Climate change is often cast as a global issue. But in reality, it’s already affecting each of us in our backyards.
Why it matters: The more people see the impact on their own lives, the more likely it is that they’ll look for things they can do about it — from the candidates and policies they support to the personal changes they can make.
Scientists at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution announced today that ribonucleic acid (RNA), an analog of DNA that was likely the first genetic material for life, spontaneously forms on basalt lava glass. Such glass was abundant on Earth 4.35 billion years ago. Similar basalts of this antiquity survive on Mars today.
“Communities studying the origins of life have diverged in recent years,” remarked Steven Benner, a co-author of the study appearing online in the journal Astrobiology.
“One community re-visits classical questions with complex chemical schemes that require difficult chemistry performed by skilled chemists,” Benner explained. “Their beautiful craftwork appears in brand-name journals such as Nature and Science.” However, precisely because of the complexity of this chemistry, it cannot possibly account for how life actually originated on Earth.
In contrast, the Foundation study takes a simpler approach. Led by Elisa Biondi, the study shows that long RNA molecules, 100-200 nucleotides in length, form when nucleoside triphosphates do nothing more than percolate through basaltic glass.
“Basaltic glass was everywhere on Earth at the time,” remarked Stephen Mojzsis, an Earth scientist who also participated in the study. “For several hundred million years after the Moon formed, frequent impacts coupled with abundant volcanism on the young planet formed molten basaltic lava, the source of the basalt glass. Impacts also evaporated water to give dry land, providing aquifers where RNA could have formed.”
The same impacts also delivered nickel, which the team showed gives nucleoside triphosphates from nucleosides and activated phosphate, also found in lava glass. Borate (as in borax), also from the basalt, controls the formation of those triphosphates.
The same impactors that formed the glass also transiently reduced the atmosphere with their metal iron-nickel cores. RNA bases, whose sequences store genetic information, are formed in such atmospheres. The team had previously showed that nucleosides are formed by a simple reaction between ribose phosphate and RNA bases.
“The beauty of this model is its simplicity. It can be tested by highschoolers in chemistry class,” said Jan Špaček, who was not involved in this study but who develops instrument to detect alien genetic polymers on Mars. “Mix the ingredients, wait for a few days and detect the RNA.”
The same rocks resolve the other paradoxes in making RNA in a path that moves all of the way from simple organic molecules to the first RNA. “For example, borate manages the formation of ribose, the ‘R’ in RNA,” Benner added. This path starts from simple carbohydrates that could “not not” have formed in the atmosphere above primitive Earth. These were stabilized by volcanic sulfur dioxide, and then rained to the surface to create reservoirs of organic minerals.
Thus, this work completes a path that creates RNA from small organic molecules that were almost certainly present on the early Earth. A single geological model moves from one and two carbon molecules to give RNA molecules long enough to support Darwinian evolution.
“Important questions remain,” cautions Benner. “We still do not know how all of the RNA building blocks came to have the same general shape, a relationship known as homochirality.” Likewise, the linkages between the nucleotides can be variable in the material synthesized on basaltic glass. The import of this is not known.
Mars is relevant to this announcement because the same minerals, glasses, and impacts were also present on Mars of that antiquity. However, Mars has not suffered continental drift and plate tectonics that buried most rocks from Earth older than 4 billion years. Thus, rocks from the relevant time remain on the surface of Mars. Recent missions to Mars have found all of the needed rocks, including borate.
“If life emerged on Earth via this simple path, then it also likely emerged on Mars,” said Benner. “This makes it even more important to seek life on Mars as soon as we can.”
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Summary
Explosions rock Ukrainian capital; one wounded
Kyiv, Moscow both claim gains around Sievierodonetsk
Governor says Ukrainian troops control half of city
Macron says it’s important not to humiliate Russia
KYIV, June 5 (Reuters) – Russia struck Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles early on Sunday for the first time in more than a month, while Ukrainian officials said a counter-attack on the main battlefield in the east had retaken half of the city of Sievierodonetsk.
Dark smoke could be seen from many miles away after the attack on two outlying districts of Kyiv. Ukraine said the strike hit a rail car repair works; Moscow said it had destroyed tanks sent by Eastern European countries to Ukraine.
Wreckage lie along a street at a railway service facility hit by a Russian missile strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Sunday, June 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia took aim Sunday at Western military supplies for Ukraine, launching airstrikes on Kyiv that it claimed destroyed tanks donated from abroad, as Vladimir Putin warned that any Western deliveries of long-range rocket systems would prompt Moscow to hit “objects that we haven’t yet struck.”
