Thursday, May 9, 2019
Joe Biden Might as Well Be a Republican
MAY 08, 2019
Recent criticism of Joe Biden
for praising Dick Cheney as “a
decent man” and Mike Pence as “a decent guy” merely
scratches the surface of what’s wrong with the current frontrunner for the
Democratic presidential nomination. His compulsion to vouch for the decency of
Republican leaders — while calling Donald Trump an “aberration” — is consistent
with Biden’s political record. It sheds light on why he’s probably the worst
Democrat running for president.
After several decades of
cutting corporate-friendly deals with GOP legislators — often betraying the
interests of core Democratic constituencies in the process — Biden has a big
psychological and political stake in denying that the entire GOP agenda is
repugnant.
At the outset of his Senate
career, Biden lost no time appealing
to racism and running interference for
huge corporate interests. He went on to play a historic role in helping
to move
the Supreme Court rightward and serving such predatory businesses
as credit
card companies, big banks and hedge
funds.
Biden’s role as vice president
included a near-miss at cutting a deal with Republican leaders on Capitol Hill
to slash
Medicare and Social Security. While his record
on labor and trade has
been mediocre, Biden has enjoyed tight
mutual alliances with moneyed elites.
The nickname that corporate
media have bestowed on him, “Lunch Bucket Joe,” is wide of the mark. A
bull’s-eye is “Wall Street Joe.”
With avuncular style, Biden
has reflexively used pleasant rhetoric to grease the shaft given to millions of
vulnerable people, suffering the consequences of his conciliatory approach to
right-wing forces. Campaigning in Iowa a few days ago, Biden declared that
“the other side is not my enemy, it’s my opposition.” But his notable
kinship with Republican politicians has made him more of an enabler
than an opponent. Results have often been disastrous.
“In more than four decades of
public service, Biden has enthusiastically championed policies favored by
financial elites, forging alliances with Wall Street and the political right to
notch legislative victories that ran counter to the populist ideas that now
animate his party,” HuffPost senior reporter Zach Carter recounts.
Biden often teamed up with Senate Republicans to pass bills at the top of
corporate wish lists and to block measures for economic fairness.
In the mid-1970s, during his
first Senate term, Biden repeatedly clashed with Sen. Edward Kennedy, the chair
of the Judiciary Committee, who wanted to rein in runaway corporate
power. “Biden became an advocate for corporate interests that had
previously been associated with the Republican Party,” Carter reports. As he
gained seniority, Biden kept lining up with GOP senators against antitrust
legislation and for bills to give corporations more leverage over consumers and
workers. “By 1978, Americans for Democratic Action, the preeminent liberal
watchdog group of the time, gave Biden a
score of just 50, lower than its ratings for some Republicans.”
Opposing measures for racial
equity and economic justice, Biden’s operational bonds with GOP leaders
continued. Carter reports that “on domestic policy — from school
integration to tax policy — he was functionally allied with the Reagan
administration. He voted for a landmark Reagan tax bill that slashed the top
income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and exempted many wealthy
families from the
estate tax on unearned inheritances, a measure that cost the federal
government an estimated $83
billion in annual revenue. He then called for a
spending freeze on Social Security in order to reduce the deficits
that tax law helped to create.”
Biden came through for
corporate power again in November 1993 when he joined with 26 other Democrats
and 34 Republicans to win Senate passage of NAFTA, the trade agreement strongly
opposed by labor unions and environmental groups. In mid-1996, when Congress
approved President Clinton’s “welfare reform” bill, Biden helped to vote the
draconian measure into law. It predictably had devastating effects on women and
children.
Throughout the 1990s — from
tax-rate changes that enriched the already-rich to deregulating banks with
repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to loosening government curbs on credit
default swaps — Biden stood with the Senate’s Republicans and the most corporate-aligned
Democrats. Carter sums up: “Biden was a steadfast supporter of an economic
agenda that caused economic inequality to skyrocket during
the Clinton years. . . . Biden voted for all of it.”
Biden led the
successful push to pass the milestone 1994 crime bill, engaging
in racist tropes on
the Senate floor along the way. By then, he had become a powerful
lawmaker on criminal-justice issues.
In 1991, midway through his
eight years as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden ran
the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas that excluded
witnesses who were prepared to corroborate Anita Hill’s accusations of
sexual harassment. “Much of what Democrats blame Republicans for was
enabled, quite literally, by Biden: Justices whose confirmation to the Supreme
Court he rubber-stamped worked to disembowel affirmative action, collective
bargaining rights, reproductive rights, voting rights,” feminist author Rebecca
Traister writes.
