Whatever Happened to Global Governance? by Professor Ngaire Woods

Posted on by August 27, 2014
Reply

On Sun 31 Aug 2014 at 17:00 on BBC Radio 4, will broadcast “Whatever Happened to Global Governance?” by Professor Ngaire Woods, Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government and Professor of Global Economic Governance at the University of Oxford. In fact, the program deals with economic global governance, which is not really the same as global governance, but it nevertheless raises interesting issues.

The following link might not work after the broadcast: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04f9rdr

The programme carries the following explanation:

The way that countries cooperate with each other is changing, and in surprising ways. The old powers – the United States, Britain, Europe – used to hold the reins of how global issues were dealt with. Professor Ngaire Woods examines how a new playing field is emerging where newcomers – such as Brazil, Russia, India and China – are creating their own solutions.

Is old-style global governance fragmenting? In 1944, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, was the birthplace of the familiar international organisations that keep countries talking to each other. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank were created, followed by the United Nations and what went on to be the World Trade Organisation (WTO). They were a huge achievement – but 70 years on, are they fit for purpose?

The world’s smaller economies, such as in Africa, used to have to go cap in hand to Washington DC for answers. Now they have many other options. Professor Woods speaks to former chief economists of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz and Justin Yifu Lin, and former WTO director, Pascal Lamy, to find out why.

So as the old system fragments, how will the world solve its big issues, such as poverty, climate change, immigration and pandemics? And how will Britain negotiate this new terrain?

Producer: Dominic Byrne
A Blakeway production for BBC Radio 4.

Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)

Posted on by August 27, 2014
Reply

The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is an independent, non-partisan think tank focused on international governance. Led by experienced practitioners and distinguished academics, CIGI supports research, forms networks, advances policy debate and generates ideas for multilateral governance improvements. Conducting an active agenda of research, events and publications, CIGI’s interdisciplinary work includes collaboration with policy, business and academic communities around the world.

CIGI’s research programs focus on: global economy, global security & politics and international law. Founded in 2001, CIGI collaborates with several research affiliates and gratefully acknowledges support from a number of funding partners, in particular the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario.

Evidence found for massive stars in the young universe

Posted on by August 23, 2014
Reply

Astronomers have found evidence for the existence of very large stars in the early Universe. Weighing hundreds of times more than the mass of the Sun, such stars would have been the first to fuse hydrogen and helium into heavier elements. They left a chemical signature that the researchers have now found in an ancient, second-generation star.

Little is known about the Universe’s first stars, which would have formed out of clouds of hydrogen, helium and a tiny amount of lithium in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

Simulations have long predicted that some of this first batch of stars were enormous. Such large stars only exist for a very short time before they exploded in supernovae, creating the first heavy elements from which later galaxies and stars evolved.

But no traces of their existence have previously been found. Now Professor Wako Aoki at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo and his colleagues have used a technique called stellar archaeology to identify the first traces of such a star, preserved in the chemical make-up of its ancient long-lasting daughter.

The daughter star has a very low abundance of lighter elements, such as carbon, magnesium and calcium, relative to heavier elements such as iron. The most likely explanation for this signature is a type of explosion of the parent known as a “pair-instability supernova”

This type of supernova occurs when the temperature in the star’s core becomes so high that pairs of photons turn into pairs of electrons and positrons. The resulting fall in outward pressure causes the star to collapse dramatically, setting off a huge thermonuclear explosion. This would tear the whole star apart and produce the high levels of iron relative to lighter elements that Aoki’s team found.

Lower-energy supernovae, which result when normal, lower mass stars explode, create very little iron compared to lighter elements because, although the outer layer is blown away, heavier elements get sucked back into the core, forming a black hole. Most of the iron in the universe was created not in supernovae but in red giants, the phase at the end of most stars’ lives.

References

http://www.nature.com/news/imprint-of-primordial-monster-star-found-1.15751

Hallucigenia finally comes down to find it’s nearest relative

Posted on by August 22, 2014
Reply
photo of a Hallucigenia

A specimen photo of a Hallucigenia sparsa from the collections of the Department of Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution. Photo by C. Clark

Hallucigenia sparsa, a strange creature that walked the seas 500 million years ago, may have finally found its family.

With its dorsal spines and a head easily confused with its tail, this wormlike animal baffled scientists for nearly 40 years—largely because no living animals seemed to be related to it.

Velvet worm

Velvet worm

But Martin Smith, Junior Research Fellow, Department of Earth Science, and other researchers from the University of Cambridge have shown that Hallucigenia has something odd in common with today’s velvet worms.

Its claws, like velvet worms’ jaws, are made up of cuticle layers stacked inside one another, they report online this week in Nature. That means Hallucigenia is likely the velvet worm’s great-great-great-great-great-etc. grandmother.

Sources

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13576.html

http://sciencefriday.com/segment/08/22/2014/-evolutionary-misfit-finds-its-way-into-the-family-tree.html

http://news.sciencemag.org/sifter/2014/08/bizarre-walking-worm-finds-its-place-in-evolutionary-tree

Velvet worm image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Velvet_worm_rotated,_mirror.png

The “Azolla Event” Helped Start the Current Glacial Period

Posted on by July 30, 2014
Reply

50 million years ago during the Eocene, the Earth was much hotter than it is now, with levels of greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere far higher than today. There was very little ice on the Earth at that time, and a tiny fresh-water plant called Azolla was able to flourish around the edges of the Arctic Ocean. Many scientists believe that there was so much Azolla drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that it caused the climate to cool. This so-called “Azolla Event”, along with other factors such as mountain building and changes in ocean currents, led the start of the glacial period in which we are still living.

