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12/03/2023

Even if we manage to stabilize Earth's temperatures by peaking at 2 °C, Greenland's and Antarctica's vast ice sheets are on track for irreversible melting, a new study warns.

"If we miss this emission goal, the ice sheets will disintegrate and melt at an accelerated pace, according to our calculations," explains climate physicist Axel Timmermann from the Institute for Basic Science in Korea.

Global sea levels have already risen about 20 centimeters on average over the last century. The calculated acceleration would put one in 10 people at direct risk from rising sea levels, UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres explained at a Security Council debate in New York.

"For the hundreds of millions of people living in small island developing states and other low-lying coastal areas around the world, sea-level rise is a torrent of trouble," he said.

"We would witness a mass exodus of entire populations on a biblical scale."

By including feedback mechanisms that have been missing from previous modeling, Pusan National University climate scientist Jun Young Park and colleagues predict a major tipping point is approaching faster than expected.

"Computer models that simulate the dynamics of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica often do not account for the fact that ice sheet melting will affect ocean processes, which, in turn, can feed back onto the ice sheet and the atmosphere," explains Park.

As ice on land and sea continues to thaw at increasingly rates, meltwater flowing into the ocean concentrates towards the surface, decreasing the exchange of heat from the depths and driving up temperatures of the subsurface even further. This added heat risks further eroding the frozen buttresses holding back Antarctica's ice shelf, causing even more meltwater to flow into the ocean.

While the team is yet to achieve as high a resolution as other leading climate models, including data from these processes allows researchers to see how meltwater and calving impacts the stability of ice sheets.

We're already seeing some of these effects in real time, with previously unheard of events like rain in Greenland and clearly observable increases in meltwater fluctuations on the Antarctic ice shelf, the team points out.

But Park and team's new calculations suggest this irreversible process could be triggered at just 1.8 °C.

It was only in their most aggressive mitigation scenario, keeping temperatures below 1.5 °C, that the model showed we could avoid this rapid acceleration in sea level rise.

"If we don't take any action, retreating ice sheets would continue to increase sea level by at least 100 centimeters within the next 130 years," explains Timmermann.

"This would be on top of other contributions, such as the thermal expansion of ocean water."

Such a scenario would seriously impact mega-cities on every continent, including urban centers such as Cairo, Mumbai, Shanghai, London, Los Angeles, New York, and Buenos Aires notes Guterres.

As alarming as the potential might be, there are plenty of features affecting our complex ecological systems that the new modeling hasn't included, such as the impacts of narrow coastal currents.

"It's crucial that developments such as theirs are brought into our state of the art climate models," explains atmospheric scientist Robin Smith, who was not involved in the study.

"Even though more work needs to be done to reduce the uncertainty in projections like these, this study clearly shows the importance of taking rapid action to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible to minimize the risks associated with the loss of major ice sheets."

That doesn't mean we have the luxury of waiting to find out. Every increment of warming we can avoid gives us a far better chance of helping future societies avoid the worst of a rapidly warming planet.

12/03/2023

Prehistoric stone tools found in a cave in Poland 50 years ago were recentlyidentified as some of the oldest ever discovered in the region.

The tools from the Tunel Wielki cave in Małopolska are between 450,000 and 550,000 years old. This dating may allow scientists to learn more about the humans who made them, and their migration and habitation in Central Europe across prehistory.

For example, the timeframe likely means that the tools were made by extinct human species Homo heidelbergensis, usually considered the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans (us). And it means the region was inhabited by humans at a time that Central Europe's harsh climate would have required significant physical and cultural adjustment.

"This is an extremely interesting aspect of analyses for us," archaeologist Małgorzata Kot of the University of Warsaw in Poland explained to Science in Poland back in October 2022 when the research was released.

"We can examine the limits of the possibilities of survival of Homo heidelbergensis, and thus observe how he adapted to these adverse conditions."

Tunel Wielki cave was excavated in the 1960s, with archaeologists returning again to the site in 2016. Layers of material were dated to the Holocone, dating back to around 11,700 years ago, and the Middle Paleolithic, stretching as far as 40,000 years ago.

But archaeologist Claudio Berto of the University of Warsaw thought the dating was at odds with what he was observing. Animal bones recovered from the site, he concluded, were almost certainly older than 40,000 years.

