Month: March 2016

Here’s Why the Moon has Tilted Over Time

The moon may not have always had the same face pointed toward the Earth. Instead, the “Man in the Moon” nodded up and down, due to heating and volcanic eruptions on the side facing Earth.

Researchers made the discovery while trying to explain maps of lunar polar hydrogen. The hydrogen, discovered by NASA’s Lunar Prospector mission in the 1990s, is believed to represent water ice, protected from the sun’s rays in cold, permanently shadowed craters near the moon’s north and south poles. If ice were exposed to direct sunlight on the moon, it would boil off into space, so it is a very sensitive tracer of the moon’s orientation with time.

A vast hotspot of intense volcanism underneath the dark, blotchy “face” of the moon known as Oceanis Procellarum (red area on right) resulted in less density there than in other parts of the moon. To restore balance, the moon’s axis shifted by six degrees. Traces of water ice deposits near the poles outline the movement from the location of the ancient (blue) to the present pole (teal). (Credit: James Keane)
A vast hotspot of intense volcanism underneath the dark, blotchy “face” of the moon known as Oceanis Procellarum (red area on right) resulted in less density there than in other parts of the moon. To restore balance, the moon’s axis shifted by six degrees. Traces of water ice deposits near the poles outline the movement from the location of the ancient (blue) to the present pole (teal).  Click/tap for larger image. (Credit: James Keane)

“Weirdly, the moon’s ice isn’t exactly at the coldest spots on the north or south poles of the moon,” says Matt Siegler, a scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona and first author of a new paper published in Nature.

Instead, the polar ice is shifted off the poles by about six degrees, and in exact opposite directions at either pole. (On the Earth, six degrees is about equal to the distance from Tucson to Los Angeles.)

This precisely opposite (“antipodal”) relationship indicates that the moon’s spin axis—the imaginary line that runs from the north pole, through the center of the moon, to the south pole, and around which the moon rotates—shifted over the last few billion years. As the moon reoriented, it left behind a trail of water ice, effectively “painting out” the path that the poles took with time.

The moon’s ancient north pole was located near the impact site of NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, which provided evidence for the presence of water ice on today’s lunar surface. Click/tap for larger image. (Credit: James Keane)
The moon’s ancient north pole was located near the impact site of NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, which provided evidence for the presence of water ice on today’s lunar surface. Click/tap for larger image. (Credit: James Keane)

When researchers realized that the moon’s ice might be telling a story of reorientation, it turned to James Keane and Isamu Matsuyama, planetary scientists at the University of Arizona.

“Usually we think of planets as ‘spinning on’ in the same unchanging way with time, but that’s not true,” says Keane, a graduate student at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. “We know that the Earth and a handful of other planetary bodies have changed their spin axes with time.”

On the Earth, this reorientation can be measured with GPS and techniques that we don’t have on other planets. This forces scientists to look for clues in other, more unusual datasets. For example, Matsuyama, a professor of planetary science at LPL and Keane’s doctoral advisor, recently used gravity measurements and observations of ancient valley networks on Mars to infer reorientation on that planet.

The new study is the first to use lunar ice to infer the change in the spin of the moon.

The spins of planetary bodies are set by how mass is distributed within the planet: A planet’s denser spots try to drag the planet toward its equator, less dense spots toward the pole. On the moon, tidal forces from the Earth also can drag dense spots toward—or away from—the Earth-facing side of the moon. Scientists refer to this reorientation phenomenon as “true polar wander.”

PATH ETCHED IN POLAR ICE

Using this idea that the moon’s ice traces an earlier spin pole, researchers used a combination of theoretical models and measurements of the moon’s mass distribution from NASA missions to identify what could physically cause this polar wander.

“I was shocked when the models outlined Oceanus Procellarum as the only possible geologic feature that could have done this,” Keane says.

A schematic drawing of the moon’s polar wander. The shift in the moon’s axis covered a latitudinal distance equivalent to that between Tucson and Los Angeles. Click/tap for larger image. (Credit: James Keane)
A schematic drawing of the moon’s polar wander. The shift in the moon’s axis covered a latitudinal distance equivalent to that between Tucson and Los Angeles. Click/tap for larger image. (Credit: James Keane)

Oceanus Procellarum is a vast, volcanic province on the Earth-facing side of the moon. It contains all of the dark splotches we see forming the “face” of the moon, which is actually a giant field of ancient lava flows. When the moon formed, many of the body’s radioactive elements ended up in the Procellarum.

“This radioactive crust acted like an oven broiler heating and melting the mantle below,” Siegler says.

The giant Procellarum hotspot was less dense than the rest of the moon and caused the whole moon to move. As the moon slowly moved over billions of years, it etched a path into the polar ice.

The paper shows that the moon may have once had much more ice near its poles and the ice we see today is the tiny portion, which has survived this polar migration. Large amounts of ice could have been brought to the moon by comets and icy asteroids early in the moon’s history or potentially outgassed from the lunar mare themselves.

Figuring out the origin of this ancient lunar water might also help scientists understand how water was delivered to the early Earth.

“This gives us a way to model exactly where the ice should be, which tells us about its origin and where astronauts might find a drink on future missions to the moon,” Siegler says.

