A Tibetan monk self immolated near a police station Tuesday in Tawu, Kham, Tibet, calling for the return of the Dalai Lama, who is considered a criminal separatist in Tibet, and for Tibet to be free of Chinese rule.
Kalsang Yeshe, a man in his late 20s or early 30s, was a monk practicing at Nyitso monastery in the town of Tawu. Prior to the Chinese invasion of Tibet, Nyitso had been a large monastery of around 2,000 monks, but currently only 200 monks practice at the monastery.
The police station near which Kalsang self immolated was recently built near the monastery. Repression of monks and other Tibetans has been particularly severe near Nyitso in recent years, according to Save Tibet.
Reports of the self immolation come by way of exiled Tibetans in India, many of whom cannot return to Tibet for fear of charges under Chinese law for their support of Tibetan autonomy and the Dalai Lama. Communications from within Tibet are rare because such communications are illegal and are severely punished by Chinese authorities.
The self immolation was the third within one week. It is the 136th self immolation within Tibet, and the 142nd known self immolation for the cause of Tibetan freedom.
After the self immolation, armed police removed the body. Locals called for the body to be returned to them in order to preform traditional religious ceremonies.
Kalsang was described by one source who knew him at a monastery in exile as a very hard worker in the cause to protect and preserve Tibetan cultural language and identity.
The share of farmland tended by small farmers is shrinking. The land is changing hands. Although small farms are more productive than large farms and tend to grow food products–they produce 80 percent of the world’s food–they are being swallowed up by large corporate farms that grow high-profit crops for export markets. The land left to the largely food-producing small farms is currently only 24 percent of fertile land, and that number is declining sharply.
“Over the past decades, small farmers have been losing access to land at an incredible speed,” Henk Hobbelink, coordinator of GRAIN, told The Speaker. “If we don’t reverse this trend we will not only have more hungry farmers in the future, but the world as a whole will lose the capacity to feed itself.”
“What became very clear from our research is that increasingly fertile farmland is being taken over by huge industrial operations that produce commodities for the global market, not food for people,” Hobbelink told us. “Small farmers, who continue to produce most of the food in the world, are being pushed into an ever diminishing share of the world’s farmland.
“This trend has to be reversed if we want to be able to feed a growing population,” he said.
However, many governments and international organizations are offering grossly incorrect or misleading figures, according to GRAIN, such as those announced by representative’s of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) recent “State of Food and Agriculture“–which was dedicated to family farming.
At this year’s inauguration of the International Year of Family Farming, UN FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva stated that 70 percent of the world’s farmland was managed by families, echoing previous conclusions by the UN and other world organizations.
The percentage of farm land currently in the hands of small farms (an average of 2.2 hectares) is, according to GRAIN, actually less than 25 percent. Excluding China and India–where about half of all small farms are located–the ratio is less than one-fifth.
Similar findings were in evidence for every region of the world.
For example, in Belarus small farmers produced over 80 percent of fruits, vegetables, potatoes and vegetables with only 17 percent of the land. In Botswana, small farmers produced at least 90 percent of millet, maize and groundnuts with less than eight percent of the land.
“Because rural peoples’ access to land is under attack everywhere. From Honduras to Kenya and from Palestine to the Philippines, people are being dislodged from their farms and villages,” GRAIN found. “Those who resist are being jailed or killed. Widespread agrarian strikes in Colombia, protests by community leaders in Madagascar, nationwide marches by landless folk in India, occupations in Andalusia–the list of actions and struggles goes on and on.”
Eighty percent is also the figure given for the percentage of the world’s hungry people who live in rural areas. Many of these people are farmers or farmworkers.
Hobbelink explained this finding to us by saying that it was the result of small farmers simply not having enough land to produce food, and losing access to land at a rapid rate.
There were six general findings GRAIN found to be most compelling.
First, most of the world’s farms are shrinking. Second, the total of these farms account for less than 25 percent of the world’s farmland. Third, big farms are getting bigger, and small farms and farmers are losing to them. Fourth, despite this, small farms continue to be the world’s biggest food producers. Fifth, overall, small farms are more productive than big farms. Sixth, most small farmers are women.
Particularly surprising to the researchers was that land was becoming increasingly concentrated, despite extensive global agrarian reforms.
A “kind of reverse agrarian reform” is taking place in many countries, according to GRAIN. Most of this is happening through corporate land grabbing in Africa and foreign investment and massive farm expansion in Latin America and Asia.
Besides land concentration, among the forces causing small farms to collapse are population pressure and lack of access to land.
Even in India and Asia farms have been shrinking. In India, the size of the average farm is 50 percent of what it was in the 1970s, and in China farm sizes shrunk 25 percent between 1985 and 2000.
In Africa, where no official statistics for farmland concentration were available to GRAIN, researchers based their conclusions on research papers that indicated small farms were shrinking there as well.
Why small farms produce so much, and why they are losing to big corporate farms, was explained by GRAIN in their report: small farms tend to focus on food production, which is then bought from local markets and eaten. Large farms focus on return on investment, and tend to grow more export commodities such as animal feed, biofuels, and wood products. Thus, big farms, with maximized profits, are able to buy more land to produce high-profit commodities.
