Photo: bixentro

In a letter to Congress, writes the Guardian, the White House stated that officials believe, with “varying amounts of confidence,” that the chemical weapon sarin was used in the ongoing conflict in Syria and that the use of this type of weapon “would very likely have originated with” supporters of Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian government. The link between the use of sarin and al-Assad is not completely firm, though, and the U.S. Intelligence community is looking for more proof of what’s really going on.

Sarin, wrote Smart News previously, is a nerve agent first developed in 1938 Germany. “A colourless, odourless gas with a lethal dose of just 0.5 mg for an adult human,” sarin, “can be spread as a gaseous vapor, or used to contaminate food. The CDC says that symptoms can arise within seconds, and can include, like VX, convulsions, loss of consciousness, paralysis, and death.” And according to a 2002 article from the New York Times, sarin “dissipates to nondeadly levels after a few hours.”

How exactly are investigators supposed to figure out what’s going on in Syria? According to the Guardian, the United Nations will carry out analyses of soil samples collected in Syria to try to figure out if sarin gas was used. But, says Wired‘s Danger Room, there is another way to check for sarin.

The U.S. military tests for evidence of nerve gas exposure by looking for the presence of the enzyme cholinesterase in red blood cells and in plasma. (Sarin messes with the enzyme, which in turn allows a key neurotransmitter to build up in the body, causing rather awful muscle spasms.) The less cholinesterase they find, they more likely there was a nerve gas hit.

The problem is, some pesticides will also depress cholinesterase. So the military employs a second test. When sarin binds to cholinesterase it loses a fluoride. The pesticides don’t do this. This other test exposes a blood sample to fluoride ions, which reconstitutes sarin if it’s there, in which case it can be detected with mass spectrometry.

Blood samples are drawn from a pricked finger tip into a 10 milliliter tube. They can be kept fresh for about a week before they have to be used in the blood analyzer, a gizmo about the size of a scientific calculator that produces varying shades of yellow depending on the cholinesterase level.

There is still a lot of uncertainty around this news, both about what happened and what, if anything, to do about it. At least there are relatively specific tests that can be done to sort out the first question.

More from Smithsonian.com:

If Syria Uses Chemical Weapons, Here’s How They’ll Work

Margaret Thatcher in 1984 with Ronald Reagan at Camp David. Image: White House Photographic Office

Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, died today at the age of 87. Thatcher, the first woman to lead a Western power, pushed back against socialism in Britain and ushered in a new era of partnerships with Russia.

Thatcher wasn’t exactly an uncontroversial figure. She was fiercely conservative, tough and unwavering in her commitment to her own ideas, earning her the nickname the Iron Lady. “I am not a consensus politician,” she would say. “I am a conviction politician.” Later, she said to her internally warring party “Turn if you like, the lady’s not for turning.”

Some think that this hard-working, hard-headed ethic came from her working class background. Thatcher was born above a shop in Grantham, to a grocer. Early in her career, Thatcher underwent an image overhaul that included changing her voice to be lower. She worked with a speech therapist to lower her register. In Vanity Fair, her biographer chronicles the episode saying, “soon the hectoring tones of the housewife gave way to softer notes and a smoothness that seldom cracked except under extreme provocation on the floor of the House of Commons.”

This sort of commitment and work wasn’t uncommon for Thatcher: if she set out to do something, she did it. And it is that resolve that made Thatcher successful, according to the New York Times:

At home, Lady Thatcher’s political successes were decisive. She broke the power of the labor unions and forced the Labour Party to abandon its commitment to nationalized industry, redefine the role of the welfare state and accept the importance of the free market.

Abroad, she won new esteem for a country that had been in decline since its costly victory in World War II. After leaving office, she was honored as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven.

Thatcher was one of first Western leaders to work with Mikhail Gorbachev, spurring a slow turn towards working with the former Soviet Union. Thatcher pushed British Petroleum to explore oil deals in Kazakhstan to help Gorbachev, eventually creating a giant oil production facility in Azerbaijan that has pumped thousands of barrels of oil a day for the last seven years.