So, in 2018, Kot and her team returned to the cave. They reopened and extended one of the trenches, carefully examining the different layers of material accumulated over the years, and collecting more bone material to analyze.

They found that the upper layers did indeed contain the bones of animals that lived in the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene. But the bottom layer was distinctly older. It contained the bones of several species that lived half a million years ago: the European jaguar, Panthera gombaszoegensis; the Mosbach wolf, ancestor to modern gray wolves, Canis mosbachensis; and Deninger's bear, Ursus deningeri.

The layer that yielded the bones also contained evidence of flint knapping, including flint flakes, the "blanks" from which other tools can be shaped, and the cores from which they are struck. There were also some finished tools, such as knives.

"Since these items come from the same layer as the bones, it means that their age is very similar," Kot explained. "This assumption was confirmed by excavations carried out in the cave in 2018. They confirmed the arrangement of layers described by researchers half a century ago. We also discovered more production waste and animal bones."

Previously, she added, there were only two known sites in Poland with tools from around the same time period: Trzebnica and Rusko. But the Tunel Wielki cave artifacts are different. Several archaeological sites in the area show evidence of ancient human habitation – but they are all open-air sites.

To find artifacts dating from that time in a cave is, according to Kot, very unexpected.

"We were surprised that half a million years ago people in this area stayed in caves, because those were not the best places to camp," she noted.

"Moisture and low temperature would discourage that. On the other hand, a cave is a natural shelter. It is a closed space that gives a sense of security. We found traces that may indicate that the people who stayed there used fire, which probably helped tame these dark and moist places."

Also of interest was the technique used to knap the flint found in the cave. This technique is the simplest used by ancient humans, and, at the time the tools were created, rarely used as a primary mode; usually, it was only used on poor-quality materials, or when flint was in short supply.

Only one other site, Isernia La Pineta in Italy, was using the technique as the primary one. The Tunel Wielki flint was not poor quality, nor was it scarce, being locally obtained. This was also the case for Isernia La Pineta; finding a second site with the same characteristics might help archaeologists work out the reason these ancient humans used that specific technique.

10/03/2023

In a recent essay published in The Washington Post, a mother explained her decision to continue writing essays and blog posts about her daughter even after the girl had protested. The woman said that while she felt bad, she was "not done exploring my motherhood in my writing".

One commentor criticized parents like the essay's author for having "turned their family's daily dramas into content".

Another said the woman's essay surfaces a "nagging – and loaded – question among parents in the age of Instagram. … Are our present social media posts going to mortify our kids in the future?"

These questions are valid, and I've published research about the need for parents to steward their children's privacy online. I agree with critics who accuse the woman of being tone-deaf to her child's concerns.

However, I believe the broader criticism of parents and their social media behavior is misplaced.

I've been studying this topic – sometimes called "sharenting" – for six years. Too often, public discourse pits parents against children.

Parents, critics say, are being narcissistic by blogging about their kids and posting their photos on Facebook and Instagram; they're willing to invade their child's privacy in exchange for attention and likes from their friends. So the story goes.

But this parent-versus-child framing obscures a bigger problem: the economic logic of social media platforms that exploit users for profit.

A natural impulse
Despite the heated responses sharenting can evoke, it's nothing new. For centuries, people have recorded daily minutiae in diaries and scrapbooks.

Products like baby books explicitly invite parents to log information about their children.

Communication scholar Lee Humphreys sees the impulse parents feel to document and share information about their kids as a form of "media accounting".

Throughout their lives, people occupy many roles – child, spouse, parent, friend, colleague. Humphreys argues that one way to perform these roles is by documenting them.

Looking back on these traces can help people shape a sense of self, construct a coherent life story and feel connected to others.

If you've ever thumbed through an old yearbook, a grandparent's travel photos or a historical figure's diary, you've looked at media accounts.

Same if you've scrolled through a blog's archives or your Facebook Timeline. Social media may be fairly new, but the act of recording everyday life is age-old.

Writing about family life online can help parents express themselves creatively and connect with other parents. Media accounting can also help people make sense of their identities as a parent.

Being a parent – and seeing yourself as a parent – involves talking and writing about your children.

