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Business Recorder
14-06-2025
- Business Recorder
The Indus under siege
The Egyptian and Indus Valley civilizations, though separated by the chasm of time and geography, are linked by the remarkable parallels in their histories. These ancient societies flourished under the lifeblood of their respective rivers—the Nile in Egypt and the Indus in South Asia—both of which nurtured their existence and fueled their development. The Nile and the Indus were not merely rivers; they were the arteries of thriving civilizations, ensuring agricultural success, enabling trade, and forming the bedrock of their prosperity. For ancient Egyptians, the Nile was indispensable. It enriched their lands with fertile soil, sustained complex irrigation systems, and provided reliable transportation. However, the Nile's importance extended beyond the practical — it became the spiritual essence of their civilization. The Egyptians revered the river as a divine gift, integral to their identity and central to their beliefs and rituals. As historians from institutions such as the Carnegie Museum of Natural History have noted, the Nile influenced every aspect of Egyptian life, making it not just a source of sustenance but also a spiritual anchor. Even today, Egyptians honor the river's origins at Lake Victoria and Lake Tana, often referred to as the 'mothers of the Nile.' Visiting these lakes has become a cultural tradition, a testament to the unbroken bond between the people and their cherished river. The Indus River (Sindhu) held an equally pivotal role in shaping the Indus Valley Civilization and, later, the culture of Sindh, now a province of Pakistan. Like the Nile, the Indus provided the foundation for advanced agricultural practices, the development of bustling urban centers, and robust trade networks. The very name 'Sindh' derives from the ancient Sanskrit word Sindhu, meaning 'river,' underscoring how deeply the region's identity is tied to this waterway. The Indus originates from the sacred Lake Mansarovar in Tibet, yet unlike Egyptians, who honour the Nile's sources, Sindhis have not developed cultural or spiritual traditions around the origins of their river. Nevertheless, Sindhis have consistently demonstrated their devotion to protecting the Indus. A vivid example of this commitment was witnessed during the relentless protests and unwavering resolve to seek agreed water share in accordance with the 1991 Water Accord. The protests proved determination to safeguard the health and flow of the river. This unity and dedication are a powerful reminder of how deeply the Indus is intertwined with their cultural and economic survival. However, in a tragic and alarming turn of events, India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) on April 24, 2025, escalating tensions over water rights. The treaty, brokered by the World Bank in 1960, has long been a cornerstone of water-sharing agreements between India and Pakistan, governing the use of the Indus and its tributaries. Yet, the geography of the Indus poses a complex challenge: the river flows for approximately 500 kilometers through the Ladakh region, which is under Indian control. According to the IWT, India is permitted to store up to 0.25 million acre-feet (MAF) of water for general and power storage in the Ladakh region, but recent developments indicate plans far exceeding these limits. Over the years, India has constructed several hydropower projects on the Indus in Ladakh, including Nimoo Bazgo and Chutak, with capacities of 45 MW and 44 MW, respectively. Now, India has unveiled plans for 10 new mega hydropower projects in Ladakh, including Achinthang-Sanjak, Parfila, Sunit (Batalik), and Khalsti. These projects not only exceed the storage capacities allowed under the treaty but also raise significant concerns about the diversion and reduction of water flow into Pakistan. Perhaps even more troubling is India's development of a 45-kilometer inland water transport route on the Indus in Ladakh, stretching from Upshi village to Shey village (NW-46). This project involves constructing barrages to maintain water levels, with one weir already completed at Ugu village. While these initiatives are framed as efforts to improve transportation and energy production, their strategic implications cannot be overlooked. The question that arises is whether Ladakh truly needs such projects. Ladakh is one of the most sparsely populated regions in India, with a thinly distributed population that experiences high energy losses during transmission. During winter, the Indus often freezes, rendering hydropower projects ineffective. On the other hand, Ladakh is uniquely positioned to harness solar energy, receiving over 300 sunny days annually. Leh, the capital of Ladakh, enjoys more than 320 clear, sunny days each year, making the region an ideal location for solar energy generation. With an average output of 5.29 kWh/kWp daily, Ladakh has the potential to generate significantly more solar energy than areas like Delhi, which average 4.0 kWh/kWp. Yet, despite this abundant solar wealth, India's focus on hydropower and water transport projects on the Indus appears to serve a different agenda. This agenda became starkly evident in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's speech on May 12, 2025, in which he declared that 'water and blood cannot flow together,' vowing to reduce the Indus River's flow into Pakistan to zero. This chilling statement, combined with the expansion of hydropower and inland water transport projects, signals