Day: September 7, 2018

New research warns of supplements containing the potentially harmful cardiovascular stimulant known as higenamine.

The idea of dietary supplements is undeniably attractive: Silver bullets made from natural ingredients that promise to enhance certain functions and boost health. With this in mind, here in the United States we spend $40 billion a year on vitamins, herbs, minerals, and botanicals. The problem is that many of them don’t deliver on their claims, and even worse, may contain harmful ingredients. In the U.S., supplements do not require FDA approval before hitting the shelves; and in fact, the FDA has to prove a supplement is not safe before they can remove it from the market.

Which may be the reason why some 23,000 people a year end up in the emergency room after taking a supplement.

Earlier we wrote about 15 harmful supplement ingredients to avoid, but now we have another one to add to the list.

A new peer-reviewed study of weight-loss and sports/energy supplements found “unpredictable and inaccurately labeled dosages” of the potentially harmful cardiovascular stimulant, higenamine – which also goes by the names “norcoclaurine” and “demethylcoclaurine.” Two years ago the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) prohibited higenamine for use in sports.

The independent study was conducted by scientists at the global public health organization NSF International, Harvard Medical School, and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) in the Netherlands.

“We’re urging competitive and amateur athletes, as well as general consumers, to think twice before consuming a product that contains higenamine,” says John Travis, Senior Research Scientist at NSF International and a co-author of the study. “Beyond the doping risk for athletes, some of these products contain extremely high doses of a stimulant with unknown safety and potential cardiovascular risks when consumed. What we’ve learned from the study is that there is often no way for a consumer to know how much higenamine is actually in the product they are taking.”

The researchers analyzed 24 readily-available supplements, mostly sold for weight loss and energy, that included higenamine in their ingredients. Of the 24 products tested, only five of them listed a specific amount of higenamine on the label; none of those quantities were accurate. Based on the labeled directions for use, consumers could be exposed to up to 110 mg of higenamine daily, the researchers explain.

“Some plants, such as ephedra, contain stimulants. If you take too much of the stimulants found in ephedra, it can have life-threatening consequences. Similarly, higenamine is a stimulant found in plants,” says Dr. Pieter Cohen, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the study. “When it comes to higenamine, we don’t yet know for certain what effect high dosages will have in the human body, but a series of preliminary studies suggest that it might have profound effects on the heart and other organs.”

To put it bluntly, Cohen says: “If it lists higenamine on the label, don’t purchase it.”

For more on the research and to see which products were tested, visit the NSF website.

Think of the Sahara, with its windswept dunes shining in the sunlight. Some people might see barren land, with minimal water or life and scorching temperatures. Others see a potential solution to a looming energy crisis, and one that could potentially make it rain in one of the largest deserts in the world.

In a paper published this week in Science researchers found that by building out huge wind and solar farms across the desert, they could not only provide a stunning amount of power to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, but they could simultaneously change the climate—increasing heat, but also increasing precipitation and vegetation in areas that could sorely use the added greenery. They estimate that such a venture could double the rainfall in the region, and increase vegetation cover by about 20 percent.

How much green are we talking? The Sahara covers 3.55 million square miles (9.2 million square kilometers). In the study, the researchers ran computer models that placed wind turbines across the desert close to a mile apart, and covered 20 percent of the desert with solar panels in different configurations (sometimes the panels were spread across the desert in a checkerboard pattern, and in other cases were concentrated in quadrants). Smaller coverage produced smaller climate impacts—in this case, less precipitation—but much of it depended on the location of the turbines and panels as well. For example, installing panels in the northwest corner had a larger impact than the other three desert options.

Covering parts of the desert with darker solar panels meant that less sun bounced off the Saharan sand, which is unusually light in color, and therefore has a higher albedo than other non-polar deserts. That means that typically the Sahara reflects more light and heat back into the air. Reducing the albedo by installing darker solar panels could actually increase precipitation in the region even as it increases the temperature around the solar panels. Warmer air rises to areas in the atmosphere where it’s cooler, and moisture there condenses and falls as rain.

“In 1975 Jule Charney, my PhD advisor at MIT, proposed a feedback mechanism to help explain the drought in the Sahel, the semi-arid transition region south of the Sahara: Overgrazing increased surface albedo (reflectivity), reduced precipitation, and in turn further reduced vegetation. About a decade ago, I had the idea that this feedback would work in the opposite direction in the presence of large solar panel farms, since they would reduce the surface albedo,” said Eugenia Kalnay, a lead author of the paper in a press release. “Similarly, wind farms would increase land surface friction and convergence of air, thus producing upward motion and precipitation.”

With more rain, grass and trees could slowly grow back into the once-lush landscape, sprouting between turbines and solar panels as they do on existing farms.

The solar farm would produce an estimated average of 79 terawatts of power, and the wind farm would produce about 3 terawatts—without producing greenhouse gas emissions. To put that in perspective, the authors say that the entire world used about 18 terawatts of power last year.

