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Tag Archives: settling
Israel and Lebanon reach historic agreement, settling a years-long maritime border dispute
CNN
—
Israel and Lebanon have reached a historic agreement, leaders on each side said separately on Tuesday, settling a years-long maritime border dispute involving major oil and gas fields in the Mediterranean.
The United States has been trying to broker a deal between the neighboring countries over the 860-square-kilometer (332-square-mile) area of the sea that has been under dispute for years.
It includes the Karish oil and gas field and a region known as the Qanaa prospect, which are expected to fall into Israeli and Lebanese waters respectively under the deal. Israel has said it would begin extracting oil and gas from Karish and exporting it to Europe imminently.
“The final version of the offer is satisfactory to Lebanon and meets its demands and preserved Lebanon’s rights of this natural wealth,” Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun said in a statement hours after receiving Israel’s final offer through US mediator Amos Hochstein.
Aoun said he hopes the agreement, which is yet to be signed, will be announced “as soon as possible.”
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said: “This is an historic achievement that will strengthen Israel’s security, inject billions into Israel’s economy, and ensure the stability of our northern border.”
The draft agreement meets all the security and economic principles laid out by Israel, Lapid said.
The Israeli prime minister will convene the security cabinet on Wednesday followed by a special meeting of the government, he said.
Lebanese officials have said the deal does not mean any “treaty” will be signed with Israel and this agreement is not a step toward normalization of relations between the two countries, which are technically at war.
Earlier Tuesday, Lebanese negotiator and deputy parliament speaker Elias Bou Saab told CNN that “Lebanon felt that [the deal] takes into consideration all of Lebanon’s requirements and we believe the other side should feel the same.”
Meanwhile, Israeli chief negotiator Eyal Hulata said: “All our demands were met, the changes that we asked for were corrected. We protected Israel’s security interests and are on our way to an historic agreement.”
On Tuesday, Lebanese Energy Minister Walid Fayyad also said the French energy company Total, which owns the contract to explore Lebanese waters, would start working on the Qanaa prospect “immediately.”
Talks gained momentum after London-based oil and gas exploration company Energean arrived in June to begin development of the Karish field on Israel’s behalf. Although the Energean ship is well south of the disputed area, part of the field is in an area Lebanon had claimed.
Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite milita, had threatened Energean’s gas rig if they started producing gas before a deal had been struck.
On Tuesday, Hezbollah declined to comment when contacted by CNN, but the Iran-backed armed group has previously said it would abide by any agreement signed by the Lebanese government.
The historic agreement does not affect land borders, but it is likely to ease security and economic tensions for both nations.
Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Thursday that an agreement “will circumvent us from a definite war in the region.”
The End of the Cosmic Dawn: Settling a Two-Decade Debate
Schematic representation of the view into cosmic history provided by the bright light of distant quasars. Observing with a telescope (bottom left) allows us to gain information about the so-called reionization epoch (“bubbles” top right) that followed the Big Bang phase (top right). Credit: Carnegie Institution for Science / MPIA (annotations)
Astronomers determine the time when all the neutral hydrogen gas between galaxies produced by the
From its inception to its current state, the Universe has undergone different phases. During the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, it was a hot and dense ionized
Frederick Davies, also an MPIA astronomer and co-author of the paper, comments, “Until a few years ago, the prevailing wisdom was that reionization completed almost 200 million years earlier. Here we now have the strongest evidence yet that the process ended much later, during a cosmic epoch more readily observable by current generation observational facilities.” This time correction may appear marginal considering the billions of years since the Big Bang. However, a few hundred million years more was sufficient to produce several dozens of stellar generations in the early cosmic evolution. The timing of the “cosmic dawn” era constrains the nature and lifetime of the ionizing sources present during the hundreds of million years it lasted.