“Corporate farms a backed by big money, often from the finance industry, investment firms, etc.,” Hobbelink told us. “They are also able to access and influence political decisions at high level, and in this way often get handed over huge swaths of land at incredible low prices or for free. In the meanwhile, small farmers don’t have access to credit, and are up against agricultural policies that discriminate against them.”
Besides that, however, small farms tend to be more productive than large farms anyway, according to GRAIN. This phenomenon, which has been termed “the productivity paradox” because it seems contrary to what many people are told, is evinced in statistics. In nine EU countries, small farms have at least double the productivity of large farms, and the other countries show only slightly higher productivity for large farms. According to their findings, GRAIN calculated that if large farms in some Central American and African nations were as productive as small farms, national agricultural production would double.
In its findings, GRAIN also pointed out that big farms are less productive even with more resource consumption, the best land, most of the irrigation water, and better credit and technical assistance.
Much of the disparity is also due to differences in labor, GRAIN concluded. Big farms cut labor to maximize profits, and this labor is needed for better production.
“There are multiple factors at play,” Hobbelink told us. “In countries with big population growth, farmers without access to more land are forced to divide their land amongst their children. Expansion of urban areas into farmland, the same for mining, tourism, etc. But perhaps the most important factor is the global expansion of industrial plantation farming encroaching upon areas where small farmers and indigenous peoples live.
“The reason why small farmers still produce the majority of the world’s food is twofold. On one hand–as we show in our report–they are simply more efficient, more productive, than the large industrial plantations. And on the other hand they prioritize their land use towards producing food, while industrial plantations mostly produce commodities that no one can eat, or that need a lot of processing before they end up in our food: soybean, oilpalm, sugarcane, rapeseed, etc.”
“The bottom line is that land is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of the rich and powerful, not that small farmers are doing well,” GRAIN concluded.
“Today, small farmers feed the world and we need them to continue to do so,” said Hobbelink. “If we don’t reverse the current trend of the corporate takeover of the worlds farmland to produce industrial commodities, they will not be able to do so and we will all lose out.”
Statistically, New York police shoot more often at blacks than at whites–by about 700 percent. But, statistically blacks are armed and shoot at police more often than whites–by over 700 percent, according to national statistics and the NYPD’s annual firearms discharge report. In light of the recent “Black Lives Matter” protests in New York following the decision not to indict white NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo for the death of unarmed black New Yorker Eric Garner, some experts have been dismayed by current popular misunderstandings and misrepresentations, as well as by the creation of what they call a “moral panic” about policing in the US.
“Nobody is in denial here that there is a racial problem in America–however, pining the problem on the police profession, in general, and police officers specifically will lead to an even greater divide and injustice and, furthermore, will weaken and eventually collapse our democracy,” Dr. Maria Maki Haberfeld, professor and chairperson at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told The Speaker.
Dr. Maria Maki Haberfeld
“I have written about this extensively, over the years, and I am beyond depressed with what is happening right now.
“[The] stats seems to be reflective of what is indeed the situation in the country and reflect, to a high degree, what we refer to as the ‘Moral Panic Theory,’ when the general public, fed by the media coverage of some exaggerated and/or misleading accounts, where the impression is that ‘Black lives do not matter’ responds to this mantra without posing for a moment to look at the numbers and realize that black lives indeed do matter to the police departments and police officers around the country, yet they appear not to matter to the black population itself.”
Haberfeld qualified that her comments related to the statistics and the numbers and that she made no judgments specifically about the two most recent cases of Mr. Brown and Mr. Garner. She was, she said, “responding to the moral panic rhetoric that claims that these two incidents are representative of policing in the US.”
“We have around 18,000 police departments in this country and close to 800,000 armed police officers, so statistically speaking you also have something here that doesn’t show a trend of “trigger happy” officers.”
Haberfeld noted that the context in which police shootings take place was also important when considering shooting deaths.
“If somebody threatened to kill their spouse, for example, and was killed by a police officer–then this killing is not something that can be understood from the perspective of sheer number, it was a justified killing, so, I would rather comment about how many unjustified killings were there and still, some will always feel that all the killings by the police are unjustified.”
New York is America’s largest police authority by far, policing over 9 million people with around 35,000 officers.
According to the NYPD’s Annual Firearms Discharge Report, the most recent of which is for 2012, blacks killed by police equates roughly with the incidence of armed blacks encountered by police and with the incidence of blacks shooting at police.
Most of the officers who discharged their firearms were white (53 percent), followed by hispanic (32 percent) and black (12 percent). The 53 percent for whites was roughly on par with their percentage in the department (52 percent). Blacks were slightly
underrepresented–16 percent of staff but only 12 percent of shootings. Hispanics were slightly overrepresented in 2012–26 percent of staff, but 32 percent of shootings.
NYPD records showed that of armed civilians encountered by police in 2012, 75 percent were black. 13 percent were hispanic and 9 percent were white.
Of civilians who fired at police, 79 percent were black, 16 percent were hispanic and 5 percent white.
