EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Begins Exit Amid 13 Scandals, Leaves Regulatory Trail of Blood

July 5, 2018 by Michael Riviello Leave a Comment

Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt is leaving the agency, President Trump tweeted Thursday.

“I have accepted the resignation of Scott Pruitt as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency,” Trump said in a tweet. “Within the agency Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this.”

Andrew Wheeler, Deputy EPA Administrator and former coal lobbyist, will replace Pruitt on Monday, Trump said.

“I have no doubt that Andy will continue on with our great and lasting EPA agenda,” Trump tweeted. “We have made tremendous progress and the future of the EPA is very bright!”

Pruitt’s exodus, perhaps long overdue, culminates a rollercoaster ride of political liability for the Trump administration, one that has perplexed even the President’s strongest allies. If one scandal taints a political tenure, Pruitt’s more than one dozen scandals, several involving federal investigators, has left his legacy in tatters. Because of his taxpayer-funded excursions, hidden meetings with Vatican officials later convicted of sexual crimes, and because he leveraged his position to the advantage of his family—including the chance to, of all things, acquire a Chick-fil-A for his wife—Pruitt will continue to be under the lens of a multitude of federal investigations and political scrutiny.

The worst transgressions, though, may consist in the speeds at which he worked to dismantle the agency his was entrusted with managing, in accordance with its mission to protect the environment in which Americans live. For now, he walks away leaving a trail of blood behind him, with a rotten, FBI probe-laden stench quick to follow.

1 In 5 Immigrant Children Detained During ‘Zero Tolerance’ Border Policy Are Under 13

June 23, 2018 By Shefali Luthra and Marisa Taylor, Kaiser Health News

(Not pictured here) U.S. Border Patrol agents take Central American asylum seekers into custody on June 12 near McAllen, Texas.
The immigrant families were then sent to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing center for possible separation.

The Trump administration has detained 2,322 children 12 years old or younger amid its border crackdown, a Department of Health and Human Services official told Kaiser Health News on Wednesday. They represent almost 20 percent of the immigrant children currently held by the U.S. government in the wake of its latest immigrant prosecution policy.

Their welfare is being overseen by a small division of the Department of Health and Human Services — the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) — which has little experience or expertise in handling very young children.

The number of children has exploded in the past six weeks since the Trump administration moved to stop parents and their children at the U.S. border and separate and detain them in different facilities. A total of 11,786 children under age 18 are currently detained, the official said.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that seeks to detain parents and children together. The order also changes oversight of detention from HHS to the Department of Homeland Security. But it’s unclear whether the children currently detained by HHS will be transferred and whether the order will comply with a court standard for the treatment of children in custody, known as the Flores agreement.

Since 2003, ORR has been charged with sheltering and finding suitable homes for “unaccompanied alien children” — generally teenaged immigrants who reach the United States without a parent or guardian.

But its responsibilities have morphed and multiplied since April because the immigration crackdown means that the ORR is now responsible for detaining not only more children, but minors who are far younger than those who had arrived in the past, experts said.

Beyond specialized medical care, younger children have different food and housing needs, and require more personal attention.

“The children are younger and will be there for a longer time and are deeply traumatized by being forcibly separated from their parents,” said Mark Greenberg, a former administration official at HHS’ Administration for Children and Families, which oversees the ORR. “All of that makes it much more difficult to operate the program.”

The complex crisis is magnified by the inexperience of some of the political appointees leading the response, said critics who include former officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations of the past decade.

ORR Director Scott Lloyd is a lawyer whose career has been focused on anti-abortion efforts. He led the Trump administration’s legal efforts to prevent abortions for detained teen immigrants. Lloyd’s main immigration experience before leading ORR was research for a report on refugees for the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic service organization with an anti-abortion stance, according to a deposition he gave in lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Kenneth Wolfe, the HHS spokesman who provided the figures, declined to address how many people are currently working at ORR or whether ORR had secured additional staff or expertise to cope with the influx of young children. He also would not say how many of the 2,322 children 12 and younger have been separated from their families.

The administration had previously refused to provide the ages of the children separated from their families — saying only that about 2,300 children have been separated and detained since the policy took effect.

