Latest News Clips 2016.08.29

               

1.      Italy’s Fragile Beauty

The New York Times  AUG. 24, 2016

The town of Amatrice in Italy was hit by a strong earthquake on Wednesday morning. CreditStefano Rellandini/Reuters

Milan — If you put a pin right in the middle of a map of Italy, you’re likely to hit Amatrice. A small, historic city known as “the town of the hundred churches,” it lies two hours from Rome and 3,280 feet above sea level, in the scenic Gran Sasso National Park, on the watershed between the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Seas. The area straddles four of our most famous regions: Lazio, Abruzzo, Marche and Umbria. Amatrice is the centerpiece of picture-postcard Italy, for those who find Tuscany too obvious, Rome too noisy and Venice too crowded.

And in the space of just one summer’s night, Amatrice is all but gone.

So are the nearby villages of Accumoli and Pescara del Tronto, wiped out by a 6.2 magnitude earthquake that struck central Italy early Wednesday, killing at least 160 people, including children, trapping scores more under debris, leaving thousands homeless and setting off tremors that were felt from Bologna to Naples.

Today, according to one witness, “The area looks like Dante’s Inferno.” But until yesterday it looked like paradise. A lovely corner of the country. Ancient, unspoiled hilltop villages — for many foreigners, the quintessence of their Italian fantasies. For us Italians, a source of pride.

The quake struck Amatrice and the surrounding area at 3:36 a.m. — amazingly, almost the exact same time as the one that devastated L’Aquila and Abruzzi in 2009, which killed over 300. Some of the dead, this time, were tourists. Travelers go to Amatrice in August for the mild climate, an evening stroll and spaghetti all’amatriciana — a dish famous all over the world, invented by local shepherds in the Middle Ages.

This week, the town was getting ready for the 50th annual festival dedicated to the celebrated sauce. Luckily, most visitors had left for the night. But the Hotel Roma had 70 guests, and at the time of writing they are unaccounted for.

We all forget — visitors and residents alike — that Italy is a stunning but shaky land. Since 1861, when the country was unified, there have been 35 major earthquakes and 86 smaller ones. Every region has been hit. Over 70,000 people lost their lives in an earthquake that struck Messina, Sicily, in 1908. The island was hit again in 1968; Friuli in 1976, Campania in 1980, Abruzzo in 2009, Emilia in 2012. The Apennine mountain range, the geological spine of Italy, has been repeatedly battered.

Italy’s beauty is fragile. Ancient buildings are gorgeous but can be dangerous. Its cities are old and dense, and its buildings rendered vulnerable by heritage laws that protect them from modernization, for better and worse. Carmine Galasso, a lecturer in earthquake engineering at University College London, told Time magazine: “The challenge is really to assess the seismic safety of existing old buildings and prioritize interventions for retrofitting and strengthening.”

2.      Discovery of potentially Earth-like planet Proxima b raises hopes for life

Thought to be at least 1.3 times mass of Earth, planet lies within ‘habitable’ zone of Proxima Centauri, raising hopes for life outside our solar system

The Guardian   24 August 2016 

The search for life outside our solar system has been brought to our cosmic doorstep with the discovery of an apparently rocky planet orbiting the nearest star to our sun.

Thought to be at least 1.3 times the mass of the Earth, the planet lies within the so-called “habitable zone” of the star Proxima Centauri, meaning that liquid water could potentially exist on the newly discovered world.

Named Proxima b, the new planet has sparked a flurry of excitement among astrophysicists, with the tantalising possibility that it might be similar in crucial respects to Earth.

“There is a reasonable expectation that this planet might be able to host life, yes,” said Guillem Anglada-Escudé, co-author of the research from Queen Mary, University of London.

Eamonn Kerins, an astrophysicist at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, was among those enthusiastic about the discovery. “Finding out that the nearest star to the sun hosts not just a planet, not just an Earth-sized planet, but one which is in the right location that it could support life - and there are a lot of caveats there - really underscores that not only are planets very common in our galaxy, but potentially habitable planets are common,” he said.

Proxima b may be the closest of the thousands of exoplanets - which are planets orbiting stars outside our solar system - discovered to date, but at 4.2 light years away the prospect of quick visit to find any Proximese aliens is still remote. Based on spacecraft today, a probe launched now would take around 70,000 years to reach the new planet.

Writing in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers describe how they discovered the planet after scrutinising data based on the light emitted by Proxima Centauri, collected using instruments at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. 

 “What we basically do is measure how the star is moving,” said Anglada-Escudé. “If you have a planet around a star, the planet is also pulling the star a bit so you see the star is moving. It is going towards you and away from you, periodically.”

