Meteorite’s magnetic memory gives clues to Earth’s future

Scientists have studied the magnetic memory contained in ancient meteorites, offering a tantalising glimpse of what may happen to the Earth’s magnetic core billions of years from now.

Using a detailed imaging technique, the researchers were able to read the magnetic memory contained in ancient meteorites, formed in the early solar system over 4.5 billion years ago.

The readings taken from these tiny ‘space magnets’ may give a sneak preview of the fate of the Earth’s magnetic core as it continues to freeze.

Using an intense beam of X-rays to image the nanoscale magnetisation of the meteoritic metal, researchers led by the University of Cambridge, UK, were able to capture the precise moment when the core of the meteorite’s parent asteroid froze, killing its magnetic field.

These ‘nano-paleomagnetic’ measurements, the highest-resolution paleomagnetic measurements ever made, were performed at the BESSY II synchrotron in Berlin.

The researchers found that the magnetic fields generated by asteroids were much longer-lived than previously thought, lasting for as long as several hundred million years after the asteroid formed, and were created by a similar mechanism to the one that generates the Earth’s own magnetic field.

The results help to answer many of the questions surrounding the longevity and stability of magnetic activity on small bodies, such as asteroids and moons.

The particular meteorites used for the study are known as pallasites, which are primarily composed of iron and nickel, studded with gem-quality silicate crystals.

Contained within these chunks of iron however, are tiny particles just 100 nanometres across – about one thousandth the width of a human hair – of a unique magnetic mineral called tetrataenite, which is magnetically much more stable than the rest of the meteorite, and holds within it a magnetic memory going back billions of years.

The researchers’ magnetic measurements, supported by computer simulations, demonstrated that the magnetic fields of these asteroids were created by compositional, rather than thermal, convection – meaning that the field was long-lasting, intense and widespread.

These meteorites came from asteroids formed in the first few million years after the formation of the Solar System. At that time, planetary bodies were heated by radioactive decay to temperatures hot enough to cause them to melt and segregate into a liquid metal core surrounded by a rocky mantle.

As their cores cooled and began to freeze, the swirling motions of liquid metal, driven by the expulsion of sulphur from the growing inner core, generated a magnetic field, just as the Earth does today.

“In our meteorites we’ve been able to capture both the beginning and the end of core freezing, which will help us understand how these processes affected the Earth in the past and provide a possible glimpse of what might happen in the future,” said Dr Richard Harrison of Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, who led the researc

The eco-fundamentalists

The recent furore over the Modi government's ban on the Indian branch of Greenpeace receiving funding from its foreign parent raises some important issues. What should be the role of foreign NGOs in Indian democracy - particularly since, as I have argued at length in my Reviving the Invisible Hand, a host of the environmental ones are the stormtroopers of the anti-globalisation movement? What are their true aims? Is there any international civil society of which they can be taken to be the spokesmen, as they claim? And what are we to make of their local representatives who seek to influence their countries public policy to the agenda of their foreign sponsors?

NGOs are pressure groups which have been a part of the political process in the UK and US for over 200 years. The American "pluralist" school of political sociology has considered them to be benign, with perfect competition among interest groups, and the state acting as umpire, leading to the political analogue of the perfect competition paradigm of the economist. This benign view was punctured by Mancur Olson who showed that they are predatory: aiming to use the political process to obtain special benefits for their members at the expense of the common weal.

But, within the domestic domain, such distributional games need only concern the domestic polity. What is different about the international NGOs (particularly the green ones) is that instead of promoting sectional interests they are dealing with particular causes whose resonance comes from some form of universal moral claim. They are, in the apt phrase of my former University College of London colleague David Henderson (in his Misguided Virtue), "global salvationists", who resemble religious fundamentalists.