But building a massive solar farm doesn’t happen overnight, so the researchers programmed the computer model to look at what would happen during a 100 year buildup period, and during the 100 years after the plants were built.

“If we can finish building all the wind and solar farms immediately, some of the effects on atmosphere would be observed almost immediately. But the effects due to the vegetation–albedo–precipitation feedback mechanism would take some time before it could be observed, because vegetation needs time to grow (within a few years). In reality, the effect would grow as the size of wind and solar farms that have been installed grows,” two of the lead authors, Yan Li and Safa Motesharrei, said in an email.

Green Precedent

This wouldn’t be the first time that humans have altered the Sahara. It used to be a much wetter, greener area than it is today.

“The Sahara is a critical biome for humanity in terms of being a reservoir of cultural and ecological diversity,” David Wright, an archeologist at Seoul National University wrote in an email. He points out that even today, the region isn’t just mass of sand, but has mountains, hills, and small rivers and lakes, home to thousands of species.

“Our earliest known ancestor following our lineage’s split from other apes, Sahelanthropus tschadensis, has been found in the Sahara. During the African Humid Period (ca. 11,000-5000 years ago), the Sahara was a vast, diverse ecosystem dotted with lakes and fisherfolk. It became a site of early domestication of cattle and camels and donkeys. It is the site of vast continental overland trading networks managed by empires. The Sahara has much to teach us about how humans have adapted to climate change in the past,” Wright says.

A paper Wright published last year proposed that cattle herders moved into the region between 8,000 and 4,000 years ago. The cattle did what cattle always do, eating away the vegetation, and in the process enhanced the albedo—speeding up the shift from a wetter Sahara to a bone-dry one.

“Human impacts pushed the natural system over the threshold of desertification, and in places where humans entered ecosystems with their animals, the transition from wet to dry far exceeded the pace that would have occurred in the absence of those pressures. Such changes have been demonstrated time and again from deserts ranging from the Atacama to Mongolia to the Sahara,” says Wright, who was not involved in the new Science study.

Researchers have linked climate change with the Sahara’s continued growth. The desrt has grown 10 percent since 1920.

The authors of the more recent paper did not look at other ecological impacts that could be caused by large installations of wind and solar farms in the Sahara, but they think the increased rainfall would overall be a boon to the people who live in and around the region.

“The top 10% of the world’s population is producing about 50% of the world’s carbon emissions. Thus, if the poorest 90% of the world population aims to bring its standard of living up to the level of the richest 10% using fossil energy, that would increase total energy use and emission of global greenhouse gases by five times,” Li and Motesharrei say in an email. To give the whole world access to development—without pushing climate change even further—the authors argue that we need as much clean, renewable energy as possible.

The prospect of purposefully altering the climate is obviously fraught with ethical questions. But Wright points out that we’ve done it before. “Humans are, by nature, niche constructors. We evolved as niche constructors and our niche construction activities will have one of two possible outcomes: either it will save our species from extinction or doom us to extinction. Human societies have already placed large ecological footprints into desert and semi-desert environments,” he says. “In terms of willingness, yes, people are certainly willing and able to construct dozens of energy plants in the deserts and semi-deserts of Africa. Whether it is prudent to do so is an open question. This study suggests it is prudent, but as they indicate, there are more costs to such projects than just ecological.”

Analyzing the costs and benefits for such a world-changing project is daunting under the best of circumstances, but the stakes here are particularly high. Especially for the people who live in the region already.

“It is up to local people to determine if they are willing to gamble on developing energy infrastructure, which could have recursive effects within the broader ecology of the region,” Wright says. “In the context of Industrial-Era geopolitics, such development projects are likely to benefit very few people in the areas where they are constructed even though the ecological impacts to them will be the most severe. The benefits will flow to the already-developed areas of the world, which assume no risk and only reap the benefits,” Wright says.

The authors of the paper also advise a considered approach to any action that might be taken in the future.

“Implementing such large-scale solar and wind farms has become increasingly possible, but requires proper planning and visionary decision-making, plus co-operation of policymakers, companies, stakeholders, and people. We hope that all these local and global actors and stakeholders co-operate and make this a reality,” Li and Motesharri write. “This could be the best chance for sustaining life on this planet while improving the quality of life for everyone.”

A new 360-degree panorama captured by the Curiosity Rover is one of its best yet.

The photos used to create this mosaic were taken by Curiosity on August 9, 2018, at Vera Rubin Ridge, where the intrepid rover has been working over the past several months. The image shows the Red Planet’s iconic butterscotch-colored sky, though it’s a bit darker than usual owing to a dissipating global dust storm.

Curiosity’s counterpart, the Opportunity rover, is currently on the other side of the planet where the storm was much worse. NASA had to put Opportunity into hibernation mode as the dust storm made it too dark for the rover’s solar panels to collect energy. It’s not known when—or even if—Opportunity will return to active duty.