The detention conditions, which include children being held in chain-link holding pens and “tent cities,” have ignited a political firestorm over possible abuse in the treatment of children as young as 4. Some of these younger children — including toddlers — are being sent to “tender age” shelters, according to media reports. The care is also costly: Tents alone cost HHS $775 per person per day, according to media reports.

Republicans, including former first lady Laura Bush, have called on the administration to stop the policy. Trump has blamed Congress for the detentions, but top White House advisers were actively promoting family separations as a policy shift.

News reports have described children as young as 5 being scolded for playing, one teenager teaching others how to change a small child’s diaper, and caretakers not being permitted to touch children. ProPublica reported that more than 100 children detained are younger than 4.

ORR, experts add, is already at a disadvantage.

“It’s significantly challenging to create that capacity, and quite expensive,” noted Robert Carey, a former ORR director from the Obama administration. “All the aspects of care are dramatically different based on age. … You need people who are trained in early childhood development or care.”

That’s a heavy lift for an office that, experts stress, was never built to serve as a long-term housing system.

It’s not clear, Carey and others said, that the administration has had sufficient time or support to adapt.

Many ORR employees, Carey added, are career staffers with deep knowledge about immigration and child welfare, with whom he frequently worked while in office.

“The kids are going into the custody of ORR without adequate resources,” said Shadi Houshyar, who directs early childhood and child welfare initiatives at Families USA, an advocacy group. “It’s definitely going to result in some potentially damaging decisions being made. The capacity, training and fundamental orientation — while understanding the needs of children — is not the orientation that ORR has.”

While ORR has a history of placing teenagers who arrive on their own with relatives of families in the U.S., that challenge is heightened by the policy of separating children, who are young and may understand little of the experience or be able to identify relatives who could take them in.

Making matters more complicated, when families are separated, parents and children are tracked by different federal agencies — the parents by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the children by ORR. Children are also tracked and treated the same as minors who arrived on their own. Together, that makes reunification more difficult. And that’s a problem experts worry will persist, even if family separations cease.

“It does not look like they’ve figured out this process,” said a former HHS official, who requested anonymity because she could face professional ramifications for speaking publicly. As a result, she added, “the time the child stays in ORR could be significantly longer” — which in turn adds to trauma and causes other long-term problems.

KHN’s coverage of children’s health care issues is supported in part by the Heising-Simons Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Why a minor change to how EPA makes rules could radically reduce environmental protection

June 23, 2018 By Joseph Aldy, Harvard University

Since the Reagan administration, federal agencies have been required to produce cost-benefit analyses of their major regulations. These assessments are designed to ensure that regulators are pursuing actions that make society better off.

In my experience working on the White House economic team in the Clinton and Obama administrations, I found cost-benefit analysis provides a solid foundation for understanding the impacts of regulatory proposals. It also generates thoughtful discussion of ways to design rules to maximize net benefits to the public.

On June 7, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt proposed changing the agency’s approach to this process in ways that sound sensible, but in fact are a radical departure from how government agencies have operated for decades.

As the agency frames it, the goal is to provide “clarity and real-world accuracy with respect to the impact of the Agency’s decisions on the economy and the regulated community.” But I see Pruitt’s proposals as an opaque effort to undermine cost-benefit analysis of environmental rules, and thus to justify rolling back regulations.

The importance of co-benefits

Have you ever done something for more than one reason? An action that you justified because it “kills two birds with one stone”? When a regulation leads to improvements that it was not designed to produce, government agencies call the unexpected payoffs “co-benefits.”

For example, the Clean Air Act’s Acid Rain Program was designed to reduce sulfur dioxide pollution from electric power plants, a key ingredient in acid rain. Some utilities complied by installing devices called scrubbers to capture sulfur dioxide emissions from plant exhaust.

The scrubbers also reduced fine particulate matter, which is linked with a wide range of health effects that can cause premature deaths and illnesses. This represented a huge co-benefit – one that economists have estimated to be worth US$50 billion to $100 billion yearly.

Historically, federal agencies have given co-benefits full weight in regulatory impact analysis because they help to show how Americans would be better off under the policy for multiple reasons. Pruitt wants to change this policy.

According to an EPA analysis, amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990 that tightened emissions standards will produce benefits through 2020 that exceed their costs by a factor of more than 30 to one. Credit: USEPA

Eliminating co-benefits from rule-making

Pruitt’s proposal solicits public comment on how to weigh co-benefits from pollution reductions. While this request may appear neutral, it reflects an interest in trying to minimize or eliminate consideration of co-benefits.