“Up until this work, most researchers thought that the moon’s water was just recently deposited, as a late veneer,” Keane says. “Since we’ve shown that the moon’s water is linked to volcanic activity on the moon several billion years ago, this means it might be a time capsule of primordial water. Directly sampling this ancient ice will allow us to investigate many still unanswered questions around the origin of the Earth’s water.”

Scientists from California Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, the University of Alabama, and the University of California, Los Angeles are coauthors of the study.

NASA’s SSERVI VORTICES node, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the NASA Lunar Advanced Science and Exploration Research, or LASER, program supported the work.

Source: Republished from Futurity.org as a derivative work under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Original article posted to Futurity by .

Featured Photo Credit: Mrinmoy7/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

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The other opioid crisis — people in poor countries can’t get the pain medication they need

Luke Messac, University of Pennsylvania

There are two opioid crises in the world today. One is the epidemic of abuse and misuse, present in many countries but rising at an alarming rate in the United States. The other crisis is older and affects many more people around the world each year: too few opioids.

Hospitals in the U.S. and Europe routinely prescribe opioids for chronic cancer pain, end-of-life palliative care and some forms of acute pain, like bone fractures, sickle cell crises and burns. But patients with these conditions in much of Asia, Africa and Latin America often receive painkillers no stronger than acetaminophen.

Many factors play into this crisis, but I would argue that the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), an independent monitoring agency established by the U.N., is a fundamental cause of untreated pain in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

A worker handles medicine in the Pharmacie de la Sante Publique warehouse in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Opioid painkillers can be difficult to access in many parts of Africa. Thierry Gouegnon/Reuters

Just how vast is the gap in pain relief?

In 2009, the U.S., Canada and Europe accounted for 18 percent of global population, but 90 percent of global morphine consumption.

The global gap in access to opioids has been growing for a long time. In the U.S., consumption of morphine in 2013 was 32 times higher than in 1964 (increasing from 2.3 mg per person to 79.9 mg per person). In the same time period, morphine consumption Tanzania only doubled to 0.15 mg person. In India in 2013, this figure was only 0.11 mg per person.

Per capita medicinal opioid consumption in Asia, Central America, the Caribbean and Africa is far below the INCB’s own minimum global standard. In countries and regions below this benchmark (set at 200 daily doses per million inhabitants per day), we can be certain that patients who need opioids for legitimate medical reasons do not receive them.

The INCB argues that poor countries have too few opioids because they cannot afford them. While there is a correlation between national income and national consumption of opioids, cost isn’t the principal issue.

Generic opioids are cheap. A generic 10mg immediate-release morphine sulfate tablet costs roughly US$0.01 to produce.

The main problem, I would argue, is a policy based on the fear that increased use of opioids will inevitably lead to abuse and trafficking. Palliative care physician and ethicist Eric Krakauer calls this fear “opiophobia.”

The work of the INCB has been crucial in increasing this fear of opioids and promoting restrictive policies that continue to keep millions of patients in unnecessary pain.

Morphine has legitimate medical uses.
Vaprotan, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Fear of abuse drives ‘opiophobic’ policies

The International Narcotics Control Board has two purposes: to prevent addiction and to ensure the availability of opioids for legitimate medical use. But since its founding in 1968, the INCB has focused almost entirely on combating drug abuse, while ignoring access to pain relief.

One way the INCB tried to prevent addiction was by writing so-called “model laws” that it encouraged countries to enact. One such law, written in 1969, set controls on opioid prescription and distribution that were manageable for wealthier countries, but that would prove onerous in poor countries, particularly those with few doctors.

The Model Law stated, for instance, that opioids could be supplied only by doctors. This provision did not affect access to opioids in the United States or in other other wealthy nations with many physicians. But many poorer countries, where doctors were scarce, relied on nurses and other kinds of practitioners to prescribe drugs. The model law made no allowance for this.

In addition, the Model Law stated that physicians who prescribed opioids inappropriately or who failed to keep full records should be subject to “the same prison sentences and fines as are inflicted under the Penal Code for housebreaking.”

INCB laws were promoted by the United Nations Fund for Drug Control and Abuse (UNFDAC), which was founded in 1970. The UNFDAC conducted training sessions for national drug-control administrators and law enforcement to stress the dangers of abuse. But, as I found in my research, the sessions rarely mentioned the importance of access to pain relief.

The model laws and training sessions helped inspire countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa to pass new, more restrictive laws during the 1970s and ‘80s.

For instance, in India, a 1985 law required hospitals to obtain so many licenses before each shipment of morphine that many stopped using the drug at all. Medicinal morphine consumption in India fell by 97 percent between 1985 and 1997.

In Panama, nurses were barred from prescribing opioids. Paraguay and Guinea-Bissau mandated long prison sentences for any doctor who could not produce documentation justifying every single pill prescribed over years of practice. Fearing these punishments, doctors avoided prescribing opioids, even when they were medically necessary.

Cancer patients receive chemotherapy at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana. Terminal cancer patients in Africa often cannot access opioid painkillers.
Olivier Asselin/Reuters

Countries underestimate opioid needs in response to INCB pressure

The INCB also tried to prevent opioids prescribed to treat pain from being diverted into illegal markets by requiring every country to provide annual estimates of projected opioid needs for medical and scientific purposes. The INCB was responsible for approving these annual estimates, and tried to ensure that countries imported no more than the approved quantities.

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, INCB reports chastised many nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America for making estimates that it considered too high.

