Wild sheep show benefits of putting up with parasites (Science Daily)

09/08/2014UncategorizedAnimais, Evolucionismo, Microbiota, Microorganismos, Parasitasrenzotaddei

Date: August 7, 2014

Source: Princeton University

Summary: In the first evidence that natural selection favors an individual’s infection tolerance, researchers have found that an animal’s ability to endure an internal parasite strongly influences its reproductive success. The finding could provide the groundwork for boosting the resilience of humans and livestock to infection.

The researchers examined the relationship between each sheep’s body weight and its level of infection by nematodes, tiny parasitic worms that thrive in the gastrointestinal tract of sheep. This scanning electron micrograph shows nematodes on the surface of a sheep’s gut with a field of view of approximately one centimeter. An economic detriment to sheep farmers, nematodes infect both wild and domesticated sheep, resulting in weight loss, reduced wool growth and death. Credit: Photo by David Smith/Moredun Research Institute

In the first evidence that natural selection favors an individual’s infection tolerance, researchers from Princeton University and the University of Edinburgh have found that an animal’s ability to endure an internal parasite strongly influences its reproductive success. Reported in the journalPLoS Biology, the finding could provide the groundwork for boosting the resilience of humans and livestock to infection.

The researchers used 25 years of data on a population of wild sheep living on an island in northwest Scotland to assess the evolutionary importance of infection tolerance. They first examined the relationship between each sheep’s body weight and its level of infection with nematodes, tiny parasitic worms that thrive in the gastrointestinal tract of sheep. The level of infection was determined by the number of nematode eggs per gram of the animal’s feces.

While all of the animals lost weight as a result of nematode infection, the degree of weight loss varied widely: an adult female sheep with the maximum egg count of 2,000 eggs per gram of feces might lose as little as 2 percent or as much as 20 percent of her body weight. The researchers then tracked the number of offspring produced by each of nearly 2,500 sheep and found that sheep with the highest tolerance to nematode infection produced the most offspring, while sheep with lower parasite tolerance left fewer descendants.

To measure individual differences in parasite tolerance, the researchers used statistical methods that could be extended to studies of disease epidemiology in humans, said senior author Andrea Graham, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton. Medical researchers have long understood that people with similar levels of parasite infection can experience very different symptoms. But biologists are just beginning to appreciate the evolutionary importance of this individual variation.

“For a long time, people assumed that if you knew an individual’s parasite burden, you could perfectly predict its health and survival prospects,” Graham said. “More recently, evolutionary biologists have come to realize that’s not the case, and so have developed statistical tools to measure variation among hosts in the fitness consequences of infection.”

Graham and her colleagues used the wealth of information collected over many years on the Soay sheep living on the island of Hirta, about 100 miles west of the Scottish mainland. These sheep provide a unique opportunity to study the effects of parasites, weather, vegetation changes and other factors on a population of wild animals. Brought to the island by people about 4,000 years ago, the sheep have run wild since the last permanent human inhabitants left Hirta in 1930. By keeping a detailed pedigree, the researchers of the St Kilda Soay Sheep Project can trace any individual’s ancestry back to the beginning of the project in 1985, and, conversely, can count the number of descendants left by each individual.

Expending energy to fight infection

Nematodes puncture an animal’s gut and can impede the absorption of nutrients. Therefore, tolerance to nematode infection could result from an ability to make up for the lost nutrition, or from the ability to repair damage the parasites cause to the gut, Graham said. “This island is way out in the North Atlantic, where the sun doesn’t shine much,” she said. “So tolerant individuals might be the ones who are better able to compete for food or better able to assimilate protein and other useful nutrients from the limited forage.”

Tolerant animals might invest energy in gut repair, but would then be expected to incur costs. Graham and her colleagues identified a similar evolutionary tradeoff in a 2010 study that compared immune-response levels and reproductive success in female Soay sheep. They found that animals with strong antibody responses produced fewer offspring each year, but also lived longer. The team has not yet been able to detect costs of parasite tolerance in the sheep, but such costs could help explain variation in tolerance if the most tolerant animals were at a disadvantage under particular conditions.

While the PLoS Biology findings provide strong evidence that natural selection favors infection tolerance, they do raise questions, such as how the tolerance is generated, and why variation might persist from one generation to the next despite the reproductive advantage of tolerance, Graham said. The data in this study did not permit the researchers to detect a genetic component to tolerance. If genetics do play a role, she suspects multiple genes may interact with environmental factors to determine tolerance; ongoing research will help to tease apart these possibilities.

Understanding the genetic underpinnings of nematode tolerance could someday guide efforts to boost tolerance in livestock by identifying and selectively breeding those animals that exhibit a heightened parasite tolerance, said David Schneider, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University.

“This study shows that parasite tolerance can have a profound effect on animal health and breeding success,” said Schneider, who is familiar with the work but was not involved in it. “In the long term, this suggests that it could be profitable to invest in breeding tolerant livestock.”

In humans and domesticated animals, intestinal parasites are becoming increasingly resistant to the drugs used to treat infections, Graham said. If the availability of nutrients, even just during the first few months of life, impacts lifelong parasite tolerance, simple nutritional supplements could be an effective way to promote tolerance in people. About 2 billion people are persistently infected with intestinal nematode parasites worldwide, mostly in developing nations. Children are especially vulnerable to the worms’ effects, which include anemia, stunted growth and cognitive difficulties.

“Ideally, we would clear the worms from the bellies of the kids who have those heavy burdens,” Graham said. “But if we could also understand how to ameliorate the health consequences and thus promote tolerance of nematodes, that could be a very powerful tool.”

Journal Reference:

Adam D. Hayward, Daniel H. Nussey, Alastair J. Wilson, Camillo Berenos, Jill G. Pilkington, Kathryn A. Watt, Josephine M. Pemberton, Andrea L. Graham. Natural Selection on Individual Variation in Tolerance of Gastrointestinal Nematode Infection. PLoS Biology, 2014; 12 (7): e1001917 DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001917

Harvard historian: strategy of climate science denial groups ‘extremely successful’ (The Guardian)

08/08/2014UncategorizedConservadorismo, Estados Unidos, História, Mudanças climáticas, Naomi Oreskes, Negacionismo, Políticarenzotaddei

Professor Naomi Oreskes says actions of climate denialists are laying the foundations for the government interventions they fear the most

Posted by

Graham Readfearn

Thursday 24 July 2014 23.12 BST

Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University Professor of the History of Science

Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University Professor of the History of Science. Photograph: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Public Affairs & Communications

In 1965, US President Lyndon Johnson had a special message for the American Congress on conservation of the environment.

Worried about the “storm of modern change” threatening cherished landscapes, Johnson said: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through… a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”

The same quote appears at the beginning of the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt: How A Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by science historians Erik Conway and Professor Naomi Oreskes.

Plainly the line – almost half a century old now – was picked to show just how long the impacts of fossil fuel burning have been known in the corridors of the highest powers.

The book explained the efforts since the 1960s of vested interests and ideologues to underplay the risks of pumping ever-increasing volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

One of the most startling revealing aspects of the book was how some of the same institutions and individuals who held out against a wave of scientific warnings about the health impacts of tobacco smoke became integral to efforts to block any meaningful policy response to greenhouse gas emissions.

Oreskes is a Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and she has a new book out, again co-written with Conway.

The Collapse of Western Civilisation: A view from the future is written from the perspective of a historian living in the year 2393 and looking back at what went horribly wrong in the lead up to the “Great Collapse”.

Here’s my Q&A with Oreskes.

Q: Merchants of Doubt looked at the role of think tanks, vested interests and free market ideologies in attacking the science linking fossil fuel burning to climate change, smoking to cancer, pollution to acid rain and CFCs to the ozone hole. Four years later, has anything changed?

Not really. There are some new faces on the horizon, but recruiting “fresh voices” has been a tactic for a long time. So even the things that may look new are in fact old. The Heartland Institute has become more visible, and the George Marshall Institute a bit less, but the overall picture continues: these groups continue to dismiss or disparage the science, attack scientists, and sow doubt.

They continue to try to block action by confusing us about the facts. And the arguments, the tactics, and the overall strategy has remained the same. And, they’ve been extremely successful. CO2 has reached 400 ppm, meaningful action is still not in sight, and people who really understand the science—understand what is at stake—are getting very worried.

Q: How did you move from being a geologist working in Australia for the Western Mining Corporation to being a scholar of the history of science?

Oh this is a long story. I was always interested in broad questions about science. History of science gave me the opportunity to pursue those broad questions.

VIDEO: Naomi Oreskes discusses the background to the 2010 Merchants of Doubt

Q: You were filmed for an ABC documentary that pitched a climate change “advocate” against a “sceptic”. You met Australian politician and climate science sceptic Nick Minchin – the key political kingmaker who engineered the leadership challenge that gave the now Prime Minister Tony Abbott the Liberal leadership. What were your impressions of Minchin?

Well, I think he is a basically nice guy who has fallen into a trap: the trap of imprecatory denial. He doesn’t like the implications of climate change for our political and economic system, so he denies its reality. But climate change will come back to bite us all. It is already starting to.

VIDEO: Naomi Oreskes meets former Australian politician and climate sceptic Nick Minchin. Clip from ABC documentary “I Can Change Your Mind About Climate” Produced by Smith&Nasht.

Q: So you worked in Australia as a geologist, toured here to promote Merchants of Doubt and had an academic role at the University of Western Australia, so you’ve seen a bit of how things have played out. How do you think Australia has been influenced by organised climate science denial?

Clearly. One sees all the same strategies and tactics being used there, plus a few additional ones (trotting out geologists to claim there are hidden underwater volcanoes that are responsible for the extra atmospheric CO2.) The Institute of Public Affairs in Australia has been very active trotting out skeptical and denialist claims with little or no basis in evidence. If you go to their web site, they link back to many of the very same groups whose activities we documented in Merchants of Doubt : the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, Competitive Enterprise institute, the Heritage Foundation.

It’s the same old, same old: defend the free market, deny the reality of market failure, block action that could actually address those failures. And of course, that is the point of the new book: by denying the reality of market failure, and blocking corrective action, these folks are actually undermining our economies, and laying the foundations for kinds of government interventions that will make them pine for the good old days of a carbon tax.

Q: Oh yes the new book – The Collapse of Western Civilisation: A view from the future. You’ve written it from the point of view of a historian writing about the “Period of the Penumbra (1988–2093) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2073–2093)”. It doesn’t sound like there are too many laughs?

Not unless we are talking about black humour. Our editor, when he first approached us, said he found it funny in a Dr Strangelovian way. I took that as a huge compliment.

Q: Dr Strangelove – a character that apparently borrowed parts from the real life Edward Teller, the so-called “father” of the H-bomb. Your new book borrows much from real life events and modern science too doesn’t it (it’s a clunky segue, but I’m sticking with it)?

Yes of course. A good deal of the power of that film came from the fact that while it was farce, it was all too true in some ways—or at least, all too plausible. It was conceivable that the world would end not in deliberate, calculated aggression, but in stupidity, mistakes, and men and machines run amok.

Kubrick understood that. Fortunately, we escaped disaster in the Cold War, because enough people realized what was at stake. Erik and I have often discussed that, in this case—climate change—a lot of people, folks like Nick Minchin included—don’t seem to realize what is at stake.

They’ve dismissed the science. They’ve pooh-poohed the mounting evidence that disruptive climate change is already underway. They’ve assumed scientists were over-reacting, and that all environmentalists are watermelons. And that bodes poorly for our future. Because the longer we wait, the more plausible our “collapse” scenario, with its unhappy implications for western democracies, becomes.

Q: But what is it that you think drives the denial industry? How much of it is just pure self-interest? Is it fear of socialism – a kind of post-Cold War paranoia that you identified in Merchants of Doubt? Or is it ideological fervour like the kind you’ve witnessed amongst American Tea Baggers?

I think it’s a complicated mix. Certainly, there are some very cynical individuals and groups who are protecting their own self-interest, with little or no regard to the consequences for others.

There are also those who have bought into the watermelon argument—that environmentalists are green on the outside, red on the inside—and that climate change is just an excuse to bring in socialism by another name.

Then there are also many people who I think believe, or have persuaded themselves, that climate change is just another fad, exaggerated by scientists who just want more money for their research, or environmentalists who over-react to small threats or are unrealistic about where their bread is buttered.

Finally there is the power of rationalization—people whose bread really is buttered by the fossil fuel industry, or people who are heavily invested in the industry in one way or another, and just don’t want to accept that there is a fundamental problem.

Q: Is that a big issue – do you think? That the nuances of the science aren’t that widely understood and so it’s an easy job to confuse people about it?

Yes I think so. That’s one reason why these disinformation campaigns have been so successful. It’s always easy to find some aspect of the science that is uncertain, or confusing, and focus on that to the exclusion of the larger picture

Q: It sounds like an almost intractable situation. Is there something you think should have happened, that didn’t, that might have helped to combat that misinformation?

Well, it certainly would have helped if political leaders had not repeated that disinformation!

Q: What would you do about it?

What I am doing: writing and talking about it, so we can accurately diagnose the problem. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know what it is.

Q: Researching denial and organised misinformation has been your thing for about a decade now. So what’s next?

A book about the solutions? How not to go down the road to collapse?

VIDEO: Naomi Oreskes in a 2014 TEDTalk explaining why people should trust science – just not for the reasons most people think.