an intent to weaponize the river as part of an economic and strategic campaign against Pakistan. If fully implemented, these plans could reduce the Indus's flow by over 23 MAF, a catastrophic blow to Pakistan's agriculture, economy, and water security. Such an outcome would have consequences far graver than the Six Canal issue, threatening the very survival of millions in Sindh and Pakistan as a whole. In the face of this looming crisis, the question is whether the Sindhi people, who have so valiantly defended the Indus in the past, can extend their resistance beyond their borders. Can they take their protests beyond the Sukkur Barrage all the way to Frano, the last Pakistani village where the Indus crosses into Pakistan from India? Can they draw inspiration from the Egyptians, who have guarded the Nile all the way to Lake Victoria, and take similar action to protect the Indus up to Lake Mansarovar-China? This is not merely a battle for water; it is a battle for survival, sovereignty, and the preservation of a civilization's heritage. The Sindhis must now rise with the same unity and determination they showed during protests over the just and fair water distribution as agreed per Water Accord 1991. The Indus has been their cradle of civilization, the source of their culture, and the foundation of their identity. To safeguard its flow is to safeguard their future. The Indus River has sustained life and nurtured civilizations for millennia. Now, it is calling on the Sindhis to defend it once more—not just for themselves but for future generations of Pakistan who will depend on its life-giving waters. Let this be a rallying cry for action, for resilience, and for the enduring spirit of a people who have always stood by their river. Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
CairoScene
05-06-2025
- Science
- CairoScene
Ancient Pigment Egyptian Blue Revived by US Researchers
Researchers at Washington State University have revived Egyptian blue—the world's first synthetic pigment. Jun 05, 2025 A team of researchers from Washington State University, in collaboration with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute, has successfully recreated Egyptian blue, the oldest known synthetic pigment in the world. Originally developed over 5,000 years ago, the pigment was commonly used in ancient Egyptian art, tombs, and architecture. The scientists tested 12 different methods to reproduce the pigment, adjusting materials and heating times to mirror ancient techniques. They discovered that a rich, vivid blue could be achieved even when only half of the mixture's colour-bearing component was used—challenging previous assumptions about how the pigment was made. Small variations in temperature and ingredients also caused the colour to shift, from pale greens to intense blues and even greys. Beyond its historic value, Egyptian blue has properties that make it relevant for modern technology. It absorbs visible light and emits infrared radiation, which can be applied in biomedical imaging, telecommunications, and anti-counterfeiting technologies. The recreated pigment is now on display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Dinosaurs didn't roar like the movies; Here's how they really sounded
(WHTM) — No human has ever heard a dinosaur's roar, so most people believe the iconic film series Jurassic Park and Jurassic World correctly depict how they communicated. However, according to experts, most dinosaurs sounded completely different than how they were portrayed in the movies. BBC says there is no simple answer to what dinosaurs sounded like, as they evolved into countless shapes and sizes, but scientists have used fossils to reconstruct vocal organs to recreate how they could have sounded. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now In one study conducted by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, paleontologists dug up a nearly complete skull of a Parasaurolophus and used computer technology to simulate how the creature sounded. To listen to how the creature may have sounded, click here. 'I would describe the sound as otherworldly,' Tom Williamson told BBC, who was one of those who worked on the dig and is now curator of palaeontology at the museum. 'It sent chills through my spine, I remember.' In an interview with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, paleontologist Dr. Julia Clarke of the University of Texas explained that instead of open-mouthed roars, scientists theorize that many dinosaurs may have produced closed-mouth vocalizations. 'Animals produce closed-mouth vocalizations by inflating their esophagus (the tube that connects the throat and stomach) or tracheal pouches (pouches on their windpipe) while keeping their mouth closed, producing something comparable to a low-pitched swooshing, growling, or cooing sound,' said Dr. Clarke. According to Vox, the most notable dinosaur sounds from the Jurassic Park series were mainly constructed using combinations of different types of mammal sounds, including tigers, lions, koalas, donkeys, dolphins, and elephants. Dr. Clarke adds that T-Rexes did not typically open their mouths and roar like the movies depicted. 'The Jurassic Park films have got it wrong,' said Dr. Clarke in another interview with BBC. 'A lot of the early reconstructions of dinosaurs have been influenced by what we associate with scary noises today from large mammalian predators like lions. In the Jurassic Park movies, they did use some crocodilian vocalisations for the large dinosaurs, but on screen, the dinosaurs have their mouths open like a lion roaring. They wouldn't have done that, especially not just before attacking or eating their prey. Predators don't do that – it would advertise to others nearby that you have got a meal, and it would warn their prey they are there.' Jurassic World: Rebirth is expected to release on July 2, 2025. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Times
