mais nova arma para combater uma doença que não só resiste como avança sobre os métodos até então empregados em seu controle. A Organização Mundial de Saúde estima que possam haver de 50 a 100 milhões de casos de dengue por ano no mundo. No Brasil, a doença é endêmica, com epidemias anuais em várias cidades, principalmente nas grandes capitais. Em 2012, somente entre os dias 1º de janeiro e 16 de fevereiro, foram registrados mais de 70 mil casos no país. Em 2013, no mesmo período, o número praticamente triplicou, passou para 204 mil casos. Este ano, até agora, 400 pessoas já morreram de dengue no Brasil.
Em Juazeiro, o método de patente britânica é testado pela organização social Moscamed, que reproduz e libera ao ar livre os mosquitos transgênicos desde 2011. Na biofábrica montada no município e que tem capacidade para produzir até 4 milhões de mosquitos por semana, toda cadeia produtiva do inseto transgênico é realizada – exceção feita à modificação genética propriamente dita, executada nos laboratórios da Oxitec, em Oxford. Larvas transgênicas foram importadas pela Moscamed e passaram a ser reproduzidas nos laboratórios da instituição.
Os testes desde o início são financiados pela Secretaria da Saúde da Bahia – com o apoio institucional da secretaria de Juazeiro – e no último mês de julho se estenderam ao município de Jacobina, na extremidade norte da Chapada Diamantina. Na cidade serrana de aproximadamente 80 mil habitantes, a Moscamed põe à prova a capacidade da técnica de “suprimir” (a palavra usada pelos cientistas para exterminar toda a população de mosquitos) o Aedes aegypti em toda uma cidade, já que em Juazeiro a estratégia se mostrou eficaz, mas limitada por enquanto a dois bairros.
“Os resultados de 2011 e 2012 mostraram que [a técnica] realmente funcionava bem. E a convite e financiados pelo Governo do Estado da Bahia resolvemos avançar e irmos pra Jacobina. Agora não mais como piloto, mas fazendo um teste pra realmente eliminar a população [de mosquitos]”, fala Aldo Malavasi, professor aposentado do Departamento de Genética do Instituto de Biociências da Universidade de São Paulo (USP) e atual presidente da Moscamed. A USP também integra o projeto.
Malavasi trabalha na região desde 2006, quando a Moscamed foi criada para combater uma praga agrícola, a mosca-das-frutas, com técnica parecida – a Técnica do Inseto Estéril. A lógica é a mesma: produzir insetos estéreis para copular com as fêmeas selvagens e assim reduzir gradativamente essa população. A diferença está na forma como estes insetos são esterilizados. Ao invés de modificação genética, radiação. A TIE é usada largamente desde a década de 1970, principalmente em espécies consideradas ameaças à agricultura. O problema é que até agora a tecnologia não se adequava a mosquitos como o Aedes aegypti, que não resistiam de forma satisfatória à radiação
O plano de comunicação
As primeiras liberações em campo do Aedes transgênico foram realizadas nas Ilhas Cayman, entre o final de 2009 e 2010. O território britânico no Caribe, formado por três ilhas localizadas ao Sul de Cuba, se mostrou não apenas um paraíso fiscal (existem mais empresas registradas nas ilhas do que seus 50 mil habitantes), mas também espaço propício para a liberação dos mosquitos transgênicos, devido à ausência de leis de biossegurança. As Ilhas Cayman não são signatárias do Procolo de Cartagena, o principal documento internacional sobre o assunto, nem são cobertas pela Convenção de Aarthus – aprovada pela União Europeia e da qual o Reino Unido faz parte – que versa sobre o acesso à informação, participação e justiça nos processos de tomada de decisão sobre o meio ambiente.
Ao invés da publicação e consulta pública prévia sobre os riscos envolvidos no experimento, como exigiriam os acordos internacionais citados, os cerca de 3 milhões de mosquitos soltos no clima tropical das Ilhas Cayman ganharam o mundo sem nenhum processo de debate ou consulta pública. A autorização foi concedida exclusivamente pelo Departamento de Agricultura das Ilhas. Parceiro local da Oxitec nos testes, a Mosquito Research & Control Unit (Unidade de Pesquisa e Controle de Mosquito) postou um vídeo promocional sobre o assunto apenas em outubro de 2010, ainda assim sem mencionar a natureza transgênica dos mosquitos. O vídeo foi divulgado exatamente um mês antes da apresentação dos resultados dos experimentos pela própria Oxitec no encontro anual daAmerican Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (Sociedade Americana de Medicina Tropical e Higiene), nos Estados Unidos.
