Parrotfish munching on algae ingest coral and then eliminate the rocky substrate, creating island-building grade sediment in places like the Maldives. Julia Rosen reports.
ByThe form a constellation of almost 1,200 coral reef islands in the Indian Ocean. They have stunning white sand beaches surrounded by emerald blue water. And according to a new study, they may owe their existence to . More specifically: to parrotfish poop. C.T. Perry et al, , in ]
(Raises death toll to 24) By Lisa Maria Garza and Jim Forsyth DALLAS/SAN ANTONIO, May 30 (Reuters) - Rain caused flooding on roads in parts of Texas on Saturday, an official said, after severe weather killed at least 24 people during the week and prompted U.S.
May 31, 2015
The soccer world is abuzz with the allegations that officials at FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) engaged in racketeering, money laundering and other criminal activities.
Officials at FIFA engaged in a "24-year scheme to enrich themselves through the corruption of international soccer," according to a statement released by the United States Department of Justice on May 27.
But while it's tempting to blame such activities on weak morals, research shows that corruption—or abuse of power for private gain—is far more complicated, said Marina Zaloznaya, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Iowa.
Corruption can span large groups—such as organizations or even the populations of entire nations—if the majority of the people within them find bribery and other forms of corruption to be commonplace, Zaloznaya said. []
There are many facets of an organization that can lead to , but Zaloznaya focused on three important ones.
Yenkey pointed to the example of Chuck Blazer, a former official with FIFA and Concacaf, a governing group that oversees soccer in the North American, Central American and Caribbean region, who pled guilty in 2013 to charges that he engaged in racketeering, wire fraud, money laundering and income tax evasion, .
"It just tells you that this [allegedly] is a normal practice," Yenkey said. Blazer likely saw his millions "as part of his compensation package," Yenkey said. []
Fixing & preventing corruption
Also, organizations can hold classes that teach and anti-corruption policies, Ajunwa said.
Modern-day alligators may illustrate how dinosaurs went from two-legged to four
By | |Alligators hyperextend their digits when they walk with their body raised from the ground.
All dinosaurs once pranced, strolled or lumbered about on two legs. But some took to occasionally resting or running on all fours for greater stability and over time evolved into quadrupeds. During the transition, the forelimbs were shorter than the hind limbs, raising the question of how the intermediate animals leveled out the tilted stance from those stubby appendages: Did they walk on their “fingertips” or their palms? New research suggests the latter—some early dinosaurs and their close relatives may have stepped straight down on the front of their palms.
Dinosaurs are closely related to alligators' ancestors and consequently share many structural features with gators. So biologist Joel Hutson and geologist Kelda Hutson compared the forelimb mechanics of alligators with fossils from Postosuchus—a relative of early dinosaurs and an ancestor of alligators and crocodiles—to learn more about joint mobility. The Hutsons measured movement of each joint in alligator specimens in multiple states: intact, without scales, without muscles and tendons, without ligaments and, finally, without cartilage. The team found that the ability of bone-on-bone specimens to hyperextend matched that of the fossils. They also verified that with cartilage in place, the alligator digits easily hyperextended backward, suggesting that would have been capable of hyperextension as well. Thus, perhaps dinosaurs making the transition from bipedalism walked in such a way, too—walking on their palms with hyperextended fingers. The results were published online in March in the .
Range-of-motion comparisons among dinosaur fossils and fresh, intact tissues have rarely been performed, says Mason Meers, a biologist at the University of Tampa who researches the evolution of crocodile locomotion. “The work's 100 years overdue,” he adds. And although the study is small, the results shed more light on exactly how strange early dinosaurs would have looked as they stalked about, Joel Hutson says. For instance, while in the process of developing four legs dedicated to locomotion, dinosaurs might have used their wrists and palms as if they were stilts.
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Two volcanic islands that were recently born in the Red Sea are providing scientists with new information about a rift in Earth's crust
Two volcanic islands recently born in the Red Sea have yielded stunning images, providing scientists with new insights about a little-known rift in Earth's crust.
The Red Sea is an enormous crack in the Earth's crust called a rift, where the African and Arabian tectonic plates are tearing apart at about 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) per year. At a rift, the crust stretches apart slowly over centuries, like a piece of taffy candy, but it also sometimes suddenly splits when the strain becomes too great. For instance, in 2005, in nearby Afar, Ethiopia, giant fissures and fiery lava flows appeared in the after a series of earthquakes. []
The chain of volcanic islands in the Zubair Archipelago marks another branch of the same rift zone, one that has been quiet for nearly 150 years. (Yemen's Jabal al-Tair Island erupted in 2007, killing several people at a naval base.) []
The two eruptions in the Red Sea were heralded by swarms of small earthquakes triggered by magma squeezing through long, narrow cracks in the Earth's crust. The magma-filled cracks are called , and are at least 6 miles (10 kilometers) long, the researchers reported Tuesday (May 26) in the journal Nature Communications. The islands are both less than 0.6 miles (1 km) wide.
Similar have rattled the region for years, the researchers noted. The seismic shaking could mean that magma had been tunneling underground for up to a decade before the volcanic islands appeared, the researchers said.
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How much do you trust the weather forecast? Is it enough to attempt to fly an and five nights across the Pacific Ocean, when even a single stray storm could be enough to destroy the craft? There is no alternative airport, so any mishap means ditching the electric airplane in the sea.
Andre Borschberg and Betrand Piccard, the two pilots of the , think forecasts are good enough for Borschberg to take off from Nanjing in China to Honolulu on May 31. Borschberg will take this first leg to Hawaii and then, assuming all goes well, Piccard will take over for the final Pacific crossing from Honolulu to Phoenix in coming weeks.
"Once in the air, you're stuck," Piccard explains. "I had this vision 16 years ago of an . Now it's the moment of truth to see if this vision is realistic or completely impossible."
. is an adventure you do with the forces of nature
— Bertrand PICCARD (@bertrandpiccard)
The primary challenge will be energy. The airplane has to to recharge the batteries during the day to permit another flight through the long night. The two pilots are energy-challenged as well. They each have to get enough rest—in 20-minute spurts—while the autopilot takes over as many as 12 times on a good night, but perhaps much less. "Sustainability is what matters," Borschberg says. "If I am exhausted on the third day I will not be able to cope. Every day, every cycle I must make sure I get my energy, the airplane gets its energy and so together we go forward."
The point of this flight is not just to prove that that a five-day solar flight over water can be done. It is to raise awareness for the "" initiative to push clean energy alternatives and energy efficiency, like the solar panels that power Solar Impulse 2 and the efficiency of its electric systems that allows it to achieve powered flight. "The world needs these clean technologies," Piccard says. "It will protect the environment but will also create jobs, make profits and stimulate the growth of industry and economic growth for countries."
, given its inability to bank, low power and the lack of a pressurized, climate-controlled or even oxygenated cockpit. The pilots have to wear oxygen masks whenever flying above 3,600 meters. But one thing the solar plane does have in abundance is backup safety systems to go with back-up batteries and even four sets of oxygen masks in case of failure. On the flight from Mandalay in Myanmar to Chongqing in China over the Tibetan Plateau, known colloquially as "the roof of the world," alarms started blaring because the original oxygen mask was improperly assembled. Fortunately, there were those backups.
The of just 3.8 cubic meters may be home, but it is a tiny one, akin to living in something a bit larger than a Japanese-style coffin hotel room while alternately freezing and boiling and reaching altitudes of 8,500 meters.
There is also the particularly , which is built into the cockpit's single seat. "Until now I am the first person in the world to have used the toilet in the solar powered airplane," Piccard notes, though Borschberg will no doubt employ it during the estimated 5-day flight over the western Pacific Ocean. "The team is always teasing me with this, yeah, it's a big first." Up until now such waste has been kept onboard but during the Pacific crossing it will be jettisoned over the ocean in biodegradable bags.
