An unusual case of vaginal tumour.

“A young unmarried woman aged 24 years, suffering from cancerophobia, came to the clinic in an acute anxiety state, convinced that she had a malignant growth, having, she stated, only that morning felt a hard lump in the vagina.

She was a well-nourished person and there was no history of loss of weight, menstrual iregularity, or vaginal discharge; nor was there any previous history of gynaecological or other relevant disorder. She did, however, exhibit signs of emotional distress with sweaty palms and tachycardia.

Examination.
A large, hard, smooth lump filed the vagina. On removal it was found to be a globular circumscribed object, possessing no capsule, and on section was seen to have a laminated structure (Figure). It was identified as a specimen of “liliaceaeoma” or an Allium cepa.

The encyclopaedia defines the Allium cepa as one of the family Liliaceae. It has been cultivated from ancient times and probably originated in Asia. The edible part is the bulb containing an acrid volatile oil, giving a strong flavour. The allium is a bienial, the common species producing a bulb in the first season and seeds in the second. The example shewn is evidently of the first season.

Result.
On being informed that she had no cancer, but rather an onion, the patient shewed no signs of pleasure or of gratitude on being so quickly cured of her complaint and relieved of her anxiety. Instead she exhibited signs of anger, the reason for which was the same as had caused the presence of this unexpected vegetable in such an unusual garden. It appeared that her male consort and herself had indulged very freely in alcohol on the previous evening and that he had departed sometime during the night leaving her in a deep sleep on the bed. The removal of the onion from a bunch of its fellows hanging on the back of the door, and its subsequent insertion, had been his parting gesture of affection.”

[This is the full article, but the free PDF is also available here.]

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The Roman Goddess of beauty and love, and the brightest object in the night sky after the moon.  Venus appears as a glowing, bright blue star; beautiful, calm, serene, distant, cool.

Venus over the Pacific Ocean Image; Mila Zinkova, all rights reserved

That’s the image, anyway.  When you get closer to Venus, you start to see some serious cracks in the “love and beauty” image.

For one thing, Venus is hot.  Very hot.  There is a runaway greenhouse effect at work on the planet, making its surface temperature about 460 degrees C (860 F).  This is hotter than the surface of Mercury.  Venus is isothermal, meaning its temperature is constant; pole to pole, night and day.  What a steam bath.

The atmosphere on Venus is very dense, too.  About 93 times denser than on Earth.  You’d have to go about 1 kilometer below the ocean to experience the same crushing pressure as the atmosphere on Venus.  Above the CO2 layer, there are thick clouds of sulfuric dioxide and sulfuric acid.  There is a huge atmospheric vortex on the south pole of the planet, and the cloud layers produce lightning, much like the clouds on Earth.  They also make it impossible to see the surface.

So much for serene, calm, and cool.

Surface of Venus from Soviet lander Venera 13. Image PD/USGOV

Venus has an interesting retrograde orbit; it rotates clockwise instead of counter-clockwise with a near circular orbit.  On Venus, the sun rises in the West and sets in the East.

In orbit, Venus overtakes the Earth every 584 days, changing it from the Evening Star to the Morning Star.  Whether she appears in the morning or the evening, Venus is hard to miss.  In fact, she is so bright in the sky, she has been reported as a UFO several times.

Hans Glaser woodcut, 1566 Public Domain

However Venus appears close up, from a distance she is our beautiful Morning and Evening Star.  I like to look up and find Venus in the night sky.  She is, indeed, hard to miss… and she is a true beauty in the night.

Moon and Venus in conjunction three consecutive nights; Image by fdecomite, some rights reserved

Greetings from sunny Houston. The hotels are overrun with basketball fans donning the colors of Duke, Baylor, and other colleges playing basketball here tonight. But the NCAA tournament isn’t the competition that brought DISCOVER deep in the heart of Texas.