A comunidade científica se surpreendeu com a notícia de que as primeiras liberações no mundo de insetos modificados geneticamente já haviam sido realizadas, sem que os próprios especialistas no assunto tivessem conhecimento. A surpresa se estendeu ao resultado: segundo os dados da Oxitec, os experimentos haviam atingido 80% de redução na população de Aedes aegypti nas Ilhas Cayman. O número confirmava para a empresa que a técnica criada em laboratório poderia ser de fato eficiente. Desde então, novos testes de campo passaram a ser articulados em outros países – notadamente subdesenvolvidos ou em desenvolvimento, com clima tropical e problemas históricos com a dengue.
Depois de adiar testes semelhantes em 2006, após protestos, a Malásia se tornou o segundo país a liberar os mosquitos transgênicos entre dezembro de 2010 e janeiro de 2011. Seis mil mosquitos foram soltos num área inabitada do país. O número, bem menor em comparação ao das Ilhas Cayman, é quase insignificante diante da quantidade de mosquitos que passou a ser liberada em Juazeiro da Bahia a partir de fevereiro de 2011. A cidade, junto com Jacobina mais recentemente, se tornou desde então o maior campo de testes do tipo no mundo, com mais de 18 milhões de mosquitos já liberados, segundo números da Moscamed.
“A Oxitec errou profundamente, tanto na Malásia quanto nas Ilhas Cayman. Ao contrário do que eles fizeram, nós tivemos um extenso trabalho do que a gente chama de comunicação pública, com total transparência, com discussão com a comunidade, com visita a todas as casas. Houve um trabalho extraordinário aqui”, compara Aldo Malavasi.
Em entrevista por telefone, ele fez questão de demarcar a independência da Moscamed diante da Oxitec e ressaltou a natureza diferente das duas instituições. Criada em 2006, a Moscamed é uma organização social, sem fins lucrativos portanto, que se engajou nos testes do Aedes aegypti transgênico com o objetivo de verificar a eficácia ou não da técnica no combate à dengue. Segundo Malavasi, nenhum financiamento da Oxitec foi aceito por eles justamente para garantir a isenção na avaliação da técnica. “Nós não queremos dinheiro deles, porque o nosso objetivo é ajudar o governo brasileiro”, resume.
Em favor da transparência, o programa foi intitulado “Projeto Aedes Transgênico” (PAT), para trazer já no nome a palavra espinhosa. Outra determinação de ordem semântica foi o não uso do termo “estéril”, corrente no discurso da empresa britânica, mas empregada tecnicamente de forma incorreta, já que os mosquitos produzem crias, mas geram prole programada para morrer no estágio larval. Um jingle pôs o complexo sistema em linguagem popular e em ritmo de forró pé-de-serra. E o bloco de carnaval “Papa Mosquito” saiu às ruas de Juazeiro no Carnaval de 2011.
No âmbito institucional, além do custeio pela Secretaria de Saúde estadual, o programa também ganhou o apoio da Secretaria de Saúde de Juazeiro da Bahia. “De início teve resistência, porque as pessoas também não queriam deixar armadilhas em suas casas, mas depois, com o tempo, elas entenderam o projeto e a gente teve uma boa aceitação popular”, conta o enfermeiro sanitarista Mário Machado, diretor de Promoção e Vigilância à Saúde da secretaria.
As armadilhas, das quais fala Machado, são simples instrumentos instalados nas casas de alguns moradores da área do experimento. As ovitrampas, como são chamadas, fazem as vezes de criadouros para as fêmeas. Assim é possível colher os ovos e verificar se eles foram fecundados por machos transgênicos ou selvagens. Isso também é possível porque os mosquitos geneticamente modificados carregam, além do gene letal, o fragmento do DNA de uma água-viva que lhe confere uma marcação fluorescente, visível em microscópios.
Desta forma, foi possível verificar que a redução da população de Aedes aegypti selvagem atingiu, segundo a Moscamed, 96% em Mandacaru – um assentamento agrícola distante poucos quilômetros do centro comercial de Juazeiro que, pelo isolamento geográfico e aceitação popular, se transformou no local ideal para as liberações. Apesar do número, a Moscamed continua com liberações no bairro. Devido à breve vida do mosquito (a fêmea vive aproximadamente 35 dias), a soltura dos insetos precisa continuar para manter o nível da população selvagem baixo. Atualmente, uma vez por semana um carro deixa a sede da organização com 50 mil mosquitos distribuídos aos milhares em potes plásticos que serão abertos nas ruas de Mandacaru.
“Hoje a maior aceitação é no Mandacaru. A receptividade foi tamanha que a Moscamed não quer sair mais de lá”, enfatiza Mário Machado.