13-04-2025
- General
- New York Times
Standing Up for Invasive Species
Mason Heberling, an invasion biologist and botany curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, crouched down in a woodland park just outside the city and swept away the leaf litter. It was March and the forest looked dormant. The trees were bare, the shrubs brown. But there, under the dry leaves, one plant was already forming perky green rosettes: garlic mustard. It wasn't the cheerful harbinger of spring it seemed. 'It's taking in sunlight and doing stuff before the other plants it's competing with are even awake,' Heberling said. Native to Eurasia, garlic mustard has other advantages over local flora. Caterpillars can't digest it, deer don't like it and the toxic compounds it releases inhibit fungal networks supporting other plants. Aided by climate change, garlic mustard has spread rapidly through the Northeast and into the Midwest. One nature conservancy website calls it an 'aggressive invader' waging 'chemical warfare' on unsuspecting natives. And to think, this pitiless conquistador came to North America as a humble kitchen herb, deliberately imported by European settlers for its piquant flavor. Its heart-shaped leaves smell sharp but comforting, like pasta sauce simmering on the stove. 'It makes great pesto,' Heberling conceded. 'Uprooted: Plants Out of Place,' a new exhibition at the Carnegie, addresses the human behaviors driving the spread of invasive species and how context shapes our perceptions: a weed here is a medicine there. 'Itadori means to take away pain,' said the artist Koichi Watanabe, whose photographs of itadori (Japanese knotweed) feature in the exhibition. In Japan, the plant is sometimes used as a salve for bug bites. Elsewhere, including the United States and Britain, knotweed is widely considered a vegetable plague. The Carnegie show is the latest expression of a larger surge of interest in invasive species among artists, scientists and historians who are collectively rethinking our relationships with troublesome organisms. Banu Subramaniam, an interdisciplinary scholar originally trained as a biologist, was among the first to suggest that the language surrounding invasives is shot through with fear of the 'other.' 'I think part of the reason why they're so reviled is that we see in them something of our own impact on ecosystems,' said Yota Batsaki, the executive director of Dumbarton Oaks, the Harvard research center in Washington, D.C., where she leads the Plant Humanities Initiative. In light of this growing awareness, biologists have revised the common names of some invasive species to emphasize traits other than their origins. A wasp formerly known as the Asian giant hornet, a species with a penchant for decapitating entire hives of honeybees, is now the northern giant hornet, a nod to its presence in Washington State. 'Five years ago, I didn't really see it as that important,' Heberling said of these efforts. 'I saw it as more of a distraction.' What seemed like mere semantics took on new urgency during the Covid-19 pandemic, however, when Heberling noticed invasive plants from Asia provoking racist comments. 'Making some of these small changes in what we call a particular plant can change how people think about that plant and how people think about the problem,' he said. Visual artists are introducing these conversations, long confined to scientific papers and scholarly journals, to broader audiences of museum and gallery goers. Some artists say it's a mind-set problem. What would happen if we saw unkillable weeds as resilient survivors? 'People just don't know what to do with monstrosities,' said Precious Okoyomon, an artist and poet who frequently grows kudzu, Japanese knotweed and other reviled plants in living installations. 'I try and make a lot of space for them because they're not monstrosities. I believe they're miracles.' Invasive species, Okoyomon points out, frequently become scapegoats for human blunders. Before it became known as 'the vine that ate the South,' kudzu was embraced as a remedy to the ravages of soil erosion across the former Cotton Belt. 'We can't just use things to try and cover up environmental impacts, and then call them menaces when they don't work,' said Okoyomon, who uses they/them pronouns. With projects like 'Theory of a Curve,' a garden of invasive and native plants at Cornell University, the artist hopes to dispel the fear surrounding 'alien' species. 'When we free ourselves from these violent, mythmaking languages and just see things for really what they are, we can start to understand them a bit better,' they said. 