In Africa, elephants trample farms. Some traditional herders are prohibited from grazing their herds on land occupied by tourist-magnets like lions, leopards, giraffes and gazelles.

And buffalo, zebras and antelopes eat grass that could feed cattle.

In the East African savannas, the interactions between wildlife and the people whose livelihood depends on cows and goats, are complicated, critical and contentious.

Grazing is about the only way to make a living in this hot, dry land, but livestock and many wild herbivores eat similar vegetation.

And so the competition is obvious: How can a cow eat forage that a zebra ate first?

The question answers itself, and so nobody studied the issue.

Not so obvious after all

But in other realms, ecologists have found that organisms that seem to compete may actually aid each other. “We are just beginning to understand that the relationship between species is highly contextual,” says Truman Young, a professor of plant sciences at the University of California at Davis, “and this interaction includes competition and facilitation. Once, people thought if two species were similar, they always competed, but years ago, it became clear that facilitation exists in certain situations.”

Young is senior author of new study showing that in Kenya’s highland savannas, competition is partly offset by facilitation; although during the dry season wildlife steal food from the mouths of cattle, so to speak, the situation is reversed during the wet season.

When the rains come, wild ungulates (mammals with hooves), particularly zebras, seem to benefit cattle by eating fibrous, woody grasses and revealing the more delectable, higher-protein grasses beneath.

This gives cattle access to forage with more protein, and their wet-season weight gains nearly counterbalance the dry-season losses inflicted by wildlife.

Well done

The study was performed during 2007 and 2008, on nine fenced plots, or “exclosures,” each 4 hectares in size. The researchers placed four young, unbred females of an African breed called Boran on each plot for 16-week periods, and measured their eating habits and weight gain in three conditions:

First author Wilfred Odadi, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and the African Wildlife Foundation, wrote us to explain that facilitation nearly equaled competition. “Wildlife-driven depression of cattle weight gain in the dry season is 35 to 40 percent. In the wet season, cattle put on weight faster by about the same percentage when they forage with wildlife.” The real-world situation, he added, would “depend on the lengths and frequencies of dry and wet seasons.”

This was the first experimental evidence that wildlife and livestock are engaged in facilitation and competition, Young says. “There is a basic-science excitement here. With this large-vertebrate system, we have shown that you can actually sometimes have competition and sometimes facilitation.”

It’s possible that the 15-year history of experiments on the site has changed the vegetation enough to weaken the results. But the continuous grazing of cattle kept the site’s vegetation similar to the surrounding savanna, Young says. “If we had excluded all large herbivores, the rangeland would become very different, and our inferences would be skewed. But because cattle are the dominant herbivores … the plots were not that different. My belief is if we had started the exclosures last year, we would have gotten the same result.”

What are the practical implications?

Killing wildlife, except for rogue animals, is illegal in Kenya, but it still happens, Odadi told us. “Because in Kenya wildlife belongs to the state, and not to the land owner, some livestock keepers still show a negative attitude towards wildlife because of perceived ‘detrimental’ effects on livestock including competition, livestock depredation and disease transmission. Some people react by fencing off their properties to keep wildlife away. There are also situations where water sources are fenced off by pastoralists to make them inaccessible to wildlife. In extreme cases, wild animals are actually killed, albeit illegally.”

And so in a region with unreliable rainfall and few resources, it’s good news for advocates of biodiversity conservation that the competition between domestic and wild ungulates, at least on savannas, may be more apparent than real.

Good news for conservation

Indeed, large mammal ecologist Johan du Toit of Utah State University, wrote in Science that the new information should eventually “provide managers with opportunities to capitalize on facilitative interactions, intervene against competitive ones, and enhance animal production overall.”

Rangeland managers often mix native and non-native plants, du Toit added. And after “bold experimentation and a break from orthodoxy,” a similar approach with animals could boost production while conserving biodiversity.

Odadi says better knowledge of cattle-wildlife interactions could support short-term changes, such as slaughtering or marketing livestock “at the end of the wet season, when they have recovered from competition in the preceding dry season, and also to minimize competitive effects (by reducing densities) in the next dry season.”

Conservationists in East Africa and elsewhere are seeking “to manage land for ecosystem biodiversity and short-term extractive value,” says Young, “but it’s pretty hard to find good examples, other than assertions about the profitability of ecotourism. We were able to show that wildlife and cattle have a complex interaction; that wildlife is not uniformly bad for cattle, and that allows us to be a little more lenient toward wildlife.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Southwest fires still ablaze

Last week, New Mexico’s famous Los Alamos National Laboratory, home of the atomic bomb, was shut down when a wildfire exploded from 2,000 acres to 49,000 acres over 24 hours, forcing the evacuation of the town of Los Alamos.

A wildfire that started May 29 in droughted Arizona scorched 538,000 acres – the largest in the state’s history.

Historically, wildfires have been usually battled as threats to life, limb and property. But scientists and land managers now see them as a part of nature that can be postponed but not denied.

This edition of The Why Files examines the ecology of fire in the forest.

For a century, the highly successful Smokey the Bear ad campaign fueled fear and loathing of wildfires in the United States. Embezzlers have been more popular than wild fires, which scourged the landscape, burned the birds and rendered Bambi homeless. But in recent decades, ecologists have come to three startling conclusions about fire:

Forests afire

One touchstone for the reconsideration of fire was the “catastrophic” conflagration in Yellowstone National Park in 1988 — which, despite the frightening photos, turned out to be a temporary setback for the ecosystem. Still, even ignoring the human toll for a moment, scientists have found that massive debris flows from denuded slopes can permanently alter the landscape.

More recently, discussion has shifted to reducing the intensity of wildfires, and to their interaction with a warming climate. How effective is controlled burning? Are global warming and the likely increase in drought already accelerating wildfires? Will more wildfires turn arid parts of Australia, the American West and Asia to desert?

An old debate

Each fire is shaped by weather, geology, plant life, and topography, which makes them hard to study, let alone control. Beyond harming or killing plants and animals, fires force a broad range of changes in chemistry, pH, microbial activity, moisture, water flows, soil structure and erosion.

The debate over wildfire is old, according to Stephen Pyne, a fire historian at Arizona State University. Although it’s impossible to know for certain the prevalence of fire five centuries ago, for a 1998 Why Files, Pyne estimated that before Columbus, wildfires, often set to clear land for planting, burned five times as much area as today.

Pyne said the debate over wildfire in the United States when the first national parks opened a century ago “mirrored an earlier argument in Europe over the role of fire” in natural landscapes. The European emigrants to the New World associated fire with “primitive” agriculture, and the U.S. government sought to eradicate fire from its parks and forests. The policy of fighting pretty much all fires succeeded at first, Pyne said. “Absolute suppression will work for a number of years, even a few decades, but you are always going to have fires.”

In the long run, he contended, total suppression is futile or counterproductive, since it allows a buildup of fuel that makes future fires larger, fiercer and even harder — or impossible — to fight.

Controlled burns — a forest fire you can love!

In response to this fuel buildup, controlled (“prescribed”) burns have been used for decades to reduce the chance of a catastrophic fire and return forests to a condition adjudged to be more natural. Prescribed burns reduce the amount of fuel, try to remove the “ladder trees” that can carry a creeping ground fire into the treetops, and are the “primary management tool” in the Forest Service region that covers 18 national forests in California.

USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station

Watch this piece of Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest grow denser as fire is excluded and trees are harvested. Before 1895, low-intensity fires burned through this forest every three to 30 years, until people began logging and suppressing fires. Click the link for a more complete explanation.

But prescribed burns are expensive, difficult to pull off (as they require a forest that is dry enough to burn, but not so dry that a raging fire will result), and studies of their efficacy conflict:

Do controlled burns damage trees?

Despite some successes from these deliberate burns, scientists have noted that they are sometimes followed by outbreaks of destructive bark beetles, or that fire in the heavy layer of organic matter left after a century of firefighting can kill tree roots – and trees. In a 2007 report, Sharon Hood of the U.S. Forest Service wrote that prescribed burning “is causing significant mortality of these high-value trees even with low intensity fires.”

In a 2005 test in Lassen National Forest and Lassen National Volcanic Park in California, Hood and colleagues looked at the effect of raking litter and duff away from ponderosa and Jeffrey pine trees before a controlled burn. Raking did not confer a survival advantage, perhaps because trees survived well in both the treatment and control groups, but raking did confer some advantage against beetle attack.

Bigger ecological picture

In the search to find out how fires affect forests, one theme stands out: The aftermath of fires is as varied as their weather conditions, biology and landscapes. In some cases, as we’ll see for Yellowstone, the ecosystem bounces back after a fire. But the results vary, even in one fire in one location. For example, the 2002 study of the Rodeo-Chediski Wildfire (which set an Arizona record at 189,000 hectares) found that about half the area was severely burned, and that many more years would be needed to restore the area despite efforts to replant vegetation and contain erosion. The mildly burned half section, however, had reverted to pre-fire conditions by 2009.

In the Arctic, the aftermath of a fire was much more serious: A report after the 1,000-square kilometer Anaktuvuk River fire in Alaska in 2007 documented a dramatic reduction in stored carbon. The researchers concluded that the growing frequency and intensity of fire would cause major changes in the ecosystem, climate and “the well-being of humans and other animals that inhabit Alaska’s North Slope.” After a severe burn, soil carbon, a key indicator of fertility, is “unlikely to recover to pre-fire levels over the next millennia.”

In general, animals get less consideration than plants in research on the aftermath of fires, but several studies of birds describe changes for better and for worse:

Open-air experiment in Yellowstone…

Much of what we know about the ecological impact of fire has come from Yellowstone National Park, where a giant blaze burned about 45 percent of the 1-million hectare park in 1988. Photos of towers of flame and exhausted firefighters became symbolic of nature run amok. Yet long-term studies of the aftermath produced surprising results, says Monica Turner, a landscape ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

By 1998, 10 years after the blaze, Yellowstone was already on the rebound. Fish and mammals had survived the holocaust surprisingly well, and lodgepole pines—which dominated the park for 10,000 years — were poking through the shrubs and weeds, heralding a return of the park’s old ecosystem.

• While it looked catastrophic, Yellowstone’s infamous 1988 fire turned out to be a regular stage of ecological change.
  Photo: Jeff Henry, U.S. National Park Service, 12120
  
• Before: A stand of lodgepole pines tower above spruce and fir in Yellowstone 1965.
  Photo: RG Johnsson, , U.S. National Park Service, 08161
  
• 10 years after: The forest restored itself, as lodgepole pines sprout between dead ones in 1998.
  Photo: Jim Peaco, U.S. National Park Service, 15995
  

On cone-y island?

Why the quick rebound? Although the horrific photos from 1988 suggested that the vast sections of Yellowstone were uniformly charred, the severity varied from place to place. While intense crown fires killed all above-ground vegetation in some areas, trees and plants survived milder ground fires elsewhere, and the “mosaic” destruction allowed rapid, but patchy, regeneration. “In some places, very few trees are coming back, in other we see hundreds of thousands per hectare,” says Turner.

These extremes of tree density after a fire reflect that pattern of fire severity, Turner explains, and the biology of the dominant lodgepole pines. Many of these trees produce cones that, in a fire, open and release their seeds, which confront ideal growing conditions: Bare soil with little competition, plenty of sun, and the weather they are adapted to.

Other lodgepoles, however, release their seeds essentially on schedule, giving them less advantage after a fire. As the difference in tree density plays itself out over the decades, the fire’s imprint on the landscape can persist for more than 150 years, Turner says.

A flowering success

Because the soil was charred only to an average depth of 2 centimeters, and never more than 6 centimeters, some plants resprouted from roots or underground structures called rhizomes. By 1990, wildflowers were already abundant, Turner said. “Regeneration of these plants was very rapid, and it came from within the burned area. Even the really big fires leave a legacy of the plants that were there before the fire.”

In contrast, invasive species, did unexpectedly poorly after the fire, Turner said. “We had hypothesized that there might be an invasion by non-natives; the fires had created so much expansive, disturbed habitat, but the invasives have not appeared to spread, and are still where they used to be, along roads and trails.”

Burn and revive — or not

Over all, the fires had surprisingly little impact on wildlife, says Turner, who studied survival of elk and bison in Yellowstone, and the fire may even have given elk an advantage over the reintroduced wolf. “The young forest that is coming back after the ’88 fires provides quite a bit of cover for elk; the young pines are super-dense, it’s difficult to see your hand in front of your nose.” Furthermore, logs from the fallen trees killed by the fire can conceal elk and interfere with the wolf attempts to run down elk in open fields.

The summary word for Yellowstone is resilience, Turner says. The natural fire regime in the Yellowstone area includes a hot, crown fire “that replaces the whole forest and the cycle begins again about every 120 to 300 years. Big fires at the historic intervals are not detrimental to the system in any way.” Although these fires threaten homes and businesses, “from the perspective of plants and animals, fire is a normal event.”

Wildfires can carry other hazards, however. For example, a 2010 study of dry regions of Southeast Australia noted heavy erosion and debris flows after a big fire, mirroring what has been seen in the arid American Southwest. The debris flows were not seen in wetter forests, however.

Fire in a changing globe

Fire, obviously, removes stored carbon from the forest, making it a potential source of greenhouse warming. But the opposite is also true: global warming seems to cause more fires. According to experts on Western water and climate⁵ rapid climate change is underway in the American West, with:

The “signature” of global warming is already appearing in western forests, agreed a 2006 study⁶ which identified a change starting in the mid-1980s toward “higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons. The greatest increases occurred in mid-elevation, Northern Rockies forests, where land-use histories have relatively little effect on fire risks and are strongly associated with increased spring and summer temperatures and an earlier spring snowmelt.”

In other words, the increase in large, intense forest fires was more likely due to global warming than to the increased fuel load left by a century of fire-fighting.

Data: National Interagency Fire Center

In the United States, the area burned has gradually increased since 1983.

These changes are evident in Yellowstone, says Erica Smithwick, an assistant professor of geography and ecology who studies the aftermath of wildfires at Penn State. Historically, the “fire regime” — the average time needed to burn the entire area — is 120 to 300 years, but the lodgepole pines that dominate the plateau recover within a century, so the forest has survived regular large fires.

But Smithwick, Turner and colleagues came to an alarming conclusion when they compared projections for temperature and rainfall timing and intensity in 2050 to the history of fires when those conditions prevailed in the past.

Near Ryazan, Russia, 8 May 2011, mcsdwarken via Flickr

Record heat in Russia in 2010 led to a series of huge wildfires.