Bactéria pode aumentar inteligência (Exame)

06/08/2014UncategorizedBactérias, Microbiota, Saúde mental, Visceralidaderenzotaddei

Microbiologia | 24/05/2010 15:50

Cientistas acreditam que espécie também tem capacidades antidepressivas por aumentar níveis de serotonina no cérebro

Célio Yano

São Paulo – Uma espécie de bactéria que os cientistas já acreditavam ter capacidades antidepressivas pode também deixar pessoas mais inteligentes. A descoberta foi apresentada hoje no 110º Encontro Geral da Sociedade Americana de Microbiologia (ASM, na sigla em inglês), realizado em San Diego, nos Estados Unidos.

“A Mycobacterium vaccae é uma bactéria de solo natural, que as pessoas geralmente ingerem ou respiram quando passam algum tempo na natureza”, disse Dorothy Matthews, que conduziu a pesquisa junto com Susan Jenks. Espécie não-patogênica, a M. vaccae tem esse nome por ter sido encontrada pela primeira vez em fezes de vaca.

De acordo com a ASM, estudos anteriores já haviam mostrado que bactérias da espécie mortas injetadas em ratos estimulam o crescimento de alguns neurônios que resultam no aumento de níveis de serotonina e reduzem a ansiedade.

Como a serotonina, tipo de neurotransmissor, desempenha um papel importante no aprendizado, Dorothy e Susan imaginaram que a M. vaccae vivas poderiam aumentar a capacidade de aprendizado do rato. Elas então alimentaram as cobaias com bactérias vivas e testaram a habilidade dos roedores para percorrer um labirinto. Conforme as pesquisadoras, os ratos que se alimentaram da bactéria atravessaram o labirinto duas vezes mais rápido e com menor índice de ansiedade que ratos que não haviam recebido o tratamento.

Em um segundo experimento, as bactérias foram removidas da dieta dos animais e eles foram testados novamente. Embora os ratos percorressem o labirinto mais lentamente do que haviam feito quando ingeriram a bactéria, eles ainda eram mais rápidos que os ratos que não haviam ingerido M. vaccae em nenhum momento. Após três semanas de descanso, os ratos ainda percorriam o labirinto mais rapidamente que os demais, mas os resultados já não eram mais estatisticamente significantes, o que sugere que o efeito foi temporário.

“Esta pesquisa mostra que M. vaccae pode ter uma função na ansiedade e aprendizado de mamíferos”, disse Dorothy. “É interessante imaginarmos que criar ambientes de aprendizado nas escolas que incluam momentos ao ar livre, onde M. vaccae esteja presente, pode baixar a ansiedade e aumentar a capacidade de aprender novas tarefas”, complementou.

Geoengineering the Earth’s climate sends policy debate down a curious rabbit hole (The Guardian)

04/08/2014UncategorizedConservadorismo, Geoengenharia, Mudanças climáticas, Tecnocracia, Tecnofetichismorenzotaddei

Many of the world’s major scientific establishments are discussing the concept of modifying the Earth’s climate to offset global warming

Posted by Graham Readfearn

Monday 4 August 2014

Many leading scientific institutions are now looking at proposed ways to engineer the planet's climate to offset the impacts of global warming.

Many leading scientific institutions are now looking at proposed ways to engineer the planet’s climate to offset the impacts of global warming. Photograph: NASA/REUTERS

There’s a bit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland where things get “curiouser and curiouser” as the heroine tries to reach a garden at the end of a rat-hole sized corridor that she’s just way too big for.

She drinks a potion and eats a cake with no real clue what the consequences might be. She grows to nine feet tall, shrinks to ten inches high and cries literal floods of frustrated tears.

I spent a couple of days at a symposium in Sydney last week that looked at the moral and ethical issues around the concept of geoengineering the Earth’s climate as a “response” to global warming.

No metaphor is ever quite perfect (climate impacts are no ‘wonderland’), but Alice’s curious experiences down the rabbit hole seem to fit the idea of medicating the globe out of a possible catastrophe.

And yes, the fact that in some quarters geoengineering is now on the table shows how the debate over climate change policy is itself becoming “curiouser and curiouser” still.

It’s tempting too to dismiss ideas like pumping sulphate particles into the atmosphere or making clouds whiter as some sort of surrealist science fiction.

But beyond the curiosity lies actions being countenanced and discussed by some of the world’s leading scientific institutions.

What is geoengineering?

Geoengineering – also known as climate engineering or climate modification – comes in as many flavours as might have been on offer at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

Professor Jim Falk, of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne, has a list of more than 40 different techniques that have been suggested.

They generally take two approaches.

Carbon Dioxide Reduction (CDR) is pretty self explanatory. Think tree planting, algae farming, increasing the carbon in soils, fertilising the oceans or capturing emissions from power stations. Anything that cuts the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Solar Radiation Management (SRM) techniques are concepts to try and reduce the amount of solar energy reaching the earth. Think pumping sulphate particles into the atmosphere (this mimics major volcanic eruptions that have a cooling effect on the planet), trying to whiten clouds or more benign ideas like painting roofs white.

Geoengineering on the table

In 2008 an Australian Government–backed research group issued a report on the state-of-play of ocean fertilisation, recording there had been 12 experiments carried out of various kinds with limited to zero evidence of “success”.

This priming of the “biological pump” as its known, promotes the growth of organisms (phytoplankton) that store carbon and then sink to the bottom of the ocean.

The report raised the prospect that larger scale experiments could interfere with the oceanic food chain, create oxygen-depleted “dead zones” (no fish folks), impact on corals and plants and various other unknowns.

The Royal Society – the world’s oldest scientific institution – released a report in 2009, also reviewing various geoengineering technologies.

In 2011, Australian scientists gathered at a geoengineering symposium organised by the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.

The London Protocol – a maritime convention relating to dumping at sea – was amended last year to try and regulate attempts at “ocean fertilisation” – where substances, usually iron, are dumped into the ocean to artificially raise the uptake of carbon dioxide.

The latest major United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also addressed the geoengineering issue in several chapters of its latest report. The IPCC summarised geoengineering this way.

CDR methods have biogeochemical and technological limitations to their potential on a global scale. There is insufficient knowledge to quantify how much CO2 emissions could be partially offset by CDR on a century timescale. Modelling indicates that SRM methods, if realizable, have the potential to substantially offset a global temperature rise, but they would also modify the global water cycle, and would not reduce ocean acidification. If SRM were terminated for any reason, there is high confidence that global surface temperatures would rise very rapidly to values consistent with the greenhouse gas forcing. CDR and SRM methods carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.

Towards the end of this year, the US National Academy of Sciences will be publishing a major report on the “technical feasibility” of some geoengineering techniques.

Fighting Fire With Fire

The symposium in Sydney was co-hosted by the University of New South Wales and the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney (for full disclosure here, they paid my travel costs and one night stay).

Dr Matthew Kearnes, one of the organisers of the workshop from UNSW, told me there was “nervousness among many people about even thinking or talking about geoengineering.” He said:

I would not want to dismiss that nervousness, but this is an agenda that’s now out there and it seems to be gathering steam and credibility in some elite establishments.

Internationally geoengineering tends to be framed pretty narrowly as just a case of technical feasibility, cost and efficacy. Could it be done? What would it cost? How quickly would it work?

We wanted to get a way from the arguments about the pros and cons and instead think much more carefully about what this tells us about the climate change debate more generally.

The symposium covered a range of frankly exhausting philosophical, social and political considerations – each of them jumbo-sized cans full of worms ready to open.

Professor Stephen Gardiner, of the University of Washington, Seattle, pushed for the wider community to think about the ethical and moral consequences of geoengineering. He drew a parallel between the way, he said, that current fossil fuel combustion takes benefits now at the expense of impacts on future generations. Geoengineering risked making the same mistake.

Clive Hamilton’s book Earthmasters notes “in practice any realistic assessment of how the world works must conclude that geoengineering research is virtually certain to reduce incentives to pursue emission reductions”.

Odd advocates

Curiouser still, is that some of the world’s think tanks who shout the loudest that human-caused climate change might not even be a thing, or at least a thing not worth worrying about, are happy to countenance geoengineering as a solution to the problem they think is overblown.

For example, in January this year the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a US-based think tank founded by Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg, issued a submission to an Australian Senate inquiry looking at overseas aid and development.

Lomborg’s center has for many years argued that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is too expensive and that action on climate change should have a low-priority compared to other issues around the world.

Lomborg himself says human-caused climate change will not turn into an economic negative until near the end of this century.

Yet Lomborg’s submission told the Australian Senate suggested that every dollar spent on “investigat[ing] the feasibility of planetary cooling through geoengineering technologies” could yield “$1000 of benefits” although this, Lomborg wrote, was a “rough estimate”.

But these investigations, Lomborg submitted, “would serve to better understand risks, costs, and benefits, but also act as an important potential insurance against global warming”.

Engineering another excuse

Several academics I’ve spoken with have voiced fears that the idea of unproven and potentially disastrous geoengineering technologies being an option to shield societies from the impacts of climate change could be used to distract policy makers and the public from addressing the core of the climate change issue – that is, curbing emissions in the first place.

But if the idea of some future nation, or group of nations, or even corporations, some embarking on a major project to modify the Earth’s climate systems leaves you feeling like you’ve fallen down a surreal rabbit hole, then perhaps we should also ask ourselves this.

Since the year 1750, the world has added something in the region of 1,339,000,000,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (that’s 1.34 trillion tonnes) to the atmosphere from fossil fuel and cement production.

Raising the level of CO2 in the atmosphere by 40 per cent could be seen as accidental geoengineering.

Time to crawl out of the rabbit hole?

Congressional rift over environment influences public (Science Daily)

01/08/2014UncategorizedCongresso, Estados Unidos, Mudanças climáticas, Políticarenzotaddei

Date: July 31, 2014

Source: Michigan State University

Summary: American citizens are increasingly divided over the issue of environmental protection and seem to be taking their cue primarily from Congress, finds new research. The gap between conservatives who oppose environmental protection and liberals who support it has risen drastically in the past 20 years, a trend seen among lawmakers, activists and — as the study indicates — the general public as well, said a sociologist.

American citizens are increasingly divided over the issue of environmental protection and seem to be taking their cue primarily from Congress, finds new research led by a Michigan State University scholar.

The gap between conservatives who oppose environmental protection and liberals who support it has risen drastically in the past 20 years, a trend seen among lawmakers, activists and — as the study indicates — the general public as well, said sociologist Aaron M. McCright.

The findings echo a June 12 Pew Research Center poll showing that, in general, Republicans and Democrats are more divided long ideological lines than at any point in the past two decades.

When it comes to the environment, McCright, reporting in the journal Social Science Research, said the “enormous degree” of polarization has serious implications.

“The situation does not bode well for our nation’s ability to deal effectively with the wide range of environmental problems — from local toxics to global climate change — we currently face,” said McCright, associate professor in MSU’s Lyman Briggs College and Department of Sociology.

McCright and colleagues examined an annual national survey from 1974 to 2012 that included a question on environmental spending. According to the survey, which included more than 47,000 total respondents, the divide over environmental protection among citizens who consider themselves conservatives and liberals started growing particularly wide in 1992.

That coincides with the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. Following that historic event, McCright said, the conservative movement replaced the “Red Scare” with the “Green Scare” and became increasingly hostile toward environmental protection.

McCright said the trend has been amplified by the Tea Party pulling the Republican Party even further to the right.

In 1990, the study found, about 75 percent of self-identified Democrats and Republicans alike in the general public believed the United States spent too little on environmental protection. By 2012, a gulf had formed between party followers, with 68 percent of Democrats believing the country spent too little on the environment, contrasted with only 40 percent of Republicans.

The trend roughly follows the environmental-protection voting patterns of Congress.

“This political polarization,” McCright said, “is unlikely to reverse course without noticeable convergence in support of environmental protection among policymakers, with prominent conservatives becoming less anti-environmental in their public statements and voting records.”

Journal Reference:

Aaron M. McCright, Chenyang Xiao, Riley E. Dunlap. Political Polarization on Support for Government Spending on Environmental Protection in the USA, 1974-2012. Social Science Research, 2014; DOI:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2014.06.008

Political attitudes derive from body and mind: ‘Negativity bias’ explains difference between liberals and conservatives (Science Daily)

01/08/2014UncategorizedCiência política, Corpo, Política, Visceralidaderenzotaddei

Date: July 31, 2014

Source: University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Summary: Neither conscious decision-making or parental upbringing fully explain why some people lean left and others lean right, researchers say. A mix of deep-seated psychology and physiological responses are at the core of political differences.

Pictured are University of Nebraska-Lincoln political scientists Kevin Smith, left, and John Hibbing, right. Credit: University Communications, University of Nebraska-Lincoln/Craig Chandler

Do people make a rational choice to be liberal or conservative? Do their mothers raise them that way? Is it a matter of genetics?

Two political scientists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a colleague from Rice University say that neither conscious decision-making nor parental upbringing fully explain why some people lean left while others lean right.

A growing body of evidence shows that physiological responses and deep-seated psychology are at the core of political differences, the researchers say in the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

“Politics might not be in our souls, but it probably is in our DNA,” says the article written by political scientists John Hibbing and Kevin Smith of UNL and John Alford of Rice University.

“These natural tendencies to perceive the physical world in different ways may in turn be responsible for striking moments of political and ideological conflict throughout history,” Alford said.

Using eye-tracking equipment and skin conductance detectors, the three researchers have observed that conservatives tend to have more intense reactions to negative stimuli, such as photos of people eating worms, burning houses or maggot-infested wounds.

Combining their own results with similar findings from other researchers around the world, the team proposes that this so-called “negativity bias” may be a common factor that helps define the difference between conservatives, with their emphasis on stability and order, and liberals, with their emphasis on progress and innovation.

“Across research methods, samples and countries, conservatives have been found to be quicker to focus on the negative, to spend longer looking at the negative, and to be more distracted by the negative,” the researchers wrote.