Early in the new century,
Biden wielded another weighty gavel, with momentous results, as chair of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 2002, congressional Democrats were
closely divided on whether to greenlight the invasion of Iraq, while
Republicans overwhelmingly backed President George W. Bush’s mendacious case
for invading. Biden didn’t only vote for the Iraq invasion on the Senate floor
in October 2002. Months earlier, he methodically excluded
dissenting voices about the looming invasion at key hearings of the
Foreign Relations Committee.
While his impact on foreign
policy grew larger, Biden’s avid service to financial giants never flagged. One
of his top priorities was a crusade for legislation to undermine bankruptcy
protections. Biden was a mover and shaker behind the
landmark 2005 bankruptcy bill. Before President Bush signed it into law,
Biden was one of just 14 out of 45 Democratic senators to vote for the
legislation.
The bankruptcy law was a
monumental victory for credit-card firms — and a huge blow to consumers,
including students saddled with debt. As happened so often during Biden’s 36
years in the Senate, he eagerly aligned himself with Republicans and a minority
of Democrats to get the job done.
Now, running for president,
Biden has no use for candor about his actual record. Instead, he keeps
pretending that he has always been a champion of people he actually used his
power to grievously harm.
In ideology and record on
corporate power, the farthest from Biden among his competitors is Bernie
Sanders. No wonder Biden has gone out of his way to distance
himself from Sanders while voicing high
regard for the wealthy. (I was a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic
National Convention and continue to actively support him.)
Biden’s ongoing zeal
to defend and accommodate Republicans in Congress is undiminished, as
though they should not be held accountable for President Trump even while they
aid and abet him. Days ago on the campaign trail — while referring to Trump —
Biden asserted:
“This is not the Republican Party.” And he spoke warmly of “my Republican
friends in the House and Senate.”
All in all, it’s preposterous
yet fitting for Joe Biden to claim that Republicans like Dick Cheney and Mike
Pence are “decent.” He’s not only defending them. He’s also defending himself.
House committee votes contempt charge against Trump’s attorney general William Barr
By Patrick Martin
9 May 2019
The US House Judiciary
Committee voted Wednesday afternoon to hold Attorney General William Barr in
contempt for refusing to provide Congress with an unredacted copy of the
Mueller report and other documents supporting the report’s findings.
The action came on a straight
party-line vote, with 24 Democrats approving the contempt citation and 16
Republicans opposing it. The committee spent hours in debate, with Democrats
condemning President Trump’s decision to invoke executive privilege to withhold
the documents and Republicans denouncing the Democratic investigation as a step
towards impeachment.
Trump’s assertion of executive
privilege was unprecedented in its sweep. All previous presidential claims of
executive privilege—even including Richard Nixon’s efforts to suppress White
House tape recordings during the Watergate crisis—have involved maintaining
privacy in communications between the president and his closest advisers, or
keeping certain national security information secret.
Much of the Mueller report,
however, concerns the 2016 election campaign, before Trump became president,
and is thus entirely outside the conceivable scope of executive privilege. As
for communications between President Trump and top aides in the White House,
the subject of the second half of the report, which concerns Trump’s efforts to
block the investigation, privilege was waived when aides such as former White
House Counsel Don McGahn testified under oath to the Mueller inquiry.
During the debate on the
contempt charge, many Judiciary Committee Democrats characterized Trump’s
actions as unconstitutional and dictatorial. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee
of Texas declared, “I can only conclude that the president now seeks to take a
wrecking ball to the Constitution of the United States of America.”
Representative Pramila Jayapal
of Washington state said, “We are at a brink of importance between democracy
and dictatorship if we ignore checks and balances. And I fully support holding
this attorney general in contempt for refusing to comply with constitutional
foundations.”
At a press conference after
the vote, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler declared, “This was a
very grave and momentous step we were forced to take today to move a contempt
citation against the attorney general of the United States. We did not relish
doing this but we have no choice.”
The executive branch, at
Trump’s direction, was refusing to subordinate itself to legislative oversight,
he said, noting that since the Democrats assumed control of the House of
Representatives in January, “not a single page” has been produced in response
to congressional requests or subpoenas.
“We’ve talked for a long time
about approaching a constitutional crisis. We are now in it,” Nadler said. “Now
is the time of testing whether we can keep this type of republic, or whether
this republic is destined to change into a different, more tyrannical form of
government.”