The Russian leader’s cryptic threat of a military escalation did not specify what the new targets might be, but it came days after the United States announced plans todeliver $700 million of security assistancefor Ukraine. Those weapons include four precision-guided, medium-range rocket systems, as well as helicopters, Javelin anti-tank systems, radars, tactical vehicles and more.
Military analysts say Russia hopes to overrun Ukraine’s embattled…
FILE – A man wades into the ocean at sunset on June 22, 2021, in Newport Beach, Calif. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Friday, June 3, 2022, that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in May averaged 421 parts per million, more than 50% higher than pre-industrial levels. The NOAA said carbon dioxide levels in the air in May have reached a point last known when Earth was 7 degrees hotter, millions of years ago. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has shot past a key milestone — more than 50% higher than pre-industrial times — and is at levels not seen since millions of years ago when Earth was a hothouse ocean-inundated planet, federal scientists announced Friday.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said its long-time monitoring station at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, averaged 421 parts per million of carbon dioxide for the month of May, which is when the crucial greenhouse gas hits its yearly high. Before the industrial revolution in the late 19th century carbon dioxide levels were at 280 parts per million, scientists said, so humans have significantly changed the atmosphere. Some activists and scientists want a level of 350 parts per million. Industrial carbon dioxide emissions come from the burning of coal, oil and gas.
Levels of the gas continue to rise, when they need to be falling, scientists say. This year’s carbon dioxide level is nearly 1.9 ppm more than a year ago, a slightly bigger jump than from May 2020 to May 2021.
“The world is trying to reduce emissions, and you just don’t see it. In other words, if you’re measuring the atmosphere, you’re not seeing anything happening right now in terms of change,” said NOAA climate scientist Pieter Tans, who tracks global greenhouse gas emissions for the agency.
The U.S. government’s response to bird flu outbreaks involves killing and burying or burning millions of tightly confined birds, which threatens wildlife, habitats, water supplies, air quality and human health. iStock.com
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When a strain of bird flu sweeps through factory farms, where birds are tightly confined, the current “solution” involves immense cruelty.
This is why it’s a genuine milestone in the fight against factory farming that the Humane Society of the United States, Farm Sanctuary and Mercy For Animals just settled a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture over its reckless response plan for outbreaks of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza.
Factory farms (where virtually all meat, eggs and dairy now come from) are breeding grounds for disease. By packing thousands of stressed animals into cages or sheds, factory farms provide viruses and other pathogens with the perfect conditions to spread and mutate into more dangerous and contagious strains, a process known as amplification. State laws that prohibit cruel, tight confinement like California’s Proposition 12 have an important role to play here, but factory-farming interests are seeking to strip states of their ability to pass such laws. More on that below.
In a bird flu outbreak, the current USDA approach involves killing every animal at or near the impacted facility. Often this is done by an exceptionally cruel method called “ventilation shutdown,” which means shutting off a facility’s ventilation system and slowly suffocating conscious birds to death. The government then uses taxpayer dollars to reimburse producers for the cost of restocking their operations with new animals.
In 2015, the HSUS proposed a better way: that the agency should require producers re-stocking their facilities after an outbreak to shift to cage-free or other systems that give birds more space and the ability to engage in healthy, natural behaviors. But the USDA decided to stick to an approach that incentivizes re-stocking factory farms with dangerously high numbers of animals, often confined to the point of virtual immobilization.
Our lawsuit alleged that the agency’s plan inadequately analyzed how killing and burying or burning millions of tightly confined birds threatens wildlife, habitats, water supplies, air quality and human health. The settlement requires the agency to revisit these issues and conduct a more in-depth analysis of these threats. This is an important and timely development, as currently the U.S. is in the midst of another nationwide bird flu outbreak that has quickly spread to 40 states.
Though the USDA agreed that overcrowding animals can amplify influenza, instead of doing anything to discourage it, the agency said that it planned to just “encourage farmers to consider reducing the number of birds in poultry houses as part their best management practices.” Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that this supposed encouragement led to any reduction in cruel and dangerous confinement anywhere, and now six years later the U.S. is enduring of another devastating bird flu outbreak.