O mesmo não aconteceu com o bairro de Itaberaba, o primeiro a receber os mosquitos no começo de 2011. Nem mesmo o histórico alto índice de infecção pelo Aedes aegypti fez com que o bairro periférico juazeirense, vizinho à sede da Moscamed, aceitasse de bom grado o experimento. Mário Machado estima “em torno de 20%” a parcela da população que se opôs aos testes e pôs fim às liberações.
“Por mais que a gente tente informar, ir de casa em casa, de bar em bar, algumas pessoas desacreditam: ‘Não, vocês estão mentindo pra gente, esse mosquito tá picando a gente’”, resigna-se.
Depois de um ano sem liberações, o mosquito parece não ter deixado muitas lembranças por ali. Em uma caminhada pelo bairro, quase não conseguimos encontrar alguém que soubesse do que estávamos falando. Não obstante, o nome de Itaberaba correu o mundo ao ser divulgado pela Oxitec que o primeiro experimento de campo no Brasil havia atingido 80% de redução na população de mosquitos selvagens.
Supervisora de campo da Moscamed, a bióloga Luiza Garziera foi uma das que foram de casa em casa explicando o processo, por vezes contornando o discurso científico para se fazer entender. “Eu falava que a gente estaria liberando esses mosquitos, que a gente liberava somente o macho, que não pica. Só quem pica é a fêmea. E que esses machos quando ‘namoram’ – porque a gente não pode falar às vezes de ‘cópula’ porque as pessoas não vão entender. Então quando esses machos namoram com a fêmea, os seus filhinhos acabam morrendo”.
Este é um dos detalhes mais importantes sobre a técnica inédita. Ao liberar apenas machos, numa taxa de 10 transgênicos para 1 selvagem, a Moscamed mergulha as pessoas numa nuvem de mosquitos, mas garante que estes não piquem aqueles. Isto acontece porque só a fêmea se alimenta de sangue humano, líquido que fornece as proteínas necessárias para sua ovulação.
A tecnologia se encaixa de forma convincente e até didática – talvez com exceção da “modificação genética”, que requer voos mais altos da imaginação. No entanto, ainda a ignorância sobre o assunto ainda campeia em considerável parcela dos moradores ouvidos para esta reportagem. Quando muito, sabe-se que se trata do extermínio do mosquito da dengue, o que é naturalmente algo positivo. No mais, ouviu-se apenas falar ou arrisca-se uma hipótese que inclua a, esta sim largamente odiada, muriçoca.
A avaliação dos riscos
Apesar da campanha de comunicação da Moscamed, a ONG britânica GeneWatch aponta uma série de problemas no processo brasileiro. O principal deles, o fato do relatório de avaliação de riscos sobre o experimento não ter sido disponibilizado ao público antes do início das liberações. Pelo contrário, a pedido dos responsáveis pelo Programa Aedes Transgênico, o processo encaminhado à Comissão Técnica Nacional de Biossegurança (CTNBio, órgão encarregado de autorizar ou não tais experimentos) foi considerado confidencial.
“Nós achamos que a Oxitec deve ter o consentimento plenamente informado da população local, isso significa que as pessoas precisam concordar com o experimento. Mas para isso elas precisam também ser informadas sobre os riscos, assim como você seria se estivesse sendo usado para testar um novo medicamento contra o câncer ou qualquer outro tipo de tratamento”, comentou, em entrevista por Skype, Helen Wallace, diretora executiva da organização não governamental.
Especialista nos riscos e na ética envolvida nesse tipo de experimento, Helen publicou este ano o relatório Genetically Modified Mosquitoes: Ongoing Concerns (“Mosquitos Geneticamente Modificados: atuais preocupações”), que elenca em 13 capítulos o que considera riscos potenciais não considerados antes de se autorizar a liberação dos mosquitos transgênicos. O documento também aponta falhas na condução dos experimentos pela Oxitec.
Por exemplo, após dois anos das liberações nas Ilhas Cayman, apenas os resultados de um pequeno teste haviam aparecido numa publicação científica. No começo de 2011, a empresa submeteu os resultados do maior experimento nas Ilhas à revista Science, mas o artigo não foi publicado. Apenas em setembro do ano passado o texto apareceu em outra revista, a Nature Biotechnology, publicado como “correspondência” – o que significa que não passou pela revisão de outros cientistas, apenas pela checagem do próprio editor da publicação.
Para Helen Wallace, a ausência de revisão crítica dos pares científicos põe o experimento da Oxitec sob suspeita. Mesmo assim, a análise do artigo, segundo o documento, sugere que a empresa precisou aumentar a proporção de liberação de mosquitos transgênicos e concentrá-los em uma pequena área para que atingisse os resultados esperados. O mesmo teria acontecido no Brasil, em Itaberaba. Os resultados do teste no Brasil também ainda não foram publicados pela Moscamed. O gerente do projeto, Danilo Carvalho, informou que um dos artigos já foi submetido a uma publicação e outro está em fase final de escrita.
