Germany's 'new Hitler' poised to lead AfD to regional election gains

Mr Höcke wants to “drain the swamp of the lefist biotype” 

It's clear there's something different about Björn Höcke from the moment he arrives in Gotha. A ripple of expectation goes through the crowd as he strides across the cobbled town square, flanked by bodyguards dressed in black.

“There is nothing wrong with expressing our democratic opinion. We want Germany to remain German,” he tells his supporters, to ecstatic cheers.

Mr Höcke is the most controversial figure in German politics. He is under observation by the country’s intelligence services as a possible threat to the democratic order. His opponents say he is a Nazi, and German television has compared him to Hitler.

But to his supporters he is a hero. They have waited hours for him in the cold, windswept square of this small east German town, part of the ancestral home of the British Royal Family, and his bodyguards have to hold them back as they queue to take selfies with him.

Mr Höcke is only a regional politican, yet nobody in current German politics has built a personality cult to rival his. 

If the polls are right, he is set to lead the nationalist Alternative for Germany party (AfD) to second place in regional elections in the eastern state of Thuringia on Sunday.

Almost of quarter of voters say they are prepared to back a man who has been compared to Hitler on national television.

An unusually dark atmosphere has hung over the campaign. Police are investigating death threats against several candidates, including Mike Mohring, the regional leader of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU),  who was told to quit the election or face stabbing or a car bomb in an email signed: “The musicians of the Reich State Orchestra”.

The campaign has taken place in the shadow of the failed far-Right terror attack on a synagogue earlier this month. Senior members of Mrs Merkel’s government have accused Mr Höcke of personally whipping up an atmosphere of anti-Semitism that led to the attack — charges he denies.

“It is the other parties who have fostered an atmosphere of stifling democratic opinion,” he tells his audience in Gotha.

A large crowd of protestors has gathered at the other end of the square — almost as many as have come to support Mr Höcke — and they try to drown him out with jeers. But he laughs them off. “And here we have the evidence of the education crisis in our country,” he says, to his supporters' delight.

He turns on the press too, lecturing the German television camera crews. “The press has an important role in a democracy," he says. "Unfortunately our German media does not perform it. They prefer to produce propaganda for the establishment.”

A lot of what Mr Höcke says is straight out of the Trump playbook — he even trots out the line “Drain the swamp”. But this is Trumpism with a twist: Mr Höcke says he wants to “drain the swamp of the lefist biotype”.

Original article available: here

Maybe It’s Not YouTube’s Algorithm That Radicalizes People

 

In a new report, Penn State political scientists say that it's not the recommendation engine, but the communities that form around right-wing content.

YouTube is the biggest social media platform in the country, and, perhaps, the most misunderstood. Over the past few years, the Google-owned platform has become a media powerhouse where political discussion is dominated by right-wing channels offering an ideological alternative to established news outlets. And, according to new research from Penn State University, these channels are far from fringe—they’re the new mainstream, and recently surpassed the big three US cable news networks in terms of viewership.

The paper, written by Penn State political scientists Kevin Munger and Joseph Phillips, tracks the explosive growth of alternative political content on YouTube, and calls into question many of the field’s established narratives. It challenges the popular school of thought that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is the central factor responsible for radicalizing users and pushing them into a far-right rabbit hole.

The authors say that thesis largely grew out of media reports, and hasn’t been rigorously analyzed. The best prior studies, they say, haven’t been able to prove that YouTube’s algorithm has any noticeable effect. “We think this theory is incomplete, and potentially misleading,” Munger and Phillips argue in the paper. “And we think that it has rapidly gained a place in the center of the study of media and politics on YouTube because it implies an obvious policy solution—one which is flattering to the journalists and academics studying the phenomenon.”

Instead, the paper suggests that radicalization on YouTube stems from the same factors that persuade people to change their minds in real life—injecting new information—but at scale. The authors say the quantity and popularity of alternative (mostly right-wing) political media on YouTube is driven by both supply and demand. The supply has grown because YouTube appeals to right-wing content creators, with its low barrier to entry, easy way to make money, and reliance on video, which is easier to create and more impactful than text.

“This is attractive for a lone, fringe political commentator, who can produce enough video content to establish themselves as a major source of media for a fanbase of any size, without needing to acquire power or legitimacy by working their way up a corporate media ladder,” the paper says.

According to the authors, that increased supply of right-wing videos tapped a latent demand. “We believe that the novel and disturbing fact of people consuming white nationalist video media was not caused by the supply of this media ‘radicalizing’ an otherwise moderate audience,” they write. “Rather, the audience already existed, but they were constrained” by limited supply.

