Editor's Note:

As voices from the West continue to dominate global public opinion, it is high time for developing countries to speak louder in the international arena. In a recent email interview, Margarita Simonyan (Simonyan), editor-in-chief of RT, shared with Global Times (GT) reporters Wang Wenwen and Xia Wenxin how media outlets from countries, such as Russia and China, have challenged the West's monopoly on global public opinion by offering alternative voices as well as her personal experiences and RT's development since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war.

GT: US media often describe you as the Kremlin's loyal propagandist. What do you think of such a label?

Simonyan: The US media and American broader socio-political establishment have long been "partial" to RT in general and to my person in particular - the US' 2017 national intelligence report on Russia's influence alone cited me no less than 27 times within essentially half of the report dedicated to our news network. I am proud to carry the voice of Russia abroad, in however small or large capacity, and I am glad if this voice resonates with a wide international audience.

GT: Your new book Whirlpool, a collection of short stories, recently got published. What's it about? What do you want to convey to readers?

Simonyan: In my new book I'm paying homage to the great tradition of Russian psychological prose by highlighting vivid sketches of life. Hopefully, the readers will experience a slice of life in Russia that rarely appears on the front pages of newspapers or on TV screens, and perhaps find a universal connection to these very personal stories.

GT: Recently, there was a failed assassination attempt against you. What do you think of the fact that a media figure could be the target in a conflict?

Simonyan: As a matter of fact there have been two; as journalists, we know and accept these risks, whether we are reporting from the front lines or the studio headquarters. That is our job, our duty - to tell the world the truth about the most dangerous places and events. At the end of the day we are all mortal; for me, to die for telling the truth, for defending your Motherland, is a far less frightening fate than a slow death from an incurable disease or a life of shame for something like treason.

GT: Russian and Western media have different angles and narratives when reporting the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Do you find it difficult to make Western audiences believe that RT's reports are objective?

Simonyan: I believe that the truth always wins in the end, as long as someone keeps telling it. Every day we work, we fight for the truth, for people around the world to see what is happening in reality, on the ground in Ukraine. We have known for years that these audiences have long stopped believing the narratives sold to them by their mainstream media - which is why they have tuned in to RT in the first place, years ago - because we showed their reality better than their own channels. These audiences are now finding every way possible to continue to access RT on TV, online, and on social media in the territories where RT has been banned.

GT: Not long after the Russia-Ukraine conflict, RT America was shut down. The EU also suspended RT and Sputnik on the grounds that Russia was engaging in a "systematic, international campaign of media manipulation and distortion of facts." What do you think of such moves?

Simonyan: Western establishments have been distorting the facts about what is going on in Ukraine for a decade. They tried to silence RT for years before the Special Military Operation because they couldn't let their audiences decide for themselves what to believe about events in Ukraine, in Russia, around the world and in their own backyards. This is why they implemented any way possible, including illegal and illegitimate, to shut us down and shut us out wherever they could.

By banning RT, the facade of free press in Europe and the US completely crumbled. During all this time nobody had pointed to a single grain of evidence that what RT has reported or continues to report, is not true. Instead, what the members of the Western establishments have said is that what RT brings to its audience is not allowed in their supposedly free media environment. When it comes to the Russian voice, or just a different perspective from theirs, it is simply not allowed to exist.

GT: Both Chinese and Russian media encounter such challenges when they try to expand international influence. How do you view Western dominance of discourse power and how should Chinese and Russian media deal with such challenges?

Simonyan: It is difficult to overestimate how important it is for Russian and Chinese media to work together in the international news space. It is simply a matter of survival of Russian and Chinese voices on a global stage. We are virtually alone in confronting the most powerful army of Western mainstream journalism, and such dominance makes for a dangerous, bellicose world.

We are proud that RT is available in Chinese on popular Chinese social media platforms - Weibo, Bilibili, and Douyin. RT's Weibo account is well ahead of AFP, Financial Times, Associated Press and BBC in terms of audience engagement and follower growth rate.

GT: What do you think of the current Sinophobia and Russophobia in the US?