This indirect approach is currently the only way to characterize the objects that drove the process of reionization. Observing those first stars and galaxies directly is beyond the capabilities of contemporary telescopes. They are simply too faint to obtain useful data within a reasonable amount of time. Even next-generation facilities like 
From Earth, we are always looking into the past of the cosmos. The light from distant quasars from the early universe passed through the already partially ionized gas of the reionization epoch, arranged around early galaxies. The neutral hydrogen gas between the galaxies produces the signatures of absorption. Due to the expansion of the Universe, absorption lines appear differently redshifted from the UV range. Credit: MPIA graphics department
Quasars as cosmic probes
To investigate when the Universe was fully ionized, scientists apply different methods. One is to measure the emission of neutral hydrogen gas at the famous 21-centimeter spectral line. Instead, Sarah Bosman and her colleagues analyzed the light received from strong background sources. They employed 67 quasars, the bright disks of hot gas surrounding the central massive black holes in distant active galaxies. Looking at a quasar spectrum, which visualizes its intensity laid out across the observed wavelengths, astronomers find patterns where light seems to be missing. That is what scientists call absorption lines. Neutral hydrogen gas absorbs this portion of light along its journey from the source to the telescope. The spectra of those 67 quasars are of an unprecedented quality, which was crucial for the success of this study.
The method involves looking at a spectral line equivalent to a wavelength of 121.6 nanometres (one nanometer is one-billionth of a meter). This wavelength belongs to the UV range and is the strongest hydrogen spectral line. However, the cosmic expansion shifts the quasar spectrum to longer wavelengths the farther the light travels. Therefore, the redshift of the observed UV absorption line can be translated into the distance from Earth. In this study, the effect had moved the UV line into the infrared range as it reached the telescope.
Depending on the fraction between neutral and ionized hydrogen gas, the degree of absorption, or inversely, the transmission through such a cloud, attains a particular value. When the light encounters a region with a high fraction of ionized gas, it cannot absorb UV radiation that efficiently. This property is what the team was looking for.
The quasar light passes through many hydrogen clouds at different distances on its path, each of them leaving its imprint at smaller redshifts from the UV range. In theory, analyzing the change in transmission per redshifted line should yield the time or distance at which the hydrogen gas was fully ionized
Models help disentangle competing influences
Unfortunately, the circumstances are even more complicated. Since the end of reionization, only the intergalactic space is fully ionized. There is a network of partially neutral matter that connects galaxies and galaxy clusters, called the “cosmic web.” Where the hydrogen gas is neutral, it leaves its mark in the quasar light, too.
To disentangle these influences, the team applied a physical model that reproduces variations measured in a much later epoch when the intergalactic gas was already fully ionized. When they compared the model with their results, they discovered a deviation at a wavelength where the 121.6 nanometres line was shifted by a factor of 5.3 times corresponding to a cosmic age of 1.1 billion years. This transition indicates the time when changes in the measured quasar light become inconsistent with fluctuations from the cosmic web alone. Therefore, that was the latest period when neutral hydrogen gas must have been present in intergalactic space and subsequently became ionized. It was the end of the “cosmic dawn.”
The future is bright
“This new dataset provides a crucial benchmark against which numerical simulations of the Universe’s first billion years will be tested for years to come,” says Frederick Davies. They will help characterize the ionizing sources, the very first generations of stars.
“The most exciting future direction for our work is expanding it to even earlier times, toward the mid-point of the reionization process,” Sarah Bosman points out. “Unfortunately, greater distances mean that those earlier quasars are significantly fainter. Therefore, the expanded collecting area of next-generation telescopes such as the ELT will be crucial.”
Additional information
Of the 67 quasars used in this study, 25 stem from the XQR-30 survey. It is a large observational program of almost 250 hours to obtain high-quality spectra of 30 quasars with the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) X-shooter spectrograph mounted at UT3 of the
Reference: “Hydrogen reionization ends by z = 5.3: Lyman-a optical depth measured by the XQR-30 sample” by Sarah E I Bosman, Frederick B Davies, George D Becker, Laura C Keating, Rebecca L Davies, Yongda Zhu, Anna-Christina Eilers, Valentina D’Odorico, Fuyan Bian, Manuela Bischetti, Stefano V Cristiani, Xiaohui Fan, Emanuele P Farina, Martin G Haehnelt, Joseph F Hennawi, Girish Kulkarni, Andrei Mesinger, Romain A Meyer, Masafusa Onoue, Andrea Pallottini, Yuxiang Qin, Emma Ryan-Weber, Jan-Torge Schindler, Fabian Walter, Feige Wang and Jinyi Yang, 7 June 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stac1046
The MPIA team consists of Sarah E. I. Bosman, Frederick B. Davies, Romain A. Meyer (MPIA), Masafusa Onoue (now Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University, Beijing, China), Jan-Torge Schindler (now Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, The Netherlands) and Fabian Walter.
