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Doomsday Clock reset: World now faces ‘unprecedented danger’
By Adriana Diaz
January 24, 2023 11:23am
The symbolic Doomsday Clock — designed by scientists to measure how close the world is to an apocalypse — has been reset to 90 seconds to midnight.
This is the closest the clock has ever been set to midnight in the 76 years since its creation.
“We are living in a time of unprecedented danger, and the Doomsday Clock time reflects that reality,” Rachel Bronson, PhD, president and CEO of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said in the announcement on Tuesday.
“Ninety seconds to midnight is the closest the Clock has ever been set to midnight, and it’s a decision our experts do not take lightly. The US government, its NATO allies and Ukraine have a multitude of channels for dialogue; we urge leaders to explore all of them to their fullest ability to turn back the Clock.”
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists organization was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and other scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, which produced the first nuclear weapons during the Second World War.
They created the first Doomsday Clock during the Cold War in 1947 as a warning of the dangers of nuclear war. It was originally set to seven minutes before midnight and has previously been moved 24 times — backward 17 times and forward seven times.
In 2020, it first moved to 100 seconds before midnight — the most alarming countdown at the time — where it remained until this year.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which includes 10 Nobel laureates, chose to move the clock closer to midnight this year “due largely but not exclusively” to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and their threats of nuclear war.
“Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks,” the experts warned.
The scientists also noted the “continuing threats posed by the climate crisis and the breakdown of global norms and institutions needed to mitigate risks associated with advancing technologies and biological threats such as COVID-19.”
Mary Robinson, Chair of the Elders and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned that “the Doomsday Clock is sounding an alarm for the whole of humanity. We are on the brink of a precipice. But our leaders are not acting at sufficient speed or scale to secure a peaceful and liveable planet.”
Our leaders are not even acting in the general direction of securing peace. America and other NATO countries are deliberately attempting to destroy Russia and China for their own financial gain. There is nothing of 'peace' in their foreign policies.
Humanity was supposedly the safest in 1991 when the hands were furthest from midnight, set at 17 minutes until the apocalypse, as the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty — ending the Cold War and reducing the threat of nuclear war.
But then the US and NATO decided to ignore their promises not to recruit countries that border Russia. Since 2014, they have been pressuring Russia to invade Ukraine by supporting the Nazi Azov Batallion as it terrorized Russian-speaking people in Eastern Ukraine - the opposite of what Ukraine agreed to in the Minsk Accords.
“The science is clear, but the political will is lacking,” Robinson said insisting that “leaders need a crisis mindset” if the world is to “avert catastrophe.”
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Ancient sea creature sported a big fork on its head
to toss away the competition, study suggests
Fights between horned trilobites are believed to be the earliest example of sexual combat
CBC Radio ·
Posted: Jan 20, 2023 12:27 PM PST |
A 3D model of a Walliserops trifurcatus trilobite, which sports a unique trident at the front of its head. (Alan D. Gishlick)
An ancient sea creature sported a massive fork on its head — what for?
A species of ancient trilobites grew big forks on their heads to fight their opponents and impress potential mates, in what scientists say could be the earliest known example of ritualized combat.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that one trilobite species used a strange appendage on its head for sexual selection — and most likely for fighting other male trilobites.
Though they've been extinct for 250 million years, trilobites were one of the most successful and diverse animal groups ever — dominating the ancient oceans for hundreds of millions of years. All trilobites shared certain traits — like a three-lobed body — and visually resembled modern woodlice or pillbugs, ranging in size from a few millimetres to the size of a sea turtle.
But a striking feature of one trilobite species, Walliserops trifurcatus, stands out from the rest: at the front of its head was a trident-like structure as long as the trilobite's body. This trident has made Walliserops a popular find among fossil collectors and an evolutionary puzzle for biologists.
"The trilobite's fork most resembled the structures of animal weapons involved in a type of fighting behavior that's been characterized as shoveling," Alan Gishlick, assistant professor at Bloomsburg University and one of the study authors, told Quirks & Quarks.
"You get your horn underneath your opponent, and then you lift him up and toss him away."
Fork as cutlery or a hunting weapon?
Trilobites are on display at the American Museum of Natural History in June 2013 in New York.
Trilobite fossils are among the most common and beloved items for museums and private collectors alike.
(Mary Altaffer/Associated Press)
About 50 years ago while canoeing on the Groundhog River south of James Bay, Ontario, I found about a dozen trilobite fossils. One of my siblings took them to school one day and I never saw them again. I think they ended up in a museum in Nova Scotia.
An unusual fossil helped Gishlick and his colleague Richard Fortey solve this puzzle. Instead of the usual three prongs on its head appendage, this particular Walliserops specimen had four.
Previously, the trident was thought to be used for either hunting or defense — to fork the prey or the opponent, Gishlick said. However, the appendage was not flexible or close enough to the creature's mouth to be useful as cutlery.
The defense theory also relied on the trilobite's ability to wield the trident effectively, which the creature lacked. Plus, trilobites had a different method of defending themselves.
"They curl themselves up like a little pillbug into an armoured ball," Gishlick said.
The four-pronged trident in the unusual Walliserops fossil provided a big clue: the trilobite trident could have a significant variation from the species norm without getting in the way of the creature growing to maturity.
In fact, Gishlick said the specimen is slightly bigger than an average Walliserops.
"And yet its fork was clearly malformed in such a way that catching or stirring up prey would not have been as efficient, defending against predators would not have been as efficient," he said.
Excluding the functions of defense and hunting left one more possibility.
"There's another common explanation we tend to employ when it comes to extreme structures in living organisms and in fossils, and that's they have something to do with reproductive success," Gishlick said. "Organisms will devote a phenomenal amount of biological energy to structures that aid in their ability to gain mates."
These structures could be used for display, like a male peacock's vibrant tail feathers, or for ritualized combat with other males, like impressive crowns of antlers in deer and elk.
Shoveling the competition
To figure out what exactly a fight between two Walliserops trilobites would have looked like, the researchers looked to modern-day animals that visually resemble the ancient creatures. Gishlick and Fortey created 3D computer models of the trilobite and compared its fork-like structure to the horns of several species of stag beetles.
The closest match turned out to be the Japanese rhinoceros beetle, which also sports an impressive multi-pronged horn.
"If they dip their head down and get it underneath their opponent and lift rapidly, it just twitches and the other male is gone," Gishlick explained.
A side-by-side 3D model depiction of a W. trifurcatus trilobite and a Japanese rhinoceros beetle (Trypoxylus dichotomous) with a comparable anatomical weapon. (Alan D. Gishlick)
If this theory is correct, Walliserops tridents may be the earliest known example of sexual combat 400 million years ago. And to Gishlick, getting a glimpse of a creature's behaviour from millions of years ago is the coolest part.
"The problem is, with fossils, we can't observe their behaviours and we are missing so much data," he said.
"So when you have a structure like this that … we can tie to a particular kind of sexual selection, particularly combat, which is harder to nail down, we're helping learn more about the past and realizing that the past isn't that different than the present."
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