Anna Bramwell in her Ecology in the 20th Century: A History emphasises that the stronghold of environmentalism has been in Protestant Europe (Britain and Germany) and the United States. Its origins lie in the death of the Christian God with the scientific and Darwinian revolutions. As I argued in my Unintended Consequences, the West has been haunted by St Augustine's City of God. Carl Becker in his The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers showed how the philosophesof the Enlightenment demolished Augustine's Heavenly City, only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials. The Garden of Eden was replaced by Greece and Rome, and God became an abstract First Cause - the Divine Watchmaker - and instead of Holy Writ, God's laws were recorded in the Great Book of Nature that the scientific revolution of the 19th century had begun to decipher. But when Darwin showed that the Divine Watchmaker was blind, the Christian God died, as Nietzsche proclaimed from the housetops.

This did not, however, end variations on the theme of Augustine's City. There were two further mutations in the form of Marxism and Freudianism - and the more recent mutation in the form I have labelled Eco-fundamentalism (see my article in International Affairs, July 1995). This carries the Christian notion of contemptus mundi to its logical conclusion. Humankind is evil and only by living in harmony with a deified Nature can it be saved. As Professor Bramwell puts it, in the past the West was "able to see the earth as man's unique domain precisely because of God's existence…When science took over the role of religion in the 19th century, the belief that God made the world with a purpose in which man was paramount declined. But, if there was no purpose, how was man to live on the earth? The hedonistic answer, to enjoy it as long as possible, was not acceptable. If Man had become God, then he had become the shepherd of the earth, the guardian, responsible for the oekonomie of the earth". (p. 23).

The religious nature of the Green movement is further supported by its failure to admit that its predictions have been wrong, eg its Malthusian beliefs which have been belied by the "demographic transition" now spreading through the developing world. Based on faith rather than reason, it has great similarities with the religious fundamentalisms sweeping the world. For though it may appear that the environmental movement is "scientific" and hence "modern", whereas religious fundamentalists are "non-scientific" and "pre-modern", they both share a fear and contempt of the modernity whose central features are rightly seen to be an instrumental rationality that undermines humankinds traditional relationship with God or Nature.

The sense of loss with modernity's "disenchantment of the world" of the ecologists is paralleled by the fundamentalist's fear of losing cherished traditional lifestyles. Both are also pre-modern, claiming to have a privileged view of reality which brooks no discussion. Both too have adherents willing to use coercion (including violence) to impose their beliefs, as witness the various threats of physical violence and arson by animal rights activists on university medical researchers, and Greenpeace's own antics like the recent desecration of an ancient pre Inca World heritage site in Peru. These eco-fundamentalists are not Charlie Hebdo, but closer to the Islamist fundamentalists who slaughtered its journalists. As such the Modi government is right, in my view, in preventing foreign financing of their activities in the country.

Nor is their claim that they represent the world's citizens and thence an international civil society whose interests they serve, sustainable. There are no world citizens as there is no world polity. There are only citizens of nation-states to whom in democracies their governments are accountable. The chief characteristic of a state is the monopoly of coercive power, which in democracies is given to governments elected by the electorate, and only they can be responsible for making domestic and international laws.

What of the local agents of these eco-fundamentalists? They are best seen as what the Chinese called "Rice Christians". As citizens of the country they are free to pursue their secular religion as they see fit, but as with other religions in a secular state they can have no privileged position, nor can they use intimidation to enforce their beliefs. Their oft repeated claim that they represent the popular will was tested when the last government adopted much of their program under the aegis of a National Advisory Council stuffed with their activists, creating an environmental Permit Raj. The overwhelming rejection of this programme at the last elections showed their claim to be serving the popular will to be wrong. Moreover, to correct the damage the environmental license Raj has done to India's growth prospects, it needs to be repudiated along with the eco-fundamentalists - both foreign and local - who have promoted it.

Pointing at billionaires

The World Bank, in its report on inequality in South Asia, says that India has a disproportionate share of dollar-billionaires, and that they own a disproportionate share of the country's wealth. Almost all those billionaires - some 50 to 60 of them - hold the bulk of their wealth as shares in the companies they manage. As those share prices rise and fall, so does billionaire wealth.