The apocalyptic language
raises an obvious question: if Trump is trampling on the Constitution and is
hell bent on establishing an authoritarian form of rule in the United
States—and he certainly is—then why do the Democrats categorically reject
bringing charges of impeachment against him?
And why do they continue to
seek collaboration with this “more tyrannical form of government” on a wide
range of policies, from the federal budget, to immigration, to the projection
of American military force in the Persian Gulf, the South China Sea and
throughout the world?
The conflict between Congress
and the White House is not merely partisan warfare in advance of the 2020
elections, but represents the breakdown of the institutional framework through
which American capitalist politics has operated for more than two centuries.
The structure of “checks and balances” has been undermined over a protracted
period, with the president taking on virtually unchecked powers, both as
“commander-in-chief” in foreign and military policy and increasingly in
domestic policy as well.
In February, Trump declared a
national emergency on the US-Mexico border, ordering the Pentagon to shift
funds to provide the resources to build his border wall, in direct defiance of
congressional refusal to authorize such spending. This was a flagrant violation
of the most important constitutional power of Congress, the “power of the
purse,” but the Democrats did nothing but file a lawsuit and warn that the next
Democratic president might assert similar emergency powers to accomplish their
own policy goals.
The Democrats may now protest
that the president is assuming unconstitutional authority, but they do not come
to the table with clean hands. Under the Obama administration, they endorsed
the “right” of the president to launch a war of aggression against Libya
without congressional sanction, and they applauded when Obama ordered drone
missile strikes that killed thousands across the Middle East and North Africa,
including American citizens.
Equally important, their
“opposition” to Trump has from the beginning taken the form of support for a
palace coup by the national-security apparatus, based on the allegations of
Russian “meddling” in the 2016 elections. This reached the point of full-blown
McCarthyite witch-hunting, with claims that Trump is a stooge of Russian
President Vladimir Putin who does Moscow’s bidding in the White House.
The Democratic congressional
leaders do not actually believe such claims, but find them useful in seeking to
divert popular opposition to the Trump administration in a right-wing,
pro-imperialist direction. And by hammering Trump on the alleged Russian
connection, they have sought to push the administration to a more aggressive
foreign policy in Syria, in Ukraine, and more generally against Russia. This
has now found its most noxious expression in the preparations by the Trump
administration to provoke a war with Iran—to which the Democrats would give
near-unanimous backing.
The author also recommends:
[8 May 2019]
Genetic therapy heals damage caused by heart attack
May 8, 2019
King's College London
Researchers have found that
therapy that can induce heart cells to regenerate after a heart attack.
Researchers from King's
College London have found that therapy that can induce heart cells to
regenerate after a heart attack.
Myocardial infarction, more
commonly known as a heart attack, caused by the sudden blocking of one of the
cardiac coronary arteries, is the main cause of heart failure, a condition that
now affects over 23 million population in the world, according to the World
Health Organisation.
At present, when a patient
survives a heart attack, they are left with permanent structural damage to
their heart through the formation of a scar, which can lead to heart failure in
the future. In contrast to fish and salamander, which can regenerate the heart
throughout life.
In this study, published today
in Nature, the team of investigators delivered a small piece of genetic
material, called microRNA-199, to the heart of pigs, after a myocardial
infarction which resulted in the almost complete recovery of cardiac function
at one month later.
Lead author Professor Mauro
Giacca, from King's College London said: "It is a very exciting moment for
the field. After so many unsuccessful attempts at regenerating the heart using
stem cells, which all have failed so far, for the first time we see real
cardiac repair in a large animal."
This is the first
demonstration that cardiac regeneration can be achieved by administering an
effective genetic drug that stimulates cardiac regeneration in a large animal,
with heart anatomy and physiology like that of humans.
"It will take some time
before we can proceed to clinical trials" explained Professor Giacca.
"We still need to learn
how to administer the RNA as a synthetic molecule in large animals and then in
patients, but we already know this works well in mice."
Story Source:
Materials provided by King's College London. Note:
Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Khatia Gabisonia, Giulia
Prosdocimo, Giovanni Donato Aquaro, Lucia Carlucci, Lorena Zentilin, Ilaria
Secco, Hashim Ali, Luca Braga, Nikoloz Gorgodze, Fabio Bernini, Silvia
Burchielli, Chiara Collesi, Lorenzo Zandonà , Gianfranco Sinagra, Marcello
Piacenti, Serena Zacchigna, Rossana Bussani, Fabio A. Recchia & Mauro
Giacca. MicroRNA therapy stimulates uncontrolled cardiac repair after
myocardial infarction in pigs. Nature, 2019 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1191-6
Broccoli sprout compound may restore brain chemistry imbalance linked to schizophrenia
May 8, 2019
Johns Hopkins Medicine
In a series of recently
published studies using animals and people, researchers say they have further
characterized a set of chemical imbalances in the brains of people with
schizophrenia related to the chemical glutamate. And they figured out how to
tweak the level using a compound derived from broccoli sprouts.
