Someone Just Killed One of the Last Remaining Jaguars in the US

One of just three jaguars known to be living in the U.S. was recently killed by poachers. Experts identified the jaguar's pelt in a recent photo and say it is Yo'oko, a male jaguar (Panthera onca) that was known to roam the Huachuca Mountains in southern Arizona, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

The rosette patterns on a jaguar's pelt are unique to each individual, a trait that allowed officials with the Arizona Game and Fish Department to identify Yo'oko's pelt in a photo sent to them from the Tucson-based Northern Jaguar Project. The endangered carnivore had been photographed near the Mexican border in Arizona several times in 2016 and 2017, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting endangered species.

It's unclear when Yo'oko died or who killed him, but the Arizona Daily Star reported today (June 28) that he may have been killed by a mountain lion hunter. A local rancher, Carlos Robles Elias, told the Arizona Daily Star that he heard from a friend that the jaguar was trapped and killed six months ago somewhere in Sonora, Mexico, near the U.S. border. [Photos: Elusive Jaguars Take Center Stage]

It's illegal to hunt or kill jaguars, which are an endangered species, and a jaguar may not have been what Yo'oko's killer was after. Elias told the Arizona Daily Star that he suspects a hunter was hired to trap a mountain lion, which are legal to kill in Arizona, but caught Yo'oko instead. Ranchers in the area go after mountain lions and other predators that eat calves and threaten the ranchers' livelihood, the Arizona Daily Star reported.             

The Northern Jaguar Project, a nonprofit working to conserve jaguars, has declined to share the source of the pelt photo. The group doesn’t want to risk losing the trust of ranchers and farmers in the area, whose support the group depends on for conserving endangered native species like jaguars, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

Seven jaguars have been photographed in the U.S. in the past 20 years, although in the last three years, experts have spotted only three of the wild cats, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. However, jaguars once lived throughout the Southwest, from Louisiana to Southern California. Hunting and habitat loss over the past 150 years has decimated the population and jaguars have been listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service since 1972.

s the World's First Nuclear Fusion Plant Finally on Track? the new question qrrive in the mind of the scientist<><<><><><>

The world's first nuclear fusion plant has now reached 50 percent completion, the project's director-general announced Wednesday (Dec. 6).

When it is operational, the experimental fusion plant, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), will circulate plasma in its core that is 10 times hotter than the sun, surrounded by magnets as cold as interstellar space.

Its goal? To fuse hydrogen atoms and generate 10 times more power than goes into it by the 2030s.

Ultimately,  ITER is meant to prove that fusion power can be generated on a commercial scale and is sustainable, abundant, safe and clean.

"With ITER and fusion energy, we have a chance to leave a powerful and positive legacy for future generations, instead of the current energy outlook," Bernard Bigot, director-general of ITER, told Live Science. [Top 10 Craziest Environmental Ideas]

Nuclear fusion, the same reaction that occurs in the heart of the sun, merges atomic nuclei to form heavier nuclei. Nuclear fusion has been a long-sought goal because fusion reactions generate far more energy than burning fossil fuels do. For example, a pineapple-size amount of hydrogen atoms offers as much energy as 10,000 tons of coal, according to a statement from the ITER project.

Unlike today's nuclear fission plants —which splits large atoms into smaller ones — a fusion plant would not generate high levels of radioactive waste. And in contrast to fossil fuel plants, fusion energy does not generate the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, or other pollutants. [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

ITER aims to use superconducting magnets to fuse hydrogen atoms and produce massive amounts of heat. Future nuclear fusion plants can then use this heat to drive turbines and generate electricity.

The experimental reactor will not use conventional hydrogen atoms, whose nuclei each consist of one proton. Instead, it will fuse deuterium, whose nuclei each possess one proton and one neutron, with tritium, whose nuclei each have one proton and two neutrons. Deuterium is easily extracted from seawater, while tritium will be generated inside the fusion reactor. The supply of these fuels is abundant, enough for millions of years at current global energy usage, according to ITER.

And unlike fission reactors, fusion is very safe: If fusion reactions get disrupted within a fusion plant, fusion reactors will simply shut down safely and without need of external assistance, the ITER project noted. In theory, fusion plants also use only a few grams of fuel at a time, so there is no possibility of a meltdown accident.

Unprecedented challenge, big delays

Although fusion energy has many potential benefits, it has proved extraordinarily difficult to achieve on Earth. Atomic nuclei require huge amounts of heat and pressure before they fuse together.

