Madeline Bodin writes about science and the environment for national magazines and the occasional newspaper from her home base in Vermont.

Image by Mark F. Levisay via Flickr

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Photographs taken by Andrea Turkalo of her elephants.

The border guards, wary of advancing rebels, fired their guns in the air as three motorized skiffs approached along the Sangha River in the late March night. But the boats’ occupants were unarmed foreigners, fleeing a bloody insurrection that had gripped the Central African Republic (CAR). Among the refugees was elephant researcher Andrea Turkalo, carrying $25,000 in cash and six hard drives—packed with more than 20 years of data—which she’d grabbed before fleeing her jungle compound.

Turkalo, 60, is a field biologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, and one of the world’s foremost experts on African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis). Since 1990, she’s been observing the elusive pachyderms—thought to be a different species from their larger, curvier-tusked, savannah-dwelling cousins (Loxodonta africana)—at a clearing known as Dzanga Bai, in the CAR’s southwestern rainforest. But her life’s work now hangs in the balance, as does the fate of the elephants themselves.

Driving out research

The trouble began last November, when a coalition of rebel groups known as the Séléka, based in the country’s northern region, started an uprising against the government of President François Bozizé. Turkalo was in the United States at the time, getting some dentistry done, but she returned to the CAR in late December. She arrived just as the U.S. embassy’s staff evacuated from the capital, Bangui. But Turkalo decided to stay on at Dzanga Bai for as long as possible.

She spent a tense three months at her compound, near the village of Bayanga, as the Séléka marched southward, massacring civilians along the way. On March 24, the rebels took Bangui, and Turkalo got word that they were heading toward her area. She consulted with World Wildlife Federation staffers at the nearby headquarters of the Dzanga-Sangha National Park, who agreed that it was time to go. Turkalo joined a dozen others heading downriver toward the Congolese border, 50 kilometers to the south.

As they neared a riverside border checkpoint, around 10:00 PM, they heard angry shouts and a burst of gunfire. Turkalo and a WWF technical director, Anna Feistner, got out and approached a drunken guard brandishing a rifle and a revolver. “We just started talking to him very calmly,” Turkalo says. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, we didn’t see you, you had no lights…’” The guard threatened to search her belongings, and she feared he would find and confiscate her money. But two of his colleagues recognized her from previous trips; they apologized and waved the group through without further incident.

Turkalo reached Bomassa, in the Republic of the Congo, around midnight, and hunkered there for the next three weeks. When she heard that the Séléka had cleared out of Bayanga, she returned to her compound—which had been looted in her absence—and got back to work observing elephants. But after three days, word came that the rebels were returning, and she fled to Bomassa again. From there, she made her way back to her childhood home in Massachusetts.

The plight of Dzanga Bai

Since then, Turkalo has been trying to draw international attention to the plight of the people as well as the elephants around Dzanga Bai. Soon after her return, she traveled to Washington to brief State Department officials on the situation. Forest elephants, found only in the CAR and a few neighboring countries, have long been under siege by organized poachers supplying the booming Asian market for illegal ivory; according to a recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE, their numbers fell by 62 percent between 2002 and 2011, to about 100,000. (Savannah elephant populations have also declined, though more slowly, and now total about 400,000.) And the chaos in the CAR is making previously protected areas far more vulnerable.

On May 8, a gang of poachers armed with AK-47s mowed down 26 elephants (including four babies) at Dzanga Bai. “I’m sure some of them were individuals I knew,” says Turkalo, who learned of the killing in e-mails from local contacts. Guards at the site had previously been disarmed by the rebels, and were unable to stop the slaughter. After the poachers sawed off the tusks, wildlife officials reported, villagers butchered the carcasses. “It was a food fest,” Turkalo says ruefully.

Even in exile, Turkalo is determined to continue her scientific work, including a longtime collaboration with Cornell University’s Elephant Listening Project. Since 1999, she’s been recording her subjects’ complex vocalizations using microphones strung up around the bai, with the eventual goal of developing a forest-elephant lexicon. This summer, as in the past, she’ll spend a few weeks on campus, working with ELP researchers and writing papers of her own. After that, however, her plans are uncertain.

Turkalo has witnessed two previous coups in the CAR, and she’s not easily intimidated, but this is the first time that armed rebels have invaded her part of the country. One villager in Bayanga was killed by the Séléka in March, while Turkalo was in Bomassa. She learned of the murder from a park official by satellite phone: “He said something they didn’t like, and they just shot him in front of everybody,” she says. The rebels have reportedly raped hundreds of women, and she’s conscious of her own vulnerability in an isolated jungle camp.

For now, Turkalo is watching and waiting. “I’m not going to go back until I feel that the situation is much more secure than it is right now,” she says. “But I will go back.”

Learn more about endangered forest elephants here. 

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The passenger pigeon is one animal being discussed for de-extinction. Image courtesy National Park Service.

Chuck Bonham, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, is no stranger to potentially controversial species restoration plans: His agency will soon poison non-native fish in an effort to re-establish the Paiute cutthroat trout to its historic range.

Still, the practicalities of efforts to revive extinct species raised mixed emotions among Bonham and participants at the “De-Extinction: Ethics, Law and Politics” conference held at the Stanford Law Auditorium last Friday.

Addressing the scientists in the audience, Bonham (who made clear he wasn’t speaking for the agency) said he and colleagues were “scared, worried, thrilled, excited, and angry at you guys for exploring this idea.”  Yet, with the planet facing massive biodiversity loss, he said, de-extinction may be one of the few options for protecting species in perpetuity.