This marked an increase in armed blacks from 2011 when 56 percent of adversarial conflicts involved am armed black civilian. Armed Hispanics accounted for 30 percent and whites 15 percent in 2011. Of those who actually shot and hit a police officer, 43 percent were black, 36 percent were Hispanic and 21 percent white.
The yearly report also found that blacks were the race most frequently shot at by police, with roughly similar figures.
Of those shot at by police, 69 percent were black, 17 percent Hispanic and 10 percent were white. Sixty-nine percent of those killed by police were black, while Hispanics and whites each made up 12.5 percent of the picture. The report found that of approximately 35,000 uniformed officers employed by the NYPD, who responded to approximately five million calls–250,000 of which involved weapons, 60 officers (or 0.17 percent) intentionally fired their weapon at a civilian. Meanwhile, officers made 26,091 weapons arrests that included 6,000 gun arrests. Over 26,000 of the 26,091 weapons arrests were completed without an officer firing his or her weapon.
“Again statistically speaking this is not a significant number,” commented Haberfeld, “given the fact that many of these shootings were justified because the people who were shot were armed and dangerous.”
Blacks are also more frequently encountered by police answering calls with regards to violent crime. Nationwide, blacks are over 700 percent as likely to commit violent crimes than whites, and when they do, they are almost three times more likely than non-Blacks to use a gun and over twice as likely to use a knife. The victims of violent crimes committed by blacks are usually white (45 percent), which is significantly higher than the victims of violent crimes committed by whites. Only three percent of criminal violence by whites is directed at blacks. In other words, blacks are around 39 times as likely to commit a violent crime against a white person than vice versa.
The trend is a little different when murder is at issue, however. Unlike violent crime in general, homicides are most frequently committed by and against a person of the same race, with black on white being only a few percent more common than white on black homicide.
Recently, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani commented on the recent police shooting deaths in New York and referenced the statistic that, “Ninety-three percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks. We’re talking about the exception here.”
From 1980 to 2008, 94 percent of black homicide victims were killed by blacks, and 84 percent of white victims were killed by whites.
Statistically. the main killer of blacks when it comes to violent deaths is other blacks. US-wide, around 8,000 blacks were killed every year between 1976 and 2011, and 94 percent of those were killed by other blacks. Of those 8,000 around 2.8 percent were killed by police.
“The overwhelming majority of black victims are killed by black perpetrators and NOT the police,” noted Haberfeld.
In St Louis, which has experienced prolonged demonstrations and riot over the past months in the wake of the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown, just under two percent of the 1,265 murder victims between 2003 and 2012 were attributed to police, while 90 percent of the deaths–1,138 killings–were attributed to black civilians.
Blacks, however, have been found to perceive that police are targeting them based on race. A Pew study last year found that 70 percent of blacks feel that police treat whites better. Thirty-seven percent of whites agreed.
The sentiment that police target blacks has been given voice recently by US President Barack Obama and other politicians and public figures. This month, Obama said that blacks’ distrust of police was “rooted in realities” and that the black reaction to the verdict was “an understandable reaction.” The sheer numbers of black deaths was highlighted by liberal black professor and author Marc Lamont Hill in a recent debate, who stated, “Every 28 hours. Every 28 hours, Larry. Larry, every 28 hours. According to the MXGM study, a black person is killed by law enforcement, vigilantes or security…”
Haberfeld stated that she did not feel that numbers would provide the whole picture, however.
“In general, I believe that police work cannot be simply understood by the analysis of sheer numbers.”
“As to what I think the public needs to understand about policing? Well, first and foremost the fact that police organizations are political entities that operate based on what the local, state or federal politicians mandate them to do. I can assure you that no police chief or commissioner comes up with his/her own operational priorities, without having them approved or, to begin with, designed by the politicians–a Mayor for the local, municipal forces, Governor for the State Police and the President for the Federal law enforcement agencies.
“So, if certain groups within the public feel that there is something profoundly wrong with the way police agencies operate then they should direct their anger at the politicians and demand their resignation or change of whatever it is they feel that is wrong, be it recruitment, selection, training, supervision and discipline of police officers.”
A 19-year-old Tibetan woman has become the 135th Tibetan to self immolate in protest of Chinese rule and policies. The woman, known as Tseypey, self immolated and chanted prayers as she burned.
She died on the scene, reportedly, and her body was removed by police. Internet access in the area has been restricted and phone lines blocked, reportedly.
Tseypey self immolated in the center of a town in Ngaba, Amdo, Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Monday, as reported by Save Tibet.
The woman hailed from Meruma township. She was the fourth of six children, and was described as “well-behaved, honest and gentle” by monks living in exile in Dharamsala, India.
She had worked as a herder with her family, who have since been taken away by police. It is not known whether the parents are currently detained, but Tibetans have been charged as accessories under Chinese law in the past when relatives and associates have self immolated.
Tseypey was the 135th Tibetan to self immolate within the country in protest of repressive and abusive Chinese policies. She is the third to self immolate this month.
[Video warning. This video is graphic and depicts the remains of a burned human body.]
While attacks from Muslim terrorist outfits in various parts of the world are making headlines, the Boko Haram made sure that their efforts to break the human spirit in Nigeria did not go unnoticed.
