Climate change accelerates maturing of grape in wine production

                             Johann Martínez-Lüscher , Nafarroako Unibertsitatea

The increase in temperatures and of CO2 levels – the consequences of climate change – accelerates the maturing of grapes in wine production, affecting colour and possibly aromas”. This was the conclusion of the PhD thesis defended by Johann Martínez-Lüscher, undertaken jointly by the University of Navarra and the University of Bordeaux.

The biologist explained that if the forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of a level of 700ppm of carbon dioxide and a temperature increase of 4ºC are proved correct, “the accumulation of sugars could be so rapid that the rest of these processes that depend on this will not be capable of keeping up. This will mean that, on comparing grapes with the same concentration of sugars or degree of alcohol, the crops under climate change conditions will have poorer colouration and this will be noticed in the wine”.

In fact, “it is increasingly more frequent to find wines with a higher alcoholic degree due to the over maturing of the grape”. Nonetheless, in the framework of climate change, the consequences can vary. “For example, the changes in levels of ultraviolet radiation or the decrease in rainfall may have antagonistic effects to those caused by an increase in temperature or CO2 levels. Thus, there are many unknowns about what the future holds”, he added.

Wine in a new scenario

In this way wine production will have to find solutions in order to confront environmental challenges. “The use of slower maturing ‘clones’ (sub-varieties) could be one of the possible strategies. It would also be very tempting to substitute the varieties planted in each location by others better adapted to warmer climates, but this would to a great extent mean giving up the typical characteristics of each variety of our wines – something unthinkable to date”.

Nevertheless, as this expert pointed out, climate change can provide new opportunities: for example, the production of a type of wine in cooler climes where it was not possible before. “This is the case of the incipient wine industry in the United Kingdom where I intend to continue working”, stated the researcher.

Mr. Martínez-Lüscher’s research has been financed by the University of Navarra, the Navarre-Aquitane Cross-Border Cooperation Programme, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the 7th European Union Framework Programme.

Source: Elhuyar Fundazioa

How widespread is tax evasion? Cost of 'round-tripping,' a method investors use to avoid the tax collector

A new study puts a cost on "round-tripping," a method investors use to avoid the tax collector.
Credit: Illustration: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT

Tax evasion is widely assumed to be an eternal problem for governments -- but how widespread is it? For the first time, a new study, co-authored by an MIT professor, has put a cost on a particular kind of tax evasion, known as "round-tripping," that the U.S. government has been trying to thwart.

In round-tripping, U.S. investors move funds to offshore tax havens, then invest in U.S. equity and debt markets with these "foreign" funds. In essence, the U.S. investors are disguising themselves as foreign investors, who are not subject to the same tax rates on capital gains and interest income. The money is said to have made a "round trip" since it originates in the U.S., and winds up back in U.S. markets.

According to the study, published in the Journal of Finance, every 1 percent increase in the top U.S. tax rate leads to an increase of 2.1 percent to 2.8 percent in foreign portfolio investment (FPI) from tax havens. As of 2008, some $34 billion to $109 billion of FPI from those havens appears to have been invested in the U.S. via round-tripping, leading to a loss of $8 billion to $27 billion in tax revenue.

"The higher the tax rate, the more securities appear to be purchased from tax haven jurisdictions," says Michelle Hanlon, a professor of accounting at MIT. "This seems to indicate that U.S. individuals are pretending to be foreigners who then invest in the U.S. markets."

The paper, "Taking the Long Way Home: U.S. Tax Evasion and Offshore Investments in U.S. Equity and Debt Markets," is co-authored by Hanlon, Edward L. Maydew of the University of North Carolina, and Jacob R. Thornock of the University of Washington.

Hanlon and her co-authors have presented their findings to the staff of the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, among other groups interested in the results.

A subtle strategy for identifying evaders

To be sure, not all investments from tax havens are dubious, so the study employed a multiprong strategy. First, it looked at changes in investment levels from tax havens after changes in U.S. tax rates. Second, the study evaluated these changes in investment with an eye to whether or not the U.S. has a bilateral Tax Information Exchange Agreement (TIEA) with the offshore sovereignty in question. TIEAs potentially allow the U.S. to find out considerably more information about the investments being made from those locations.