To overcome that huge challenge, ITER aims to heat hydrogen to about 270 million degrees Fahrenheit (150 million degrees Celsius), 10 times hotter than the core of the sun. This superheated hydrogen plasma will get confined and circulated inside a donut-shaped reactor called a tokamak, which is surrounded by giant superconducting magnets that control the electrically charged plasma. In order for the superconducting magnets to function, they must be cooled to minus 452 degrees F (minus 269 degrees C), as cold as interstellar space.

Industrial facilities around the world are manufacturing 10 million components for the reactor. The reactor is often billed as the most complicated piece of engineering ever built. For example, magnets more than 55 feet high (17 meters) must get fitted together with a margin of error of less than 0.04 inches (1 millimeter).

"So many of the technologies involved are really at the cutting edge," Bigot said. "We are pushing the boundaries in many fields – cryogenics, electromagnetics, even the use of giant tooling devices. Cooling 10,000 tons of superconducting magnet material to minus 269 degrees, for example, is unprecedented in scale."

A scientific partnership of 35 countries is building ITER in southern France. All members share in ITER's technology, and they receive equal access to the intellectual property and innovations that come from the effort.

The idea of a scientific partnership to build a fusion plant was first conceived at the 1985 Geneva Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The ITER project began in earnest in 2007, and was originally due to be completed in 10 years for $5.6 billion. However, the project is more than a decade behind schedule, and its estimated cost has ballooned to about $22 billion.

"When the original ITER project was established and agreed upon by members, their understanding was that the design was nearly complete and ready for construction, and that wasn't even close to being accurate," said William Madia, vice president at Stanford University, who led an independent review of ITER in 2013.

Bigot took over the troubled project in 2015. "It's making better progress for sure," Madia, a former director of the Oak Ridge and Pacific Northwest national laboratories, told Live Science. "I'm a big supporter and fan of Bernard Bigot — I think he's done a good job. In two or maybe three more years, if he continues to make progress, we may see real changes in attitude regarding ITER."

Circulating plasma

ITER is now halfway toward its initial goal of circulating plasma.

"It is definitely a big milestone for us," Bigot said.

Bigot said ITER remains on schedule for first plasma in 2025. "When we set that schedule in November 2015, we had many skeptics," Bigot said. "This schedule has no 'float' or contingency, meaning it is the best technically achievable schedule. This means we are constantly working to anticipate and mitigate risks that could cause additional delay or cost. It is not easy. But in the past two years, we have met every milestone, and we remain on track. We have also learned a lot about working as a team. This gives us confidence as we face the remaining 50 percent."

The final goal, of course, is not just circulating plasma, but fusing deuterium and tritium to create a "burning" plasma that generates significantly more energy than goes into it. The ITER tokamak should generate 500 megawatts of power, while commercial fusion plants would house larger reactors to generate 10 to 15 times more power. A 2,000-megawatt fusion plant would supply 2 million homes with electricity, the according to a statement.. [Quiz: The Science of Electricity]

"Optimistically, they'll get a burning plasma in the 2030s," Madia said.

If the project proves successful, ITER scientists predict that fusion plants may start coming online as soon as 2040, with a 2 gigawatt fusion plant built to last 60 years or more, according to the statement. The capital costs of building a nuclear fusion plant should be similar to those of current nuclear fission plants ― about $5 billion per gigawatt. At the same time, nuclear fusion plants just use deuterium and tritium, and so avoid "the costs of mining and enriching uranium, or the costs of caring for and disposing of radioactive waste," Bigot said.

Although building a nuclear fusion plant costs more than building a fossil fuel plant, "fossil fuel costs are very high, and fuel costs for fusion are negligible, so over the life of the plant, we expect it will average out," Bigot said.

At the same time, fossil fuels have costs other than financial ones. "The huge cost of fossil fuels is in the environmental impacts, whether due to mining, pollution or release of greenhouse gases," Bigot said. "Fusion is carbon-free."

Nuclear Fusion Power Could Be Here by 2030, One Company Says

A private nuclear-fusion company has heated a plasma of hydrogen to 27 million degrees Fahrenheit  (15 million degrees Celsius)  in a new reactor for the first time — hotter than the core of the sun.

UK-based Tokamak Energy says the plasma test is a milestone on its quest to be the first in the world to produce commercial electricity from fusion power, possibly by 2030.

The company, which is named after the vacuum chamber that contains the fusion reaction inside powerful magnetic fields, announced the creation of the superhot plasma inside its experimental ST40 fusion reactor in early June.