A country that imported more opioids than the INCB had approved risked a costly stain on its international reputation. The INCB could even recommend that countries impose trade embargoes on nations that produced or imported more opioids than it had deemed necessary. As a result, countries low-balled their estimates of future medicinal opioid requirements.

But the INCB didn’t judge these estimates based on actual medical need. Rather, it insisted estimates should be based on the number of physicians in a country, a potentially misleading piece of data in parts of the world were doctors are in short supply, and nurses and other health care professionals fill the gaps and prescribe medicine.

The INCB worried that too many opioid prescriptions could lead to abuse. Indeed, this is a major cause of the current addiction crisis in the United States. But, in the countries where the INCB exerted the greatest influence, the bigger problem was that too few (rather than too many) opioids were being prescribed.

A 1989 report from the INCB and World Health Organization revealed that national estimates of future opioid need were often calculated based on nothing more than previous years’ imports. That report also quantified the extent of untreated cancer pain, estimating that “at least 3.5 million cancer patients” worldwide “suffer needlessly from pain.”

The INCB is starting to change, slowly

For many years, the only thing most countries heard from the INCB was that their estimates were too high. But in 1999, the INCB announced it would begin to contact governments that submitted “particularly low estimates” to encourage them to increase their imports.

And in 2010, the INCB agreed that countries with few doctors should allow nurses to prescribe morphine, a reversal from previous policy recommendations.

But these small steps have not been enough to overcome the fear of opioids spread by decades of model laws and training sessions. The INCB’s recommendations continue to focus almost entirely on abuse.

For instance, a 2012 INCB report stated that national requests to import opioids sufficient to address existing need might be denied if such imports might raise “the possibility of diversion or abuse.”

International meetings, especially the United Nations Special Session on the World Drug Problem in April 2016, should pay far more attention to untreated pain than they have in the past.

More recent estimates from the World Health Organization suggest that each year 5.5 million terminal cancer patients and 1 million end-stage HIV/AIDS patients around the globe don’t get enough treatment, or any treatment at all, for their moderate to severe pain. The WHO estimates that tens of millions of people are denied medically necessary pain treatment every year.

Pain is universal, but its relief is still a function of geography.

The ConversationLuke Messac, M.D./Ph.D. student in History, University of Pennsylvania

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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How Yeast and People are Remarkably Similar

Yeast, common ingredients in bread and beer, is also a model organism for understanding the aging process in humans. In fact, yeast cells are more similar to animal cells than they are to bacteria or plants.

David Goldfarb, a professor of biology at the University of Rochester who studies lifespan and yeast, recently discussed his work in this interview with writer Peter Iglinski.

MOST PEOPLE THINK OF YEAST AS AN ESSENTIAL INGREDIENT IN BREAD AND BEER. WHAT MAKES IT A GOOD RESEARCH SPECIMEN?

Yeast cells are quite similar to animal cells; more so than they are to bacteria or plants. Of course yeast do not have brains or livers or bones. But the cellular biology of yeast and humans—how they grow and divide, age, and metabolize food—is remarkably similar.

Yeast is an excellent “model” organism for studying processes in which yeast and humans share genes that carry out similar functions. We often get our first view of human cell processes by studying the biology of yeast.

Yeast is easy, cheap, and quick to work with because it divides rapidly, usually once every couple of hours, and is “genetically tractable,” meaning we can readily alter genes and their expression using classical genetics or modern molecular genetic techniques. For example, in a single experiment we can easily determine how a single genetic modification affects the expression of all 6,000 yeast genes.

Decades of work in hundreds of labs has led to a fantastically broad and deep understanding of yeast biology, much of which instructs our thinking about human biology.

There is little argument that the best way to attack human disease starts with an understanding of the underlying cell biology responsible for the pathology. For many diseases, including aspects of cancer, profound insights have come from work in yeast. The utility of yeast extends to biotechnology and the large-scale manufacturing of natural products and drugs. Yeast is not the only available model organism, but for the work we do, yeast is uniquely qualified.

YEAST WAS AT THE CENTER OF ONE OF YOUR PATENTS, WHICH WAS CALLED “THE MOST-CITED DISCOVERY TO EMERGE FROM ACADEMIC RESEARCH IN RECENT YEARS.” WHAT WAS THE PATENT FOR?

This patent describes results of a large experiment aimed at discovering small drug-like molecules that either speed or slow aging.  It may come as a surprise that yeast and humans age in many of the same ways.

My research group—and I wish to emphasize the contribution of many—developed a new way to measure lifespan in yeast that allowed us to simultaneously measure the effects on aging of hundreds-of-thousands of drug-like molecules.  We identified over 100 compounds that have a positive effect on lifespan.  The patent describes how we did the experiment, so others could repeat it, and provided a list of novel lifespan altering compounds for others to mine for their purposes.

WHY DO YOU THINK THAT PATENT BECAME INFLUENTIAL TO THAT DEGREE?

Good question. We are not sure why our patent was cited in so many other patents. There may be multiple reasons. The specific claims of these patents that cite ours are diverse. It’s possible that the lifespan-altering molecules we identified represent a useful collection of biologically active compounds. So others may have found that these molecules do interesting and potentially valuable things in their experiments, many of which involve treating or preventing human diseases and disorders.

WHAT MYSTERIES ARE YOU LOOKING TO UNRAVEL IN THE FUTURE?