Bonham was one of 15 speakers at Friday’s conference, only the fourth meeting on the topic and the first to dig deep into pragmatic issues of liability, justice, animal welfare and regulation surrounding the creation and release of once-extinct organisms. Raising the dead, it seems, also raises a raft of legal and regulatory uncertainties.

The conference’s sparse, roughly 60-person turnout was a stark contrast to the flashy, live-streamed TEDx De-Extinction talks, which garnered 11,000 unique viewers on March 15 when researchers unveiled the technological advances that may enable the resurrection of passenger pigeons and woolly mammoths.

GMO or endangered species?

Most speakers agreed that reviving extinct species is undeniably cool, but the political realities of releasing revived species into nature prompts a number of considerations — including what legal and regulatory responses will be triggered.

For example, would a wooly mammoth, created through the most careful editing of an Asian elephant’s genome, be considered a genetically-modified organism (GMO)? Possibly. The fact is that any organism re-created using genomic tools would likely not be an exact replica of what once roamed Earth. As such, would a revived organism be considered a new species? Another wrinkle: how and when would the Endangered Species Act be applicable?

The Endangered Species Act defines a species as endangered if it is so throughout all or a significant portion of its range. “The question would come — if it’s bred in captivity, what is its range?” said Alex Camacho, director of the University of California at Irvine Law Center for Land, Environment and Natural Resources. “Clearly, the Endangered Species Act didn’t contemplate the revival of species.”

Interestingly, if DNA exists, the line between extinct and endangered starts to get blurry — so much so that Stewart Brand, founder of the non-profit Long Now Foundation’s Revive and Restore program (focused on resurrecting the passenger pigeon), suggested that a new category of potentially recoverable, or “exceptionally endangered,” species is emerging.

In addition to the legal and regulatory concerns, the biggest political concern was whether de-extinction would compromise political resolve to stave off extinctions. If de-extinction takes the urgency out of preventing extinction, it will become a shunt for taking no action, said Jamie Rappaport Clark, former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and current president of the non-profit Defenders of Wildlife.

To that end, Bonham made a personal plea to de-extinction advocates. We need a social compact between the regulators and the scientific-innovators to figure out how to pursue de-extinction together — and how to make clear that preventing extinctions remains an important part of the narrative, he told the audience.

How technology shapes life

“De-extinction is just the tip of the iceberg when discussing how genetic manipulations could interact with conservation biology,” said Kate Jones, a bat ecologist at University College London, in her talk. “We’re entering a time on our planet where things are completely changing — we might have fake trees to clean up carbon in the atmosphere — and we need to be prepared to deal with that.”

Meeting organizer Hank Greely, a Stanford bioethicist, agreed. Recreating extinct animals is only one part of a potential universe of man’s increasing ability to shape life through technology, he said after the meeting. Greely considers himself a qualified supporter of de-extinction, if done correctly. After the conference, he said, he came away with a few more questions about what “doing it carefully” would mean.

Virginia Gewin is a freelance science journalist covering everything from food security to acidifying oceans from her perch in Portland, Oregon. She is also a contributor to the recently-published Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish, and Prosper in the Digital Age.

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Despite its name, the Paleo Diet is a new food trend, one which has become increasingly popular in recent years. The diet’s basic tenet is that our bodies haven’t yet evolved to cope with the changes to our food intake as a result of agriculture. Paleo Diet aficionados hold that grains like wheat are making us fat and unhealthy, and that we would be far better off if we ate how our ancient ancestors did, focusing on lean meats, fruits and vegetables.

What researchers haven’t been able to answer, however, is exactly what our ancestors ate. Early humans and our other hominin predecessors lived pretty much everywhere, in environments as diverse as the Arctic, tropical rainforests and deserts, and so its likely that diet varied by region. Even within a given region, reconstructions of diet have had to rely on tooth analysis or bones found nearby.

A quartet of papers published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have instead turned to stable isotope analysis, which analyzes the specific chemical signature of molecules, to determine the diets of a variety of ancient hominin species by looking at their fossilized teeth. The findings show that human ancestors started moving away from the traditional ape diet of fruit and leaves about 2.5 million years ago—much earlier than previously thought. Thus, even our “paleo” ancestors may never have eaten a paleo diet.

(For more paleo myths, read our April article “Paleomythic.“)

“Most modern primates have diets of leaves from trees and shrubs. What sets humans apart is their transition to the new restaurant in town,” which serves grains, grasses and sedges, said Thure Cerling, a geologist at the University of Utah and co-author of three of the four new PNAS papers. “Humans are one of the few primates to figure out how to access this resource, which they appeared to do sometime between 4 and 3.5 million years ago.”

Carbon clues

Researchers frequently analyze carbon’s chemical signature when they study organisms, living and dead, since carbon is a key component of the molecules of life. Unlike radioactive isotopes, stable isotopes don’t radioactively decay, which means their ratios remain constant over time.

Carbon has two stable isotopes: carbon-12 and carbon-13. Most of the carbon found on Earth is carbon-12, which means it has six protons and six electrons. Stable isotope expert Hope Jahren, a geologist at the University of Hawaii who was not involved in the studies, calls this vanilla carbon. Carbon-13, which makes up just 1.1% of Earth’s carbon, has six protons and seven neutrons. Jahren calls this cinnamon carbon.