But thanks to the settlement, the USDA will go back to the drawing board, and nothing is stopping the agency from adopting the anti-confinement incentives the HSUS suggested in 2015. The agency never questioned the efficacy of those incentives; it rejected them without examining whether they may prove effective in limiting the threat of bird flu.
This case overlaps with a major legal battle in which the HSUS is currently engaged. We’re defending California’s landmark Proposition 12 in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. The HSUS led the campaign that passed Proposition 12 in 2018, banning the extreme confinement of mother pigs, egg-laying hens and calves used for veal, while prohibiting the sale of pork, eggs and veal from factory farms that cruelly confine animals. Instead of complying with this commonsense and hugely popular reform, the pork industry is trying to get the law overturned.
It’s obvious to most people that the pork industry’s practice of locking a mother pig in a barren metal cage so tightly that she can’t turn around is cruel. But these cages (known as “gestation crates”) also pose an enormous threat to public health. Confining mother pigs in gestation crates stresses the animals and this suppresses their immune responses. In pig breeding facilities, hundreds or thousands of pigs are confined right next to each other in these crates, helping influenza and other pathogens spread more easily. Just like overcrowding birds, overcrowding pigs risks amplifying influenza, increasing the likelihood of generating a virus that could become the next devastating human pandemic. This is not hypothetical: The 2009 swine flu pandemic jumped from pigs to humans and killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.
Factory farms that force animals to live in overcrowded, filthy conditions are a massive threat to public health, in addition to being our nation’s largest source of animal suffering. The HSUS will continue to battle intensive farm animal confinement wherever the fight takes us—whether it be in courts, corporate boardrooms, online or the public square. You can join us by adding your name to this action alert.
The bird flu lawsuit was prepared and defended by pro bono counsel at the law firm Shearman & Sterling, LLP and the HSUS’s Animal Protection Law team along with co-plaintiffs, Mercy For Animals and Farm Sanctuary.
Sara Amundson is president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund.
While fishermen are notorious for telling tall tales about the sizes of their catches without supporting evidence, the photos for this story are accessible … and horrifying.
It all began on May 22 when a spearfisher in Thailand, in the Phatthalung province in the far south of the country, washuntingand came up for air.
As he surfaced, another creature did, too.
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A 5-inch-longfishknown as an Anabas leaped into the air — and directly into the man’s throat.
The Anabas fish’s dorsal fin is spiky, making the ordeal that much more painful.
While the fisherman certainly wasn’t expecting the fish to leap into his mouth, the fish didn’t seem too happy about the situation either, and it tried to wiggle out, but took a wrong turn.
Television sitcoms once portrayed women almost exclusively as June Cleavers and Donna Reeds, housewives with no interests beyond serving their husbands and children. These characters represented the absence of a woman’s perspective, a cultural denial of a woman’s life. But over time, sitcoms evolved to more accurately reflect the lives of women, and popular culture evolved with them. When will this evolution happen for nonhuman animals and the acknowledgment of the cruelty of animal agriculture?
Studies show that television sitcoms can shape public opinion regarding gender, race, and human rights, and “have the potential to substantially shape individual-level opinion.”
Sitcoms provide an opportunity to inform and educate the public about the realities of animal agriculture, but instead mostly ignore, deny, and excuse the killing and suffering of animals, reinforcing our cultural blindness to the plight of nonhumans.
The most common way that sitcoms teach us to live in denial about the atrocities that underlie animal-based food production is simply by pretending that meat has no source. There are countless examples of sitcom characters happily eating hamburgers and pot roasts or cooking bacon and eggs, behaving as if the meat in front of them did not come from a dead, abused animal body.
Modern Family, Parks & Rec, and 30 Rock
Modern Family’s Thanksgiving episode “Three Turkeys” focuses on the experiences of Phil and Gloria spending the day cooking turkeys. One of the dead turkey bodies is carelessly tossed into a suitcase for comedic effect. This treatment of the turkey’s carcass as an object and a prop models a cavalier attitude toward the dead body that would be considered odd and inappropriate if the characters acknowledged the fact that they were tossing around the body of a recently living being. Instead, the audience is encouraged to pretend, along with Phil and Gloria, that the turkey’s carcass was never a living creature, that it has no history or context, and that it is simply an object for humans to do with whatever they’d like.