The researchers caution that they make no value judgments about this finding. In fact, some studies show that conservatives, despite their quickness to detect threats, are happier overall than liberals. And all people, whether liberal, conservative or somewhere in between, tend to be more alert to the negative than to the positive — for good evolutionary reasons. The harm caused by negative events, such as infection, injury and death, often outweighs the benefits brought by positive events.

“We see the ‘negativity bias’ as a common finding that emerges from a large body of empirical studies done not just by us, but by many other research teams around the world,” Smith explained. “We make the case in this article that negativity bias clearly and consistently separates liberals from conservatives.”

The most notable feature about the negativity bias is not that it exists, but that it varies so much from person to person, the researchers said.

“Conservatives are fond of saying ‘liberals just don’t get it,’ and liberals are convinced that conservatives magnify threats,” Hibbing said. “Systematic evidence suggests both are correct.”

Many scientists appear to agree with the findings by Hibbing, Smith and Alford. More than 50 scientists contributed 26 peer commentary articles discussing the Behavioral and Brain Sciences article.

Only three or four of the articles seriously disputed the negativity bias hypothesis. The remainder accepted the general concept, while suggesting modifications such as better defining and conceptualizing a negativity bias; more deeply exploring its nature and origins; and more clearly defining liberalism and conservatism across history and culture.

Journal Reference:

John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Alford. Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2014; 37 (03): 297 DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X13001192

The Future Will Be Swarming With Rats (Motherboard)

31/07/2014UncategorizedAnimais, Antropoceno, Interação humanos-animais, Ratos, Saúde, Saúde públicarenzotaddei

Written by BRIAN MERCHANT, SENIOR EDITOR

July 29, 2014 // 02:00 PM CET

That cockroaches will inherit our despoiled earth is just a tired misconception. The real champions will be disease-carrying rats.

Even though cockroaches seem to be of inexhaustible supply, their invertebrate ilk are actually suffering a fairly rapid decline—and the rodents are rising up. In a recent and widely-discussed study in Science, researchers examined a process called defaunation—remember that term, it’s likely to prove as vital as ‘Arctic ice melt’ or ‘habitat loss’ to understanding our planet’s ecological collapse—that describes how the majority of the world’s animals are vanishing at a rapid pace.

Led by Rodolfo Dirzo, a professor of biology at Stanford University, a team of scientists documented the rate that fauna are going extinct in the modern era. Since the year 1500 AD, at least 320 vertebrate species have been extinguished, primarily due to human activity. Those that remain have seen their total populations decline by 25 percent. Even more striking is the decline of insects: In the past 35 years alone, the scientists found that the number of invertebrates have plummeted 45 percent. The researchers cite the drops as further evidence that we are bearing witness to the unfurling of the Anthropocene Extinction event—the planet’s sixth great mass extinction.

So who wins, besides humans, when the bees and the tigers and the bears lose? Rats.

“Where human density is high, you get high rates of defaunation, high incidence of rodents, and thus high levels of pathogens, which increases the risks of disease transmission,” Dirzo said in a statement upon the study’s publication. “Who would have thought that just defaunation would have all these dramatic consequences? But it can be a vicious circle.”

Hilary Young, one of the study’s authors, has conducted previous research examining how rodents thrived after a large species went extinct.

RATS COULD GROW LARGER THAN SHEEP

“What we found was that these areas quickly experienced massive increases of rodents,” Young told The Current. “All the grass and shrubs normally eaten by this megafauna was, instead, available for rodents—both as food and as shelter. Consequently, the number of rodents doubled—and so did the abundance of the disease-carrying ectoparasites that they harbored.”

Twice the rats. And twice the ectoparasites. A 2013 study in the International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences examined how parasite-carrying rats are instrumental in transporting disease: “Rodents together with arthropod ectoparasites can play an important role in the distribution of the arboviruses, streptococcal infections, choriomeningitis, plague, tularemia, leptospirosis, spirochaetosis etc.,” the authors wrote.

“Ectoparasites include insects and acarnies (fleas and mites),” the 2013 study continued, “some of them are permanent like lice, while most of the mature ticks and fleas are temporary parasites. Rats are known to harbor four groups of arthropod ectoparasites: fleas, ticks, mites and lice… Some of the ectoparasites can biologically or mechanically transfer infectious agents to the human or animals and results in the spread of infection.”

In other words, rats carry a lot of parasites, which carry a lot of diseases. Here, according to the Centers for Disease Control, is a quick list of the diseases rats are currently responsible for spreading in the United States:

Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome
Hemorrhagic Fever with Renal Syndrome
Lassa Fever
Leptospirosis
Lymphocytic Chorio-meningitis (LCM)
Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever
Plague
Rat-Bite Fever
Salmonellosis
South American Arenaviruses (Argentine hemorrhagic fever, Bolivian hemorrhagic fever, Sabiá-associated hemorrhagic fever, Venezuelan hemorrhagic fever)
Tularemia

It’s an ugly list. And in light of their impending dominance, it’s worth remembering that rats played a key role in helping spread the bubonic plague during the Black Death. Crammed, unhygienic living conditions helped it become such a devastating killer, but it was an ectoparasite—a flea—that brought the plague.

“The bubonic plague, a disease still present in some areas of the world, is now known to have spread via fleas living on rats,” Mark Ormrod, a professor of history at the University of York, wrote for the BBC.

Our hygiene and health-care are much improved from Medieval times, but we are headed towards a future marked by shared, maybe cramped, living spaces: More than half the world’s population currently lives in cities, billions are slated to join them, and so, the megacities are growing. More urban living, paired with more rats, could beget similar, if not as deadly, health woes.

And Dirzo and his crew aren’t the only ones who worry about the rise of the rats. In fact, just earlier this year, another group of scientists determined that rodents would be the species most likely to outlast all others.

Dr. Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester, believes that rats are the animal best suited to repopulate the world in the event of a mass extinction.

“[Rats] are now on many, if not most, islands around the world,” he explained, “and once there, have proved extraordinarily hard to eradicate. They’re often there for good, essentially. Once there, they have out-competed many native species and at times have driven them to extinction. As a result, ecospace is being emptied—and rats are in a good position to re-fill a significant chunk of it, in the mid to far geological future.”

For many of us, that future is exceedingly easy to imagine. By some counts, in New York, there are twice as many rats as human residents. They are a scourge in other cities, too, of course.

As humans continue to knock out the larger fauna, and the number of rats “double” to fill the void, we can, theoretically, look forward to seeing more of all of the above. And even if you’re not concerned with the health implications, there’s the simple fact that we’re hacking away at our immense, spectacular biodiversity, and trading it in for a deeply unpleasant, rat-centric monotony.

Beyond defaunation, there’s evidence that climate change is improving conditions for rats in general in many regions, too. It’s also probably worth adding at this point that warmer temperatures are causing some rat species to grow larger, too, thus adding another potential population booster. Zalasiewicz, for his part, imagines that once its competition is scarce, rats could become larger than sheep.

So that, then, is a foreboding slice of the Anthropocene: Giant, parasite-and-disease-carrying rats, multiplying in droves while everything else goes extinct.

Ice age lion figurine: Ancient fragment of ivory belonging to 40,000 year old animal figurine unearthed (Science Daily)

31/07/2014UncategorizedAnimais, Arqueologia, Religiãorenzotaddei

Date: July 30, 2014

Source: Universitaet Tübingen

Summary: Archaeologists have found an ancient fragment of ivory belonging to a 40,000 year old animal figurine. Both pieces were found in the Vogelherd Cave in southwestern Germany, which has yielded a number of remarkable works of art dating to the Ice Age. The mammoth ivory figurine depicting a lion was discovered during excavations in 1931. The new fragment makes up one side of the figurine’s head.

The fragment on the left makes up half the head of the animal figure on the right, showing that the “lion” was fully three-dimensional, and not a relief as long thought. Credit: Hilde Jensen, Universität Tübingen

Archaeologists from the University of Tübingen have found an ancient fragment of ivory belonging to a 40,000 year old animal figurine. Both pieces were found in the Vogelherd Cave in southwestern Germany, which has yielded a number of remarkable works of art dating to the Ice Age. The mammoth ivory figurine depicting a lion was discovered during excavations in 1931. The new fragment makes up one side of the figurine’s head, and the sculpture may be viewed at the Tübingen University Museum from 30 July.

“The figurine depicts a lion,” says Professor Nicholas Conard of Tübingen University’s Institute of Prehistory and Medieval Archaeology, and the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment Tübingen. “It is one of the most famous Ice Age works of art, and until now, we thought it was a relief, unique among these finds dating to the dawn of figurative art. The reconstructed figurine clearly is a three dimensional sculpture.”

The new fragment was discovered when today’s archaeologists revisited the work of their predecessors from the 1930s. “We have been carrying out renewed excavations and analysis at Vogelherd Cave for nearly ten years,” says Conard. “The site has yielded a wealth of objects that illuminate the development of early symbolic artifacts dating to the period when modern humans arrived in Europe and displaced the indigenous Neanderthals.” He points out that the Vogelherd Cave has provided evidence of the world’s earliest art and music and is a key element in the push to make the caves of the Swabian Jura a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Vogelherd is one of four caves in the region where the world’s earliest figurines have been found, dating back to 40,000 years ago. Several dozen figurines and fragments of figurines have been found in the Vogelherd alone, and researchers are piecing together thousands of mammoth ivory fragments.

Money talks when it comes to acceptability of ‘sin’ companies, study reveals (Science Daily)

31/07/2014UncategorizedÉtica, Capitalismo, Mercado, Moralidaderenzotaddei

Date: July 30, 2014

Source: University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management

Summary: Companies who make their money in the ‘sin’ industries such as the tobacco, alcohol and gaming industries typically receive less attention from institutional investors and financial analysts. But new research shows social norms and attitudes towards these types of businesses are subject to compromise when their share price looks to be on the rise.

Companies who make their money in the “sin” industries such as the tobacco, alcohol and gaming industries typically receive less attention from institutional investors and financial analysts.

But new research shows social norms and attitudes towards these types of businesses are subject to compromise when their share price looks to be on the rise. A paper from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management found that institutional shareholdings and analysts’ coverage of sin firms were low when firm performance was low but went up with rising performance expectations.

That suggests that market participants may ignore social norms and standards with the right financial reward.

“This is a way to test the trade-off between people’s non-financial and financial incentives. The boundary of people’s social norms is not a constant,” said researcher Hai Lu, an associate professor of accounting at the Rotman School. Prof. Lu co-wrote the paper with two former Rotman PhD students, McMaster University’s Kevin Veenstra and Yanju Liu, now with Singapore Management University.

The paper sheds light on why there can be a disconnect between the investment behaviour of Wall St. and the ethical expectations of ordinary people. It also suggests a worrisome implication that compromising one’s ethical values in the face of high financial rewards can become a social norm in itself.

On the brighter side, the paper also finds that strong social norms still have an influence over people’s behaviour. If social norms are strong enough and the price of ignoring them is high, this may act as a disincentive to disregard them in favour of other benefits.

This is the first study to examine whether the social acceptability of sin stocks can vary with financial performance. The researchers compared consumption and attitudinal data with information on sin firm stocks, analysts’ coverage and levels of institutional investment.

Journal Reference:

Liu, Yanju and Lu, Hai and Veenstra, Kevin J. Is Sin Always a Sin? The Interaction Effect of Social Norms and Financial Incentives on Market Participants’ Behavior. Accounting, Organizations and Society, March 31, 2014 [link]

Contrary to image, city politicians do adapt to voters (Science Daily)

31/07/2014UncategorizedCiência política, Política, Políticas públicasrenzotaddei

Date: July 29, 2014

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Summary: Political scientists have long wondered whether city governments in the U.S. are really responsive to their voters. Aren’t local governments simply mired in machine politics, or under the sway of local big-money interests? Does ideology matter? Now a uniquely comprehensive study has produced a pair of distinctive findings: first, that the policies of city governments do closely match the politics of their citizens, and second, that this occurs regardless of the exact form of government than a city has.

Political scientists have long wondered whether city governments in the U.S. are really responsive to their voters. Aren’t local governments simply mired in machine politics, or under the sway of local big-money interests? Does ideology matter?

Now a uniquely comprehensive study co-authored by an MIT political scientist has produced a pair of distinctive findings: first, that the policies of city governments do closely match the politics of their citizens, and second, that this occurs regardless of the exact form of government than a city has.

That means that urban governance is more flexible, adaptable, and representative than the popular image might suggest. It also indicates that the link between public opinion and policy outcomes in municipal government is independent of whether it is led by a mayor, a town council, or selectmen, or uses direct referendums as opposed to indirect representatives.

“Politics doesn’t look quite as different at the local level as people thought it did,” says Chris Warshaw, an assistant professor of political science at MIT, and an author of a new paper detailing the findings of the study.

The research is singularly broad, examining the policies of every U.S. city and town with a population of 20,000 or more. It breaks new ground by extensively examining, on the municipal front, what researchers have found to be true of federal and state governments: that the views of the people usually matter significantly in shaping political action.

Or, as the researchers say in their new paper on the subject, there is a “robust role for citizen policy preferences in determining municipal policy outcomes.”

All politics is not just local, but ideological

The paper, “Representation in Municipal Government,” appears in the latest issue of the American Political Science Review. It was written by Warshaw and Chris Tausanovitch, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The study links data from seven large-scale surveys, taken from 2000 through 2011, each of which asked 30,000 to 80,000 American voters their views on a wide range of policy questions. To further enhance the measurement of policy preferences among voters, the researchers also incorporated models that estimate preferences based on demographic and geographic information, and looked at other data, such as on presidential vote results in cities and towns.