Outro dos riscos apontados pelo documento está no uso comum do antibiótico tetraciclina. O medicamento é responsável por reverter o gene letal e garantir em laboratório a sobrevivência do mosquito geneticamente modificado, que do contrário não chegaria à fase adulta. Esta é a diferença vital entre a sorte dos mosquitos reproduzidos em laboratório e a de suas crias, geradas no meio ambiente a partir de fêmeas selvagens – sem o antibiótico, estão condenados à morte prematura.
A tetraciclina é comumente empregada nas indústrias da pecuária e da aquicultura, que despejam no meio ambiente grandes quantidades da substância através de seus efluentes. O antibiótico também é largamente usado na medicina e na veterinária. Ou seja, ovos e larvas geneticamente modificados poderiam entrar em contato com o antibiótico mesmo em ambientes não controlados e assim sobreviverem. Ao longo do tempo, a resistência dos mosquitos transgênicos ao gene letal poderia neutralizar seu efeito e, por fim, teríamos uma nova espécie geneticamente modificada adaptada ao meio ambiente.
A hipótese é tratada com ceticismo pela Oxitec, que minimiza a possibilidade disto acontecer no mundo real. No entanto, documento confidencial tornado público mostra que a hipótese se mostrou, por acaso, real nos testes de pesquisador parceiro da empresa. Ao estranhar uma taxa de sobrevivência das larvas sem tetraciclina de 15% – bem maior que os usuais 3% contatos pelos experimentos da empresa –, os cientistas da Oxitec descobriram que a ração de gato com a qual seus parceiros estavam alimentando os mosquitos guardava resquícios do antibiótico, que é rotineiramente usado para tratar galinhas destinadas à ração animal.
O relatório da GeneWatch chama atenção para a presença comum do antibiótico em dejetos humanos e animais, assim como em sistemas de esgotamento doméstico, a exemplo de fossas sépticas. Isto caracterizaria um risco potencial, já que vários estudos constataram a capacidade do Aedes aegypti se reproduzir em águas contaminadas – apesar de isso ainda não ser o mais comum, nem acontecer ainda em Juazeiro, segundo a Secretaria de Saúde do município.
Além disso, há preocupações quanto a taxa de liberação de fêmeas transgênicas. O processo de separação das pupas (último estágio antes da vida adulta) é feito de forma manual, com a ajuda de um aparelho que reparte os gêneros pelo tamanho (a fêmea é ligeiramente maior). Uma taxa de 3% de fêmeas pode escapar neste processo, ganhando a liberdade e aumentando os riscos envolvidos. Por último, os experimentos ainda não verificaram se a redução na população de mosquitos incide diretamente na transmissão da dengue.
Todas as críticas são rebatidas pela Oxitec e pela Moscamed, que dizem manter um rigoroso controle de qualidade – como o monitoramento constante da taxa de liberação de fêmeas e da taxa de sobrevivências das larvas sem tetraciclina. Desta forma, qualquer sinal de mutação do mosquito seria detectado a tempo de se suspender o programa. Ao final de aproximadamente um mês, todos os insetos liberados estariam mortos. Os mosquitos, segundo as instituições responsáveis, também não passam os genes modificados mesmo que alguma fêmea desgarrada pique um ser humano.
Mosquito transgênico à venda
Em julho passado, depois do êxito dos testes de campo em Juazeiro, a Oxitec protocolou a solicitação de licença comercial na Comissão Técnica Nacional de Biossegurança (CTNBio). Desde o final de 2012, a empresa britânica possui CNPJ no país e mantém um funcionário em São Paulo. Mais recentemente, com os resultados promissores dos experimentos em Juazeiro, alugou um galpão em Campinas e está construindo o que será sua sede brasileira. O país representa hoje seu mais provável e iminente mercado, o que faz com que o diretor global de desenvolvimento de negócios da empresa, Glen Slade, viva hoje numa ponte aérea entre Oxford e São Paulo.
“A Oxitec está trabalhando desde 2009 em parceria com a USP e Moscamed, que são parceiros bons e que nos deram a oportunidade de começar projetos no Brasil. Mas agora acabamos de enviar nosso dossiê comercial à CTNBio e esperamos obter um registro no futuro, então precisamos aumentar nossa equipe no país. Claramente estamos investindo no Brasil. É um país muito importante”, disse Slade numa entrevista por Skype da sede na Oxitec, em Oxford, na Inglaterra.