Success depends mostly on the , which will determine how long the flight takes, or even if it succeeds. "Sure, it's unreliable," Borschberg admits of the all-important weather forecast. "We try to identify a pattern which we know unfolds in such a way." The unofficial motto of the flight team is: "cogito ergo circumvolat," or "we think therefore he flies around."
That places the focus squarely on the . The two-man forecast team lead by Luc Trullemans must make a 5-day weather projection using the same data from the U.S. and E.U. employed by your local forecaster. Piccard says he needs a more personal touch. "I need to hear the voice," Piccard admits of even previous, much shorter flights. "I call them on the satellite phone and I say: 'I need to hear your voice and your degree of confidence in what you have written.'"
That's because after the plane passes the west coast of Japan at the end of the first day of this flight, there will be no airports—or even land—between it and its next destination. "You are committed," Borschberg explains. "You need to go to Hawaii. There is no other way or you end up in the water." And with a , the plane cannot escape unpredicted atmospheric disturbances.
On the bright side, turbulence is at a minimum over the ocean, thanks to the lack of mountains to fly over—and this . On the other hand, clouds are a constant concern. "If you cannot recharge your battery then you cannot make it through the night to the next sunrise then you have to ditch and bail out," Piccard notes. The risks of a bailout range from parachute or life raft failure to something else unique to the Solar Impulse 2: electrocution if the pilot fails to get far enough clear of the entirely electric aircraft.
Explosive geysers of material that shoot away from black holes at nearly the speed of light seem to form more often in galaxies that are the product of two galaxies merging together
This artist's impression illustrates how high-speed jets from a supermassive black hole would look.
Powerful jets of material spewing from the edge of monster black holes may be more likely to arise where two galaxies have merged together, a new study suggests.
Like a cosmic version of Old Faithful (the famous Yellowstone geyser), some black holes at the center of galaxies will spew jets of material into space that stretch for thousands of light-years. You can see an illustration of what these gushing pillars look like in a .
Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, new research suggests these jets are more likely to be found in galaxies that are the product of galaxy mergers. However, the authors of the research say merging two galaxies isn't always a recipe for creating galactic jets. []
When a black hole is gobbling up material, the friction and movement of the particles may generate light. If the black hole is particularly gluttonous, surrounded by a buffet of matter, it may create enough light to . These bright regions around a galactic center are called active galactic nuclei, or AGNs.
What they found was that more than 90 percent of the surveyed AGNs with jets were also the product of . But, not all galaxy mergers necessarily created jets.
"We found that most merger events in themselves do not actually result in the creation of AGNs with powerful radio emission," said Roberto Gilli, of the Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna, Italy, and an author on the paper. "About 40 percent of the other galaxies we looked at had also experienced a merger and yet had failed to produce the and jets of their counterparts."
“But this process should affect in all merging galaxies, and yet not all merging galaxies with black holes end up with jets, so it is not enough to explain how these jets come about," said Colin Norman, co-author of the paper. "The other possibility is that a merger between two massive galaxies causes two black holes of a similar mass to also merge. It could be that a particular breed of merger between two black holes produces a single spinning supermassive black hole, accounting for the production of jets."
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Astronomers worldwide are focusing on Pluto, in anticipation of a July 14 flyby of the dwarf planet by NASA's New Horizons probe
With naked eye and binoculars, locate Pluto in relation to the well-known "teapot" asterism of Sagittarius. It is close to the stars Chi2 and Omicron Sagittarii, just north of the "handle" of the teapot.
With NASA's New Horizons probe zeroing in on Pluto, due to pass it on July 14, attention of astronomers all over the world is focusing in on Pluto.
Let's leave aside the question of whether is the smallest planet in the solar system or the largest of the Kuiper Belt Objects, and agree that whatever we call it, the distant world is an interesting and mysterious member of our planetary family.
Many amateur astronomers are interested in with their own telescopes, and this is what we will discuss here. Pluto is at present around 14th magnitude, requiring a telescope with at least 8 inches (200mm) aperture to be seen. The good news is that it is traveling in front of a rich part of the Milky Way, so there will be plenty of guide-posts among the stars to help you find it. The bad news is that it is easily lost amongst those stars, because it will look no different from a 14th magnitude star. []
With Starry Night, I have plotted a series of charts zooming in on this tiny target. The first sky map in this guide shows what you will see with naked eye and binoculars at 3 a.m. your local time this week: the familiar "teapot" of Sagittarius. Use Ascella and Nunki in the "handle" of the teapot to locate the two 4th magnitude stars Omicron and Xi2 in .
Switch to a to see the view in the second chart. To give you some idea of scale, this chart shows the position of the New Horizons probe, although it is too faint to be visible in even the most powerful telescopes on Earth.
So, to positively identify Pluto, is essential to observe it on at least two successive nights.
Because of the great interest in Pluto with the impending fly-by of New Horizons, Simulation Curriculum has released a free app for iOS and Android called chronicling the flyby along with details about Pluto This will be updated with new information as the fly-by approaches.
Simulation Curriculum, the leader in space science curriculum solutions and the makers of and . Follow Starry Night on Twitter . Follow us , and . Original article on
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The link between cardiovascular problems and depression starts young
ByHeart disease and depression often go hand in hand. Long-term studies have found that people with depression have a significantly higher risk of subsequent heart disease, and vice versa. Recent research has revealed that the link begins at an early age and is probably caused by chronic inflammation.
A new study in the November 2014 issue of by researchers in the U.S., Australia and China examined data from an ongoing study of health among Australians. The researchers looked at the scores of 865 young adults on a questionnaire that assesses depression symptoms and other measures of mental health. They also examined measurements of the internal diameter of the blood vessels of the retina, a possible marker of early cardiovascular disease.
After controlling for sex, age, smoking status and body mass index, the investigators found that participants with more symptoms of depression and anxiety had wider retinal arterioles than others, which could reflect the quality of blood vessels in their heart and brain. “We don't know if the association is causal,” explains study co-author Madeline Meier, a psychology professor at Arizona State University. “But our findings suggest that symptoms of depression and anxiety may identify youth at risk for cardiovascular disease.”
Other research shows that people with depression have more inflammation throughout their body and nervous system. “One theory is that stress and inflammation could play a causal role in depression,” Meier says. Such chronic inflammation is also a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. The relationship is complex: in some people, inflammation seems to precede depression and heart disease; in others, the disorders seem to cause or exacerbate the inflammation.
A study published last year suggests that atypical depression, one particular type of the disorder, may be more strongly associated with inflammation—and thus with cardiovascular problems. Atypical depression accounts for 15 to 40 percent of depression cases. It is characterized by more flexibility in mood than is found in typical depression—for instance, mood might improve in response to positive events—along with symptoms such as increased appetite, feelings of heaviness in the limbs and sensitivity to interpersonal rejection.
In the study, which was reported in the , researchers found that blood levels of a telltale immune protein in young adults with atypical depression were at least 55 percent higher than in those with other types of depression or no depression. The number of participants with atypical depression who had readings that indicated high cardiovascular risk was almost double that of the others.
The good news is that treating depression symptoms may indeed help prevent heart disease, according to a trial reported in 2013 in . Patients with depression—some with and some without heart disease—either got 12 months of treatment with antidepressants and psychotherapy, or they were simply advised to follow up with their primary care provider. Over eight years the patients without heart disease whose depression was treated had a 48 percent lower risk of heart attack and stroke than those who were not treated. There was no change in risk for patients who already had heart disease at the start of the study, further underscoring the need for timely intervention.
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Martin Rees, astrophysicist and founding member of the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, talks differentiating sci-fi from real doomsday possibilities
By | |This year the Doomsday Clock moved forward for the first time since 2012. The theoretical countdown to catastrophe was devised 67 years ago by the , a watchdog group created in 1945 by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. Its contemporary caretakers have inched the clock three minutes closer to midnight based on the threats of climate change and a slowdown in disarmament.