We continue to study some of our lifespan-altering molecules. I founded a biotech company to explore medical applications of one set of molecules. This endeavor was exciting and gave me a rare opportunity to experience another type of research and development, for which I am grateful. Some venture capitalists provided years of generous support for our work on the relationship between aging and disease. Ultimately, this commercial endeavor ended because we couldn’t achieve a key milestone (c’est la vie), but we still have a freezer full of molecules with fascinating biological activities.

I like the idea of using small molecules as probes to gain a foothold on the study of important biological processes. Instead of using genetics to alter cellular processes, we use small molecules to do the job. I am fascinated by cell biology, so I tend to focus, when possible, on the molecular mechanisms at play. Those are the ones we pursue.

My goal is to reveal new biology with a focus on asking how aging leads to disease. At my stage of career, the goal of having a direct impact on the human condition is becoming at least as important as revealing new biology.

Source: Republished from Futurity.org as a derivative work under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Original article posted to Futurity by .

Featured Photo Credit:  Peter Kelly/Flickr

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New Foam Metal Could Enable ‘Transformers-Like’ Capabilities [Video]

Imagine an aircraft that could alter its wing shape in midflight and, like a pelican, dive into the water before morphing into a submarine.

The key to making this Transformer-like fantasy a reality is a hybrid material featuring stiff metal and soft, porous rubber foam that combines the best properties of both: stiffness when it’s called for, and elasticity when a change of shape is required.

The material also has the ability to self-heal following damage.

“It’s sort of like us—we have a skeleton, plus soft muscles and skin,” says Rob Shepherd, a Cornell University engineering professor. “Unfortunately, that skeleton limits our ability to change shape—unlike an octopus, which does not have a skeleton.”

The idea blends the rigidity and load-bearing capacity of humans with the ability to dramatically alter shape, like an octopus can.

“That’s what this idea is about, to have a skeleton when you need it, melt it away when you don’t, and then reform it,” Shepherd says.

His group’s work was published recently in Advanced Materials.

The metal/foam compound can be heated in order to change its shape, then cooled to regain stiffness. It has potential applications in soft robotics and aeronautics. (Credit: Rob Shepherd group)
The metal/foam compound can be heated in order to change its shape, then cooled to regain stiffness. It has potential applications in soft robotics and aeronautics. (Credit: Rob Shepherd group)

HOW IT’S MADE

This hybrid material combines a soft alloy called Field’s metal with a porous silicone foam. In addition to its low melting point of 144 degrees Fahrenheit, Field’s metal was chosen because, unlike similar alloys, it contains no lead.

“In general, we want the things we make in this lab to be potentially biocompatible,” says Ilse Van Meerbeek, a graduate student in the field of mechanical engineering and the first author of the paper.

The elastomer foam is dipped into the molten metal, then placed in a vacuum so that the air in the foam’s pores is removed and replaced by the alloy. The foam had pore sizes of about 2 millimeters; that can be tuned to create a stiffer or a more flexible material.

In testing of its strength and elasticity, the material showed an ability to deform when heated above 144 degrees, regain rigidity when cooled, then return to its original shape and strength when reheated.

AIRCRAFT AND ROBOTS

Shepherd says this material would be the skin for a morphing wing, giving a micro air vehicle (MAV) the ability to become an underwater vehicle on the fly.

“If you have a wing that’s really broad, you can’t do that because the wing will break off when it hits the water,” he says. “So you need to sweep it back, similar to what a puffin does, and then go under water. And using that new shape, it could be a propeller-driven ship.”

In addition to a morphing-wing application, Van Meerbeek sees this material being used in soft robots that must negotiate tight spaces.

“It could be used in search-and-rescue robots,” she says. “It would be able to go into dangerous and/or unpredictable environments, and be able to go through narrow cracks, which rigid robots can’t do.”

“Sometimes you want a robot, or any machine, to be stiff,” adds Shepherd, whose group recently published a paper on electroluminescent skin, which also has applications in soft robotics. “But when you make them stiff, they can’t morph their shape very well. And to give a soft robot both capabilities, to be able to morph their structure but also to be stiff and bear load, that’s what this material does.”

Grants from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded the work. The research was published recently in Advanced Materials.

Source: Republished from Futurity.org as a derivative work under  the Attribution 4.0 International license. Original article published to Futurity by  .

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Cuba’s sustainable agriculture at risk in U.S. thaw

Miguel Altieri, University of California, Berkeley

President Obama’s trip to Cuba this week accelerated the warming of U.S.-Cuban relations. Many people in both countries believe that normalizing relations will spur investment that can help Cuba develop its economy and improve life for its citizens.

But in agriculture, U.S. investment could cause harm instead.

For the past 35 years I have studied agroecology in most countries in Central and South America. Agroecology is an approach to farming that developed in the late 1970s in Latin America as a reaction against the top-down, technology-intensive and environmentally destructive strategy that characterizes modern industrial agriculture. It encourages local production by small-scale farmers, using sustainable strategies and combining Western knowledge with traditional expertise.

Cuba took this approach out of necessity when its economic partner, the Soviet bloc, dissolved in the early 1990s. As a result, Cuban farming has become a leading example of ecological agriculture.

But if relations with U.S. agribusiness companies are not managed carefully, Cuba could revert to an industrial approach that relies on mechanization, transgenic crops and agrochemicals, rolling back the revolutionary gains that its campesinos have achieved.