Simonyan: There has hardly been a period in US history when the American establishment and society at large haven't had some sort of phobia of this kind. From the Salem witch hunts and the persecution of Native Americans to the lynchings of Black Americans by the Ku Klux Klan and the communist scare during McCarthyism — the forces governing American society have always needed someone to turn their anger on, to pin the blame for all the sins and with whom to fight directly, indirectly or in a hybrid warfare. Today's Russophobia and Sinophobia are not much different from classic racism and fascism.

GT: Most American media is not owned by the government. But the US media speaks with one voice on major international affairs. Why? How do American politicians influence and even manipulate the media?

Simonyan: Indeed, it is very telling that American news media, public and private alike, with its thousands of outlets - print, TV, online - speak with a single voice when it comes to American foreign policy. Former White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, got her own TV show on a major channel, MSNBC, within weeks of leaving her government job. Various US government departments openly and proudly cooperate with Hollywood film and TV productions, such as Top Gun, when they show the US military in a good light. Despite their claims to the contrary, the lines between American political and media establishments aren't just blurred - they do not exist.

China on Thursday delivered the world's first seaborne drone carrier, the Zhu Hai Yun, capable of operating on its own. The unmanned carrier can be controlled remotely and navigate autonomously in open water. It will undertake marine scientific research and other observations.

The Zhu Hai Yun entered its home port of Zhuhai Gaolan port in South China's Guangdong Province on Thursday morning and was officially put into use after a year and a half of construction.

Built under the auspices of the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), the Zhu Hai Yun is the world's first unmanned system scientific research ship with autonomous navigation and remote-control functions, and has been awarded the first intelligent ship certificate by the China Classification Society (CCS).

The design and construction of the Zhu Hai Yun have followed the principles of green intelligence, scientific support for unmanned systems and "sense of the future." Meanwhile, its power systems, propulsion systems, intelligent systems, power positioning systems and investigation support systems have been independently developed by Chinese research teams.

"This is the first professional sea trial of the Zhu Hai Yun, which aims to test its autonomous navigation performance and the launching of the unmanned craft," said Chen Dake, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory.

For the first time, the carrier navigated autonomously for 12 consecutive hours, and realized obstacle avoidance and path planning. It achieved the desired effect and validated the design, Chen added.

The 88.5-meter-long intelligent unmanned carrier is one of the landmark achievements of the Southern Marine Laboratory, with a designed displacement of about 2,100 tons and a top speed of 18 knots.

The ship has a spacious rear deck, which can carry a variety of unmanned air, sea and submarine observation instruments. It can carry out comprehensive marine survey tasks such as ocean surveying and mapping, ocean observation, sea patrol and partial survey and sampling.

Days after northern China emerged from flood, four provincial regions in the northwestern part of the country are facing a new challenge that has led them to activate level-IV emergency responses for drought. Experts warned of more severe droughts this year with the return of El Nino, but called for calm as these regions are frequently hit by drought and have accumulated rich experience.

Since June, drought has hit central and western Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai and Ningxia, with the amount of flowing water and the amount of water stored in reservoirs in this region lower than the same period in normal years, according to the Ministry of Water Resources on Wednesday.

The severe drought in the four provincial regions is also expected to continue to persist for a longer period, according to the ministry. China has a four-tier emergency response system for disaster relief, with Level IV being the lowest and Level I the highest.

In the Jinchuan district of Jinchang city in Gansu, corn cobs cannot even be seen across stretches of corn fields where corn stalks are evidently short and leaves are withered. In response, local departments have started a second round of irrigation to ensure arable land get sufficient water supply, China Central Television reported.

Jinchang city also mobilized drones for free to spray pesticides in farmers' corn and potato fields to prevent pests and disease and lower the losses of farmers. 

The Lanzhou Central Meteorological Observatory activated a yellow warning for drought at noon on Tuesday. It said the latest monitoring data shows the drought in the cities of Jinchang, Wuwei and Baiyin has become even more severe.