Stable isotope analysis essentially measures the ratio of vanilla and cinnamon carbon, Jahren says. It’s useful because different organisms have different ratios depending on what they eat. Plants have different ratios of vanilla and cinnamon carbon based on the type of photosynthesis they use. Plants using C3 photosynthesis (trees, shrubs and herbs) aren’t picky about whether they use vanilla or cinnamon carbon, so the ratios in these plants are the same as the ratio of carbons in the natural environment. Plants that rely on C4/CAM photosynthesis (including tropical grasses and sedges) are much more selective toward cinnamon carbon. Since animals build molecules in their bodies from the foods they eat, analyzing the stable isotopes of fossilized remains can tell scientists a lot about an ancient organism’s diet.

“Your bones are not just made of the last meal you had, but the meals that you’ve had across many years. By looking at the composition of those teeth, researchers can say that something was a large component of the diet. This tells us a lot about how hominins lived and what they ate,” Jahren said.

Great grains

Essentially all of the great apes and their ancestors appeared to have eaten a C3-based diet, consuming fruits, leaves and other plants. Modern humans, on the other hand, rely much more on C4 plants, which include grains like wheat sorghum and corn. What researchers didn’t know was when that shift occurred. The PNAS papers show that this shift appears to have occurred in Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in and around Ethiopia 2.9 to 3.9 million years ago.

An analysis of the vanilla and cinnamon carbon in A. afarensis from the middle Pliocene (3.0 to 3.7 million years ago) shows that this hominin had already shifted to a C4-based diet. Jonathan Wynn, a geologist at the University of South Florida, and colleagues analyzed 20 fossilized teeth of A. afarensis from the Hadar region of Ethiopia. Although there was significant variability in the proportion of C4 plants consumed, on average, A. afarensis consumed significantly more C4 plants than its recent ancestor Australopithecus anamensis. These hominins were thus already eating grain in an adaptation for life on the savannah, Cerling said.

Cerling’s own analysis of hominin fossils found in the Turkana basin in Kenya, and published in a second paper, shows that some hominins there were also making the shift to a C4-based diet. Several species of Homo (the authors did not distinguish between several of these closely related species) as well as Paranthropus boisei, which lived between 2.3 to 1.2 million years ago, showed evidence of a grain- and grass-based diet. This shift coincided with the retreat of heavily forested areas that were replaced by open savannah.

A third study, also led by Cerling, used stable isotopes to analyze the diet of several species of Theropithecus, the ancestors of the modern gelada baboon, a grass-eating ape that lives in the highlands of Ethiopia. Like its descendant, Cerling and colleagues found that the ancient Theropithecus species almost exclusively ate C4 plants, similar to the diets of the modern geladas. But although ancient Theropithecus and ancient hominins lived in the same area and both had a primarily C4 diet, they did not appear to be in direct competition with each other, Cerling noted, likely because they preferred different types of C4 plants.

A new hominin trait

Finally, a review paper by Wynn, Cerling and colleagues analyzed what we know about ancient hominin diets. Big brains and upright walking are two of the main factors that distinguish humans from other primates, and it appears that a shift in diet from leaves to grasses may be a significant third factor.

“Hominins began leaving the forests along the riverbanks and venturing more and more into open habitats that primates haven’t previously explored,” Cerling said. “Most primates today are still stuck in the forests.” Human success, he noted, is partly linked to our ability to exploit a more diverse array of food.

“These studies are important mainly for their novelty,” Jahren said. “It’s a major advance in understanding not just what a hominin looked like or where they lived but what it was like to be one—how they lived, what they sat down to eat every night if they were lucky. That’s a major advance.”

So while there remains little doubt that many modern humans eat too much sugar and processed foods, these studies show that identifying a particular “paleo” diet is impossible. Researchers are just beginning to understand what ancient humans ate, and these recent studies show that grasses and grains have been part of the human diet for millions of years.

Carrie Arnold is a freelance science writer in Virginia. She blogs about the science of eating disorders at www.edbites.com, and frequently covers microbiology topics for national magazines.

Image by dctim1 via Flickr

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Inside a nondescript office building in Mountain View, California, a gathering took place recently that might have been a glimpse into the future.

At first, the people, like the building, didn’t offer many hints of what that future might look like. They came from all walks of life: young, old, students, businesspeople, men and women.

Then they started talking.

Rockets, microgravity, space planes, moon bases, gas stations in orbit – if you didn’t know better, you would think you had walked into a science fiction conference. But, in this case, reality is much better than fiction. These everyday people were learning how to design science experiments to take place in low Earth orbit.

The majority of attendees at the Space Hackers Workshop weren’t scientists. They were part of the growing movement of citizen science, experiments performed in a distributed way by non-specialists, tinkerers, and the scientifically curious. And now, building on the growing market for private space travel, citizen science is edging toward a new frontier: space.

How to get to space

Though the future of federal funding for American space travel is questionable, the space industry is currently experiencing incredible private sector growth. No fewer than twenty-three different vehicle designs capable of carrying passengers into space or low Earth orbit are currently in development or actively being tested. Virgin Galactic and SpaceX are the most visible of the contenders due to their recent successful test flights. Consequently, the opportunities for citizen scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to be part of humanity’s expansion into space are set to increase dramatically while at the same time becoming much more affordable.

The workshop, held May 4-5, was brimming with talks explaining the ways in which citizen scientists could get involved in space research and exploration.

In a presentation about the Lynx, a two-seat, reusable launch vehicle currently in development by XCOR, Khaki Rodway ran down a long list of scientific experiments that could fit into the 20 kg and 120 kg payloads of the suborbital spaceplane: everything from electronics testing for future technologies to be used on Earth or in space to remote imaging to help authorities fight forest fires more effectively.