But global warming and nuclear malaise are not the only threats facing humanity. One organization is looking at the potential threats posed by emerging technologies—dangers no one has even considered yet. The Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge, founded in 2012, develops scientific methodologies for evaluating new global risks—to determine, for example, if a scenario in which robots take over the earth represents science fiction or a real-life possibility. Some of the world's greatest minds, including Stephen Hawking, Jaan Tallinn (a founding engineer of Skype) and philosopher Huw Price, contribute to the endeavor.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN sat down with one of the center's co-founders, astrophysicist Lord Martin Rees, to ponder the possible end of life as we know it. Edited excerpts follow.
Why start a group that delves into the threat of new technologies?
What types of scenarios do you examine?
What are the major risks to humanity as you see them and how serious are they?
Is there anything people worry about that they shouldn't?
What should worry us more are threats that are newly emergent. They surely merit more attention, and they are what CSER aims to study. It's an important maxim that the unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable. The stakes are so high that even if we can reduce the probability of catastrophe by one part in a million, we'll have earned our keep.
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A heritage committee of the UNESCO cultural agency raised long-term concerns about the reef's future
May 29, 2015
A new study suggests the long-held industry assumption that bisphenol-A breaks down safely in the human body is incorrect. Instead, researchers say, the body transforms the ubiquitous chemical additive into a compound that might spur obesity.
The study is the first to find that people’s bodies metabolize bisphenol-A (BPA) — a chemical found in most people and used in polycarbonate plastic, food cans and paper receipts — into something that impacts our cells and may make us fat.
“This shows we can’t just say things like ‘because it’s a metabolite, it means it’s not active’,” said Laura Vandenberg, an assistant professor of environmental health at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was not involved in the study. “You have to do a study.”
People are exposed to BPA throughout the day, mostly through diet, as it can leach from canned goods and plastic storage containers into food, but also through dust and water.
Within about 6 hours of exposure, our liver metabolizes about half the concentration. Most of that — about 80 to 90 percent — is converted into a metabolite called BPA-Glucuronide, which is eventually excreted.
The Health Canada researchers treated both mouse and human cells with BPA-Glucuronide. The treated cells had a “significant increase in lipid accumulation,” according to the study results. BPA-Glucuronide is “not an inactive metabolite as previously believed but is in fact biologically active,” the Health Canada authors wrote in the .
Researchers believe BPA does so by mimicking estrogen hormones, but its metabolite doesn’t appear to do so. In figuring out why metabolized BPA appears to spur fat cells, Zoeller said, it’s possible that BPA-Glucuronide is “hitting certain receptors in cells”.
Health Canada researchers were only looking at this one possible health outcome. “There could be other [health] impacts,” Zoeller said.
In recent BPA-Glucuronide has been found in human blood and at higher concentration than just plain BPA.
However, the fact that Health Canada even conducted such a study is a big deal, Vandenberg said.
“Health Canada is a regulatory body and this is pretty forward thinking science,” she said. “Hopefully this is a bell that can ring for scientists working for other regulatory agencies.”
Environmental Health News
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Books and recommendations from
ByHow to Bake π: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of MathematicsBasic Books, 2015 (($27.50))
“The world of math is more weird and wonderful than some people want to tell you,” writes Cheng, a mathematician at the University of Sheffield in England. Invoking plenty of examples from cooking and baking, as well as other everyday-life situations such as calculating a taxi fare, searching for love through online dating services and training for a marathon, she explains abstract mathematical ideas—including topology and logic—in understandable ways. Cheng's specialty is category theory, which she describes as “the mathematics of mathematics”—a way to organize and understand the many rules and processes that govern math. Her lively, accessible book demonstrates how important and intriguing such a pursuit can be.
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SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — In an industrial section of a San Francisco Bay Area suburb, the sleek new office building of Genentech, a biotechnology firm, opened last week. The company knows it will be energy efficient because it is the first project to take advantage of a cutting-edge efficiency testing facility that was developed last year in nearby Berkeley.
"Building 35" was developed on a rotating test bed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to model real-life conditions as closely as possible. Lighting, ventilation and shading in the 255,000-square-foot building have all been adjusted based on months of experiments in a mocked-up office with sensors to measure temperature, glare and energy use.
First impressions of the building, however, come from a coffee bar in the airy atrium with kombucha on draft, massage chairs off the lobby and Herman Miller desks that raise and lower at the touch of a button. More subtle are the green couch cushions and the metal fins on the sides of the building, each embossed with graphic representations of DNA code.
"It's all about choice, collaboration, well-being and sustainability," said Joana Calvo, a project coordinator at the building and a tour guide at Genentech's unveiling last week. The building will eventually house 1,500 of Genentech's 10,000 Bay Area employees.
There is much more at work here than mere style. The atrium is designed so that it relies on natural air flows 40 percent of the time. Ventilation systems in the conference rooms don't turn on until carbon dioxide levels reach 1,000 parts per million.
The metal fins are aligned to minimize glare and make the most of natural heat and light; as such, they are placed horizontally on the building's south face and vertically on the rest of the sides, to bounce light into the top part of the ceiling and down onto the workers.
Under construction since October 2013, the building underwent four months of testing at LBNL's Flexlab, a customizable facility that allows commercial real estate developers to create mock-ups of planned buildings to test their energy use.
Funded with $15.7 million from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the lab features eight rooms that can be outfitted to mirror an existing or planned building's layout. Two of the rooms rotate 270 degrees in order to test various levels of sunlight (, July 11, 2014).
All told, energy-saving techniques and materials are expected to reduce energy use about 30 percent below the building industry's voluntary efficiency standards of 2007, and are calculated to pay for themselves within three to five years.
Adjusting lighting controls further than the manufacturers' settings, for example, is expected to save $4,145 per year and 60 percent more energy than the default efficiency settings. The automated window shades never completely close, because testing at Flexlab revealed that the bottom 6 inches of window should always stay exposed to maximize use of natural daylight.
Although the lawns around the building are currently brown, to comply with lawn-watering restrictions put in place to combat the state's historic drought, the drought-tolerant landscaping will eventually reduce irrigation by 78 percent.
The building doesn't have solar power, as its perch overlooking San Francisco Bay is known for its often-foggy microclimate.
"Our focus was having a positive ROI," said Andrew Keller, Genentech's campus site planner. "I think the return on that investment was about 27 years."
Genentech officials wouldn't say how much the building cost, but noted that if Flexlab had been available earlier in the planning process, the energy savings would have been even greater. The use of Flexlab cost $250,000.
"Flexlab did not exist when we developed our initial plans for the building, but when they came online, we were very pleased to be the first client to test several features and operating systems for the building," said spokeswoman Lisa Slater.
Currently, utility Pacific Gas & Electric is using Flexlab to test efficiency technologies, and SolarCity and Tesla are slated to test their combined solar panel and battery systems there this summer.
www.eenews.net
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A DNA-based vaccine gave rats six months of protection against high blood pressure, as well as healthier hearts. Christopher Intagliata reports.
BySome have . Three quarters of them to keep the condition in check. But you've got to remember to actually the daily dose. Now researchers have devised a longer-lasting alternative: a to lower blood pressure…for rats, at least.
The result is a reduction in angiotensin II's usual blood pressure raising effects—similar to what blood pressure meds like Benicar do. Less angiotensin II means more relaxed blood vessels, and a drop in pressure. That effect lasted six months in the vaccinated rats, and lengthened their lifespan by eight weeks. Necropsies on the vaccinated rats revealed healthier heart tissue than normally found with high blood pressure, and no damage to their kidneys or livers. The results are in the journal . [Hiroshi Koriyama et al, ]
Computer scientists have endowed a six-legged robot with the ability to rapidly modify its motion to cope with damage, such as the loss of a foot. They say the algorithm that enables this recovery, which they liken to an instinct, could add resilience to other machines, from such as the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant to .
