Web inventor calls for global internet freedom bill

Thomson Reuters Posted: Mar 12, 2014 9:22 AM ET Last Updated: Mar 12, 2014 8:33 PM ET

"Are we going to continue on the road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more control - more and more surveillance?" asks Tim Berners-Lee, seen here in a 2013 photo. (Jean-Christophe Bott, Keystone/Associated Press)

The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, called on Wednesday for bill of rights to protect freedom of speech on the internet and users' rights after leaks about government surveillance of online activity.

Exactly 25 years since the London-born computer scientist invented the web, Berners-Lee said there was a need for a charter like England's historic Magna Carta to help guarantee fundamental principles online.

Web privacy and freedom have come under scrutiny since former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year leaked a raft of secret documents revealing a vast U.S. government system for monitoring phone and Internet data.

Accusations that NSA was mining personal data of users of Google, Facebook, Skype and other U.S. companies prompted President Barack Obama to announce reforms in January to scale back the NSA programme and ban eavesdropping on the leaders of close friends and allies of the United States.

Berners-Lee said it was time for a communal decision as he warned that growing surveillance and censorship, in countries such as China, threatened the future of democracy.

"Are we going to continue on the road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more control - more and more surveillance?" he told BBC Radio on Wednesday.

"Or are we going to set up something like a Magna Carta for the world wide web and say, actually, now it's so important, so much part of our lives, that it becomes on a level with human rights?" he said, referring to the 1215 English charter.

The Magna Carta, signed between England's King John and feudal barons, regulated feudal customs and the justice system to "limit despotic behaviour by the king," according to the British Library. It is most famous for a clause that guarantees that no "free man" will be stripped of rights or property, imprisoned or exiled "except by the lawful judgment of his equals."

While acknowledging the state needed the power to tackle criminals using the internet, Berners-Lee has called for greater oversight over spy agencies such Britain's GCHQ and the NSA, and over any organizations collecting data on private individuals.

He has previously spoken in support of Snowden, saying his actions were "in the public interest".

Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium, a global community with a mission to lead the web to its full potential, have launched a year of action for a campaign called the Web We Want, urging people to push for an Internet "bill of rights" for every country.

"Our rights are being infringed more and more on every side, and the danger is that we get used to it. So I want to use the 25th anniversary for us all to do that, to take the web back into our own hands and define the web we want for the next 25 years," he told the Guardian newspaper.

March 15: Beyond Antibiotics Mar. 12, 2014 12:06 PM This week on Quirks & Quarks, we look at the threat of a post-antibiotic world, and what new strategies researchers are looking at to cope with a world where antibiotics no longer work.

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How humans shaped Canada's spectacular wilderness

By Emily Chung, CBC News Posted: Mar 11, 2014 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Mar 11, 2014 11:50 AM ET

Long before Europeans arrived, Canada's aboriginal people were applying fire to shape the bison-friendly grasslands of the Prairies and the scrub oak forests of eastern Canada.

On the Pacific coast, they were cultivating camas lilies and settling salmon eggs in new streams, a new documentary series shows. And of course, the human influence on Canada's wilderness has only increased since then.

Wild Canada, which debuts on CBC-TV's The Nature of Things on Thursday, is a four-part series shot in ultra-high definition that takes viewers on an exploration of some of our country's most spectacular landscapes, and intimate encounters with the animals that live there. It also features historical re-enactments illustrating how humans have interacted with their surroundings and their animal neighbours for thousands of years. 

An interactive iPad app envisioned as a companion "coffee table book" can be downloaded for free until Thursday. Starting Friday, it will cost $3.99.

Canadian nature documentary filmmaker Jeff Turner had previously worked on projects such as BBC's Planet Earth series, acclaimed for its high-definition footage of beautiful and rarely seen wild places and wildlife around the world. Turner said he came to realize that the natural beauty of our own country had never been showcased like that.

"It's an incredibly wild and beautiful place," he said. "There was so much in the country that people hadn't seen before. There was a newness here."

After some research, he realized that despite its seemingly natural state, one of the things that makes Canada's wilderness unusual is that it has been influenced by humans from the beginning.

Dall's sheep live in the mountains of Canada's North. One of the goals of Wild Canada was to show people parts of Canada that most people haven't seen before. (CBC)

"Just 15,000 years ago, Canada didn't exist as a natural landscape. It was covered by ice," Turner said.

Shortly after that, the ice melted and exposed new landscapes for plants and animals to colonize. Human beings first set foot on the continent at about the same time.

"That's fairly unique in the world. All the landscapes that formed in the country – all the natural landscapes – formed with the presence of humans … people have been shaping the landscape that they lived in over thousands and thousands of years."

The vast prairie landscape stretching from Manitoba to the Rocky Mountains in the West is one of the classic examples showcased in the series.

