Daniel Salzler No. 1073
EnviroInsight.org 3 Items October 23, 2020
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1. This is already posted at the NEW EnviroInsight.org
1. 11 Days Until It’s Time To Vote. If you have not done so as of this date, please make sure to do so by November 3rd.
2. CAP water orders: planning for 1.4 million acre-feet of deliveries
Nearly 1.4 million acre-feet of Colorado River water – that’s how much Colorado River water Central Arizona Project estimates it will deliver next year to more than 80 percent of the state’s population in central and southern Arizona.
How is CAP accounting for every single acre-foot?
The planning for 2021 begins long before New Year’s Day.
World of water orders
Before CAP water flows as much as 336 miles through the CAP system, CAP water operations employees have worked methodically to understand and fulfill customer water orders.
Preparations begin with gathering water delivery schedule requests from water users by Oct. 1, and continue until Jan. 1 when the first deliveries of the new year commence. In fact, in addition to water delivery schedule requests for the following year, CAP requests that water users submit preliminary estimates for the succeeding two years, and then this 3-year delivery outlook is updated with the most current year’s request.
CAP strives to be responsive to customer needs, working collaboratively with water users to help them plan, schedule, deliver and account for the Colorado River water when and where they need it.
CAP delivery supply outlook
CAP creates a delivery supply outlook prior to receiving actual water delivery schedule requests based on the prior year’s estimates and other pertinent information.
This is the outlook for 2021:
Here’s a summary:
CAP safely assumes there will be an estimated 1.67-million acre-feet of Colorado River water available for CAP to divert for the calendar year (Colorado River Supply);
CAP subtracts its commitment to Drought Contingency Plan reductions because the system has already been declared to be in Tier Zero on Jan.
CAP subtracts system losses, and then adds any estimated supply from its storage reservoir Lake Pleasant that could be delivered — for a total CAP Delivery Supply of 1.453 million acre-feet. This, of course, matches the total amount of anticipated CAP water orders.
Once agreed-upon other Lake Mead contributions (via water users) are accounted for, the total CAP deliveries for 2021 would be 1.394 million acre-feet.
Annual CAP water deliveries first meet the highest priority — long-term contract demand requests — according to the CAP system priority.
Remaining delivery supplies go to the Agricultural Settlement Pool first and then to the Statutory Firming Pool for underground storage and replenishment, but with DCP reductions it is not anticipated that water will be available to the Statutory Firming Pool in 2021.
3. Are You Left Handed Or Right Handed? A new study has handed important information to scientists mystified by lefties and righties, Source: Wall Street Journal
Why do people favor one hand over the other? The trait has baffled scientists across a half-century of scattershot research. While environmental factors appear to play a crucial role, many scientists have long espoused a theory that a single dominant gene may be the reason so many people are right-handed. But in new studies encompassing millions of people, scientists now are discovering that the answer may lie in dozens of genetic variations shaping our preference in small, unexpected ways.
The question goes beyond which hand we favor when throwing a ball or picking up a pen. Broadly speaking, it touches on how language, face recognition and some sensory perceptions can vary in location and intensity across the brain’s two hemispheres. Brain imaging studies suggest these neural signals are processed by one side of the brain or another in ways that seem to track with handedness, scientists say. Hand preference shapes our behavior from how we hug and kiss or kick a soccer goal, to the side we favor when we pose for selfies on Instagram. Indeed, ideas of right and left are so ingrained that they shape the way we talk about morality, creativity and politics.
”This is very much at the core of how our brains and nervous systems are organized—and how it relates to behavior,” says psychologist Sebastian Ocklenburg at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, who studies hand preference among humans and animals. “You think you have free will in all these things, but there is this ancient brain principle shaping all sorts of little everyday tidbits of what we do.”Many species, from dogs and cats to Japanese crabs, are evenhanded, favoring one paw or claw over the other in almost equal numbers, studies show. Humans, however, are about 90% right-handed. No one knows exactly why, nor why a significant minority is persistently left-handed and has been so for tens of thousands of years, based on the evidence of prehistoric cave art and handprints.
Even if the genetic aspects of left-handedness become much clearer, science may conclude that heredity plays a surprisingly small role. Hand preference is “very environmental,” says geneticist David Evans at the University of Queensland in Australia, who was also a senior author on the new study suggesting multiple genetic influences.
The year someone is born, how much they weighed at birth, or whether they were in a set of twins or triplets may influence handedness, according to data collected by the health research resource UK Biobank. Other researchers found the proportion of births of left-handers is higher in the spring and early summer months in the Northern Hemisphere, while births of left-handers in the Southern Hemisphere appear to be highest from September to January. Sex differences could play a role as well. Slightly more men than women are left-handers, studies show.