Citizen scientists can design experiments individually or as part of a team and have them sent up as payload in spaceplanes like the Lynx. XCOR, expecting to make much of its profits from payload use, has laid out guidelines for payload development on their website. Payload cost will vary according to company and amount of space required, but XCOR quoted the range of $5,000 to $500,000. If you want to go to space alongside your experiment be prepared to shell out at least $95,000. NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program acts as a middleman to help scientists find flights for their projects.

Another option is to launch your own satellite. Small satellites called CubeSats are available to anyone, although academics, companies, and amateur satellite builders are currently the primary market. The present cost of sending a CubeSat into low-earth orbit ranges between $100,000-200,000 for construction and launch. However, several open-source components, including variations on arduino programming boards, alongside advancing smartphone technologies, are bringing down the cost for building and developing experiments.

Finally, there’ll be competitions. Initiatives in the mold of the XPRIZE have had success in soliciting research ideas from individuals and companies, and space research is following suit. Citizens In Space, a project of the United States Rocket Academy, has announced a High-Altitude Astrobiology Challenge which will award cash prizes of up to $10,000 to ordinary citizens for the development of devices to collect microbes from space. The group has also said that they plan to sponsor 100 citizen science experiments to fly on suborbital missions in the Lynx spaceplane.

The questions such research could answer are nearly limitless. For example, it’s thought that studying small aquatic invertebrates called waterbears (or tardigrades) might give us insight into human biology in space; synthetic biology could design useful microbes to transform waste into energy for long space missions; protein crystallization studies, sometimes easier in microgravity, have already led to pharmaceutical breakthroughs.

From basic biology and chemistry to more instantly applicable technology, there is more unknown about space than known at the moment, and a lot of room for ordinary people to iterate upon ideas.

Small businesses join the action

In addition to science, attendees were there with an eye toward business. Entrepreneurs discussed opportunities like 3-D printing in space, mining of objects in the solar system, manufacturing on the moon and Mars, and space tourism. Jim Kerevala, CEO of Shackleton Energy, and Jason Dunn, the Chief Technologist for Made In Space, both made the case that small-scale experiments in sub-orbital or orbital payloads will be the driving force behind new business development in the fledgling sector of space services.

For instance, the process of soldering, essential to electronics and metal work here on Earth, is not effective in microgravity. However, questions related to the soldering process can be tested easily on sub-orbital flights (and more cost-effectively than on the ISS). Anyone able to solve the problem of soldering in space and commercialize the solution stands to make a lot of money as more business moves off-planet.

However, new space-related businesses do still face an uphill battle. Sentiment about who is qualified to explore space needs to change if funding is to find its way into the hands of space-entrepreneurs. Currently, space advocates and entrepreneurs are thought of as “early adopters” whose projects often produce looks of incredulity and giggles in conversations with the uninitiated. Persistent communication programs will be a huge part of making space science and exploration more mainstream and fundable.

States step in

Implicit in all the presentations was the need for access to space: more rockets and space planes run by more companies are required before space really becomes a democratic place. But, as NASA steps back from its role in exploration, several states see the potential financial revenues and are stepping in. California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, New York and Texas are all currently discussing or planning spaceports. Texas and Florida, in particular, are working to entice space-related companies to base enterprises in their states. It looks as though Texas might get both SpaceX and XCOR, but it is still unknown who will be the victor in the state race for space.

As for the future vision of the space industry as a whole, that differs depending on who you talk to. Some see it as a place for industry or science, while others imagine that it will be populated by tourists.

In either case, in the near future – within just a few years – trips into suborbital space will be a daily occurrence in many parts of the U.S.

And the future of space will be a product of the combined efforts of everyone who labors to create it. (As Jim Kerevala of Shackleton Energy put it, “The supply chain doesn’t exist yet!”) The same way that ordinary people with extraordinary ideas have painted the current cultural and commercial landscape on the surface of the Earth, citizen scientists will be particularly important for the development of humanity’s expansion off of the planet. In conjunction with professional scientists, they will be among the first wave of explorers to shine a light on the darkness that surrounds us, and among the first experimenters to have a shot at testing the widgets upon which future space tourists will depend.

Dr. Kiki Sanford is a specialist in neuroscience and behavior. When not studying her toddler son, she tries to explain science and technology to anyone who will listen. She also hosts the weekly kickass science show This Week in Science, and harbors secret dreams of vacationing on the moon.

Image by BiterBig / Shutterstock

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Mathematically, the Greco-Roman-Etruscan number system is an endlessly repetitive number system that is inefficient and cumbersome. To write 3333, which we do by repeating the sign 3 four times, a Roman would have had to scribble down MMMCCCXXXIII—three times as many characters. And I challenge anyone to multiply this number by MMDCCCLXXIX—using only the Roman system (meaning without translating these numbers into what they would be in our base-10 number system and then back into Roman numerals). Surprisingly, this clunky old Roman number system, with its ancient Greek and Etruscan roots, remained in use in Europe until the thirteenth century!

Our base-10 system derives its power and efficiency from the fact that we use a zero. The zero here is not just a concept of nothingness (and something every schoolchild learns you are forbidden to divide by), but also a place holder. The zero is a sign we place in a location in a number when there is nothing there—to tell us, for example, that 40 means four tens and no units, or that 405 is four hundreds, no tens, and five units.