"If human beings hadn't been here, then that landscape would have looked very different than it does today and it would have very different animals in it," said Turner.

It's easy to imagine that the Prairies have always been a sea of grasses stretching as far as the eye can see, providing the perfect habitat for vast herds of bison to roam. But the grasslands were actually shaped by regular fires that have kept trees at bay for thousands of years. And those fires were caused by humans in order to expand grazing lands for the bison, their prey, Turner said.

The Canadian Prairies were shaped by aboriginal people who use fire to keep trees from encroaching on the grasslands, expanding the habitat favoured by the bison they hunted. (CBC)

Meanwhile, the maple forests of Ontario that wow Algonquin Park visitors with their scarlet leaves each fall were shaped by Europeans, who valued the trees for the syrup they produced, the series shows.

Prior to the arrival of European settlers, aboriginal people kept the maples in check through burning, transforming the landscape into oak savannah forests. Those forests featured open grassy areas that provided the light for widely spaced trees to grow very large and produce more edible nuts and cones. Turner said one of the few remnants of that habitat remains in Toronto's High Park, and is now preserved by an annual burning every spring.

The series also shows how humans helped some wild animals spread beyond their traditional ranges, while changing what was the "natural" range for others. The bison are just one example.

On the West Coast, salmon were valued by the Heiltsuk people for food and recognized for their role in nourishing the entire ecosystem. One of their traditional practices was to take eggs from a river rich in fish to one that didn't have many, spreading salmon populations through the river system.

There are many ways humans have changed the way wild animals live in ways we don't even realize, such as pushing grizzly bears into the mountains, where they were less likely to prey on livestock, Turner said.

"We think of them as mountain species, but they're actually a prairie animal."

He added that humans are now recognizing this and allowing the grizzly bears back to their traditional habitat. The bears are resettling the Prairies.

"Nature is here," Turner said. "If we give it a chance, it'll come back."

Canadian nature documentary filmmaker Jeff Turner had previously worked on projects such as BBC's Planet Earth series, and realized the natural beauty of our own country had never been showcased like that. (CBC)

March 15: Beyond Antibiotics Mar. 12, 2014 12:06 PM This week on Quirks & Quarks, we look at the threat of a post-antibiotic world, and what new strategies researchers are looking at to cope with a world where antibiotics no longer work.

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Oceans' worth of water stored deep in Earth

A dirty, $10 diamond with a prize inside has helped reveal that there are vast quantities of water stored deep inside the Earth.

The diamond formed in the "transition zone" around 410 to 660 kilometres below our planet's surface. Analysis of a mineral grain trapped inside it suggests that it came from surroundings that were about one per cent water, report researchers led by University of Alberta geochemist Graham Pearson. They published their  findings online in the journal Nature today.

If the sample is representative of that part of the deep Earth, the amount of water there could be "about the same as the mass of all the world’s oceans combined," wrote Hans Keppler, a geophysicist at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, in an analysis article.

That, in turn, changes our understanding of the way water cycles through our planet, and has implications for the way tectonic plates and volcanoes behave, Pearson notes.

Previously, geophysicists had debated about whether there could be water in the transition zone. Geophysical measurements from the surface had provided conflicting results.

The diamond has a bumpy surface, sculptured by corrosive fluids in the Earth's mantle on its way to the surface. (Richard Siemens, University of Alberta)

The new, hard evidence that there is water deep in the Earth comes from a tiny grain of rock — just four-hundredths of a millimetre in diameter — trapped inside the diamond.

That grain was made of ringwoodite — a form of the green mineral peridot that has never before been found on Earth, except in meteorites from space. That's because, like a diamond itself, it can only be made under extremely high pressures like those found so deep inside the Earth that they are inaccessible to humans.

"You can't run a field trip to those areas," Pearson said in a phone interview. "No one's ever even going to drill to those areas."

Typically, the amount of water in peridot is "vanishingly small," Pearson added.

But he and his colleagues probed the ringwoodite in the diamond with different kinds of light and looked for the signature of water. Their analysis showed the sample contained 1.5 per cent water by weight, suggesting that the transition zone where it formed is about one per cent water.

The layers of Earth above and below the transition zone, called the upper and lower mantles respectively, are each known to be "a desert for water," Pearson said.

'It actually looks as though it's been to hell and back, which it literally has.'- Graham Pearson, University of Alberta

"What we've found is an oasis of water in the transition zone."

A lot of that water was likely carried down by tectonic plates that were originally at the bottom of the oceans, Pearson said — "water that we would call recycled, that comes from Earth's surface and then is put back down into the Earth."

Although scientists hadn't acknowledged until recently that the planet's water might make these kinds of underground voyages, it makes sense, Pearson added. That's because huge amounts of water from the depths of the Earth are constantly being spewed by volcanoes into the oceans and atmosphere.

"If that weren't replenished, then the interior of the Earth would just become a dry desert," he said. "So it's part of what we call the water cycle."

