With climate change, heat more than natural disasters will drive people away (PNAS)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella

By Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications

Although scenes of people fleeing from dramatic displays of Mother Nature’s power dominate the news, gradual increases in an area’s overall temperature — and to a lesser extent precipitation — actually lead more often to permanent population shifts, according to Princeton University research.

The researchers examined 15 years of migration data for more than 7,000 families in Indonesia and found that increases in temperature and, to a lesser extent, rainfall influenced a family’s decision to permanently migrate to another of the country’s provinces. They report in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that increases in average yearly temperature took a detrimental toll on people’s economic wellbeing. On the other hand, natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes had a much smaller to non-existent impact on permanent moves, suggesting that during natural disasters relocation was most often temporary as people sought refuge in other areas of the country before returning home to rebuild their lives.

The results suggest that the consequences of climate change will likely be more subtle and permanent than is popularly believed, explained first author Pratikshya Bohra-Mishra, a postdoctoral research associate in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy (STEP) in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The effects likely won’t be limited to low-lying areas or developing countries that are unprepared for an uptick in hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters, she said.

“We do not think of ‘environmental migrants’ in a broader sense; images of refugees from natural disasters often dominate the overall picture,” Bohra-Mishra said. “It is important to understand the often less conspicuous and gradual effect of climate change on migration. Our study suggests that in areas that are already hot, a further increase in temperature will increase the likelihood that more people will move out.”

Indonesia’s tropical climate and dependence on agriculture may amplify the role of temperature as a migration factor, Bohra-Mishra said. However, existing research shows that climate-driven changes in crop yields can effect Mexican migration to the United States, and that extreme temperature had a role in the long-term migration of males in rural Pakistan.

“Based on these emerging findings, it is likely that the societal reach of climate change could be much broader to include warm regions that are now relatively safe from natural disasters,” Bohra-Mishra said.

Indonesia became the case study because the multi-island tropical nation is vulnerable to climate change and events such as earthquakes and landslides. In addition, the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) conducted by the RAND Corporation from 1993 to 2007 provided thorough information about the movements of 7,185 families from 13 of the nation’s 27 provinces in 1993. The Princeton researchers matched province-to-province movement of households over 15 years to data on temperature, precipitation and natural disasters from those same years. Bohra-Mishra worked with co-authors Michael Oppenheimer, the Albert G. Millbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs and director of STEP, and Solomon Hsiang, a past Princeton postdoctoral researcher now an assistant professor of public policy at the University of California-Berkeley.

People start to rethink their location with each degree that the average annual temperature rises above 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit), the researchers found. The chances that a family will leave an area for good in a given year rise with each degree. With a change from 26 to 27 degrees Celsius (78.8 to 80.6 Fahrenheit), the probability of a family emigrating that year increased by 0.8 percent when other factors for migration were controlled for. From 27 to 28 degrees Celsius (80.6 to 82.4 Fahrenheit), those chances jumped to 1.4 percent.

When it comes to annual rainfall, families seem to tolerate and prefer an average of 2.2 meters (7.2 feet). The chances of outmigration increased with each additional meter of average annual precipitation, as well as with further declines in rainfall.

Landslides were the only natural disaster with a consistent positive influence on permanent migration. With every 1 percent increase in the number of deaths or destroyed houses in a family’s home province, the likelihood of permanent migration went up by only 0.0006 and 0.0004 percent, respectively.

The much higher influence of heat on permanent migration can be pinned on its effect on local economies and social structures, the researchers write. Previous research has shown that a one-degree change in the average growing-season temperature can reduce yields of certain crops by as much as 17 percent. At the same time, research conducted by Hsiang while at Princeton and published in 2013 showed a correlation between higher temperatures and social conflict such as civil wars, ethnic conflict and street crime.

In the current study, the researchers found that in Indonesia, a shift from 25 to 26 degrees Celsius resulted in a significant 14 to 15 percent decline in the value of household assets, for example. Precipitation did not have a notable affect on household worth, nor did natural disasters except landslides, which lowered assets by 5 percent for each 1 percent increase in the number of people who died.

Read the abstract.

Bohra-Mishra, Pratikshya, Michael Oppenheimer, Solomon Hsiang. 2014. Nonlinear permanent migration response to climatic variations but minimal response to disasters. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Article published online June 23, 2014. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1317166111.

A farewell to arms? Scientists developing a novel technique that could facilitate nuclear disarmament (Nature)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella
Alexander Glaser and Robert Goldston
Alexander Glaser and Robert Goldston with the British Test Object. Credit: Elle Starkman/PPPL Communications Office

By John Greenwald, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory Office of Communications

A proven system for verifying that apparent nuclear weapons slated to be dismantled contained true warheads could provide a key step toward the further reduction of nuclear arms. The system would achieve this verification while safeguarding classified information that could lead to nuclear proliferation.