A empresa de biotecnologia é uma spin-out da universidade britânica, o que significa dizer que a Oxitec surgiu dos laboratórios de uma das mais prestigiadas universidades do mundo. Fundada em 2002, desde então vem captando investimentos privados e de fundações sem fins lucrativos, tais como a Bill & Melinda Gates, para bancar o prosseguimento das pesquisas. Segundo Slade, mais de R$ 50 milhões foram gastos nesta última década no aperfeiçoamento e teste da tecnologia.
O executivo espera que a conclusão do trâmite burocrático para a concessão da licença comercial aconteça ainda próximo ano, quando a sede brasileira da Oxitec estará pronta, incluindo uma nova biofábrica. Já em contato com vários municípios do país, o executivo prefere não adiantar nomes. Nem o preço do serviço, que provavelmente será oferecido em pacotes anuais de controle da população de mosquitos, a depender o orçamento do número de habitantes da cidade.
“Nesse momento é difícil dar um preço. Como todos os produtos novos, o custo de produção é mais alto quando a gente começa do que a gente gostaria. Acho que o preço vai ser um preço muito razoável em relação aos benefícios e aos outros experimentos para controlar o mosquito, mas muito difícil de dizer hoje. Além disso, o preço vai mudar segundo a escala do projeto. Projetos pequenos não são muito eficientes, mas se tivermos a oportunidade de controlar os mosquitos no Rio de Janeiro todo, podemos trabalhar em grande escala e o preço vai baixar”, sugere.
A empresa pretende também instalar novas biofábricas nas cidades que receberem grandes projetos, o que reduzirá o custo a longo prazo, já que as liberações precisam ser mantidas indefinidamente para evitar o retorno dos mosquitos selvagens. A velocidade de reprodução do Aedes aegypti é uma preocupação. Caso seja cessado o projeto, a espécie pode recompor a população em poucas semanas.
“O plano da empresa é conseguir pagamentos repetidos para a liberação desses mosquitos todo ano. Se a tecnologia deles funcionar e realmente reduzir a incidência de dengue, você não poderá suspender estas liberações e ficará preso dentro desse sistema. Uma das maiores preocupações a longo prazo é que se as coisas começarem a dar errado, ou mesmo se tornarem menos eficientes, você realmente pode ter uma situação pior ao longo de muitos anos”, critica Helen Wallace.
O risco iria desde a redução da imunidade das pessoas à doença, até o desmantelamento de outras políticas públicas de combate à dengue, como as equipes de agentes de saúde. Apesar de tanto a Moscamed quanto a própria secretaria de Saúde de Juazeiro enfatizarem a natureza complementar da técnica, que não dispensaria os outros métodos de controle, é plausível que hajam conflitos na alocação de recursos para a área. Hoje, segundo Mário Machado da secretaria de Saúde, Juazeiro gasta em média R$ 300 mil por mês no controle de endemias, das quais a dengue é a principal.
A secretaria negocia com a Moscamed a ampliação do experimento para todo o município ou mesmo para toda a região metropolitana formada por Juazeiro e Petrolina – um teste que cobriria meio milhão pessoas –, para assim avaliar a eficácia em grandes contingentes populacionais. De qualquer forma e apesar do avanço das experiências, nem a organização social brasileira nem a empresa britânica apresentaram estimativas de preço pra uma possível liberação comercial.
“Ontem nós estávamos fazendo os primeiros estudos, pra analisar qual é o preço deles, qual o nosso. Porque eles sabem quanto custa o programa deles, que não é barato, mas não divulgam”, disse Mário Machado.
Em reportagem do jornal britânico The Observer de julho do ano passado, a Oxitec estimou o custo da técnica em “menos de” £6 libras esterlinas por pessoa por ano. Num cálculo simples, apenas multiplicando o número pela contação atual da moeda britânia frente ao real e desconsiderando as inúmeras outras variáveis dessa conta, o projeto em uma cidade de 150 mil habitantes custaria aproximadamente R$ 3,2 milhões por ano.
Se imaginarmos a quantidade de municípios de pequeno e médio porte brasileiros em que a dengue é endêmica, chega-se a pujança do mercado que se abre – mesmo desconsiderando por hora os grandes centros urbanos do país, que extrapolariam a capacidade atual da técnica. Contudo, este é apenas uma fatia do negócio. A Oxitec também possui uma série de outros insetos transgênicos, estes destinados ao controle de pragas agrícolas e que devem encontrar campo aberto no Brasil, um dos gigantes do agronegócio no mundo.