The study examined 1,600 American municipalities. San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington ranked as the most liberal cities with 250,000 or more people, while Mesa, Ariz., Oklahoma City, and Virginia Beach, Va., were rated as the most conservative.

To see if voter preferences matched the policies that municipal governments enacted, Warshaw and Tausanovitch used a wide variety of data sources to rate the policy choices enacted by local governments, often involving spending and taxes. “The substantively consequential policies are the ones we look at,” Warshaw says.

The researchers also controlled for cities’ fiscal health, since well-off municipalities can afford to spend more on public projects and regulations than poorer towns and cities.

Even accounting for such factors, Warshaw and Tausanovitch found that liberal cities tend to both tax and spend more, while having “less regressive tax systems,” with a lower share of revenues from sales taxes. This strong correlation, they found, persists whatever the form of local government.

So while people like to say that “all politics is local,” Warshaw thinks we should amend that view. The notion that “idiosyncratic local political battles, about zoning, land, growth, and fixing potholes, is the core of city politics,” as he puts it, is not quite wrong; it’s just that the battles over such things also occur within the same ideological spectrum that applies to state and federal politics.

Room for more research

Warshaw notes that more research could be conducted on the causal mechanisms that make cities broadly responsive to public opinion. “My hope is this will inspire other people to go out and fill in those mechanisms,” he says.

Methodologically, he suggests, the variation in the structures of city governments, among other things, might allow scholars to further compare and contrast otherwise similar groups of municipalities.

“Given that we know the powers of cities vary a lot in different states, an obvious piece of variation to explore is that in states that give more discretion to cities, you [might] get different outcomes,” Warshaw says. “By utilizing that variation across the country, you can start to get into those questions.”

Pressões territoriais forçam índios isolados a estabelecer contato (Fapesp)

31/07/2014UncategorizedAmazônia, Índios, Desenvolvimento econômico, Perú, Violênciarenzotaddei

Integrantes de grupo indígena travam primeiro contato com funcionários da Funai e índios Ashaninka na Aldeia Simpatia, no Acre (foto: divulgação/Funai)

31/07/2014

Por Elton Alisson, de Rio Branco (AC)

Agência FAPESP – Um grupo indígena de etnia ainda não identificada estabeleceu em junho o primeiro contato com funcionários da Fundação Nacional do Índio (Funai) e com índios Ashaninka, na Aldeia Simpatia, da Terra Indígena Kampa e Isolados do Alto Envira, na fronteira do Acre com o Peru. O grupo, que recebeu destaque da revista Science, pode ser apenas um de vários outros da região que devem sair da “condição de anonimato” nos próximos anos.

Isso porque o avanço da exploração de madeira e petróleo, além do narcotráfico e da construção de estradas próximas ou nas terras indígenas – principalmente no lado peruano –, podem estar forçando-os a sair do isolamento na floresta e a se aproximar das aldeias de índios já contatados.

A avaliação foi feita por pesquisadores participantes de uma mesa-redonda sobre índios isolados no Acre realizada durante a 66ª Reunião Anual da Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência (SBPC), que terminou no domingo (27/07), no campus da Universidade Federal do Acre (UFAC), em Rio Branco.

“Há um conjunto de 10 áreas indígenas nessa região de fronteira do Acre com o Peru, conhecida como Paralelo 10, que são corredores de índios isolados”, disse Terri Vale de Aquino, antropólogo da Coordenação Geral de Índios Isolados e de Recente Contato da Funai e professor da UFAC.

“Existem muitas denúncias de casos de contatos forçados, escravidão e, sobretudo, de violência contra os povos indígenas nessa região. Isso tem provocado a migração para o Acre”, afirmou Aquino.

De acordo com o pesquisador, a construção de uma rodovia de 40 quilômetros de extensão entre os rios Muru e Tarauacá atingirá uma área utilizada por índios Kaxinawá destinada exclusivamente a índios isolados que vivem na fronteira do Acre com Peru, apontou.

“As lideranças dos índios Kaxinawá estão fazendo uma denúncia ao Ministério Público Federal porque essa estrada está sendo construída sem licença e estudos e relatórios de impacto ambiental”, afirmou.

Além disso, a distribuição de lotes para a exploração de petróleo e gás na região está “ilhando” terras indígenas no Alto Juruá e impactando diretamente os povos indígenas e grupos de índios isolados na região, sobretudo do lado peruano da fronteira, apontou.

Para agravar esses problemas, narcotraficantes têm buscado novas rotas de tráfico de drogas na Amazônia por meio do Alto Envira, um rio binacional que nasce em terras peruanas e passa pelo Acre, contou Aquino.

“O narcotráfico está muito intenso no Alto Envira e por dois anos desarticulou as bases de índios isolados do Rio Xinane [afluente do Envira] pela violência que imprimiu na região”, afirmou. “Esse conjunto de fatores pressiona muito os povos indígenas isolados que habitam essa região fronteiriça.”

Segundo os pesquisadores, o grupo de índios isolados que estabeleceu o primeiro contato no dia 29 de junho no Acre também relatou, por meio de intérpretes, ter sofrido atos de violência cometidos por não indígenas nas cabeceiras do rio Envira, em território peruano.

“Esses índios isolados podem estar fugindo dos madeireiros e do narcotráfico, além da exploração de petróleo e gás e da construção de estradas em suas terras”, estimou Aquino.

Presença recente

De acordo com Aquino, a presença de povos indígenas isolados no Acre é um fenômeno relativamente recente e tem se intensificado. Nos últimos 30 anos, a Funai avistou e passou a monitorar quatro grupos de índios isolados no Alto Envira, mas estima que possam existir muitos outros na região.

“O grupo de indígenas que estabeleceu contato em junho contou que há outros grupos de índios isolados na região – alguns aliados e outros inimigos deles – que nem sabíamos que existiam”, disse Aquino.

Um dos mais recentes grupos de índios isolados no estado foi avistado por funcionários da Funai em 2008 na cabeceira do rio Xinane e chegou à região fugindo do avanço dos madeireiros e do narcotráfico sobre suas terras, disse Aquino.

Já um outro grupo de índios isolados avistado na cabeceira do rio Humaitá, na margem esquerda do Envira, sobreviveu ao massacre de populações indígenas durante o primeiro ciclo da borracha da Amazônia, entre 1880 e 1920, no chamado “tempo dos seringais”, e resistiu por mais de 100 anos ao primeiro contato.

“Estima-se que eles formem um grupo de aproximadamente 300 índios, sendo o maior entre os quatro povos indígenas isolados já avistados pela Funai nessa região do Acre”, disse Aquino. “Eles já são bastante conhecidos aqui no Acre inclusive por outros povos isolados, que acham que eles são feiticeiros e xamãs.”

Além desses, há o grupo Mashco-Piro, conhecido pelo comportamento nômade. A comunidade costuma caminhar pelas cabeceiras do rio Madre de Díos, no lado peruano, e afluentes – em grupos grandes, formados por entre 100 e 150 índios.

Em geral, segundo Aquino, eles entram no território acreano no verão. Permanecem por períodos de três a quatro dias em um mesmo lugar e logo em seguida já migram para outro.

“Nunca localizamos nenhuma maloca ou roçado desse grupo de índios isolados no Acre. Eles são conhecidos como povo de floresta e se estabelecem aqui em acampamentos provisórios, compartilhando a terra do povo Pano”, contou.

Aumento de evidências

De acordo com Aquino, a presença desses quatro grupos de índios isolados já identificados no Acre foi constatada por meio de avistamentos e confrontos, além de coletas de vestígios de sua presença na região, tais como saques, rastros ou de utensílios, como cestas e flechas, que deixaram pelo caminho.

Um mapeamento realizado pelo pesquisador para verificar a presença de índios isolados no Acre nas últimas três décadas apontou que o maior número de evidências foi coletado entre os anos de 2006 e 2013.

Do total de 231 evidências coletadas da presença desses índios isolados na região, 156 foram registradas nesses últimos oito anos. E desses 156 indícios, 70 foram saques de ferramentas de metal, contou Aquino.

“Isso denota que esses grupos de índios isolados estão buscando, principalmente, ferramentas de metal, e substituindo o machado de pedra pelo de aço. Eles também conhecem armas e já usam até espingardas”, contou.

Uma hipótese levantada pelos pesquisadores para explicar o aumento do número de saques na região é a busca por tecnologia por parte dos grupos de índios isolados.

“Percebemos que também há muitas iniciativas de aproximação desses grupos de índios isolados pela curiosidade de conhecer e coletar produtos industrializados”, disse Carlos Lisboa Travassos, coordenador-geral de Índios Isolados e Recém-Contatados da Funai.

“Algumas dessas situações de contato podem trazer um risco muito grande à saúde desses índios isolados, uma vez que eles não possuem imunidade à gripe e a outras doenças que podem levá-los a morrer de uma forma muito rápida e devastadora”, destacou.

O grupo de sete índios – quatro rapazes, duas mulheres jovens e uma criança – que estabeleceu o primeiro contato no fim de junho contraiu gripe e teve de ser transferido para a Base de Proteção Etnoambiental Xinane, da Funai, para receber atendimento médico.

Após a conclusão do tratamento, os indígenas retornaram para suas malocas, onde estão os demais integrantes do grupo. “Precisamos nos preparar para amenizar os primeiros riscos à saúde desses grupos no primeiro contato e estabelecer uma relação franca com eles”, afirmou Travassos.

Segundo Travassos, a política de proteção aos índios isolados da Funai é a do não contato, respeitando a autodeterminação de aproximação dos povos. São previstas, contudo, ações de intervenção, como planos de contingência, quando um grupo indígena isolado procura estabelecer contato, como ocorreu no final de junho.

Registro do contato

No início da palestra os pesquisadores da Funai exibiram um vídeo de alguns minutos com imagens do primeiro contato com o novo grupo de índios isolados para uma plateia composta por muitos indígenas do Brasil e Peru.

De acordo com informações dos intérpretes que integraram a equipe da Funai que estabeleceu o primeiro contato, os índios pertencem a um subgrupo do tronco linguístico Pano, e o contato e a permanência deles na região ocorreram de forma pacífica, apesar de os índios Ashaninka terem se assustado com o aparecimento dos “forasteiros”. “Eles falaram que a língua deles é muito próxima à dos Jaminawá, se não for a mesma”, contou Aquino.

Segundo os antropólogos da Funai, alguns dos traços que os diferenciam de outros grupos isolados é o uso de folhas de envira (árvore da floresta tropical) amarrada no pênis e na cintura, na qual levam um facão.

O arco e a flecha que utilizam são feitos de madeira de pupunha e a ponta da flecha é feita de taboca (um tipo de bambu) e é bastante perfurante.

Ciência a serviço da exploração da natureza e dos trabalhadores (Portal do Meio Ambiente)

31/07/2014Uncategorizedciência, Desastre, Ecologia, Mineração, Petróleorenzotaddei

PUBLICADO 30 JULHO 2014.

Mesa: A destruição tem preço? Pode-se confiar nas garantias da Ciência? Exploração petroleira (de Yasuni a Coari / Juruá); Mineração (de Carajás a Madre de Dios). Lindomar Padilha (CIMI); Barbara Silva (militante da comunicação comunitária na Pan Amazônia), Raimundo G. Neto (CEPASP/Movimento dos Atingidos por Mineração); Simeon Velarde (Vanguardia Amazónica-Peru), Ana Patrícia (COMIN)

Na manhã do dia 24 de julho, ocorreu a mesa com o tema “A destruição tem preço? Pode-se confiar nas garantias da Ciência? Exploração petroleira (de Yasuni a Coari / Juruá); Mineração (de Carajás a Madre de Dios).”

Barbara Silva, militante da comunicação comunitária na Pan-Amazônia, destacou a ação da Petrobrás na Amazônia Equatoriana e seus impactos na floresta e em comunidades equatorianas: “A Petrobrás age em outros países de um modo diferente. Ela faz no Equador, Bolívia e Colômbia o que ela não faz no Brasil: invade terras indígenas, frauda laudos técnicos, contamina água e solos, afetando a saúde e a economia de populações inteiras” .

Barbara Silva (militante da comunicação comunitária na Pan-Amazônia)

Silva ainda nos convoca a pensar a relação homem e natureza a partir de um termo que vai além da ideia de cuidar da natureza: “A austeridade imprime uma ação sobre o cuidado que é necessário a natureza. Pensar sobre o que queremos para a região amazônica é pensar no modo que vivemos. Consumir menos é uma ação individual que reflete nossa ação de cuidado com a natureza”, finalizou.

“Precisamos avançar é na ‘perda de inocência’, o Estado Brasileiro não é a favor do povo trabalhadores brasileiro, nem ontem, nem hoje.”, aponta Raimundo Neto (CEPASP/Movimento dos Atingidos por Mineração), após realizar um panorama das políticas e projetos de mineração no Pará.

Lindomar Padilha (CIMI); Simeon Velarde (Vanguardia Amazónica-Peru), Ana Patrícia (COMIN)

Simeon Velarde, da Vanguardia Amazónica-Peru, diz que a empresa petroleira Pluspetrol contamina os rios da amazônia peruana, mas diz que é de forma responsável. “O Peru é rico em matéria primas, em petróleo, gás, minério e essa realidade produz um crescimento econômico interessante para o país, mas esse crescimento não se redistribui socialmente. Eles dizem que vão fazer escolas, programas de inclusão de jovens, mas isso não acontece. O presidente vai aos meios de comunicações para defender essas empresas, pois com elas o país terá mais desenvolvimento, e segue mentindo à população”.

Fotos: Talita Oliveira

Fonte: ADUFAC.