Of course, these policies weren’t universally praised. During her time, inequality in the U.K. rose, and her own former university, Oxford, refused to grant her an honorary degree, making her the first prime minister educated at Oxford to be denied the honor. Here’s the BBC on the internal Oxford debate:

The principal of Mrs Thatcher’s old college, also supported her nomination. Daphne Park said: “You don’t stop someone becoming a fellow of an academic body because you dislike them.”

But Professor Peter Pulzer, of All Souls, who led the opposition, said: “This is not a radical university, it is not an ideologically motivated university.

“I think we have sent a message to show our very great concern, our very great worry about the way in which educational policy and educational funding are going in this country.

Thatcher didn’t comment on the snub, but her spokesperson said, “If they do not wish to confer the honour, the prime minister is the last person to wish to receive it.”

Eventually, however, Thatcher’s political enemies caught up with her. She fought over poll taxes and over water privatization. She called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. And then, in 1990, she left office.

Here is her last speech to Parliament, made on November 22, 1990.

Of course, no one with such sway stays quiet once officially out of politics. Thatcher is thought to have greatly influenced George H.W. Bush in his decisions about the first Gulf War, telling him it was “no time to go wobbly.” She retired from public life in 2002, after a stroke, and it was another stroke that ultimately claimed her life on Monday.

Thatcher was divisive; she was tough; and she was intense. The New York Times closes its obituary of the Iron Lady with this quote:

“Margaret Thatcher evoked extreme feelings,” wrote Ronald Millar, a playwright and speechwriter for the prime minister. “To some she could do no right, to others no wrong. Indifference was not an option. She could stir almost physical hostility in normally rational people, while she inspired deathless devotion in others.”

And while many disagreed with her policies, most agree that her resolve was admirable and her precedent as a woman in charge opened doors for generations after her.

More from Smithsonian.com:

We Prefer Our Leaders to Have Deep Voices, Even If They Are Women

Image: Steve Rhodes

This week, the Supreme Court of the United States has been hearing arguments for and against the legalization of gay marriage, and the hearings have rekindled the debate among American people, outside the courthouse, in the news, on Facebook. But the U.S. isn’t the only nation struggling with the gay marriage issue. Here are where the debate stands in other countries around the world:

There are a few places where gay marriage is legal. Denmark began allowing couples to marry last year. Argentina did three years ago. It’s also legal in Belgium, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Spain legalized gay marriage eight years ago and ever since has been hearing counterarguments in court. It wasn’t until November of last year that the highest court in Spain rejected an appeal presented by conservatives, perhaps closing the case for good.

Other places are debating the issue much like we are. France in many ways seems like a mirror to the United States. The senate there will make a final vote on a bill that would legalize marriage and adoption for gay couples in April. Riot police were called to an anti-gay marriage protest on Sunday, where most estimate there were about 300,000 protestors (although conservatives who organized it claim there were 1.4 million). France’s president, much like our own, supports the bill.

Colombia is debating the issue now, and Uruguay will vote in April. Taiwan started hearing arguments on gay marriage this year, and if they legalize it they’d become the first nation in Asia to do so. India decriminalized homosexuality in 2009 but has yet to broach the marriage subject.

In China, the gay marriage question is a little different. The Los Angeles Times explains:

Women who unwittingly married gay men, dubbed “gay wives,” have pleaded to be able to annull their unions and then be labeled as “single” rather than “divorced,” the official Xinhua News Agency reported in January. Gay rights advocates countered the real solution was to allow same-sex marriage.

Sixty percent of U.N. countries have abolished laws that ban same-sex couples, but two-thirds of African countries still have laws banning homosexuality. Five countries still punish homosexuality with death: Sudan, Mauritiania, Nigeria, Somaliland and Afghanistan. In Russia, a huge proportion of the citizens are opposed to gay marriage—85 percent according to one poll. Five percent of the people polled said that gays should be “eradicated.”