The interval between fires, they calculated, would be drastically shorter, and that is disturbing, Smithwick acknowledges. “If these projections are correct, there really might be a threshold in the vegetation where it would not be able to recover.”

Such a fire regime, she adds, is “more consistent with lower montane forests [with trees spaced far apart] or non-forests.”

What is the endgame of warmer, drier forests where fires are becoming more frequent? Could fires turn a forest to desert? Yes, according to a 2009 presentation by Daniel Neary of the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Flagstaff, Ariz. “Wildfire is now driving desertification in some of the forest lands in the western United States. The areas of wildfire in the Southwest U.S.A. have increased dramatically in the past two decades” from less than 10,000 hectares per year in the early 20th century to over 230,000 hectares today. “Individual wildfires are now larger and produce higher severity burns than in the past. A combination of natural drought, climate change, excessive fuel loads, and increased ignition sources have produced the perfect conditions for fire-induced desertification.”

It’s impossible to know the outcome in Yellowstone, a jewel of the U.S. national parks, Smithwick says. “I don’t think the ecosystem is doomed, but how do you manage a system like Yellowstone in that context? There should be some opportunity for the ecosystem to shift.” Eventually, grassland may replace forest, she notes. “Ecosystems are constantly shifting; that’s the kind of mindset we need to go forward. But this is a bit of a wakeup call. We are pushing the system, and we don’t know what is on the other side of the tipping point.”

– David Tenenbaum

On May 4, scientists announced success after a 50-year quest to measure two key consequences of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The most perfectly round objects ever created by human hand, spinning aboard a spaceship launched in 2004, have detected infinitesimal disturbances in spacetime, the invisible fourth dimension of the universe:

To The Why Files, frame-dragging means that space is no longer flat, or even just warped. It is also twisted. And as a matter of principle, The Why Files likes twisted.

These consequences of predictions made in the early 20th century by history’s archetypal theoretical physicist are yet more proof that Einstein had it right, and are the latest chapters in history’s most compelling scientific detective story; which substantiated the highly theoretical speculation of a brilliant scientist through nuts-and-bolts observations of the universe.

Courtesy Eric Zuelow, University of New England

Is this tyke being “frame-dragged” in accordance with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, or is he just playing in a park in Kenilworth, England?

1905: Relatively special

In 1905, the same year he finished his Ph.D. thesis, Einstein published several amazing insights, including papers on Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect (the latter won Einstein his sole Nobel Prize). One of those papers proposed a theory of “special relativity” that said that the speed of light is fixed and independent of the observer’s motion. The 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment convinced Einstein that there was no ether (the supposed physical background that allowed light to move), and that the laws of physics were the same in reference frames moving with a constant velocity relative to each other.

Common sense says that a ball thrown from a moving car will move faster than one thrown by a person standing still – and still faster for someone in another car driving towards it. Common sense, Einstein proved, does not always apply. The speed of light does not depend on whether the light source is mounted on a Stanley Steamer, a space ship or a water tower. The speed of light is constant. And it doesn’t matter whence you observe it. Light speed is light speed. End of story.

Image: FL0

Using a device like this, Michelson and Morley found that light had the same velocity under different circumstances; a key stimulus to Einstein’s thoughts while working on special relativity.

1916: General relativity

Einstein’s theory of “general” relativity described how gravity affects space and time. Following his habit, Einstein started a thought experiment — a series of “what-if” questions – related to gravity: “If I were falling through space, I would not feel gravity.” Therefore, the laws of physics did not require gravity in every situation. But since the laws of physics must apply everywhere, then gravity must result from something else, which Einstein concluded was the fabric of spacetime.

The classic explanation for spacetime is this: gravity results when the curved fabric of spacetime causes a massive object (a bowling ball or a galaxy) to distort space-time, causing other objects to fall toward the “valley” it has created in spacetime. To us, this looks like gravity, but to Einstein, it’s more a matter of geometry.

1906: Working on the proof

One year after Einstein published special relativity, scientists got some support for the theory, says Richard Staley, an associate professor of the history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Einstein and others had predicted, for different reasons, that certain fast-moving electrons would gain mass. German physicist Walter Kaufmann did some experiments, and interpreted his results as proof that the mass gain was due to a competing theory rather than relativity, but “the tests were not accurate enough to make a decisive choice between the different theories,” Staley says.

1919: Sun’s gravity bends light

The first confirmation of general relativity appeared after a highly publicized journey by British astronomer Arthur Eddington. During a total solar eclipse, Eddington observed stars that were almost directly behind the sun. As predicted by general relativity, their starlight was bent by the sun’s gravity.

Gravity, counter to intuition, could bend light, and Eddington, no dunce, became an ardent popularizer of relativity.

Although we may look back on Einstein as an oddball with a zany haircut who stuck out his tongue and rode a bike, he was a serious man who thought about politics as well as physics. Living in Germany during World War I, he was an outspoken pacifist who organized scientists against militarism. “Einstein thought we needed to think across national borders and tried to start a book project to include contributions from people from neutral and enemy countries,” Staley notes. “Most of his colleagues said it was a great idea, but would be counterproductive. They refused to participate, so it did not happen.”

Even before his fame got a boost by the 1919 confirmation of relativity, Einstein was willing to “take stances counter to others,” Staley says. “He was cautioned about going public, but when the war was finished, he decided he’d been right. Even though physics does not give you a particular insight into politics, it was clear that nobody had better insights, so he might as well make his views public.”

1974: Neutron stars and gravity waves

By the 1920s and ’30s, relativity was enshrined as a foundation of physics, but the proofs rolled on. In 1974, researchers found that a pair of neutron stars — phenomenally dense objects formed after regular stars collapse — was losing energy. Neutron stars emit extremely regular radio pulses, and the slowing of the pulses was interpreted to mean they were losing energy through the gravitational waves that general relativity predicts. The discovery won the 1993 Nobel Prize for physics.

Detecting gravity waves remains the object of an expensive, long-term scientific quest.

1979: One weighty lens

In 1936, three years after Einstein emigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis, he predicted that immense gravitation would bend light rather like a lens. Contemporary telescopes were unable to find such a “gravitational lens,” but in 1979, astronomers noticed two surprisingly similar images of a distant quasar and concluded that they were looking at a double image of one giant light source, split in two by a cluster of galaxies along the sight path to Earth.

“As usual, Einstein was ahead of the curve,” Harvard historian of science Gerald Holton told The Why Files in 1997. In 2006, a single quasar appeared in five individual images, again due to the gravity of an intervening cluster of galaxies.

Apparently a trillion stars, more or less, will do strange things…

1997: Neutron stars and frame-dragging

Although the 2011 report from Gravity Probe B was the first to identify “frame-dragging” of spacetime due to Earth’s mass, in 1997, scientists reported that rotating black holes and neutron stars were frame-dragging. The study, by Wei Cui at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that the gravity of a black hole spinning several thousand of times per second was distorting spacetime into a funnel shape. “It’s a very abstract thing,” Cui told us.

Black holes are extraordinarily dense points in space with a super-intense gravity that even traps light. Their presence can be deduced from a shower of X-rays produced as matter falls into the hole.

Scientists have long accepted that massive objects distort spacetime much as a bowling ball would distort a web of fabric that supports it. But frame-dragging means a rotating mass has some “sticky” quality that drags spacetime, and frame-dragging was more proof that Einstein was right, Cui said. “These are all results of his theory of general relativity, which described gravity.” In other words, gravity becomes a property of spacetime. “You can take all the facts of gravity and explain them with a certain geometry of spacetime.”