In pioneering work in 2006, evolutionary roboticist Josh Bongard at the University of Vermont in Burlington and his team built a six-legged robot that and calculated new motion patterns that enabled it to resume operations. But although the hexapod robot broke new grounds in machine self-awareness, it was slow to adapt to new situations. “Time is of the essence,” says Bongard. “If a car starts to skid off the road, it needs to find a way to recover very quickly.”
Choosing these patterns from the much larger pool, or 'space', of all possible movements took a computer work station two weeks: the researchers initially encoded the walking patterns as 36 variable parameters—such as how wide a leg swings forward, and by what angle, at each step — and then cut down the number of parameters to six by focusing on plausible movements.
Armed with this knowlege, the hexapod usually needed just a minute or less to start walking again after a failure. In some cases, the robot found that hopping was now the most efficient way to move (see video above).
The algorithm also enabled the hexapod to adapt in situations where there was no mechanical failure but the environmental conditions, for example the type of terrain, had changed—as the researchers discovered when they tested an early version after their lab’s floors had been freshly waxed.
The work is “very exciting”, Bongard says, although he warns that it remains to be seen whether the team’s methods can be scaled up to more complex machines: a robot's space of behaviours grows exponentially as its complexity increases.
One advantage of the approach is that it relies mostly on software and so works independently of a robot's specific physical design. The researchers successfully tested the algorithm on an entirely different kind of machine—a robotic arm. “Virtually any robot would benefit from this," says Mouret.
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Books and recommendations from
ByChoosing between colleges or job offers is challenging: one job may offer more prestige—seemingly the logical choice—but our gut seems to be pulling us in another direction. So which do we trust? In Feeling Smart: Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think (PublicAffairs, 2014), economics professor Eyal Winter proposes that the best choices often come when we combine logic and emotion. Combining research on decision making, human behavior and evolution, Winter explores how our emotions interact with rational thinking. He finds that we can often trust our gut instincts to lead us to good choices and that our emotional reactions can work in our favor. In one study conducted by Winter, he found that our inclination to become angry actually increases when we can benefit from the emotion. “In other words,” he writes, “there is logic in emotion and often emotion in logic.”
Often, however, we are faced with group, not individual, decisions that involve and affect our loved ones, business and economic ventures, or social activities. In Wiser: Getting beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Reid Hastie, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, delve into the psychology of group decision making—why the hive mind can make mistakes and how to avoid those pitfalls. First, Sunstein and Hastie explain that instead of correcting errors in reasoning, the group voice may amplify mistakes or become divided on an issue, leading to discord. The authors then offer advice to guide the group to better choices, by, for instance, giving quieter members a stronger voice or combining opinions and solutions from different individuals to forge new ideas.
Still, much of our decision-making processes occur outside of our conscious awareness. In Unthink: And How to Harness the Power of Your Unconscious (Hodder & Stoughton, 2015), evolutionary biologist Chris Paley explains the interesting, sometimes bizarre, ways in which our unconscious mind influences our choice of friends, how we receive good news or even what foods we buy. Paley also offers advice on how to use this understanding of the unconscious to our advantage. For instance, he explains that you are more likely be asked out on a date if you discreetly mimic your potential mate's body language and speech.
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Defendants whose convictions on drug charges were based on evidence potentially tainted by can pursue retrials without having to face more charges or tougher sentences, the . Dookhan, who has acknowledged that she mixed evidence samples and falsified results while working at the Hinton drug laboratory in Massachusetts, was in November 2013.
However, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts as a victory for tens of thousands of people who were denied due process by Dookhan’s misconduct. Some innocent defendants feared that challenging their convictions could subject them to even harsher convictions and sentences, according to ACLU.
In a related case, that state law enforcement officials never conducted a thorough investigation of how many times tampered with drug evidence during the nine years she worked at a state forensics drug lab in Amherst. In April 2013, was prosecuted for tampering with evidence at the drug lab where she worked and stealing cocaine. Farak, who had once also worked at the Hinton Lab, pleaded guilty to all 10 charges in January 2014.
There are four basic properties of sets that beginning analysis and topology students see: , compact, and connected. Of those properties, it seems like connectedness should be the easiest. has a pretty clear meaning in English. But it's surprisingly difficult to get the mathematical definition just right. The topologist's sine curve is one of the that helps illuminate exactly what it means to be connected.
As a regular English word, we usually think of connectedness as a property of two things: A and B are connected if they overlap in some way or if you can get from A to B. In mathematics, connectedness is a property of one set. How do we make the English idea mathematical and apply it to one object? One tempting definition is that a set is connected if you can get from one point in the set to any other point in the set. But what about duplexes? You can walk between rooms in the same unit of a duplex, but you can’t get from one unit to the other one without leaving the duplex. Is a duplex connected? I think it is. So that's not quite the right definition of connected. Being able to get between any two points in a set is a very useful mathematical property, but it’s too strong. Mathematicians call a space with that property , and we’ll talk more about that later.
Connectedness is a little more subtle. For our second attempt, we’ll start here: a set X is connected if you can't stick part of it in a set A and the rest of it in a set B so that A and B don’t overlap. There’s one tiny problem: that definition is totally useless. It would make too many spaces disconnected. We could break up the set of all real numbers into numbers that are greater than or equal to 0 and numbers that are less than 0. Those don’t overlap, so by our definition, the real number line would be disconnected. Clearly, the it should be connected, and any definition that makes it disconnected is wrong.
What was the problem? We included the boundary point 0 in one set but not the other. If we had included it in both, the sets would overlap, and if we included it in neither, the sets wouldn’t overlap, but they wouldn’t cover the whole real line either. The "right" answer is to exclude the endpoints from both intervals. Intervals that don’t include their endpoints are called open, so we say that a set X is connected if you can't stick part of it in an set A and the rest of it in an set B so that A and B don’t overlap. This definition doesn’t just work for one-dimensional sets; we can define openness in higher dimensions as well. Basically, a set is open if none of its points are right on the boundary, or equivalently if every point in the set has a little blob around it that’s also in the set.
All that work just to define connectedness! Now for the payoff. Behold, the topologist’s sine curve! A portion of the topologist's sine curve. Note that the left part of the graph isn't actually solid; that effect is merely a relic of the finite nature of our existence. Image: Morn the Gorn, via Wikimedia Commons.
This space is the graph of the function f(x)=sin(1/x) for x in the interval (0,1] joined with the point (0,0). We can see that as x gets closer to 0, 1/x gets larger and larger, so sin(1/x) oscillates wildly between -1 and 1.
The topologist’s sine curve is one of the first examples a math student will see of a set that is connected but not path connected. You can see the finish line, but you can't get there from here.
Why is it connected? Let’s try to put it into two nonoverlapping open sets. One of those sets has to contain the point (0,0); since it’s open, it also has to contain a blob around (0,0). No matter how small that blob is, it’s going to include some points with positive x-coordinate and 0 as the y-coordinate, which means it will include some pieces of the graph of f(x). That means that if we want to disconnect the space, we’ll have to put part of the graph of f(x) in one set and part in the other. But there’s no way to split up the graph. It’s a continuous curve, so like the real line, it’s connected.
Why isn’t the topologist's sine curve path-connected? Let's say you're trying to get from a point on the graph of f(x) to the point (0,0). You have to walk along the graph towards (0,0), but you'll be stuck walking forever. You’ll get really, really close, but you’ll always have an infinitely long road still ahead of you.
A very closely related space is the closed topologist’s sine curve. A closed space contains all of its boundary points, meaning points that are arbitrarily close to points in the set. With the way the curve f(x) oscillates, all the points on the y-axis between -1 and 1 are very close to points on the curve, so to close up the topologist’s sine curve, we throw in that line segment as well. This doesn't ruin the other topological properties—it's still connected but not path connected—but now it's closed as well. Some people like that kind of thing.