The tides are turning elsewhere. In Uganda, an anti-homosexuality bill has been in the works since 2009, but protests against it have kept it from becoming law. Malawi no longer enforces its anti-gay laws. And even in Russia, things might be changing. The country’s first lesbian-only magazine was just published earlier this month.

So the U.S. isn’t alone in tackling the gay marriage question, and they’re certainly not the only citizenry up in arms on either side.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Pediatricians Back Gay Marriage
California Bans ‘Cure The Gays’ Therapy

Photo: killerturnip

They’re healthy; they’re plentiful; they’re kosher. Just in time for Passover, some Israelis are taking advantage of a swarm of locusts flying in from Egypt to whip up a unique holiday snack. The versatile insects, which are a couple inches long, are apparently equally tasty breaded and fried or covered in molten chocolate.

Israel has been dealing with the swarm for the past couple weeks, the BBC reports. Locusts can eat their body weight in a farmer’s crops per day, so innovative humans have decided to turn the tide on the hungry pests by eating them.

Eucalyptus, a fancy restaurant in Jerusalem, for example, has a particular interest in ancient Biblical food, according to the BBC. The chef there, Moshe Basson, recommends cooks “drop them into a boiling broth, clean them off, and roll in a mixture of flour, coriander seeds, garlic and chilli powder. Then deep-fry them.” He adds that they can also be mixed with caramel and pan-fried as a crunchy, sweet snack. The BBC continues:

Locusts are usually hard to source in Israel and Basson has to get them from a specialist lab. But nothing, he says, beats freshly gathered, locally sourced, wild ones.

Locusts that have feasted on sesame plants acquire an oily, shiny tinge, and are said to be particularly delicious.

Locust is the only kosher insect, and the Torah states that red, yellow, spotted grey and white locusts are fine for eating. Rabbi Ari Zivotofsky told the BBC, however, that he regularly fields calls from concerned Jews about whether or not everyone can eat locusts, or only those Yemenite and North African Jews who had a tradition of eating them. For Jews in Europe, the tradition likely died out since locusts rarely make their way that far north. But that doesn’t mean Ashkenazi Jews can’t enjoy locusts, he says.

While there are simply too many locusts to eat the swarm out of existence, Israelis who do tuck in will enjoy a healthy—and reportedly delicious—source of zinc, iron and protein.

More from Smithsonian.com:

A Plague of Locusts Descends Upon the Holy Land, Just in Time for Passover 
Cooking With the Bible 

That 2007 spike in groundwater use was one dramatic example of a longer trend in the region, documented in a new study, of over-using the fresh water that is stored in subsurface aquifers. In the video above, satellite estimations gathered by NASA’s GRACE mission show the seasonal ebb-and-flow of the region’s groundwater stores, with aquifers filling up in the winter and draining in the summer. On top of this annual oscillation, you can also see the obvious trend of the aquifers steadily drying out over the 2003-2009 study period: the winter blues get less blue, and the summer reds get deeper.

Relying too heavily on groundwater can cause these subsurface stores of fresh water to fade. What’s happening in the Middle East has also been a problem in the midwestern United States, especially during this past summer’s drought. Aquifers take a long time to fill back up, and eventually, they will dry out.

Some of the groundwater loss in the Middle East did come from the 2007 drought conditions (rather than people’s response to them) and from other effects. But NASA says that “about 60 percent” of the region’s shrinking water supply was because of overdrawn groundwater stores.

According to the Associated Press, the mismanaging of their groundwater supplies means that the Middle Eastern countries have now effectively lost “117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of its total stored freshwater,” a volume “almost the size of the Dead Sea.”