We’re here for the Shell Eco-marathon Americas. All weekend long in downtown Houston, students from 29 universities and 9 high schools will he going head-to-head with their prototype ultra-high mileage vehicles. Most of the 50 vehicles are powered by combustion engines, but a smattering of vehicles running on ethanol, hydrogen fuel cells, solar, and petroleum gas have come down to challenge the traditional engine.

Check Discoblog over the weekend, as we’ll be continually updating on the wild cars and their brilliant young designers. Official competition runs Saturday and Sunday. However, given that winners of past eco-marathons have reached efficiencies in the thousands of miles per gallon, these vehicles might just keep on going.

First the smog, then the stink. Beijing’s white hot economic growth has led not just to smoggy skies but also stinky landfills that are literally taking people’s breath away.

Faced with overflowing landfills across the city, Beijing residents have been complaining about the rising stench of garbage that can be overpowering when the wind blows. So, the government decided to remedy the situation by installing 100 giant deodorant guns aimed at the city’s stinkiest landfill–the Asuwei dump site on the edge of Beijing.

The high-pressure cannons, like the one seen here being used at a public gathering, can spray dozens of pints of fragrance per minute over a distance of 160 feet. In addition to being bathed in sweet perfume, the Asuwei dump site will also get extra plastic layers to cover the garbage so that the smell doesn’t waft towards the city when the wind blows.

But The Guardian reports that it would take more than a few plastic sheets and perfume guns to zap Beijing’s garbage problems away:

According to the local government, the city of 17m people generates 18,000 tonnes of waste every day — 7,000 tonnes more than the capacity of municipal disposal plants.

The city recycles less than four percent of its rubbish each year, and the city’s residents continue to churn out trash too fast for the city to either bury or burn it. City officials want to build more incinerators, but those have pollution problems of their own–six incinerator projects within Beijing have been put on hold due to public protests. So, till those projects are approved, or the till the government figures out another way to take out the collected trash, Beijing residents will just have to spritz and bear it.

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Image: The Register

Former Roman Catholic priest and respected evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala has won this year’s Templeton Prize. The $1.53 million award honors a living person “who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.” The John Templeton Foundation cited Ayala’s dogged work through the years advocating the peaceful co-existence of science and religion in its decision. The somewhat controversial prize is often given to scientists who find common ground between religion and science, but previous winners have also included more traditional spiritual leaders like Mother Teresa and televangelist Billy Graham.

Ayala is the former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is respected for his research into the evolutionary history of the parasite scientists have associated with malaria, with an eye toward developing a cure for the disease. He also pioneered the use of an organism’s genetic material as molecular clocks that help track and time its origins [The Christian Science Monitor]. But he is known best, perhaps, for being an expert witness in the 1981 federal court trial that led to the overturning of an Arkansas law mandating the teaching creationism with evolution in science class. In 2001, he was awarded the National Medal of Science.

Ayala will receive his award at the Buckingham Palace on May 5, but addressing a press conference yesterday in Washington, D.C. he reiterated that science doesn’t have to contradict religion: “If they are properly understood,” he said, “they cannot be in contradiction because science and religion concern different matters, and each is essential to human understanding” [Templeton Prize]. Referring to Picasso’s paiting Guernica, which famously depicts the tragedies of war, Ayala noted that science helps us understand the painting’s proportions and pigments, but only a spiritual view conveys the horror of the subject matter. He argued that the spiritual and scientific analyses were both necessary to comprehend the totality of the masterpiece, saying: “Science gives us an insight on reality which is very important; our technology is based on our science…. But at the end of the day, questions important to people, questions of meaning, purpose, moral values, and the like” are not answered through science [The Christian Science Monitor].

Born in Madrid in 1934, Ayala felt the two pulls of religion and science early on. He became an ordained priest, but left the fold when he came to New York’s Columbia University to get an PhD in genetics. He’s currently a top professor of biological sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

Some scientists have criticized the John Templeton Foundation’s work, arguing that science and religion shouldn’t be mixed up together. Critics were further angered when the National Academy of Sciences hosted the Templeton Foundation’s announcement of Ayala’s award, saying that the foundation may gain scientific respectability by associating with scientists and their institutions [Guardian].