Numbers on a dial

The zero thus turns the numerals 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 into what algebraists call the ring Z(10). When you stack such rings one on top of the other, and you let them represent, in turn, the units, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, and so on, based on each ring’s location, you get the highly efficient number system we have today. Think of each ring as a dial—when it goes around full circle, you get 0 and you add a 1 to the ring above it. As an example, start with the number 5—this means only the lowest ring, that of the units, is nonempty, and has the number 5. Now add to this the number 7. Five units from the 7 will bring the units ring to 0 and make the tens ring jump up to 1. The remaining 2 from the 7 will make the lowest ring (the lowest dial) now show 2. Thus we have that the sum of 5 and 7 is 12. Without the place-holding zero, which makes each “dial” start repeating itself after going through zero, we couldn’t do this.

The ancient Babylonians (preceded by the Akkadians and Sumerians) had a base-60 number system, without a zero. So already 4,000 years ago, people in ancient Babylon understood that it is efficient to make numbers become “circular” or dial-like, in the sense that 60 was like our 10, and 3600 (60 squared) was like our 100, and so on. But the Babylonians didn’t use a place-holding zero, so there were serious ambiguities in their system.

Our number system is far superior to the old Babylonian base-60 system, because our base is much smaller and because we use a zero, and it is also superior to the 3,000-year-old Greco-Roman-Etruscan letter-based system. Zero is the incredible invention that made our number system so efficient. This system was popularized in Europe after the publication, in 1202, of the book Liber Abaci (The Book of the Abacus), by Fibonacci (of the famous Fibonacci sequence). Presumably, Fibonacci learned the use of the 10 numerals with zero from Arab traders, with whom he dealt on behalf of his merchant father, and that is why we often call them the Arabic numerals. But Fibonacci himself refers to them in his book as the “nine Indian numerals” with zero, which he calls zephirum, perhaps originating from the Arab sefir.

The original zero

But who invented the zero, which gives so much power to our number system? We don’t know who invented it, but we are pretty sure that the zero is an Eastern invention. The oldest zero in India with a confirmed date is from the mid-ninth century, and found in the Chatur-bujha temple in the city of Gwalior.

At one point, an older zero was known. In the 1930s a zero from the year AD 683 was found in Cambodia, and its great antiquity allowed a French researcher by the name of Georges Coedes to prove that the zero is of Eastern provenance. This is because, while the Gwalior zero is concurrent with the Arab empire based in Baghdad (the Caliphate), the zero from 683 predates extensive Arab trading. It also comes from a location that is much farther east than India. Its existence thus makes it highly unlikely that the zero was invented in Europe or Arabia and traveled east through Arab traders, as some had believed in the early 20th century. The Cambodian zero proved that zero was an Eastern invention. But this zero disappeared during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, and no one knew if it still existed.

I felt very strongly that it was important to recover the world’s oldest zero. I spent five years researching its whereabouts and developed various hypotheses about where it might be found. Then last year I was awarded a generous research grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, which enabled me to travel to Cambodia to search for this precious find. As is well known, Cambodian artifacts have been plundered for decades and sold illegally on the international antiquities markets. During the Khmer Rouge era, while killing 1.7 million of their own people, Pol Pot and his henchmen also looted, vandalized or destroyed more than 10,000 ancient statues or inscriptions.

The location where the oldest zero in the world—on a seventh-century stone inscription—was kept was plundered by the Khmer Rouge as late as 1990. I traveled to that location, not far from the famous Angkor Wat temple, and after weeks of searching among thousands of artifacts, many of them damaged or discarded, I was able to discover the inscription. It is shown in the photo below, taken by my wife.

Inscription K-127, from Sambor on Mekong. Photo Credit: Debra Gross Aczel

The zero is the dot in the middle, to the right of the spiral-looking character, which is a 6 in Old Khmer. The numeral to the right of the dot is a 5, making the full number 605. The inscription says: “The Chaka era reached year 605 on the fifth day of the waning moon…” We know that in Cambodia the Chaka era began in the year 78 AD. Thus the date of this zero is 605 + 78 = 683.

I notified the Cambodian Government of my discovery, and His Excellency Hab Touch of the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, who had helped me in my search, promised me to place this inscription—one of the most important finds in the history of science—in the Cambodian National Museum in Phnom Penh, where it rightly belongs. So anyone interested in the history of science and the birth of numbers should soon be able to see the first zero ever discovered.

Amir D. Aczel writes often about physics and cosmology. His book about the discovery of the Higgs boson, Present at the Creation: Discovering the Higgs Boson, was published in paperback by Broadway Books in November 2012.

Top image by yanugkelid / Shutterstock

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The recent boom in fracking has turned America into the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, almost overnight.

Proponents say that this burgeoning industry has ensured U.S. energy independence for years to come, and created a more climate-friendly alternative to dirtier-burning fuels like coal and gas. It has arguably also hastened the demise of the coal industry, as power plants switch in large numbers to the cheaper gas, resulting in U.S. CO₂ emissions sinking to their lowest levels in nearly two decades. And with less smog-producing particulates and deadly mercury in the air, we can hope that respiratory illnesses like asthma may begin to decline.

But fracking poses its own risks. While our air has been getting cleaner, opponents argue that America’s water has been getting dirtier as the result of the hydraulic fracturing of shale. Fracking uses lots of water—up to seven million gallons for every well drilled—which is mixed together with sand and a witch’s brew of industrial chemicals, then blasted a mile into the earth to the shale formations where the natural gas is located. This high pressure stream shatters the rock and releases the gas, which geysers up to the surface to be recovered.

But what exactly happens to the water which is shot into the earth? A study published today in the journal Science says that we don’t entirely know the answer to this yet—and what we don’t know may harm us.