1995: The ultimate chill-out

Back in 1925, when “automobile” meant model A, and “president” meant “Silent Cal” Coolidge, Einstein predicted that a strange phase of matter would exist near absolute zero, a frosty -273°C. Expanding upon the calculations of Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, Einstein calculated that atoms would enter a unified quantum-mechanical state near the coldest possible temperature.

The atoms would become a drill sergeant’s dream — identical in mind and body.

What was dubbed the “Bose-Einstein condensate” would also be a new phase of matter. Since only four phases exist in the universe — gas, liquid, solid and plasma — discovering another phase would pump up a resume.
In 1995, Carl Wieman, a professor of physics at the University of Colorado, and colleague Eric Cornell fulfilled Einstein’s prediction by creating this bizarre phase of matter at just 200-billionths of a degree Celsius above absolute zero. As Wieman told us in 1997, “We wanted to see if real atoms could ever match the ideal system that Einstein was considering, and they did match — really quite nicely.”

Quantum mechanics says that atoms can exist in certain energy states, but not in between. A group of atoms occupies numerous energy states, washing out the quantum-mechanical effects, but in a Bose-Einstein condensate, Wieman said, “You have a bunch of atoms in a single quantum state, obeying the laws of quantum mechanics as a whole. Traditionally, to see a quantum state, you had to look inside a single atom. Now we can look at millions of atoms.”

2011: Sweet success smiles on Gravity Probe B

The insights of the former Swiss patent clerk are impossible to exaggerate, but it took a lot of technical sophistication and ingenuity to detect disturbances in spacetime in the vicinity of Earth. That was the goal of Gravity Probe B.

Francis Everitt, a Stanford University physicist who has devoted his career to sailing Gravity Probe B across technological and financial shoals, compares the “dragging” of spacetime to a giant pot of honey. “As the planet rotated its axis and orbited the Sun, the honey around it would warp and swirl, and it’s the same with space and time.”

Save for the effects of gravity and relativity, the high-tech gyroscopes aboard the spaceship should point forever in one direction. Instead, gravity changes their orientation in subtle but measurable ways.

The rotors in those gyroscopes are the most precise spheres ever manufactured, which is astonishing if you consider that they were measured with “micro-inches” rather than microns.

It is not necessary  to offer a practical justification for a proof of relativity – simply explaining the universe is ample. But Gary Shiu, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that the ultra-precise equipment crafted for the gravity probe helped improve global positioning systems and the gizmos used to map the microwave background radiation that was created shortly after the Big Bang and still pervades the cosmos. “These technologies have already been developed, the spinoff already proven,” Shiu says.

Although some of the previous proofs of general relativity could conceivably be explained with alternate theories, Shiu says, “The frame-dragging detected in Gravity Probe B provides yet another independent test that any alternative to Einstein’s general relativity would have to meet.”

A man apart

A theory must explain the working of some aspect of nature, and it must be tested, generally by trying to disprove its predictions. Does your theory say gravity is an attraction between any two objects? Then, if you can find objects that fail to attract, you need to revise or reject your theory.

After a century of confirmation of Einstein, the obvious remaining question concerns scientific creativity rather than physics: What was Einstein’s secret? “He was very persistent, was the prototypical scientist,” says Shiu, who helped organize an upcoming conference on Cosmology since Einstein. “When he wanted to solve a problem, he could take 10 or 20 years. We cannot figure out the answer in a few months or years, we need to do whatever it takes to solve the problem.”

Kip Thorne, a California Institute of Technology physicist, told us in 1997 that he attributed Einstein’s deep insight to his “conviction that the universe loves simplicity and beauty… His willingness to be guided by this conviction, even if it meant destroying the foundations of Newtonian physics, led him, with a clarity of thought that others could not match, to his new description of space and time. … All new laws that have been successful in describing the real universe have turned out to obey Einstein’s principle of relativity.”

Indeed, Thorne called relativity a kind of super-law that “must be obeyed by all laws of physics, no matter whether they are laws governing electricity and magnetism, or atoms and molecules, or steam engines and sports cars.”

Gerald Holton, a physicist and historian of science at Harvard University, pointed to several characteristics that helped Einstein ^{1 2} excel:

Beyond a unique ability to peer inside the universe, Holton says Einstein also wrote about his philosophy and technique. “This man allowed himself to be more public and frank, and in particular about his scientific method, which is very much the method still used by other physicists.”

Yet for all his brilliance, Einstein failed to find the holy Grail of physics –a “grand unified theory” to explain all four physical forces. Electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces are explained by a single theory called the “standard model,” but to this day, gravitation stands stubbornly apart.

Summing up? Einstein

Einstein’s revolutionary theories grew from his philosophy of nature and insistence that physical laws must be true on Earth, space ships and stars, combined with a phenomenal intuition for nature and enough self-confidence to rewrite Newton’s laws of gravitation and motion. Einstein interpreted experiments from the 1880s, which suggested that the speed of light was independent of the observer’s motion, as meaning that the speed of light is constant throughout the universe. He then proposed that mass would affect light and spacetime, which is the backdrop for all events, atomic, human, cosmic and comic.

Still, everybody makes mistakes. Einstein denied the existence of black holes and loathed the role of chance in quantum theory, saying “God does not play dice with the universe.” He also cooked up a “cosmological constant” because his theories implied that the universe was changing size, which he considered too weird to be true.

When astronomer Edwin Hubble proved that the universe was expanding, Einstein called the cosmo constant “the greatest blunder of his life.” And yet recent discoveries indicating that the universe is, for unknown reasons, expanding ever faster could mean that his “greatest blunder” was not that far off…

Although Newtonian physics still describes what we see every day, more than a century after the young patent clerk brutally shouldered Newton aside, there’s no question Einstein grasped the big picture. And that returns us to this simple question: “How did he do the things he did?”

“Einstein was typically working between several different theoretical approaches,” says Staley, the science historian. “He was looking for places in which the best laws we currently have fail or don’t provide clear guidance, and then was trying to use those critical gaps to provide new insight into connections between different areas. People often think he thought outside the box. I think he thought across several boxes, and saw ways to link theory that others did not recognize. Although others were also looking at the limits of theory and trying to unify different areas, he did it better.”

For decades, one name has dominated discussion of the ancient New World: Clovis. Tools representing the characteristic Clovis technology, first found in Clovis, New Mexico, in 1929, have long been considered the product of the first inhabitants of the Americas. With a tool style that’s been found across much of North America, Clovis was the best-selling brand in “the first Americans” competition.

Clovis technology is apparently a home-grown phenomenon, as it’s never been found in Northeast Asia, the source of migrants into the New World.

The oldest solid date for Clovis people is 13,100 years ago, says Michael Waters, an archeologist at Texas A&M University. Now, in an article in Science on March 25, Waters and colleagues argue that tools have been found near Austin, Texas, that date to 15,500 years ago.

The researchers found 15,528 artifacts at a site called Buttermilk Creek. Most of their finds were flakes busted off while making stone tools, but the site also yielded 56 stone choppers, points and scrapers.

Using a technique that calculated when an object was last in direct sunlight, “We took the most conservative route to estimate the age,” says Waters, who directs the Center for the Study of the First Americans at A&M. The stone tools and flakes were probably made by a band of hunter-gatherers who paused at the creekside site.