Why would EPA’s administrator seek to reduce estimated benefits of regulations? As I see it, the agency faces a regulatory conundrum. President Trump issued an executive order in 2017, focused on the costs of regulations that required agencies to eliminate two rules for every new rule they issue. Since regulations have benefits as well as costs, if an existing rule delivers more benefits than costs, then striking it would impose net harm on the public.

For example, Pruitt is seeking to roll back three Obama administration air pollution initiatives: the Clean Power Plan, which limits greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, and combined carbon emission and fuel economy standards for light-duty vehicles and heavy-duty vehicles. Halting these rules would save money for some electric utilities and vehicle manufacturers, but would also greatly increase air pollution.

Specifically, one recent analysis estimates that eliminating these rules would increase premature deaths from inhaling fine particulate matter by more than 80,000 over a decade. In today’s dollars, and using the current value EPA employs to monetize mortality risk reduction, public health costs from reversing these three rules amount to nearly $75 billion per year – far more than any potential benefits to industry.

Harvard University professor Douglas Dockery explains the
impacts of air pollution on health and the public benefits of pollution
controls.

Even for an administration with a strong deregulatory tilt, such a step would raise political red flags. It also would run afoul of another executive order that has governed regulatory review in Democratic and Republican administrations since 1993, and requires agencies to issue rules if their benefits justify the costs. The Obama administration concluded that each of these air pollution regulations passed that test.

But what if the EPA can find a way to ignore major categories of benefits, such as zeroing out estimated co-benefits from reducing premature deaths? Then regulatory rollback could appear to pass a cost-benefit test on paper, even if it makes the American people worse off in the real world.

Pruitt has already taken other steps in this direction. Notably, the EPA has reduced its estimate of the damages from climate change from $42 per ton of carbon pollution at the end of the Obama administration to as low as $1 per ton now. This makes the social benefit of actions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as the Clean Power Plan, look much smaller than they actually are.

EPA Administrator William Reilly, left, watches as President George H.W. Bush signs the Clean Air Act Amendments, November 15, 1990. Credit: USEPA archive/Carol T. Powers

Gaming the numbers

The late Nobel laureate Gary Becker, who often called for limited government intervention in the economy, once wrote that “cost-benefit analysis may also be useful for undermining misleading claims of self-interested political pressure groups..” By this he meant that rigorous, transparent assessment of a regulation’s social benefits and costs makes it politically hard for special interests such as the coal industry to hijack the rule-making process.

Some conservative critics argue that under the Obama administration, the EPA gamed cost-benefit analysis to justify overregulation by introducing what they describe as speculative “social costs” and “social benefits.” But this approach is not new or imprecise. When regulators do cost-benefit analysis, they are calculating the net change in “social welfare” that a regulation is expected to produce. This term comes from the White House guidance to agencies for conducting such analysis. Economists define social welfare as social benefits minus social costs.

The EPA used this process during the Reagan administration to show that the public would benefit from reducing lead in gasoline. Under President George H.W. Bush, the EPA’s cost-benefit analysis supported phasing out chlorofluorocarbons that were destroying the ozone layer. Cost-benefit analysis has also supported hundreds of other EPA regulations over more than 30 years.

Indeed, transparent analysis of the social benefits and costs of regulations helps to hold regulators accountable. But if agencies put their thumbs on the scale by excluding major public health benefits, they will weaken the legitimacy of regulatory policy and make the American people worse off.

Joseph Aldy, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Misinformation and biases infect social media, both intentionally and accidentally

June 22, 2018 By Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia and Filippo Menczer, Indiana University

People who share potential misinformation on Twitter (in purple) rarely get to see
corrections or fact-checking (in orange). Credit: Shao et al., CC BY-ND

Social media are among the primary sources of news in the U.S. and across the world. Yet users are exposed to content of questionable accuracy, including conspiracy theories, clickbait, hyperpartisan content, pseudo science and even fabricated “fake news” reports.

It’s not surprising that there’s so much disinformation published: Spam and online fraud are lucrative for criminals, and government and political propaganda yield both partisan and financial benefits. But the fact that low-credibility content spreads so quickly and easily suggests that people and the algorithms behind social media platforms are vulnerable to manipulation.