Released late on Saturday to journalists, a video landed on the internet just two days after reports of the Boko Haram rounding up helpless elderly captives and killing them in schools in Gwoza made headlines.
The “infidels” were massacred in a long dormitory with bunk beds in a school in Bama, some 40 miles north of Gwoza were the elderly were earlier rounded up.
The horrific NSFW video shows a substantial number of adult men, some of whom are still twitching for life as the gunmen tried to step over the corpses left behind in the aftermath.
The leader of the Boko Haram Abubakar Shekau said,“We have made sure the floor of this hall is turned red with blood, and this is how it is going to be in all future attacks and arrests of infidels. From now, killing, slaughtering, destructions and bombing will be our religious duty anywhere we invade.”
The video also quotes the leader of the Boko Haram saying, “we felt this is not the right time for us to keep prisoners; that is why we will continue to see that the grounds are crimsoned with the flowing blood of prisoners.” in reference to the Prophet’s teachings regarding taking one prisoner.
After falsely promising to spare the lives of residents as long as they were not enemies of the proposed Islamic Caliphate they swore to bring in Nigeria, the Boko Haram have reneged and unleashed a killing spree along the region in the north-eastern Nigeria bordering Cameroon.
The Boko Haram has declared that anyone claiming to be a Muslim is an infidel. The Sunni jihadists that follow Shariah law rose to a notorious prominence after they kidnapped nearly 200 Christian schoolgirls from Chibok.
Dubbed one of 2014 biggest failures, the #bringbackourgirls campaign has done nothing but draw attention to Boko Haram’s heinous crimes which started in 2009. Since the insurgency, schools, children, women, men and the elderly have been murdered mercilessly forcing nearly more than 2 million people to flee from Nigeria and neighbouring Cameroon, Chad and Niger.
Language facilitates the global flow of ideas, and elite languages in global communications are those that are both literate and online, according to new research that has mapped information flows across languages. Certain languages have been found to be much more powerful than others, because they are more and better connected within the communications networks of the world, while others are relatively weaker. Some smaller languages are stronger than languages spoken by much larger groups of people however, due to political and other reasons.
“The global influence of a language is determined by its connections to other languages, not by its number of speakers or their economic power, as these connections make possible the global transfer of ideas,” MIT’s Shahar Ronen, first author of the study, told The Speaker.
Shahar Ronen
Ronen explained how some language speakers–those who speak central languages–have a disproportionate amount of power and responsibility because their communications are “tacitly shaping the way in which distant cultures see each other,” while other language groups are handicapping themselves with policies that restrict or disconnect people from global communications networks (GLNs).
“Think about it this way: if the English-speaking world did not care about the 2014 events in Ukraine, the rest of the world would have a very hard time learning about it as well.”
“A government that disconnects its people from the internet–e.g., as China does with its Great Firewall–hamstrings its ability to gain global influence,” said Ronen. “Governments concerned with boosting international soft power should invest in translating more documents and encourage more people to tweet in their national language. Contemporary China and Russia produce very few international thought leaders, and leave little legacy for future generations.”
The study generated maps of connections between communications media–including 30 years worth of book translations in 150 countries, 550 million Tweets in 73 languages, and multiple language editions of Wikipedia pages.
“We mapped three global language networks from three sources: Twitter, Wikipedia and book translations,” Ronen explained. “These sources are by no means representative of the world’s population; rather, they represent the elites that generate and propagate ideas around the world.”
The team found that the more central a given language was to the network, the more famous its speakers were predicted to be–more so than other factors such as population and wealth.
Centrality was based on both strength and number of connections, the team found. The three GLNs identified by the team centered on English as a global hub. That hub is connected to secondary hubs–Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Chinese and Russian.
“For example, it is easy for an idea conceived by a Spaniard to reach an Englishman through bilingual speakers of English and Spanish,” said Ronen. “An idea conceived by a Vietnamese speaker, however, might only reach a Mapudungun speaker in south-central Chile through a circuitous path that connects bilingual speakers of Vietnamese and English, English and Spanish, and Spanish and Mapudungun.”
Many of the world’s people are to a degree left out of the global conversation–those who do not communicate in an elite language–and these people face profound limitations. This extends to both languages that are not spoken by relatively large amounts of people and languages are spoken by significant populations but that are limited for other reasons, Ronen said.
“The truly disenfranchised, at least as global communication is concerned, are those whose language don’t even show up on our network. That said, speakers of languages such as Chinese or Arabic, both a with low centrality given their number of speakers, are disadvantaged as well, as they are less likely to be exposed to the latest and greatest ideas in their fields and well not be able to communicate theirs globally. Consider a researcher who speaks only Chinese who will not be exposed to work by her peers abroad, or a CEO who speaks only Arabic.”
Ronen highlighted the importance of learning more than one language–particularly top elite languages.
“Learning a new language opens up a new part of the world for the learner and broadens his/her perspective. Achieving reasonable fluency in English is one of the best investments an individual in any country and any occupation can make. If you already speak English, learning another language is still valuable. If you have a specific goal such as doing business in a certain country, learning that country’s language will be highly beneficial.