A drought relief expert who preferred not to be named told the Global Times on Wednesday that the four northwestern provincial regions are frequently hit by drought, so local departments are experienced in drought relief. In the end, the biggest impact in the region will be on animal husbandry.

The Gansu provincial emergency department called for efforts to guarantee the water supply for people's livelihoods and livestock. 

One day earlier on Tuesday the ministry said it had sent working groups and expert teams to the four provincial regions. 

The ministry has also urged local water management authorities to closely monitor the development of rain, water and drought, to scientifically divert water from conservancy projects and to adopt localized measures.

But according to the National Meteorological Center on Wednesday, in the next three days, there will be moderate to heavy rain in Qinghai, Gansu, western Sichuan, and also precipitation in Inner Mongolia. 

The drought relief expert said the rainfall should mitigate the regional drought but it still needs to be decided in how much degree it would ease the drought. 

Climate change experts have warned that the development of El Nino, a result of natural shifts in winds and ocean temperatures, is expected to contribute to global warming and increase the likelihood of temperature records being broken. It also brings heavier floods to some parts of the planet while drying others out.

In the period from late June to July 2009, 17 provinces in China suffered from severe drought due to a moderate El Ni?o event. Eastern Inner Mongolia, western Jilin Province, and western Liaoning Province also experienced extreme drought, experts said. 

Brazil, now a poster child for mosquito-borne virus spread, was once a model for mosquito eradication.

“It was amazing,” says Dan Strickman, medical entomologist with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Aedes aegypti mosquito, today identified by epidemiologists as one of the carriers of the Zika virus, was attacked in the 1930s with the simple tools then available. By 1965, the mosquito was certified as eradicated from Brazil and 17 other countries in the Americas (but not the United States). The feat took ferocious effort, but as the threat dwindled, so did money and the political will to stay vigilant.
Whether eradication would even be possible now is unclear. But the question of how to cope with Ae. aegypti has taken on new urgency as that mosquito species sweeps Zika virus through South and Central America and into parts of North America. Known as the yellow fever mosquito, Ae. aegypti can also spread dengue, chikungunya and West Nile viruses (SN: 6/13/15, p. 16).
It’s “the most difficult mosquito in the Americas to control,” says Michael Doyle, director of mosquito control for the Florida Keys. The mosquito’s resistance to major pesticides and its unusual biology foil many standard control measures. Some scientists have developed high-tech control approaches. Other specialists are going back to the basics to search for biological vulnerabilities that have been overlooked.
Casual slappers of mosquitoes tend to lump all of them into one annoying category, but there are 3,500 or so species, with a wide range of idiosyncrasies. Some species, for instance, don’t drink blood. As a group, though, mosquitoes are among the most dangerous animals on Earth, claiming more than 400,000 lives a year just from spreading malaria.

Researchers propose that several species might spread Zika, depending on location: Ae. hensilli was suspected in a previous outbreak on Yap in Micronesia and Ae. polynesiensis in French Polynesia. In the Americas, epidemiologists are watching two widespread invasives: the Asian tiger mosquito Ae. albopictus (SN: 6/29/13, p. 26) as well as the notorious Ae. aegypti.

A forest-dwelling form of Ae. aegypti, native to Africa, frequents tree holes and sucks blood from animals. The worldwide invaders, however, have become domesticated. “They bite almost exclusively humans; they live almost exclusively within feet of humans,” Doyle says.

For many mosquitoes, blood is for motherhood, usually one drink per batch of eggs. The insects meet everyday energy needs with plant sugars such as flower nectar. Ae. aegypti females, however, sip blood often, raising the chances of passing on disease. That’s because they’re unusually adept at extracting energy from blood instead of nectar, Laura Harrington, who studies mosquito biology at Cornell University, and her colleagues found.