Scientists at Princeton University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are developing the prototype for such a system, as reported this week in the journal Nature. Their novel approach, called a “zero-knowledge protocol,” would verify the presence of warheads without collecting any classified information at all.

“The goal is to prove with as high confidence as required that an object is a true nuclear warhead while learning nothing about the materials and design of the warhead itself,” said physicist Robert Goldston, coauthor of the paper, a fusion researcher and former director of PPPL, and a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton.

While numerous efforts have been made over the years to develop systems for verifying the actual content of warheads covered by disarmament treaties, no such methods are currently in use for treaty verification.

Traditional nuclear arms negotiations focus instead on the reduction of strategic — or long-range — delivery systems, such as bombers, submarines and ballistic missiles, without verifying their warheads. But this approach could prove insufficient when future talks turn to tactical and nondeployed nuclear weapons that are not on long-range systems. “What we really want to do is count warheads,” said physicist Alexander Glaser, first author of the paper and an assistant professor in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

The system Glaser and Goldston are mapping out would compare a warhead to be inspected with a known true warhead to see if the weapons matched. This would be done by beaming high-energy neutrons into each warhead and recording how many neutrons passed through to detectors positioned on the other side. Neutrons that passed through would be added to those already “preloaded” into the detectors by the warheads’ owner — and if the total number of neutrons were the same for each warhead, the weapons would be found to match. But different totals would show that the putative warhead was really a spoof. Prior to the test, the inspector would decide which preloaded detector would go with which warhead.

No classified data would be measured in this process, and no electronic components that might be vulnerable to tampering and snooping would be used. “This approach really is very interesting and elegant,” said Steve Fetter, a professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a former White House official. “The main question is whether it can be implemented in practice.”

A project to test this approach is under construction at PPPL. The project calls for firing high-energy neutrons at a non-nuclear target, called a British Test Object, that will serve as a proxy for warheads. Researchers will compare results of the tests by noting how many neutrons pass through the target to bubble detectors that Yale University is designing for the project. The gel-filled detectors will add the neutrons that pass through to those already preloaded to produce a total for each test.

The project was launched with a seed grant from The Simons Foundation of Vancouver, Canada, that came to Princeton through Global Zero, a nonprofit organization. Support also was provided by the U.S. Department of State, the DOE (via PPPL pre-proposal development funding), and most recently, a total of $3.5 million over five years from the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Glaser hit upon the idea for a zero-knowledge proof over a lunch hosted by David Dobkin, a computer scientist, and until June 2014, dean of the Princeton faculty. “I told him I was really interested in nuclear warhead verification without learning anything about the warhead itself,” Glaser said. ‘“We call this a zero-knowledge proof in computer science,”’ Glaser said Dobkin replied. “That was the trigger,” Glaser recalled. “I went home and began reading about zero-knowledge proofs,” which are widely used in applications such as verifying online passwords.

Glaser’s reading led him to Boaz Barak, a senior researcher at Microsoft New England who had taught computer science at Princeton and is an expert in cryptology, the science of disguising secret information. “We started having discussions,” Glaser said of Barak, who helped develop statistical measures for the PPPL project and is the third coauthor of the paper in Nature.

Glaser also reached out to Goldston, with whom he had taught a class for three years in the Princeton Department of Astrophysical Sciences. “I told Rob that we need neutrons for this project,” Glaser recalled. “And he said, ‘That’s what we do — we have 14 MeV [or high-energy] neutrons at the Laboratory.’” Glaser, Goldston and Barak then worked together to refine the concept, developing ways to assure that even the statistical noise — or random variation — in the measurements conveyed no information.

If proven successful, dedicated inspection systems based on radiation measurements, such as the one proposed here, could help to advance disarmament talks beyond the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) between the United States and Russia, which runs from 2011 to 2021. The treaty calls for each country to reduce its arsenal of deployed strategic nuclear arms to 1,550 weapons, for a total of 3,100, by 2018.

Not included in the New START treaty are more than 4,000 nondeployed strategic and tactical weapons in each country’s arsenal. These very weapons, note the authors of the Nature paper, are apt to become part of future negotiations, “which will likely require verification of individual warheads, rather than whole delivery systems.” Deep cuts in the nuclear arsenals and the ultimate march to zero, say the authors, will require the ability to verifiably count individual warheads.