Aguardando autorização da CTNBio, a Moscamed já se preparara para testar a mosca-das-frutas transgênica, que segue a mesma lógica do Aedes aegypti. Além desta, a Oxitec tem outras 4 espécies geneticamente modificadas que poderão um dia serem testadas no Brasil, a começar por Juazeiro e o Vale do São Francisco. A região é uma das maiores produtoras de frutas frescas para exportação do país. 90% de toda uva e manga exportadas no Brasil saem daqui. Uma produção que requer o combate incessante às pragas. Nas principais avenidas de Juazeiro e Petrolina, as lojas de produtos agrícolas e agrotóxicos se sucedem, variando em seus totens as logos das multinacionais do ramo.
“Não temos planos concretos [além da mosca-das-frutas], mas, claro, gostaríamos muito de ter a oportunidade de fazer ensaios com esses produtos também. O Brasil tem uma indústria agrícola muito grande. Mas nesse momento nossa prioridade número 1 é o mosquito da dengue. Então uma vez que tivermos este projeto com recursos bastante, vamos tentar acrescentar projetos na agricultura.”, comentou Slade.
Ele e vários de seus colegas do primeiro escalão da empresa já trabalharam numa das gigantes do agronegócio, a Syngenta. O fato, segundo Helen Wallace, é um dos revelam a condição do Aedes aegypti transgênico de pioneiro de todo um novo mercado de mosquitos geneticamente modificados: “Nos achamos que a Syngenta está principalmente interessada nas pragas agrícolas. Um dos planos que conhecemos é a proposta de usar pragas agrícolas geneticamente modificadas junto com semestres transgênicas para assim aumentar a resistências destas culturas às pragas”.
“Não tem nenhum relacionamento entre Oxitec e Syngenta dessa forma. Talvez tenhamos possibilidade no futuro de trabalharmos juntos. Eu pessoalmente tenho o interesse de buscar projetos que possamos fazer com Syngenta, Basf ou outras empresas grandes da agricultura”, esclarece Glen Slade.
Em 2011, a indústria de agrotóxicos faturou R$14,1 bilhões no Brasil. Maior mercado do tipo no mundo, o país pode nos próximos anos inaugurar um novo estágio tecnológico no combate às pestes. Assim como na saúde coletiva, com o Aedes aegypti transgênico, que parece ter um futuro comercial promissor. Todavia, resta saber como a técnica conviverá com as vacinas contra o vírus da dengue, que estão em fase final de testes – uma desenvolvida por um laboratório francês, outra pelo Instituto Butantan, de São Paulo. As vacinas devem chegar ao público em 2015. O mosquito transgênico, talvez já próximo ano.
Dentre as linhagens de mosquitos transgênicos, pode surgir também uma versão nacional. Como confirmou a professora Margareth de Lara Capurro-Guimarães, do Departamento de Parasitologia da USP e coordenadora do Programa Aedes Transgênico, já está sob estudo na universidade paulista a muriçoca transgênica. Outra possível solução tecnológica para um problema de saúde pública em Juazeiro da Bahia – uma cidade na qual, segundo levantamento do Sistema Nacional de Informações sobre Saneamento (SNIS) de 2011, a rede de esgoto só atende 67% da população urbana.
Tráfego na avenida 23 de Maio, em São Paulo. Foto: Photostock/IPS
Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 11/10/2013 – Nos últimos cinco anos, em plena crise econômica internacional, o Brasil passou a integrar o grupo dos grandes poluidores mundiais, cuja fonte principal de gases-estufa é a queima de combustíveis fósseis. Esse país está assumindo um perfil de contaminação climática próprio do primeiro mundo, segundo o cientista José Marengo, um dos autores do Quinto Informe de Avaliação do Grupo Intergovernamental de Especialistas sobre a Mudança Climática (IPCC), cujo primeiro volume sem editar foi divulgado no dia 30 de setembro.
E isto se deve, em parte, a uma simples razão de fenômeno industrial e de consumo. As isenções de impostos para estimular a venda de automóveis e motocicletas tiveram um efeito positivo no crescimento econômico. Contudo, ao mesmo tempo, criaram um aumento vertiginoso do parque automotivo. A quantidade de automóveis duplicou em uma década, passando de 24,5 milhões em 2001 para 50,2 milhões em 2012, segundo o informe Evolução da Frota de Automóveis e Motos no Brasil – Relatório 2013, divulgado ontem.
As motocicletas tiveram um aumento ainda mais espetacular no mesmo período, passando de 4,5 milhões para 19,9 milhões. O Brasil “terminou 2012 com uma frota total de 76.137.125 veículos automotores. Em 2001, havia aproximadamente 31,8 milhões de unidades. Houve, portanto, aumento de 138,6%”, afirma o documento publicado pelo Observatório das Metrópoles. “Vale recordar que o crescimento populacional do país entre os últimos censos (2000 e 2010) foi de 11,8%”, acrescenta.