California Institute of Technology physicist Sean Carroll, who writes for the DISCOVER blog Cosmic Variance, was one of those who voiced his disapproval: “The Templeton Foundation is working in good faith. They’re in favour of science but want to see a reconciliation with religion. That’s not evil and crackpotty, but it’s incorrect. It’s a mistake…. I’m not asking NAS to put out an official statement of atheism. They don’t have to take a stand either way, but the academy is best served by just staying away” [Nature blog]. But the NAS president Ralph Cicerone waved the concerns away, saying NAS agreed to host the event when a member of the foundation requested a room for the ceremony.

Ayala plans to give his award money to charity.

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Cosmic Variance: In Bed With Templeton questions political spending by John Templeton, Jr.
Cosmic Variance: Templeton and Skeptics discusses a conference on science and religion

Image: Mark Finkenstaedt/Templeton Prize

You would think that kids these days would have something better to do with their time than balancing 15 books on their heads while manipulating Rubik’s cubes and reciting the mathematical constant pi to a hundred digits.

But no. In the latest geek-tastic viral video, a young lady who calls herself “Bookonmyhead” carries out just this stunt. The video was posted in November but just went viral in the last few days; by now it has racked up more than 131,000 hits. Mashable says the girl is 18-year-old Lauren.

The 42-second video is pretty cool but comments left on YouTube allege that Lauren had solved the Rubik cube prior to the taping and that the books were superglued together—which is why they didn’t slither right off her head. Whatever! When was the last time you balanced 15 books on your head, messed with a Rubik cube, and got so many pi digits right? We thought so. Now watch.

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According to my understanding of the new reform, courtesy of CNN:
Citizens will be required to have acceptable coverage or pay a penalty of $95 in 2014, $325 in 2015, $695 (or up to 2.5 percent of income) in 2016. Families will pay half the amount for children, up to a cap of $2,250 per family. After 2016, penalties are indexed to Consumer Price Index.
Um, okay, so I will definitely have to buy health care by 2015 or so. That I get. After that, dodging it starts to hurt. Meanwhile, my current MIT health care ends in May with the end of the Knight Fellowship. At that point, it seems likely that I'll return to being a freelance writer, so for about 3.5 years, I'm not sure what I'll be doing for health care. My previous strategy was to buy something relatively cheap with a high deductible--catastrophic coverage, essentially. But I can't say the approach was particularly satisfying. I spent some $ 1300 per year (premiums increased each year) and barely went to the doctor, because I essentially had to pay 100 % for anything routine, like a check up or a bad cold that wouldn't go away. To obtain significantly better coverage, I ...

The Sun is displaying its individuality — I guess the manager at Chochkies finally got through to it — by showing a nice little flare the other day:

This image, taken by the STEREO spacecraft (for Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory), shows the Sun in the far ultraviolet, almost at X-ray energies. The bright flare is on the left. The slightly tilted elongated diamond is not real; it’s what happens when an electronic detector gets flooded with light. Detectors like this convert photons of light into electrons, and if too many photons hit it, the electrons leak out and "bloom" into nearby pixels.

Flares happen when the magnetic field lines of the Sun get tangled up. A huge amount of energy is stored in those lines! If the magnetic field gets too entangled, they can suddenly reconnect and release that energy. In my book, I make the analogy to a bunch of bed spring coils all under tension and thrown into a bag. If one snaps back, it hits the others which then snap, and you get a very quick and very violent release of energy. For the Sun, that means a solar flare is released. The one shown here is little, but big ones can release as much as 10% of the Sun’s total energy! They roar out, vast and powerful across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, and unleash a flood of subatomic particles as well.

If you look to the right of the flare, you’ll see some arcs extending up from the Sun’s surface. Those are also loops of magnetic energy, and a little time after this image was taken they too snapped, releasing a coronal mass ejection; it’s spread out more than a flare, so it’s less intense, but CMEs can blast out huge amounts of energy as well.