“If you’re looking for a language that can open new opportunities for you in general, our study can inform you which languages to consider–Spanish or French are great options. From a global point of view, more multilinguals mean more and stronger connections between languages, which in turn facilitate the global flow of ideas.
Memory was considered the greatest faculty of mind before the invention of printing. Greek philosophers, Roman lawyers and Medieval European priests practiced the art by storing memories within mentally constructed architecture and objects. Recently, a study has found that rooms may be just how memory is stored.
“Each place–or room in your house–is represented by a unique map or memory and because we have so many different maps we can remember many similar places without mixing then up,” Dr. Charlotte Alme, PhD student Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience/Centre for Neural Computation Medical Technical Research Centre at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and lead researcher on the study, told The Speaker.
Dr. Charlotte Alme
“[W]e just published a paper where we see that rats–and most likely humans–have a map for each individual place, and this is why the method of loci works.”
“Episodic memory is characterized by an apparently astronomical storage capacity,” the reserachers framed their study, commenting on the thousands of new experiences that are encoded in the mind every day. These memories are thought to be stored on neural network properties of the hippocampus.
Alme provided some basic context for understanding the work.
“Memories are thought to be stored in physical networks of neurons that are connected to each other. Memories consist of many sensory pieces of information that are associated–when our brain encodes a personal experience, something in common is: what happened where and when.
“The connections between the neurons involved in encoding an experience are modified and strengthened in order to make a memory for that event. This means that when we years later smell an odor for example, we can remember the whole episode just by getting a cue–the odor–presented.
“We know now that the hippocampus is involved in formation of episodic–autobiographical–and spatial memories, in both humans and rats. The hippocampus is an evolutionarily very old part of the brain, conserved across mammals. Accordingly, we can investigate the spatial component of memory in rats and at the same time figure out how our memory system works. We have known for a long time that there are place specific cells in the hippocampus.
Experimental setup and procedure and photographs of all 11 rooms
“The place cells that are active in restricted areas of an environment are also reactivated if a rat–or a human–experiences a previously known location–the place cell fires at the exact same location meaning that a memory for that particular place is formed. When a rat is placed in a different room, the place cell changes its firing location and that tells us that the rat knows it is in a different room.”
The current research, Alme said, was a matter of conducting a test to validate one of two possible theories.
“We wondered, what happens if we introduce many very similar rooms to a rat while we look at the firing response of the place cells. Will we see a generalization over all–or some–of the environments so that many place cells fire at the same location across all the rooms? Alternatively, the rat will create unique maps for each location and thus be able to separate between many and very similar experiences. Indeed, we observed the latter scenario because we can combine the 11 rooms in 55 ways to compare the rooms with each other, and when none of the room representations or memories overlap, this tells us that we have an enormously large storage capacity for memories in the brain.
In the research, the team found a complete lack of any overlap between spacial maps despite exposing the animals to a range of rooms with similar sensory features, which means that CA3 place cells may well form unique spacial representations for every single environment.
Method of Loci figure and place cell maps that we actually recorded from the rats to show that each room is represented by its own map
“We recorded from on average 50 neurons in each rat and the rat hippocampus consist of hundreds of thousands of cells, in other words we can create and store very many memories throughout our lifetime.”
The team did not in their research find evidence to make detailed guesses about the bounds of memory capacity in CA3.
The work has important implications for the traditionally practiced arts of memory. Throughout history, people accross cultures have developed and trained themselves in nmemonic arts that are based on mentally constructing physical architecture and objects. For example, Romans would search through a mental apartment until they found a piece of legislation, and Medeival monks would memorize sermons by organizing important aspects of those sermons as mental objects stored appropriately in mental architecture.
“The findings of our paper also help to explain how the ancient Method of Loci works. Because we are extremely good at remembering places and because we are very visual creatures, this combination can be utilized when you want to remember something.
Alme explained how this can work.
“Associate what you want to remember to a place that you know well, e.g. your own house. Your own house consists of several rooms, or loci. Create a mental path through your house and in each room you connect or associate what you want to remember with something you place in that room. When you have made all the associations, you can recall or remember everything by taking a mental walk through your house again.
“For example as this cartoon shows: in the kitchen there are chilies flying in the air, the country to remember is Chile. Next to the kitchen, in the dining room your friend Tina is very angry–Argentina. In the living room there is a seal playing bras, Brazil. Up the staircase there is a Globus with a red band around equator–Ecuador. In the attic Columbus is lying on a bed watching TV–Columbia.
“You create your own associations, the stranger the associations the easier they are to remember!”
The research has pushed forward our understanding of how memories are stored in place cells in the hippocampal area CA3. It had not been known whether the cells maintain independence when the number of memorized environments is increased.
The report, “Place cells in the hippocampus: Eleven maps for eleven rooms,” was completed by Charlotte B. Alme, Chenglin Miao, Karel Jezek, Alessandro Treves, Edvard I. Moser, and May-Britt Moser, a join-team of researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for Neural Computation along with colleagues from the Czech Republic and Italy, and was published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) website.