Read the abstract: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13457

A.Glaser, B. Barak, R. Goldston. A zero-knowledge protocol for nuclear  warhead verification. Nature 26 June 2014 DOI: 10.1038/nature13457

Strange physics turns off laser (Nature Communications)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella

By Steve Schultz, School of Engineering Office of Communications

An electron microscope image shows two lasers placed just two microns apart from each other. (Image source: Turecki lab)
An electron microscope image shows two lasers placed just two microns apart from each other. (Image source: Turecki lab)

Inspired by anomalies that arise in certain mathematical equations, researchers have demonstrated a laser system that paradoxically turns off when more power is added rather than becoming continuously brighter.

The finding by a team of researchers at Vienna University of Technology and Princeton University, could lead to new ways to manipulate the interaction of electronics and light, an important tool in modern communications networks and high-speed information processing.

The researchers published their results June 13 in the journal Nature Communications.

Their system involves two tiny lasers, each one-tenth of a millimeter in diameter, or about the width of a human hair. The two are nearly touching, separated by a distance 50 times smaller than the lasers themselves. One is pumped with electric current until it starts to emit light, as is normal for lasers. Power is then added slowly to the other, but instead of it also turning on and emitting even more light, the whole system shuts off.

“This is not the normal interference that we know,” said Hakan Türeci, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton, referring to the common phenomenon of light waves or sound waves from two sources cancelling each other.  Instead, he said, the cancellation arises from the careful distribution of energy loss within an overall system that is being amplified.

Interactions between two lasers
Manipulating minute areas of gain and loss within individual lasers (shown as peaks and valleys in the image), researchers were able to create paradoxical interactions between two nearby lasers.(Image source: Turecki lab)

“Loss is something you normally are trying to avoid,” Türeci said. “In this case, we take advantage of it and it gives us a different dimension we can use – a new tool – in controlling optical systems.”

The research grows out of Türeci’s longstanding work on mathematical models that describe the behavior of lasers. In 2008, he established a mathematical framework for understanding the unique properties and complex interactions that are possible in extremely small lasers – devices with features measured in micrometers or nanometers. Different from conventional desk-top lasers, these devices fit on a computer chip.

That work opened the door to manipulating gain or loss (the amplification or loss of an energy input) within a laser system. In particular, it allowed researchers to judiciously control the spatial distribution of gain and loss within a single system, with one tiny sub-area amplifying light and an immediately adjacent area absorbing the generated light.

Türeci and his collaborators are now using similar ideas to pursue counterintuitive ideas for using distribution of gain and loss to make micro-lasers more efficient.

The researchers’ ideas for taking advantage of loss derive from their study of mathematical constructs called “non-Hermitian” matrices in which a normally symmetric table of values becomes asymmetric. Türeci said the work is related to certain ideas of quantum physics in which the fundamental symmetries of time and space in nature can break down even though the equations used to describe the system continue to maintain perfect symmetry.

Over the past several years, Türeci and his collaborators at Vienna worked to show how the mathematical anomalies at the heart of this work, called “exceptional points,” could be manifested in an actual system. In 2012 (Ref. 3), the team published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters demonstrating computer simulations of a laser system that shuts off as energy is being added. In the current Nature Communications paper, the researchers created an experimental realization of their theory using a light source known as a quantum cascade laser.

The researchers report in the article that results could be of particular value in creating “lab-on-a-chip” devices – instruments that pack tiny optical devices onto a single computer chip. Understanding how multiple optical devices interact could provide ways to manipulate their performance electronically in previously unforeseen ways. Taking advantage of the way loss and gain are distributed within tightly coupled laser systems could lead to new types of highly accurate sensors, the researchers said.

“Our approach provides a whole new set of levers to create unforeseen and useful behaviors,” Türeci said.

The work at Vienna, including creation and demonstration of the actual device, was led by Stefan Rotter at Vienna along with Martin Brandstetter, Matthias Liertzer, C. Deutsch, P. Klang, J. Schöberl, G. Strasser and K. Unterrainer. Türeci participated in the development of the mathematical models underlying the phenomena. The work on the 2012 computer simulation of the system also included Li Ge, who was a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton at the time and is now an assistant professor at City University of New York.

The work was funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund and the Austrian Science Fund, as well as by the National Science Foundation through a major grant for the Mid-Infrared Technologies for Health and the Environment Center based at Princeton and by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Read the abstract.

M. Brandstetter, M. Liertzer, C. Deutsch,P. Klang,J. Schöberl,H. E. Türeci,G. Strasser,K. Unterrainer & S. Rotter. Reversing the pump dependence of a laser at an exceptional point. Nature Communications 13 June 2014. DOI:10.1038/ncomms5034

Science 2 May 2008. DOI: 10.1126/science.1155311

Physical Review Letters 24 April 2012. DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.173901

 

Migrating north may trigger immediate health declines among Mexicans (Demography)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella
Mexican-Square_351x351_45
Photo credit: Ticiana Jardim Marini, Woodrow Wilson School

By B. Rose Huber, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs

Mexican immigrants who relocate to the United States often face barriers like poorly paying jobs, crowded housing and family separation. Such obstacles – including the migration process itself – may be detrimental to the health of Mexican immigrants, especially those who have recently moved.