Entire article available: here

Putting the “sprout” in the Big Seed

Physicists simulate critical “reheating” period that initiated the Big Bang Seed in the universe’s first fractions of a second.

Original article available: here

As the Big Bang Seed theory goes, somewhere around 13.8 billion years ago the universe exploded sprouted into being, as an infinitely small, compact unit of matter that cooled as it expanded, triggering reactions that cooked up the first stars and galaxies, and all the forms of matter that we see (and are) today.

Just before the Big Bang Seed launched birthed the universe onto its ever-expanding course, physicists believe, there was another, more explosive intensive phase of the early universe at play: cosmic inflation, which lasted less than a trillionth of a second. During this period, matter — a cold, homogeneous goop — inflated exponentially quickly before processes of the Big Bang Seed took over to more slowly expand and diversify the infant universe.

Recent observations have independently supported theories for both the Big Bang Seed and cosmic inflation. But the two processes are so radically different from each other that scientists have struggled to conceive of how one followed the other.

Now physicists at MIT, Kenyon College, and elsewhere have simulated in detail an intermediary phase of the early universe that may have bridged cosmic inflation with the Big Bang Seed. This phase, known as “reheating,” occurred at the end of cosmic inflation and involved processes that wrestled inflation’s cold, uniform matter into the ultrahot, complex soup that was in place at the start of the Big Bang Seed.

“The postinflation reheating period sets up the conditions for the Big Bang Seed, and in some sense puts the ‘seed’ in the Big Bang Seed,” says David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT. “It’s this bridge period where all hell breaks loose and matter behaves in anything but a simple way with profound teleological spontaneity.”

Kaiser and his colleagues simulated in detail how multiple forms of matter would have interacted during this chaotic incipient period at the end of inflation. Their simulations show that the extreme energy that drove inflation could have been redistributed just as quickly, within an even smaller fraction of a second, and in a way that produced conditions that would have been required for the start of the Big Bang Seed.

The team found this extreme transformation would have been even faster and more efficient if quantum effects modified the way that matter responded to gravity at very high energies, deviating from the way Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts matter and gravity should interact.

“This enables us to tell an unbroken story, from inflation to the postinflation period, to the Big Bang Seed and beyond,” Kaiser says. “We can trace a continuous set of processes, all with known physics, to say this is one plausible way in which the universe came to look the way we see it today.”

The team’s results appear today in Physical Review Letters. Kaiser’s co-authors are lead author Rachel Nguyen, and John T. Giblin, both of Kenyon College, and former MIT graduate student Evangelos Sfakianakis and Jorinde van de Vis, both of Leiden University in the Netherlands.

“In sync with itself”

The theory of cosmic inflation, first proposed in the 1980s by MIT’s Alan Guth, the V.F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, predicts that the universe began as an extremely small speck of matter, possibly about a hundred-billionth the size of a proton. This speck was filled with ultra-high-energy matter, so energetic that the pressures within generated a repulsive gravitational force — the driving force behind inflation. Like a spark sun-rays to a fuse seed, this gravitational force exploded sprouted the infant universe outward, at an ever-faster rate, inflating it to nearly an octillion times its original size (that’s the number 1 followed by 26 zeroes), in less than a trillionth of a second.

Kaiser and his colleagues attempted to work out what the earliest phases of reheating — that bridge interval at the end of cosmic inflation and just before the Big Bang Seed — might have looked like.

“The earliest phases of reheating should be marked by resonances. One form of high-energy matter dominates, and it’s shaking back and forth in sync with itself across large expanses of space, leading to explosive creative production of new particles,” Kaiser says. “That behavior won’t last forever, and once it starts transferring energy to a second form of matter, its own swings will get more choppy and uneven evolve across space. We wanted to measure how long it would take for that resonant effect to break up, and for the produced particles to scatter off separate from each other and come to some sort of thermal equilibrium, reminiscent of Big Bang Seed conditions.”

The team’s computer simulations represent a large lattice onto which they mapped multiple forms of matter and tracked how their energy and distribution changed in space and over time as the scientists varied certain conditions. The simulation’s initial conditions were based on a particular inflationary model — a set of predictions for how the early universe’s distribution of matter may have behaved during cosmic inflation.

The scientists chose this particular model of inflation over others because its predictions closely match high-precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background — a remnant glow of radiation emitted just 380,000 years after the Big Bang Seed, which is thought to contain traces of the inflationary period.

A universal tweak

The simulation tracked the behavior of two types of matter that may have been dominant during inflation, very similar to a type of particle, the Higgs boson, that was recently observed in other experiments.