“É preocupante, porque sempre criticamos os países desenvolvidos por isso”, observou Marengo, que dirige o Centro de Ciência do Sistema Terrestre do Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais. Esse aspecto contrasta com a redução do intenso desmatamento no país, amplamente divulgado pelas autoridades brasileiras.
Em 27 de setembro, quando o IPCC divulgou o Resumo para Responsáveis por Políticas, o secretário de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento do Ministério de Ciência e Tecnologia, Carlos Nobre, dizia à IPS que este país conseguiu reduzir em 38,4% suas emissões de gases-estufa entre 2005 e 2010, devido à redução no desmatamento da Amazônia.
O Brasil se comprometeu em 2009 a reduzir suas emissões de gases-estufa entre 36,1% e 38,9%, segundo dois cenários de crescimento do produto interno bruto. O governo garante que já avançou 62% rumo a essa meta, graças à acentuada redução do desmatamento. Até 2009, o desmatamento era a causa de 60% da contaminação climática do Brasil, enquanto o uso de combustíveis fósseis estava em segundo lugar. Agora emergem novos problemas.
“Se tivéssemos um sistema de transportes de massa confiável e confortável, as pessoas deixaram seus carros em casa. Mas, viajar em certas horas do dia no metrô de São Paulo ou do Rio de Janeiro (duas das maiores cidades do país) é uma humilhação”, disse Marengo à IPS. “Isso precisa mudar, e a única forma é fomentar um transporte público decente”.
Para o diretor de políticas públicas do Greenpeace Brasil, Sergio Leitão, essa mudança de perfil também coincide com a prioridade que se dá a novos empreendimentos, como a prospecção e exploração das jazidas de petróleo do pré-sal, a mais de sete mil metros de profundidade na plataforma submarina. “Estamos começando a exploração do pré-sal e nossas grandes cidades estão abarrotadas de carros”, pontuou Leitão. Enquanto o mundo caminha para novos modelos energéticos, o Brasil segue na contramão, segundo o ativista, tornando impossível que este país seja “amigo do planeta”, afirmou.
O informe do IPCC diz que as mudanças observadas desde 1950 não têm precedentes e demonstram que a ação do homem é uma causa inequívoca do aquecimento global registrado desde meados do século 20. O informe assinala que a humanidade deve fazer todos os esforços para manter o clima do planeta nas coordenadas do cenário mais otimista, com o aquecimento global não superando os dois graus neste século.
Para conseguir isso, segundo Leitão, as “medidas fundamentais, urgentes e inevitáveis” são mudar o modelo de produção e reduzir drasticamente o consumo de petróleo, gás e carvão. “Nos preocupa o fato de no Brasil o pré-sal ser visto como a grande oportunidade econômica do futuro”, afirmou. Na área energética, os grandes volumes de investimentos são destinados a viabilizar a exploração do petróleo no pré-sal, com até US$ 340 milhões até 2020, ressaltou.
Por outro lado, Leitão disse que “seria preciso adotar um rumo diferente, de pesquisas em energias renováveis e limpas. O Brasil se destaca em abundância de sol e vento. É necessário dinamizar essas vertentes e criar substitutos tecnológicos para os combustíveis fósseis”.
Marengo destacou que, se o mundo inteiro deixasse de emitir gases-estufa hoje, seriam necessários 20 anos para frear as transformações climáticas já desatadas. “O IPCC fala de aproximadamente duas décadas, pois foram centenas de anos acumulando dióxido de carbono (CO2). Os processos de fotossíntese nas florestas podem ajudar a absorver CO2, mas isso não é imediato e exige décadas de inércia”, destacou.
As medidas de mitigação – para reduzir a quantidade de gases lançados na atmosfera – são caras e seus efeitos são de longo prazo, mas são as únicas que permitirão minimizar os impactos futuros, acrescentou Marengo, para quem os impactos mais severos começarão a ser sentidos depois de 2040.
Adaptar-se a essas alterações é possível, mas a mensagem que o IPCC pretende dar à próxima cúpula mundial do clima, que se reunirá em novembro em Varsóvia, é que devem tomar medidas para evitar os cenários mais pessimistas, com elevações da temperatura média acima dos dois graus.
Marengo lamentou que a agenda ambiental tenha passado para segundo plano desde que começou a crise econômica e financeira mundial em 2008. “É impossível um país com uma situação econômica ruim aderir a um tratado ambiental, pois este terá um custo social elevado”, enfatizou.
Today’s guest blog post is by Dr. Emilio Moran. Dr. Moran is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Indiana University and Visiting Hannah Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University.