The successful test – the highest plasma temperature achieved so far by Tokamak Energy – means the reactor will now be prepared next year for a test of an even hotter plasma, of more than 180 million degrees F (100 million degrees C).

That will put the ST40 reactor within the operating temperatures needed for controlled nuclear fusion; the company plans to build a further reactor by 2025 that will produce several megawatts of fusion power.

"It's been really exciting," Tokamak Energy co-founder David Kingham told Live Science. "It was very good to see the data coming through and being able to get the high-temperature plasmas — probably beyond what we were hoping for." [Science Fact or Fiction? The Plausibility of 10 Sci-Fi Concepts]

Tokamak Energy is one of several privately funded companies racing to create a working fusion reactor that can supply electricity to the grid, perhaps years before the mid-2040s, when the ITER fusion reactor project in France is expected to even achieve its "first plasma."

It could be another decade after that before the experimental ITER reactor is ready to create sustained nuclear fusion — and even then, the reaction will not be used to generate any electricity.

Star in a jar

The nuclear fusion of hydrogen into the heavier element helium is the main nuclear reaction that keeps our sun and other stars burning for billions of years — which is why a fusion reactor is sometimes likened to a "star in a jar."

Nuclear fusion also takes place inside powerful thermonuclear weapons, also known as hydrogen bombs, where hydrogen is heated to fusion temperatures by plutonium fission devices, resulting in an explosion hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than a fission bomb.  

Earthbound controlled fusion projects like ITER and the Tokamak Energy reactors will also fuse hydrogen fuel, but at much higher temperatures and lower pressures than exist inside the sun.

Proponents of nuclear fusion say it could make many other types of electricity generation obsolete, by producing large amounts of electricity from relatively small amounts of the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, which are relatively abundant in ordinary seawater.

"Fifty kilograms [110 lbs.] of tritium and 33 kilograms [73 lbs.] of deuterium would produce a gigawatt of electricity for a year," while the amount of heavy hydrogen fuel in the reactor at any one time would be only a few grams, Kingham said.

That’s enough energy to power more than 700,000 average American homes, according to figures from the US Energy Information Administration.

Existing nuclear-fission plants generate electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions, but they are fueled by radioactive heavy elements like uranium and plutonium, and create highly radioactive wastethat must be carefully handled and stored. [5 Everyday Things That Are Radioactive]

In theory, fusion reactors could produce far less radioactive waste than fission reactors, while their relatively small fuel needs mean that nuclear meltdowns like the Chernobyl disaster or Fukushima accident would be impossible, according to the ITER project.

However, veteran fusion researcher Daniel Jassby, who was once a physicist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, has warned that ITER and other proposed fusion reactors will still create significant amounts of radioactive waste.

Road to nuclear fusion

The ST40 reactor and future reactors planned by Tokamak Energy use a compact spherical tokamak design, with an almost round vacuum chamber instead of the wider donut shape being used in the ITER reactor, Kingham said.

A critical advance was the use of high-temperature superconducting magnets to create the powerful magnetic fields needed to keep the superhot plasma from damaging the reactor walls, he said.

The 7-foot-tall (2.1 meters) electromagnets around the Tokamak Energy reactor were cooled by liquid helium to operate at minus 423.67 degrees F (minus 253.15 degrees C).

The use of advanced magnetic materials gave the Tokamak Energy reactor a significant advantage over the ITER reactor design, which would use power-hungry electromagnets cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, Kingham said.

Other investment-funded fusion projects include reactors being developed General Fusion, based in British Colombia and TAE Technologies, based in California.

A Washington-based company, Agni Energy, has also reported early experimental success with yet a different approach to controlled nuclear fusion, called "beam-target fusion," Live Science reported earlier this week.

One of the most advanced privately funded fusion projects is the compact fusion reactor being developed by U.S.-based defense and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin at its Skunk Works engineering division in California.

The company says a 100-megawatt fusion reactor, capable of powering 100,000 homes, could be small enough to put on a truck trailer and be driven to wherever it is needed.

Beam of Invisibility' Could Hide Objects Using Light

Once thought of as the province of only "Star Trek" or "Harry Potter," cloaking technologies could become a reality with a specially designed material that can mask itself from other forms of light when it is hit with a "beam of invisibility," according to a new study.

Theoretically, most "invisibility cloaks" would work by smoothly guiding light waves around objects so the waves ripple along their original trajectories as if nothing were there to obstruct them. Previous work found that cloaking devices that redirect other kinds of waves, such as sound waves, are possible as well.