Sudeste, rumo à desertificação (Envolverde)

30/07/2014UncategorizedDesastre, Desertificação, São Paulo, Secarenzotaddei

29/7/2014 – 12h08

por Julio Ottoboni*

O sudeste do Brasil, parte da região central e do sul caminham para se tornar desérticas. A seca registrada este ano na porção centro-sul, principalmente em São Paulo, está ligada a permanente e acelerada degradação da floresta amazônica. O transporte de umidade para as partes mais ao sul do continente está sendo comprometida, pois além de sua diminuição é trazido partículas geradas nos processos de queimadas que impedem a formação de chuvas.

Os cientistas do (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (Inpe) e do Instituto de Pesquisas da Amazônia (Inpa) há mais de uma década fizeram esse alerta, que a cada ano está pior e mais grave. E coloca em confronto o modelo econômico agropecuário, baseado em commodities, com a área mais industrializada, produtiva e rica do país. E também a mais urbanizada e detentora de 45% da população brasileira e abrigada em apenas 10,5% do território nacional.

O cientista e doutor em meteorologia do Inpe, Gilvam Sampaio de Oliveira, a situação é preocupante e bem mais grave do imaginado em relação a eventos extremos. A comunidade científica está surpresa com a dinâmica das alterações do clima. O número de desastres naturais vem crescendo. Entre 1940 e 2009 houve uma curva ascendente de inundações e o número de dias frios, principalmente em São Paulo, está em franca decadência.

“As questões que já estamos passando, como essa seca, eram projetadas para daqui há 15 ou 20 anos. A área de altas temperaturas está aumentando em toda América do Sul. Em São Paulo e São José dos Campos, por exemplo, há um aumento de chuvas com mais de 100 milímetros concentradas e períodos maiores sem precipitação alguma. E quanto mais seca a região, aumenta o efeito estufa e diminui a possibilidade de chuvas”, alertou o cientista.

O sistema principal formador do ciclo natural que abastece a pluviometria do sudeste começa com a massa de ar quente repleta de umidade, formada na bacia do Amazonas, seguindo até os Andes. Com a barreira natural, ela retorna para a porção sul continental, o que decreta o regime de chuvas.

A revista científica Nature publicou em 2012 um estudo inglês da Universidade de Leeds. O artigo apresentou o resultado de um estudo no qual os mais de 600 mil quilômetros quadrados de floresta amazônica perdidos desde a década de 1970, e com o avanço do desmatamento seguido de queimadas cerca de 40% de todo complexo natural, estará extinto até 2050. Isso comprometerá o regime de chuvas, que seriam reduzidas em mais de 20% nos períodos de seca.

Faixa dos desertos

O sudeste brasileiro está na faixa dos desertos existente no hemisfério sul do planeta. Ela atravessa enormes áreas continentais, como os desertos australianos de Great Sendy, Gibson e Great Victoria, na plataforma africana surgem as áreas desertificadas da Namíbia e do Kalahari e na América do Sul, o do Atacama. Sem qualquer coincidência, ambos desertos africanos, inclusive em expansão, estão alinhados frontalmente, dentro das margens latitudinais, com as regiões dos Estados do Sudeste e do Sul do país.

Essa porção territorial só se viu livre da desertificação com o êxito da Amazônia e a formação da Mata Atlântica. Ambas foram determinantes para se criar um regime de chuvas que mantiveram essas partes do Brasil e da América do Sul com solos férteis e índices pluviométricos mais que satisfatórios à manutenção da vida.

O geólogo do Inpe e assessor da Agência Espacial Brasileira (AEB), Paulo Roberto Martini, tem sua teoria para esse fenômeno. Na qual a desertificação destas regiões ocorrerá se o transporte de ar úmido for bloqueado ou escasseado, por ação natural ou antrópica. Exatamente o que vem acontecendo. As investigações geomorfológicas já mostraram que entre os anos 1000 e 1300 houveram secas generalizadas e populações inteiras desaparecerem nas Américas. E isto pode ocorrer novamente, agora potencializado pela devastação causada pelo homem.

“Esse solo da região Sul e Sudeste tem potencial enorme para se tornar deserto, basta não chover regularmente. A distribuição da umidade evitou que essa região da América do Sul fosse transformada num imenso deserto”, explicou Martini.

Segundo o pesquisador, no fim do período glacial, por volta de 12 mil anos, a cobertura do Brasil teria sido predominantemente de savana, como na África, pobre em diversidade e formada por gramíneas e poucas espécies arbóreas. O que ainda é encontrado no interior de São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo e no Mato Grosso. Entretanto, a umidade oceânica associada à amazônica possibilitou a constituição da Mata Atlântica e seu ingresso continente adentro.

A penetração da flora em áreas de campo realimentou o ciclo das chuvas, nível de umidade das áreas ocupadas e a fertilização do solo. Em milhares de anos formou-se um vasto complexo florestal, atualmente reduzido a menos de 5% de seu tamanho original na época do descobrimento.

“Há uma cultura de degradação e falar em restauração das matas no Brasil é ficção. Só se produz água quando se faz floresta, a sociedade tem que reagir a isso”, observou o dirigente da entidade SOS Mata Atlântica, Mário Mantovani.

As pesquisas mostram que o povoamento vegetal no que é hoje o território brasileiro teria começado pela costa do Oceano Atlântico, seguindo para o interior ao longo das várzeas dos rios, onde se encontram os solos mais ricos em nutrientes. Foram milhares de anos neste ritmo, o que induziu diversos especialistas a defenderem a tese de que a Mata Atlântica esteve intimamente ligada a Floresta Amazônica, pois ambas detém diversas semelhanças em seus ciclos sazonais e em espécimes de fauna e flora.

Mas com a derrubada desta proteção vegetal e o encurtamento do ciclo de chuvas oriundas do mega sistema amazônico, as mudanças climáticas ganharam impulso e têm causado alterações no desenvolvimento de diferentes culturas agrícolas, entre elas milho, trigo e café com impactos imensos na produção brasileira e norte-americana. A avaliação partiu dos integrantes do Workshop on Impacts of Global Climate Change on Agriculture and Livestock , realizado em maio na Universidade de São Paulo (USP), em Ribeirão Preto (SP).

* Júlio Ottoboni é jornalista diplomado e pós-graduado em jornalismo científico.

10 reasons to be hopeful that we will overcome climate change (The Guardian)

30/07/2014UncategorizedMudanças climáticas, Otimismo, Políticas públicasrenzotaddei

From action in China and the US to falling solar costs and rising electric car sales, there is cause to be hopeful

Karl Mathiesen

theguardian.com, Wednesday 30 July 2014 05.00 BST

Indian workers walk past solar panels at the 200 megawatts Gujarat Solar Park at Charanka in Patan district, India, Saturday, April 14, 2012.

Indian workers walk past solar panels at the 200 megawatts Gujarat Solar Park at Charanka in Patan district, India, Saturday, April 14, 2012. Photograph: Ajit Solanki/AP

For the last few months, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have been at record levels unseen in over 800,000 years. The chairman of the IPCC, an international panel of the world’s top climate scientists, warned earlier this year that“nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change”.

Future generations will no doubt wonder at our response, given the scale of the threat.It’s known that death, poverty and suffering await millions, and yet governments still vacillate.

But solutions are available. Here are ten reasons to be hopeful that humans will rise to the challenge of climate change.

1) Barack Obama has made it one of his defining issues

Any politician who runs as the personification of hope is bound to be a bit of a let down. And so it seemed for five long, hot years. Barack Obama inaugurated his first US presidential term by promising to “roll back the spectre of a warming planet”. Yet he seemed unable (or willing) to even roll back the ghosts haunting his Congress. Now, as he staggers into his legacy-building stage, Obama has confronted and even circumvented Congress. His emissions caps on coal power stations, announced last month were the culmination of a massive public relations push and scientific blitzkriegwith Obama as its champion, potentially making the next presidential election a referendum on climate change action.

Obama speaks at the 2014 State of the Union. Sitting behind him on the right is Republican congressional leader John Boehner, who said in May “that every proposal that has come out of this administration to deal with climate change involves hurting our economy and killing American jobs”

2) China has ordered coal power plants to close

Just a day after the launch of Obama’s big crackdown on coal, He Jiankun, a top Chinese government climate advisor told Reuters, “The government will use two ways to control CO2 emissions in the next five-year plan, by intensity and an absolute cap”. This was the first time the promise of limiting absolute emissions had emerged from a source close to the Chinese leadership (even if He was later forced to disown the comments).

The response of world’s largest emitter of carbon has the potential to be swift and decisive, given its centrally controlled economy. Responding to smog-tired residents in China’s cities, the government has ordered a mass shutdown of coal plants within a few years. Coal control measures now exist in 12 of the country’s 34 provinces.Greenpeacehave estimated that if these measures are implemented, it could bring China’s emissions close to the level the International Energy Agency says are needed to avoid more than 2C warming.

China's project coal consumption with coal control measures

China’s project coal consumption with coal control measures Photograph: /Greenpeace

3) The cost of solar has fallen by two thirds

According to the authoritative IEA thinktank, the price of installing photovoltaic (solar electricity) systems dropped by two thirds over the past six years. The resulting solar explosion has generated a “prosumer” market, in which the owners of homes and businesses are taking ownership of a growing proportion of the energy supply. During June in Australia’s “sunshine state” of Queensland the price of electricity fell below zero for several days, largely thanks to the input from privately-owned solar panels. The UK, Germany and other European nations smashed their record solar outputs over this year’s summer solstice.

4) People are taking their money out of fossil fuels

Dozens of cities, institutions and investors are taking their money out of fossil fuel companies after the launch of a divestment campaign in the US around 18 months ago. Similar campaigns were used in the past to hamstring apartheid South Africa and tobacco companies, but this one is happening faster than any of those. Supporters of the movement include former US vice president Al Gore, who says fossil fuel companies are overvalued because they cannot burn the assets they own if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change. “Investors have so far been slow to appreciate the implications for the carbon-intensive assets within their portfolios.”

CO2 emissions potential of listed fossil fuel reserves

CO2 emissions potential of listed fossil fuel reserves Photograph: Carbon Tracker

5) Bangladeshi women are being retrained as solar technicians

The UN says global warming will impact more women than men because they make up the majority of the world’s poor. Close to two billion people rely on wood, charcoal and agricultural waste for cooking and heating. The primary gatherers of this toxic, labour- and carbon-intensive energy source are women. Thus, the education and social emancipation of women could be one of the greatest catalysts for grassroots climate action. Bangladeshi women who previously lived without electricity have beenretraining as solar technicians to bring power to the country’s 95 million people who live without electric light. The country now has the fastest growing solar sector in the world with 2 million households fitted with solar power units.

6) Renewable energy will soon take the lion’s share of new power

Falling technology prices, innovation and some decent government initiatives have seen renewables taking an increasing share of global electricity generation. After stalling through the early part of last decade, the increase is now inexorable. The sector, flushed with confidence, has begun to attract the kind of sustained investment growth of which most industries can only dream. In 2013 investors contributed US$268.2 billion to renewable projects – 5 times more than in 2004. The average growth of US$24 billion per year is in the same ball park as the riotous expansion of venture capital during the late 90s dot com bubble, except it has already lasted five time longer. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that by 2030 spending on renewable energy sources could make up two thirds of a global energy spend of US$7.7 trillion.

See: New power generation

7) European homes are using 15% less energy than they were in 2000

In every part of the world (barring the Middle East) governments are taking advantage of the cheapest way to bring down their emissions – by saving energy. Energy efficient housing and appliances have seen global household emissions drop almost 1% per year, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but a 1% drop over a year is equivalent to every resident of New York going completely off grid. In the EU, households reduced their consumption by 15.5% between 2000 and 2011. In the developing world, where urban populations are booming and millions of new homes will need to be built, the IPCC has said there is a “window of opportunity” to create sustainable housing for the future. Since 2009, the United Nations’ Sushi programme has been training local builders and planners in Thailand, Brazil, India and Bangladesh to use low cost energy efficient building practices for social housing projects.

Lilac co-housing project in Bramley, Leeds

The Low Impact Living Affordable Community in Bramley, Leeds. Photograph: Andy Lord

8) Cutting emissions has become a business imperative

A recent WWF/Ceres report found that the 53 US Fortune 100 companies who report their emissions had cut their carbon footprint by 58 million megatonnes in 2012 – roughly equivalent to the total emissions of Peru. This was achieved mainly through energy efficiency measures, although switching to green energy sources was also a factor. These measures are turning out to be not just cost effective but actually a business imperative. Each megatonne reduction saved an average of US$19 – a total of US$1.1 billion across just 53 companies. In the UK, tyre manufacturer Michelin has dropped its £20 million energy bill by 20% in five years by employing energy managers. “[Climate] adaptation is just good business,” say analysts from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

9) Oil is becoming much more expensive to find

Oil and gas companies are finding it increasingly expensive to find and extract their buried gravy. The Wall Street Journal reported in January the total capital expenditure of fossil giants Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell grew to £70 billion in 2013, yet all three have experienced huge declines in production relative to cost as their budgets are stretched by the need to open new wells in challenging environments. Off the coast of Brazil, huge oil fields lie more than 5km beneath the deep ocean floor. Despite the world’s largest corporate spending programme (£138 bn), national driller Petrobras is being driven towards the wall by the crippling expense of drilling so deep.

One area where the shift from Promised Land to land of compromise has been exemplified is the Arctic. Oil companies see the region’s melting sea ice as a fine opportunity to recover vast untapped reserves. But the costs of exploring the region have proved too great for Shell, who after spending £5bn, have shelved their exploration in the region. Many other companies, although notably not Russian behemoth Gazprom, have ruled out Arctic exploration in the foreseeable future. “I don’t think we’ll see any oil production in the Arctic any time soon. Probably not this decade and not the next,” Lundin Petroleum chairman Ian Lundin said in February. “The commercial challenges are too big.”