The shift to peasant agroecology

For several decades after Cuba’s 1959 revolution, socialist bloc countries accounted for nearly all of its foreign trade.

The government devoted 30 percent of agricultural land to sugarcane for export, while importing 57 percent of Cuba’s food supply. Farmers relied on tractors, massive amounts of pesticide and fertilizer inputs, all supplied by Soviet bloc countries. By the 1980s agricultural pests were increasing, soil quality was degrading and yields of some key crops like rice had begun to decline.

When Cuban trade with the Soviet bloc ended in the early 1990s, food production collapsed due to the loss of imported fertilizers, pesticides, tractors and petroleum. The situation was so bad that Cuba posted the worst growth in per capita food production in all of Latin America and the Caribbean.

But then farmers started adopting agroecological techniques, with support from Cuban scientists.

Thousands of oxen replaced tractors that could not function due to lack of petroleum and spare parts. Farmers substituted green manures for chemical fertilizers and artisanally produced biopesticides for insecticides. At the same time, Cuban policymakers adopted a range of agrarian reform and decentralization policies that encouraged forms of production where groups of farmers grow and market their produce collectively.


Havana market.
Julia Dorofeeva/Shutterstock

As Cuba reoriented its agriculture to depend less on imported chemical inputs and imported equipment, food production rebounded. From 1996 though 2005, per capita food production in Cuba increased by 4.2 percent yearly during a period when production was stagnant across Latin America and the Caribbean.

In the mid-2000s, the Ministry of Agriculture dismantled all “inefficient state companies” and government-owned farms, endorsed the creation of 2,600 new small urban and suburban farms, and allowed farming on some three million hectares of unused state lands.

Urban gardens, which first sprang up during the economic crisis of the early 1990s, have developed into an important food source.

Today Cuba has 383,000 urban farms, covering 50,000 hectares of otherwise unused land and producing more than 1.5 million tons of vegetables. The most productive urban farms yield up to 20 kg of food per square meter, the highest rate in the world, using no synthetic chemicals. Urban farms supply 50 to 70 percent or more of all the fresh vegetables consumed in cities such as Havana and Villa Clara.

The risks of opening up

Now Cuba’s agriculture system is under increasing pressure to deliver harvests for export and for Cuba’s burgeoning tourist markets. Part of the production is shifting away from feeding local and regional markets, and increasingly focusing on feeding tourists and producing organic tropical products for export.

President Obama hopes to open the door for U.S. businesses to sell goods to Cuba. In Havana last Monday during Obama’s visit, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack signed an agreement with his Cuban counterpart, Agriculture Minister Gustavo Rodriguez Rollero, to promote sharing of ideas and research.

“U.S. producers are eager to help meet Cuba’s need for healthy, safe, nutritious food,” Vilsack said. The U.S. Agriculture Coalition for Cuba, which was launched in 2014 to lobby for an end to the U.S.-Cuba trade embargo, includes more than 100 agricultural companies and trade groups. Analysts estimate that U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba could reach US$1.2 billion if remaining regulations are relaxed and trade barriers are lifted, a market that U.S. agribusiness wants to capture.


Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Alabama Congresswoman Terri Sewell tour a Havana farmers’ market, November 2015.
US Department of Agriculture/Flickr, CC BY

When agribusinesses invest in developing countries, they seek economies of scale. This encourages concentration of land in the hands of a few corporations and standardization of small-scale production systems. In turn, these changes force small farmers off of their lands and lead to the abandonment of local crops and traditional farming ways. The expansion of transgenic crops and agrofuels in Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia since the 1990s are examples of this process.

If U.S. industrial agriculture expands into Cuba, there is a risk that it could destroy the complex social network of agroecological small farms that more than 300,000 campesinos have built up over the past several decades through farmer-to-farmer horizontal exchanges of knowledge.

This would reduce the diversity of crops that Cuba produces and harm local economies and food security. If large businesses displace small-scale farmers, agriculture will move toward export crops, increasing the ranks of unemployed. There is nothing wrong with small farmers capturing a share of export markets, as long as it does not mean neglecting their roles as local food producers. The Cuban government thus will have to protect campesinos by not importing food products that peasants produce.

Cuba still imports some of its food, including U.S. products such as poultry and soybean meal. Since agricultural sales to Cuba were legalized in 2000, U.S. agricultural exports have totaled about $5 billion. However, yearly sales have fallen from a high of $658 million in 2008 to $300 million in 2014.

U.S. companies would like to regain some of the market share that they have lost to the European Union and Brazil.

There is broad debate over how heavily Cuba relies on imports to feed its population: the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that imports make up 60 to 80 percent of Cubans’ caloric intake, but other assessments are much lower.

In fact, Cuba has the potential to produce enough food with agroecological methods to feed its 11 million inhabitants. Cuba has about six million hectares of fairly level land and another million gently sloping hectares that can be used for cropping. More than half of this land remains uncultivated, and the productivity of both land and labor, as well as the efficiency of resource use, in the rest of this farm area are still low.

We have calculated that if all peasant farms and cooperatives adopted diversified agroecological designs, Cuba would be able to produce enough to feed its population, supply food to the tourist industry and even export some food to help generate foreign currency.