But the new study's  researchers, from at the Technical University of Vienna, have developed a different strategy to render an object invisible — using a beam of invisibility. [Now You See It: 6 Tales of Invisibility in Pop Culture]

Complex materials such as sugar cubes are opaque because their disorderly structures scatter light around inside them multiple times, said study senior author Stefan Rotter, a theoretical physicist at the Technical University of Vienna.

"A light wave can enter and exit the object, but will never pass through the medium on a straight line," Rotter said in a statement. "Instead, it is scattered into all possible directions."

With their new technique, Rotter and his colleagues did not want to reroute the light waves.

"Our goal was to guide the original light wave through the object, as if the object was not there at all. This sounds strange, but with certain materials and using our special wave technology, it is indeed possible," study co-author Andre Brandstötter, a theoretical physicist at the Technical University of Vienna, said in the statement.

The concept involves shining a beam, such as a laser, onto a material from above to pump it full of energy. This can alter the material's properties, making it transparent to other wavelengths of light coming in from the side.

"To achieve this, a beam with exactly the right pattern has to be projected onto the material from above — like from a standard video projector, except with much higher resolution," study lead author Konstantinos Makris, now at the University of Crete in Greece, said in a statement.

The pattern that is projected onto an object to render it invisible must correspond perfectly to the inner irregularities of that item that usually scatters light, the researchers said.

"Every object we want to make transparent has to be irradiated with its own specific pattern, depending on the microscopic details of the scattering process inside," Rotter said in a statement. "The method we developed now allows us to calculate the right pattern for any arbitrary scattering medium."

Rotter and his colleagues are now carrying out experiments to see whether their idea will actually work. "We think that an experiment would be easiest to perform in acoustics," Rotter told Live Science. For instance, loudspeakers could generate sound waves to make a tube "transparent" to other forms of sound.

"For me, personally, the most surprising aspect is that this concept works at all," Rotter said. "There may be many more surprises when digging deeper along these lines."

Eventually, similar research could also experiment with light, he said. Such work could have applications in telecommunication networks, Rotter said. "It is clear, however, that considerable work is still required to get this from the stage of fundamental research to practical applications," Rotter said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Sept. 8 in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

For nutrition security: On undernourishment. . .

The UN’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report for 2017 has important pointers to achieve nutrition policy reform. At the global level, the five agencies that together produced the assessment found that the gains achieved on food security and better nutrition since the turn of the century may be at risk. Although absolute numbers of people facing hunger and poor nutrition have always been high, there was a reduction in the rate of undernourishment since the year 2000. That has slowed from 2013, registering a worrying increase in 2016. The estimate of 815 million people enduring chronic food deprivation in 2016, compared to 775 million in 2014, is depressing in itself, but more important is the finding that the deprivation is even greater among people who live in regions affected by conflict and the extreme effects of climate change. In a confounding finding, though, the report says that child under-nutrition rates continue to drop, although one in four children is still affected by stunting. These are averages and do not reflect the disparities among regions, within countries and between States. Yet, the impact of the economic downturn, many violent conflicts, fall in commodity export revenues, and failure of agriculture owing to drought and floods are all making food scarce and expensive for many. They represent a setback to all countries trying to meet the Sustainable Development Goal on ending hunger and achieving food security and improved nutrition.

India’s efforts at improving access to food and good nutrition are led by the National Food Security Act. There are special nutritional schemes for women and children operated through the States. In spite of such interventions, 14.5% of the population suffers from undernourishment, going by the UN’s assessment for 2014-16. At the national level, 53% of women are anaemic, Health Ministry data show. What is more, the Centre recently said it had received only 3,888 complaints on the public distribution system (PDS) over a five-year period. All this shows that the Centre and State governments are woefully short on the commitment to end undernourishment. Institutions such as the State Food Commissions have not made a big difference either. Distributing nutritious food as a public health measure is still not a political imperative, while ill-conceived policies are making it difficult for many to do this. The report on nutritional deficiency should serve as an opportunity to evaluate the role played by the PDS in bringing about dietary diversity for those relying on subsidised food. In a report issued two years ago on the role played by rations in shaping household and nutritional security, the NITI Aayog found that families below the poverty line consumed more cereals and less milk compared to the affluent. Complementing rice and wheat with more nutritious food items should be the goal.

Reduce, segregate: On plastic ban

We need substitutes for plastic, incentives to re-use, and better waste disposal.