If you’ve taken a topology class before, you might have seen the definition of the topological property called compactness: a set is compact if every open cover of the set has a finite subcover. The topologist’s sine curve is not compact, but the closed topologist’s sine curve is. In the spirit of frustrating math textbooks everywhere, I’ll leave an exercise for the reader: find an open cover of the topologist’s sine curve that does not have a finite subcover and figure out why the example doesn't work for the closed topologist's sine curve. Write your answer on the back of a closed, uncountable, nowhere dense subset of the [0,1] interval and send it to Cantor Plaza, Box Log2(3).
Read about more of my favorite spaces:
The Cantor setFat Cantor sets
U.S. personnel working at an Army facility in Utah appeared to follow correctly all the outlined procedures to inactivate anthrax before they mistakenly shipped off live samples of the deadly bacteria
May 28, 2015
The El Niño event underway in the Pacific Ocean is impacting temperature and weather patterns around the world. But its effects aren’t confined to the atmosphere: A new study has found that the cyclical climate phenomenon can ratchet up sea levels off the West Coast by almost 8 inches over just a few seasons.
The findings have important implications in terms of planning for sea level rise, as ever-growing coastal communities might have to plan for even higher ocean levels in a warmer future. In California alone, some $40 billion of property and nearly 500,000 people could be affected by the sea level rise expected through mid-century, not including any additional boost from El Niño events.
“This paper is an important reminder that we cannot neglect interannual sea level variability and we need a quantitative understanding of its impact,” , an oceanographer with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) said in an email.
‘Best of both worlds’El Niño is a Pacific-driven climate pattern that features warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropics of that ocean basin. (That excess heat can bleed into the atmosphere and to typical circulation patterns.)
But while it’s clear that in the main El Niño regions of the tropics, the effects further afield and on smaller scales have been harder to tease out, particularly along coastlines.
It’s a way to get “the best of both words,” Hamlington, an assistant professor at in Norfolk, Va., said.
On Hamlington’s charts, for example, the very strong El Niño events of 1982-83 and clearly jump out in the West Coast data. While the tide gauge and satellite data largely agreed, the satellites seemed to slightly underestimate the El Niño-related rise.
La Niña events—the counterpart to El Niños, featuring colder than normal tropical Pacific waters—caused dips in sea levels. None were as large as the El Niño shifts, but there were no exceptionally strong La Niñas in the record Hamlington used.
There also seemed to be some El Niño effect on sea levels off the Southeast coast, which Hamlington said could be due to increased storminess and related storm surge.
Planning aheadJournal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
Understanding how such year-to-year natural climate variations impact coastal water levels is key to developing a full picture of the sea level rise threat through the end of the century. Warming alone is expected to cause up to 2 feet of rise along the West Coast, according to the .
Climate Central. The article was
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Black balls that litter the planet may prove the best marker for a new geologic epoch recognizing humanity's outsized impacts
ByFire ranks among humanity's . Now the residue from all the oil and coal burned to power modern civilization may provide the best marker for the start of a new geologic epoch that highlights s world-changing impact, known as the , or "new age of humans."
"We're actually changing and continuing to change how the Earth system functions and leaving time," says Earth scientist Karen Bacon of the University of Leeds in England. "That's quite incredible to think about."
The proposed marker is billions of microscopic black balls found from the high arctic to the bottoms of lakes in Chile. When a flame eats into the hydrocarbons known as coal or oil, not all the carbon atoms pair up with the oxygen that makes fire and carbon dioxide emissions possible. Some of that carbon remains bonded tightly to its fellow carbons, unburned, forming a little black sphere. These spheres are known as spheroidal carbonaceous particles (SCP) to environmental scientists and incomplete combustion products to fire engineers; the general public knows them best perhaps as .
That soot, fly ash or whatever you want to call it is borne aloft by the hot gases of combustion before settling gently back to Earth in lungs, into lakes and the sea or onto the landscape. The more coal and oil burned, the more black spheres formed, making such soot the perfect record of a . As CO2 changes the climate, one of humanity's biggest impacts on the planet as a whole, these pitted carbon balls mark the potentially irrevocable change. "In the very top of these sediment cores we take, we get these fly ash indicators," explains Leeds geologist Graeme Swindles, lead author of a on May 28 (Scientific American and are part of Nature Publishing Group.)
Environmental scientist Neil Rose of University College London has been collecting such SCP records from lakes around the world for 25 years. On every continent more fly ash starts falling into the geologic record around 1950, Rose notes in a on March 19, even though we have been adding SCPs to the environment for roughly 170 years now.
Such fly ash is not typically produced by natural phenomena like volcanic eruptions—except those that set off coal combustion like the massive ones that followed a 66 million years ago to end the Cretaceous period. Volcanic SCPs are different—much lighter in color and easy to distinguish from the dark black spheres formed by high-temperature fossil-fuel burning in coal-fired power plants and vehicles. "If SCPs survive as long as the particles from the [Cretaceous–Paleogene] boundary, then they will —and probably most ice records on the planet," Rose notes.
That makes for a marker that will be preserved in the more than four-billion-year-long geologic record. Similar soot particles can still be found from the volcanic eruptions that aided the period around 252 million years ago. The dark balls also appear at roughly the same time everywhere—circa 1950—exactly what geologists look for in determining the boundaries of geologic ages, like the newly proposed Anthropocene.
Soot is not the only potential marker. Other proposals include the in the wake of the first atom bomb explosion in 1945 to a occasioned by the mass deaths that followed European arrival in North and South America a century or so earlier. But none of these alternatives are directly tied to a change in the entire planet. Soot, on the other hand, is the aftermath of the coal and oil burning that is also responsible for changing the global climate.
Swindles even has a spot that might make for a good location to host a golden spike in the geologic timescale: , the highest glacial lake in England situated in the Yorkshire Dales. The lake and adjacent bog record some 8,000 years of human activity in the vicinity, from the advent of farming millennia ago to the industrial revolution, and remains largely unchanged throughout its history But in the last 50 years, "everything changes," Swindles says. "Traces of pollution, fly ash particles coming in, evidence of recent climate change—all the records from that site basically look like hockey sticks."
That half-century has been dubbed the "," and includes everything from plastics to the boom in population that put more than today. This further strengthens the case for a shift in geologic epoch around 1950. "Any potential [spike] would have both the radionuclide record as well as the SCP one—as well as a few invasive species, bits of microplastic and stable carbon isotopes," explains geologist Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester in England and chairman of the that is evaluating whether or not to add the Anthropocene to the geologic timescale. "It adds to the evidence that the mid–20th century is not only important as regards Earth system change, but that it left durable markers in strata."
A signifies an irreversible change in this planet's history, whether the icy ages of the Pleistocene or the long summer of the Holocene. "Geologists simply try to do the best they can to define a boundary that works reasonably well reasonably often," Zalasiewicz says. Humanity's quest for fire has left a consistent trace, remarkable even in the vast expanse of geologic time—and that trace is, in large part, a dirty, black smudge that covers the globe as well as higher concentrations of atmospheric CO2 that may set Earth’s temperature for millennia.
A collaboration with Matter
State Route 87, the thin band of pavement that approaches the mostly shuttered town of Coolidge, Ariz., cuts through some of the least hospitable land in the country. The valley of red and brown sand is interrupted occasionally by rock and saguaro cactus. It’s not unusual for summer temperatures to top 116 degrees. And there is almost no water; this part of Arizona receives less than nine inches of rainfall each year.
Then Route 87 tacks left and the dead landscape springs to life. Barren roadside is replaced by thousands of acres of cotton fields, their bright, leafy green stalks and white, puffy bolls in neat rows that unravel for miles. It’s a vision of bounty where it would be least expected. Step into the hip-high cotton shrubs, with the soft, water-soaked dirt giving way beneath your boot soles, the bees buzzing in your ears, the pungent odor of the plants in your nostrils, and you might as well be in Georgia.