Images like this, and more observations by STEREO, help astronomers understand our nearest star better. And this isn’t just academic knowledge: flares and CMEs can damage or even destroy satellites, which represent billions of dollars of assets. The government and private companies take this threat very seriously indeed, of course. Just imagine the number of TPS reports they’d have to fill out!

Image credit: NASA, STEREO

Life: Ain’t it grand?

That seems to have been the starting point for the new nature documentary series LIFE, which spotlights some of the planet’s most gloriously unusual critters. The series, which airs on Sunday evenings on the Discovery Channel, presents animals that belong in the evolution hall of fame. Many have developed remarkable tricks to survive in inhospitable environments, while others have developed fascinating mating rituals that ensure that the fittest individuals pass on their genes, generation after generation.

Click through the gallery for some of our favorite hall-of-famers from the show.

A Restless Trail-Runner

Size does matter, especially for the tiny rufous sengi, an “elephant shrew” whose small size and constant movement makes it hungry—all the time! But movement in a forest full of predators is dangerous, so the sengi devised a clever method to forage for food.

The tiny mammal constructs a series of neatly cleared trails between its regular feeding spots and memorizes their details. Then it launches itself on a trail patrol at breakneck speed, stopping only to check for tasty insects and to clear the trail of any debris. A single twig can be fatal, so the sengi spends up to 40 percent of its time running the trails and clearing away obstacles.

Details here. The bill will be signed into law Tuesday by President Obama. Yes we did.

The media glorifying burns: a hindrance to burn prevention.

“The media have a profound influence on the actions of children and adults. Burns and burn prevention tend to be ignored or even mocked. The purpose of this presentation is to reveal the callousness of the media in its dealings with burns and burn prevention. Printed materials with a relationship to burns, risk of burning, or disrespect for the consequences of burns were collected. The materials were tabulated into four categories: comics, advertisements (ads), articles that made light of burns, and television shows that portrayed behavior that would risk burn injury. Most burn-related materials were found in comics or advertisements. Several comics made light of high-risk behavior with flames, scald injury, contact injury, or burns. In addition, several advertisements showed people on fire or actions that could easily lead to burns. Several articles and televisions shows portrayed high-risk behavior that, in some instances, led to copycat injuries. Flames are frequently used to sell items that target adolescent boys or young men. The high incidence injuries that frequent this population parallel the high-risk behaviors portrayed by the media. The media portrays flames and high-risk behavior for burn injury as being cool, funny, and without consequence. The use of flames on clothing and recreational equipment (skateboards, hot rods) particularly targets the high-risk adolescent male. The burn community should make the media aware of the harm it causes with its callous depiction and glorification of burns.”

Photo: flickr/happysweetmama

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News here. It's great to see such a staunch champion of the teaching of evolution, and of embryonic stem cell research, winning this award. There is no better demonstration, I think, that science and religion don't have to be at war all the time--for after all, Ayala is also a former priest and has been exceedingly prominent in making the argument against the problematic "conflict thesis." Meanwhile, those who embrace that thesis, and dislike the Templeton Foundation, will still have a hard time saying anything bad about Ayala, I would imagine. In addition to fighting doggedly in defense of evolution, his scientific credentials include winning the National Medal of Science and serving as president and chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In congratulating Ayala, the National Center for Science Education adds:
Among his contributions to the defense of the integrity of science education was his testimony for the plaintiffs in McLean v. Arkansas and his coordination of support for evolution education at the National Academy of Sciences, including his lead authorship of the publication Science, Evolution, and Creationism (National Academies Press, 2008). NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott commented, "Ayala's contributions to NCSE and its goal ...

NOVA Science Now has a nifty feature they’re doing online where they spotlight "The Secret Life of Scientists". I have some reservations about it, because one thing scientists aren’t, is secretive. We talk about what we do constantly.

Anyway, they have a series of short videos about teen astronomer Caroline Moore, who recently discovered a rare type of supernova. She found this supernova, by the way, when she was 14.