Maharashtra’s ban on several consumer articles made of plastic, introduced after a three-month notice period to industry and users, is an extreme measure. It is naturally disruptive, and Mumbai, famed for its resilience in the face of urban challenges, is trying to adapt quickly. Today, stemming the plastic tide is a national imperative. India hosted this year’s World Environment Day and Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a high-profile pledge, to international acclaim, that it would do away with all single-use plastics by 2022. This goal is not yet backed by an action plan so that State governments and local bodies can be in sync. Worldwide, the problem has got out of hand, with only 9% of about nine billion tonnes of plastic produced getting recycled. India has an uninspiring record when it comes to handling waste. It has patchy data on volumes, and even less on what it recycles. This lackadaisical approach is at odds with its ambitious goals. Quite simply, if the Centre and the States had got down to dealing with the existing regulations on plastic waste management and municipal solid waste, a ban would not even have become necessary. Specifications for the recycling of different types of plastics were issued two decades ago by the Bureau of Indian Standards.

To address the global concern that the bulk of India’s plastic waste — estimated officially at 26,000 tonnes a day — is being dumped in the oceans, there has to be an effort on a war footing to segregate it at source. The Urban Development Secretary in each State, who heads the monitoring committee under the rules, should be mandated to produce a monthly report on how much plastic waste is collected, including details of the types of chemicals involved, and the disposal methods. Such compulsory disclosure norms will maintain public pressure on the authorities, including the State Pollution Control Boards. But segregation at source has not taken off, as there is little awareness, official support or infrastructure. Even bulk generators such as shopping malls, hotels and offices do not abide by the law. Priority, therefore, should be given to stop the generation of mixed waste, which prevents recovery of plastics. Companies covered by extended producer responsibility provisions must be required to take back their waste. In parallel, incentives to reduce the use of plastic carry bags, single-use cups, plates and cutlery must be in place. Retailers must be required to switch to paper bags. Potentially, carry bag production using cloth can create more jobs than machines using plastic pellets. What needs to be underscored is that plastics became popular because they are inexpensive, can be easily produced and offer great convenience. But, as the UN Environment Programme notes, their wild popularity has turned them into a scourge. Consumers will be ready to make the switch, but they need good alternatives.

Make or break?: On BJP’s Bihar allies

It makes no sense to save the worst for last. The allies of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Bihar, the Janata Dal (United) and the Lok Janshakti Party, have their own reasons for pushing for an early agreement on seat-sharing for the Lok Sabha election next year. Unless the BJP is willing to sacrifice some of the seats it won in 2014, it is unlikely to be able to accommodate the JD(U). The LJP does not want to be squeezed out of its six seats, and the JD(U) will not be happy if it is given seats solely on the basis of its performance in the last Lok Sabha election, when it won from just two of the 40 constituencies. For the BJP to retain all its current allies, it must consider contesting fewer seats than the 22 seats it won in the last election. That is not easy to do, and there is a real possibility of the alliance breaking on the seat-sharing issue. After frequently switching electoral partners, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar does not enjoy high political credibility despite his efforts to couch opportunism in idealistic garb. If he is unable to tie up the alliance issue, Mr. Kumar may well become isolated in Bihar. The BJP’s hand will only be strengthened the closer it gets to the Lok Sabha election, as the JD(U) will have fewer options. The national party may actually fancy its chances in a triangular fight as in 2014: leaving the JD(U) in the lurch might not be bad as a political tactic.

The JD(U) was the senior partner of the alliance in Bihar until Mr. Kumar broke away on the issue of Narendra Modi being named the prime ministerial candidate in 2014. But after its spectacular victory in 2014, the BJP feels it is on the ascendant in Bihar. Only a mahagathbandhan with the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress allowed the JD(U) to make a comeback in 2015. Political manoeuvres have allowed Mr. Kumar to continue as Chief Minister as he alternately took sides against communalism and corruption, but the JD(U) is no longer the largest party in Bihar. The demand that the alliance fight the Lok Sabha election under Mr. Kumar is but a faint stab at regaining the JD(U)’s pre-2014 primacy in relation to the BJP. But while the JD(U) wants an understanding to be reached without loss of time, the BJP would like to put it off to the extent possible. BJP leader and Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi sought to downplay the differences, saying “when hearts have met” sharing seats was no big deal. But if there is one lesson in politics, it is that cold calculations of the mind always trump spontaneous emotions of the heart. Even if the JD(U) forces a decision in the short term, the seat-sharing may not be to its satisfaction.