A common way to fight bloodsuckers is spraying pesticides from trucks or aircraft. But spraying often does little to Ae. aegypti holing up in houses, resting on clothing in closets or hiding under beds. And don’t count on nighttime protection from bed nets. Ae. aegypti readily bite during the day.
To fight such a foe, crews start by trying to kill larvae before they reach vampire age. Mosquitoes generally go through their first life stage in water, and Ae. aegypti needs only a little containerful. So Doyle sends inspectors on house-by-house quests for stray minipools: in a bucket, a Fritos bag, old tires, a kayak and plant saucers by the dozens. And that could be in just one yard. His difficulties make a fine case study in how hard — and expensive — fighting a human-specialist mosquito can be.

The human-versus-mosquito battle isn’t all door-to-door. The company Oxitec, based in the United Kingdom, engineered male Ae. aegypti mosquitoes to carry genes that cause their offspring to die (SN: 7/14/12, p. 22). Using an old insect-control strategy, mass releases of dysfunctional males seduce wild females and, in time, shrink the problem population.

Experimental releases of Oxitec’s genetically modified Ae. aegypti males have reduced the size of mosquito populations by more than 80 percent in a test site of about 5.5 hectares in a suburb of Juazeiro, Brazil. The Brazilian government has approved these engineered mosquitoes for widespread use. Oxitec has applied for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to do a similar test in the Florida Keys. On March 11, the FDA released a draft statement predicting “no significant impact” to the environment from the test (SN Online: 3/11/16).

Efforts to genetically sterilize mosquitoes may improve with advances in CRISPR/Cas9 techniques to cut and paste genes (SN: 12/12/15, p. 16). And an advance in the genetics of sex determination last year opens new possibilities for refining sterile-male releases. What’s called an M factor determines maleness in certain insects, and for the first time in any mosquito, researchers determined the sequence of the genetic components of Ae. aegypti’s M factor. Manipulating it to produce entire generations of only males could have many uses, says Virginia Tech’s Zach Adelman.
In a different approach to reengineering mosquitoes ( SN: 7/14/12, p. 22 ), researchers with the international consortium called Eliminate Dengue are testing a nongenetically modified mosquito in Brazil among other places. Instead of wiping out a population, the goal is to reduce its disease-spreading power. Infection with a strain of Wolbachia , bacteria common in insects, can render these mosquitoes less likely to transmit dengue virus. A paper due out soon will show that the Wolbachia -carrying mosquitoes are also less likely than uninfected ones to transmit chikungunya, as well as  Zika, says Wolbachia project leader Scott O’Neill at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Search for an Achilles’ heel
What interests Cornell’s Harrington are the undiscovered mosquito-fighting targets. Her lab studies courtship and reproduction in mosquitoes. “I really believe that’s where their Achilles’ heel is,” she says.

Courtship among Ae. aegypti is unusual and more complex than anyone had imagined, Harrington, her student Lauren Cator and colleagues reported in 2009. The scent of a human host attracts amorous male mosquitoes, which fly nearby until a female arrives looking for a blood meal. Male mosquitoes’ wide, feathery antennae pick up harmonic overtones of the whine of female wingbeats. The mosquitoes then synchronize one of the wingbeat overtones. “They’re singing to each other,” says Ethan Degner, a Harrington graduate student. Perhaps there’s a way to disrupt this courtship.

Another of the Harrington lab’s findings might be more immediately relevant. Conventional wisdom is that Ae. aegypti mosquitoes mate only once in their lives. Degner offered lab females a second chance to mate, but with a collaborating lab’s genetically engineered males that produce fluorescent red sperm. In lab conditions, a low percentage of females showed red in their reproductive tracts, indicating they mated twice, Degner and Harrington reported online February 15 in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. This result agrees with observations of what looked like occasional second matings in the wild. With millions of dollars going into mass releases of sterile competitors to local fertile males, female willingness takes on new importance.

If biologists come up with some new way to eradicate Ae. aegypti, then humankind would have to decide whether to use it. Aside from moral questions, removing any species from an ecosystem can have unexpected risks and consequences. The weighing of arguments will differ species by species, even for mosquitoes. But the human-seeking form is a relative newcomer to the Americas. So in this era of Zika and other rampant mosquito-borne diseases, whether to blast this mosquito out of the hemisphere, should it ever be possible, might not be a difficult decision at all.