Images: the work of the researchers, Nature Reviews, the Palace Project
Arguably the biggest science story of the week was the discovery of material evidence of dark matter. In this two-part article, two lead researchers on the report explain their findings and the significance of the work. Their accounts are full of–besides beautiful explanations of cutting-edge physics research in layman’s terms–potent philosophy and enthralling sentiment about what these scientists are doing and what will come.
Never-before detected elements have been found by a group of European physicists looking for anomalies in signals emanating from several galaxies. The findings–pieces of “missing Lego” in the words of researcher Dr. Oleksii Boiarskyi–will validate some of the approaches currently being undertaken to understand the universe while invalidating others, and will bring us one step closer to the complete picture of physics.
Dr. Oleksii Boiarskyi
“If this signal is confirmed, we will have a completely new tool to study the structure of our Universe, it’s ‘dark side’ and also its history, how did it form,” Dr. Oleksii Boiarskyi of the Instituut-Lorentz for Theoretical Physics and and Leiden University told The Speaker.
“On the particle physics level, we will know more about the missing Lego elements that where used to build this Universe–and that we did not detect so far. This will support some approaches extending our knowledge and will disfavour the others.
“We would make one more step towards the complete picture of physics.”
The team detected anomalies in signals–photon emissions in X-ray spectra–using the European Space Agency’s (ESA) XMM-Newton telescope (feature image). The anomalies were something the the team had been seeking–they were acting on a hypothesis that dark matter occasionally decayed, and that they could pick up signals that represented that decaying dark matter. They found just that.
The findings, if confirmed, would be the first ever evidence of the heretofore undetectable material that accounts for an estimated 80 percent of our universe.
Boiarskyi explained to us what the signal was that they had detected, and what it was like reading the data.
“We study the spectra of galaxies and clusters of galaxies,” said Boiarskyi. “This is a function, a number of photons detected for each energy.
“It has a smooth–continuous–part and narrow lines. The lines come from various atomic transitions and continuum from just emission of accelerated charged particles.
“We can find a model that describes all these emissions and find a good fit for the data. If a statistically significant residual to this model exists, this means that there is another line, that is coming from some additional quantum transition.
“In our case the position and normalisation of this lines are not like you expect from atomic transition. Moreover, it changes over the sky as DM density–projected along the line of sight.
“That is why there is a conjecture that this could come from decay of DM particles. You can check this conjecture by comparing signals from various DM dominating objects. So far it is consistent.”
It is not certain whether the type of dark matter found by the team accounts for the full 80 percent of currently unknown matter expected to exist, or whether there were a variety of dark matters.
“Nobody knows,” said Boiarskyi, “both are possible. But of course one first tries a minimal model with one sort of DM.”
Confirmation could be a year away, Boiarskyi told us.
“[W]e still need to wait about a year, once new data are available, to check if this hypothesis is correct or not. If DM will be discovered once, most likely it will be a story similar to the one we are having now…”
Arguably the biggest science story of the week was the discovery of material evidence of dark matter. In this two-part article, two lead researchers on the report explain their findings and significance of the work. Their accounts are full of–besides beautiful explanations of cutting-edge physics research in layman’s terms–potent philosophy and enthralling sentiment about what these scientists are doing and what will come.
Setting out with the hypothesis that dark matter occasionally though rarely decays, European physicists pointed the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton telescope at faraway galaxies to seek evidence of the common, though never seen, material that makes up an estimated 80 percent of our universe–in signal anomalies. In his explanation of the recent work, researcher Dr Oleg Ruchayskiy pointed to the era we are now entering, in which our vision and understanding will reach what we have not before known–both in terms of nature and of time.
Dr. Oleg Ruchayskiy
“Dark structures that surround us will become ‘visible,'” Dr. Oleg Ruchayskiy, physicist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and one of the authors of the study, told The Speaker. “Dark matter distribution is not expected to be perfectly smooth and its clumps and streams–they carry important information about the past of the Milky way or the Local Group. We will be able to visualize and maybe even tell the story of ‘our Galactic past.’
“This will be the epoch of ‘astronomical archaeology–looking at the events that happened a billion years ago.”
“The fact that this can be possible–to explore by the power of our minds the regions of space and periods of time, incomparable with the lifespan of humans–isn’t it beautiful?”
Ruchayskiy commented on the kinds of improvements that were in store for humanity as our ability to see our universe was expanded to the perception of dark matter.
“Another thing about our research: if this signal is real dark matter decay–we will soon be able to build ‘dark matter telescopes.’ We will be able to do 3D tomography of our own galaxy and of nearby Universe. We will even be able to look into the past of our Universe.
Ruchayskiy explained the teams recent work.
“We were testing the hypothesis that this particle is _the same_ in different galaxies and in the galaxy clusters. Otherwise it would be very difficult to cross-check this signal.”
The physicist provided details about what the signal was that they found–how it was characterized and where it was located–and about the course of the study, which happily coincided with similar results from a completely separate team of physicists.
“Just to give you some background info. We were looking at X-ray spectra of galaxies and galaxy clusters. X-rays do not pass through the atmosphere, therefore all X-ray satellites are in space. So, the data is just files. In essence, the file is very simple: it tells you how many X-ray photons of a given energy had arrive from a given direction.