Explaining the tools developed at the Observatory on Social Media.

Our research has identified three types of bias that make the social media ecosystem vulnerable to both intentional and accidental misinformation. That is why our Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University is building tools to help people become aware of these biases and protect themselves from outside influences designed to exploit them.

Bias in the brain

Cognitive biases originate in the way the brain processes the information that every person encounters every day. The brain can deal with only a finite amount of information, and too many incoming stimuli can cause information overload. That in itself has serious implications for the quality of information on social media. We have found that steep competition for users’ limited attention means that some ideas go viral despite their low quality – even when people prefer to share high-quality content.

To avoid getting overwhelmed, the brain uses a number of tricks. These methods are usually effective, but may also become biases when applied in the wrong contexts.

One cognitive shortcut happens when a person is deciding whether to share a story that appears on their social media feed. People are very affected by the emotional connotations of a headline, even though that’s not a good indicator of an article’s accuracy. Much more important is who wrote the piece.

To counter this bias, and help people pay more attention to the source of a claim before sharing it, we developed Fakey, a mobile news literacy game (free on Android and iOS) simulating a typical social media news feed, with a mix of news articles from mainstream and low-credibility sources. Players get more points for sharing news from reliable sources and flagging suspicious content for fact-checking. In the process, they learn to recognize signals of source credibility, such as hyperpartisan claims and emotionally charged headlines.

Screenshots of the Fakey game. Credit: Mihai Avram and Filippo Menczer

Bias in society

Another source of bias comes from society. When people connect directly with their peers, the social biases that guide their selection of friends come to influence the information they see.

In fact, in our research we have found that it is possible to determine the political leanings of a Twitter user by simply looking at the partisan preferences of their friends. Our analysis of the structure of these partisan communication networks found social networks are particularly efficient at disseminating information – accurate or not – when they are closely tied together and disconnected from other parts of society.

The tendency to evaluate information more favorably if it comes from within their own social circles creates “echo chambers” that are ripe for manipulation, either consciously or unintentionally. This helps explain why so many online conversations devolve into “us versus them” confrontations.

To study how the structure of online social networks makes users vulnerable to disinformation, we built Hoaxy, a system that tracks and visualizes the spread of content from low-credibility sources, and how it competes with fact-checking content. Our analysis of the data collected by Hoaxy during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections shows that Twitter accounts that shared misinformation were almost completely cut off from the corrections made by the fact-checkers.

When we drilled down on the misinformation-spreading accounts, we found a very dense core group of accounts retweeting each other almost exclusively – including several bots. The only times that fact-checking organizations were ever quoted or mentioned by the users in the misinformed group were when questioning their legitimacy or claiming the opposite of what they wrote.

A screenshot of a Hoaxy search shows how common bots – in red and dark pink – are spreading a false story on Twitter. Credit: Hoaxy

Bias in the machine

The third group of biases arises directly from the algorithms used to determine what people see online. Both social media platforms and search engines employ them. These personalization technologies are designed to select only the most engaging and relevant content for each individual user. But in doing so, it may end up reinforcing the cognitive and social biases of users, thus making them even more vulnerable to manipulation.

For instance, the detailed advertising tools built into many social media platforms let disinformation campaigners exploit confirmation bias by tailoring messages to people who are already inclined to believe them.

Also, if a user often clicks on Facebook links from a particular news source, Facebook will tend to show that person more of that site’s content. This so-called “filter bubble” effect may isolate people from diverse perspectives, strengthening confirmation bias.

Our own research shows that social media platforms expose users to a less diverse set of sources than do non-social media sites like Wikipedia. Because this is at the level of a whole platform, not of a single user, we call this the homogeneity bias.

Another important ingredient of social media is information that is trending on the platform, according to what is getting the most clicks. We call this popularity bias, because we have found that an algorithm designed to promote popular content may negatively affect the overall quality of information on the platform. This also feeds into existing cognitive bias, reinforcing what appears to be popular irrespective of its quality.

All these algorithmic biases can be manipulated by social bots, computer programs that interact with humans through social media accounts. Most social bots, like Twitter’s Big Ben, are harmless. However, some conceal their real nature and are used for malicious intents, such as boosting disinformation or falsely creating the appearance of a grassroots movement, also called “astroturfing.” We found evidence of this type of manipulation in the run-up to the 2010 U.S. midterm election.

