[PHOTO] Weeds by brick

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Big Picture shares photos relating to the restoration of Cuban-American relations.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about why she uses Twitter.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a study noting the sulfur-rich environment of protostar HH 212.


• The Dragon's Tales reports a Chinese plan to develop a mixed fission/fusion reactor.


• Language Log notes an example of Chinese writing in pinyin without accompanying script.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen notes the importance of Kevin Kwan's novels about Chinese socialites.


• Language Hat reports on an effort to save the Nuu language of South Africa.


• Languages of the World reports on Urum, the Turkic language of Pontic Greeks.


• Discover's Out There reports on the oddities of Pluto.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla explains why the New Horizons data from Pluto is still being processed.


• Spacing Toronto reports from a Vancouver porch competition.


• Towelroad notes a married gay man with a child denied Communion at his mother's funeral.


• Window on Eurasia notes racism in Russia, looks at Tajikistan's interest in the killing of its citizens in Russia, suggests Belarus is on the verge of an explosion, and examines Mongolian influence in Buryatia.

[LINK] "Black Death Left a Mark on Human Genome"

Science's Elizabeth Pennisi wrote about a fascinating study that, by comparing the genes of ethnic Romanians with Roma residents of that country, determined that the black death had left an imprint on European populations absent elsewhere.

The Black Death didn’t just wipe out millions of Europeans during the 14th century. It left a mark on the human genome, favoring those who carried certain immune system genes, according to a new study. Those changes may help explain why Europeans respond differently from other people to some diseases and have different susceptibilities to autoimmune disorders.

Geneticists know that human populations evolve in the face of disease. Certain versions of our genes help us fight infections better than others, and people who carry those genes tend to have more children than those who don’t. So the beneficial genetic versions persist, while other versions tend to disappear as those carrying them die. This weeding-out of all but the best genes is called positive selection. But researchers have trouble pinpointing positively selected genes in humans, as many genes vary from one individual to the next.

Enter Mihai Netea, an immunologist at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands. He realized that in his home country, Romania, the existence of two very distinct ethnic groups provided an opportunity to see the hand of natural selection in the human genome. A thousand years ago, the Rroma people—commonly known as gypsies—migrated into Europe from north India. But they intermarried little with European Romanians and thus have very distinct genetic backgrounds. Yet, by living in the same place, both of these groups experienced the same conditions, including the Black Plague, which did not reach northern India. So the researchers sought genes favored by natural selection by seeking similarities in the Rroma and European Romanians that are not found in North Indians.

Netea; evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain; and their colleagues looked for differences at more than 196,000 places in the genomes of 100 Romanians of European descent and 100 Rroma. For comparison, the researchers also cataloged these differences in 500 individuals who lived in northwestern India, where the Rroma came from. Then they analyzed which genes had changed the most to see which were most favored by selection.

Genetically, the Rroma are still quite similar to the northwestern Indians, even though they have lived side by side with the Romanians for a millennium, the team found. But there were 20 genes in the Rroma and the Romanians that had changes that were not seen in the Indians’ versions of those genes, Netea and his colleagues report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These genes “were positively selected for in the Romanians and in the gypsies but not in the Indians,” Netea explains. “It’s a very strong signal.”

[LINK] "Breakaway Transnistria region could become next flashpoint with Russia"

Al Jazeera America's Matthew Luxmoore reports from Transnistria, where the economy is apparently in a state of collapse and people are leaving.

Transnistria certainly needs a shoulder to lean on. A clampdown on the transit of excisable goods, launched last March by Ukraine and enthusiastically taken up by Saakashvili, is severely restricting a trade on which its economy has long relied.

Moreover, the authorities cut pensions by 30 percent in February, promising to return what’s owed once the economic crisis abates. That has led to a daily crowd of mostly elderly people gathering outside the city’s Russian consulate, hoping to access higher pensions under a newly expedited procedure for Russian citizenship.

In the line are also some working-age people looking to leave. Among them is Andrian Braga, who at 23 decided to move to Moscow with his wife and two-year-old daughter. “Things are bad, but they always have been. The fact that everyone’s leaving is nothing new,” he said, standing outside the consulate clutching his daughter’s new Russian passport.

The region has always struggled. Since separating from Moldova, Europe’s poorest country, it’s also been dependent on Moscow’s aid. Heavily subsidized Russian gas has provided a lifeline, saddling Transnistria with a $5 billion debt that would fall on Chisinau if the territory were reabsorbed. Trolleybuses course through central Tiraspol, decorated with pictures of beaming pensioners and the words “Into the future together with Russia!” Like dozens of big-ticket items dotted throughout the region — from modern hospitals to construction cranes — the vehicles bear the logo of their sponsor: Moscow-based non-profit “Eurasian Integration,” founded in 2012 by Russian MP and leader of nationalist party Rodina, Alexey Zhuravlev.