They also asked her 10 questions, and while I might disagree with her choice of a news source, I think it’s great that they let her be her, and she shines right through in these videos. It’s also really terrific that she doesn’t compromise in these interviews, belting out whatever is on her mind. She’s a fantastic role model for kids interested in science, showing them that science really is cool, and you can do it and still be you.

A certain species of dung beetle has been crowned the world’s strongest insect. A male Onthophagus taurus can pull 1,141 times its own body weight — the equivalent of a 70-kilogramme (154-pound) person being able to lift 80 tonnes, the weight of six double-decker buses [AFP]. That power comes in handy not just to roll up a few extra dung-balls, but also to protect mates and stave off potential rivals.

Chronicling the insect’s amazing strength in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists Rob Knell and Leigh Simmons explain that the beetle’s amazing strength is connected to his sex life. These female dung beetles dig tunnels beneath choice pieces of dung in which to lay their eggs. If another male enters a tunnel already occupied by a rival, then the dung beetles duke it out, each male using his immense strength in an attempt to push the other out. Usually, the male that guards the tunnel repeatedly mates with the female inside.

In the study, scientists calibrated the males’ strength by gluing a cotton thread to the beetles’ hard wing-cases, stringing the thread across a pulley, and tying it to a miniature bucket, to which they added drops of water [ScienceNOW]. The dung beetle’s coronation as the world’s strongest insect steals the thunder from the rhinoceros beetle, which can lift up to 850 times its own weight.

The weaker males in this brawny insect community aren’t entirely out of luck, as nature has endowed them with other survival advantages. Knell added that some male dung beetles are smaller and weaker, but do not have to fight for female attention due to their “substantially bigger testicles”. “Instead of growing super strength to fight for a female, they grow lots more sperm to increase their chances of fertilizing her eggs and fathering the next generation” [AFP].

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Image: Alex Wild. Two male dung beetles fight for supremacy. 

Skeptic Magazine’s website has a new feature I like: short bios of important skeptics.

Daniel Loxton, the creator of this series, also made banners to put a face on skepticism. The face featured here is for the tireless and wondrous and totally awesome Swoopy^*, who runs the Skepticality podcast with Derek Colanduno.

I suspect you might recognize some of the others there too. And if you don’t, get to know them! You’ll be happy you did. But don’t believe me. Prove it for yourself.

Our book reviews aren't over yet--perhaps they will keep coming out all the way to the paperback release date in May. The latest is from David J. Tenenbaum of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, founding feature writer for the WhyFiles, who is reviewing in the journal Science Communication. Tenenbaum begins with a revealing vignette:
I e-mailed an eminent limnologist today, seeking to discuss an environmental issue that he’s considered important enough to study for several years. To my delight, he immediately responded with word that a new study was forthcoming in an important journal. Then, to my dismay, he added that the journal’s embargo would expire a couple of weeks after my publication date.
No problem, I replied. He’d watched the issue develop for years and would surely have a useful comment. Then I got the silent treatment.
Huh? When you contact scientists for a living (I admit, science journalism can seem a branch of telemarketing), you get used to nonresponses, to experts who think a “tight deadline” means 3 months, or are in Mongolia or at an invitation-only conference in Estonia. This latest wrinkle on the rejection letter told me that this expert would be happy to get help publicizing his newest research ...

Here’s what we know about the social networking site, Facebook. It can mysteriously suck away large portions of your day, and make you sneaky, nosy, and narcissistic. It can also, in some extreme cases, cause carpal tunnel syndrome from clicking through the bazillion vacation pictures you posted online. But does Facebook cause syphilis? The short answer is “no.” The longer one is “Are you nuts?”

But that didn’t stop British tabloid The Sun from cranking up its imagination and posting an article titled “Sex diseases soaring due to Facebook romps.”

The piece was based on a British National Health Service (NHS) report that noted that syphilis cases in the Teesside region, an area of northeast England, were up four fold. It said casual sex in the area had spiked and as a result of people not using condoms, a surprising number of women had contracted syphilis. So, from fewer than ten cases in 2008, the number had now gone up to 30.