Surveillance capitalism enters the equation
Framed this way, it becomes clear why telling parents to stop blogging or posting about their children online is a challenging proposition. Media accounting is central to people's social lives, and it's been happening for a long time.

But the fact that parents are doing it on blogs and social media does raise unique issues.

Family album photos don't transmit digital data and become visible only when you decide to show them to someone, whereas those Instagram pictures sit on servers owned by Facebook and are visible to anyone who scrolls through your profile.

Children's opinions matter, and if a child vehemently opposes sharenting, parents could always consider using paper diaries or physical photo albums. Parents can take other steps to manage their children's privacy, such as using a pseudonym for their child and giving their child veto power over content.

However, debates about privacy and sharenting often focus on a parent's followers or friends seeing the content. They tend to ignore what corporations do with that data.

Social media didn't cause parents to engage in media accounting, but it has profoundly altered the terms by which they do so.

Unlike the diary entries, photo albums and home videos of yore, blog posts, Instagram photos and YouTube videos reside in platforms owned by corporations and can be made visible to far more people than most parents realize or expect.

08/03/2023

Fossilized treasures entombed in golden, glassy amber capture countless stories of ancient forested landscapes through which the dinosaurs roamed. Sometimes these prized fossils are part of a very different story.

One such instance is in Myanmar. While embroiled in political turmoil, the country has also enchanted the field of paleontology with spectacular amber specimens that are sourced by unethical or illegal means.

According to a new study – described by scientists not involved in the work as "one of the most important papers in paleontology you'll read this year" – research on fossils encased in Myanmar amber is booming, a direct result of ongoing violent conflicts in parts of the country where amber is mined.

Amber sourced from Myanmar has in recent years yielded a wealth of dazzling specimens, preserved in exquisite detail. From feathered dinosaur tails to fossilized flowers and metallic insects, the burnt-orange blobs of hardened tree resin have trapped life that flourished some 99 million years ago, alongside the dinosaurs during the mid-Cretaceous.

But those finds come with a cost.

Since 2019, reports have emerged that the trade of lucrative amber, and the fossils it often contains, is fueling conflicts in Myanmar, representing an 'ethical minefield' for paleontologists wishing to study the specimens.

"We already knew that the situation was bad through anecdotes and journalistic investigations, but our study finally puts the situation into perspective and shows just how bad the situation really is," paleontologist Nussaïbah Raja of Friedrich Alexander University (FAU) of Erlangen–Nuremberg in Germany explains to ScienceAlert in an email.

"Our analysis shows the extent to which scientists have been exploiting the legal conundrum that Myanmar amber represents."

Since 2015, exporting fossil materials from Myanmar has been prohibited. But because the amber can be exported legally, fossils contained within it fall into a legal gray area.

"Where does the fossil end and the amber begin?" asks Raja in her email.

Yet research on Myanmar amber fossils is roaring, according to the new analysis. The researchers scrutinized nearly 1,000 scientific papers published over the past 30 years on Myanmar amber fossils and found that the explosion in papers since 2014 tracks closely with major political, legal, and economic events occurring at that time in the country.

Some paleontologists have questioned the study findings, arguing that the dramatic increase in research on Myanmar amber fossils simply reflects growing academic interest.

But the study authors argue that the soaring number of papers on fossils preserved in the golden gemstone is "explicitly linked" to the country's violent conflict and "seriously deficient" enforcement of national laws. And foreign paleontologists are among those who benefit.

"Myanmar amber represents the starkest case of how loopholes in the law continue to be exploited, resulting in unethical work and the exclusion of local researchers," fellow FAU paleontologist and co-lead author of the study Emma Dunne said on Twitter when sharing the team's new paper.

Most of the amber is mined in northern Myanmar, in the conflict-ridden Kachin state, where rival political factions have been warring for control of the area and profiteering off the amber trade.

The gemstones smuggled across the border into China are sold in markets, often to private collectors and paleontologists, which means local scientists in Myanmar have little opportunity to study the ancient remains, the analysis found.

"Until 2022, there have been no authors based in Myanmar who have contributed to a scientific paper that describes a fossil embedded in Myanmar amber," Raja explains.

Since 2014, China has published more papers on Myanmar amber fossils than any other country, followed by the United States. This, the researchers say, reflects the influx of Myanmar amber into Chinese markets from 2014 onwards.