Looking for a date

Because no organic remains were available for carbon-dating, the scientists relied for dating on optically stimulated luminescence, or OSL. “OSL has been around for a long time, has been employed in geology for 30-plus years” for dating windblown sand and silt, says Waters. “It’s been compared to radiocarbon dates, toe-to-toe, and in all cases, OSL ages have been determined to be comparable.”

The OSL dating, which essentially figures how long something has been buried, took place at the University of Illinois, in Chicago, under the direction of Steven Forman.

The find at Buttermilk Creek is the latest — and one of the better documented — archeological sites to break the Clovis barrier. Others pre-Clovis finds have been made in Oregon, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and even Chile.

The news got WhyFilers wondering:

How convincing?

To get the skinny on the Texas discovery, we phoned Steve Shackley, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. “Proof does not exist in science,” he told us, “but Mike [Waters] has made good, defensible arguments.”

Much of the discussion about the Buttermilk Creek site concerns the vertical position — the stratigraphy — of stone artifacts, and the Waters team went to great lengths to show that older material was under younger stuff, as expected in an undisturbed site. Undetected dislocations can confuse archeologists, who tend to think deeper is older and shallower is younger.

Buttermilk Creek actually offers a three-fer: Clovis artifacts are sandwiched above those now identified as pre-Clovis, but below artifacts are in a more modern style. “This site has all these time periods, superimposed, in the correct order,” says Shackley. Because Waters is “one of the foremost” experts in analyzing the geology of archeological sites, “I think it’s going to be difficult to defeat his stratigraphic work. He’s been very careful about it.”

Douglas Bamforth, an archeologist at the University of Colorado, says the Waters team has avoided three errors that often destabilize ancient archeological claims:

“They have absolutely dated the site, they absolutely have artifacts, and the article talks in great detail about how intact the sediment was, they have really addressed whether the artifacts are in place,” says Bamforth. “They have refitted the [stone] flakes to the tools; I am totally convinced they have an intact site” and solid dates.

But that does not prove, to Bamforth, that the artifacts are pre-Clovis — they may be early Clovis. “The deep levels at the site are certainly older than the oldest carbon-14 date on Clovis-style projectile points, which Waters very emphatically argues is the beginning of the Clovis period. But the first problem with seeing the deep levels as different from Clovis is that there seems to be exactly nothing in those levels that differs from Clovis [as the site does not contain arrow- or spear-points that would prove or disprove the case]. … So I do not see why the site is not just early Clovis.”

Not so fast!

Aware that the latest find may be seen as final vindication for the “Clovis was not first” viewpoint, we phoned Thomas Dillehay, professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University and the University of Southern Chile, who fought for decades to have Chile’s Monte Verde site recognized as pre-Clovis. Now that Monte Verde is finally accepted as one of the best-confirmed pre-Clovis sites, we figured the experience would make Dillehay receptive to the new find.

We were wrong. “I have a mixed opinion,” Dillehay told us, proceeding to list some shortcomings in the study. “It would be most convincing if there was standard radiocarbon dating, and even better if those dates were taken from features like hearths and food stains. OSL dating has become more reliable, but it’s still not as reliable as carbon-14, although the sequences do line up very nicely with sediment dating.”

Dillehay has questions about the three-layer sandwich of pre-Clovis, Clovis and post-Clovis material. “I’m not saying the materials are mixed. Geologists, to identify the strata, applied these excellent, meticulous sediment and particle analyses, but there was no clear visible stratigraphy to distinguish Clovis from pre-Clovis, and again this does not meet standard archeological criteria.”

Dillehay also points to the lack of “diagnostic, complete projectile points in either the Clovis and pre-Clovis material. In a discipline that has placed incredibly heavy emphasis on formal projectile points as the primary criteria for acceptance of a site, along with C-14 [radioactive carbon] dating, and geologic stratigraphy, I find this sort of acceptance, which seems to be uncritical, to be a major shift in the discipline.”

Still, Dillehay says “the interdisciplinary work is first rate, and I admire the multidisciplinary approach. But had there been C-14 dating and diagnostic projectile points, all this extraneous analysis would probably not be needed.”

It certainly would be nice to find arrow- or spear-points, says Waters, but “You can’t dictate what you will find. You have to roll with the punches.” Further excavation may or may not reveal a “smoking gun projectile point,” Waters adds. “We don’t know what kind of weaponry they used. In Siberia and Alaska, people were using a lot of bone, ivory and antler weaponry, and it might be that early folks in North America were using this as well.”

But due to heat and humidity, such organic material would not be preserved in the Texas site, he says.

Migration routes

The timing of human occupation of North America bears heavily on their migration route from Northeast Asia, which is accepted, for geographic and genetic reasons, as the source of the first Americans. The melting of the last ice age during the Clovis period, starting roughly 11,000 years ago, producing an ice-free corridor through Northwest Canada that would have allowed transit into the North American interior.

But the region was clogged with glaciers a few thousand years earlier, meaning that any early immigrants would have moved along the coast, either on foot, or via short hops in boats.

The possibility of coastal movement got a boost in a study¹ published March 4, which reported the discovery of stone tools dating from 11,400 to 12,200 years ago on the Channel Islands west of Los Angeles.

According to study leader Jon Erlandson, an archeologist at the University of Oregon, the ancient residents of these offshore islands made delicate stone tools to hunt in the ocean. “The points we are finding are extraordinary, the workmanship amazing. They are ultra thin, serrated and have incredible barbs on them. It’s a very sophisticated chipped-stone technology.”

The stone artifacts are quite different from the fluted points left throughout North America by Clovis and the later Folsom peoples, who hunted big game on land, said Erlandson. “This is among the earliest evidence of seafaring and maritime adaptations in the Americas, and another extension of the diversity of Paleoindian economies.”

The find is yet another reason to doubt that Clovis was first, says Shackley. “When you get dates to 11,000 or 12,000 years ago, out on islands, that makes it tough for the Clovis-firsters, who reject maritime entry. On the Channel Islands, they had get out there by boat,” and if they were already using boats, that means they could also have boated down the West Coast, he adds. “A lot of people accept that now.”

But even if people did move south along the coast rather than inland, Dillehay says they probably needed a long time to reach Chile. “There are hundreds if not thousands of rivers that descend the western slope of the mountain chain from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and every river, whether major or secondary, is a temptation to head upriver,” slowing the overall southward movement.

Photo: University of Oregon Northern Great Basin Field School

In Paisley caves in south-central Oregon, researchers uncovered pre-Clovis artifacts and the oldest human DNA discovered in the Americas. Radiocarbon dates show that people lived in the caves between 12,000 and 14,340 years ago.

And if Monte Verde was occupied by 14,500 years ago, this logic suggests that people reached North America much earlier than even the 15,500 pre-Clovis date in Texas.

Should we trademark the “pre-pre-Clovis” brand?

At any rate, the increasing number of solid pre-Clovis finds answers a riddle: How did Clovis artifacts appear in so many places at roughly the same time? According to the Waters report, “These data are evidence that by 15.5 ka [thousand years ago], human populations occupied the continental United States… . The sites of Cactus Hill, Virginia, and Miles Point, Maryland, hint that these [pre-Clovis] technologies may have been present a few millennia earlier. This early occupation of North America provides ample time for people to settle into the environments of North America, colonize South America by at least about 14.1 to 14.6 ka (Monte Verde, Chile), develop the Clovis tool kit, and create a base population through which Clovis technology could spread.” ²

When science gets ossified

Although we’ve covered the Texas discovery as a bit of gee-whiz archeology, it’s more accurate to say that the discipline proceeds by stacking study atop study, says Sissel Schroeder, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and expert on ancient peoples of the Americas. Although most of the signs left by people who lived in North America will never be found, if they even still exist, “We work with the best information we have. The very small samples of data can make some of our interpretations less robust. Archeology is a cumulative science, so future finds can potentially add confirmatory evidence, or can disconfirm earlier conclusions; you just have to be open to recognizing that your interpretations could change.”