The Sun quotes Professor Peter Kelly, director of Public Health for NHS Tees:

“I don’t get the names of people affected, just figures. And I saw that several of the people had met sexual partners through these sites…. Social networking sites are making it easier for people to meet up for casual sex. There is a rise in syphilis because people are having more sexual partners than 20 years ago and often do not use condoms.”

So the professor is stating what’s in the report: More people are finding dates online and are having casual sex, which leads, in some cases, to syphilis. From his quote above, it’s clear that he makes no specific mention of Facebook, nor is he saying that people who meet sexual partners on Facebook–rather than in bars, through friends, or via online dating sites–are more likely to wind up with an STD.

But here is how The Sun sums up what the professor said:

And an NHS trust chief said Facebook and similar sites were to blame for a shocking rise in cases of potentially-lethal syphilis in the region.

Once The Sun was on the story, other tabloids followed suit, starting with The Telegraph’s article “Facebook Linked to Rise in Syphilis” and The Independent’s “Internet Casual Sex is Blamed For Rise in Syphilis.” The BBC states that while Facebook is Britain’s favorite social networking site, it wasn’t entirely unreasonable to make that connection, but to literally put words in the professor’s mouth was inaccurate and misleading.

Edward Kunonga, Professor Kelly’s colleague told the BBC:

Our press release was simply trying to highlight the risks of casual sex. We did not make the claim that social networking sites are causing the rise in the incidence of syphilis.”

Gawker meanwhile ran a quote by a Facebook spokesperson, who scoffed at the false reporting:

While it makes for interesting headlines, the assertions made in newspaper reports that Facebook is responsible for the transmission of STDs are ridiculous, exaggerate the comments made by the professor, and ignore the difference between correlation and causation. As Facebook’s more than 400 million users know, our Web site is not a place to meet people for casual sex – it’s a place for friends, family and coworkers to connect and share.

Most readers, luckily, recognize that using Facebook and practicing safe sex are two completely different things. But that hasn’t stopped the Internet from tittering about the latest story; as one person commented on The Telegraph’s article: “My suggestion, practice ’safe social networking,’ wear a condom when on Facebook.”

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Image: Flickr/benstein

What looks like a giant helmet, can potentially zip through congested city streets, has eco-friendly bona fides, and can “talk” with other vehicles on the road? It’s the new 2-person EN-V, an “Electric Networked Vehicle” from GM–a concept car that the company hopes will change the way people in crowded cities drive in the future.

GM unveiled several models of the helmet-shaped concept vehicle in Shanghai. The 2-wheeled vehicles, built in collaboration with Segway and GM’s Chinese partner S.A.I.C., are powered by electric motors and can travel up to 25 miles on a single charge. The two-seater EN-V is also a third of the length of a regular car at 1.5 meters [about 5 feet]. It will be equipped with wireless communication and GPS-based navigation that will help it avoid accidents and pick the fastest routes based on real-time traffic conditions, GM says [The Wall Street Journal]. A driver could either control the car manually or could put it into the more relaxing autonomous mode.

Says GM executive Kevin Wale: “It provides an ideal solution for urban mobility that enables future driving to be free from petroleum and emissions, free from congestion and accidents, and more fun and fashionable than ever before” [The New York Times].

But don’t expect to see the EN-V on roads anytime soon. GM says the concept car is meant to showcase “what might be possible by 2030,” when infrastructure for networked vehicles might be in place. The company says that if the EN-V is eventually put into production, it will cost less than a small car but more than a moped.

GM’s decision to unveil the EN-V in Shanghai underscores China’s importance for GM’s future plans. It is GM’s second-largest market after the United States and a strategic battleground for all foreign automakers, with the likes of Volkswagen AG (VOWG.DE) and Toyota fighting fiercely for bigger market share [Reuters]. The country also has some of the most congested cities in the world, making it well-suited for tiny cars like GM’s EN-V.