The water now known to exist deep in Earth may help scientists better understand major geological processes.

"Really it's the essence of how plate tectonics works, because water weakens rocks," Pearson said. "And also, water lowers the melting point of rock, so water dictates where many of the Earth's volcanoes are found."

Ringwoodite is a form of the mineral found on Earth's surface as peridot (the birthstone for the month of August) or olivine. In fact, the grain trapped inside the diamond likely started its life as an ordinary grain of olivine on a plate at the bottom of the ocean, Pearson said.

At some point, the plate was pushed down to the transition zone. There, the high pressure compresses the peridot into a different kind of crystal — one that is mostly denser than regular peridot, but features regularly spaced pores that allow it to suck up surrounding water like a sponge: ringwoodite.

The grain of ringwoodite became trapped in a diamond that has kept it preserved under high pressure. The diamond eventually transported it up to Earth's surface via a type of volcanic rock called kimberlite, which can erupt very quickly from extreme depths.

The diamond, a bumpy, dirty brown stone, just three millimetres wide, eventually ended up in the gravel at the bottom of a shallow river in Mato Grosso, Brazil, where it was scooped up by artisan miners in 2008.

"It actually looks as though it's been to hell and back, which it literally has," said Pearson, who estimates his research team bought the 90-milligram (0.45 carat) diamond for about $10.

Back at the University of Alberta, his graduate student John McNeill examined the rock using an instrument called a Raman microscope in the hopes that it might contain a calcium-rich mineral that would provide information about how old the diamond was.

The instrument belonged to Enrica Nestola, who happened to walk into the lab while McNeill was puzzling over what he was seeing.

That was a stroke of luck.

Nestola "is one of the handful of people in the word who would have known instantly what that was and identified it as ringwoodite," Pearson said. "And if that hadn't happened, then we would have just put this diamond on the pile and kept looking for what we were supposed to be looking for."

Pearson, who is a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Arctic Resources, added that the story illustrates the importance of basic and not just applied research, since scientists often make major discoveries "almost by chance" while looking for something completely different.

"But of course," he said, "you don't make discoveries like that unless you're looking in the first place."

A cross-section of Earth shows the location of ringwoodite, which makes up approximately 60 per cent by volume of the lower transition zone. The diagram also shows how water gets transported down to those depths, and how diamonds and water move back to the surface. (Kathy Mather)

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Climate likely fuelled Genghis Khan's conquests

Genghis Khan led the Mongols to take over huge swaths of Europe and Asia during the 13th century, including most of modern-day Russia, China, Korea, southeast Asia, India, the Middle East and eastern Europe. (REUTERS)

Scientists think they have figured out a key factor that allowed Genghis Khan's Mongol empire to take over huge swaths of Europe and Asia during the 13th century.

The Mongols under Khan, his sons and his grandsons took over most of modern-day Russia, China, Korea, southeast Asia, Iran, India, the Middle East and eastern Europe during their conquest. But in some ways, they seemed unlikely conquerors. Mongolia has a very harsh climate – cold and dry, with few resources, said researcher Neil Pedersen in a video interview posted by Columbia University's Earth Institute.

"How did these people that were perceived as being primitive, how did they rise up and just start dominating Eurasia?"

Pedersen and Amy Hessl of West Virginia University think they have figured out a big part of the answer, thanks to their analysis of rings from Mongolian trees that are more than 1,000 years old. The stunted larches and Siberian pines were growing out of cracks in hardened volcanic lava north of the former Mongol capital of Karakorum.

Because trees grow faster when it is warmer and wetter than when it is cooler and drier, their rings can provide a record of past climate.

Researcher Neil Pederson takes a core from an old Siberian pine on the Khorgo lava field in central Mongolia. The tree rings from the core provide information about the changing climate over the tree's lifetime. (Image courtesy of Kevin Krajick, Earth Institute and Columbia University)

While Mongolia is normally cold and dry, the tree rings showed that the regional climate during the rise of Khan's empire was "warm and persistently wet," the researchers reported in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In fact, there was an "unprecedented" 15 straight years of above average rainfall right coinciding with Khan's rise, the researchers wrote.

Pedersen noted that major sources of the Mongols' military strength were their horses and advanced cavalry tactics.

"Grass is the fossil fuel, the oil for the Mongol empire," he said.

Hessel said in a video interview that she thinks of it as "nature set the table and Genghis Khan came to eat… It was a matter of whether or not the culture and the people capitalized on that."

The study didn't just look at climate during Khan's rule, but over the entire 1,112 years visible in the tree rings. One of its findings was that the recent drought in central Mongolia was the hottest in the entire period of more than a millennium. Similar droughts due to future warming may have "potentially severe consequences for modern Mongolia," the researchers wrote.

Roots of Empire from Earth Institute on Vimeo.

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