Getting plants to grow in the Sonoran Desert is made possible by importing billions of gallons of water each year. Cotton is one of the thirstiest crops in existence, and each acre cultivated here demands six times as much water as lettuce, 60 percent more than wheat. That precious liquid is pulled from a nearby federal reservoir, siphoned from beleaguered underground aquifers and pumped in from the Colorado River hundreds of miles away. Greg Wuertz has been farming cotton on these fields since 1981, and before him, his father and grandfather did the same. His family is part of Arizona’s agricultural royalty. His father was a board member of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District for nearly two decades. Wuertz has served as president of several of the most important cotton organizations in the state.
But what was once a breathtaking accomplishment—raising cotton in a desert—has become something that Wuertz pursues with a twinge of doubt chipping at his conscience. Demand and prices for cotton have plummeted, and he knows no one really needs what he supplies. More importantly, he understands that cotton comes at enormous environmental expense, a price the American West may no longer be able to afford.
Wuertz could plant any number of crops that use far less water than cotton and fill grocery store shelves from Maine to Minnesota. But along with hundreds of farmers across Arizona, he has kept planting his fields with cotton instead. He says he has done it out of habit, pride, practicality, and even a self-deprecating sense that he wouldn’t be good at anything else. But in truth, one reason outweighs all the others: The federal government has long offered him so many financial incentives to do it that he can’t afford not to.
“Some years all of what you made came from the government,” Wuertz said. “Your bank would finance your farming operation … because they knew the support was guaranteed. They wouldn’t finance wheat, or alfalfa. Cotton was always dependable, it would always work.”
The water shortages that have brought California, Arizona and other Western states to the edge of an environmental cliff have been attributed to a historic climate event—a dry spell that experts worry could be the worst in 1,000 years. But an examination by ProPublica shows that the scarcity of water is as much a man-made crisis as a natural one, the result of decades of missteps and misapprehensions by governments and businesses as they have faced surging demand driven by a booming population.
The federal subsidies that prop up cotton farming in Arizona are just one of myriad ways that policymakers have refused, or been slow to reshape laws to reflect the West’s changing circumstances. Provisions in early–20th-century water-use laws that not only permit but also compel farmers and others to use more water than they need are another. “Use It or Lose It” is the cynical catch phrase for one of those policies.
Western leaders also have flinched repeatedly when staring down the insatiable, unstoppable force of urban sprawl. Las Vegas authorities have spent billions of dollars inventing new ways to bring water to their ever-expanding city, yet could not cite a single development permit they had ever denied because of concerns about water.
Instead, when faced with a dwindling water supply, state and federal officials have again and again relied on human ingenuity to engineer a way out of making hard choices about using less water. But the engineering that made settling the West possible may have reached the bounds of its potential. Dams and their reservoirs leak or lose billions of gallons of water to evaporation. The colossal Navajo Generating Station, which burns 22,000 tons of coal a day in large part to push water hundreds of miles across Arizona, is among the nation’s biggest greenhouse gas polluters, contributing to the very climate change that is exacerbating the drought.
Few crises have been more emphatically and presciently predicted. Almost 150 years ago, John Wesley Powell, the geologist and explorer, traveled the Colorado River in an effort to gauge America’s chances for developing its arid western half. His report to Congress reached a chastening conclusion: There wasn’t enough water to support significant settlement.
For more than a century, Americans have defied Powell’s words, constructing 20 of the nation’s largest cities and a vibrant economy that, among other bounties, provides an astonishing proportion of the country’s fruit and vegetables.
For almost as long, the policies that shaped the West have struggled to match the region’s ambitions—endless growth, new industry, fertile farming and plentiful power—to its water supply.
Today, as the Colorado River enters its 15th year of drought, the nation’s largest reservoirs have been diminished to relative puddles. Power plants that depend on dams along the river face shortages and shutdowns that could send water and electricity prices skyrocketing. Many of the region’s farmers have been forced to fallow fields.
The still-blooming cotton farms of Arizona are emblematic of the reluctance to make choices that seem obvious. The Wuertz family has received government checks just for putting cottonseeds in the ground and more checks when the price of cotton fell. They have benefited from cheap loans for cotton production that don’t have to be fully repaid if the market slumps. Most recently, the government has covered almost the entire premium on their cotton crop insurance, guaranteeing they’ll be financially protected even when natural conditions—like drought—keep them from producing a good harvest.
The payments, part of the U.S. Farm Bill, are a legacy of Dust Bowl-era programs that live on today at the urging of the national cotton lobby and the insurance industry. Similar subsidies support corn, rice, wheat and, indirectly, alfalfa—all of which also use lots of water. But in Arizona one of the driest states in the nation, it’s cotton that has received the most federal aid, tipping the balance on farmers’ decisions about what to plant.
Over the last 20 years, Arizona’s farmers have collected more than $1.1 billion in cotton subsidies, nine times more than the amount paid out for the next highest subsidized crop. In California, where cotton also gets more support than most other crops, farmers received more than $3 billion in cotton aid.
Cotton growers say the subsidies don’t make them rich but help bridge the worst years of losses and keep their businesses going. And because the money is such a sure thing, they have little choice but to keep planting.
“If you’re sitting on land and thinking of shifting, cotton is safer,” said Daniel Pearson, a senior fellow of trade policy studies at the Cato Institute.
Growing cotton in the desert, long term, may be doomed. In Arizona, the price for cotton has been in decline, and with it the overall planting of the crop. But when the price spikes, as it did dramatically in 2010, the growers get busy. One thing has yet to change: the government’s willingness to back and protect those still wanting to be cotton farmers.
For years, the federal support came through subsidies and price protection cash put directly in the farmer’s pocket. In Arizona, those payments could total tens of millions of dollars a year. Today, the government’s aid comes chiefly in the form of insurance subsidies—reliable and robust protections against losses that many farmers and their lobbyists hoped would be every bit as effective as cold cash. And so every year more than 100,000 acres of cotton still get planted, making the crop the second-most popular in the state.
Thus, at a time when farmers in Arizona, California and other Western states might otherwise adapt to a water-short world, federal farm subsidies are helping preserve a system in which the thirstiest crops are grown in some of the driest places.
“The subsidies are distorting water usage throughout the West and providing an incentive to use more water than would be used in an open market,” said Bruce Babbitt, Arizona’s former governor and a former U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
One night last October, in the weary twilight of the cotton harvest, Greg Wuertz nestled his white Chevy pickup by the mailboxes at the head of his street. Opening a small aluminum door, he removed an envelope containing a $30,000 insurance payment on a policy paid for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Easy money, to be sure, but it left Wuertz uncertain.
“This kind of way of life in the West, it’s got to be different,” he said. “Water is going to be the oil of the 21st century and it should go to the best use. Right now, I don’t know if we’re doing that.”
Cotton might never have been grown in Arizona without some form of government enticement. During the Civil War, a Union blockade impounded the Southern states’ global exports. As Europe turned to new strains of cotton grown in Egypt, Arizona’s settlers, knowing the Pima Indians had long planted cotton there, thought they could replicate hot and dry North African conditions and compete. Townships reportedly offered cash to farmers willing to pioneer commercial-scale crops, according to a local historical account. Arizona’s first cotton mogul was said to be a blacksmith who abandoned his trade to take the subsidies and try farming.
Arizona, at the time, was short on people and long on land. It was also rich in freshwater aquifers, groundwater that then seemed ample enough to irrigate vast fields and turn the desert into an oasis.
When the United States first went to war in Europe, the demand for cotton surged. The fibers were used to reinforce truck tires and canvas airplane wings. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company bought thousands of farm acres and built a factory west of Phoenix, where a city by the name of Goodyear still stands. Farmers flocked to the state in search of opportunity.