But scientists, like other people, can get stuck, she adds. “It seems easy for certain interpretive frameworks to become quite entrenched, and repeated over and over again. Into the 1920s, it was hugely debated that there were even people in the Americas” at the end of the last ice age. “There were a number of very provocative finds that led scholars to suggest that people had been here at the end of the Pleistocene [about 12,000 years ago], but wasn’t until the find at Folsom, New Mexico [in 1926] that scholarly acceptance began to develop.”

The Folsom find, soon followed by the discovery of those distinctive fluted points near Clovis, New Mexico, sparked “a transformative intellectual step for archeologists,” says Schroeder. “This was a radical shift in thinking.”

“You build a reputation based on a particular perspective,” says Bamforth, “and it’s hard to see evidence that is in opposition; we all believe we are really good at what we do.” Those who gain fame for overturning the conventional wisdom can wind up in the opposite corner, defending their own views long after contradictory evidence arises.

Some early claims for pre-Clovis sites were based on faulty excavation or inaccurate dating, which left a tradition of doubt, Bamforth says. For example, erroneous radiocarbon dates arose after dig sites were contaminated with groundwater. And European-style artifacts unearthed in the Hudson River valley, once interpreted as evidence for ancient European immigration, actually came from ship’s ballast that was dumped into the river, Bamforth told us.

Once archeologists got used to refuting claims, that skeptical attitude itself became entrenched, says Bamforth. “Because people were making such poor claims, very powerful people in the field clamped down on any claims for antiquity, and often the rejected claims turned out to be correct. People at the Smithsonian famously had nothing to do with Folsom until finally the evidence carried the day. There’s a famous photo showing a Folsom spearpoint between the ribs of an extinct bison. That’s proof you can’t argue with.”

Clovis-first is dead, at long last!

After 40 years of assault, Clovis-first seems dead at last. The Texas find “anchors the fact that people were here in the 14,000 or 15,000 year range, there is no longer an argument with that,” says Bamforth.

As the technology of archeology improves, Waters expects some of the most interesting finds to emerge from South America. “We have this North American bias. I’ve heard a lot about early sites in South America of the same age [as the Texas site] or older that nobody hears about. If you think about the immensity of South America, there is no way Clovis was first. There are going to be some amazing finds in the next 10 years, given the South American evidence, the work with genetics and DNA. The story of the first Americans is going to stay exciting.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

They are the ear-wrenching, jaw-jangling junk of the scientific world, the poly-syllabic, hexa-enjargonated children of the refereed journal. Cobbled higgledy-piggledy, these stacks of Greek and Latin roots are primed with prefixii and capped with suffixii.

Some of these mongrelized mutants say the uber-obvious: Does “biomedicine” not equal “medicine”?

More of them seem to say the obscure, redundant or ridiculous, like “biomolecular medicine.” Eh?

Did ancient civilizations follow astrolacism to find their way around? Photo: Gerard Mercator

You don’t need much experience reading science to adopt a love-hate relationship with the incessant onslaught of obscurity: Some of these terms, like “decadal mean,” (average temperature during a specific 10-year period) have real utility and no synonyms, and you’d best learn them and soldier on.

Others seem mainly designed to serve as scientific ownership flags staked by the first to discover a phenomenon — whether it’s actually new or not.

Evidence of early-onset electrostatic compulsion? Photo: Steve Paine

And at a time when record numbers of people communicate in English, and that well-known tongue is the standard language for many scientific papers, why must every new hunk of jargon originate in Greek or Latin — or preferably both?

We could go on to decry the esthetic obnoxion of fabrications like “pharmacological,” which often could be replaced by the rather simpler “drug.”

Enough whining. We must move to today’s challenge:

Below, we’ve briefly defined some scientific jargon. Please tell us which are real, and which we concocted.

Positive “JargoPro” points are awarded for obscurity, over-reliance on Greek and Latin, length (measured in syllables), a grating quality on the ear, and esthetic points for excessive use of linguistic force.

Negative “JargoCon” points go to ease of pronunciation and a heightened chance that mere mortals may comprehend and even pronounce the term.

Pharmaco-optimalic (concerning the visual presentation of drugs)

JargoPro: Nice use of multiple obscure roots; ambiguity (does “optimalic” refer to a state of mind, or to optics)?

JargoCon: Rather straightforward pronunciation.

Phyto-viability: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Phyto-viability (ability of soils to promote plant survival)

JargoPro: Incorporates the Greek “Ph” phoneme instead of the more familiar Anglo-Saxon “f”; also grating on the ear.

JargoCon: Use of hyphen fosters understanding; perilously comprehensible to the one percent who recognize “phyt” as the Greek root for “plant.”

Did this plant succumb to poor phyto-viability or just neglect? Photo: pete_pick

Electrostatic compulsion: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Fake: April Fool’s!

Electrostatic compulsion (gravitational pull between silicon-powered screens and human minds)

JargoPro: The adjective seems familiar, but is tantalizingly obscure.

JargoCon: Condition is so common that readers may jump to the correct conclusion about meaning, always a negative to a jargoneer!

Stoichiometry: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Stoichiometry (related to the proportions of chemical elements in a chemical reaction)

JargoPro: Symmetrical, reverse-reiteration of “oi” as “io”; essentially unpronounceable.

JargoCon: Fundamental concept, so the term may be necessary.

Polymorphism: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Polymorphism (taking several different shapes)

JargoPro: Elegant concatenation of the Greeks: “poly” (many) and “morph” (shape).

JargoCon: At four syllables, syllabically deficient, thus impairing incomprehensibility.

Are the differently colored heads of these gouldian finches an example of polymorphism or did one just get into the hair dye? Nigel Jacques

Astrolacism: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Fake: April Fool’s!

Astrolacism (use of stars as fixed points in geography)

JargoPro: Suffic-ates with the opaque “-ism”; exploits confusion between astronomy and astrology.

JargoCon: Some people will understand “astro” as related to astronomy, and therefore stars.

Longitudinal: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Longitudinal (variations over time)

JargoPro: Easily dropped into an otherwise-comprehensible sentence; also may confuse geographers who think it refers to imaginary, north-south lines on maps.

JargoCon: Easy to pronounce, so long as you catch the soft “g”

Gastrophrenology: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Fake: April Fool’s!

Gastrophrenology (study of the correlation between microstructures in the small intestine and surface of the cranium)

JargoPro: Strong reliance on dead languages for roots; induces guilt — is this something your doctor warned about last year?

JargoCon: Although “phren” is satisfyingly opaque, “gastro” may give away at least part of meaning.

Etiological: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Etiological (related to causes)

JargoPro: Enviable compression of six syllables in 11 letters; tricky pronunciation leads with a long “E” where a short “e” is expected.