A screenshot of the Botometer website, showing one human and one bot account. Credit: Botometer

To study these manipulation strategies, we developed a tool to detect social bots called Botometer. Botometer uses machine learning to detect bot accounts, by inspecting thousands of different features of Twitter accounts, like the times of its posts, how often it tweets, and the accounts it follows and retweets. It is not perfect, but it has revealed that as many as 15 percent of Twitter accounts show signs of being bots.

Using Botometer in conjunction with Hoaxy, we analyzed the core of the misinformation network during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. We found many bots exploiting both the cognitive, confirmation and popularity biases of their victims and Twitter’s algorithmic biases.

These bots are able to construct filter bubbles around vulnerable users, feeding them false claims and misinformation. First, they can attract the attention of human users who support a particular candidate by tweeting that candidate’s hashtags or by mentioning and retweeting the person. Then the bots can amplify false claims smearing opponents by retweeting articles from low-credibility sources that match certain keywords. This activity also makes the algorithm highlight for other users false stories that are being shared widely.

Understanding complex vulnerabilities

Even as our research, and others’, shows how individuals, institutions and even entire societies can be manipulated on social media, there are many questions left to answer. It’s especially important to discover how these different biases interact with each other, potentially creating more complex vulnerabilities.

Tools like ours offer internet users more information about disinformation, and therefore some degree of protection from its harms. The solutions will not likely be only technological, though there will probably be some technical aspects to them. But they must take into account the cognitive and social aspects of the problem.

Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Assistant Research Scientist, Indiana University Network Science Institute, Indiana University and Filippo Menczer, Professor of Computer Science and Informatics; Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, Indiana University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Climate change will make rice less nutritious, putting millions of the world’s poor at risk

June 19, 2018 By Kristie Ebi, Professor of Global Health and Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, The Conversation, University of Washington

Rice is the primary food source for more than 3 billion people around the world. Many are unable to afford a diverse and nutritious diet that includes complete protein, grains, fruits and vegetables. They rely heavily on more affordable cereal crops, including rice, for most of their calories.

My research focuses on health risks associated with climate variability and change. In a recently published study, I worked with scientists from China, Japan, Australia and the United States to assess how the rising carbon dioxide concentrations that are fueling climate change could alter the nutritional value of rice. We conducted field studies in Asia for multiple genetically diverse rice lines, analyzing how rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere altered levels of protein, micronutrients and B vitamins.

Our data showed for the first time that rice grown at the concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide scientists expect the world to reach by 2100 has lower levels of four key B vitamins. These findings also support research from other field studies showing rice grown under such conditions contains less protein, iron and zinc, which are important in fetal and early child development. These changes could have a disproportionate impact on maternal and child health in the poorest rice-dependent countries, including Bangladesh and Cambodia.

Many of poorest regions in Asia rely on rice as a staple food. IRRI, CC BY-NC-SA

Carbon dioxide and plant growth

Plants obtain the carbon they need to grow primarily from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and draw other required nutrients from the soil. Human activities – mainly fossil fuel combustion and deforestation – raised atmospheric CO2 concentrations from about 280 parts per million during pre-industrial times to 410 parts per million today. If global emission rates continue on their current path, atmospheric CO2 concentrations could reach over 1,200 parts per million by 2100 (including methane and other greenhouse gas emissions).

Higher concentrations of CO2 are generally acknowledged to stimulate plant photosynthesis and growth. This effect could make the cereal crops that remain the world’s most important sources of food, such as rice, wheat and corn, more productive, although recent research suggests that predicting impacts on plant growth is complex.

Concentrations of minerals critical for human health, particularly iron and zinc, do not change in unison with CO2 concentrations. Current understanding of plant physiology suggests that major cereal crops – particularly rice and wheat – respond to higher CO2 concentrations by synthesizing more carbohydrates (starches and sugars) and less protein, and by reducing the quantity of minerals in their grains.

After steadily declining for over a decade, global hunger appears to be on the rise, affecting 11 percent of the global population. FAO, CC BY-ND

The importance of micronutrients

Worldwide, approximately 815 million people worldwide are food-insecure, meaning that they do not have reliable access to sufficient quantities of safe, nutritious and affordable food. Even more people – approximately 2 billion – have deficiencies of important micronutrients such as iron, iodine and zinc.