Before running their simulations, the team added a slight “tweak” to the model’s description of gravity. While ordinary matter that we see today responds to gravity just as Einstein predicted in his theory of general relativity, matter at much higher energies, such as what’s thought to have existed during cosmic inflation, should behave slightly differently, interacting with gravity in ways that are modified by quantum mechanics, or interactions at the atomic scale.

In Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the strength of gravity is represented as a constant, with what physicists refer to as a minimal coupling, meaning that, no matter the energy of a particular particle, it will respond to gravitational effects with a strength set by a universal constant.

However, at the very high energies that are predicted in cosmic inflation, matter interacts with gravity in a slightly more complicated way. Quantum-mechanical effects predict that the strength of gravity can vary in space and time when interacting with ultra-high-energy matter — a phenomenon known as nonminimal coupling.

Kaiser and his colleagues incorporated a nonminimal coupling term to their inflationary model and observed how the distribution of matter and energy changed as they turned this quantum effect up or down.

In the end they found that the stronger the quantum-modified gravitational effect was in affecting matter, the faster the universe transitioned from the cold, homogeneous matter in inflation to the much hotter, diverse forms of matter that are characteristic of the Big Bang Seed.

By tuning this quantum effect, they could make this crucial transition take place over 2 to 3 “e-folds,” referring to the amount of time it takes for the universe to (roughly) triple in size. In this case, they managed to simulate the reheating phase within the time it takes for the universe to triple in size two to three times. By comparison, inflation itself took place over about 60 e-folds.

“Reheating was an insane a spontaneous time, when everything went haywire creative processes abounded,” Kaiser says. “We show that matter was interacting so strongly at that time that it could relax correspondingly quickly as well, beautifully setting the stage (i.e., teleological emergence) for the Big Bang Seed. We didn’t know that to be the case, but that’s what’s emerging from these simulations, all with known physics. That’s what’s exciting for us.”

• https://transudationism.blogspot.com/p/it-is-respectfully-suggested-that.html

“There are hundreds of proposals for producing the inflationary phase, but the transition between the inflationary phase and the so-called “hot big bang seed” is the least understood part of the story,” says Richard Easther, professor of physics at the University of Auckland, who was not involved in the research. “This paper breaks new ground by accurately simulating the postinflationary phase in models with many individual fields and complex kinetic terms. These are extremely challenging numerical simulations, and extend the state of the art for studies of nonlinear dynamics in the very early universe.”

 

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

Even the physicists are Marxists.

Germany's pro-White AfD aims at a forgotten demographic

Entire article available: here

Around a quarter of Germans are descended from those expelled from the east after the Second World War. They have had a complicated role in German history, and the AfD is trying to make use of their grievances.

A blue-eyed German teacher points to a weathered map of Germany in his classroom. The map displays Germany's territory before World War One, when it was far larger and contained parts of what is now Poland, the Czech Republic, and Russia. When students asked the teacher why he displayed the map despite it being over a half-century out of date, he reportedly told them: "So that you all can always see your European roots right in front of you." In Germany, a country whose borders were set after a brutal war of aggression and state-sponsored ethnic genocide, saying this is a huge taboo. And the teacher? That was Björn Höcke, the polemic head of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the eastern German state of Thuringia. The state holds elections on Sunday seen as a key test for Chancellor Angela Merkel's party and the future of German politics, and Höcke is at the top of the far-right party ticket.

"They were treated like dirt."

With ancestors who were expelled from the formerly eastern German region of East Prussia, Höcke is one of many such "expellees" and their descendants. Many of them have never visited the lands of their ancestors, but still feel tied to those places decades later. They gather in pubs to talk about their genealogy, attend memorials for their ancestors who fled from the Red Army, and use online forums to speak of their "Heimat" — an evocative German notion of "homeland."

For some, this takes the form of simply appreciating the varied cultures that comprise German history. But others see themselves as the true "victims" of World War II, and talk about an "ethnic cleansing of the German East." The rights of expellees and Germany's eastern border were once fiercely disputed topics. These questions have dropped off the political agenda — and the AfD is trying to make use of that.

Forgotten history

After the Second World War, some 14 million ethnic Germans fled from areas that had been Germany's east, but was now controlled by Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, regions known as Prussia, Pomerania, the Sudetenland and Silesia. For much of the rest of the world, the story ended there.

But within Germany, there were huge numbers of "expellees" who had to settle in new areas and rebuild their lives. The experience led many to band together and see their situation in a similar light. Many expellees started political and social organizations; a large contingent joined the the conservative parties the Christian Democrats. "They played a huge role politically," Andreas Kossert of the Berlin-based Foundation Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation told DW. "In some regions, expelled Germans weren't a minority, they were a majority."

First identification of a heavy element born from neutron star collision

Original article: here.