ATLANTA — Grim discoveries in Belize’s aptly named Midnight Terror Cave shed light on a long tradition of child sacrifices in ancient Maya society.

A large portion of 9,566 human bones, bone fragments and teeth found on the cave floor from 2008 to 2010 belonged to individuals no older than 14 years, bioarchaeologist Michael Prout reported April 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Many of the human remains came from 4- to 10-year-olds. Because these bones are so fragmented, it’s difficult to estimate precisely how many individuals lay in the cave.
Prout, of California State University, Los Angeles, and colleagues suspect these children were sacrificed to a rain, water and lightning god that the ancient Maya called Chaac.

Radiocarbon dating of the bones indicates that the Maya deposited one or a few bodies at a time in the cave over about a 1,500-year-period, starting at the dawn of Maya civilization around 3,000 years ago, Prout said. At least 114 bodies were dropped in the deepest, darkest part of the cave, near an underground stream. Youngsters up to age 14 accounted for a minimum of 60 of those bodies. Ancient Maya considered inner cave areas with water sources to be sacred spaces, suggesting bodies were placed there intentionally as offerings to Chaac.

The researchers found no evidence that individuals in the cave had died of natural causes or had been buried.

Until now, an underground cave at Chichén Itzá in southern Mexico contained the only instance of large-scale child sacrifices by the ancient Maya, Prout said. Other researchers have estimated that 51 of at least 101 individuals whose bones lay scattered in Chichén Itzá’s “sacred well” were children or teens.

Researchers have often emphasized that human sacrifices in ancient Central American and Mexican civilizations targeted adults. “Taken together, however, finds at Chichén Itzá and Midnight Terror Cave suggest that about half of all Maya sacrificial victims were children,” Prout said.

The planet Mercury is about to throw some shade at Earth.

For about seven hours on Monday, May 9, the innermost planet will trek across the face of the sun and cast a shadow on our planet. During its journey, a rare event known as a transit, Mercury will appear as a tiny black speck on the sun. The transit will begin at 7:12 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time and end at 2:42 p.m. It will be visible from most countries, though folks in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and islands in the West Pacific are out of luck.

Transits of Mercury happen on average about eight times a century and only in May or November. The last one was in 2006; the next one won’t be until 2019.

Don’t stare at the sun to try and see it. Seriously. Don’t do that. Staring at the sun is dangerous. Plus, Mercury is tiny. A solar-filtered telescope with at least 50x magnification is the best and safest way to enjoy the show. Many astronomy clubs and organizations will have viewing events. And there will be many ways to see it online such as NASA TV, the Virtual Telescope Project and the Slooh Observatory.

COLD SPRING HARBOR, N.Y. — Garbled signals from cellular antennas may have grounded the Galápagos cormorant.

Galápagos cormorants (Phalacrocorax harrisi) are the only cormorant species with wings too small to lift the birds’ large bodies off the ground. Broken primary cilia —antennas that cells need to receive key developmental messages — left the cormorants with stunted wings, UCLA evolutionary biologist Alejandro Burga suggested May 12 at the Biology of Genomes meeting.

Burga and colleagues compared DNA of flightless Galápagos cormorants with that of their close relatives, including double-crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus), which have large wings and can fly. The researchers found more than 23,000 differences in more than 12,000 genes. Those changes have occurred within the last 2 million years, a short time by evolutionary standards.
Many of those genes probably have nothing to do with wing size. So Burga and colleagues narrowed down which genes might have had the biggest effect on cormorant evolution using a computer program that predicts whether a change in a gene will affect its function. Genes that have mutations that damage function may have big evolutionary consequences. Of the genes predicted to have altered function, the researchers selected the 3.3 percent that have changed most drastically in Galápagos cormorants.

To determine what these genes do, Burga examined whether any of the human versions of these genes cause problems when they are mutated in people. Eight of the banged-up genes were associated with limb defects caused by faulty primary cilia, hairlike structures that grow from cells. The cilia receive signals important for the development and proper functioning of cells (SN: 11/3/12, p.16). In people, genetic mutations that damage primary cilia lead to a wide variety of diseases, including developmental defects.