Imagine what would happen if the government banned foreign institutional investors (the famed FIIs) from the stock market. Or, which comes to the same thing, the FIIs decided to exit India for reasons of their own. Since FIIs have long been the prime movers of the market, the stock marketwould collapse with their wholesale exit, and share prices would drop by a half or two-thirds. That is what happened in 2008-09, when the North American financial crisis caused the FIIs to pull their money out. The Sensex crashed from 21,000 to 8,000 in 14 months. That made many billionaires into mere millionaires, and naturally reduced wealth inequality.

I'm sure the poverty-stricken millions who have no wealth were very pleased, since inequality of wealth had come down. It may be a small matter that economic growth also slowed, as did the job market. How that helped the poor, we will have to ask the World Bank. You get the drift? There are many valid ways of assessing inequality in a society, and the World Bank looks at quite a few. But using the number of billionaires and their wealth as a proxy makes little sense, and it is a surprise that the World Bank should adopt this populist logic.

If India has more billionaires than before (15 years ago, it had only four), it is because the Indian economy began to look more attractive to FIIs. As they bought up stock, prices went up; the market value of all listed companies rose from less than 40 per cent of GDP to more than 80 per cent today. Naturally, the largest owners of stock, ie the promoters of companies, have been the biggest beneficiaries.

So why do the other countries of South Asia not have so many billionaires? That's simple; they don't have companies and economies that interest FIIs to the same degree. Pakistan's market capitalisation-to-GDP ratio is just 25 per cent. What about China? That's simple too; most of China's largest companies are owned by the state or its surrogates. In India, it is entrepreneurs who have been in the driving seat. To be sure, some of them have exploited opportunities in sectors where the government has a heavy controlling hand, which puts a shadow on the ways in which they have created their wealth. But they are in a minority. In any case, the government simply has to list companies like the Life Insurance Corporation, for the billionaires' share of stock market wealth to shrink.

Finally, bear in mind that, according to Credit Suisse's annual wealth report, 85 per cent of wealth in India is held in the form of physical assets like land; only 15 per cent is in financial form, and of that the bulk is in bank deposits. It's different in wealthy countries, where about half the wealth is held in financial form. When you look at billionaire wealth in India, remember that it is a small part of the 15 per cent. If you go by Credit Suisse, wealth inequality in India is less than in most countries.

And yet, there should be an agenda for action. India's taxes on wealth have two large gaps. The estate duty (abolished by VP Singh) should be re-instated; so should the tax on long-term capital gains in shares (abolished by Mr Chidambaram). Two thoughts for Mr Jaitley as he prepares his second Budget.

Voters Participation: Soul of Democracy

Louis L’Amour has rightly said that to make democracy work, we must be a notion of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain. Democracy can be seen as an extension of people’s participation. It is a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a representative system of elections. Democracy will collapse without proper and fair participation of its citizens. Every vote reassures our democracy and makes it stronger.

In this context, general elections 2014 were proved to be historic. 66.44 percent voters comprising of 554.1 million people have accessed their franchise to vote. Prior to this, the highest turnout was recorded as 64.02 percent in 1984. Not only this, the gender gap between the male and female turnout was reduced by 1.55 percentage points in Lok Sabha elections 2014. 16 States and UTs recorded a higher women turnout. To add to the glory, women voters surpassed men for the first time ever in any Lok Sabha elections in nine States or Union Territories. The credit for achieving such figures lies with the efforts of Election Commission of India. No doubt engaging with and motivating such a large and diverse population to cast their vote was a gigantic task with myriad range of complexities and challenges.

Election Commission of India adopted Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP)programme to increase voters’ turnout both in terms of quality and quantity. SVEEEP formulates policies, lays down the framework, plans interventions and monitors implementation besides carrying out continuous interaction with voting publics, civil society groups and media. They broadly include situation analysis; systematic planning and implementation of targeted interventions (on IMF model) based on the situation analysis, mid programme review and monitoring and end term review. The communication interventions include multi-media and inter-personal communication, physical events and innovative activities for mobilization of people/community and voter Facilitation.