In 1929, Wuertz’s grandfather packed the family’s belongings into their old Buick and drove down from South Dakota. He strung up tents on 160 acres, six miles outside Coolidge, and planted his first rows of cotton in the months before the Great Depression. By the 1950s, cotton farming had been woven into the state’s identity; Arizona schoolchildren learned about the “Five C’s”: cattle, copper, citrus, climate and cotton.
Draw a sagging line today from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., and every state below it grows cotton. The United States is the world’s largest exporter, with 17 states producing some eight billion pounds of cotton each year, most of which gets shipped off to Asia and Europe.
California and Arizona are able to produce more than twice as much cotton on each acre they plant as can cotton powerhouses like Texas and Georgia because they irrigate their fields more often. But that also means that they use two to four times as much water per acre.
From almost the beginning, Arizona’s cotton farmers understood they were withdrawing from a finite account. “There was a sense the water would run out,” said Wuertz’s father, Howard, now 89. “You could tell there was going to be an end to it, even in the 1950s.”
They’ve made it last, in large part, because as the aquifers beneath their feet were depleted, the state brought in new supplies, mainly from the Colorado River.
Today, Wuertz’s irrigated cotton plants grow to about 4 feet tall, and are planted in even rows, about 3 feet center to center, extending for miles across furrowed fields. Every August, the bolls—pregnant pods just smaller than a golf ball—burst open, allowing their white cellulosic fiber to spring outward from hearty, splayed leaves and a small seed. Modern tractors, called cotton pickers, drive a comb through the fields, plucking the drying bolls from their stems and shooting them through a mechanical snorkel into a large basket being towed behind. Another basket, or “boll buggy,” dumps the load into a compressor, which packs the cotton into a brick 8 feet tall and 32 feet long.
The brick is hauled through Coolidge to a local gin, where computerized modern machines roll it through a whirring conveyor, separating the seeds and fibers from their leaves and chaff. The seeds are collected for animal feed or crushed for cooking oil. The lint, cleaned and dried, is strapped into 500-pound bales and shipped off through distributors who either sell the cotton or store it in vast warehouses, waiting for prices to rise and the commodity markets to buoy the crop.
Between land costs, labor, equipment, shipping and other expenses, Wuertz said he spends about $1,200 for every acre of cotton he harvests. His cotton has garnered about 62 cents per pound lately, so even if Wuertz gets four bales from each acre—a blockbuster harvest—he brings in about $1,240 and barely breaks even.
Cotton farmers can cut corners to try to eke out a profit, stretching their water, cutting back on fertilizer and making fewer laps with their tractors to save on diesel. But in years when the price is lower, water is short or demand plummets, they’ll lose money. This is when they count on federal subsidies and the crop insurance programs. If Wuertz needs an advance until his cotton is bought, the government lends it to him. If he can’t sell his cotton at a profit, the government never asks for its money back. If the price falls below a base of around 52 cents, Wuertz is insured for much of the decrease in value. If his fields produce a light yield—perhaps because he couldn’t give them enough water—he’s covered for the difference in weight, too. Other crops get subsidized insurance and loans, but none, Wuertz said, are covered as thoroughly as cotton. Add it all up, and the message from the Farm Bill is clear: Grow cotton and you will not be harmed.
“If they didn’t have insurance, it would be ugly around here,” Wuertz said. “It’d be the rope and chair. There’d be people killing themselves. It’s that bad.”
Standing in his field last fall, Wuertz cupped a tuft of cotton about the size of a softball and mused over its miraculous origins.
He gets about one-quarter of his water from the Central Arizona Project, or CAP, the system of canals that brings water from the Colorado River, some 230 miles away. The rest comes from a federally built reservoir nearby called San Carlos Lake, which, with the drought, has been diminished to little more than a bed of mud.
“There comes a time when you have to leave some to keep the fish alive,” Wuertz said wryly.
Wuertz loves to farm cotton. Fingering the plant’s thorny, rose-like leaves, he explains the difference between hirsutum, what Arizonans call Upland, or short staple cotton used for everyday clothes, and barbadense, the long-fiber Pima cotton used in high-end sheets and expensive textiles. He is stocky, wearing jeans, cowhide boots, a blue-striped button-down shirt and a broad-rimmed white cowboy hat that shields his face from view as he talks. Every 10 days, he explains, he releases his ditch gates and floods the furrows, using an irrigation technique hundreds of years old, until the roots of his plants are submerged ankle deep. If he were to do it all at once, the water Wuertz spends to produce one acre of cotton would stand 4 feet deep. The ditches flow with hundreds of millions of gallons of water every year.
For the last third of a century, Wuertz was supplied prodigious amounts of water, largely because Arizona was pushing its farmers to use as much as they could. The state’s run on water began in the 1970s, when Arizona planned its mega canal in order to lay claim to its full share of water from the Colorado River. The canal would bring more water than the state needed at the time, ultimately supplying future urban expansion as its cities and economy grew. But in the short term, Arizona had to justify the canal’s $4.4 billion federally subsidized construction cost by demonstrating to Congress that it had a plan to put all that water to use right away.
The state’s aquifers had been drawn down so much that, in places, the land had begun to settle above them. The canal project looked like a way to wean Arizona’s farmers off ground water, using river water to replace it. It looked good on paper until 1993, when the Central Arizona Project canal was completed. The cost of construction plus the cost of the power needed to pump the water made CAP water more expensive than what farmers could pump cheaply from underground. In a bind, state and federal officials slashed the price—subsidizing nearly half the true cost of the water and charging farmers just a fraction of its value to get them to use more of it.
For a while, the plan worked. Farmers made the switch, using government-subsidized canals and inexpensive power to nourish their farms for another generation. But the farms were little more than a place holder in the state’s grand plans. It was understood that as cities grew, farming in Arizona would have to change. Much of the cotton, alfalfa, wheat and citrus would eventually need to be grown somewhere else as the water from CAP was switched to supply urban areas.
“That was the deal that was struck to induce agriculture to go out of business,” said Jon Kyl, the former three-term senator and four-term congressman from Arizona.
But the transition hasn’t been completed, in part owing to the farm subsidies that have delayed change. And now the state’s intricate water supply plan is beginning to crumble.
Drought has diminished the Colorado’s flow so much that federal officials—who control water deliveries on the southern half of the Colorado—now predict they will have to cut the state’s water deliveries through the CAP canal as soon as next year, potentially eliminating much of the farmers’ share. Meanwhile, loopholes in laws designed to conserve aquifers for exactly this situation have allowed housing developers and others to draw down resources that were supposed to be protected.
The water needs of Arizona’s cities are surging. The state’s population—less than two million in 1970—has ballooned to more than three times that and is expected to reach 11 million within the next 30 years, turning the state into what the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University has described as a “megalopolis.”
Last year Arizona officials forecast the state could run out of water within a few decades.
“The shortages projected hitting municipal customers are really in the 2026 time frame,” said Thomas Buschatzke, the director of Arizona’s Department of Water Resources, as if a 10-year cushion was supposed to be reassuring.
Land use statistics show that acres of irrigated farmland in Arizona have decreased over the past few decades, and since 1985 they’ve dropped by more than half in the area around Phoenix. The Wuertz family sold a chunk of its fields to home developers in 2009.
But the patterns of agricultural water use make clear that it’s not just how many acres of land are planted there, but what is grown on them.
Cotton’s domestic benefits are questionable. After a price spike in 2010, production of cotton surged while global demand—and prices along with it—plummeted. Today, China, the world’s largest cotton producer, has enough cotton in warehouses to stop farming for a year. And Texas, the U.S.’s largest producer, harvests enough to cover more than one third of U.S. exports alone, relying largely on natural rainfall, not irrigation, to do it. Wuertz’s cotton—produced with Arizona’s precious water—is likely to get stacked in cavernous warehouses until the marketing cooperative he uses finds new customers. If Arizona stopped farming cotton tomorrow, Wuertz said, he’s not sure anyone would notice.