This movement affects the colour of light detected from the star - as it the star moves slightly towards us we see the light as being slightly bluer - as it moves away the light appears a little redder. The frequency of this motion relates to the duration of the planet’s orbit, and hence its distance from the star, while the magnitude of the motion provides information about the planet’s mass.

While analysis of data collected before 2016 hinted at the presence of a planet, it took a further intense round of data collection earlier this year before the discovery could be confirmed.

Taking 11.2 days to travel around Proxima Centauri, the planet orbits at just 5% of the distance separating the Earth and the sun. But, researchers say, the planet is still within the habitable zone of its star because Proxima Centauri is a type of red dwarf known as an M dwarf - a smaller, cooler, dimmer type of star than our yellow dwarf sun.

Whether the planet could harbour life, however, is matter of debate. 

Red dwarfs are generally very active stars, emitting powerful solar flares, with Proxima b receiving greater doses of high-energy radiation than reaches Earth from our sun. “Because they tend to have a lot of these flares and things like that, it makes it very difficult for [planets] to keep an atmosphere - these flares just blow the atmosphere away,” said Don Pollacco, professor of astrophysics at the University of Warwick, who was not involved in the research. But, he adds, Proxima Centauri is only a moderately active red dwarf, potentially making its environment less hostile than other such stars. Whether the star’s activity when it was younger could have stripped Proxima b of an atmosphere remains to be discovered, while it is also unknown if the planet has a magnetic field which could potentially protect it from such radiation.

3.      The burkini ban: what it really means when we criminalise clothes

France is tearing itself apart over a swimsuit but it’s not the first time an item of clothing has caused a political storm. What we wear has always hidden deeper fears about sex, race and class

The Guardian   24 August 2016 

This is what happens to my skin in the sun. After a few minutes, it goes a mottled pink. Give it an hour or so, and it goes the colour of a ripe tomato. Shortly after that, it burns really badly, and the next day I develop full-body dandruff. Not a good look.

So I go to the beach well equipped. I wear sunscreen, of course. But also a hat, a scarf to cover my neck and my head as well if it’s too windy for the hat, a long-sleeved tunic, and light trousers to pull on somewhere between the mottled pink and tomato stage. I long ago accepted that I am never going to go brown, so I cover up, and I’m comfortable that way. But on a growing number of French beaches, it seems that covering up is now against the law.

On Tuesday, we saw photographs showing four armed policemen on a beach in Nice bullying a woman by forcing her to strip off layers. Another woman – a mum of two, identified only as Siam, aged 34 – was also fined on a Cannes beach for dressing in a similar way, and so apparently not wearing “an outfit respecting good morals and secularism”.

My current beach trousers and tunic are remarkably like those the woman was wearing on the beach in Nice, but we all know how unlikely it would be for me to attract police attention. This legislation is aimed at the burkini, clothing that apparently “overtly manifests adherence to a religion at a time when France and places of worship are the target of terrorist attacks”. Nor am I likely to get into trouble for wearing a T-shirt with an image of the Buddha, another of my favourite coverups: the only religion being targeted here is Islam.

A woman’s right to choose her own beach outfit has long been an area of controversy. In 1907, record-breaking Australian swimmer Annette Kellermanwas arrested on Revere beach in Boston for wearing a sleeveless one-piece swimming outfit remarkably similar to the burkini. It was then considered to be so revealing it was obscene, though a judge later allowed a compromise whereby she could go into the water wearing her revolutionary suit, as long as she was covered by a cape until submerged.

Still, when the bikini was introduced in the 1950s, Kellerman declared it was a mistake. “Only two women in a million can wear it,” she said. “And it’s a very big mistake to try. The bikini shows too much. It shows a line that makes the leg look ugly, even with the best of figures. A body is at its most beautiful when there is one beautiful, unbroken line.”

The Pope also condemned the two-piece, although for rather different reasons. It was banned in Italy, Spain and Portugal and, despite Brigitte Bardot posing on a Cannes beach in a bikini in 1953 and Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in an iconic white bikini in Dr No in 1962, it took a surprising amount of time to catch on. But now, it seems, it is our civic and moral duty to display as much bare flesh as possible while sunbathing, and it is hard to find a women’s magazine in spring that isn’t hectoring us to get “bikini-ready”, to starve, wax, salon tan and exercise our bodies into the desired condition.

To the French minister for women’s rights, Laurence Rossignol, wearing as little as possible on the beach has now somehow become a feminist issue. “[The burkini] has the same logic as the burqa: hide women’s bodies in order to control them,” she has said, seemingly unaware of the contradiction of forcing women to show their bodies instead. “It is not just the business of those women who wear it, because it is the symbol of a political project that is hostile to diversity and women’s emancipation.”