Insufficient dietary iron can lead to iron deficiency anemia, a condition in which there are too few red blood cells in the body to carry oxygen. This is the most common type of anemia. It can cause fatigue, shortness of breath or chest pain, and can lead to serious complications, such as heart failure and developmental delays in children.

Zinc deficiencies are characterized by loss of appetite and diminished sense of smell, impaired wound healing, and weakened immune function. Zinc also supports growth and development, so sufficient dietary intake is important for pregnant women and growing children.

Higher carbon concentrations in plants reduce nitrogen amounts in plant tissue, which is critical for the formation of B vitamins. Different B vitamins are required for key functions in the body, such as regulating the nervous system, turning food into energy and fighting infections. Folate, a B vitamin, reduces the risk of birth defects when consumed by pregnant women.

Anemia affects one-third of women of reproductive age globally – or about 613 million women. FAO, CC BY-ND

Significant nutrition losses

We carried out our field studies in China and Japan, where we grew different strains of rice outdoors. To simulate higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations, we used Free-Air CO2 Enrichment, which blows CO2 over fields to maintain concentrations that are expected later in the century. Control fields experience similar conditions except for the higher CO2 concentrations.

On average, the rice that we grew in air with elevated CO2 concentrations contained 17 percent less vitamin B1 (thiamine) than rice grown under current CO2 concentrations; 17 percent less vitamin B2 (riboflavin); 13 percent less vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid); and 30 percent less vitamin B9 (folate). Our study is the first to identify that concentrations of B vitamins in rice are reduced with higher CO2.

We also found average reductions of 10 percent in protein, 8 percent in iron and 5 percent in zinc. We found no change in levels of vitamin B6 or calcium. The only increase we found was in vitamin E levels for most strains.

Rice within the octagon in this field is part of an experiment designed to grow rice under different atmospheric conditions. Rice grown under carbon dioxide concentrations of 568 to 590 parts per million is less nutritious, with lower amounts of protein, vitamins and minerals. Dr. Toshihiro HASEGAWA, National Agriculture and Food Research Organization of Japan, CC BY-ND

Worsening micronutrient deficiencies

At present, about 600 million people — mostly in Southeast Asia — get more than half of their daily calories and protein directly from rice. If nothing is done, the declines we found would likely worsen the overall burden of undernutrition. They also could affect early childhood development through impacts that include worsened effects from diarrheal disease and malaria.

The potential health risks associated with CO2-induced nutritional deficits are directly correlated to the lowest overall gross domestic product per capita. This suggests that such changes would have serious potential consequences for countries already struggling with poverty and undernutrition. Few people would associate fossil fuel combustion and deforestation with the nutritional content of rice, but our research clearly shows one way in which emitting fossil fuels could worsen world hunger challenges.

How could climate change affect other key plants?

Unfortunately, today there is no entity at the federal, state or business level that provides long-term funding to evaluate how rising CO2 levels could affect plant chemistry and nutritional quality. But CO2-induced changes have significant implications, ranging from medicinal plants to nutrition, food safety and food allergies. Given the potential impacts, which may already be occurring, there is a clear and urgent need to invest in this research.

It is also critical to identify options for avoiding or lessening these risks, from traditional plant breeding to genetic modification to supplements. Rising CO2 concentrations are driving climate change. What role these emissions will play in altering all aspects of plant biology, including the nutritional quality of the crops that we use for food, feed, fiber and fuel, remains to be determined.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article

Beating Chaos: The Curious—Perhaps Contentious—Case of The Interstellar Asteroid

May 30, 2018 By Michael Riviello

Nearly all of the objects that pepper our solar system revolve around the sun in one direction, opposite the hands on your wristwatch. A small percentage, however—less than one-hundredth of one percent—circle the sun in the direction opposing the normal stellar commute.

Strikingly, according to a new study published last week in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, a backward-orbiting asteroid named
2015 BZ509—nicknamed Bee-Zed—made itself at home in our solar system’s earliest incarnation. This, at least, according to a simulation performed by Helena Morais, PhD, a researcher at Brazil’s São Paulo State University, and Fathi Namouni, PhD, a CNRS researcher at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Southwestern France.