National Voters Day is one such initiative which was adopted in 2011 to reach out to masses of the country. Since then it is being observed every year with the objective to increase enrolment of voters and to make universal adult suffrage a complete reality. A series of mass interactive activities like symposiums, cycle rally, human chain, folk arts programmes, mini-marathon, competitions and awareness seminars will be organized on the fifth National Voters Day which will be celebrated on 25th January 2015 across the country. 25^th January is also the foundation day of the Commission , which came into being on this day in 1950.The theme for NVD 2015 is ‘Easy Registration; Easy Correction’. The Booth Level Officers (BLOs) in over 6 lakh (0.6 million) Polling Station areas will felicitate the newly registered voters in a brief ceremony and hand over their Elector Photo Identity Card (EPIC) to give the younger generation a sense of responsible citizenship. They will also be given a badge with the slogan “Proud to be a Voter – Ready to Vote”.

      It took a lot of convincing on part of civil societies and NGOs in sensitising people to exercise their valuable right. Several campaigns were launched to encourage masses especially the young generation, women and transgenders for leading them to polling booths. . They acted as a catalyst to spread voter education. It was due to combined efforts of NGOs, Civil Societies, Election Commission of India, etc that India is touching new heights of voters’ turnout.

            Free and fair elections are the life force of democracy. Credible elections at stipulated intervals have ever since enabled India’s peaceful transformative journey for inclusion and empowerment of common citizen. The justification of election as a key anchor of democracy comes from the fact that it translates the idea of people’s power to a physical reality. This can effectively happen only when people are able to exercise such power through informed participation.

Cooperation in the Field of Information & Communications Technology and Electronics (ICTE)

India and US Sign a Joint Declaration of Intent for Cooperation in the Field of Information & Communications Technology and Electronics (ICTE)

India and United States have signed a Joint Declaration of Intent for cooperation in the field of Information & Communications Technology and Electronics (ICTE). The Joint Declaration was signed by the Secretary, Department of Electronics and IT Shri RS Sharma, and the US Ambassador to India Shri Richard Verma, at a ceremony held in New Delhi this evening. Speaking to news persons, the Secretary, Department of Electronics and IT said that this is likely increase partnership for the ‘Digital India’ programme, electronic manufacturing, cyber security and several other such related fields between two countries. The US ambassador expressing happiness hoped that this declaration before the arrival of the US president on Sunday would further strengthen cooperation between industries of both the countries in the sector.  Shri Ram Sevak Sharma said that at the Indo US Joint working Group meeting on ICT held at Washington last week several US companies has expressed interest for their participation in India.  This Joint Declaration of intent made for a period of next five years would help in strengthening industrial, technological, research & innovation and economic cooperation between India and U.S. in the ICTE sector. It would also lead to US companies exploring opportunities for collaboration in India’s ambitious Digital India programme, Electronics manufacturing and Human Resource Development, through cooperation among private and public entities in a focused manner under the umbrella of the ongoing India-US ICT Dialogue. On this occasion, reference was made to the deliberations at India US ICT Working Group meeting held in Washington, D.C., during January 14-15, 2015. It was agreed at this meeting to continue to explore the opportunities for collaboration on implementing India`s ambitious Digital India initiative, with the goal of enhancing digital infrastructure, deploying e-governance and e-services, and expanding the diffusion and use of ICT as a tool to expand economic opportunities, boost productivity, create jobs, and empower citizens. Besides, broad agreement was also reached on the importance of policies that promote innovation in the ICT sector, facilitate the flow of data across borders, and foster the global and open nature of the Internet as a platform for economic growth.

Google hopes to take the web directly to billions lacking access

Google has never shied from novelty or spending big to find ways to connect more people to the internet. Over the last two years, its ideas have included fleets of little satellites, solar-powered drones that would fly around the world and balloons that float high into the stratosphere, beaming the internet to those below.