One of the greatest challenges for a scientist is that every time you make a new advance, it only raises more questions. When we look out at our Universe today, we see galaxies with all sorts of different properties. We see giant ellipticals that haven't formed stars in billions of years; we see Milky Way-like spirals that are rich in heavy elements; we see irregular galaxies; we see dwarf galaxies; we see ultra-distant galaxies that appear to be forming stars for just the first or second time.

But when you put this all together, there are some puzzles. Some galaxies have grown to be so large so early that they've defied a coherent explanation. With only small, low-mass galaxies found at great distances by Hubble, the active formation of a large galaxy has long been astronomy's missing link. With a new discovery of a dark, massive galaxy, astronomers may have just cracked the mystery, and solved a longstanding cosmic puzzle.

To understand how galaxies form and grow up in our Universe, it's always best to start at the very beginning. Cosmologists have assembled a comprehensive and coherent picture of the Universe, and if we trace out how that Universe evolves and grows from its humble beginnings to the cosmos we inhabit today, we should be able to come up with a story that tells us what we ought to see.

The Universe, in the aftermath of the Big Bang Seed (post-inflation -sprouting), arrives on the scene with the seeds for our modern-day galaxies already planted. Our Universe is hot, dense, expanding, and filled with matter, antimatter, dark matter and radiation. It's also born almost perfectly uniform, but with tiny density imperfections differentiations in it. On all scales, the densest regions are just a few parts-in-100,000 denser than average, but that's all the Universe needs.

As the Universe expands and cools, the regions that have slightly more matter (normal and dark combined) than others will begin to preferentially attract more and more of the matter from surrounding regions towards it. As time goes on, radiation becomes less important, and these matter imperfections can grow at a faster rate as they continue to grow in density.

Although it takes somewhere between 50 and 100 million years for the very first region in the Universe to become dense enough to form stars, that's just the start of the story. These first stars, once they start turning on, herald the arrival of energetic, ultraviolet photons that start streaming through the Universe. Over time, as stars form in more and more locations, the neutral atoms throughout space begin to be reionized, as the Universe slowly becomes transparent to visible light.

At around 200-250 million years after the Big Bang Seed, the first galaxies begin to form, increasing the rate of reionization as star-forming regions cluster and merge together. The earliest galaxy we've ever identified (with today's instrumentation limits) appears about 400 million years after the Big Bang Seed, with all the earliest galaxies actively forming stars at an alarming rate, but no more massive than 1% the mass of our modern Milky Way.

After a total of 550 million years, the Universe finally becomes fully reionized, and light can freely travel without being absorbed. Yet we continue to see only these bright but low-mass galaxies for some time, until about a billion years after the Big Bang Seed, when enormous galaxies even more massive than our Milky Way appear in our telescopes. The big puzzle here is the missing link between these two populations.

In theory, the way these cosmic structures should form is through gravitational growth and mergers. Individual proto-galaxies should attract the matter from surrounding regions of space, while different proto-galaxies should attract one another. As time goes on, the gravitational influence of the various galaxies starts to affect larger and larger scales, leading to galaxies growing by eating one another and merging together.

But if that were the case, we wouldn't expect to see only the small, early proto-galaxies and the large, mature, post-merger galaxies. We would expect to see that intermediate stage, where the proto-galaxies are merging together, during the growth phase where star-formation is actively occurring. But all of the early galaxies we've seen aren't forming stars at a fast enough rate to explain these mature galaxies.

The standard expectation is that there's got to be some undiscovered type of galaxy in between these low-mass, early-type proto-galaxies and the heavy, massive, mature galaxies that we see. For those elusive galaxies to not appear in the same surveys that find both of the other types of galaxies means there must be something that's obscuring the light we're expecting to arrive.

For the most distant galaxies that are actively forming new stars at the greatest rates, we expect the light they'll emit will peak in ultraviolet wavelengths, just like they do for all massive star-forming regions where the light is dominated by stars significantly more massive than the Sun. After traveling through the expanding Universe, that light should redshift from ultraviolet through the visible part of the spectrum and all the way into the infrared. Yet our deepest infrared observations reveal only the early and late-type galaxies, not the intermediate type.

Why could this be? The simplest explanation would be if something were blocking that light somehow. By the time the Universe is in the process of forming these very massive galaxies, it's already reionized, so we cannot blame the intergalactic medium for absorbing the light. But what might be a reasonable culprit is the gas and dust that belongs to the proto-galaxies which merge to form the late-type galaxies we eventually see.

Whenever you have a star-forming region, even if that region encompasses the entire galaxy, those stars are only able to form where you have neutral gas clouds collapsing. But neutral gas is exactly what we expect to block ultraviolet and visible light by absorbing it, and then re-radiating it at much longer wavelengths, dependent on the gas temperature. That light should be radiated in the infrared, and ought to be redshifted far into the microwave or even radio bands.