Drilling for oil in the Arctic has proved costly for Shell

Drilling for oil in the Arctic has proved costly for Shell Photograph: Design Pics Inc/REX

10) Electric car sales are doubling each year

Since 2011 electric car sales have doubled every year. Consumer acceptance of the technology is on an exponential growth curve that researchers say will see more than one million such vehicles driven across the world by the end of 2015. Five years ago, the technology was a quirky, futuristic gimmick lacking any serious impact on the global car market. Questions were raised about its price competitiveness. But in Norway, one in every hundred cars is now electric. Beyond the oft-enlightened Norse, the technology has a growing foothold in the US (which is by far the largest single market with 174,000 cars), Japan (68,000) and China (45,000).

German chancellor Angela Merkel next to the new BMW i3 electric car

German chancellor Angela Merkel next to the new BMW i3 electric car Photograph: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters/REUTERS

Learning the smell of fear: Mothers teach babies their own fears via odor, animal study shows (Science Daily)

30/07/2014UncategorizedAnimais, Inteligência animal, Medo, Odores, Socialidade animal, Visceralidaderenzotaddei

Date: July 28, 2014

Source: University of Michigan Health System

Summary: Babies can learn what to fear in the first days of life just by smelling the odor of their distressed mothers’, new research suggests. And not just “natural” fears: If a mother experienced something before pregnancy that made her fear something specific, her baby will quickly learn to fear it too — through her odor when she feels fear.

Even when just the odor of the frightened mother was piped in to a chamber where baby rats were exposed to peppermint smell, the babies developed a fear of the same smell, and their blood cortisol levels rose when they smelled it. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Michigan Health System

Babies can learn what to fear in the first days of life just by smelling the odor of their distressed mothers, new research suggests. And not just “natural” fears: If a mother experienced something before pregnancy that made her fear something specific, her baby will quickly learn to fear it too — through the odor she gives off when she feels fear.

In the first direct observation of this kind of fear transmission, a team of University of Michigan Medical School and New York University studied mother rats who had learned to fear the smell of peppermint — and showed how they “taught” this fear to their babies in their first days of life through their alarm odor released during distress.

In a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team reports how they pinpointed the specific area of the brain where this fear transmission takes root in the earliest days of life.

Their findings in animals may help explain a phenomenon that has puzzled mental health experts for generations: how a mother’s traumatic experience can affect her children in profound ways, even when it happened long before they were born.

The researchers also hope their work will lead to better understanding of why not all children of traumatized mothers, or of mothers with major phobias, other anxiety disorders or major depression, experience the same effects.

“During the early days of an infant rat’s life, they are immune to learning information about environmental dangers. But if their mother is the source of threat information, we have shown they can learn from her and produce lasting memories,” says Jacek Debiec, M.D., Ph.D., the U-M psychiatrist and neuroscientist who led the research.

“Our research demonstrates that infants can learn from maternal expression of fear, very early in life,” he adds. “Before they can even make their own experiences, they basically acquire their mothers’ experiences. Most importantly, these maternally-transmitted memories are long-lived, whereas other types of infant learning, if not repeated, rapidly perish.”

Peering inside the fearful brain

Debiec, who treats children and mothers with anxiety and other conditions in the U-M Department of Psychiatry, notes that the research on rats allows scientists to see what’s going on inside the brain during fear transmission, in ways they could never do in humans.

He began the research during his fellowship at NYU with Regina Marie Sullivan, Ph.D., senior author of the new paper, and continues it in his new lab at U-M’s Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute.

The researchers taught female rats to fear the smell of peppermint by exposing them to mild, unpleasant electric shocks while they smelled the scent, before they were pregnant. Then after they gave birth, the team exposed the mothers to just the minty smell, without the shocks, to provoke the fear response. They also used a comparison group of female rats that didn’t fear peppermint.

They exposed the pups of both groups of mothers to the peppermint smell, under many different conditions with and without their mothers present.

Using special brain imaging, and studies of genetic activity in individual brain cells and cortisol in the blood, they zeroed in on a brain structure called the lateral amygdala as the key location for learning fears. During later life, this area is key to detecting and planning response to threats — so it makes sense that it would also be the hub for learning new fears.

But the fact that these fears could be learned in a way that lasted, during a time when the baby rat’s ability to learn any fears directly was naturally suppressed, is what makes the new findings so interesting, says Debiec.

The team even showed that the newborns could learn their mothers’ fears even when the mothers weren’t present. Just the piped-in scent of their mother reacting to the peppermint odor she feared was enough to make them fear the same thing.

And when the researchers gave the baby rats a substance that blocked activity in the amygdala, they failed to learn the fear of peppermint smell from their mothers. This suggests, Debiec says, that there may be ways to intervene to prevent children from learning irrational or harmful fear responses from their mothers, or reduce their impact.

From animals to humans: next steps

The new research builds on what scientists have learned over time about the fear circuitry in the brain, and what can go wrong with it. That work has helped psychiatrists develop new treatments for human patients with phobias and other anxiety disorders — for instance, exposure therapy that helps them overcome fears by gradually confronting the thing or experience that causes their fear.

In much the same way, Debiec hopes that exploring the roots of fear in infancy, and how maternal trauma can affect subsequent generations, could help human patients. While it’s too soon to know if the same odor-based effect happens between human mothers and babies, the role of a mother’s scent in calming human babies has been shown.

Debiec, who hails from Poland, recalls working with the grown children of Holocaust survivors, who experienced nightmares, avoidance instincts and even flashbacks related to traumatic experiences they never had themselves. While they would have learned about the Holocaust from their parents, this deeply ingrained fear suggests something more at work, he says.

Going forward, he hopes to work with U-M researchers to observe human infants and their mothers — including U-M psychiatrist Maria Muzik, M.D. and psychologist Kate Rosenblum, Ph.D., who run a Women and Infants Mental Health clinic and research program and also work with military families. The program is currently seeking women and their children to take part in a range of studies.

Journal Reference:

Jacek Debiec and Regina Marie Sullivan. Intergenerational transmission of emotional trauma through amygdala-dependent mother-to-infant transfer of specific fear. PNAS, July 28, 2014 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1316740111

Global warming amplifier: Rising water vapor in upper troposphere to intensify climate change (Science Daily)

30/07/2014UncategorizedMeteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, RSMASrenzotaddei

Date: July 28, 2014

Source: University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science

Summary: A new study from scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and colleagues confirms rising levels of water vapor in the upper troposphere — a key amplifier of global warming — will intensify climate change impacts over the next decades. The new study is the first to show that increased water vapor concentrations in the atmosphere are a direct result of human activities.

Illustration of annual mean T2-T12 field that provides a direct measure of the upper-tropospheric water vapor. Purple = dry and Red = moist. Credit: Eui-Seok Chung, Ph.D. Assistant Scientist – UM Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science

A new study from scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and colleagues confirms rising levels of water vapor in the upper troposphere — a key amplifier of global warming — will intensify climate change impacts over the next decades. The new study is the first to show that increased water vapor concentrations in the atmosphere are a direct result of human activities.

“The study is the first to confirm that human activities have increased water vapor in the upper troposphere,” said Brian Soden, professor of atmospheric sciences at the UM Rosenstiel School and co-author of the study.

To investigate the potential causes of a 30-year moistening trend in the upper troposphere, a region 3-7 miles above Earth’s surface, Soden, UM Rosenstiel School researcher Eui-Seok Chung and colleagues measured water vapor in the upper troposphere collected by NOAA satellites and compared them to climate model predictions of water circulation between the ocean and atmosphere to determine whether observed changes in atmospheric water vapor could be explained by natural or human-made causes. Using the set of climate model experiments, the researchers showed that rising water vapor in the upper troposphere cannot be explained by natural forces, such as volcanoes and changes in solar activity, but can be explained by increased greenhouse gases, such as CO2.

Greenhouse gases raise temperatures by trapping Earth’s radiant heat inside the atmosphere. This warming also increases the accumulation of atmospheric water vapor, the most abundant greenhouse gas. The atmospheric moistening traps additional radiant heat and further increases temperatures.

Climate models predict that as the climate warms from the burning of fossil fuels, the concentrations of water vapor will also increase in response to that warming. This moistening of the atmosphere, in turn, absorbs more heat and further raises Earth’s temperature.

The paper, titled “Upper Tropospheric Moistening in response to Anthropogenic Warming,” was published in the July 28th, 2014 Early Addition on-line of the journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper’s authors include Chung, Soden, B.J. Sohn of Seoul National University, and Lei Shi of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Ashville, North Carolina.

Journal Reference:

Eui-Seok Chung, Brian Soden, B. J. Sohn, and Lei Shi. Upper-tropospheric moistening in response to anthropogenic warming. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1409659111

Impact of Deepwater Horizon oil spill on coral is deeper and broader than predicted (Science Daily)

30/07/2014UncategorizedBritish Petroleum, Corais, Desastre, Ecologia, Golfo do México, Petróleo, Vazamento de óleorenzotaddei

Date: July 28, 2014

Source: Penn State

Summary: A new discovery of two additional coral communities showing signs of damage from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill expands the impact footprint of the 2010 spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

A new discovery of two additional coral communities showing signs of damage from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill expands the impact footprint of the 2010 spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The discovery was made by a team led by Charles Fisher, professor of biology at Penn State University. A paper describing this work and additional impacts of human activity on corals in the Gulf of Mexico will be published during the last week of July 2014 in the online Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Several colonies of coral with attached anemones and brittle star from a previously discovered coral community 13 km from the spill site showing damage from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Corals from this community were used as models to identify damage from the oil spill in two newly discovered coral communities. The extensive brown growth on the normally gold-colored coral is not found on healthy colonies. Credit: Fisher lab, Penn State University

A paper describing this work and additional impacts of human activity on corals in the Gulf of Mexico will be published during the last week of July 2014 in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The footprint of the impact of the spill on coral communities is both deeper and wider than previous data indicated,” said Fisher. “This study very clearly shows that multiple coral communities, up to 22 kilometers from the spill site and at depths over 1800 meters, were impacted by the spill.”

The oil from the spill in the Gulf of Mexico has largely dissipated, so other clues now are needed to identify marine species impacted by the spill. Fisher’s team used the current conditions at a coral community known to have been impacted by the spill in 2010 as a model “fingerprint” for gauging the spill’s impact in newly discovered coral communities.

Unlike other species impacted by the spill whose remains quickly disappeared from the ocean floor, corals form a mineralized skeleton that can last for years after the organism has died. “One of the keys to coral’s usefulness as an indicator species is that the coral skeleton retains evidence of the damage long after the oil that caused the damage is gone,” said Fisher. The scientists compared the newly discovered coral communities with one they had discovered and studied around the time of the oil spill, using it as a model for the progression of damage caused by the spill over time. “We were able to identify evidence of damage from the spill in the two coral communities discovered in 2011 because we know exactly what our model coral colonies, impacted by the oil spill in 2010, looked like at the time we found the new communities.”

Corals are sparse in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, but because they act as an indicator species for tracking the impact of environmental disasters like the Deepwater Horizon blowout, the effort to find them pays off in useful scientific data. “We were looking for coral communities at depths of over 1000 meters that are often smaller than the size of a tennis court,” said Fisher. “We needed high-resolution images of the coral colonies that are scattered across these communities and that range in size from a small houseplant to a small shrub.”

To begin the search, the team used 3D seismic data from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to identify 488 potential coral habitats in a 40 km radius around the spill site. From that list they chose the 29 sites they judged most likely to contain corals impacted by the spill. The team then used towed camera systems and Sentry, an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), which they programmed to autonomously travel back-and-forth across specific areas collecting images of the sites from just meters above the ocean floor. Finally, the team used a Shilling ultra-heavy-duty remote-operated vehicle (ROV), to collect high-resolution images of corals at the sites where they were discovered.

“With the cameras on board the ROV we were able to collect beautiful, high-resolution images of the corals,” said Fisher. “When we compared these images with our example of known oil damage, all the signs were present providing clear evidence in two of the newly discovered coral communities of the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.”

In searching for coral communities impacted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the team also found two coral sites entangled with commercial fishing line. These additional discoveries serve as a reminder that the Gulf is being impacted by a diversity of human activities.

In addition to Fisher, the research team included Pen-Yuan Hsing, Samantha P. Berlet, Miles G. Saunders and Elizabeth A. Larcom from Penn State; Carl L. Kaiser, Dana R. Yoerger, and Timothy M. Shank from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Harry H. Roberts from Louisiana State University; William W. Shedd from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management; Erik E. Cordes from Temple University; and James M. Brooks from TDI-Brooks International Inc.

The research was supported by the Assessment and Restoration Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative funding to support the Ecosystem Impacts of Oil and Gas Inputs to the Gulf (ECOGIG) consortium administered by the University of Mississippi, and B P as part of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Natural Resource Damage Assessment.

Journal Reference:

Charles R. Fisher, Pen-Yuan Hsing, Carl L. Kaiser, Dana R. Yoerger, Harry H. Roberts, William W. Shedd, Erik E. Cordes, Timothy M. Shank, Samantha P. Berlet, Miles G. Saunders, Elizabeth A. Larcom, and James M. Brooks. Footprint of Deepwater Horizon blowout impact to deep-water coral communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014; DOI:10.1073/pnas.1403492111

Evolution in rainforest flies points to climate change survival (Science Daily)

30/07/2014UncategorizedAdaptação, Biodiversidade, Extinção, Mudanças climáticasrenzotaddei

Date: July 29, 2014

Source: Monash University

Summary: Scientists believe some tropical species may be able to evolve and adapt to the effects of climate change. The new findings suggests some sensitive rainforest-restricted species may survive climate change and avoid extinction. But only if the change is not too abrupt and dramatically beyond the conditions that a species currently experiences.