The study is the latest evidence of a worsening water crisis in the Middle East, where demands from growing populations, war and the worsening effects of climate change are raising the prospect that some countries could face sever water shortages in the decades to come.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Watch Drought Dry Up America’s Groundwater

Aramaic is one language scholars are racing to save. Image: Charles Roffey

By the year 2100, the human race will have lost about half of the languages in use today. Every fourteen days a language dies. For native speakers of Navajo, Southwestern Ojibwa, Ohlone or Aragonese, losing their language means losing cultural heritage and history. And saving a dying language is really hard. But the people who provide life support for the struggling tongues can look to one success story: Yurok. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Last fall, Eureka High became the fifth and largest school in Northern California to launch a Yurok-language program, marking the latest victory in a Native American language revitalization program widely lauded as the most successful in the state.

At last count, there were more than 300 basic Yurok speakers, 60 with intermediate skills, 37 who are advanced and 17 who are considered conversationally fluent.

That might seem like a small group, but in the 1990s, there were just six Yurok speakers left.

Keeping small languages vibrant has always been a big challenge, says National Geographic:

Throughout human history, the languages of powerful groups have spread while the languages of smaller cultures have become extinct. This occurs through official language policies or through the allure that the high prestige of speaking an imperial language can bring. These trends explain, for instance, why more language diversity exists in Bolivia than on the entire European continent, which has a long history of large states and imperial powers.

As big languages spread, children whose parents speak a small language often grow up learning the dominant language. Depending on attitudes toward the ancestral language, those children or their children may never learn the smaller language, or they may forget it as it falls out of use. This has occurred throughout human history, but the rate of language disappearance has accelerated dramatically in recent years.

Many linguists are trying to preserve these languages as they totter along towards extinction. The Endangered Language Project is creating an online database of research and information about languages that are imperiled. There are currently 141 languages that qualify as extinct or “sleeping.” Aramaic isn’t on that list, but it’s close. Linguists are working furiously to preserve the language that Jesus spoke, Smithsonian reports:

Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, was the common tongue of the entire Middle East when the Middle East was the crossroads of the world. People used it for commerce and government across territory stretching from Egypt and the Holy Land to India and China. Parts of the Bible and the Jewish Talmud were written in it; the original “writing on the wall,” presaging the fall of the Babylonians, was composed in it. As Jesus died on the cross, he cried in Aramaic, “Elahi, Elahi, lema shabaqtani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”)

But Aramaic is down now to its last generation or two of speakers, most of them scattered over the past century from homelands where their language once flourished. In their new lands, few children and even fewer grandchildren learn it. (My father, a Jew born in Kurdish Iraq, is a native speaker and scholar of Aramaic; I grew up in Los Angeles and know just a few words.) This generational rupture marks a language’s last days. For field linguists like Khan, recording native speakers—“informants,” in the lingo—is both an act of cultural preservation and an investigation into how ancient languages shift and splinter over time.

The key to success for Yurok is teaching children the language that perhaps their parents forgot, says the LATimes:

The tribe has pushed for high school classes to be scheduled in the early morning — to get students there and keep them there. It seems to be working.

Alex Gensaw lives next door to tribal elder Archie Thompson and craved a deeper connection to his culture. He came into McQuillen’s class three years ago knowing only 10 words of Yurok: It wasn’t spoken in his home. But the 16-year-old (a second cousin to Yurok teacher James Gensaw) now is teaching his mom. And his feelings about the high school have shifted. “It’s like they care more,” he said.

In the Northwest Territories of Canada, a kindgerarten class might be the last chance for the Tlicho Yait language, Smithsonian reported last year:

In a bid to save their language, and with it, their culture, the Tlicho government has implemented an immersion kindergarten program taught entirely in their native language, Tlicho Yati, the first such class in neatly 20 years, reports the CBC. With only a few thousand native speakers spread amongst four main communities in the Northwest Territories, Canada, the language of the Tlicho people is in a tenuous position. A majority of Tlicho children do not speak the language, but similar immersion programs elsewhere have shown that kids are open to learning new languages.

And while many older native speakers are wary of academics and their recording devices, they’re also wary of losing their words.