Building on that, Google and the mutual fund giant Fidelity announced a $1-billion investment on Tuesday into Space Exploration Technologies, a growing private rocket company that is still trying to prove itself on the world stage. The company, also known as SpaceX, could give Google a way to put its devices into outer space.

With that growing collection of devices in the sky, Google believes it can spread the internet to underserved areas around the world. The investments also reflect a bit of enlightened self-interest, since the more people who are connected directly to Google, the more ads it can show them. And that is how Google makes its money.

"Anything they provide, if it's going through their own pipe, they have more control over the experience and more potential for revenue," said J P Gownder, an analyst at Forrester Research. That means those consumers are more likely to stick with Google services like search, Gmail or YouTube rather than going somewhere else.

Google's interest in satellites is anything but original. Last week, the Virgin Group and Qualcomm, a maker of communications semiconductors, announced they had invested in OneWeb, a network of internet connectivity satellites, while Planet Labs, a maker of shoebox-size satellites that offer Earth imagery, announced Tuesday that it had received $95 million in financing.

Last year, Facebook bought a British drone maker and hired a bevy of top aerospace scientists, with the goal of deploying high-altitude, unmanned planes to deliver internet service to parts of the world that have little connectivity now.

These companies have different technologies and different ideas for making money, but the bind among them is a common assumption that there is no economic way to physically wire the world's underserved consumers. So the only way to do it is with satellites and other wireless technologies.

There is another benefit for Google: The company is always looking for ways to get around internet service providers. As Google executives have shown with new offerings, from insurance shopping to the growing Google Fiber broadband service, if there is one thing they believe, it is that their company's interests are best served by going directly to the consumer.

And as first reported on the tech website The Information, Google has been in talks with cellular network companies with a goal of providing its own wireless service, according to two people familiar with Google's efforts.

This idea of sky-high internet connections seems to be a fixture of technology booms. In the mid-1990s, there were similar efforts. One, called Sky Station, was a sort of stratospheric blimp that would hover over areas that needed broadband internet service. It was not successful, mostly because there was not much demand for the high-speed access it could provide, said Martine Rothblatt, inventor of the satellite service SiriusXM who was a Sky Station partner and is now chief executive of United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company.

The interest in satellites also extends to services. Last year, Google spent about $500 million to buy Skybox Imaging, a maker of small high-resolution imaging satellites that could do things like monitor crops or map the terrain below a forest canopy.

But be it imaging or connections, the recent interest in satellites stems from a reduction in satellite cost. Unlike the first space race, when governments had to make almost everything themselves, there are now all kinds of off-the-shelf chips, batteries and other components that can be mixed and matched. And just as the camera on your mobile phone becomes better with each upgrade, the advancement in space imaging technology has been rapid.

"Aerospace is following business because the dominant research and development dollars are no longer in the Air Force or NASA, but they are in Google and Apple and all these places pushing the boundaries of miniaturised electronics," said Will Marshall, co-founder and chief executive of Planet Labs.

There is nothing new about connecting to the internet via satellite. People do it on airplanes, at sea and in remote corners of the world. ViaSat, a Carlsbad, California, satellite company, beams satellite internet to 700,000 homes and apartments in the US. But this is done with bigger, higher-orbiting satellites that sit in a geosynchronous orbit, meaning that they move at the same speed as the earth and so stay above a fixed point.

Mark Dankberg, ViaSat chief executive, estimated that dozens of companies around the world are working on satellite-based internet services that are regional in scope and use these higher-orbit technologies.

But the satellites internet companies have become enamored with use lower orbits and can cover the world to put the three billion people who do not have internet access online.

Low-earth-orbit satellites are already revolutionising imaging technologies by allowing companies to receive continuously updated pictures of earth, which lets them do things like measure a mall's hourly parking lot traffic. But whether these satellites can be used to connect people to the internet more cheaply has yet to be proved, Dankberg said.