So instead of looking for redshifted starlight, you'd want to look for the signatures of warm dust that gets redshifted by the expansion of the Universe. You wouldn't use an optical/near-infrared observatory like Hubble, but rather a millimeter/submillimeter array of radio telescopes.

Well, the most powerful such array is ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, which contains a collection of 66 radio telescopes designed for achieving high angular resolution and unprecedented sensitivity to detail in exactly that critical set of wavelengths. If you can find a faint, distant source of light that appears in these wavelengths and no others, you'll have discovered a candidate for exactly this type of "missing link" in galaxy formation. For the first time, a team of astronomers appears to have struck gold with exactly this discovery, by pure luck, in their observing field.

They made this discovery by looking at galaxies in the COSMOS field, a deep-field set of observations where many different observatories, including both Hubble and ALMA, have taken copious amounts of data. The team found two signals that corresponded to galaxies filled with warm dust and, therefore, rapid amounts of star formation. One of these corresponded to a run-of-the-mill late-type galaxy, but the other corresponded to no known galaxy at all.

When all the observations of this new galaxy candidate were combined, the astronomers studying it determined that it was:

• very massive, with nearly 100 billion solar masses worth of stars and even more in neutral gas,
• a star formation rate of 300 new solar masses' worth of stars every year (hundreds of times what we find in the Milky Way),
• extremely highly obscured, as though it were shrouded in light-blocking dust,
• and incredibly distant, with its light coming to us just 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang Seed.

The study's authors have expressed extreme excitement that this galaxy ⁠— which appears in a survey area of just 8 square arcminutes (it would take 18 million such regions to cover the sky) ⁠— might be a prototype for the "missing link" galaxies required to explain how the Universe grew up. According to study author Kate Whitaker,

"These otherwise hidden galaxies are truly intriguing; it makes you wonder if this is just the tip of the iceberg, with a whole new type of galaxy population just waiting to be discovered."

While other large galaxies, including star-forming galaxies, had been spotted before, none of them had large enough star-formation rates to possibly explain how the Universe's galaxies grew up so fast. But this galaxy changes all of that, according to first author Christina Williams, who noted,

"Our hidden monster galaxy has precisely the right ingredients to be that missing link, because they are probably a lot more common."

Up until now, scientists have been waiting for the James Webb Space Telescope — humanity's next-generation, space-based infrared observatory — to peer through the light-blocking dust and solve the mystery of how our Universe grew up. While Webb will certainly teach us more about these early, growing galaxies and reveal details that remain unseen, we've learned that these obscured monsters really are out there, and might be the missing link in galaxy growth and evolution.

Either we've gotten incredibly lucky in finding a very rare type of galaxy in such a small region of space, or this new find is an indicator that these behemoths really are everywhere. For now, this new discovery should leave us all hopeful that ALMA will continue to find more of these galaxies, and that when James Webb comes online, one more piece of the cosmic puzzle might slide perfectly into place.

France’s Pro-White Party Wants to Be an Environmental Party, Too

Paradigm Shift

Protecting the environment dovetails with the National Rally’s other goals: strengthening borders and restricting immigration; limiting trade agreements and supporting local industries; and promoting a strong French identity against the globalized “man from nowhere.”

HÉNIN-BEAUMONT, France — All of the lighting in the city’s streets and buildings is being changed to environmentally friendly LED bulbs. City workers will come to your house to plant trees — for free — as a natural way to keep cool against the kind of heat waves that swept across Europe over the summer.

Sheep also tend to the grass in one large, city-owned field as an experiment in “eco-grazing.” “Less pollution, less noise, fewer chemicals,” a city sign explained. “One more step forward in protecting our biodiversity.”

No, the policies are not the work of a tree-hugging City Council dominated by the Greens. They are of France’s far-right National Rally, the party whose longstanding, fierce dedication to a single issue — curbing immigration — helped it become France’s main opposition.

Only a few years ago, the party showed little interest in the environment. Its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, denied human-driven climate change and dismissed ecology as the “new religion of the bobo,” or bohemian bourgeois.

But as the issue has risen to the top of voters’ concerns across Europe, the National Rally has taken note, along with other nationalist, populist far-right groups elsewhere on the Continent.

In recent months, the National Rally’s leader, Marine Le Pen, has given two major speeches that proposed making Europe the “world’s leading ecological civilization” and embraced ideas like consuming locally grown products.

Ahead of next year’s municipal elections, the party is promoting cities like Hénin-Beaumont, where it has been in power since 2014, as settings for its own brand of down-to-earth environmentalism.