In a series of recently
published studies using animals and people, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers
say they have further characterized a set of chemical imbalances in the brains
of people with schizophrenia related to the chemical glutamate. And they
figured out how to tweak the level using a compound derived from broccoli
sprouts.
They say the results advance
the hope that supplementing with broccoli sprout extract, which contains high
levels of the chemical sulforaphane, may someday provide a way to lower the
doses of traditional antipsychotic medicines needed to manage schizophrenia
symptoms, thus reducing unwanted side effects of the medicines.
"It's possible that
future studies could show sulforaphane to be a safe supplement to give people
at risk of developing schizophrenia as a way to prevent, delay or blunt the
onset of symptoms," adds Akira Sawa, M.D., Ph.D., professor of psychiatry
and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and
director of the Johns Hopkins Schizophrenia Center.
Schizophrenia is marked by
hallucinations, delusions and disordered thinking, feeling, behavior,
perception and speaking. Drugs used to treat schizophrenia don't work
completely for everyone, and they can cause a variety of undesirable side
effects, including metabolic problems increasing cardiovascular risk,
involuntary movements, restlessness, stiffness and "the shakes."
In a study described in the
Jan. 9 edition of the journal JAMA Psychiatry, the researchers looked for
differences in brain metabolism between people with schizophrenia and healthy
controls. They recruited 81 people from the Johns Hopkins Schizophrenia Center
within 24 months of their first psychosis episode, which can be a characteristic
symptom of schizophrenia, as well as 91 healthy controls from the community.
The participants were an average of 22 years old, and 58% were men.
The researchers used a
powerful magnet to measure and compare five regions in the brain between the people
with and without psychosis. A computer analysis of 7-Tesla magnetic resonance
spectroscopy (MRS) data identified individual chemical metabolites and their
quantities.
The researchers found on
average 4% significantly lower levels of the brain chemical glutamate in the
anterior cingulate cortex region of the brain in people with psychosis compared
to healthy people.
Glutamate is known for its
role in sending messages between brain cells, and has been linked to depression
and schizophrenia, so these findings added to evidence that glutamate levels
have a role in schizophrenia.
Additionally, the researchers
found a significant reduction of 3% of the chemical glutathione in the brain's
anterior cingulate cortex and 8% in the thalamus. Glutathione is made of three
smaller molecules, and one of them is glutamate.
Next, the researchers asked
how glutamate might be managed in the brain and whether that management is
faulty in disease. They first looked at how it's stored. Because glutamate is a
building block of glutathione, the researchers wondered if the brain might use
glutathione as a way to store extra glutamate. And if so, the researchers
questioned if they could use known drugs to shift this balance to either
release glutamate from storage when there isn't enough, or send it into storage
if there is too much.
In another study, described in
the Feb. 12 issue of the journal PNAS, the team used the drug L-Buthionine
sulfoximine in rat brain cells to block an enzyme that turns glutamate into
glutathione, allowing it to be used up. The researchers found that theses
nerves were more excited and fired faster, which means they were sending more
messages to other brain cells. The researchers say shifting the balance this
way is akin to shifting the brain cells to a pattern similar to one found in
the brains of people with schizophrenia. Next, the researchers wanted to see if
they could do the opposite and shift the balance to get more glutamate stored
in the form of glutathione. They used the chemical sulforaphane found in
broccoli sprouts, which is known to turn on a gene that makes more of the
enzyme that sticks glutamate with another molecule to make glutathione. When
they treated rat brain cells with glutathione, it slowed the speed at which the
nerve cells fired, meaning they were sending fewer messages. The researchers
say this pushed the brain cells to behave less like the pattern found in brains
with schizophrenia.
"We are thinking of
glutathione as glutamate stored in a gas tank," says Thomas Sedlak, M.D.,
Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. "If you
have a bigger gas tank, you have more leeway on how far you can drive, but as
soon as you take the gas out of the tank it's burned up quickly. We can think
of those with schizophrenia as having a smaller gas tank."