The missing half

What we do know is that about half of the fracking fluid gushes back up to the surface. “People focus on what exactly are the chemicals that we are putting into frack fluid,” said Radisav Vidic, the lead author of the study and a professor at the University of Pittsburg, in a Science podcast. “But a more significant problem is what comes out—because the quality of what comes out is many, many times worse than the quality of the water that was injected into the well.”

That’s because the frack water picks up contaminants underground—a variety of salts, benzene, heavy metals, organic compounds and radioactive substances such as radium-226, which is found in high levels in the Marcellus Shale formation that is being fracked from West Virginia to Pennsylvania.

The hydraulic fracturing water cycle. Courtesy EPA

Vidic says that disposing of this briny and highly contaminated water can be a problem. Either it is re-injected deep into wells in the earth where, theoretically, it remains for perpetuity; or it is purified in a waste treatment facility and then either recycled or discharged into a river.

If all of this goes smoothly, our water supply remains pristine. But the study warns that accidents can, and do, happen. In one well-publicized incident, improperly treated fracking fluids were discharged into the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water for most of Pittsburgh, forcing 325,000 residents of the region to switch to bottled water for several weeks.

Another potential problem area is the roughly half of the water used in fracking which does not migrate back to the surface through the drilling shaft, but remains interred underground. Ideally, Vidic says, this contaminated water will never come in contact with the groundwater, which sits in the aquifer thousands of feet above it. But he adds that there is a lot that we still don’t know about how water moves underground.

A leaky system

Gas companies argue that the frack fluid is prevented from fouling the groundwater by the thick cap of bedrock which sits between it and the aquifer. However, the Pennsylvania researchers point out that geological formations are not watertight. There can be networks of fractures in the rock which permit toxic fracking fluids to flow back up towards the surface under certain circumstances.

Marcellus Shale underlies a U.S. East Coast region from New York to Virginia. Courtesy USGS

This flow underground might account for some of the reports of tainted water in wells near gas drilling sites. But there are also other ways that fracking fluids can get into our water; for example, through cracks in well casings, well blowouts, and surface spills from trucks or containment ponds. Anthony Ingraffea at Cornell University found that there was an 8.9 percent failure rate among wells in the Pennsylvania Marcellus region in 2012, and he predicts that leaks and other problems will become increasingly common as the wells age.

What kind of impacts might these leaks have? There have been numerous anecdotal reports of illnesses in people living near fracking wells, but not yet any long-term epidemiological studies. One stumbling block is that the chemical mix added to the fracking fluid is a mystery. Many of the scores of industrial chemicals being used are not currently regulated by the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act, says the Science study, due to a loophole introduced by former Vice President Dick Cheney which exempts natural gas drilling from certain provisions of the environmental law. Drillers have so far refused to reveal their formulas, claiming this is proprietary information.

But Vidic and his colleagues say that companies need to disclose the exact composition of the injection fluid—information which is critical for scientists and regulators in their efforts to ensure water quality. The researchers also point out that states including Pennsylvania are not yet consistently collecting the kinds of hard data about surface water and well water quality which would allow us to assess the impact that fracking is having.

Until this monitoring takes place, they argue, fracking’s effect on our water supply is anybody’s guess.

Richard Schiffman is an environmental journalist, poet and author of two books based in New York City. You can read more of his work here.

Top image by Nato via Flickr

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Bees are dying all over the world, and nobody is sure why it is happening. Up to 40 percent of U.S. beekeeper hives failed to survive the past winter, making this the worst season so far on record. In part this was the result of a mysterious and growing phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in which bees fly off en masse and never return to their hive.

Agricultural production is beginning to take a hit from the loss of bees. In California’s Central Valley at the end of February, there weren’t enough commercially bred bees to pollinate all of the 800,000 acres of almond trees. Some desperate almond farmers actually flew in the precious insects from Australia to service their trees. Almonds aside, fully one out of every three bites of food that we eat were produced with the help of insect pollinators.

Domestic bees aren’t the only ones in trouble. Wild pollinators have been diminishing too. Feral honey bee populations in the U.S. have dropped an alarming 90 percent in the last 50 years. Some species are teetering on the edge of extinction. Fifteen pollinators are listed as endangered in the U.S. alone. The World Conservation Union forecasts that, largely as a result of global declines in wild pollinators, over 20,000 flowering plant species are likely to disappear over the next few decades.

While some food crops like almonds depend on commercially bred bees, others use primarily wild insects  to pollinate them. A study published in the journal Science in March concluded that wild pollinators are equally if not more important than domestic honey bees. The continued loss of feral pollinators, the researchers warn, could spark a crisis in our agricultural system from which it would be difficult to recover.

Pollinators, moreover, are considered indicator species for the overall health of the environment. When domesticated bees and their wild cousins fare poorly, it is a sign that all is not well in the natural world.

Chemical contributors

But scientists are finding it hard to pinpoint which factors in particular are the most responsible for the rise in pollinator mortality. That’s because a lot of different things have gone wrong lately. For one thing, wild habitats such as meadows and grasslands that the pollinators depend on for a varied diet are shrinking, as urban sprawl and the spread of monoculture agriculture encroaches upon them. The introduction of non-native species has also reduced the numbers of native pollinators in the U.S. and elsewhere. The European honey bee, which is the one that commercial beekeepers raise, is actually an invasive species which is competing with American insects for limited resources. In some areas, moreover, there is evidence that erratic weather and shifts in rainfall patterns due to climate change may already be a factor in the decline of certain species.