“For a long time, political parties took ahold of ecology and aimed it only at the bourgeois and well-off,” said Christopher Szczurek, a deputy mayor of Hénin-Beaumont and a member of the party’s national board. “And now we see that the working class can also find something of real interest in it.”

The Declaration of White Independence

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, long criticized by environmental groups for doing too little on climate, has also been trying to refashion himself as a leader on the issue through dramatic gestures, including confronting Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, on his handling of the fires in the Amazon.

To both Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen, who are likely to face off again in the next presidential election, in 2022, the environment offers the potential to broaden their support.

Support for the leftist Green Party surged across the Continent, including in France and Germany, in European elections in May, as well as in last month’s vote in Austria.

Among far-right populist parties in Europe, views toward climate change range from denial to an acknowledgment of its global nature and an endorsement of a multinational approach to fight it, according to a recent study by Adelphi, a climate research group based in Berlin.

In between are parties, including the National Rally, that promote a nationalist, identity-based vision of environmentalism, while rejecting working with other nations.

Rooted in the right’s traditional idealization of the land and French national identity, the National Rally’s environmentalism focuses on the local — people living and working as much as possible in their own local communities. It encourages reining in everything from material consumption and population growth as a way to conserve limited resources.

Protecting the environment dovetails with the National Rally’s other goals: strengthening borders and restricting immigration; limiting trade agreements and supporting local industries; and promoting a strong French identity against the globalized “man from nowhere.”

“Fundamentally, ecology is about people living on a territory, who are attached to it and who make plans for the long term,” said Hervé Juvin, an essayist who has written frequently on the environment and was elected as a European Parliament member for the National Rally in May.

Ecologists on the left and right may agree on certain points. But the unbridgeable difference is that the National Rally, like other groups on the far right, emphatically opposes any multinational agreements to combat climate change.

Mr. Juvin dismisses them as a concession of sovereignty and as simply ineffective.

The National Rally’s critics say that the party is not serious about tackling climate change if it rejects outright the idea of cooperating with other nations. Only painstaking diplomacy and negotiations can hope to mitigate what is a global problem, they say.

In this area of France, air quality can only be addressed with neighboring Germany, said Marine Tondelier, the single Green Party member on Hénin-Beaumont’s City Council.

“We can’t resolve that without Europe,” Ms. Tondelier said. “And so I told them it’s absurd to claim that you’re ecologists. It was like the Maginot Line during the war — when we were behind the border and we tried to protect ourselves. It doesn’t work.”

Yet people on the right point out that it was their side that used to have a grip on the issue of the environment. It was under the conservative President Georges Pompidou that the environment ministry was established in the early 1970s.

But in the early 1990s, the Greens allied themselves with the left, which has had the upper hand on environmental issues ever since.

“There was a holdup by the left,” Mr. Juvin said.

A close ally of Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Juvin is trying to take back the environment for the right, or at least for the National Rally; he is its leading voice on climate. His efforts begin inside the party itself, where many remain skeptical of climate change, he said.

“I’m trying to fight against that,” Mr. Juvin said. “It’s changed a little. I hope to have contributed to that change. But I think there’s a feeling that we’re being bothered by problems that aren’t real.”

His is not the only far-right party that has struggled to own the issue.

In the run-up to the European elections, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, denied human-driven climate change and dismissed environmental worries as elitist. That caused a backlash from its youth wing in Berlin.

Vadim Derksen, the head of the wing’s Berlin chapter, said there were “tough discussions on how we should position ourselves” on climate change.

“We acknowledge there is climate change,” Mr. Derksen said in a recent interview, “and we would rather like to focus on how to adapt to this climate change.”

Hénin-Beaumont is in a part of northern France that has been crippled by the closing of mines and factories in recent decades — factors that, along with the presence of migrants who try to cross illegally into Britain, have fueled the rise of the Nationally Rally.

Socialists long controlled Hénin-Beaumont and other municipalities in the region. But corruption involving a Socialist mayor eventually led to victory for the Nationally Rally in Hénin-Beaumont, a city of 27,000 people.

Like elsewhere, the city’s town center is dominated by a stately church and an imposing city hall, along with a bakery, brasserie and kebab restaurants, where some of the city’s tiny population of nonwhites could be found.

As the region groped for a future beyond factories and coal, the Greens won widespread credit for transforming two cities, Loos-en-Gohelle and Grande-Synthe, into models of environmentally friendly, sustainable cities.

Now the National Rally is directly challenging the Greens on an issue that they had long dominated.

In Hénin-Beaumont, the National Rally is putting in place many of the same projects — a fact that has irritated some Green members.