More from Smithsonian.com:

How to Save a Dying Language
Reviving the Ohlone Language
Kindergarten Classes Could Save Fading Language

Photo: adam coster

Science savvy female teens in Asia, east and south Europe and the Middle East represent their gender well. These ladies, on average, outperform their male counterparts on science tests for comprehension. In the United States, however, women still lag behind men in science achievement. Only Colombia and Liechtenstein exhibit a higher gap between the genders than the U.S., where boys performed 2.7 percent higher than girls, the New York Times shows (with an interactive plot).

Sixty-five developed countries took part in the test, which was given to 15-year-old students. In the majority of countries, girls dominated. The U.S., plus a handful of countries mostly in west north Europe and the Americas, showed the opposite trend.

The Times writes that the tests point to cultural differences in the incentives offered for learning math and science. Andreas Schleicher, the project leader behind the test, from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that boys in the U.S. are more likely to see science as something relevant to their lives than girls.

The Scientist continues:

Christianne Corbett, a senior researcher at the American Association of University Women, agreed, saying, “we see that very early in childhood—around age 4—gender roles in occupations appear to be formed. Women are less likely to go into science careers, although they are clearly capable of succeeding.”

In contrast, Schleicher said, “for girls in some Arab countries”—such as Jordan, where girls outscored boys by an impressive 8 percent—“education is the only way to move up the social structure. It is one way to earn social mobility.”

Like soccer is for young men in some African and Latino countries, science may be the new ticket to financial and societal freedom for women around the world. Women in the U.S., Canada, Britain and other European nations might not have the same incentive to break free of cultural discouragement, but if they could overcome that barrier, the scientific playing field would only become a more diverse and fruitful arena.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Women in Science 
Women Are Still Discriminated Against in Science 

Photo: UK Ministry of Defense

The British military has taken stealth to a new level. In Afghanistan, troops fly drones the size of a hamster. The Norwegian-manufactured machines currently rank as the world’s smallest military-grade spy drone, weighing just 16 grams and measuring at 4 inches long. Dubbed the Black Hornet, the sneaky little choppers carry just a steerable camera that takes still and video images, Wired reports.

British soldiers use the tiny drones to spy on insurgent firing points and survey exposed areas before moving in. The Black Hornet acts as a one-man intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance package, filtering information directly to the individual behind the controls rather than a company or supply chain of operators. In other words, the bot acts as as the remote-controlled eyes of a single soldier. Soldiers control the drone with a mouse-like device and view images on a screen akin to a Game Boy console.

The U.S. smallest drone, the Raven, can fit into a rucksack but is a giant next to the Black Hornet. From here, these little spy machines can only get smaller. The Pentagon’s already working on a drone the size of a hummingbird; perhaps soon we’ll see drones the size of honey bees or gnats.

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The triumphant space traveler returned from his/her big adventure? Photo: mashreghnews

A picture can speak a thousand words. This one reads: “Ohdeargod help me I just returned from space.” This monkey, Iran says, just returned from a trip into space—and a rather traumatic one, by the looks of it. The Washington Post reports:

The alleged rocket launch that put the monkey into space has not been confirmed by Western intelligence agencies. But that face certainly carries the expression of a creature that has just been launched, against its will, on a terrifying journey into the great beyond that its tiny brain could never possibly comprehend.

Iran’s Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi announced today on Iran’s state television that the country had successfully launched the monkey, AFP writes. Iranian news agencies reported that the monkey traveled in a capsule at an altitude of 75 miles for its sub-orbital flight. In 2011, Iran attempted a similar feat, though the unfortunate monkey from that trip did not return to grimace about it. No official explanation about the animal’s fate was ever released. Iran has also sent a rat, turtles and worms into space.

Iran sees the victory as a step towards buffering up its technology and space program. Vahidi remarked that sending a human into space would take some time, though. The country predicts that goal could be realized in 2020. 

Western nations, however, are less than thrilled. The same technologies deployed in Iran’s space program, they fear, could be used to develop ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads that some countries suspect Iran is developing in secret. Iranian officials deny that the space program is a front for any military pursuits.