Something else that has been getting a lot of attention, especially in Europe, is the impact of agro-chemicals on both wild and domesticated bees. In a landmark move late last month, the European Union imposed a provisional two year ban on the use of the most common class of pesticides in the world, the neonicotinoids (neonics for short). A growing body of research now shows that the neonics, a chemical relative of nicotine which acts as a nerve poison in insects, harm bees by disrupting the navigational ability which they use to find flowers and make their way back to the hive.

In one of the most widely publicized studies, scientists at Harvard were actually able to duplicate the symptoms of CCD by exposing bees over a 23 week period to a low dose of  imidacloprid, a neonic which is produced by the German  company Bayer AG. Another report published in PLOS One found “remarkably high” levels of neonics and other agro-chemical toxins in pollen collected by honeybees, leading, the researchers said, to significant reductions in overall honey bee fitness. Yet another study conducted by Jeffrey Pettis, the head of the US Department of Agriculture’s Bee Research Laboratory, concluded that exposure to the neonic imidaclopid (the most popular pesticide in the world) makes bees more susceptible to infection by a variety of common pathogens.

Only part of the problem

While these chemicals clearly hurt bees, most researchers believe that insecticides are only a part of the problem. The spread of the blood-sucking bee parasite the Varroa mite may also be weakening bees and making them more prone to CCD. Another suspect is the Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) toxin in the pollen of genetically modified corn, which German scientists found compromised bee immune systems.

And certain practices of commercial beekeepers could be contributing to the collapse of their own hives as well. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month suggests that the high-fructose corn syrup that bees are fed lacks critical elements which help bees fight off the ill effects of environmental toxins, like the neonics, as well as pathogens. The entomologists from the University of Illinois said that this nutritionally bereft equivalent of junk food deprives bees of the enzyme p-coumaric found in their own honey, which is crucial in the regulation of their immune systems.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a report [pdf] last Thursday which points to a “complex set of stressors and pathogens,” including agro-chemicals, as likely suspects in recent bee die-offs. But it stopped short of making any specific policy recommendations. The Environmental Protection Agency says that it is currently reviewing the situation and will come out with its own recommendations in 2018.

This seemingly casual approach led commercial beekeeper Larry Pender to comment, “I can’t wait for the regulators to take their time, because we need these bees now.” He told CBS News that he lost a half million dollars last year alone, and had to lay off five of his seven workers. Beekeepers like Pender are clearly hurting. But with so much of our human food supply on the line, the stakes could not be higher for the rest of us as well.

Richard Schiffman is an environmental journalist, poet and author of two books based in New York City. You can read more of his work here.

Image by Marjan Veljanoski / Shutterstock

The post What’s Behind Bee Die-Off? U.S. and Europe Disagree appeared first on The Crux.

The thing about crossing into uncharted territory is that you may not know when, exactly, you have crossed into it. No one needs to tell that to the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is currently at the center of a controversy about where the solar system ends and interstellar space begins.

Today, a press release from the American Geophysical Union initially stated Voyager had left our solar system. Two hours later, though, they issued a correction calling Voyager’s current location a “new region of space,” which is considerably less flashy (but equally scientifically valuable). The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees the spacecraft, weighed in with a press release saying that no, in fact Voyager was still in the solar system.

So why the controversy? What is the debate about the boundary of the solar system? And what is this “new region” of which the scientists speak?

Let’s begin at the beginning. NASA launched Voyager 1 in 1977. Since then, the 1,600-pound (722 kilogram) probe has been zipping away from Earth and toward the edge of the solar system. It is currently more than 11 billion miles from the Sun, which is nearly three times as far out as Pluto is (don’t worry, Pluto; Voyager isn’t a planet, either).

But moving 11 billion miles from home isn’t always enough to free you of its influence. In the case of the solar system, the region where the Sun’s influence dominates is known as the heliosphere. Here, the Sun has blown high-speed, charged pieces of itself into a womb-like bubble.

Since 2004, Voyager 1 has been traveling in a subsection of the outer heliosphere: the heliosheath, where the solar wind slows down in response to pressure from the interstellar medium, which is the combination of winds from other, distant stars. When the influence of the solar wind and the interstellar medium are equal, the solar system ends, or so we say, and actual interstellar space begins. But determining whether or not Voyager has arrived there is no simple task.

The paper causing all the controversy has to do with cosmic rays (high-energy charged particles) both in and from outside the solar system. The authors state that on August 25, 2012, Voyager 1 saw a 90 percent drop in anomalous cosmic rays (those trapped in the solar system). At the same time, the number of galactic cosmic rays, from outside, doubled. Bill Webber, professor emeritus of astronomy at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and an author of the paper, calls this abrupt change the “heliocliff,” a coinage that deserves to catch on.

The flip in cosmic ray intensities caused some scientists to say Voyager was now primarily under the influence of Space with a Capital S rather than ensconced in our protective heliosheath.

But other scientists asked those scientists to hang on a second, because what about the magnetic field?

Well, the magnetic field is supposed to change at the edge of the solar system, when the Sun’s magnetic influence tapers off. The data of what Voyager is seeing in terms of magnetic field, however, have not been released yet.

If the magnetic field and the cosmic ray counts changed at the same point in space, we may soon see another press release with the title “Voyager 1 has left solar system”—but only time, and publications forthcoming in Science, will tell. Till then, and forever after, Voyager 1 will continue to travel farther and farther away, and even if it hasn’t crossed out of the heliosphere yet, it certainly will one of these days.

Sarah Scoles is an associate editor at Astronomy magazine. Follow her on Twitter @ScolesSarah.