Geography and culture also are likely factors. People born in the U.K. had a 10.1% chance of being born left-handed, while for U.K. residents born elsewhere, the chances fell to 6.8%, according to research published last year. While ethnic differences may play a part here, a study showed that 3.5% of schoolchildren in China but only 0.7% in Taiwan were left-handed. More broadly, the prevalence of left-handedness is lower in Asia than in North America or Europe.
Greek scientist Marietta Papadatou-Pastou at the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens and colleagues have pulled together data encompassing more than 2.3 million people world-wide, collected in 200 published studies. In findings published online in April in Psychological Bulletin, Dr. Papadatou-Pastou and her team estimated that 10.6% of people world-wide are left-handed—about 827 million people in all.
The new study on multiple genetic variations, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, involved 1.7 million people and is the largest genetic study of hand preference ever conducted. An international consortium of 118 scientists led by Sarah Medland, head of the psychiatric genetics group at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane, Australia, discovered 41 genetic variations active only among people who are left-handed. They also detected another seven genetic variants associated only with people who are ambidextrous—able to use either hand with equal facility.
The scientists based their conclusions on anonymized genetic data collected by UK Biobank, the biotech company 23andMe and 32 research groups participating in the International Handedness Consortium. The researchers looked for telltale patterns among 1.5 million right-handed, 194,198 left-handed and 37,637 ambidextrous individuals.
The researchers are not sure yet what any of these genetic changes do, but based on their discoveries so far, they suspect that hundreds, if not thousands, of such variations may be associated with hand preferences. Several appear to be related to brain development.
Previous studies had simply been too small to detect significant genetic influences, the scientists said. They took 10 years to assemble sufficient data. “At first we didn’t have significant findings because the sample size was too small,” says Dr. Evans. “It is only the advent of extremely large cohort studies that allows us to do this.”
The focus on left-handers was rare among such studies, several scientists said, reflecting what might be a longtime bias against studies of lefthandness. In fact, until recently, neuroscientists routinely excluded left-handers from brain-imaging studies designed to explore brain functions. Most focused solely on right-handed men in order to simplify results, several neuroscientists and psychologists said.
Earlier this year, neuroscience researcher Lyam Bailey at Dalhousie University in Canada and his colleagues reviewed more than 1,000 recent articles published in high-impact, peer-reviewed, neuroimaging-focused journals during 2017 and found that only 3.2% of participants were not right-handed.
“It has been a matter of convenience to exclude left-handers” in imaging studies with a small number of research subjects, says neuropsychologist Susan Bookheimer at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is past chair of the international Organization for Human Brain Mapping. “If you include left-handers you get a lot of messy signal noise,” though the reason remains unclear.
Hundreds of studies have tried and failed to sort out such complications. “Why are we not all right-handed or left-handed? Even in isolated societies, we see this same 10% or so of left-handers,” Dr. Papadatou-Pastou says. “We really don’t know why.”
Best Foot Forward
Many people prefer their right foot to kick a ball or crush something underfoot. A study of 12,000 people found 61.6% right-footers, 8.2% left-footers and 30.2 % mixed-footers.
Taking Selfies
People usually pose showing their left side, says a study of online photos posted with the hashtag #selfie on Instagram.
Kissing
Most people tilt their heads to the right when they kiss. Studies show that about 64.5% of couples turned their heads to the right during kissing and 35.5% of couples turned to the left.
Hugging
People hugging in public tend to favor the right side, several studies show. A 2018 study of 2,500 people found that 83.04% engaged in right-side embraces.
Cradling a Baby
Most people use their left arm to cradle an infant, several studies show, regardless of whether they are right- or left-handed.
So, are left handed people smarter that right handed people? So raise an eyebrow (right or left) at any labcoat making sweeping statements about the smarts of a potentially arbitrary 10 percent of the world’s population. However, a few earnest studies have proposed interesting links between primary hand and cognitive skills.
It appears that righties may perform slightly better academically than lefties. Research also suggests that left-handers more often suffer learning disabilities and dyslexia. On the other hand, southpaws dominate in tasks involving the mental manipulation of objects, which might explain the high proportion of left-handed chess players. More general claims, especially concerning “right-brained” versus “left-brained” people, are more pseudo- than science. The only clear advantage lefties enjoy is on a baseball diamond. Source: https://www.livescience.com/32143-are-left-handed-people-smarter.html|
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