Other team members are George D. Becker (Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of California, Riverside, USA [UCR]), Laura C. Keating (Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik, Potsdam, Germany [AIP]), Rebecca L. Davies (Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Australia [CAS] and ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), Australia [ARC]), Yongda Zhu (UCR), Anna-Christina Eilers (
University of Michigan settling students’ sexual abuse lawsuit
The University of Michigan on Thursday reached a settlement agreement with students who demanded changes in the university’s handling of sexual assault on campus, according to a report by The Associated Press.
In the university’s deal with the students in federal court, the school will create a multidisciplinary committee which will be designed to protect those on the University of Michigan campus from sexual assault and abuse, the AP notes.
The committee, called the Coordinated Community Response Team (CCRT), will be made up of 30 members that include experts on Title IX and campus sexual abuse, reports the AP.
The committee will also include select faculty and administration members, as well as members of the community, the AP reports.
“I think, most importantly, [the committee] has representation from students and survivors,” said assistant professor of law at Wayne State University Nancy Cantalupo to the AP. “They will all have a seat at the table alongside the other experts that are on the CCRT.”
“And that will give them a direct line into the administration — and the upper levels of the administration — in terms of communicating their concerns and their needs,” Cantalupo added.
The University of Michigan was hit by allegations that came to light in 2020 from hundreds of men who alleged sexual assault by the deceased campus doctor, Robert Anderson, the outlet reports.
The school announced a $490 million settlement with those who accused Anderson, the AP reports.
Former University President Mark Schlissel was also removed from his position early this year, the AP notes, following the revelation of emails citing an inappropriate sexual relationship between him and a subordinate.
Experts warn humans settling on far away planets could end up eating each other
Space colonists could turn into CANNIBALS: Experts warn humans settling on far away planets could end up eating each other if farming and crops failed
- Academics said humans may turn to cannibalism if space colonies disorganised
- They warned preparation is important before we venture outside of the Earth
- Charles Cockell and Dr Cameron Smith said the move to space is ‘inevitable’
Scientists have warned that when humans ‘inevitably’ set up space colonies they could turn to cannibalism if crops and farming systems fail.
They said future colonists will end up eating each other if they run out of food and don’t receive regular supplies from Earth.
Experts warned that more preparation was necessary given that humans could start colonising parts of space by the end of the 21st century.
The specialists, speaking with Metro, flagged disease, food sustainability and self-sustenance among the major issues that would need to be tackled before successful colonisation.
![Two scientists warned that when humans 'inevitably' set up space colonies, we could turn to cannibalism if crops fail. [File photo]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/01/01/13/52439031-10360617-image-a-21_1641043953633.jpg)
Two scientists warned that when humans ‘inevitably’ set up space colonies, we could turn to cannibalism if crops fail. [File photo]
They suggested Calliston, Jupiter’s moon or Saturn’s second largest moon Titan as possible locations for humans’ first permanent settlement in space.
Charles Cockell, a professor of astrobiology at Edinburgh University, said: ‘Even with the best technology, isolated human communities can degenerate very quickly.
‘If you put a group of people on Callisto, things start going wrong and the plant growth module breaks down, they are going to eat each other if there is no other way to survive.’
Experts said preparation is necessary given that humans could attempt to venture into living in space by the end of the century, if not as soon as in the next 30 to 40 years
Dr Cameron Smith, pictured, a Portland State University anthropologist, said good farming and food sustainability methods must be in place as we venture into space
For this reason Mr Cockell believes any ‘systems’ in place need to be tested before humans brave settling in the final frontier.
Dr Cameron Smith, a Portland State University anthropologist, added proper farming and food sustainability methods must be put in place.
But he was more optimistic that humans wouldn’t resort to eating each other if faced with shortages, adding that historically there are different examples of how humans have responded to surviving testing environments.
Dr Smith also said disease would be an important challenge to overcome, suggesting that populations would be able to quarantine if segmented into independent settlements.
Charles Cockell (pictured), a professor of astrobiology at Edinburgh University, said: ‘Even with the best technology, isolated human communities can degenerate very quickly’
Both academics believe humans should test out colonies closer to home – Mars or maybe even our Moon – where supplies from Earth would be more feasibly obtainable should anything go awry.
Professor Cockell believes the technology with which we could live in space already exists but must be throughly tested, and that colonies on Mars are possible in 30 or 40 years, with Callisto on the horizon only 100 years after that.
However Dr Smith thinks attempts would only be plausible by the end of the century.