Scientists believe some tropical species may be able to evolve and adapt to the effects of climate change. Credit: © Banana Republic / Fotolia

Scientists believe some tropical species may be able to evolve and adapt to the effects of climate change.

The new findings published in the journal,Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests some sensitive rainforest-restricted species may survive climate change and avoid extinction. But only if the change is not too abrupt and dramatically beyond the conditions that a species currently experiences.

Previous research offered a bleak prospect for tropical species’ adaptation to climate change, now researchers from Monash University believe the situation may not be quite so hopeless.

One of the lead researchers, Dr Belinda Van Heerwaarden said the impact of climate change on the world’s biodiversity is largely unknown.

“Whilst many believe some species have the evolutionary potential to adapt no one really knows for sure, and there are fears that some could become extinct.”

Dr Van Heerwaarden and Dr Carla M. Sgrò, from the Faculty of Science extended on an experiment from the 2000s in which tropical flies native to Australian rain forests called Drosophila birchii, were taken out of the damp rainforest and exposed to very dry conditions, mimicking the effects of potential climate change.

In the original experiment the flies died within hours and despite rescuing those that survived longest and allowing them to breed for over 50 generations, the flies were no more resistant, suggesting they didn’t have the evolutionary capacity to survive.

In Dr Van Heerwaarden and Dr Sgrò’s version they changed the conditions from 10 per cent to 35 per cent humidity.

“The first experiment tested whether the flies could survive in 10 per cent relative humidity. That’s an extreme level that’s well beyond the changes projected for the wet tropics under climate change scenarios over the next 30 years.”

“In our test we decreased the humidity to 35 per cent, which is much more relevant to predictions of how dry the environment will become in the next 30 to 50 years. We discovered that when you change the environment, you get a totally different answer,” Dr Van Heerwaarden said.

Whilst on average most of the flies died after just 12 hours, some survived a little longer than others. By comparing different families of flies, the researchers discovered the difference in the flies’ resistance is influenced by their genes.

To test this theory the longest-living flies were rescued and allowed to breed. After just five generations, one species evolved to survive 23 per cent longer in 35 per cent humidity.

As well as looking at the potential impact of climate change, the research also highlights the importance of genetic diversity within species.

Dr Sgrò said this finding suggests there is genetic variation present in these flies, which means they can evolve in response to climate change.

“Tropical species make up the vast majority of the world’s biodiversity and climactic models predict these will be most vulnerable to climate change. However these models do not consider the extent to which evolutionary response may buffer the negative impacts of climate change.”

“Our research indicates that the genes that help flies temporarily survive extreme dryness are not the same as those that help them resist more moderate conditions. The second set of genes are the ones that enable these flies to adapt,” she said.

“We have much work to do but this experiment gives us hope that some tropical species have the capacity to survive climate change,” said Dr Sgrò.

The results mean that other species thought to be at serious risk might have some hope of persisting a little longer under climate change than previously thought.

The next phase of the research study will see Dr Van Heerwaarden and Dr Carla M. Sgrò investigate whether the climactic stress tolerated by the tropical flies extends to other species.

Journal Reference:

B. van Heerwaarden, C. M. Sgro. Is adaptation to climate change really constrained in niche specialists? Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2014; 281 (1790): 20140396 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2014.0396

Social origins of intelligence in the brain (Science Daily)

30/07/2014UncategorizedInteligência, neurociências, Neurofisiologiarenzotaddei

Date: July 29, 2014

Source: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Summary: By studying the injuries and aptitudes of Vietnam War veterans who suffered penetrating head wounds during the war, scientists are tackling — and beginning to answer — longstanding questions about how the brain works. The researchers found that brain regions that contribute to optimal social functioning also are vital to general intelligence and to emotional intelligence. This finding bolsters the view that general intelligence emerges from the emotional and social context of one’s life.

Brain regions that contribute to optimal social functioning also are vital to general intelligence and to emotional intelligence. Credit: © christingasner / Fotolia

By studying the injuries and aptitudes of Vietnam War veterans who suffered penetrating head wounds during the war, scientists are tackling — and beginning to answer — longstanding questions about how the brain works.

The researchers found that brain regions that contribute to optimal social functioning also are vital to general intelligence and to emotional intelligence. This finding bolsters the view that general intelligence emerges from the emotional and social context of one’s life.

The findings are reported in the journal Brain.

“We are trying to understand the nature of general intelligence and to what extent our intellectual abilities are grounded in social cognitive abilities,” said Aron Barbey, a University of Illinois professor of neuroscience, of psychology, and of speech and hearing science. Barbey (bar-BAY), an affiliate of the Beckman Institute and of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the U. of I., led the new study with an international team of collaborators.

Studies in social psychology indicate that human intellectual functions originate from the social context of everyday life, Barbey said.

“We depend at an early stage of our development on social relationships — those who love us care for us when we would otherwise be helpless,” he said.

Social interdependence continues into adulthood and remains important throughout the lifespan, Barbey said.

“Our friends and family tell us when we could make bad mistakes and sometimes rescue us when we do,” he said. “And so the idea is that the ability to establish social relationships and to navigate the social world is not secondary to a more general cognitive capacity for intellectual function, but that it may be the other way around. Intelligence may originate from the central role of relationships in human life and therefore may be tied to social and emotional capacities.”

The study involved 144 Vietnam veterans injured by shrapnel or bullets that penetrated the skull, damaging distinct brain tissues while leaving neighboring tissues intact. Using CT scans, the scientists painstakingly mapped the affected brain regions of each participant, then pooled the data to build a collective map of the brain.

The researchers used a battery of carefully designed tests to assess participants’ intellectual, emotional and social capabilities. They then looked for patterns that tied damage to specific brain regions to deficits in the participants’ ability to navigate the intellectual, emotional or social realms. Social problem solving in this analysis primarily involved conflict resolution with friends, family and peers at work.

As in their earlier studies of general intelligence and emotional intelligence, the researchers found that regions of the frontal cortex (at the front of the brain), the parietal cortex (further back near the top of the head) and the temporal lobes (on the sides of the head behind the ears) are all implicated in social problem solving. The regions that contributed to social functioning in the parietal and temporal lobes were located only in the brain’s left hemisphere, while both left and right frontal lobes were involved.

The brain networks found to be important to social adeptness were not identical to those that contribute to general intelligence or emotional intelligence, but there was significant overlap, Barbey said.

“The evidence suggests that there’s an integrated information-processing architecture in the brain, that social problem solving depends upon mechanisms that are engaged for general intelligence and emotional intelligence,” he said. “This is consistent with the idea that intelligence depends to a large extent on social and emotional abilities, and we should think about intelligence in an integrated fashion rather than making a clear distinction between cognition and emotion and social processing. This makes sense because our lives are fundamentally social — we direct most of our efforts to understanding others and resolving social conflict. And our study suggests that the architecture of intelligence in the brain may be fundamentally social, too.”

Journal Reference:

A. K. Barbey, R. Colom, E. J. Paul, A. Chau, J. Solomon, J. H. Grafman. Lesion mapping of social problem solving. Brain, 2014; DOI: 10.1093/brain/awu207

Violent aftermath for the warriors at Alken Enge (Science Daily)

30/07/2014UncategorizedDinamarca, História, Violênciarenzotaddei

Date: July 29, 2014

Source: Aarhus University

Summary: Denmark attracted international attention in 2012 when archaeological excavations revealed the bones of an entire army, whose warriors had been thrown into the bogs near the Alken Enge wetlands in East Jutland after losing a major engagement about 2,000 years ago. Work has continued in the area since then and archaeologists have now made sensational new findings.

Four pelvic bones on a stick. Credit: Peter Jensen, Aarhus University

Four pelvic bones on a stick and bundles of desecrated bones testify to the ritual violence perpetrated on the corpses of the many warriors who fell in a major battle close to the Danish town of Skanderborg around 2,000 years ago.

Denmark attracted international attention in 2012 when archaeological excavations revealed the bones of an entire army, whose warriors had been thrown into the bogs near the Alken Enge wetlands in East Jutland after losing a major engagement around 2,000 years ago. Work has continued in the area since then and archaeologists and experts from Aarhus University, Skanderborg Museum and Moesgaard Museum have now made sensational new findings.

“We have found a wooden stick bearing the pelvic bones of four different men. In addition, we have unearthed bundles of bones, bones bearing marks of cutting and scraping, and crushed skulls. Our studies reveal that a violent sequel took place after the fallen warriors had lain on the battlefield for around six months,” relates Project Manager Mads Kähler Holst from Aarhus University.

Religious act

The remains of the fallen were gathered together and all the flesh was cleaned from the bones, which were then sorted and brutally desecrated before being cast into the lake. The warriors’ bones are mixed with the remains of slaughtered animals and clay pots that probably contained food sacrifices.

“We are fairly sure that this was a religious act. It seems that this was a holy site for a pagan religion — a sacred grove — where the victorious conclusion of major battles was marked by the ritual presentation and destruction of the bones of the vanquished warriors,” adds Mads Kähler Holst.

Remains of corpses thrown in the lake

Geological studies have revealed that back in the Iron Age, the finds were thrown into the water from the end of a tongue of land that stretched out into Mossø lake, which was much larger back then than it is today.

“Most of the bones we find here are spread out over the lake bed seemingly at random, but the new finds have suddenly given us a clear impression of what actually happened. This applies in particular to the four pelvic bones. They must have been threaded onto the stick after the flesh was cleaned from the skeletons,” explains Field Director Ejvind Hertz from Skanderborg Museum.

Internal Germanic conflict

The battles near Alken Enge were waged during that part of the Iron Age when major changes were taking place in Northern Europe because the Roman Empire was expanding northwards, putting pressure on the Germanic tribes. This resulted in wars between the Romans and the Germanic tribes, and between the Germanic peoples themselves.

Archaeologists assume that the recent finds at the Alken dig stem from an internal conflict of this kind. Records kept by the Romans describe the macabre rituals practised by the Germanic peoples on the bodies of their vanquished enemies, but this is the first time that traces of an ancient holy site have been unearthed.

Diet affects males’ and females’ gut microbes differently (Science Daily)

30/07/2014UncategorizedFlora intestinal, Gênero, Microbiota, Microorganismos, Visceralidaderenzotaddei

Date: July 29, 2014

Source: University of Texas at Austin

Summary: The microbes living in the guts of males and females react differently to diet, even when the diets are identical, according to a new study. These results suggest that therapies designed to improve human health and treat diseases through nutrition might need to be tailored for each sex.

Illustration by Marianna Grenadier and Jenna Luecke. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Texas at Austin

The microbes living in the guts of males and females react differently to diet, even when the diets are identical, according to a study by scientists from The University of Texas at Austin and six other institutions published this week in the journal Nature Communications. These results suggest that therapies designed to improve human health and treat diseases through nutrition might need to be tailored for each sex.

The researchers studied the gut microbes in two species of fish and in mice, and also conducted an in-depth analysis of data that other researchers collected on humans. They found that in fish and humans diet affected the microbiota of males and females differently. In some cases, different species of microbes would dominate, while in others, the diversity of bacteria would be higher in one sex than the other.

These results suggest that any therapies designed to improve human health through diet should take into account whether the patient is male or female.

Only in recent years has science begun to completely appreciate the importance of the human microbiome, which consists of all the bacteria that live in and on people’s bodies. There are hundreds or even thousands of species of microbes in the human digestive system alone, each varying in abundance.

Genetics and diet can affect the variety and number of these microbes in the human gut, which can in turn have a profound influence on human health. Obesity, diabetes, and inflammatory bowel disease have all been linked to low diversity of bacteria in the human gut.

One concept for treating such diseases is to manipulate the microbes within a person’s gut through diet. The idea is gaining in popularity because dietary changes would make for a relatively cheap and simple treatment.

Much has to be learned about which species, or combination of microbial species, is best for human health. In order to accomplish this, research has to illuminate how these microbes react to various combinations of diet, genetics and environment. Unfortunately, to date most such studies only examine one factor at a time and do not take into account how these variables interact.

“Our study asks not just how diet influences the microbiome, but it splits the hosts into males and females and asks, do males show the same diet effects as females?” said Daniel Bolnick, professor in The University of Texas at Austin’s College of Natural Sciences and lead author of the study.

While Bolnick’s results identify that there is a significant difference in the gut microbiota for males and females, the dietary data used in the analysis are organized in complex clusters of disparate factors and do not easily translate into specific diet tips, such as eating more vegetables or less meat.

“To guide people’s behavior, we need to know what microbes are desirable for people,” said Bolnick. “Diet and sex do interact to influence the microbes, but we don’t yet know what a desirable target for microbes is. Now we can go in with eyes open when we work on therapies for gut microbe problems, as many involve dietary changes. We can walk into those studies looking for something we weren’t aware of before. All along we treated diet as if it works the same for men and women. Now we’ll be approaching studies of therapies in a different way.”

Why men and women would react differently to changes in diet is unclear, but there are a couple of possibilities. The hormones associated with each sex could potentially influence gut microbes, favoring one strain over another. Also, the sexes often differ in how their immune systems function, which could affect which microbes live and die in the microbiome.

One notable exception in Bolnick’s results was in the mice. Although there was a tiny difference between male and female mice, for the most part the microbiota of each sex reacted to diet in the same manner. Because most dietary studies are conducted on mice, this result could have a huge effect on such research, and it raises questions about how well studies of gut microbes in lab mice can be generalized to other species, particularly humans.