"What we observed here is an extreme form of parachute science where instead of fieldwork, amber specimens are obtained through commercial routes and are apparently not regulated accordingly by national laws relating to fossils or gemstones," Raja, Dunne, and colleagues write.

Parachute science – where researchers from wealthy nations jet in to conduct research without involving local scientists – is a legacy of a dark colonial history that continues to be exploited today, and which ultimately warps our view of life on Earth.

Other recent studies analyzing the authorship of scientific papers have similarly exposed how pervasive parachute science is in coral reef research and geoscience. Unsurprisingly, paleontology is no exception.

"Documenting who is – or more precisely, which countries are – publishing on Myanmar amber allows us to clearly see that this same imbalance is extremely prevalent in this field of research," Dunne adds.

Despite calls from paleontological societies for scientific journals not to publish papers on fossils in Myanmar amber, and some journals adopting stricter policies in response, progress to curb unethical or illegal research practices in paleontology has, on the whole, been slow.

The latest analysis found that only 2 out of 222 papers published since 2020 describing fossils in Myanmar amber detailed in the supplementary methods how their specimen was legally and ethically acquired.

While seeing this kind of data might be a wake-up call to some researchers, it spells out a sobering reminder to other paleontologists who are reckoning with the field's colonial past and how to improve its ethical standards.

"Myanmar amber is beautiful. The fossils inside are stunning. I get the excitement and desire to study them," University of Edinburgh paleontologist Steve Brusatte tweeted upon reading the study. "But to me, while war still rages, no fossil is worth a single human life."

06/03/2023

Vaccines do not cause autism.

You wouldn't know that if you'd ever used an Amazon Prime account to watch the 2016 documentary "Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe."

Following criticism from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Amazon took down the documentary from its streaming video subscription service on March 1st.

The "Vaxxed" documentary aims to draw a link between vaccines and autism, but it relies on research from a discredited British doctor named Andrew Wakefield, who also directed the film.

What the movie doesn't tell you is that Wakefield's controversial and un-replicated research on the dangers of measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccines has been retracted and debunked by years of rigorous studies.

One 2015 study looking at over 95,000 children across the US found no association between autism and MMR vaccines, even among kids who were already at a higher risk of developing autism.

"As the largest online marketplace in the world, Amazon is in a unique position to shape consumption," Schiff wrote in an open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Friday.

"Amazon's recommendations are not designed to distinguish quality information from misinformation or misleading information and, as a result, harmful anti-vaccine messages have been able to thrive and spread."

Vaccine rates are falling in rich countries around the world, prompting more measles outbreaks than health officials have seen in years, in countries including France, the US, the UK, and Japan.

Wakefield made a lot of money casting doubt on vaccine safety
"Vaxxed" was barred from the Tribeca film festival in 2016, even though it was backed by Tribeca co-founder Robert De Niro, who has an autistic son.

"My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation around an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family," De Niro said at the time in a statement.

"But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for."

"Vaxxed" director Wakefield stood to potentially profit from drawing a link between vaccines and autism. The discredited doctor not only wanted to help bring a lucrative class-action lawsuit against MMR vaccine-makers, he even once "proposed starting a company that could reap huge returns from molecular viral diagnostic tests," for autism, as journalist Brian Deer discovered in an investigation published in the BMJ in 2011.

Deer revealed that Wakefield pocketed over US$750,000 in fees gathered from the UK legal aid fund for trying to prove a link between autism and vaccines – a clear conflict of interest with his vaccine research.

Wakefield has always maintained his innocence. He said that Deer's investigation was "a deliberate public relations strategy" by an "incestuous cabal" made up of pharmaceutical companies, government interests, and journalists.

"Do I feel that I was framed by the pharmaceutical industry?" he asked in a 2016 video statement. "Yes, I think I was."

Pharmaceutical companies make very little money off of vaccines, which cost an average of US$12 a dose and typically protect people for a lifetime.

Pinterest, YouTube, and Facebook are all trying to combat anti-vaccine efforts
Other online platforms are also taking down content that promotes false narratives about vaccines. Pinterest, YouTube, and Facebook are all grappling with how to avoid promoting a link between vaccines and autism that is not supported by science, as the Wall Street Journal first reported last month.