The United States and the world are changing rapidly. These new conditions challenge the ability of the social, behavioral and economic sciences to understand what is happening at a national scale and in people’s daily local lives. Forces such as globalization, the shifting composition of the economy, and the revolution in information brought about by the internet and social media are just a few of the forces that are changing Americans’ lives. Not only has the world changed since data collection methods currently used were developed, but the ways now available to link information and new data sources have radically changed. Expert panels have called for increasing the cyber-infrastructure capability of the social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) sciences so that our tools and research infrastructure keep pace with these changing social and informational landscapes. A series of workshops for the past three years has met to address these challenges and they now invite you to provide them with feedback on the proposal below and you are invited to attend a Special Event at this year’s AAA meeting in Chicago, Saturday, November 23, 2013 from 1215 to 1:30 pm at the Chicago Hilton Boulevard C room.
Needed is a new national framework, or platform, for social, behavioral and economic research that is both scalable and flexible; that permits new questions to be addressed; that allows for rapid response and adaptation to local shocks (such as extreme weather events or natural resource windfalls); and that facilitates understanding local manifestations of national phenomena such as economic downturns. To advance a national data collection and analysis infrastructure, the approach we propose — building a network of social observatories — is a way to have a sensitive instrument to measure how local communities respond to a range of natural and social conditions over time. This new scientific infrastructure will enable the SBE sciences to contribute to societal needs at multiple levels and will facilitate collaboration with other sciences in addressing questions of critical importance.
Our vision is that of a network of observatories designed from the ground up, each observatory representing an area of the United States. From a small number of pilot projects the network would develop (through a national sampling frame and protocol) into a representative sample of the places where people live and the people who live there. Each observatory would be an entity, whether physical or virtual, that is charged with collecting, curating, and disseminating data from people, places, and institutions in the United States. These observatories must provide a basis for inference from what happens in local places to a national context and ensure a robust theoretical foundation for social analysis. This is the rationale for recommending that this network of observatories be built on a population-based sample capable of addressing the needs of the nation’s diverse people but located in the specific places and communities where they live and work. Unlike most other existing research platforms, this population and place-based capability will ensure that we understand not only the high-density urban and suburban places where the majority of the population lives, but also the medium- and low-density exurban and rural places that represent a vast majority of the land area in the nation.
To accomplish these objectives, we propose to embed in these regionally-based observatories a nationally representative population-based sample that would enable the observatory data to be aggregated in such a way as to produce a national picture of the United States on an ongoing basis. The tentative plan would be to select approximately 400 census tracts to represent the U.S. population while also fully capturing the diversity that characterizes local places. The individuals, institutions and communities in which these census tracts are embedded will be systematically studied over time and space by observatories spread across the country. During the formative stages the number of census tracts and the number of observatories that might be needed, given the scope of the charge that is currently envisioned, will be determined.
These observatories will study the social, behavioral and economic experiences of the population in their physical and environmental context at fine detail. The observatories are intended to stimulate the development of new directions and modes of inquiry. They will do so through the use of diverse complementary methods and data sources including ethnography, experiments, administrative data, social media, biomarkers, and financial and public health record. These observatories will work closely with local and state governments to gain access to administrative records that provide extensive data on the population in those tracts (i.e. 2 million people) thereby providing a depth of understanding and integration of knowledge that is less invasive and less subject to declining response rates than survey-derived data.
To attain the vision proposed here we need the commitment and enthusiasm of the community to meet these challenges and the resolve to make this proposed network of observatories useful to the social sciences and society. For more details on our objectives and reports from previous meetings, visit http://socialobservatories.org/. Please contribute your ideas at the site so that the proposal can benefit from your input and come to Chicago for the Special Event on Saturday, November 23, 2013. We are particularly interesting in hearing how this platform could help you in your future research. This is an opportunity for anthropological strengths in ethnography and local research to contribute its insights in a way that will make a difference for local people and for the nation.
Emilio F. Moran, co-Chair of the SOCN
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Indiana University and
Visiting Hannah Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University
Scott Collis (by Joel Kimmel)
The figure above shows sectors’ importance and vulnerability to Peak Oil. The bubbles represent sectors. The size of the bubbles visualizes the vulnerability of a particular sector to Peak Oil according to the expected price changes; the larger the size of the bubble, the more vulnerable the sector is considered to be. The X axis shows a sector’s importance according to its contribution to GDP and on the Y axis according to its structural role. Hence, the larger bubbles in the top right corner represent highly vulnerable and highly important sectors. In the case of Peak Oil induced supply disruptions, these sectors could cause severe imbalances for the entire U.S. economy. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Maryland)
Uma (in)certa antropologia 
Você precisa fazer login para comentar.