JargoCon: Basic meaning is accessible to all; streamlined American spelling avoids the “we’re Brits so we can add letters whenever we want” blighted spelling “aetiological.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2011/english-is-optional-dept/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2011/climate-simple-beautiful/ http://whyfiles.org/2011/climate-simple-beautiful/#comments Thu, 03 Mar 2011 19:01:21 +0000 svmedaristwf http://whyfiles.org/?p=14759 Climate: Mucking with the mechanism?

ENLARGE

Original satellite image from NASA

Vostok, at the “pole of cold,” is a long-term Russian polar research station.

For decades, scientists have thought that the pre-historic Antarctic climate was governed by events at the other end of the planet — in the Arctic. That’s because variations in solar radiation in the northern summer tracked nicely with the temperature record from sediment cores and ice cores taken on or around Antarctica.

Our record of temperatures in the deep south is carried in the ratios of oxygen and hydrogen isotopes (atoms with different masses) contained in ice cores. But Thomas Laepple, of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, has just published an article maintaining that because the Antarctic ice cores did not accumulate at a steady pace, they have not been interpreted correctly.

Today, more snow (the source of ice), gathers in winter. Because that likely also happened in the past, ice cores from Antarctic tell us more about winter than summer, says Laepple.

And God created winter!

Photo 1: Hans Oerter, Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany, Photo 2: Eric Cravens, National Ice Core Lab

This 150,000-year-old piece of Antarctic ice is 10 centimeters in diameter, and was taken from a depth of 2,250 meters. After researchers clean, measure and catalog this core, it may be stored in a giant freezer like the one in the next image (rollover).

When Laepple and his colleagues factored in this seasonal effect, the level of sunlight in the southern hemisphere suddenly began to explain Antarctic temperatures. Although the orbital cycles still globally affect solar radiation, there was no longer a need to look at the other end of the Earth to explain rhythms in Antarctic temperatures.

The orbital cycles in question are named for Serbian engineer Milutin Milankovitch, who, about a century ago, sought to understand how three slow shifts in Earth’s orbit would affect the amount of sunshine in different regions, different seasons and years.

These orbital variations, which are influenced by gravity of the moon, sun, Jupiter and Saturn, are the basis of the “Milankovitch cycle:”

ENLARGE

Courtesy Thomas Laepple, Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany

The Milankovitch cycle

The Milankovitch cycle tries to sum up the interactions of three long-term variations in Earth’s orbit, which affect the amount of solar radiation during different seasons at different places.

The tilt of Earth’s axis (obliquity) changes, in a rhythm of about 41,000 years, between 22° and 24.5° from a line at 90° to the orbital plane.

The axis changes its direction through “precession,” relative to fixed stars over a 21,000-year period, changing the seasonal distribution of sunlight.

The shape, or eccentricity, of the orbital ellipse varies on a complex rhythm that changes our distance to the sun during different seasons.

As scientists examined ocean sediments and then ice cores, the Milankovitch influence on solar radiation in the Northern hemisphere became the accepted explanation for the changing global climate. But when Laepple factored in the seasonal nature of Antarctic snowfall, he found that Milankovitch could explain the climate on the southern continent more directly. “I don’t question that the Milankovitch cycle has an influence on climate,” says Laepple, “but I question that its influence on the Antarctic is coming through the Artic.”

The adjustment was needed because more ice accumulates during winter and does not affect the overall climate record, Laepple says, “but it completely changes the recording of the signal stemming from the precession of the earth axis, which was the evidence for the remote North-South connection.”

Photo 1: Steven Profaizer, Photo 2: Sepp Kipfstuhl, Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany

Scientists use massive drills to uncover the stories about past climates told in ice cores (roll over for to see a core from a depth of 2,668 meters).

How would you explain it?

Climate is never simple, notes Richard Alley, a climate expert and professor of earth science at Penn State, who was not involved in the research. The Milankovitch cycle, he says, “shifts sunshine around on the planet, with more in some places and less in others, changing the length of seasons, the total sunshine during seasons … so it is not surprising that multiple hypotheses can be advanced to explain a given climate record. Ultimately, the mere fact of correlation is not the answer; we seek understanding of the physical linkages. … The new paper provides a clever new idea for a physical linkage, and I anticipate it will get people discussing and studying.”

Any new study concerning climate processes could get sucked into the political vortex enmiring global warming, so we asked if Laepple’s study of Antarctic conditions should lead us to question the widely-accepted theory that burning fossil fuels and changing land use have altered the climate.

Laepple reminded us that he’s studying changes that occur over periods of 10,000 years. He also insists that the new analysis “will not change the basic record of glacial and interglacial periods — the march of ice ages over the past million years. We are focusing on the precession cycle [the 21,000-year cycle affecting the location of Earth's axis], as this provides the evidence showing where and how the climate is affected by radiation changes, and might hold the key to the mechanism of slow climate change.”

Years ago, scientists began to revise their interpretation of Greenland ice to account for the seasonality in snowfall, Laepple says. “This new study is part of a long discussion. As we interpret the climate record, we have to focus more on how the climate signal gets recorded in the climate record.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

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Terry Devitt, editor; S.V. Medaris, designer/illustrator; David J. Tenenbaum, feature writer; Amy Toburen, content development executive; Molly Simis, project assistant

Bibliography

1. Synchronicity of Antarctic temperatures and local solar insolation on orbital timescales, Thomas Laepple et al, Nature, 3 March 2011 ↩
2. Another Antarctic rhythm, Koji Fujita, Nature, 3 March 2011 ↩
3. Milankovitch cycles. ↩
4. Astronomical theory of climate change. ↩
5. Climate of Antarctica. ↩
6. Antarctica and the tropical Pacific. ↩
7. Climate change and Antarctica. ↩
8. The poles and climate change. ↩
9. Antarctic climate change fact sheet. ↩
10. NASA: paleoclimatology. ↩
11. NOAA: paleoclimatology. ↩
12. NSF polar news. ↩
13. Drilling ice cores. ↩
14. Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. ↩

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2011/climate-simple-beautiful/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2010/happy-tax-day-meet-bureaucracys-roots/ http://whyfiles.org/2010/happy-tax-day-meet-bureaucracys-roots/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:13:56 +0000 svmedaristwf http://whyfiles.org/?p=6555 Taxes done?

Two conquest inscriptions on Building J, from about 100 BC. At the bottom, upside-down heads, with closed eyes, signify conquest.

Given the current hostility to government, you could be forgiven for thinking that “bureaucrat” is a euphemism for “bottom feeder” or “control freak.”

But does bureaucracy contain the keys to making a large state? Did bureaucracy’s characteristic division of administrative labor and power allow ancient states to rule areas that were too large to walk across in a day?

Yes, says anthropologist Charles Spencer of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, Spencer looked at states that arose thousands of years ago, in isolation from any other state.

He found that, so far as the archeological record could say, the rise of bureaucracy and the territorial expansion were more or less simultaneous. In contrast to another more traditional view of state development, the expansion did not occur long after bureaucracy appeared.

The six states under study were in Mexico, Peru, Egypt, Iraq, China and Pakistan’s Indus Valley.

“In all six cases this model seems to work, which suggests that this process of territorial expansion is perhaps how a state bureaucracy evolves in the first place,” says Spencer.

He adds that the tight link between bureaucracy and expansion “may tell us something fundamental about the nature of states and bureaucracy.”

All photos copyright Charles S. Spencer, AMNH, used with permission

The main plaza of Monte Albán, in the Oaxaca Valley. Building J (foreground), features some 40 stone slabs with inscriptions showing the city’s conquests.