More from Smithsonian.com:

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Climate justice protestors in Doha. Photo: World Resources

None of the terms commonly used to described the climate negotiations in Doha, which finish today—including “stalled,” “inching forward,” “sluggish,” “delayed,” “a frustratingly slow process” and “tough going”—provide much promise that any progress has been made on the increasingly urgent issue of global climate change.

Today, countries struggled to agree on the wording of draft texts of an agreement that, in theory, would be the outcome of the entire conference, The Guardian reports. Despite recent warnings that we could soon face the end of winter and bid farewell to places like the New Orleans (it’ll be underwater) and the entire Mediterranean (too scorching to handle), there was little sense of urgency in the room throughout the talks. Bloomberg Businessweek says of the mood:

“There is a very poor level of ambition and a general pushing off of concrete outcomes for another year,” said Kieren Keke, the foreign minister of Nauru, who leads the Aosis bloc of 43 island nations. “The current package is largely about continuing to talk and very little about current action.”

Some delegates blamed the Qatari presidency, which, they say, didn’t bother to seize the reigns and get everyone in line, for the lackluster outcome. At the same time, the Saudi Arabian chair has reportedly been acting up and not cooperating with the negotiators, while Chinese representatives shrugged and said they’re willing to be flexible on compromising on carbon cuts, so long as the other two lead polluters—the U.S. and India—follow suit. Meanwhile, the other delegates have resigned themselves to talks that will likely continue late into the night and Saturday morning, despite the schedule originally listing Doha’s conclusion at 6 p.m. this evening.

Bloomberg Businessweek quotes Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists:

“It’s a procedural train wreck that could happen if they don’t pull it together. They’re making progress on the individual bits. But what needs to happen is for them to show how those bits fit into a political package.”

Thankfully, there is still hope for reform. The Guardian points out:

To observers, the talks may seem difficult to follow. The problem is that the really tough negotiations are not happening at these talks – they will not start until next year. Those talks will be on drafting a global agreement, binding developed and developing countries to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, by 2015. If successful, it would be the first such global treaty.

However, if the Doha conference fails to produce a few resolutions on a small set of issues tabled for discussion, these “housekeeping” problems could drag into next year and eat into precious time allocated to negotiating the big questions. The Guardian concludes on a dire note: If the worst happens, and Doha ends in failure, it would cast doubt on the whole UN process of climate negotiations.

More from Smithsonian.com:

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Image: Flickr user Nacho Facello

American citizens aren’t the only ones concerned about the outcome of tomorrow’s election. This country’s politics have an outsized effect on the world at large and, for certain countries, can dramatically change the course of domestic events. Time singles out five particular countries and regions where the stakes of this election are unusually high and where the two candidates have suggested very different policies:

Syria 

So far, the U.S. has held back from direct intervention in the Syrian civil war. The next president will decide whether to provide military support for the rebels or to work on foraging a single multi-country opposition leadership in order to support their cause.

Israel 

In 2009, the U.S. pushed to restart peace talks with the Palestinian Authority. It’s still unclear what role the next American president could have in restarting the moribund peace process.

China 

China’s an easy scapegoat for American politicians, and presidents have varied dramatically in their friendliness towards the country. “Relations with any new Administration usually start on awkward footing,” Time explains.

European Union 

The interlinked financial and debt crises of the past four years have demonstrated how closely the EU’s 27 countries are tied to one another and to the broader global economy, including the United States. The next president will be an important voice in the current debate over whether the EU should pursue growth-oriented or austerity-centered economic policies.

The Arctic 

The Arctic’s rapidly shrinking ice cap, a symptom of a warming planet, bestows this region with perhaps the most urgent and imminent stake in the outcome of Tuesday’s election. Climate change was woefully absent from the presidential and vice presidential debates: If polar bears could vote, however, they likely would not be thrilled with either candidate on offer this Tuesday, Time points out.