Normal versions of those eight genes are necessary for primary cilia to pick up signals sent by an important protein called hedgehog. Those genes are so crucial for normal development that evolution has not allowed them to change much in 300 million years. Three other genes that are mutated in the flightless cormorants affect other aspects of the primary cilia. In people, mutant versions of all 11 cilia genes can cause small limbs, extra fingers and short ribs, Burga said.

It wasn’t clear whether the cilia defects were the primary cause of the birds’ flightlessness. So Burga further narrowed his focus to 10 of the altered Galápagos cormorant genes predicted by the computer program to give the biggest functional and evolutionary disadvantages. Those genes would be the most important wing shrinkers, Burga and his colleagues reasoned.

One of those top 10 candidates is a gene called CUX1. The protein it produces helps turn on other genes. Vertebrates from primitive coelacanths to people have nearly identical versions of the gene. But in flightless cormorants, four amino acids have been lost from the protein, suggesting that it can no longer do its job or does it poorly. In chickens, a defective form of CUX1 can shrink wings. That finding indicates the Galápagos cormorant’s altered form of CUX1 might also make wings smaller because it fails to turn on limb growth genes.
Many researchers would have left the story at that point, says Ludovic Orlando, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen. “But they didn’t simply stop there,” Orlando says. “They made an effort to validate their findings. It’s unusual.”

Burga and colleagues wondered whether CUX1 and the primary cilia changes were related. The researchers injected cells used to mimic skeletal development in lab dishes with the normal vertebrate version of CUX1. Activity levels of two cilia genes rose by about 50 percent. That is evidence that CUX1 normally helps to regulate activity of primary cilia genes.

But the Galápagos cormorant version of CUX1 barely budged activity of the cilia genes. It also was not as good at stimulating growth and development of bone cells as the normal version, the researchers found. Those findings strengthen the case that CUX1 and primary cilia together were involved in shrinking the flightless fowl’s wings.

It’s still a mystery why Galápagos cormorants have normal size legs, Burga said.

The cooling effect of pollution may have been exaggerated.

Fossil fuel burning spews sulfuric acid into the air, where it can form airborne particles that seed clouds and cool Earth’s climate. But that’s not the only way these airborne particles can form, three new studies suggest. Tree vapors can turn into cooling airborne particles, too.

The discovery means these particles were more abundant before the Industrial Revolution than previously thought. Climate scientists have therefore overestimated cooling caused by air pollution, says atmospheric chemist Urs Baltensperger, who coauthored the three studies.
Simulating unpolluted air in a cloud chamber, Baltensperger and colleagues created microscopic particles from vapors released by trees. In the real world, cosmic rays whizzing into the atmosphere foster the development of these particles, the researchers propose in the May 26 Nature. Once formed, the particles can grow large enough to form the heart of cloud droplets, the researchers show in a second paper in Nature. After sniffing the air over the Swiss Alps, some of the same researchers report in the May 27 Science the discovery of the particles in the wild.

“These particles don’t just form in the laboratory, but also by Mother Nature,” says Baltensperger, of the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland.

Airborne particles, called aerosols, are microscopic bundles of molecules. Some aerosols start fully formed, such as dust and salts from sea spray, while others assemble from molecules in the atmosphere.

Since the 1970s, scientists have suspected that sulfuric acid is a mandatory ingredient for aerosols assembled in the air. Sulfuric acid molecules react with other molecules to form clusters that, if they grow large enough, can become stable. Human activities such as coal burning have boosted sulfuric acid concentrations in the atmosphere, subsequently boosting the abundance of aerosols that seed clouds and reflect sunlight like miniature disco balls. That aerosol boost partially offsets warming from greenhouse gases.