A study led by Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs finds that Mexican immigrants who relocate to the United States are more likely to experience declines in health within a short time period compared with other Mexicans.

While past studies have attempted to examine the consequences of immigration for a person’s health, few have had adequate data to compare recent Mexican immigrants, those who moved years ago and individuals who never left Mexico. Published in the journal Demography, the Princeton-led study is one of the first to examine self-reported health at two stages among these groups.

“Our study demonstrates that declines in health appear quickly after migrants’ arrival in the United States,” said Noreen Goldman, lead author and professor of demography and public affairs at the Wilson School and faculty associate at the Wilson School’s Office of Population Research (OPR). “Overall, we find that recent Mexican migrants are more likely to experience rapid changes in health, both good and bad, than the other groups. The deteriorations in health within a year or two of migration far outweigh the improvements.”

For the study, the researchers used data from the Mexican Family Life Survey, a longitudinal survey containing demographic and health information on nearly 20,000 Mexicans who were 20 years or older at the time of the first interview in 2002. Follow-up interviews took place in 2005-06 with individuals who stayed in Mexico as well as with those who moved to the United States between 2002 and 2005. Goldman and her collaborators based their analysis on a sample of 14,257 adults, excluding those who didn’t report health conditions at the follow-up interview.

In order to assess whether migrants from Mexico to the United States experienced changes in their health after they moved, the researchers used two health assessments: self-rated health (compared to someone of the same age and sex) at each of the two interviews and perceived change in health at the second interview. The latter measure was based on the following question: “Comparing your health to a year ago, would you say your health is much better, better, the same, worse or much worse?” Goldman and her collaborators narrowed the original five response categories to three: better, worse or the same. Changes in health for Mexicans who migrated between 2002 to 2005 were compared with those of migrants from earlier time periods and with people who remained in Mexico.

The researchers also took health measures at the first wave into account: obesity, anemia, hypertension – which were all determined by at-home visits by trained health workers – and hospitalization within the past year. They also controlled for socioeconomic factors – years of schooling and household spending. Additionally, they included data from 136 municipalities in Mexico (as past research has found that migration decisions can differ based on place of origin.)

Using statistical models, the researchers analyzed changes in health status. The two health measures revealed that recent migrants to the United States were more apt to experience both improvements and declines in their health than either earlier migrants or non-migrants. However, the overall net change was a substantial deterioration in the health of recent migrants relative to the other groups. The health of recent migrants was about 60 percent more likely to have worsened within a one- or two-year period than that of those who never left Mexico.

“The speed of the health decline for recent migrants suggests that the process of border crossing for both documented and undocumented immigrants combined with the physical and psychological costs of finding work, crowded housing, limited access to health care in the United States and isolation from family members can result in rapid deterioration of immigrants’ physical and mental wellbeing,” said Goldman.

“Immigrants are often assumed to be resilient and in good health because they have not yet adopted unhealthy American behaviors like poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle,” said co-author Anne Pebley from the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But these results suggest that the image of the ‘healthy migrant’ is an illusion – at least for many recent immigrants.”

“These results demonstrate the high personal costs that many immigrants are willing to pay for a chance to improve their lives,” said Goldman. “From a humanitarian standpoint, the health declines underscore the need for public health, social service and immigration agencies to provide basic services for physical and psychological health to recent migrants.”

Given the limitations of the dataset, Goldman and her collaborators could not provide a more nuanced analysis regarding the causes of the changes in health status, but, with the availability of the third wave of data (collected between 2009-12), many of these questions can be later addressed.

In addition to Goldman and Pebley, study researchers include Chang Chung from OPR; Mathew Creighton from the University of Massachusetts; Graciela Teruel from the Universidad Iberoamericana; and Luis Rubalcava from the Centro de Análisis y Medición del Bienestar Social.

Support for this project from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD051764, R24HD047879, R03HD040906, and R01HD047522) and from the Sector Research Fund for Social Development of the National Council for Science and Technology of Mexico.

Read the abstract.

Goldman N, Pebley AR, Creighton MJ, Teruel GM, Rubalcava LN, Chung C. 2014. The Consequences of Migration to the United States for Short-Term Changes in the Health of Mexican Immigrants. Demography. 2014 May 1 (Epub ahead of print).