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Photo: Portuguese_eyes

Saudi Arabia has a full fifth of the world’s oil reserves, and it is the world’s largest exporter of oil. When Saudi Arabia decides to ramp up production—the country announced today that it may do so soon—the world price of oil drops. When something threatens that flow of oil, things can get messy. Oil exports make up 90 percent of the Saudi Arabian export economy, and 45 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

So long as oil keeps flowing from the country’s borders, money will keep flowing in. But, in an ironic twist, one of the keystone regions in the fossil fuel economy is turning itself into a bastion of renewable energy production. Back in May, Saudi officials said they were looking for investors to kick off a $109 billion expansion into solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear energy production. Venture Beat:

Industry analysts say the country can earn a healthy return on the investment by displacing a third of the oil it now consumes and selling that on the open market.

In other words, one of our major sources of imported oil thinks that spending more than $100 billion to cut its own oil consumption is a good deal–because we’ll pay them more than that for the oil they don’t use.

One of the first big projects, says Bloomberg, could be an installation near the holy city of Mecca.

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A view of Aleppo in 2007, before fighting began. Photo: Watchsmart

Aleppo, the site of an ancient UNESCO-listed souk in Syria, went up in flames on Sunday as clashes between troops and rebels infiltrated the market quarter. The historic souk, largely fashioned from wood, represents Syria’s commercial capital and houses family businesses that date back for generations. This morning, the violence continued as three large explosions went off in Aleppo’s central square, and as many as five car bombs were deployed in rapid succession in an area currently controlled by the military.

AFP reports on the destruction:

Persistent explosions rocked the covered market on Sunday as rebels armed with grenades and makeshift bombs pushed towards the Umayyad Mosque in the heart of the Old City as part of the all-out offensive in Aleppo they announced on Thursday night.

Before the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime rule erupted in March last year, the UNESCO-listed covered market would have been packed with tourists.

But since mid-July the city of some 1.7 million has become the key battleground of the uprising.

UNESCO first listed Aleppo’s market quarter—which includes more than 1,550 stores and is one of the largest souks in the world—as a world heritage site in 1986. The souk dates back for more than 2,000 years.

One rebel fighter told AFP, ”It’s part of the heritage of mankind that’s being destroyed.” Yet rebels confirmed Monday that they will continue their offensive in the historic city. Around the country, soldiers, rebels and civilian looters are also plundering historic artifacts and relics.

Activists claim as many as 40 people may have been killed and 100 others injured in this latest attack, most of whom were military officers and soldiers. President Assad reportedly visited Aleppo yesterday and ordered 30,000 more troops to take part in the battle.

Syria’s ongoing uprising have so far cost the country more than 30,000 casualties, according to Reuters, and  the violence shows no signs of abating any time soon.

A video uploaded to Youtube surveys the market damage in the bombings’ immediate aftermath:

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Looters are Stealing Artifacts to Fund War in Syria 
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Bamboo sharks are one of the many species which are migrating due to climate change. Photo: Silke Baron

As the climate changes and as humans expand their footprint on the planet, the world is warming, rainfall patterns are shifting, ice is melting, forests are disappearing, and animals are forced to adapt or to face extinction. In Scientific American, Mark Fischetti reports on the mass migration taking place in the ocean, where fish are moving to cooler climes. From this shift in locale, however, a problem arises:

Scientists are finding that, in general, larger ocean organisms such as fishes have less tolerance for temperature change than the microorganisms they consume, such as phytoplankton. So it is possible that as fishes migrate, their preferred food sources may not. To survive, the migrants may have to change their diet once they reach their new neighborhoods.

This assumption, that the fish will just find something new to eat in their new home, makes a lot of sense. If you go on vacation from the U.S. to Cambodia, for instance, you don’t expect your neighborhood restaurant to follow you—you just smile and dig in to your bai sach chrouk. As io9 reports, many species are adapting to climate change at an impressive pace. (Though they note that many others aren’t doing so well.)