Photograph by Ingrid Taylar

Photograph by Ingrid Taylar

Azolla is a tiny fern which contains a symbiotic cyanobacterium within its leaves which fixes nitrogen so efficiently that the plant is able to double in mass every 24 hours. This can cause problems in rivers, but some people (for example the Azolla Foundation – see links below) think that it could be used both as a source of food for animals and as a way of sequestering carbon dioxide from today’s atmosphere and so helping to reduce global warming.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla

http://theazollafoundation.org/azolla/the-azolla-superorganism/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event

http://theazollafoundation.org/azolla/the-arctic-azolla-event-2/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0499llm

https://www.facebook.com/TheAzollaFoundation

New Music of the Spheres

Posted on by July 29, 2014
Reply

Stars are huge balls of gas and they vibrate or oscillate. This oscillation can be observed by recording slight changes in the colour of the star. This can then be converted into sound, although the frequency is so low it has to be speeded up.

Every star makes a different noise, and this has inspired Sylvie Vauclair is an astrophysicist at the French Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology, and Claude-Samuel Levine, a musician specialising in electronic music, to use the sound of the stars to compose music. They call it “Nouvelle Musique des Spheres”, The New Music of the Spheres. This takes it’s name from the Greek theory that the planets were attached to crystalline spheres which carried them around the Earth, and the mathematical relationships between these orbits was reminiscent of the relations which Pythagoras had discovered between musical notes.

Below you will find links which will let you listen to music composed from the sounds of stars.

References

Recording the Sounds of Stars

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8114694/Stars-song-captured-by-scientists.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7687286.stm

Music Created from Star Sounds

http://www.cslevine.com/etoiles/youtube_spheres.htm

http://www.odilejacob.com/catalogue/art-and-literature/music-dance/music-of-the-spheres_9782738130365.php

Music of the Spheres in Greek Philosophy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis

Making Predictions about Climate Change

Posted on by May 16, 2014
Reply

The future of the world’s climate (long term temperature, rainfall etc) is clearly of importance to everyone. There is clear evidence that the climate has changed in the past, is rapidly changing now and will continue to change in the future, bringing more unstable weather (daily changes in temperature, rainfall etc), causing droughts, fires and storms, flooding low-lying places, and probably already causing wars and mass migrations of people.

The main international body making predictions about climate change is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which assesses the science related to climate change and provides policy-makers
with regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and
options for adaptation and mitigation.

The IPCC does not do it’s own research. Instead it co-ordinates research from scientists across the world, bringing their results together to make their conclusions.

Another organistion which supports research aimed at understanding the Earth’s past environment in order to make predictions for the future is PAGES, a project within the University of Bern, Switzerland . They encourage international and interdisciplinary collaborations and seek to promote the involvement of scientists from developing countries in the global paleo-community discourse.

PAGES scope of interest includes the physical climate system, biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem processes, biodiversity, and human dimensions, on different time scales – Pleistocene, Holocene, last millennium and the recent past.

Young science communicators wanted in Bern, Switzerland, expenses paid

Posted on by May 16, 2014
Reply

PAGES (Past Global Changes) is a project at the University of Bern, Switzerland, which supports research aimed at understanding the Earth’s past environment in order to make predictions for the future. We encourage international and interdisciplinary collaborations and seek to promote the involvement of scientists from developing countries in the global paleo-community discourse.

PAGES is currently offering one or two early-career researchers to visit the PAGES office in Bern for at least one and up to two months during mid August to late October to work on that newsletter issue. First-author publishing experience is required, while editorial experience is not (although a plus). They will work together with the PAGES team and the senior editor Didier Roche on editing of the articles of the final Past4Future newsletter in terms of content, style, graphics, and layout. PAGES offers to cover travel and accommodation.

Please contact Thorsten Kiefer if you or any of your early-career team members are interested.

Direct Evidence for Inflation Found in Polarisation of CMBR

Posted on by March 20, 2014
Reply

An international collaboration BICEP2 has discovered traces of gravitational waves which existed during the inflationary phase of the creation of the universe, before any of the particles we know today existed.

b_over_b_rect_BICEP2Gravitational waves from inflation generate a faint but distinctive twisting pattern in the polarization of the Comsic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR), known as a “curl” or B-mode pattern. For the density fluctuations that generate most of the polarization of the CMBR, this part of the primordial pattern is exactly zero. Shown here is the actual B-mode pattern observed with the BICEP2 telescope, with the line segments showing the polarization from different spots on the sky. The red and blue shading shows the degree of clockwise and anti-clockwise twisting of this B-mode pattern.

One of the leaders of the collaboration, Prof John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said: “This is opening a window on what we believe to be a new regime of physics – the physics of what happened in the first unbelievably tiny fraction of a second in the Universe.”

References

Click to access b2_respap_arxiv_v1.pdf

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/CMB/bicep2/
http://bicepkeck.org/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26605974

 

719 New Exoplanets Found by Kepler Telescope

Posted on by March 9, 2014
Reply

This the biggest haul ever of exoplanets (planets outside the Solar System) have been identified by analysing data from the Kepler Telescope.

All 719 of the new planets are members of multi-planet systems—stars with more than one orbiting satellite. Researchers used a new method for weeding out false signals from among the candidate planets found by Kepler. “We studied just over 1,200 systems, and from there we were able to validate 719 planets,” says Jason Rowe of NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who led the research.

For more see: Hundreds of New Exoplanets Validated by Kepler Telescope Team – Scientific American.