Hello, my name is Harry Hirsten and this is talk about Senator Bill 43, New Hampshire, Windham election, forensic election audit we conducted in May and published a report out in mid July. First of all, we were a team myself, Professor Philip Stark from UC Berkeley and Mark Lindemann from Verified Voting. How we were chosen was that I was appointed by the Secretary of State and Attorney General of, jointly between Secretary of State and Attorney General of New Hampshire. Mark Lindemann was appointed by the select man of the town of Windham and we jointly chosen the third person to be Professor Philip Stark. So first of all, why we are talking about election machines at all, this is a little bit of my personal story. I started hacking election machines in summer of 2005 and I got involved by being invited by election, back then election supervisor, Ion Shancho of the capital of Florida, Tallahassee. He was responsible for the widely popular, widely publicized 2004 recounts and when the Supreme Court stopped his effort to find out the truth what happened, he felt that he needs to know more and he wasn't fully appreciating the claim that voting machines cannot be hacked. So he wanted to know the truth how the voting machines work. After the work we did in Florida, I was participating in a number of state commissioned voting machine studies. One of those largest ones is from 2007, Everest by Secretary of State Ohio. It is a sad fact that the study we made 2007 is still valid. Most of the same systems are still in use, very few of the systems have had software upgrades and you still literally have the same software up and running which we published the vulnerabilities 2007. Even the some vendors which have published a software upgrades to their system, those software upgrades are very seldom put in use and deployed. So we have a United States elections are run with a lot of very old systems and I have been doing similar studies around the world outside of United States. I'm also a co-organizer, co-founder of the voting machine hacking wheel chair at DEFCON and also with the election integrity foundation. More recently, we received an Emmy nomination for both of our documentary movies by HBO. Back in 2006, HBO documentary hacking democracy was the first one to light to the general audience the problems in voting technology and then the new one kill chain, the cyber war on America's elections. We received an Emmy nomination on that just few weeks ago. Our mission in DEFCON, voting machine hacking wheel chair is not to prove that voting machines can be hacked. Every single machine we have in a room, every single machine is in use in the United States, but every single voting machine has been hacked and there are no vulnerabilities. Our mission is educational. We want people to be able to see the truth and experience the technology, the old technology themselves. If they have concerns about the software, if they have concerns about hardware, experience themselves how the systems actually work. There's nothing which makes me more happy than when local election officials come to hack the very machine they are using in their jurisdictions under the election and this is the first time when they are allowed to do so. So this is something where they ask the first and often last line of defense, they need to have that knowledge, they need to have the experience, and so that they also understand what kind of mitigations needs to be done. When you look the voting systems, we have a lot of things where we can lower the risk by using mitigation strategies, better physical security etc etc. So our mission is to educate people and before we started the voting machine hacking village, there was a very small number of privileged people who had been part of these election system studies. We have single handled 100-folded number of people who have first hand experience on the machine by just having this room and having people to be able to experience the technology and find the truth. Now when we go to this extremely heated 2020 election along with 59 scientists and election security experts, we sign a letter in 16 November where we underline that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And while we have seen a lot of claims, we have been not being found a single occurrence at that time where these vulnerabilities either are real or they have raised in the level of possibly changing the outcome of the election. We keep on looking every single time a new claim is coming along and we have access. We always keep our eye on and want to study and want to research any claim with the election technology. In the 2020 election, like the audit which we are going to be talking now, there are instances where the results were inaccurate but like in the case of the New Hampshire audit, which we're going to talk, the inaccuracy didn't change the outcome of the election. The same people get elected even when there was a discrepancy in a number of votes. So we're still largely behind this letter and the text but we keep on looking and we have to remember how long are the lead times from a evidence and be able to look in this. So we keep on looking and we keep on developing strategies to mitigate against the risks because even if the discrepancy didn't change the outcome of the election, there's always a lesson to be learned to improve the election. We have to improve our elections a lot. Little bit about New Hampshire elections. New Hampshire is using handmark paper ballots. No ballot marking device is no electronic voting. Everything is done with handmark paper ballots, which is the most secure way of voting. From the election purposes, New Hampshire is organized to 320 towns and wards and 123 of those count only by hand. New Hampshire elections in the smaller jurisdictions can count with hand without using voting machines. Largid jurisdictions require voting machines. 