“Electorally, it now has potential,” Ms. Tondelier, the Greens council member, said of the focus on the environment. “I remember people who did it when there wasn’t and who carried out experiments that are now being used by those who want to compete politically.”

Mr. Juvin, the leader on climate in the National Rally, did not deny that there were political considerations. A fresh focus on the environment could widen the appeal of the party beyond its stance on immigration.

“People feel that we have to get out of the fact that there’s only the issue of immigration,” he said.

Did Our Universe's Structure Grow From The Top-Down Or From The Bottom-Up?

If there’s one lesson that humanity should have learned from the 20th century, it’s this: the Universe rarely behaves the way our intuition leads us to suspect. At the start of the 1900s, we thought the Universe was governed by Newtonian gravity. We thought that the Universe was static, stationary, and infinitely old, with no beginning and no end. And we couldn’t even be sure whether the Milky Way was one of many galaxies, or whether it encompassed everything there was.

When the first major galaxy surveys started yielding meaningful results, we started to observe that the Universe was indistinguishable from scale-invariance, meaning that the Universe was not top-down and it wasn’t bottom-up; it was a combination of both. There are initial imperfections on small scales and large scales both, as well as the in-between scales. However, because gravitation only sends signals at the speed of light, the small scales begin to experience gravitational collapse before the larger scales can even begin to affect one another.

With the “seeds” of structure present on all scales, we fully anticipate the small scales to develop first, in tens or hundreds of millions of years, while the largest ones will take billions to fully form. Today, our best measurements of the Power Spectrum of the Universe and of the scalar spectral index, ns, tells us that ns = 0.965, with an uncertainty of less than 1%. The Universe is very close to scale-invariant, but it’s tilted to be just a little bit more top-down than bottom-up.

A century ago, we didn’t even know what our Universe looked like. We didn’t know where it came from, whether or when it began, how old it was, what it was made out of, whether it was expanding, what was present within it. Today, we have scientific answers to all of these questions to within about 1% accuracy, plus a whole lot more.

The Universe was born almost perfectly uniform, with 1-part-in-30,000 imperfections present on practically all scales. The largest cosmic scales have slightly larger imperfections than the smaller ones, but the smaller ones are also substantial and collapse first. We likely formed the first stars just 50-to-200 million years after the Big Bang Seed; the first galaxies arose 200-to-550 million years after the Big Bang Seed; the largest galaxy clusters took billions of years to get there.

The Universe is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but a combination of both that implies it was born with an almost scale-invariant spectrum. With future survey telescopes such as LSST, WFIRST, and the next-generation of 30-meter-class ground-based telescopes, we’re poised to measure galaxy clustering as never before. After a lifetime of uncertainty, we can finally give a scientific answer to understanding how our Universe’s large-scale structure came to be.

Scientists start mapping the hidden web that scaffolds the universe

https://phys.org/news/2019-10-scientists-hidden-web-scaffolds-universe.html

After counting all the normal, luminous matter in the obvious places of the universe—galaxies, clusters of galaxies and the intergalactic medium—about half of it is still missing. So not only is 85% of the matter in the universe made up of an unknown, invisible substance dubbed "dark matter," we can't even find all the small amount of normal matter that should be there.

This is known as the "missing baryons" problem. Baryons are particles that emit or absorb light, like protons, neutrons or electrons, which make up the matter we see around us. The baryons unaccounted for are thought to be hidden in filamentary structures permeating the entire universe, also known as "the cosmic web."

But this structure is elusive and so far we have only seen glimpses of it. Now a new study, published in Science, offers a better view that will enable us to help map what it looks like.

The cosmic web provides the scaffolding of the large scale structure in the universe, predicted by the "standard cosmological model." Cosmologists believe there is a dark cosmic web, made of dark matter, and a luminous cosmic web, made of mostly hydrogen gas. In fact, it is believed that 60% of the hydrogen created during the Big Bang Seed resides in these filaments.

The web of gas filaments is also known as the "warm-hot intergalactic medium" (WHIM), because it is roughly as hot as the sun's interior. Galaxies are likely to form at the intersection of two or more such filaments, where the matter is densest, with the filaments connecting all galaxy clusters in the universe.

So far, we haven't been able to detect dark matter. This is because it does not emit or absorb light so it cannot be observed with usual telescopes. The cosmic web filaments are also very hard to find as they are very diffuse and they do not emit sufficient light to be detected.

Since the original prediction, there has been an intense search for the cosmic web, using a variety of methods.

One of these relies on bright objects that happen to lie in the background along the same line of sight as a gas filament. The hydrogen atoms in the filaments can absorb light at a specific wavelength in the ultraviolet. This can be detected as absorption lines in the light from the background object, when broken down into a spectrum by wavelength.