President Raul Castro has stated that while opening relations with the U.S. has some benefits,

We will not renounce our ideals of independence and social justice, or surrender even a single one of our principles, or concede a millimeter in the defense of our national sovereignty. We have won this sovereign right with great sacrifices and at the cost of great risks.

Cuba’s small farmers control only 25 percent of the nation’s agricultural land but produce over 65 percent of the country’s food, contributing significantly to the island’s sovereignity. Their agroecological achievements represent a true legacy of Cuba’s revolution.

The ConversationMiguel Altieri, Professor of Agroecology, University of California, Berkeley

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Featured Photo Credit: Melanie Lukesh Reed/Flickr, CC BY

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Evidence That Quasars Put the Brakes on the Birth of New Stars

Intense radiation from quasars has likely caused the precipitous slowdown of star formation in the universe that started some 11 billion years ago.

New observations suggest that the exceptionally powerful radiation and galaxy-scale winds emitted by quasars—the most luminous objects in the universe—heat up clouds of dust and gas, preventing the material from cooling, forming denser clouds, and eventually becoming new stars, researchers say.

“I would argue that this is the first convincing observational evidence of the presence of quasar feedback when the universe was only a quarter of its present age, when the cosmic star formation was most vigorous,” says Tobias Marriage, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University.

While the new findings are not absolutely conclusive, scientists believe the evidence is compelling. And they’re are excited.

“It’s like finding a smoking gun with fingerprints near the body, but not finding the bullet to match the gun,” Marriage saiys

Quasars are incredibly bright, active, and distant. They are believed to be areas immediately around supermassive black holes in the centers of immense galaxies formed when smaller galaxies merge. They can emit more electromagnetic energy than 100 normal galaxies, and be more than a trillion times brighter than the sun, according to NASA.

“IT’S LIKE FINDING A SMOKING GUN WITH FINGERPRINTS NEAR THE BODY, BUT NOT FINDING THE BULLET TO MATCH THE GUN.”

Galaxies reached their busiest star-making pace about 11 billion years ago, then slowed down. A team of astronomers more than three years ago estimated that the pace of star formation observed now is one-thirtieth as fast as when it peaked. The question of what happened has puzzled scientists for years—but the chief suspect has been the quasar feedback process, Marriage says.

Investigators looked at information on 17,468 galaxies and examined a tracer of energy known as the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Effect. The phenomenon, named for two Russian physicists who predicted it nearly 50 years ago, appears when high-energy electrons disturb the cosmic microwave background. The CMB is a pervasive sea of microwave radiation, a remnant from the superheated birth of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.

The thermal energy levels were analyzed to see if they rise above predictions for what it would take to stop star formation. A large number of galaxies were studied to give the study statistical heft, says graduate student Devin Crichton, lead author of the new paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “For feedback to turn off star formation, it must be occurring broadly.”

To take the faint temperature measurements that would show the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Effect, the team used information gathered by two ground-based telescopes and one receiver mounted on a space observatory. Using several instruments with different strengths in search of the SZ Effect is relatively new, Marriage says. “It’s a pretty wild sort of thermometer.”

Information gathered in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey by an optical telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico was used to find quasars. Thermal energy and evidence of the SZ Effect were found using information from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, an instrument designed to study the CMB that stands in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. To focus on the dust, investigators used data from the SPIRE, or Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver, on the Herschel Space Observatory.

The National Science Foundation, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania. and the Canada Foundation for Innovation supported the work.

Source: Republished from Futurity.org as a derivative work under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Original article posted to Futurity by .

Featured Image Credit: Johns Hopkins University (Artist’s deptiction)

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New MOZART Technique Uses ‘Music’ for Unprecedented 3D Image Resolution

Scientists have many tools at their disposal for looking at preserved tissue under a microscope in incredible detail, or peering into the living body at lower resolution.

What they haven’t had is a way to do both: create a three-dimensional, real-time image of individual cells or even molecules in a living animal—until now.

New research provides the first glimpse under the skin of a living animal, showing intricate real-time details in three dimensions of the lymph and blood vessels.

The technique, called MOZART (for molecular imaging and characterization of tissue noninvasively at cellular resolution), could one day allow scientists to detect tumors in the skin, colon, or esophagus, or even to see the abnormal blood vessels that appear in the earliest stages of macular degeneration—a leading cause of blindness.

“We’ve been trying to look into the living body and see information at the level of the single cell,” says Adam de la Zerda, assistant professor of structural biology at Stanford University and senior author of the paper that is published in Scientific Reports. “Until now there has been no way do that.”

The technique could allow doctors to monitor how an otherwise invisible tumor under the skin is responding to treatment, or to understand how individual cells break free from a tumor and travel to distant sites.

A technique called optical coherence tomography, or OCT, does exists for peeking into a live tissue several millimeters under the skin, revealing a landscape of cells, tissues and vessels. But it isn’t sensitive or specific enough to see individual cells or the molecules that the cells are producing.

A major issue has been finding a way of differentiating between cells or tissues. For example, picking out the cancerous cells beginning to multiply within an overall healthy tissue. In other forms of microscopy, scientists have created tags that latch onto molecules or structures of interest to illuminate those structures and provide a detailed view of where they are in the cell or body.