“It is more or less known how the X-ray signal from a galaxy should look. That is, ‘given X photons of energy 1 keV, we expect Y photons of energy 2 keV,’ etc. This is called ‘an X-ray spectrum of a galaxy’–or any other object.
“So, we were analyzing the spectrum of the Andromeda galaxy we found that there are ‘extra photons’ at energy around 3.5 keV. Several hundreds of them.
“This was not an “accident”–we were looking for these photons. We had a hypothesis, that dark matter particles are not stable, but occasionally decay. This happens very rarely. Any given particle has a probability of something like 1/billion to decay. But in a galaxy like our there are 10^70 such particles, so the resulting signal may be sizable. We searched for such signal for many years–and so did other groups–so we knew that it should be small…
“We found such a signal in Andromeda.
“A signal in one particular object could be anything: fluctuation, emission of ions, instrumental error. So, we looked at the data from a different object–the Perseus galaxy cluster. The galaxies and galaxy clusters have very different X-ray emissions. But masses of both types of objects are ‘dark matter dominated.’ So, seeing a line there was necessary. And we did find the signal. Moreover, we saw that the signal is redshifted–as Perseus is farther away from us–which excluded the instrumental origin of the signal. We saw that the signal’s intensity scales correctly (because the dark matter mass in Perseus cluster is different from that of Andromeda galaxy). We saw that signal becomes weaker as one goes to the outskirts of the cluster because dark matter is more concentrated towards the center — all this was consistent with the decaying dark matter hypothesis.
“Later we did another work where we have found a similar line from the center of our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. And again, its intensity fell into the predicted range.
“Independently from us and at the same time–even couple of days earlier–another group from Harvard CfA/NASA–you probably had seen the press releases of their result–had found a signal at the same energy in various galaxy clusters–both nearby and distant. Their work is completely independent, uses different observations. This is of course extremely important, that this are the independent results of two groups. And that these groups confirm each other–we haven’t seen each other’s works prior to publication on arXiv.”
Next the team will probe space for signals that would corroborate their hypothesis.
“Our strategy now is: find this signal from many dark matter dominated objects, show that its intensity is proportional to the total amount of dark matter in each object.”
Ruchayskiy elaborated on the breadth of work that remained to fill in the full picture of dark matter–namely the possibility of various types of dark matter, which we asked him about.
“Testing a hypothesis that this is only one component of dark matter and there are other types of particles would be harder, because than we need to know whether a portion of decaying particles changes from object from object and this depends on the model of dark matter.
“[W]e were specifically looking for these particles and for this type of signal. We did not know the energy, so we were scanning the energies.
“So, this road, from an idea that dark matter particle could be unstable to seeing an actual signal–it is breathtaking. The fact that people can grasp with their minds something about the whole Universe–it is very fascinating for me. And any ‘predictions’ that becomes a ‘confirmed signal’–this is very impressive. It’s a feeling that is hard to express. Of course, our signal is not unique in this aspect. Every scientific discovery is like that. Which makes it even more fascinating.”
Southeastern Asia’s rivers and lakes will be dramatically affected if China builds the dozens of dams already planned for construction. These dams would divert the water that supplies its countries with much of its population of fish, the regions primary source of food.
With it’s population of over 1.2 billion, China’s energy needs are constantly growing. They believe they’ve found a solution in hydroelectric power, utilizing the many rivers that begin in the Tibetan Plateau in the western part of the country. In fact, they already have more than half the number of dams in the world, and that number is expected to rise quickly over the coming years.
While China is creating its much needed power, downstream the effects of these dams are wreaking havoc on the fish populations in Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries. This is critical to the millions of people in the region who depend on the fishing industry to survive. As Youk Senglong, program manager at the Fisheries Action Coalition Team (FACT) states, “Community livelihoods depend on fish. The villagers fish every day for their income–they really worry about dams.”
Cambodia’s Tonle Sap lake, the largest in Asia, is thought to have the world’s largest number of fish in the world. However,the lake is fed directly by the Mekong River, which is having it’s flow diverted by the dams upstream. A decrease in the number of fish would have a huge impact on the diet of the population, as the average Cambodian consumes 63 kilograms of fish annually versus 16 for the rest of the world. Other livestock doesn’t account for nearly the amount of protein obtained from fish, says Eric Baran, a scientist at World Food. “Cambodia is a country where fish production is three times higher than pig production and 20 times higher than chicken production. If Cambodia loses fisheries, it will take decades for the livestock or aquaculture sectors to catch up,” he said.
Since studies generally underestimate the numbers of harvested fish in rivers that would be impacted by future dams, their construction is more easily given a green light, says Simon Funge-Smith, senior fisheries officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He also said that the value of human life pales in comparison to the need to build the dams. “Dam projects typically undervalue fish and their role in nutrition and food security. It’s hard to attribute dollar values to a healthy child or normal development–until you lose it.”