Sure enough, the researchers found that there is a decrease of up to 32 percent, in both equity and debt investments, when the U.S. creates a TIEA with other sovereign parties.

"The reverse effect we see is that when the U.S. enters into an exchange agreement, we see less investment from tax havens," adds Hanlon, who is the Howard W. Johnson Professor of Accounting at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

To be clear, Hanlon says, "It's very hard to identify tax evasion, because obviously people are trying to hide it." However, she adds, "Once we started seeing the data, we realized we could try to tackle this problem. We had to do a lot of tests to try to isolate the effect we're looking for, [and] we think it's a big step to try to put some numbers around this phenomenon."

The conclusions come from data collected by both the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, which allowed the researchers to piece together monthly flows of foreign investment into U.S. equity and debt markets.

Policy changes: What can be done?

Hanlon suggests that greater international cooperation will at least make this type of tax evasion more difficult and riskier. Additional TIEAs, for instance, would force some investors to go to greater lengths to engage in round-tripping.

"People always try to evade taxes, but [more TIEAs] will make it harder," Hanlon suggests. "And the more costly and risky it becomes, the costs will outweigh the benefits, at least on the margin, and the less likely people are to do it."

On the academic front, Hanlon recognizes that the study's findings present a wide range for the total cost of this tax evasion, but hopes the paper will be a spur to other scholars who may want to delve into the same topic.

"We felt it was important enough that someone try to do research like this, to get people thinking about other data sources and other ways to examine [tax evasion]," Hanlon says. 

"Our hope was that it would lead to more research and that people would take more risks to look at things like this."

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Science behind Hindu’s Four Ages (Chatur Yugas): Magnetogeddon may destroy the World!

Science behind Hindu’s Four Ages (Chatur Yugas): Magnetogeddon may destroy the world!

Research paper written by London Swaminathan

Research article No.1458; Dated  4th   December 2014.

The study of the earth’s magnetic field and the prediction about Magnetogeddon by the scientists justify the Hindus’ classification of Chatur Yugas. An interesting article reveals the science behind the Chatur Yugas

YugasWhat is Chatur Yuga/Four Ages?
Hindus have divided the ages of the world into four: Krita (4), Treta (3), Dwapara(2) and Kali (1).

Krita lasts for 1 ,728,000 years, Treta for 1296 000 years, Dwapara for 864,000 years and the last kali for 4,32,000 years. Four Yugas is Chatur Yuga in Sanskrit.8640,000,000 years make one Kalpa which is one day for Brahma, the Creator God, in Hinduism. He will live for 100 years like this. This cycle is never ending and the next Brhama takes over. 200 years ago it would not have made much sense. Now after the study of cosmology and the latest news about the Black Holes and other things show that the Hindus are the only one ancient race that understood the functioning of the Universe.

Hindus wrote in their scriptures that in between the Yugas there is an interval called Sandhya period and another as Sandhyansa period. Hindus also told that the time period for Devas, Gods and Humans are different.



What is Magnetogeddon?

Like Devas and Asuras churned the Milky Ocean, the earth’s stomach is also churned. When the molten iron bowel of the earth is churned, it inflates a magnetic bubble around our world. That protects us from the full radiation coming out of the sun.

 Now scientists are worried that this magnetic field is weakening and could soon flip out entirely. That means the magnetic North and South poles may trade places. European Space Agency’s Swarm satellites have been mapping the magnetic fields for the past several months. In the past 150 years the magnetic field has weakened 10 percent. This is an indication that the flip over is going to happen. That means North Pole will become South Pole and vice verse.

solar wind

Yuga= Change of Polarity

Geological evidence of preserved magnetic fields shows this happens every 400,000 years or so closer to the figure of Hindu’s 4,32,000 years of Kali Yuga. Hindus believe that the world will be destroyed at the end of Kali Yuga and then a new era will begin.

In the past, life has NOT been eradicated at the end of 400,000 years or so. But theoretically speaking extinction (MAGNETOGEDDON) is possible according to the scientists. Probably this is what Hindus meant the “destruction” at the end of each Chatur Yuga. When Krishna and Vyasa lived it was Dwapara Yuga. A great Mahabharata war occurred and Dharma and other rules changed, but the human beings survived.