[Continue reading to learn what “nanorods” are and how they solved these imaging issues…]

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Study Says Cannabis could be the Antidote to the Painkiller Epidemic

Painkiller prescriptions in the US have been described as being out of control, with record levels of opioid drugs being prescribed to patients with chronic pain in recent years. Now, a study from the University of Michigan says that patients who use medical marijuana to control chronic pain report a 64 percent reduction in their use of more traditional prescription pain medications known as opioids.

A study of 185 patients from a medical marijuana dispensary in Ann Arbor, Michigan also shows fewer side effects from their medications and a 45-percent improvement in quality of life since using cannabis to manage pain.

“WE’RE IN THE MIDST OF AN OPIOID EPIDEMIC AND WE NEED TO FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.”

The findings suggest that, for some people, medical marijuana may be an alternative to more common prescription painkillers at a time when national health leaders are asking the medical community to cut back on prescribing drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin.

“We’re in the midst of an opioid epidemic and we need to figure out what to do about it,” says lead author Kevin Boehnke, a doctoral student in the School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Michigan. “I’m hoping our research continues a conversation of cannabis as a potential alternative for opioids.”

Just last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued 12 recommended guidelines for prescribing opioids, saying prescriptions for them have quadrupled since 1999, and that 40 people die every day from an overdose of these drugs.

“We are learning that the higher the dose of opioids people are taking, the higher the risk of death from overdose. This magnitude of reduction in our study is significant enough to affect an individual’s risk of accidental death from overdose,” says study senior author Daniel Clauw, professor of pain management anesthesiology.

The surveys were conducted from November 2013 to February 2015. Researchers originally set out to find out if cannabis use was more effective for sufferers with severe centralized chronic pain, for whom the opioids have not always worked well.

“We hypothesized that cannabis might be particularly effective for the type of pain seen in conditions such as fibromyalgia, since there are many studies suggesting that synthetic cannabinoids work in these conditions,” Clauw says. “We did not see this because the patients in this study rated cannabis to be equally effective for those with different pain severity.”

It was the patients with less severe chronic pain who reported better quality of life and less use of opioids.

“We would caution against rushing to change current clinical practice towards cannabis, but note that this study suggests that cannabis is an effective pain medication and agent to prevent opioid overuse,” Boehnke says.

At present, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized cannabis for medical purposes and four states allow it for recreational use.

Population level research has shown a reduction in opioid use in states where medical cannabis is legal, but the new study is one of the first to look at individual patterns of use. A study also released this month from Israel followed people for six months and found a 44-percent reduction in opioid use.

One limitation of the study is that it was conducted with people at a dispensary who are presumed to be believers in the medical benefits of marijuana. These participants were surveyed after they had been using marijuana, which may decrease the accuracy of their recollections. The team plans to continue their research with this population but also conduct studies with patients who have not yet tried marijuana for pain management.

The study is published in the Journal of Pain.

Source: Republished from Futurity.org as a derivative work under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Original article posted to Futurity by .

Featured Photo Credit:  Nena B./Flickr

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Insane Winds Escape a Supermassive Black Hole, Like a “Bat Out of Hell”

The fastest winds ever seen at ultraviolet wavelengths have been discovered near a supermassive black hole.

“This new ultrafast wind surprised us when it appeared at ultraviolet wavelengths, indicating it is racing away from the ravenous black hole at unprecedented speeds—almost like a bat out of hell,” says William Nielsen (Niel) Brandt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics and a professor of physics at Penn State.

“We’re talking wind speeds of more than 200 million miles an hour, equivalent to a category 77 hurricane,” says Jesse Rogerson, who led the research as part of his efforts toward earning a PhD in the physics and astronomy department at York University in Canada.

The ultraviolet-wavelength winds are coming from the black hole’s quasar—the disk of hot gas that surrounds the black hole. Quasars form around supermassive black holes at the centers of massive galaxies. Quasars are bigger than Earth’s orbit around the Sun and hotter than the surface of the Sun, generating enough light to be seen across the observable universe.

“An exciting discovery in recent years has been the realization that ultraviolet winds from quasars can both appear and disappear when viewed from Earth, depending on various conditions surrounding the black hole,” Brandt says.

“Black holes can have a mass that is billions of times larger than the Sun, mostly because they are messy eaters in a way, capturing any material that ventures too close,” says Patrick Hall, associate professor at York University. “But as matter spirals toward a black hole, some of it is blown away by the heat and light of the quasar. These are the winds that we are detecting.”

The researchers used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to identify new outflows from quasars. After spotting about 300 examples, they selected about 100 for further exploration, collecting data with the Gemini Observatory’s twin telescopes in Hawaii and Chile.

Much of the research is aimed at better understanding outflows from quasars and why they happen. “Quasar winds play an important role in galaxy formation,” Rogerson says.

“When galaxies form, these winds fling material outwards and deter the creation of stars. If such winds didn’t exist or were less powerful, we would see far more stars in big galaxies than we actually do. Hubble Space Telescope images of galaxies would look much different if quasar winds did not exist.”

The study is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Source: Republished from Futurity.org as a derivative work under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Original article posted to Futurity by .

Featured Image Credit: Artist’s impression of high velocity wind, NASA/CXC and Nahks Tr’Ehnl

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What we’ve learned from the deadly Oso, Washington landslide two years on

Joseph Wartman, University of Washington

On March 22, 2014, a hillside above Oso, Washington collapsed, unleashing a torrent of mud and debris that buried the community of Steelhead Haven. Forty-three people lost their lives, making it one of the single deadliest landslide disasters in U.S. history.