Because sulforaphane changed
the glutamate imbalance in the rat brains and affected how messages were
transmitted between the rat brain cells, the researchers wanted to test whether
sulforaphane could change glutathione levels in healthy people's brains and see
if this could eventually be a strategy for people with mental disorders. For
their study, published in April 2018 in Molecular Neuropsychiatry, the
researchers recruited nine healthy volunteers (four women, five men) to take
two capsules with 100 micromoles daily of sulforaphane in the form of broccoli
sprout extract for seven days.
The volunteers reported that a
few of them were gassy and some had stomach upset when eating the capsules on
an empty stomach, but overall the sulforaphane was relatively well tolerated.
The researchers used MRS again
to monitor three brain regions for glutathione levels in the healthy volunteers
before and after taking sulforaphane. They found that after seven days, there
was about a 30% increase in average glutathione levels in the subjects' brains.
For example, in the hippocampus, glutathione levels rose an average of 0.27
millimolar from a baseline of 1.1 millimolar after seven days of taking
sulforaphane.
The scientists say further
research is needed to learn whether sulforaphane can safely reduce symptoms of
psychosis or hallucinations in people with schizophrenia. They would need to
determine an optimal dose and see how long people must take it to observe an
effect. The researchers caution that their studies don't justify or demonstrate
the value of using commercially available sulforaphane supplements to treat or
prevent schizophrenia, and patients should consult their physicians before
trying any kind of over-the-counter supplement. Versions of sulforaphane
supplementsare sold in health food stores and at vitamin counters, and aren't
regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
"For people predisposed
to heart disease, we know that changes in diet and exercise can help stave off
the disease, but there isn't anything like that for severe mental disorders
yet," says Sedlak. "We are hoping that we will one day make some
mental illness preventable to a certain extent."
Sulforaphane is found in a
variety of cruciferous vegetables, and was first identified as a
"chemoprotective" substance decades ago by Paul Talalay and Jed Fahey
at Johns Hopkins.
According to the World Health
Organization, schizophrenia affects about 21 million people worldwide.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Johns Hopkins Medicine. Note:
Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal References:
Anna M. Wang, Subechhya
Pradhan, Jennifer M. Coughlin, Aditi Trivedi, Samantha L. DuBois, Jeffrey L.
Crawford, Thomas W. Sedlak, Fredrick C. Nucifora, Gerald Nestadt, Leslie G.
Nucifora, David J. Schretlen, Akira Sawa, Peter B. Barker. Assessing Brain
Metabolism With 7-T Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy in Patients With
First-Episode Psychosis. JAMA Psychiatry, 2019; 76 (3): 314 DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2018.3637
Thomas W. Sedlak, Bindu D.
Paul, Gregory M. Parker, Lynda D. Hester, Adele M. Snowman, Yu Taniguchi,
Atsushi Kamiya, Solomon H. Snyder, Akira Sawa. The glutathione cycle shapes
synaptic glutamate activity. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, 2019; 116 (7): 2701 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1817885116
Thomas W. Sedlak,
Leslie G. Nucifora, Minori Koga, Lindsay S. Shaffer, Cecilia Higgs,
Teppei Tanaka, Anna M. Wang, Jennifer M. Coughlin, Peter B.
Barker, Jed W. Fahey, Akira Sawa. Sulforaphane Augments Glutathione
and Influences Brain Metabolites in Human Subjects: A Clinical Pilot Study. Molecular
Neuropsychiatry, 2017; 3 (4): 214 DOI: 10.1159/000487639
A new filter to better map the dark universe
MAY 8, 2019
by Glenn Roberts Jr., Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory
The earliest known light in
our universe, known as the cosmic microwave background, was emitted about
380,000 years after the Big Bang. The patterning of this relic light holds many
important clues to the development and distribution of large-scale structures
such as galaxies and galaxy clusters.
Distortions in the cosmic microwave
background (CMB), caused by a phenomenon known as lensing, can further
illuminate the structure of the universe and can even tell us things about the
mysterious, unseen universe—including dark energy, which makes up about
68 percent of the universe and accounts for its accelerating expansion, and
dark matter, which accounts for about 27 percent of the universe.
Set a stemmed wine glass on a
surface, and you can see how lensing effects can simultaneously magnify,
squeeze, and stretch the view of the surface beneath it. In lensing of the CMB,
gravity effects from large objects like galaxies and galaxy clusters bend the
CMB light in different ways. These lensing effects can be subtle (known as weak
lensing) for distant and small galaxies, and computer programs can identify
them because they disrupt the regular CMB patterning.