Some sitcoms, such as Parks & Recreation, take this form of denial one step further by fetishizing meat-eating. Throughout the series, Ron Swanson makes it clear that meat is his favorite food. This is considered an endearing attribute by his coworkers and by fans of the show. In the episode “Indianapolis,” Ron proudly displays a scrapbook he has assembled with photos of every steak he has ever eaten from his favorite steakhouse. Such fetishizing separates the meat from the life of the individual cow who was killed, encouraging viewers to do the same.
This abstraction of the reality of what the meat is allows the meat object to exist as a sort of ethical blank slate, which Ron is then able to associate with a feeling of pleasure and identity, like a favorite sports team. As we watch Ron fetishize meat-eating with no criticism or consequences from his fellow characters, a strong message is sent to the audience that there is no reason to feel uncomfortable about eating meat, that it is a source of contextless joy and something that Ron is proud to associate himself with. If the reality of the suffering each cow endured before being killed and dismembered to end up on Ron’s plate was acknowledged instead of pretended away, Ron’s extreme love of meat-eating would seem shockingly callous.
Other sitcoms do acknowledge the animal suffering connected to meat and food production, only to then quickly discount, justify, or rationalize it away by creating excuses for harming and killing animals for food. For example, on 30 Rock, in “Chain Reaction of Mental Anguish,” Kenneth has a memory of bonding with a pig and eventually eating him. To his credit, he shows actual emotion and remorse. But Jack Donaghy quickly thinks up an excuse to assuage Kenneth’s guilt. Jack tells Kenneth that he actually honored his pig friend by eating him and benefited from the pig’s “sacrifice.” If watchers had any doubts about their meat-eating, those doubts are washed away by this process of internal justification. This sends the clear message that animal agriculture is an unavoidable reality that we must learn to accept, shrug off or ignore.
How TV shows can do better
Television writers must come to understand that, as with issues of gender, race, and human rights, they have a social responsibility when depicting meat-eating to acknowledge what is really happening and where that meat came from.
Two examples of a starting place for sitcoms to acknowledge the suffering of animals that underlies our food system are Lisa Simpson in The Simpsons and Dina Fox in Superstore.
In The Simpsons, Lisa Simpson has been an important voice for compassion toward animals for most of the show’s 32-year history. In “Lisa the Vegetarian,” she connects a lamb she bonded with at a petting zoo with the meat she is being served for dinner. While she sits at the table in front of a plate of two slices of meat, Lisa imagines the lamb standing in front of her with two empty spaces in his body. In her imagination, she makes the lamb’s body whole again by returning the two slices of meat to it. Not surprisingly, the showrunner at the time, David Mirkin, was a vegetarian himself.
In Superstore, Dina Fox is an animal-loving vegan character. In “Golden Globe Party,” she decides to eat a piece of chicken despite her veganism in order to support her best friend. Her friends watch uncomfortably as she holds the drumstick and tearfully says, “I guess this is what he used to stand on, they just took off the little foot.” Then, she holds the chicken up to her mouth and says, “I’m going to eat a bird now. I’m going to eat a bird now.” This scene forces the audience to take the first step toward facing the realities of animal agriculture by opening our eyes and looking at what we are really doing when we eat meat.
These examples provide a path for sitcoms to acknowledge the connection between meat-eating and the cruel realities of animal agriculture, and to begin to emerge from the denial of the atrocities against nonhumans committed by our society.
Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in May were 50 percent higher than during the pre-industrial era, reaching levels not seen on Earth for about four million years, the main US climate agency said on Friday.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere passed the threshold of 420 parts per million (ppm), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said. PPM is a unit of measurement used to quantify pollution in the atmosphere.
Last May, the rate was 419ppm, and in 2020, 417ppm.
Global warming caused by humans, particularly through the production of electricity using fossil fuels, transport, the production of cement, or even deforestation, is responsible for the new high, the NOAA said.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas that traps heat, gradually causing global warming. It remains in the atmosphere and oceans for thousands of years.
Many huge automotive companies are transitioning to cleaner car manufacturing. Electric vehicles have been the focal point of that conversation, allegedly expelling less energy and leaving behind virtually no carbon footprint. But manufacturing the vehicle from its wheels to its battery could have significant damage to the earth. Consumer skepticism remains around if electric cars are as environmentally friendly as they’re marketed.
What vehicle is worse for the environment, electric cars or gasoline-powered cars? On the surface, electric vehicles create no carbon emissions because they’re not expelling harmful fumes into the atmosphere. Standard vehicles, of course, emit all kinds of pollutants into the earth and the air, which is not suitable for the upkeep of the planet. But…