A significant amount of the world’s plastic ends up in our oceans, which has caused something of a mystery for ecologists, who until recently had found evidence of only tens of thousands of tons of that garbage rather than the millions they expected would be floating on the surface. Now a joint-team of researchers has found evidence that plastic particles have been accumulating in deep sea sediment for the past century. But some questions remain–namely the how of the problem. Lead researcher Dr Lucy Woodall points to various methods by which the plastic is making its way to the bottom–methods which reflect the specific nature of the waters in which garbage is discarded.
The team–composed of researchers from the Natural History Museum of London, the Scottish Marine Institute, and the universities of Barcelona, Oxford, and Plymouth– looked at samples of from 12 sites over three bodies of water: the Atlantic, the Indian, and Mediterranean. The samples were collected between 2001 and 2012 at depths of 300-3,000 meters, and contained high levels of plastic garbage particles–called “microplastics” for their size of less than 1mm.
While the surface of the ocean is “mysteriously” clean of garbage–only around 35,000 of the millions of tons of plastic garbage currently in our oceans are expected to still be at the surface–the deposits in the ocean’s sediment were mixed with 1,000 times that amount of plastic.
The finding by the joint team marks an important step in understanding how plastics make their way through ocean ecosystems. The mystery remains, however, as to how the plastics make their way from the surface to the sediment.
“We speculate that similar oceanographic mechanisms as act on plastic fibers act on other particles, such as dense shelf cascading, severe coastal storms, offshore convection and saline subduction,” Woodall told us. “We suggest additionally that ‘Colonization by organisms, adherence to phytoplankton and the aggregation with organic debris and small particles in the form of marine snow will eventually enhance settling.’
“Specific topography of the deep sea will also carry with it specific processes, for example submarine canyons are known to act as conduits to deep areas, and taylor columns–specific currents–over seamounts could result in retention of plastics at these sites.”
Although the total garbage accumulated in the earth’s oceans are calculated at hundreds of thousands to millions of tons, this is only a fraction of the total plastic produced and discarded. A recent study found that the amount of garbage in the ocean is only around 0.1 percent of the amount we produce each year.
“Further studies specifically addressing the process of plastics moving to depth are required so that we can begin to understand the impact of these pollutants in the environment,” said Woodall.
The report, “The deep sea is a major sink for microplastic debris,” was completed by Lucy C. Woodall, Anna Sanchez-Vidal, Miquel Canals, Gordon L.J. Paterson, Rachel Coppock, Victoria Sleight, Antonio Calafat, Alex D. Rogers, Bhavani E. Narayanaswamy, and Richard C. Thompson, and was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science this week.
Danger lurks within each moment of our lives. Coupled with a lack of awareness and a stroke of bad luck, simple recreational activities could easily spiral down into a monumental disaster. Take a one-man fishing trip, for example.
67-year-old fisherman Ron Ingraham spent twelve days out in the rocky seas, exposed to the elements and harsh weather, with at least a couple hundred miles between the boater and his home in Hawaii, before the Coast Guard found him on Dec. 9 after he had made a last resort distress call from his makeshift radio.
Ingraham was found atop Malia, his 25-foot sailboat. He was described as weak, dehydrated and hungry, with almost no food and water supplies left, his boat with a broken mast but, much to everyone’s relief, he is alive and uninjured.
Recounting Ingraham’s tale, he set off alone on Nov. 27 from Molokai going to Lanai, a trip that he is more than capable to be doing. Unfortunately, weather conditions did not cooperate with him, forcing his ship to be taken by the water and him to make his first distress signal.
According to the U.S. Coast Guard, they had responded to his initial mayday call and launched a search effort, spanning an area of over 12,000 square miles and 59 flights with the Navy. However, with no results being produced, the search had to be called off at the time, only to be picked back up again when Ingraham’s second distress signal came twelve days later, designating his location to be around 64 miles south from Honolulu.
The crew of the Hawaii-based destroyer ship, Paul Hamilton, immediately responded to the Coast Guard’s directions to pick him up, as they were 14 miles away from where he was. They arrived half an hour later and gave him shelter until the Coast Guard arrived and took Ingraham–along with his boat in tow–back to land.
When asked how is was that he managed to survive for so long on his own, Ingraham said that he was fighting for his very life, eating the raw fish that he caught.
“I was way out there, and I was out of water, but I hydrated on fish,” Ingraham would say as he explained that he lived off from the moisture that his catches provided.
Currently, Ingraham is taking time off from his life as a fisherman as he plans to reunite with his 43-year-old son, whom he had not conversed with in 15 years.
NYPD records showed that of armed civilians encountered by police in 2012, 75 percent were black. 13 percent were hispanic and 9 percent were white.
Of civilians who fired at police, 79 percent were black, 16 percent were hispanic and 5 percent white.
The report found that of approximately 35,000 uniformed officers employed by the NYPD, who responded to approximately five million calls–250,000 of which involved weapons, 60 officers (or 0.17 percent) intentionally fired their weapon at a civilian. Meanwhile, officers made 26,091 weapons arrests that included 6,000 gun arrests. Over 26,000 of the 26,091 weapons arrests were completed without an officer firing his or her weapon.
“You create your own associations, the stranger the associations the easier they are to remember!”