There are some known issues
with the accuracy of lensing measurements, though, and particularly with
temperature-based measurements of the CMB and associated lensing effects.
While lensing can be a
powerful tool for studying the invisible universe, and could even potentially
help us sort out the properties of ghostly subatomic particles like neutrinos,
the universe is an inherently messy place.
And like bugs on a car's
windshield during a long drive, the gas and dust swirling in other galaxies,
among other factors, can obscure our view and lead to faulty readings of the
CMB lensing.
There are some filtering tools
that help researchers to limit or mask some of these effects, but these known
obstructions continue to be a major problem in the many studies that rely on
temperature-based measurements.
The effects of this
interference with temperature-based CMB studies can lead to erroneous lensing
measurements, said Emmanuel Schaan, a postdoctoral researcher and Owen
Chamberlain Postdoctoral Fellow in the Physics Division at the Department of
Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
"You can be wrong and not
know it," Schaan said. "The existing methods don't work
perfectly—they are really limiting."
To address this problem,
Schaan teamed up with Simone Ferraro, a Divisional Fellow in Berkeley Lab's
Physics Division, to develop a way to improve the clarity and accuracy of CMB
lensing measurements by separately accounting for different types of lensing
effects.
"Lensing can magnify or
demagnify things. It also distorts them along a certain axis so they are
stretched in one direction," Schaan said.
The researchers found that a
certain lensing signature called shearing, which causes this stretching in one
direction, seems largely immune to the foreground "noise" effects
that otherwise interfere with the CMB lensing data. The lensing effect known as
magnification, meanwhile, is prone to errors introduced by foreground noise.
Their study, published May 8 in the journal Physical Review Letters, notes
a "dramatic reduction" in this error margin when focusing solely on
shearing effects.
The sources of the lensing,
which are large objects that stand between us and the CMB light, are typically
galaxy groups and clusters that have a roughly spherical profile in temperature
maps, Ferraro noted, and the latest study found that the emission of various
forms of light from these "foreground" objects only appears to mimic
the magnification effects in lensing but not the shear effects.
"So we said, 'Let's rely
only on the shear and we'll be immune to foreground effects,'" Ferraro
said. "When you have many of these galaxies that are mostly spherical, and
you average them, they only contaminate the magnification part of the
measurement. For shear, all of the errors are basically gone."
He added, "It reduces the
noise, allowing us to get better maps. And we're more certain that these maps
are correct," even when the measurements involve very distant galaxies as
foreground lensing objects.
The new method could benefit a
range of sky-surveying experiments, the study notes, including the POLARBEAR-2
and Simons Array experiments, which have Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley
participants; the Advanced Atacama Cosmology Telescope (AdvACT) project; and
the South Pole Telescope—3G camera (SPT-3G). It could also aid the Simons
Observatory and the proposed next-generation, multilocation CMB experiment
known as CMB-S4—Berkeley Lab scientists are involved in the planning for both
of these efforts.
The method could also enhance
the science yield from future galaxy surveys like the Berkeley Lab-led Dark
Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project under construction near Tucson,
Arizona, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) project under
construction in Chile, through joint analyses of data from these sky surveys
and the CMB lensing data.
Increasingly large datasets
from astrophysics experiments have led to more coordination in comparing data
across experiments to provide more meaningful results. "These days, the
synergies between CMB and galaxy surveys are a big deal," Ferraro said.
In this study, researchers
relied on simulated full-sky CMB data. They used resources at Berkeley Lab's
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) to test their
method on each of the four different foreground sources of noise, which include
infrared, radiofrequency, thermal, and electron-interaction effects that can
contaminate CMB lensingmeasurements.
The study notes that cosmic
infrared background noise, and noise from the interaction of CMB light
particles (photons) with high-energy electrons have been the most problematic
sources to address using standard filtering tools in CMB measurements. Some
existing and future CMB experiments seek to lessen these effects by taking
precise measurements of the polarization, or orientation, of the CMB light
signature rather than its temperature.
"We couldn't have done
this project without a computing cluster like NERSC," Schaan said. NERSC
has also proved useful in serving up other universe simulations to help prepare
for upcoming experiments like DESI.
The method developed by Schaan
and Ferraro is already being implemented in the analysis of current
experiments' data. One possible application is to develop more detailed
visualizations of dark matter filaments
and nodes that appear to connect matter in the universe via a complex and
changing cosmic web.
The researchers reported a
positive reception to their newly introduced method.
"This was an outstanding
problem that many people had thought about," Ferraro said. "We're
happy to find elegant solutions."
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