Image courtesy NASA JPL

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The Casino Pier Star Jet roller coaster submerged in the sea on January 13, 2013 in Seaside Heights, NJ. Courtesy Glynnis Jones / Shutterstock

Diamond City, North Carolina, is not actually a city, in that no one actually lives there. People did live there, though, back in 1899. That was when a major hurricane hit the community, on a small barrier island near Cape Hatteras. Homes were destroyed, animals were killed, and graves were uncovered or washed away in the storm according to a conservation group in the area. By 1902, all 500 residents in Diamond City had picked up and left.

Left, Rasmus Midgett sits on the wreckage of the Priscilla after the San Ciriaco Hurricane. Right, another ship driven ashore in the storm. Images courtesy State Archives of North Carolina.

The people there didn’t have computer climate models, or rapidly rising seas, or any understanding of increasing storm vulnerability; they just had a desire not to deal with what they assumed would be a constant problem. That problem, of course, is one that anyone living on the East Coast is confronting, especially with the waters of Hurricane Sandy still slowly receding from our coastal consciousness. The question is, when should people in New Jersey, Long Island, Maryland, and elsewhere start thinking about leaving behind their own versions of Diamond City?

Straw that breaks the camel’s back

Dylan McNamara, a complex systems researcher at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is trying to answer that question. He and colleague Andrew Keeler, of East Carolina University, have created a coupled model combining physical properties of the coast—beach erosion rates, varying degrees of sea level rise, storm vulnerability, and other factors—and economic and human factors involving risk perception and government subsidies. The model—published in the journal Nature Climate Change—can be used to examine, basically, when people will begin to abandon those houses at which Sandy huffed and puffed.

McNamara says that locales are particularly vulnerable to desertion if the economics aren’t good to begin with. “Right before [a major] storm the financial returns on their investment are just barely overwhelming the costs of being there, but then the storm comes,” McNamara says. “That’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

Presently the model paints a general picture, but the researchers are working on adapting it for use in specific communities, essentially predicting when certain coastal property has negative value and the residents simply get up and leave. In general, though? Sea level rise of 10 mm per year could send some of America’s coastal residents running inside of 50 years from now.

Do you believe in sea level rise?

McNamara’s model incorporates a range of “actors”—imaginary people who buy and sell coastal property. These actors can be what he calls “observationalists,” meaning people who rely largely on what has happened in the past to inform their decisions; or they can be “model believers,” those who listen to what science is saying about impending sea level rise and increasingly damaging storms.

Debris left from Sandy in Seaside Heights, NJ. Courtesy Glynnis Jones / Shutterstock

Not surprisingly, if the coast has only observationalists, the time to abandonment is substantially longer. Model believers, in contrast, abandon their properties more quickly, and as a result they suffer less property damage overall. This creates an unfortunate “equity issue,” in that both disaster relief and beach nourishment are subsidized heavily by the federal government (meaning, taxpayers). In other words, the few are capitalizing on the generosity of the many.

“[Taxpayers] are subsidizing people who may think very differently about the environment,” McNamara says. “And more importantly, the amount that they’re subsidizing is strongly tied to that belief.” Less belief in climate change means longer time to abandonment, which means more damage over time and more money flowing from taxpayer to the stubborn coastal resident.

The modeling on that divergence is striking: with low sea level rise of 3 mm per year, the two types of property owners suffer similar amounts of damage. But if sea level rise reaches 12 mm per year, “observationalists” begin to suffer an average property damage of over $100,000 per year while the model believers’ damage actually drops toward $30,000 per year or so. Why? They know when to leave.

But an important part of the model is that it isn’t just belief in climate change and sea level rise that drives coastal property decisions. The federal government is the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

Destroy, rebuild, repeat

“There seems to be this universal agreement amongst a lot of people that the way we’re doing things at the coast right now is dumb,” says Robert Young, a professor at Western Carolina University who studies coastal processes and management. “At the moment, I don’t see any need for most of these folks to think about climate change, because the federal government isn’t thinking about climate change.”

Young points out that the Sandy relief funding approved by Congress not only included money to help rebuild infrastructure and give aid to families who lost homes, but also had $3.4 billion slated for the Army Corps of Engineers to work on protecting against future storms, an odd add-on for an emergency response package. For the better part of a century coastal communities have relied on beach nourishment—sand brought in to raise dunes and widen beaches to protect homes from erosion and storms—which is often subsidized to the tune of 65 percent or so.

Courtesy Glynnis Jones / Shutterstock

Young cited the case of Dauphin Island, Alabama, which he says has received a federal disaster declaration at least eight times in a quarter of a century. “This is a place that you would think would have been abandoned,” he says. “It’s barely a sandbar. And yet we continue to rebuild the roads on that place with federal funds, every time there’s a storm.”

Federal dollars vs. rising seas

Those federal subsidies are key to the model’s predictions. In a scenario involving sea level rising at about 3 mm per year, removing the subsidies changed the time to abandonment by as much as 250 years. Interestingly, as sea level rises faster, the subsidies play less of a role; if confronted with nature’s encroachment on a massive scale, we care a bit less that someone else is paying to raise a dune.

So the question of when we will start to abandon Ocean City, Maryland, and the southern edge of Long Island, and particularly vulnerable parts of the Jersey Shore, relies heavily on what the government does. If the storms keep coming—they will—and the seas rise faster and faster—they will—then it’s likely that Diamond City’s fate won’t look so strange anymore. And once we’re gone, we would probably stay gone: no one has ever tried to move back to Diamond City.

Dave Levitan is a freelance science journalist based in Philadelphia. He writes about energy, the environment, and occasionally zombies. Find more of his work here, and follow him on Twitter @davelevitan.

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