Locals praise Moscow’s projects for providing much-needed jobs, while many young men see conscription into the Russian Army’s regional force as the only chance for a secure job at home. Uniformed soldiers are a common sight in Tiraspol, congregating outside army bases or along the vast perimeter of the former Soviet aerodrome that now lies decaying on its outskirts.

[URBAN NOTE] "Free, fast Internet to come to New York City's poor"

Wilson Dizard at Al Jazeera America writes about the new initiative by New York City to make sure the poor will have access to free and fast Internet.

New York City announced Thursday that it will install high-speed broadband service in two public housing projects later this year, at no charge to residents, as part of a broader effort to shrink the Internet access gap between rich and poor.

"Whether you're a parent looking for a job, a child working on a school project ... broadband access is no longer a luxury; it's a necessity,” said Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito in a statement. "This effort helps close the digital divide and addresses the needs of the nearly 3 million New Yorkers who do not have access to broadband Internet at home."

The first housing projects to be wired under this effort are Queensbridge North and South, in Queens, followed by Red Hook East and West Houses, in Brooklyn, and Mott Haven, in the South Bronx. The city says it hopes to bring high-speed access to 16,000 through the $10 million effort, giving them an alternative to using library computers or browsing the Web on smartphones.

The contractor for the broadband service has yet to be selected, a city official said, and the mayor's plan does not include subsidies for computers to access the Internet.

The move comes as federal regulators have started to treat Internet access as an essential household utility, rather than an optional communications service. Earlier this year, the Obama administration successfully pushed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate Internet traffic more like a public utility, such as telephone communication.

[URBAN NOTE] "The dying beauty of old Bucharest"

Open Democracy features an essay by Romanian blogger and writer Raluca Besliu talking about the problems faced in Bucharest for people concerned with historic buildings.

Bucharest, the capital city of Romania, is a city dying for an identity. In its heyday, during the interwar period, it was dubbed ‘little Paris’ due to its resemblance to the French capital. The city was severely traumatised, however, by the megalomaniac vision of former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was determined to wipe out the architectural legacies of the monarchy and bourgeoisie in order to build a new communist city.

The few parts of Bucharest from the late 18th and 19th century that managed to survive Ceausescu’s questionable architectural vision are threatened by the current collusion of real estate agents and local authorities, interested more in buildings’ profitability rather than their historic, aesthetic and social worth. Purposefully forgotten, or intentionally damaged in the hopes of inevitable collapse, many of Bucharest’s old building which encapsulate the city’s past glory and unique architecture - a blend of oriental and occidental motifs - and represent valuable pieces of history, stoically await their fall, giving the city its contemporary beauty of decay and oblivion.

One of the buildings carrying out its slow sentence is the Solacolu Inn, a historic monument on Calea Mosilor, a notable street in Romania’s capital. Part of the Ottoman legacy, inns began to appear in Bucharest during the 18th century to satisfy the needs of international merchants seeking a place to rest and deposit their merchandise. There were three types of inns: monasterial (manastiresti), boyar ones (boieresti), and lordly (domnesti). As Calea Mosilor witnessed a rise in commerce during the 19th century, the number of inns built there increased.

[. . .]

In 2003, the Solacolu Inn was returned to the original owners’ descendants. In Romania, the owners of historical monuments benefit from lower taxes, but are responsible for restoration. The people who entered in possession of the Inn emphasised that they wanted to return it to its former glory, but lacked the funds to do so. The local authorities in Bucharest stressed that they could not invest in rehabilitating a private property. As a historic building cannot be torn down, the Solacolu Inn, one of Bucharest’s architectural jewels, was left to turn into a ruin, to the point of either collapsing to the ground or being declassified as a historic monument. The building’s decay process was accelerated in 2010, when part of the roof collapsed.

There are, however, ways in which this historic monument could be spared. In an interview with Romania Curata, Roxana Wring, the president of Pro.Do.Mo Association, stressed that the Mayor’s Office can expropriate the Solacolu Inn to save it, just as in cases of public utility. Serban Sturdza, the president of OAR Bucharest, argued that the Mayor’s Office could compensate the owners and restore the build or help the owner financially for the rehabilitation process and construct a business plan to recuperate its investment. Another solution would be filing a criminal complaint against the owners, who are not fulfilling their legal obligation to restore and maintain the patrimonial building. The complaint can be initiated by any interested party, from the Mayor’s office to heritage nonprofits and neighbors. The police then conduct a penal investigation whose results are presented to a court, which can adopt a complementary measure to restore the building.

[LINK] "Come hell or high water: The disaster scenario that is South Florida"

Omar El Akkad in The Globe and Mail on Friday wrote at length about the dire fate likely to await south Florida as oceans rise.

Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport is a strange-looking beast. Its south runway, unveiled last September as part of a $2-billion expansion project, rests like an overpass atop six lanes of highway traffic. Across the road, facing the vast turquoise sweep of the Atlantic Ocean, is Port Everglades – home to some of the largest cruise ships on Earth. Between them, the bustling terminals handle a significant portion of the human cargo that fuels Florida’s $70-billion-a-year tourism machine.

Easily lost in all this bigness is a temporary water feature – a large puddle by the side of the road near the foot of the elevated runway.

“This is just from rain,” says Lee Gottlieb, an environmental activist and 40-year resident of South Florida. “I don’t think it’s rained here in five, six days.”

But the rainwater pools anyway. Virtually all of South Florida is only a few feet above sea level. “They elevated the runway,” Mr. Gottlieb says, “but all the terminals …” he pauses, exasperated. “Obviously, if we had a major deluge – this is a flood area.”

It has become increasingly commonplace for politicians at every level of U.S. government – from small-town mayors to the President himself – to describe climate change as the single most important challenge of the coming century. Such rhetoric is buoyed by myriad crises, from sinking land mass in southern Louisiana to historic droughts in California. In low-lying Florida, the culprit is the rising sea level. Should the ocean crawl just one more foot up the edges of this peninsula – something that’s projected to happen in the next two decades, by some estimates – most of the canal systems that keep the saltwater out of the area’s drinking wells would cease to function. A few more feet, and entire towns suddenly turn neo-Venetian, the roads flooded, the infrastructure almost impossible to salvage.

[URBAN NOTE] "Quebec City makes bid for NHL expansion team official"

The Toronto Star's Paul McGran reports about Québec City's latest bid to host a NHL team again. I approve: Winnipeg is another hockey city of similar size, and it has been supporting its revived Jets. Why can't Québec City have the Nordiques again?

Quebec City officially wants back into the NHL while Las Vegas remains the odds-on favourite for an expansion team as the league’s deadline for downpayment from interested groups expired on Monday.

Groups from Toronto, Seattle and Portland were silent about their prospects. Investors with those groups might have been scared off by the $10 million (U.S.) downpayment — $2 million of it non-refundable — required to start the process.

The league is expected to have an announcement “later in the week” a source told the Star, and there remains a possibility that one more city — perhaps Seattle — may backdoor its way into the process.

Media giant Quebecor tweeted to confirm its bid and said a cheque had been given to the league on behalf of a city with an NHL-ready rink scheduled to open in September, the 18,259-capacity Videotron Arena.

“We confirm that we submitted our candidacy for the ‪#NHL expansion process in order to bring the ‪#Nordiques back to ‪#Québec City,” read the company’s tweet.

[AH] "What If Voyager Had Explored Pluto?"

Alan Stern's speculations at the New Horizons website as to what might have happened if Voyager 1 did visit Pluto in 1986 are worth noting. Much of the science that was accomplished by New Horizons would still be achieved by the earlier probe, but technological and observational issues would have hampered things.

Across flights launched in 1977 and spanning the entirety of the 1980s, Voyagers 1 and 2 performed the historic, first detailed reconnaissance of our solar system’s four giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus). The essentially identical Voyagers were launched with a core mission to explore the Jupiter and Saturn systems, and each spacecraft carried a powerful and diverse scientific instrument suite. After Saturn, Voyager 2 was tasked with reconnoitering Uranus and Neptune during an extended mission.

Although Pluto’s orbital position relative to Neptune made it impossible for Voyager 2 to travel to it from Neptune, Voyager 1 actually could have reached Pluto after its Saturn flyby, had it been targeted to do so. In fact, NASA and the Voyager project actually considered this option, but eliminated it in 1980 – going instead with the very exiting but lower-risk opportunity to investigate Saturn’s large, scientifically enticing, cloud-enshrouded and liquid-bearing moon Titan.

But if Voyager 1 had been sent to Pluto, it would have arrived in the spring of 1986, just after Voyager 2’s exploration of Uranus that January. As New Horizons approaches Pluto in 2015, it’s fun to think what we might have found almost 30 years ago had Voyager 1 - rather than New Horizons - been first to Pluto.

[. . .]

Voyager 1 carried a broad battery of cameras, spectrometers, plasma experiments, and even a sensitive magnetometer that it could have brought to bear on the exploration of Pluto. Because Pluto was almost exactly the same distance from the Sun in 1986 as Neptune was for the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989, it’s clear that the instruments aboard Voyager 1 would have worked well at Pluto. And because Voyager 1 is still working today, we know the spacecraft would likely have made the journey to Pluto successfully.

Although Voyager 1 would have been able to map Pluto and Charon well with its cameras, and detect Pluto’s atmosphere and study the atmosphere’s basic properties, the Voyager science team would not have known to plan observations of the small moons they would have discovered on close approach, nor would they have been able to explore Pluto nearly as thoroughly as the payload aboard New Horizons will.