'We can work with them.' Other artists do just that, harvesting invasive species as raw materials. In the past year alone, there have been exhibitions from the artist Lisa Jevbratt, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara and her collaborator Helén Svensson, who dye wool with fennel, wisteria and other overabundant species on Santa Cruz Island, and the emerging New York artist Kay Kasparhauser, who derives pink pigment from the wings of spotted lanternflies, a species government officials say to squash on sight. Other artists have transformed honeysuckle, phragmites, tamarisk, reed canary grass and other invasive plants into handmade paper. The sheer abundance that makes invasives environmentally problematic is what makes them attractive to artists interested in sustainability. When Hyemin Son, a founding member of the South Korean artist collective Rice Brewing Sisters Club, visited Hawaii last year, she saw opportunity in the enormous heaps of gorilla ogo — an invasive seaweed from the Philippines — blanketing stretches of the Oahu shoreline. Gorilla ogo forms dense mats on Hawaiian reefs, killing the coral and driving away fish and other animals, including tourists. When she was invited to create a project for the Hawaii Triennial art exhibition (through May 4, at venues on three islands), Son partnered with Ikaika Bishop, a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and education specialist, to see if they could use the seaweed as a sculptural material. 'It's so available on the seashore, we wanted to do something with this as a resource,' Son said. 'In Hawaiian culture, nothing is trash,' said Bishop, who's been trying to promote gorilla ogo as everything from a fertilizer to a food source. In the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation story, one of the earliest creatures is seaweed (limu). 'And so that's why for me it was uncomfortable viewing something like gorilla ogo as savage, invasive, unwanted. Because if you listen to the story and you believe in it, it's one of our oldest ancestors.' Son and Bishop mixed gorilla ogo with wheat paste and molded it onto chicken-wire forms to create undulating abstract sculptures. Suspended in the Davies Pacific Center in Honolulu, they form a lattice filtering the light streaming through the windows into dappled patterns on the floor. Invasive species are often seen as economic blights. The U.S. government spends tens of millions of dollars every year poisoning plants, electrocuting carp, shooting feral pigs and culling other invasives to protect crops, fisheries and endangered wildlife. Robert Zhao Renhui, a multimedia artist based in Singapore, is fascinated by the ethical complexities of exterminating one species to protect others. In 2018, Renhui traveled to Taipei, where he joined a brigade of volunteer citizens who spend their evenings trapping invasive lizards and frogs. 'What was interesting for me is that the people doing it genuinely love nature,' he said. 'They believe that this was needed to restore the original ecology of a native frog. I was interested in how the killing and the love were kind of mixed in together.' Perplexed by the violence, Renhui nonetheless remains neutral. 'I try to be really Zen,' he said. Each situation is so different, he added, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Other artists, like Okoyomon, oppose these programs on practical and philosophical grounds. Eradication is rarely successful, they said: 'It only begets more and more violence for us.' Okoyomon favors the introduction of other species, such as the insects that eat invasive plants in their native ranges, a method known as biocontrol. Among scientists, the wave of artistic projects on invasives has prompted mingled gratitude and unease. Heberling, the botanist in Pittsburgh, emphasized his 'immense respect' for various artists, but he worries that viewers might leave some exhibitions thinking invasion isn't an issue. 'I feel like some artistic and humanistic explorations of invasive species minimize the environmental concern,' he said. These woods could lose wildflowers, birds and other animals if invasive species spread unchecked, he said, gesturing to the forest outside Pittsburgh. Behind him, the garlic mustard simply kept doing what it does best: grow.
CBS News
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Kidsburgh Weekend Guide: March 21-23
Lots of fun things to do with your kids on this first official weekend of spring! Check out the highlights below and see the full weekend guide from Kidsburgh here . Wednesday, March 19 through Saturday, March 22: Just Between Friends Consignment Sale This weekend at the AHN Montour Sports Complex, come score amazing deals on used kids' clothing, toys, books and more. The fun includes an Easter Egg-Stravaganza on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. with an egg hunt, face painting, balloon art and visits with the big bunny himself. Find details about the sale here . (And hear about it here on the Kidsburgh Podcast.) Saturday, March 22: NatureFest at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. This event, which is included with admission, is the perfect way to explore the resources at the museum. The Carnegie Museum of Natural History's scientists, educators and community partners can't wait to teach families all about science. Browse the full schedule here and plan your day. Whether you're looking for family-friendly fun or a deep dive into land stewardship and invasive species research, there's programming for nature lovers of all ages. While this event is free, registration is suggested. Click here to learn more and register. Sunday, March 23: I AM WILD with the Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium at the Children's Museum, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. This event is a great chance to meet live animals who are visiting the museum from the zoo. Learn all about habitats and the lives of these animals while exploring the new exhibit, I AM WILD . This event is included with museum admission. Find more details here . KDKA is proud to partner with