Magnetic reversals don’t happen overnight. The process takes 1000 years to complete. Probably this is what Hindus called Yuga Sandhya (interval). The weakened field would expose us to higher levels of radiation, leaving power grids and satellites vulnerable

geomagnetic-field-orig

Earth is a Dynamo

Inside the earth there is molten iron. The churning of the core creates a magnetic field around the earth. (The churning is created by the rotation of the earth). This is what protects us from the Solar wind. If there is no magnetic field to protect us earth would have become desert like Mars. No life can exist.

Earth’s inner core is a 2400 km wide ball of solid iron with some nickel and sulphur and radioactive elements. Outer core is 6800 kms wide ball of liquid iron nickel and sulphur. The mantle is 2900 km deep mixture of semi molten rock. The crust is only 8 to 40 kms thick and we live on this crust. The earth is a magnetic dynamo. It is magnetic field generator.

After reading this bit of science we can sense some scientific truth in the Yuga classification and the interval periods between the Yugas. Scientists could study the weakening of magnetic fields or the flipping over (Change of polarity) by studying fossilised rocks.

Source for Science news: London metro with my interpretation of Chatur Yugas.

The Ant colonies help evacuees in disaster zones

Trail of ants (stock image). Credit: © grekoff / Fotolia

An escape route mapping system based on the behavior of ant colonies could give evacuees a better chance of reaching safe harbor after a natural disaster or terrorist attack by building a map showing the shortest routes to shelters and providing regular updates of current situations such as fires, blocked roads or other damage via the smart phones of emergency workers and those caught up in the disaster.

Koichi Asakura of Daido University in Nagoya and Toyohide Watanabe of the Nagoya Industrial Science Research Institute in Japan have carried out successful simulations of the construction of navigational maps using this approach and report details in the International Journal of Knowledge and Web Intelligence. Following a major earthquake, tsunami, typhoon or other disaster it is crucial for those affected, including emergency workers, to obtain and share accurate and timely information about the situation as it unfolds. Lives can only be saved if evacuation to safe areas and shelters is not stymied by blocked roads, fires and other problems.

The team's new system has two key features: First it utilizes the smart phones that are now ubiquitous across cities as networked, mobile sensors that can feed information back to emergency centers. The second feature exploits our understanding of the behavior of an ant colony. This provides a way to determine whether or not particular problems are recent or not, just as individual ants use pheromone trails, and the concentration changes in those pheromones to assess how recently a colony member left a particular signal and so find the optimal routes to and from the nest via food supplies. By using this approach to analyze the data from myriad smart phones as evacuees head for shelter, it is possible to build an active navigational map using the phones' GPS and other tools.

The system circumvents the problem that would be almost inevitable during a disaster that closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras would be unreliable whereas sufficient numbers of wireless communication devices might remain active for sufficient time given a large enough number of service providers and communication towers spread widely across the disaster area. The next step will be to develop an ad hoc mobile networking system so that evacuees can themselves access these active maps rather than the present system that provides advice to emergency services for guiding evacuees. Such a network might also circumvent the problem of service provider outages by allowing individual smart phones to create a local network.

Source: Inderscience Publishers

The Outsmarting nature during disasters: Instead of winging it, planners need to think carefully about costs and benefits

Natural Disasters

The dramatic images of natural disasters in recent years, including hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the Tohoku, Japan, earthquake and tsunami, show that nature, not the people preparing for hazards, often wins the high-stakes game of chance.

"We're playing a high-stakes game against nature without thinking about what we're doing," geophysicist Seth Stein of Northwestern University said. "We're mostly winging it instead of carefully thinking through the costs and benefits of different strategies. Sometimes we overprepare, and sometimes we underprepare."

Stein will discuss his research in a presentation titled "How Much Natural Hazard Mitigation is Enough?" at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Chicago. His presentation is part of the symposium "Hazards: What Do We Build For?" to be held Feb. 17.

Stein is the William Deering Professor of Geological Sciences in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of a new book, "Playing Against Nature: Integrating Science and Economics to Mitigate Natural Hazards in an Uncertain World" (Wiley, 2014) and the book "Disaster Deferred: A New View of Earthquake Hazards in the New Madrid Seismic Zone" (Columbia University Press, 2010).

Sometimes nature surprises us when an earthquake, hurricane or flood is bigger or has greater effects than expected. In other cases, nature outsmarts us, doing great damage despite expensive mitigation measures or causing us to divert limited resources to mitigate hazards that are overestimated.