A cloud chamber at the CERN laboratory near Geneva allowed Baltensperger and his collaborators to simulate the atmosphere when sulfuric acid was scarce. The researchers added alpha-pinene, the organic vapor that gives pine trees their characteristic smell, to pristine air and watched for growing aerosols. Previous, though inconclusive, work suggested that the pine vapors might form aerosols.
Alpha-pinene molecules reacted with ozone in the air and formed molecules that reacted and bundled together to form aerosols, the researchers observed. The researchers added an extra layer of realism by using one of CERN’s particle beams to mimic ions from the cosmic rays bombarding Earth’s atmosphere. The “rays” led to the formation of as many as 100 times the number of aerosols. The added ions help stabilize the growing aerosols, the researchers propose.

Further testing showed that the newborn aerosols can rapidly grow from around 2 nanometers wide — roughly the diameter of a DNA helix — to 80 nanometers across, large enough to seed cloud droplets.

At a research station high in the Swiss Alps, researchers observed aerosol formation during atmospheric conditions with low sulfuric acid concentrations and abundant molecules akin to alpha-pinene. The researchers couldn’t confirm the rapid growth seen in the lab, though.

Quantifying the overall climate influence of fossil fuel burning in light of the new discovery will be tricky, says Renyi Zhang, an atmospheric chemist at Texas A&M University in College Station. “Atmospheric processes are complex,” he says. “They had a pure setup, but in reality the atmosphere is loaded with chemicals. It’s hard to draw direct conclusions at this point.”

Radiation from the 23 nuclear tests conducted near Bikini Atoll in the 1940s and ’50s has lingered far longer than previously predicted.

Radioactive material such as cesium-137 currently produces, on average, 184 millirems of radiation per year on Bikini Atoll. And some parts of the island hit 639 millirems per year, researchers report online the week of June 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Those measurements, made last year, surpass the 100 millirems per year safety standard set by the United States and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, which controls the island.

Scientists had predicted that, by now, radiation levels would have dropped to 16 to 24 millirems per year. But those estimates came from extrapolating from measurements made in the 1970s. The mismatch probably stems from incorrect assumptions about how rapidly radioactive material washes off the island, proposes study coauthor Emlyn Hughes, a physicist at Columbia University.

Whether the higher radiation levels pose a serious health risk to caretakers who live on the island for part of the year depends on how long they stay on the island and whether the local fruit they eat is safe, Hughes says.

A new technique turns climate-warming carbon emissions to stone. In a test program in Iceland, more than 95 percent of the carbon dioxide injected into basaltic lava rocks mineralized into solid rock within two years. This surprisingly fast transformation quarantined the CO2 from the atmosphere and could ultimately help offset society’s greenhouse gas emissions, scientists report in the June 10 Science.

“It’s working, it’s feasible and it’s fast enough to be a permanent solution for storing CO2 emissions,” says study coauthor Juerg Matter, a geochemist at the University of Southampton in England.
Many existing carbon storage schemes pump CO2 underground, though the approach has been prone to leaks. Targeting basalt, the cooled remains of volcanic outpourings, may offer an advantage over other types of rock. As much as 25 percent of basalt is made up of elements that react with CO2 to form solid carbonate minerals such as limestone, a process that occurs naturally during rock weathering. Since it was thought that this mineralization process takes hundreds to thousands of years in most rock, it seemed far too slow to be useful in combating near-term climate change.
In Iceland, Matter and colleagues blended groundwater with 230 tons of CO2 emissions from a geothermal power plant to create a kind of seltzer water. The researchers then injected the mixture 400 to 800 meters belowground into basaltic rock. After about two years, the team collected samples of the deep rock — and discovered that almost all of the CO2 had mineralized.

At $17 per ton, mineralizing carbon emissions is roughly twice as expensive as existing storage methods, though doesn’t require long-term monitoring to prevent leaks, Matter says. Additionally, the approach only requires water and basalt, he says, and “we have enough basalt globally to take care of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions, theoretically.”

Another research group’s work backs up the new findings. Peter McGrail, a geochemist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., and colleagues conducted similar tests using pure CO2 without water. The as-yet-unpublished findings revealed rapid mineralization similar to that reported by Matter and colleagues, McGrail says.