One advantage is that low-earth satellites could have less lag between typing a search into Google and receiving the results. But since most of the world is water and barren land, Dankberg said, a fleet of internet-connected satellites would have many of its components hovering over unpopulated areas.

"It has yet to be proven that lots of little satellites can provide internet more cheaply than a handful of big ones," he said.

Innovation on the right track

Many initiatives and announcements by Prime MinisterNarendra Modi emerged last year. Among his exhortations, a particularly inspiring and widely appealing one was the need for a clean and sanitary nation, Swachh Bharat. InInnoColumn, innovation and sanitation were featured even before Modi became Prime Minister ("'Neat and clean' innovation", April 18, 2014). It is fair to add that for decades before that column, outstanding scientists, politicians and social workers dwelt on the same theme. However, there is a magical diffusion of any message when a prime minister says it. The time has come finally for a concerted and synergistic drive on Swachh Bharat. Any multi-pronged solution requires a coalescing of administrative, scientific and social forces. India has a great opportunity now to focus and innovate in a domain where success can deliver huge side benefits.

In the recent weeks, newspapers have carried reports of the PM's exhortation on this subject at the Shashti Abda Poorthifunction of ICICI Bank. He wanted the bank (and other institutions) to help advance the cause. The Indian Railways, headed by the dynamic Suresh Prabhu, announced a reorganisation and refreshment of the Railway Board. TheRailways can play a key role in advancing the PM's campaign by carrying the message in an involving and emotional way all across the length and breadth of the nation - far more effectively than many other institutions. So this week's column is a call to Prabhu and the Railway Board Chairman A K Mittal to add grist to the mill ofSwachh Bharat. But how?

On behalf of the National Innovation Council (NInC), chaired by Sam Pitroda, I had made a formal slide presentation to the full Railway Board on March 7, 2014. The presentation was titled 'Aavishkar', and suggested as a joint initiative of the Railways, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and NInC. The board gave me an attentive hearing. In the context of the PM's call, the board may like to take the dust off the NInC presentation, make required updates and improvements, and explore how the Railways can advance the PM's programme. The Indian Railways is a symbol of inclusion and innovation in the country with multiple stakeholders. The Indian Railways transports over 9 billion people every year, almost 25 million each day. It employs 1.5 million people and its operation covers 24 states and three Union Territories.

Five steps (showcase-bubble up-shortlist-execute-reward) had been suggested in the NInC presentation: first, use of Indian Railways to showcase innovations with the goal to inspire, instigate and provoke stakeholders to contribute ideas. Second, to bubble up the ideas by implementing a system to acknowledge and capture the ideas. Third, to shortlist the innovation ideas; fourth, toexecute; fifth and last, to reward the innovations. For each of these five steps, detailed charts were presented to demonstrate details of how the programme can be devised and implemented.

One important element was to launch a CWS, Challenges Worth Solving. Public sanitation and open defecation could, for example, feature very legitimately in the CWS programme. To achieve any modicum of success, an information technology backbone would be required to capture and process the thousands of ideas. A 'Rail Innoverse' software was recommended to create a repository of all ideas and to enable ideas to flow swiftly in the value chain. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has anyway announced its contribution of Rs 100 crore to the PM's programme: TCS could well be the software partner to create and run 'Rail Innoverse'.

Envisioning and implementing such a railway innovation programme needs attitude training and skill impartation. On behalf of NInC, TISS said that they would be delighted to partner on such a programme. The NInC offered to join the Indian Railways in the funding of the programme. This would require an aggressive advertising and marketing programme. Creative roughs were presented and demonstration advertisements were also presented.

The NInC does not exist anymore. But the Indian Railways and TISS do. Can Prabhu and Mittal step up to the plate?

By the way, the same theme was presented separately to India Post. India Post, too, has a wide reach and huge capability. India Post could also lead. If India Post and Indian Railways lead, the nation has so much to gain. If they fail, they will fail the PM.