This underscores questions about whether continuing to grow these water-hogging crops at their current levels is in the public interest, and whether such an important pillar of U.S. economic policy as the Farm Bill should continue to champion them.
“The basic question is how are you going to manage your water supply? And we have managed it in a way that has subsidized agriculture,” said John Bredehoeft the former manager of the western water program for the U.S. Geological Survey, referring not just to subsidies for crops like cotton, but also the support for crops like alfalfa that are grown as feed. “If you look at the fact that half of the water use in the West is to raise cows—can you say, 'Hey, we’ve got a water shortage in the West?’”
First established as a New Deal program to rescue farmers during the Great Depression, today’s unwieldy version of the U.S. Farm Bill wraps everything from food stamps to sugar imports into one 357-page, nearly $1 trillion law.
The measure allots about $130 billion over 10 years to protect farmers against price drops, bad weather and bad luck and to insure them against virtually any scenario that gets in the way of turning a profit.
No American law has more influence on what, where and when farmers decide to plant. And by extension, no federal policy has a greater ability to directly influence how water resources are consumed in the American West.
Until this year, the bill doled out direct subsidies for a full menu of crops. Every farmer planting commodities, including those planting cotton, got $40,000 just for signing up.
Then there are the steeply discounted business loans, which have a measurable impact on what farmers decide to plant. In many cases, to be eligible for these subsidies one year, a farmer has to have previously planted the crop—a basic component of the bill’s architecture that gives farmers an incentive to maintain “base” levels of acreage. In an analysis, the Congressional Budget Office found that the subsidies don’t just maintain the status quo, they also foster more planting, and more water use. The USDA’s marketing loans alone, for example, led to a 10 percent increase in the amount of cotton farmers planted—compared to 2.5 percent increase in the amount of wheat, and a 1.5 percent increase in the amount of soybeans produced—in part because the subsidies not only make cotton a safer bet, they also make it more competitive against alternative crops. Banks lend cotton growers money they wouldn’t lend for other crops, largely because they know the government will stand behind them.
All told, Wuertz estimates that nearly one-fifth of his income is derived from Farm Bill aid, and cotton has almost always been his largest and most important crop. According to USDA statistics compiled by the Environmental Working Group, the Wuertz family—including his brother’s and father’s farms—has received more than $5.3 million in farm bill subsidies since 1995, a portion of which may have been targeted for efficient irrigation equipment, Wuertz said.
The Farm Bill has been used in the past to steer environmental policy. It provides for withholding money, for example, from farms that would contribute to soil erosion or the destruction of wetlands. In North Dakota, where farmers were tearing out grasslands to plant corn for ethanol production, the law contains “sodbuster” provisions withholding insurance benefits from those who rip up lands the government wants to conserve.
The Farm Bill contains $56 billion for conservation, funding an effort to encourage farmers to reduce their water consumption by using more-modern equipment as well as measures meant to conserve land. Another section of the bill is aimed at saving energy. But the law’s farming incentives run counter to its far more modest water conservation initiatives.
“There is a real disconnect between that and what the commodity and crop insurance program are promoting, and that’s a basic conflict,” said Ferd Hoefner, the policy director at National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, based in Washington, D.C.
The Farm Bill’s authors have sometimes factored in environmental concerns in specific places and tailored incentives to affect them, Hoefner said. But when it comes to cotton, the bill does not consider the related water use, and it does not distinguish between the places where it is grown. Instead, the money corresponds roughly to the amount of cotton harvested; Arizona, which ranks in the middle in terms of its cotton production, also ranks 10th among the 17 states that receive cotton aid. California, which ranked third for overall cotton production in 2013, also ranks third in subsidies over the last 20 years according to data collected by the Environmental Working Group. It’s in those places that the incentives created by the subsidies are most in conflict with the government’s aid to conserve water.
“Trying to get USDA to break down the silos is difficult,” Hoefner noted.
The Congressional Budget Office attacked this disconnect in 2006, urging the USDA to stop supporting agricultural products that act to “impede the transfer of water resources to higher value uses,” and “encourage the use of water.” Analysts advised the USDA to enhance its conservation programs, align its subsidies with those conservation efforts, and stop paying for infrastructure that makes water artificially cheap.
Every six years or so Congress has the opportunity to revisit its Farm Bill policies and update the bill. When Congress reauthorized it in 2014, however, lawmakers changed, but did not retreat in their support for cotton farming in the Southwest, despite growing awareness of the persistent water crisis in the Colorado River basin.
Instead, legislators allowed the cotton industry to write its own future. Faced with international trade pressures and allegations that subsidies—like payments triggered by price drops—were distorting the market, U.S. cotton trade associations lobbied to ramp up the USDA’s insurance program.
Rather than paying direct subsidies to cotton farmers, starting this year the USDA will use taxpayer dollars to buy farmers additional crop insurance. Policies that once covered up to around 70 percent of farmers’ losses can now be supplemented with new coverage covering up to 90 percent, cushioning the shallowest of losses. The lucrative marketing loan program that serves as a sort of price guarantee also remains in place.
Right now, though, the stubbornly low price of cotton is making Wuertz nervous that the new, enhanced insurance program won’t deliver the same revenues as the old direct subsidies. He’s temporarily cut back, then, planting less cotton this year and only the most valuable strains.
Still, the more than 161,000 acres of cotton that were planted in Arizona in 2013 accounted for almost one out of every five acres of the state’s irrigated farmland. Many believe the insurance program is likely to keep the practice going because it limits most—if not all—downsides, encouraging farmers to take big chances with limited resources.
“If I knew my 401k was guaranteed to not fall below 85 percent of its current level and there was no limit on the upside,” said Craig Cox a senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group, who was a former staff member for the Senate committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, “my portfolio would be a lot riskier than it is.”
If the Farm Bill reshuffled its incentives, water policy experts say, farmers in states that draw on the Colorado River could reduce their water usage substantially, adding large amounts back into the region’s budget.
According to research by the Pacific Institute, simply irrigating alfalfa fields less frequently, stressing the plant and slightly reducing its yield, could decrease the amount of water needed across the seven Colorado River basin states by roughly 10 percent. If Arizona’s cotton farmers switched to wheat but didn’t fallow a single field, it would save some 207,000 acre-feet of water—enough to supply as many as 1.4 million people for a year.
There’s little financial reason not to do this. The government is willing to consider spending huge amounts to get new water supplies, including building billion-dollar desalinization plants to purify ocean water. It would cost a tiny fraction of that to pay farmers in Arizona and California more to grow wheat rather than cotton, and for the cost of converting their fields. The billions of dollars of existing subsidies already allocated by Congress could be redirected to support those goals, or spent, as the Congressional Budget Office suggested, on equipment and infrastructure that helps farmers use less water.
“There is enough water in the West. There isn’t any pressing need for more water, period,” Babbitt said. “There are all kinds of agriculture efficiencies that have not been put into place.”
Today Wuertz lives with the deep uncertainty that comes with a transition he can no longer control. He told his son, Thomas, 24, that there is no future in cotton farming. He says that if Arizona farmers keep planting cotton, farming itself may be in jeopardy. But knowing that and acting on it have so far been different beasts, and Wuertz finds himself resistant to change. He tried growing more cantaloupe but had difficulty finding buyers who would take the time-sensitive crop before it rotted. He’s planting some acres he used to plant with cotton with alfalfa instead, but that uses even more water, though it commands a premium price.
In the end, Wuertz said he doesn’t know how to grow other plants as well as he knows cotton. He’s been a gin director, president of the Arizona Cotton Growers Association, head of the Arizona Cotton Research and Protection Council. His identity is wrapped up in those prickly bolls out in his fields.
“When I quit cotton all of that goes away. Ninety percent of my life is gone. It doesn’t mean a damn thing,” he said. “I’m just not ready to do that yet. And it’s not to say I won’t get there.”
From ProPublica.org (find the original story here); reprinted with permission.
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