The EN-V, however is not GM’s first eco-friendly offering. Its Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid is slated to hit showrooms later this year.

Here’s a closer look at the new EN-V in action.

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Image: General Motors

Here we have an image of the Phoenix Lander and surrounding area taken on February 25, 2010.

The Phoenix Lander succumbed to the cold of the Martian winter. Keep in mind Phoenix was not intended to last the winter; yet mission managers are hoping beyond hope that it might have made it through.

The northern winter on Mars is subsiding and you just never know so the Mars Odyssey orbiter is listening for any tell tale signal the increasing sunlight may have warmed the lander enough to revive.  There has been two listening periods so far, one in January and one in February.  The geometry of the orbits allowed for 60 passes in four days in February.  So far – nothing.  The next set of passes is in April and it sounds like if nothing is heard at that point, then mission managers will call it over.

Out with the old and in with the new I suppose.

There is a new Mars rover being built, the Mars Science Laboratory, named Curiosity, being built.  The builders recently put the robotic arm through a series of tests to be sure not only that it functions but as they put it: “plays nice with the rest of the system”.  Apparently the tests went well and the arm will be affixed to the Curiosity later this year.

I would imagine the work load stress is just starting to be felt in earnest as the September 2011 launch date is approaching.  Sounds like a long time but I bet it’s not.

For a larger version of Curiosity’s arm, click here.   Sorry there isn’t one for the Phoenix picture, but here’s the press release.

Images:  NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona (Phoenix) and NASA/JPL-Caltech (Curiosity)

Remember that time you and your sibling couldn’t stop fighting over a toy, so your mom wouldn’t let either one of you have it? It seems the same thing happens to unhappy neighboring countries and Mother Nature.

The island in the Bay of Bengal that Bangladesh called South Talpatti and India called New Moore or Purbasha appeared after a devastating cyclone, and it appeared right near the territorial boundary between the two. Decades of fighting over the uninhabited speck of land led to no political resolution. But now there’s a perfectly clear geographical resolution: The sea has reclaimed the island, scientists say.

According to oceanographer Sugata Hazra, the island was never very big, peaking at around 1.3 miles by 1.1 miles. The island began shrinking in the 1990s, part of an 81-square-mile decline in land mass in the Bay of Bengal’s Sunderbans mudflats over the last 40 years, Hazra said. And 27 square miles more has been lost to erosion. In the 1990s, the island was only 2 meters above sea level [Los Angeles Times]. Some experts say that in addition to erosion, rising sea levels caused by global warming are also to blame. Oceanographer Sugata Hazra, who discovered the island’s disappearance while looking at satellite photos, argues that sea-level rise caused by climate change was ‘’surely” a factor in the island’s inundation…. ‘The rate of sea-level rise in this part of the northern Bay of Bengal is definitely attributable to climate change,” he said [Sydney Morning Herald].

And this island is hardly alone in its shrinkage; people have already abandoned other isles in the bay. The island of Lohachara was abandoned in 1996, while 48 per cent of Ghoramara is reportedly underwater. Thousands of so-called climate-change refugees have already fled. At least 10 other islands are said to be immediately at risk [The Independent].

So why did the two nations spend so much time fighting over a tiny island with no future? Location, location, location. It sits right in the mouth of the Hariabhanga River, the boundary between India and Bangladesh. Technically, possession of the island depends on which side of the island the main channel of the river flows. That has never been agreed by the two countries [The Independent]. The island’s strategic importance, then, has led to some unusual gambits. In 1981 India dispatched navy ships to plant its flag on the island and try to cement its claim. Says Sanjoy Hazarika, a policy analyst based in New Delhi, “This didn’t go down as a great moment of Indian diplomacy” [Los Angeles Times].

The rising seas in the Bay of Bengal are cause for concern, especially with the low-lying Bangladesh mainland home to so many people. But with South Talpatti/New Moore, it’s hard not to feel at least a small satisfaction at seeing the hubris of nations earn its just reward: nothing.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / Nafis Ahmed Kuntal