In October 2017, ‘Oumuamua’, an oblong interstellar object, entered our solar system’s interior, and then it shot back out whence it came—that is, towards the solar system’s exterior and, beyond it, interstellar space. But, it was only a visitor to our star system. Bee-Zed, the new research suggests, was here from the get-go of our solar system’s life.

Images of 2015 BZ509 obtained at the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory (LBTO) that established its retrograde co-orbital nature. The bright stars and the asteroid (circled in yellow) appear black and the sky white in this negative image. Credit: C. Veillet / Large Binocular Telescope Observatory.

Going Retro

Drs. Morais and Namouni have studied various aspects of celestial dynamics during their careers, but, only recently, in 2012, did their attention turn to the study of retrograde Centaurs—the clockwise-orbiting asteroids that are observed between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune, explain Drs. Morais and Namouni. Their unusual orbits and unknown origins made these asteroids prime targets for scientific inquiry. “Such extreme orbits must have witnessed violent histories in order to have been reversed,” says Dr. Namouni.

Drs. Morais and Namouni’s work in this area—that is, on retrograde Centaurs—is foundational to the study of these celestial bodies. Their work includes the retrograde coorbital resonance—equal orbital frequencies but opposite orbital motion, says Dr. Morais. This stable resonance allows Bee-Zed to remain in its shared orbit with Jupiter, in a temporary “trap.” Jupiter pulls on the celestial rock in one direction on first pass, then in the opposite direction on another, over the course of 12 years. These interactions cancel each other out, leaving Bee-Zed’s orbit intact.

Discovered in 2015, Bee-Zed’s shared orbit with Jupiter’s, old, chaotic path around the sun suggested a recent origin for Bee-Zed and a tough origin story to trace back to the formation of the planets 4 billion years ago. In 2017, though, researchers conducting a 100-clone simulation found that Bee-Zed clones had stable orbits lasting over 1 million years, an age 100 times greater than Drs. Morais and Namouni found for other Centaurs in 2012, which suggested a different origin from that of other Centaurs. In a step further, Drs. Morais and Namouni decided to use supercomputing to conduct a massive simulation.

Beating The Chaos

The retrograde Centaurs’ orbits between the giant planets of the solar system are home to ‘orbital chaos’. Unlike the dramatic, fictionalized take on the branch of mathematics portrayed by Ashton Kutcher in the movie, The Butterfly Effect, chaos simply means that changing the initial conditions of say, the orbit of a hunk of rock in space, yields drastically different outcomes over long timescales. In this case, slightly changing the initial position of the asteroid based on small variations in measurements drastically alters its final position over a massive ‘spread’ of possibilities if given enough time. Accounting for all of these possible outcomes remained elusive until modern supercomputing was up to the task. “Scientists used to study such orbits just for short time spans. “There was no way to beat the chaos inherent to their motion between the giant planets of the solar system,” says Dr. Namouni.

Drs. Morais and Namouni created a virtual sample of 1 million asteroid clones that covered the known error bars on the real asteroid’s orbit, then, using the power of supercomputers, they simulated the virtual asteroids’ motions backward in time and observed how the virtual space rocks spread across the solar system’s lifetime of 4.5 billion years. “The spread is caused by chaos, but because the sample is huge, we cover all possibilities to which the chaotic system can lead. Further, we can go and see if there are special locations where clones congregate implying a stronger likelihood for the asteroid’s original location,” says Dr. Namouni.

If you arrange the ages of all the simulated asteroids from least to greatest, the age in the middle of that set is 6.48 million. 99.9% of the clones were destroyed by the sun, collided with a planet, or they were shot into outer space. However, 46 of these clones remained at the simulation’s conclusion at 4.5 billion years, and 60% of these were similar to Bee-Zed’s current orbit.

Dr. Namouni says that, as opposed to a model, the recent study was a hi-res simulation. “To put it in a colorful way, we kind of invented the equivalent of CT scan to study the origin of centaurs for which, until now, only classical projective radiography was used,” says Dr. Namouni.

The co-orbital asteroids of Jupiter, also known as the ‘Trojan asteroids’. The prograde
asteroids are shown in white, and 2015 BZ509 (with a trail, shown in green) appears later.
The planets and asteroids have been enlarged for visibility.