"To do better we need to get smarter," Stein said. "This means thoughtfully tackling the tough questions about how much natural hazard mitigation is enough. Choices have to be made in a very uncertain world."

Stein's talk will use general principles and case studies to explore how communities can do better by taking an integrated view of natural hazards issues, rather than treating the relevant geoscience, engineering, economics and policy formulation separately.

Some of the tough questions include:

• How should a community allocate its budget between measures that could reduce the effect of future natural disasters and many other applications, some of which could do more good? For example, how to balance making schools earthquake resistant with hiring teachers to improve instruction?
• Does it make more sense to build levees to protect against floods or to prevent development in the areas at risk?
• Would more lives be saved by making hospitals earthquake resistant or by using the funds for patient care?

The choice is difficult because although science has learned a lot about natural hazards, Stein says, our ability to predict the future is much more limited than often assumed. Much of the problem comes from the fact that formulating effective natural hazard policy involves combining science, economics and risk analysis to analyze a problem and explore costs and benefits of different options in situations where the future is very uncertain.

Because mitigation policies are typically chosen without such analysis -- often by a government mandate that does not consider the costs to the affected communities -- the results are often disappointing.


Source: Northwestern University
Summary: The dramatic images of natural disasters, including hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the Tohoku, Japan, earthquake and tsunami, show that nature, not the people preparing for hazards, often wins the high-stakes game of chance. In a recent presentation, a geophysicist uses general principles and case studies to explore how communities can do better by taking an integrated view of natural hazards issues, rather than treating the relevant geoscience, engineering, economics and policy formulation separately.

Is there an ocean beneath our feet? Ocean water may reach upper mantle through deep sea faults

Parinacota, a volcano on the border of Chile and Bolivia. Credit: © Georges Bartoccioni / Fotolia

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have shown that deep sea fault zones could transport much larger amounts of water from Earth's oceans to the upper mantle than previously thought.

Water is carried mantle by deep sea fault zones which penetrate the oceanic plate as it bends into the subduction zone. Subduction, where an oceanic tectonic plate is forced beneath another plate, causes large earthquakes such as the recent Tohoku earthquake, as well as many earthquakes that occur hundreds of kilometers below Earth's surface.

Seismic modelling
Seismologists at Liverpool have estimated that over the age of Earth, the Japan subduction zone alone could transport the equivalent of up to three and a half times the water of all Earth's oceans to its mantle.
Using seismic modelling techniques the researchers analysed earthquakes which occurred more than 100 km below Earth's surface in the Wadati-Benioff zone, a plane of Earthquakes that occur in the oceanic plate as it sinks deep into the mantle.

Analysis of the seismic waves from these earthquakes shows that they occurred on 1 -- 2 km wide fault zones with low seismic velocities. Seismic waves travel slower in these fault zones than in the rest of the subducting plate because the sea water that percolated through the faults reacted with the oceanic rocks to form serpentinite -- a mineral that contains water.

Some of the water carried to the mantle by these hydrated fault zones is released as the tectonic plate heats up. This water causes the mantle material to melt, causing volcanoes above the subduction zone such as those that form the Pacific 'ring of fire'. Some water is transported deeper into the mantle, and is stored in the deep Earth.

"It has been known for a long time that subducting plates carry oceanic water to the mantle," said Tom Garth, a PhD student in the Earthquake Seismology research group led by Professor Andreas Rietbrock.

"This water causes melting in the mantle, which leads to arc releasing some of the water back into the atmosphere. Part of the subducted water however is carried deeper into the mantle and may be stored there.

Large amounts of water deep in Earth
"We found that fault zones that form in the deep oceanic trench offshore Northern Japan persist to depths of up to 150 km. These hydrated fault zones can carry large amounts of water, suggesting that subduction zones carry much more water from the ocean down to the mantle than has previously been suggested.

"This supports the theory that there are large amounts of water stored deep in the Earth."
Understanding how much water is delivered to the mantle contributes to knowledge of how the mantle convects, and how it melts, which helps to understand how plate tectonics began, and how the continental crust was formed.


Source: University of Liverpool

Summary: Scientists have shown that deep sea fault zones could transport much larger amounts of water from Earth's oceans to the upper mantle than previously thought.