What scientists are finding out the hard way, however, is that the adaptation strategies that seem to just make sense don’t always play out the way we’d have hoped. The BBC tells the tale of the critically endangered Asiatic cheetah, a subspecies of which there are only 70 remaining wild members, all of which live in Iran. Poaching, rather than climate change, drove down the amount of prey species available to the wild predators.

Scientists figured that the cheetahs would just adapt to their changing situation by eating more rabbits or rodents, says the BBC, but that isn’t what happened. Instead, scientists “found [that] the cats had turned to hunting domestic animals because they could not survive on smaller prey.” So now, the cheetahs are adapting, but they are adapting by taking from farmer’s herds—a strategy that could bring the big cats and the farmers into conflict. So far, “[t]he scientists’ study reported that local herders seemed unaware of the Asiatic cheetah’s “depredation of their stock”, perhaps because the cats are so rare.” They suggest that putting tighter restrictions on poaching could help boost Asiatic cheetah numbers while keeping them away from the farm.

As with the cheetahs, so too with the myriad other species affected by habitat destruction and climate change. Many of them will likely adapt, but not always in ways that are agreeable to human interests.

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Palmyra, Syria. Photo: Flickr user James Gordon

War zones are dangerous places, for both people and cultural heritage. Lately, Iraq, Afghanistan and Egypt have endured high-profile looting or looting attempts on archaeological sites and museums. Now, Syria has joined the inglorious list as priceless artifacts are being stolen, smuggled and even traded for weapons.

Interpol has gotten involved. The situation got to a point where they posted this warning in May:

The on-going armed conflict in Syria is increasingly threatening a significant part of the cultural heritage of mankind. Roman ruins, archaeological sites, historic premises and places of worship are particularly vulnerable to destruction, damages, theft and looting during this period of turmoil.

The INTERPOL General Secretariat therefore joins UNESCO’s warning of the imminent threats to which Syrian cultural heritage is currently exposed and is strengthening its co-operation with other international partner organizations for a coordinated response to this menace.

Meanace, indeed. The notice was posted as part of an appeal for the return of a group of mosaics looted from the Roman ruins of Apamea, near Hama.

An article in Time paints a vivid picture of how Syrian artifacts are being used as fodder for the war machine:

Abu Khaled knows the worth of things. As a small-time smuggler living along the porous border between Syria and Lebanon, he has dabbled in antiquities as much as the cigarettes, stolen goods and weapons that make up the bulk of his trade. So when a smuggler from Syria brought him a small, alabaster statue of a seated man a few weeks ago, he figured that the carving, most likely looted from one of Syria’s two dozen heritage museums or one of its hundreds of archaeological sites, could be worth a couple thousand dollars in Lebanon’s antiquities black market. So he called his contacts in Beirut. But instead of asking for cash, he asked for something even more valuable: weapons.

“War is good for us,” he says of the community of smugglers that regularly transit the nearby border. “We buy antiquities cheap, and then sell weapons expensively.” That business, he says, is about to get better. Fighters allied with the Free Syrian Army units battling the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad have told him that they are developing an association of diggers dedicated to finding antiquities in order to fund the revolution. “The rebels need weapons, and antiquities are an easy way to buy them,” says Abu Khaled.

But it isn’t just the rebels accused of stealing, as an article from the Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports:

In Reyhanli, a small Turkish village near the border with Syria, a newly arrived Syrian refugee from the famed ancient desert town of Palmyra told AFP that the museum there had been looted and reported large-scale theft at the site.

“These are the shabiha, the Assad gangs (militiamen) who do this,” charged Abu Jabal, giving a fictitious name. “The army is there, and oversees everything.” An amateur video posted online on August 17 shows seven or eight sculptures and busts crammed into the back of a pick-up truck. Soldiers can be seen chatting alongside the vehicle.

“We have studied what our Syrian colleagues are saying, and it is indeed soldiers. Everything leads us to believe that the army is stealing antiquities in Palmyra and elsewhere,” Spanish archaeologist Rodrigo Martin told AFP.

It seems that in Syria, unlike Egypt, neither government nor rebel is willing to protect Syria’s treasures.

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