Facing The Critics

Hal Levison, a former colleague of Dr. Namouni’s during their participation in NASA’s Cassini imaging initiative, cautioned against making definitive conclusions in light of the study, for now, given the lack of a dynamic modeling approach, and that Morais and Namouni’s conclusions rest in the assumption that no other possibilities exist.

Dr. Namouni agrees that building a model may be a next step, but notes that the predictive power of the simulation is lost in the process. “Levison is asking us to build a model—or a theory—and show how to capture Bee-Zed. A model by definition has an artificial component…on the other hand, our method is quite simple in principle, we just follow a real asteroid—with no artificial setting—in order to find where it came.”

Image of stellar nursery NGC 604 (NASA/HST), where star systems are closely packed and asteroid exchange is thought to be possible. Asteroid (514107) 2015 BZ 509 emigrated from its parent star and settled around the Sun in a similar environment. Credit: NASA / Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI).

Making The Interstellar Case Stronger. While Drs. Morais and Namouni aren’t averse to modeling, they say a stronger case for Bee-Zed can be made in two other ways. “One is to find other asteroids like Bee-Zed near Jupiter, a family of sorts. The second way is to know the composition of Bee-Zed by observing the asteroid,” says Dr. Namouni.

Ramon Brasser, PhD, a researcher at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who wasn’t involved with the new research, helped clarify the points of criticism, as well as the merits of Drs. Morais and Namouni’s assertions. “When simulating both forward and backward in time, Jupiter will eject the majority of these objects to interstellar space. This is a well-known outcome, and it is this outcome that led the authors to conclude that the object came from outer space,” he says. “It is that fact that Levison was arguing against, but Fathi is right when he says that to test those other sources requires a model and certain assumptions.”

Levison’s colleague, Bill Botkke, of the Southwest Research Institute, also told National Geographic that “short term solutions” to Bee-Zed’s origins make more sense, since the simulation found a median clone lifetime of roughly 7 million years. Dr. Basser interprets Botkke’s statements to mean that the authors cannot rule out recent capture of Bee-Zed onto its current orbit in the past 7 million years. “Such a capture is a valid hypothesis because we don’t, and never will know, when Bee-Zed came to be on its current orbit. We only know, based on Morais Namouni’s work, it could be as long as 4.5 billion years ago,” says Dr. Brasser.

One area on which all parties to the study seem to be in agreement: Bee-Zed couldn’t have been produced by collisions. “The planet forming community around the world has never produced retrograde orbits by colliding planetesimals,” says Dr. Namouni.

Origin Story: Start at The Source

“Since the motion is chaotic, it cannot be easily predicted and thus a statistical study such as this one is needed,” says Dr. Basser. However, the simulation does not tell you from where the object originated, he says.

Dr. Brasser says that, to be sure about Bee-Zed’s origins, use modeling, similar to a 2012 he conducted. If they want to determine an interstellar origin, he says, bombard the inner solar system with interstellar objects whose initial distribution is computed a priori, then have these fly past the giant planets and see if any of them get captured—in simple terms, a “flyby model” of capture based on nearby planets, explains Dr. Basser. “This would be the logical way to do this: start at the source, not at the destination,” he says.

Final Destination

Bee-Zed is like a tree that hides in a forest, says Dr. Namouni, and, he says, the results of the simulation bolster the notion that the solar system did not form in isolation from the rest of the galaxy. “The sun in its original star cluster captures comets and asteroids, and perhaps even planets, as some suggest the hypothetical planet 9—previously known as planet x in the 1980s—could itself have been captured that way,” he says. The process is symmetric in that other stars must have captured solar system bodies too, explains Dr. Namouni.

“Once we knowBee-Zed’s composition and that of similar space rocks, we can understand the influence of the sun’s stellar environment on its planets,” says Dr. Namouni. Knowing Bee-Zed’s composition may reveal the origins of earth’s water—a yet-unsolved mystery—along with the origins of organic material and water in the other planets, he says.

Michael Riviello serves as the Interim Editorial Director for Modern Scientific.

(Not pictured here) U.S. Border Patrol agents take Central American asylum seekers into custody on June 12 near McAllen, Texas. The immigrant families were then sent to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing center for possible separation.