“This means that most of the research that’s being done on lab mice — we need to treat that with kid gloves,” said Bolnick.

Bolnick’s co-authors are Lisa Snowberg (UT Austin); Philipp Hirsch (University of Basel and Uppsala University); Christian Lauber and Rob Knight (University of Colorado, Boulder); Elin Org, Brian Parks and Aldons Lusis (University of California, Los Angeles); J. Gregory Caporaso (Northern Arizona University and Argonne National Laboratory); and Richard Svanbäck (Uppsala University).

This research was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Swedish Research Council.

Journal Reference:

Daniel I. Bolnick, Lisa K. Snowberg, Philipp E. Hirsch, Christian L. Lauber, Elin Org, Brian Parks, Aldons J. Lusis, Rob Knight, J. Gregory Caporaso, Richard Svanbäck. Individual diet has sex-dependent effects on vertebrate gut microbiota. Nature Communications, 2014; 5 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5500

The Quantum Cheshire Cat: Can neutrons be located at a different place than their own spin? (Science Daily)

30/07/2014UncategorizedAlice no pais das maravilhas, Física, Mecânica quânticarenzotaddei

Date: July 29, 2014

Source: Vienna University of Technology, TU Vienna

Summary: Can neutrons be located at a different place than their own spin? A quantum experiment demonstrates a new kind of quantum paradox. The Cheshire Cat featured in Lewis Caroll’s novel “Alice in Wonderland” is a remarkable creature: it disappears, leaving its grin behind. Can an object be separated from its properties? It is possible in the quantum world. In an experiment, neutrons travel along a different path than one of their properties — their magnetic moment. This “Quantum Cheshire Cat” could be used to make high precision measurements less sensitive to external perturbations.

The basic idea of the Quantum Cheshire Cat: In an interferometer, an object is separated from one if its properties – like a cat, moving on a different path than its own grin. Credit: Image courtesy of Vienna University of Technology, TU Vienna

Can neutrons be located at a different place than their own spin? A quantum experiment, carried out by a team of researchers from the Vienna University of Technology, demonstrates a new kind of quantum paradox.

The Cheshire Cat featured in Lewis Caroll’s novel “Alice in Wonderland” is a remarkable creature: it disappears, leaving its grin behind. Can an object be separated from its properties? It is possible in the quantum world. In an experiment, neutrons travel along a different path than one of their properties — their magnetic moment. This “Quantum Cheshire Cat” could be used to make high precision measurements less sensitive to external perturbations.

At Different Places at Once

According to the law of quantum physics, particles can be in different physical states at the same time. If, for example, a beam of neutrons is divided into two beams using a silicon crystal, it can be shown that the individual neutrons do not have to decide which of the two possible paths they choose. Instead, they can travel along both paths at the same time in a quantum superposition.

“This experimental technique is called neutron interferometry,” says Professor Yuji Hasegawa from the Vienna University of Technology. “It was invented here at our institute in the 1970s, and it has turned out to be the perfect tool to investigate fundamental quantum mechanics.”

To see if the same technique could separate the properties of a particle from the particle itself, Yuji Hasegawa brought together a team including Tobis Denkmayr, Hermann Geppert and Stephan Sponar, together with Alexandre Matzkin from CNRS in France, Professor Jeff Tollaksen from Chapman University in California and Hartmut Lemmel from the Institut Laue-Langevin to develop a brand new quantum experiment.

The experiment was done at the neutron source at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, where a unique kind of measuring station is operated by the Viennese team, supported by Hartmut Lemmel from ILL.

Where is the Cat …?

Neutrons are not electrically charged, but they carry a magnetic moment. They have a magnetic direction, the neutron spin, which can be influenced by external magnetic fields.

First, a neutron beam is split into two parts in a neutron interferometer. Then the spins of the two beams are shifted into different directions: The upper neutron beam has a spin parallel to the neutrons’ trajectory, the spin of the lower beam points into the opposite direction. After the two beams have been recombined, only those neutrons are chosen, which have a spin parallel to their direction of motion. All the others are just ignored. “This is called postselection,” says Hermann Geppert. “The beam contains neutrons of both spin directions, but we only analyse part of the neutrons.”

These neutrons, which are found to have a spin parallel to its direction of motion, must clearly have travelled along the upper path — only there, the neutrons have this spin state. This can be shown in the experiment. If the lower beam is sent through a filter which absorbs some of the neutrons, then the number of the neutrons with spin parallel to their trajectory stays the same. If the upper beam is sent through a filter, than the number of these neutrons is reduced.

… and Where is the Grin?

Things get tricky, when the system is used to measure where the neutron spin is located: the spin can be slightly changed using a magnetic field. When the two beams are recombined appropriately, they can amplify or cancel each other. This is exactly what can be seen in the measurement, if the magnetic field is applied at the lower beam — but that is the path which the neutrons considered in the experiment are actually never supposed to take. A magnetic field applied to the upper beam, on the other hand, does not have any effect.

“By preparing the neurons in a special initial state and then postselecting another state, we can achieve a situation in which both the possible paths in the interferometer are important for the experiment, but in very different ways,” says Tobias Denkmayr. “Along one of the paths, the particles themselves couple to our measurement device, but only the other path is sensitive to magnetic spin coupling. The system behaves as if the particles were spatially separated from their properties.”

High Hopes for High-Precision Measurements

This counter intuitive effect is very interesting for high precision measurements, which are very often based on the principle of quantum interference. “When the quantum system has a property you want to measure and another property which makes the system prone to perturbations, the two can be separated using a Quantum Cheshire Cat, and possibly the perturbation can be minimized,” says Stephan Sponar.

The idea of the Quantum Cheshire Cat was first developed by Prof. Jeff Tollaksen and Prof. Yakir Aharonov from the Chapman University. An experimental proposal was published last year. The measurements which have now been presented are the first experimental proof of this phenomenon.

Journal Reference:

Tobias Denkmayr, Hermann Geppert, Stephan Sponar, Hartmut Lemmel, Alexandre Matzkin, Jeff Tollaksen, Yuji Hasegawa. Observation of a quantum Cheshire Cat in a matter-wave interferometer experiment. Nature Communications, 2014; 5 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5492

Luxury cruise line accused of offering ‘environmental disaster tourism’ with high-carbon footprint Arctic voyage (The Independent)

29/07/2014UncategorizedAnimais, Biodiversidade, Capitalismo, Desastre, Ecologia, Mercado, Mudanças climáticas, Turismo, Ursos polaresrenzotaddei

Cruise passengers will pay upwards of £12,000 to see polar bears and humpback whales in their natural habitat – before it disappears

ADAM WITHNALL
Tuesday 29 July 2014

A luxury cruise operator in the US has announced it will offer a “once-in-a-lifetime” trip to experience the environmental devastation of the Arctic – using a mode of transport that emits three times more CO2 per passenger per mile than a jumbo jet.

It will be the first ever leisure cruise through the Northwest Passage, only accessible now because of the melting of polar ice, and is being marketed at those with an interest in witnessing the effects of climate change first-hand.

Tickets for the trip, scheduled for 16 August 2016 and organised by Crystal Cruises, will cost between $20,000 (£12,000) and $44,000.

Yet there is no mention on Crystal Cruises’ promotion or FAQ for the journey of the boat’s own carbon footprint.

Up to 1,070 passengers will be taken on the 32-day expedition to see seals, walruses, humpback whales and musk-ox – though the company admits there is “no guarantee” of catching a glimpse of a polar bear.

The bulk of the voyage will take place on the Crystal Serenity, a 68,000-ton, 13-deck ship, though it will also be accompanied by an escort vessel and a helicopter.

Popular Science described the trip as “environmental disaster tourism”, and quoted research which suggests that the carbon footprint of a cruise ship, per passenger per mile covered, is triple that of a Boeing 747 flight.

The company said passengers may be able to see endangered polar bears while on the cruise

The cruise promotion was criticised by social media users for giving people the opportunity to “see/help ruin the environment”, “watch the ravages of global warming in person and become a human vulture” and take a “high-carbon-footprint cruise to watch polar bears drown”.

World Ocean Observatory wrote: “Is no place safe from our intrusion, waste, and consumption?”

In an FAQ on its website, Crystal Cruises said 14 experts would be accompanying guests on the cruise to give lectures about the impacts on the environment around them of climate change, as well as the “historic” nature of their inaugural journey down the Northern Passage.

Company executive Thomas Mazloum told the website GCaptain: “During this voyage, speakers will enlighten guests on information regarding climate change, and how it has impacted this passage.

“With the recent retreat of polar ice, the time is right for us to lead the way within the travel industry, as Crystal has done throughout our 25-year history.”

Under the heading of “Environmental” on its FAQ, Crystal Cruises said both the main ship and escort vessel would “voluntarily use Marine Gas Oil, a low-sulphur fuel… well in excess of the existing environmental regulations”.

Global wildlife decline driving slave labor, organized crime (Science Daily)

29/07/2014UncategorizedAnimais, Biodiversidade, Crime organizado, Ecologia, Escravidão, Extinção, Interação humanos-animais, Violênciarenzotaddei

Date: July 24, 2014

Source: University of California – Berkeley

Summary: Global decline of wildlife populations is driving increases in violent conflicts, organized crime and child labor around the world, according to a experts. Researchers call for biologists to join forces with experts such as economists, political scientists, criminologists, public health officials and international development specialists to collectively tackle a complex challenge.

Global decline of wildlife populations is driving increases in violent conflicts, organized crime and child labor around the world, according to a policy paper led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The authors call for biologists to join forces with experts such as economists, political scientists, criminologists, public health officials and international development specialists to collectively tackle a complex challenge.

The paper, to be published Thursday, July 24, in the journal Science, highlights how losses of food and employment from wildlife decline cause increases in human trafficking and other crime, as well as foster political instability.

“This paper is about recognizing wildlife decline as a source of social conflict rather than a symptom,” said lead author Justin Brashares, associate professor of ecology and conservation at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. “Billions of people rely directly and indirectly on wild sources of meat for income and sustenance, and this resource is declining. It’s not surprising that the loss of this critical piece of human livelihoods has huge social consequences. Yet, both conservation and political science have generally overlooked these fundamental connections.”

Fishing and the rise of piracy

Fewer animals to hunt and less fish to catch demand increasingly greater effort to harvest. Laborers — many of whom are children — are often sold to fishing boats and forced to work 18-20 hour days at sea for years without pay.

“Impoverished families are relying upon these resources for their livelihoods, so we can’t apply economic models that prescribe increases in prices or reduced demand as supplies become scarce,” said Brashares. “Instead, as more labor is needed to capture scarce wild animals and fish, hunters and fishers use children as a source of cheap labor. Hundreds of thousands of impoverished families are selling their kids to work in harsh conditions.”

The authors connected the rise of piracy and maritime violence in Somalia to battles over fishing rights. What began as an effort to repel foreign vessels illegally trawling through Somali waters escalated into hijacking fishing — and then non-fishing — vessels for ransom.

“Surprisingly few people recognize that competition for fish stocks led to the birth of Somali piracy,” said Brashares. “For Somali fishermen, and for hundreds of millions of others, fish and wildlife were their only source of livelihood, so when that was threatened by international fishing fleets, drastic measures were taken.”

The authors also compared wildlife poaching to the drug trade, noting that huge profits from trafficking luxury wildlife goods, such as elephant tusks and rhino horns, have attracted guerilla groups and crime syndicates worldwide. They pointed to the Lord’s Resistance Army, al-Shabab and Boko Haram as groups known to use wildlife poaching to fund terrorist attacks.

Holistic solutions required

“This paper begins to touch the tip of the iceberg about issues on wildlife decline, and in doing so the authors offer a provocative and completely necessary perspective about the holistic nature of the causes and consequences of wildlife declines,” said Meredith Gore, a Michigan State University associate professor in the nascent field of conservation criminology who was not part of the study.

As potential models for this integrated approach, the authors point to organizations and initiatives in the field of climate change, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the United for Wildlife Collaboration. But the paper notes that those global efforts must also be accompanied by multi-pronged approaches that address wildlife declines at a local and regional scale.

“The most important bit from this article, I think, is that we need to better understand the factors that underlie fish and wildlife declines from a local perspective, and that interdisciplinary approaches are likely the best option for facilitating this understanding,” said Gore.

The authors give examples of local governments heading off social tension, such as the granting of exclusive rights to hunting and fishing grounds to locals in Fiji, and the control of management zones in Namibia to reduce poaching and improve the livelihoods of local populations.

“This prescribed re-visioning of why we should conserve wildlife helps make clearer what the stakes are in this game,” said UC Santa Barbara assistant professor Douglas McCauley, a co-author who began this work as a postdoctoral researcher in Brashares’ lab. “Losses of wildlife essentially pull the rug out from underneath societies that depend on these resources. We are not just losing species. We are losing children, breaking apart communities, and fostering crime. This makes wildlife conservation a more important job than it ever has been.”

Journal Reference:

J. S. Brashares, B. Abrahms, K. J. Fiorella, C. D. Golden, C. E. Hojnowski, R. A. Marsh, D. J. McCauley, T. A. Nunez, K. Seto, L. Withey. Wildlife decline and social conflict. Science, 2014; 345 (6195): 376 DOI: 10.1126/science.1256734

Uma (in)certa antropologia

An (un)certain anthropology

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Diet affects males’ and females’ gut microbes differently (Science Daily)

The Quantum Cheshire Cat: Can neutrons be located at a different place than their own spin? (Science Daily)

Luxury cruise line accused of offering ‘environmental disaster tourism’ with high-carbon footprint Arctic voyage (The Independent)

Global wildlife decline driving slave labor, organized crime (Science Daily)