Anyhoo, Curiosity doesn’t seem to have been affected by the storm, but as the new panorama shows, a fair amount of dust has collected atop its surface. The rover landed on Mars on August 6, 2012, and it’s been steadily collecting dust ever since, with no one around to sweep it off.

NASA says Curiosity has never surveyed an area with so much variation in color and texture.

“The ridge isn’t this monolithic thing—it has two distinct sections, each of which has a variety of colors,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. “Some are visible to the eye and even more show up when we look in near-infrared, just beyond what our eyes can see. Some seem related to how hard the rocks are.”

Indeed, hard rocks are a subject of concern at the moment. Curiosity’s most recent drill attempt went well, but the prior two attempts at extracting rock samples weren’t so fruitful, as the rover’s drill was unable to penetrate through some unusually hard rocks. The six-wheeled rover has been using a new drill method over the past few months as a workaround to a mechanical problem. To date, the new technique has worked well, matching the effectiveness of the previous method. NASA says the old technique wouldn’t have worked on the hard rocks either, and that it wasn’t a limitation of the new method.

NASA has no way of knowing how hard a rock will be prior to drilling, with mission controllers having to make educated guesses. As NASA writes:

The best way to discover why these rocks are so hard is to drill them into a powder for the rover’s two internal laboratories. Analyzing them might reveal what’s acting as “cement” in the ridge, enabling it to stand despite wind erosion. Most likely, Vasavada said, groundwater flowing through the ridge in the ancient past had a role in strengthening it, perhaps acting as plumbing to distribute this wind-proofing “cement.”

Much of the ridge contains hematite, a mineral that forms in water. There’s such a strong hematite signal that it drew the attention of NASA orbiters like a beacon. Could some variation in hematite result in harder rocks? Is there something special in the ridge’s red rocks that makes them so unyielding?

Looking at Curiosity’s upcoming schedule, the rover will extract a couple more rock samples later this month. In early October, the rover will ascend higher up Mount Sharp as it heads to areas rich in clay and sulfite materials. It’ll undoubtedly gather some important scientific data, but we’re also looking forward to the rover’s view from this higher elevation.

For those of you looking to make this image your desktop wallpaper, go here.

[NASA]

A Verizon lobbyist is trying to become the attorney general of New York in the upcoming November election.

Verizon executive Leecia Eve is one of four candidates in the Democratic primary for the seat vacated when Eric Schneiderman resigned after assault allegations from four women.

If elected, Eve says she would recuse herself from Verizon matters and New York State’s appeal of the federal net neutrality repeal.

“As Vice President for Government Affairs for Verizon for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, Leecia oversees policy and ensures governmental compliance for a company that innovates and invests billions in New York State and puts nearly 20,000 New Yorkers to work every day,” Eve’s bio on her campaign site says. “She also serves as a Commissioner of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey.”

NASA successfully tested a supersonic parachute designed to land the agency’s next rover on Mars today (Sept. 7) during

a sounding rocket flight

from Wallops Island in Virginia.

The suborbital launch was designed to mimic conditions that the parachute might experience during a Mars landing, then allow engineers to study the parachute and data collected during the flight to make sure the system will function as expected.

“This is really a strength test of that Mars 2020 design,” Jeremy Hill, a mechanical engineer at JPL, said during a webcast of the launch. “We want to get as close to the Martian environment as we can.” [NASA’s Mars Rover 2020 Mission in Pictures (Gallery)]

Or rather, the team wants to put the parachute through even more strenuous conditions than they expect it to experience on Mars, with this launch destined to produce drags that are more than 40 percent higher than what the team expects to see during a real deployment, Hill said.

This morning’s launch was part of NASA’s Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment (ASPIRE). The program is building parachutes that can cling to the Red Planet’s tenuous atmosphere well enough to buffer robotic landings — in particular that of NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, which is scheduled to launch that year.

The parachute deployed smoothly about 2 minutes after the two-stage rocket launched. NASA arranged for boats to be ready in the Atlantic Ocean to retrieve the parachute after the flight and was pleased to see calm seas this morning.

But this parachute isn’t like ones you may have seen skydivers using — because the Martian atmosphere is so thin, the parachute must be between 10 and 20 times larger than terrestrial parachutes in order to protect the rover during a landing.

The parachute itself weighs 200 pounds (90 kilograms) and is packed so tightly that it is denser than hardwood, Hill said. Once it deploys, it unfurls from the size of a barrel to the size of a house in less than half a second. It’s this incredibly fast deployment that makes ASPIRE a supersonic parachute.

After this morning’s launch, the parachute will be fished out of the Atlantic Ocean and brought back for engineers to study to make sure the device performed as designed and didn’t show any signs of weakness during the extreme test. Hill explained that there are more than a million stitches in the parachute, which is made in part from Kevlar, and that the team wants to look at every one of them to make sure the Mars 2020 landing goes smoothly.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.