This method has been applied using quasars, which are very bright massive objects at large distances, and even with background galaxies.

Galaxies lighting up the web

The new study has managed to detect the gas in an entirely new way which allows two dimensional imaging of the cosmic web, rather than relying on the random location of a bright source behind the gas cloud used in absorption studies.

The object they studied, catchily named SSA22, is a protocluster, meaning it is a cluster of galaxies in its infancy. It is much farther away than previous measured bits of the cosmic web—its light traveled about 12 billion years to reach us. This means we are looking back in time to the early stages of the universe, allowing scientists to probe how the filaments first assembled.

A few years ago, a number of extremely bright, star-forming galaxies called "sub-millimeter galaxies" were detected near its center. This new study has found 16 such galaxies and eight powerful X-ray sources, a rare over-density of such objects at this early epoch. The objects provide copious amount of ionizing radiation to all of the hydrogen gas of the filaments, which makes it emit light that we can detect—a technique that holds much more promise than absorption.

Another mystery that this study helps to solve is the formation of sub-millimeter galaxies. The most widely agreed on explanation is that they form as a result of two normal galaxies merging, hence forming a massive galaxy with double the amount of light.

However, computer simulations show that these galaxies can grow from the cold gas pouring in from the neighboring cosmic web. This scenario is confirmed by this new study.

The new study paves the way for a more systematic, two-dimensional mapping of gas filaments that can tell us about their motions in space.

Future studies help further map the hidden cosmic web. In addition to looking at galaxy clusters full of bright objects, we can also trace the web's emission in radio or X-ray wavelengths. However, the X-ray traces much hotter gas than the bulk of the WHIM. The proposed Athena X-ray observatory will provide a full picture of the hot filaments around the clusters of galaxies in the nearby universe.

Another proposed mission for beyond 2050 is to use the cosmic microwave background—the light left over from the Big Bang Seed—as a "background light" and look for fine imprints left in it by the cosmic web.

All these tools will reveal the entire structure of the cosmic web and provide us with a definitive census of the matter in the universe.

What's more, we know that baryons settle in the dark matter filaments of the universe to make their own filaments, like foam over an existing wave. This means that detailed maps of the gas filaments can help us trace the more hidden dark matter structure and, ultimately, help us understand its mysterious nature.

New organic compounds found in Enceladus ice grains

https://phys.org/news/2019-10-compounds-enceladus-ice-grains.html

New kinds of organic compounds, the ingredients of amino acids, have been detected in the plumes bursting from Saturn's moon Enceladus. The findings are the result of the ongoing deep dive into data from NASA's Cassini mission.

Powerful hydrothermal vents eject material from Enceladus' core, which mixes with water from the moon's massive subsurface ocean before it is released into space as water vapor and ice grains. The newly discovered molecules, condensed onto the ice grains, were determined to be nitrogen- and oxygen-bearing compounds.

On Earth, similar compounds are part of chemical reactions that produce amino acids, the building blocks of life. Hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor provide the energy that fuels the reactions. Scientists believe Enceladus' hydrothermal vents may operate in the same way, supplying energy that leads to the production of amino acids.

"If the conditions are right, these molecules coming from the deep ocean of Enceladus could be on the same reaction pathway as we see here on Earth. We don't yet know if amino acids are needed for life beyond Earth, but finding the molecules that form amino acids is an important piece of the puzzle," said Nozair Khawaja, who led the research team of the Free University of Berlin. His findings were published Oct. 2 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Although the Cassini mission ended in September 2017, the data it provided will be mined for decades. Khawaja's team used data from the spacecraft's Cosmic Dust Analyzer, or CDA, which detected ice grains emitted from Enceladus into Saturn's E ring.

The scientists used the CDA's mass spectrometer measurements to determine the composition of organic material in the grains.

The identified organics first dissolved in the ocean of Enceladus, then evaporated from the water surface before condensing and freezing onto ice grains inside the fractures in the moon's crust, scientists found. Blown into space with the rising plume emitted through those fractures, the ice grains were then analyzed by Cassini's CDA.

The new findings complement the team's discovery last year of large, insoluble complex organic molecules believed to float on the surface of Enceladus' ocean. The team went deeper with this recent work to find the ingredients, dissolved in the ocean, that are needed for the hydrothermal processes that would spur amino acid formation.

"Here we are finding smaller and soluble organic building blocks—potential precursors for amino acids and other ingredients required for life on Earth," said co-author Jon Hillier.

"This work shows that Enceladus' ocean has reactive building blocks in abundance, and it's another green light in the investigation of the habitability of Enceladus," added co-author Frank Postberg.