Three stages of development

Spencer’s analysis builds on the idea that societies develop through three distinct stages:

Egalitarian: Leaders are chosen based on personal characteristics like intelligence or bravery; leadership is not hereditary.

Chiefdom: Leadership becomes hereditary, and the paramount chief exerts control over several villages in a region, which he rules from the center, unaided by a bureaucracy. The chief may attempt to expand his territory and benefit from greater resources, but he may lose power to rivals if he over-expands.

State: A leader delegates specific tasks and responsibilities to different functionaries in the bureaucracy. Assigning these “parcels of authority” helps prevent subordinates from overstepping their position and threatening the leadership as the state grows to control more territory.

Chicken or egg?

When historians and social scientists pondered the origin of states, many figured that the growth of the bureaucracy was a precondition for an imperialist expansion of territory. But Spencer believes that territorial expansion and the growth of bureaucracy are united in a positive feedback loop. “There is much evidence that the pre-bureaucratic system seems to be spatially more limited. Once you start getting involved in managing territory beyond that limit, you have to have a delegation of authority to secondary and tertiary centers; this seems to be a requirement for maintaining one of these larger political-economic territories.”

Spencer says chiefs were apparently loath to dispatch powerful lieutenants to administer provinces, for fear they would go rogue, but the bureaucratic structure made it safer to send out tax collectors or generals with a limited array of powers. “To move toward a larger polity, it’s necessary to assign powers and roles,” he says. But this strategy requires a fundamentally different kind of administration, one based on bureaucratic principles.

Roots of an idea

The blond clay in “Crema” pottery came from a source near Monte Albán. The timing and distribution of crema ware shows when and where Monte Albán traded with other settlements in the Oaxaca Valley.

Spencer says he began thinking about the state development in the 1970s, while doing research at the ancient city of Monte Albán, located in south-central Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley. He says Monte Albán began to acquire a bureaucratic form of government around 300 BC, and the city flourished for roughly 800 years.

The specialization that characterizes bureaucracy is evident in the “diverse array” of buildings and temples at Monte Albán itself, Spencer wrote.

The Oaxaca Valley is a large, three-lobed valley, and as Spencer explored how Monte Albán gathered more territory, he found the expansion toward the north “happened much earlier than most people thought, and was in fact contemporaneous with the appearance of state institutions around 300 BC.”

That did not jibe with the theory that the bureaucracy arose first, long before the state expanded its territory to distant regions, but rather indicated that the bureaucracy and the territory expanded at the same time. “I started to think about how territorial expansion, rather than being a consequence of state formation, might be the mechanism through which the state arose, and the extra resources generated by expansion would help finance the administrative transformation itself.”

The El Palenque palace, near San Martín Tilcajete, in the Oaxaca Valley, dates to 300-100 B.C. Although this is the earliest palace yet excavated in the Valley, a similar but larger palace probably existed at Monte Albán during this period.

States may expand violently or peacefully, Spencer says. “There are ways to impose your will on another territory that may not involve killing. You may set up an economic relationship that is far more favorable to you than to them, with the understanding that if they do not play along, they will get squashed.”

On April 15th – America’s tax day – “bureaucracy” may conjure the Internal Revenue Service, but bureaucracies can be more beneficent or more sinister than that. “Government can do very good things, but this research suggests that the state, and by extension the bureaucracy, is inherently expansionistic, you might even say inherently predatory, and that is a cautionary note we need to keep in mind,” Spencer says. When a state initiates unprovoked warfare, “we should remember that this is perhaps the oldest doctrine of all in the story of states.”

–David J. Tenenbaum

Related Why Files

Archaeology and war.

Archaeology salvage work.

New origin of wheat.

Roots of agriculture.

Origin of writing.

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2010/happy-tax-day-meet-bureaucracys-roots/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2009/bottoms-up/ http://whyfiles.org/2009/bottoms-up/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:18:36 +0000 admin http://whyfiles.org/?p=3969 http://whyfiles.org/2009/bottoms-up/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2009/internet-the-fastest-teacher/ http://whyfiles.org/2009/internet-the-fastest-teacher/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:51:48 +0000 svmedaristwf http://whyfiles.org/?p=3375 Google/Yahoo/Bing: New brain tutors?

Staying mentally and physically active is a standard prescription for helping a healthy brain survive the assaults of aging. Crossword puzzles, Sudoku, specialized software and bridge are all prized elements of the mental magic, even if the data on their true utility are a bit sketchy.

Is it time to scribble “Internet search” on the prescription pad? Maybe so, according to research reported this week to the Society for Neuroscience. Researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles rounded up 24 volunteers, aged 55 to 78, and sorted out search users from non-users, who were rather hard to find, we are told.

Is she smiling because her brain is getting stronger?

Photo: Social Security Administration

Both groups endured two functional magnetic resonance (MR) scans, which detect blood flow through various parts of the brain, a good indicator of which areas were being used at the moment. Computer equipment cannot survive the intense magnetism inside an MR machine, so the volunteers performed a simulated Internet search during the scans.

At the first scan, the “savvies” had more activity in brain regions associated with language, reading, memory and visual ability. Two weeks later, after both groups performed seven one-hour Internet searches, that difference was pretty well gone, says Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, who lead the study.

 

2007 figures from Internetworldstats.com, Sbw01f

Enormous changes in the mental machine?

Small says he is not shocked to see such a fast change in the brain. “Your brain is quite an amazing organ. The brain is sensitive to whatever we expose it to from moment to moment; it’s quite reactive.”

Brain scans compare first (blue) and second (red) session

The study, Small explains, “Shows that you can train the brain relatively quickly. An everyday activity, like searching the web, seems to activate areas involved in memory and complex reasoning.”

According to Teena Moody, the study’s first author and a senior research associate at the Semel Institute, “The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults.”

However, the study does not prove that Internet searching has real-world benefits, Small admits. “This is suggestive evidence that this exposure can do that in the short term, but whether that has any carryover to these aspects in daily life, I don’t know.”

Unfortunately, tests traditionally used to assess working memory and other faculties did not show any difference, says Small, co-author of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. That, however, was something he expected, he says. “This is a small sample, and even in larger studies, the results of brain scans change, but the paper-and-pencil tests do not.”

Still, the location of the changes was suggestive. “It looks like this is telling us something real. These are not changes in random areas; these are areas that we know are used in cognitive activities.”

From original image: UCLA

Arrow shows major change in brain activity in the second brain scan. In the second scans, which followed Internet training, activity is similar for naïve and savvy subjects.

Hop aboard the brain train!

Brain training is a burgeoning business, but the results to date are somewhat limited, Small says. “We find you get better at the specific activity you are training. If it’s verbal reasoning, that’s what improves. If it’s rote memory, then rote memory improves. The ability to transfer that to everyday memory challenges is a little trickier.”

Could improving your brain be as simple as searching out a fusion Asian restaurant or a nature preserve on the web? Perhaps, but it’s also possible that all this net-work could be harmful…

As people ranging from toddlers to the elders spend more time with screens and keyboards, Small says it’s important to know how this will affect our brains. “We want to do this with larger samples. It’s important. Technology is only continuing to penetrate our everyday lives, and we want know the upside and the downside.”

David J. Tenenbaum

Related Why Files

• Pay Attention. Change the brain?

• Learning in the Brain

• MRI Tracks Stress in the Brain

• Brain battle

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