Before and after the Oso landslide in 2014. Click/Tap for larger image. Joseph Wartman,
Before and after the Oso landslide in 2014. Click/Tap for larger image. Joseph Wartman, CC BY-ND

 

Over the past two years, we’ve learned much about the specific geology of the Stillaguamish River Valley where Oso is located, and the weather that preceded this landslide. One study I co-led identified geologic factors such as weak, saturated ground that made the Oso hillside highly susceptible to landslides. Another investigation found that large landslides similar to the one in Oso occur with surprising frequency in the region – on average, every 140 years, just a flash in recent geologic time.

A study of the rainstorm that triggered the landslide found that precipitation in the weeks leading up to the event was only moderately intense, though unusual in its timing during the normally drier early spring season.

But important questions remain about other aspects of the landslide. Answering them will not only advance landslide science, but can also help protect other threatened communities around the globe. So what do we still need to figure out?

After the March 22, 2014 Oso, Washington landslide. Joseph Wartman, CC BY-ND

Landslide basics

A landslide – the downslope movement of rock or soil – is a natural geologic process that forms and shapes landscapes. Slides occur when downward forces from gravity exceed the strength of soil or rock within a slope – in other words, when the weight of a hill slope becomes too much to bear. Landslides affect slopes across a wide range of settings, but steep terrain is most precarious. Often, it’s precipitation or earthquakes that trigger landslides.

There are several types of landslides, but most dangerous are flows, which occur when saturated ground transforms into a liquid-like state and inundates downslope areas within minutes. Flow landslides, such as the one at Oso, become disasters when they quickly spill into communities, leaving people virtually no time to escape.

Landslides occur worldwide, including in every U.S. state – the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that, on average, landslides kill 25 to 50 people across the country each year.

The global toll is much worse. During the seven-year period ending in 2010, landslides killed over 32,000 people worldwide, mostly in densely populated mountainous areas with intense rainfall, such as in Asia and Latin America. Knowing that some regions are more susceptible than others, can we minimize the potential damage from future landslides?

Excavators dig during rescue operations at an industrial estate hit by a landslide in Shenzhen, China, December 23, 2015. Credit: Kim Kyung Hoon/Reuters

Do human actions contribute to landslides?

We’ve learned a lot about the geologic aspects of the Oso landslide, but aside from nature, could human activities also have played a role? We know that human actions can contribute to landslides, especially when natural topography is altered to create oversteepened, unstable landscapes, as was the case in a recent disaster in China.

For many decades, anecdotal evidence has suggested that logging on or near hill slopes contributes to their collapse by reducing reinforcement from roots and by altering ecosystems to allow more precipitation to enter the ground. As early as 1930, after a slide occurred in the Oso region, Washington state’s game director noted that “Many people feel that this earth movement was triggered by the intense logging of the forest cover of the land and resulting erosion.” A 1988 study of the area found that timber harvesting does increase surface water infiltration to the ground, which can destabilize hillsides.

Yet it is clear that landslides bearing a striking resemblance to the 2014 event in Oso have occurred in the region for at least 2,000 years – long before large-scale timber harvesting began. Though indications are that logging can make some slopeside regions more susceptible to landslides, geologic evidence of earlier slides near Oso makes it unclear what role, if any, timber harvesting played in this event.

High-resolution topographic map of the Oso landslide and surrounding terrain. An older large slide similar to the Oso event is seen immediately to the right of the 2014 landslide. Joseph Wartman with data provided by the Puget Sound LIDAR Consortium, CC BY-ND

Living in harm’s way

Regardless of whether human action has a hand in setting off a particular landslide, its effects may be felt by anyone who lives downslope.

And we still don’t have a good grasp on the interconnected human, social and political factors that lead people to put down roots in dangerous places. Is it because of their lack of scientific understanding or access to incomplete information? Or is existing knowledge simply incomprehensible to public officials and ordinary citizens?

Oso, Washington community memorial. Joseph Wartman, CC BY-ND

At Oso, the Steelhead Haven community, which was established in the early 1960s, continued to expand even as smaller landslides occurred there during the 1990s and 2000s. In the face of continued threats from landslides, how did residents weigh risk against the cost of abandoning property – and the cherished community that bound them together?

The issue is not unique to Oso; in the decade since a landslide killed 10 people in La Conchita, California, that community, too, has continued to grow. As a La Conchita resident recently lamented, “Where else am I going to go? This is my home.”

So even as our understanding of the natural science aspects of the Oso landslide increases, there is still much we don’t know about the interface between landslides and people. Questions of this nature are complex, multidisciplinary, sometimes contentious and not easy to answer. But they’re important and go beyond scientific curiosities. Indeed, they touch upon issues that are central to land-use planning, resource management and public safety.

There is no doubt that some of these questions will soon be raised in the Washington state courts, where these issues – alleged destabilization from logging and siting a community in a hazardous area – are central to some of the pending litigation; however, juries are often not ideal arbiters of scientific issues.

Questions about logging and land-use in hazardous terrain lie at the intersection of the natural, social and applied sciences, so multidisciplinary research will be needed to better understand these issues. And understanding alone will not be enough to save lives and reduce losses. We must also have the political will to translate knowledge into practice through effective public policies.The Conversation

Joseph Wartman, Associate Professor of Geotechnical Engineering, University of Washington

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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