197 use those and this is normal in the United States. Every state has their own election laws. Some states have very complex ballots. There even the smaller jurisdictions need to have voting machines to reduce the error rate. But with humans we are slow and error prone so we are not optimal counting machines for ballots. The combination should be using a voting machine, which you don't trust and then verify the result with a mandatory risk limiting audience. In New Hampshire, right now New Hampshire is piloting with a risk limiting audience. The process in New Hampshire is that the candidates can request a recount if they think that the result was inaccurate. And recounts are very common in New Hampshire. There were 16 recounts requesting conducted after the 2020 election and seven after the state primary. New Hampshire also has a safety mechanisms in place. One of the many safety mechanisms is ballot rotation, which means that the parties and the candidates appear in a different order in a ballot. So in one town it might be Republicans all the way left and Democrat next and the other on the right and the next town over where it's different ballot it is. Other is first and then Democrats are central etc. So those all are in a rotation. The same way if there is a race where you have a multiple candidates per party and in multiple jurisdictions then the candidates are rotating when the parties are rotating from left to right then the party candidates are returning from top to bottom. In this recount, hand recount, which started this whole thing motion, this was the largest numerical discrepancy between the machine count and the human count and that was 300 votes. And because New Hampshire didn't have a mechanism to find the explanation why there was this 300 vote difference, that required the state legislators to take an action and pass a new law authorizing this audit, the forensic audit. So I have a typo, it's SB 43. So this was a reaction to the Rockham County District 7 context and that context is a eight candidates vote for any four. That's the format. In New Hampshire when recount is done, it's customary that all candidates gain more votes and this is because people are voting by filling the ballot inaccurately, maybe circling the name or underlining the name or whatnot, making the mark in a way that the voting machine didn't recognize that as a vote, but the human looking into the voters intent clearly understands who the vote was for and this is the mechanism why the hand counts always tend to have more votes to all candidates. However, this time in the hand count each of the Republican candidates gained about 300 extra votes. The three of the of the Democratic candidates gained about 25 votes and the woman who asked for a recount, she lost 99 votes. So there was a two different discrepancies. First of all, it was not clear how it's possible that in the hand count she lost that many votes, but also 300 votes was more than the traditional in the context of the election. 300 was a high number for extra votes. The whole election was a 10,006 ballots so that gives you size and this audit was starting from this local down the ballot race. It had nothing to do with the presidential race, it had nothing to do with the top of the ballot tickets. This was a single discrepancy found in the recount in this one local race only. This is what the ballot looks like. Again, this may be giving a better idea what when I say the ballot rotation changes the names of the order of the political parties from left to right and then if the same candidates are in multiple races, then from top to bottom rotating the name of the candidates. You also see that the names of the Democratic and Republican candidates are not on the same line and this was on purpose. The reason why this is done this way in New Hampshire was that they want to make clear that the voters understand that the candidates are not running against each other. You can pick any four, you are not bound to be making the choice between two candidates who are in the same row. So this physical setting of the candidates, having the Democratic candidates one row below, was to try to make sure that the voters understand how the ballot is constructed and don't have the misconception that the candidates would be running against each other. This is the voting machine used in New Hampshire. It's an acu vote precinct optical scan machine. It's a very old model. We go back to that in the moment, the technical specifications. It is also widely used in other states. So this is not only in New Hampshire. This is widely used in all the states of New England, but also in other ways. These have been used previously in large states like California and not anymore widely used machine. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's bad. First of all, this machine was originally developed in 1986 and it's believed that it was first time used in elections in general election 1990. It started to be marketed in 1989 and the first election where it's believed to be used was in Minnesota. This is extraordinarily old technology. The CPU of that is Systemon Chip. It's a microcontroller version of V20. It's a VNEC V25. It's a pin compatible with Intel 8088 and instruction compatible with 80186. So this is the first IBM PC era technology. That chip cannot address memory more than one megabyte. That's the maximum size of a memory. This is really that old. In this particular system, there's 256 kilobytes of RAM. That's all. This is not scanning an image of the ballot. This is a technological optical marker recognition, which means that the scanner is looking for a landmark, landmarks, timing marks and finding the vote targets from the cross sections of those marks. Inside of the memory of the machine, there's never a picture, never an image of the ballot. Only these cross sections. The scanner itself is reading 36 positions per line. That's all. The lines are separated one quarter inch from each other. In a sense, this is 36 pixels for the whole side of the ballot line. The scanner is using a laser diodes, which are orange red in color. On purpose, this voting machine is colorblind for color red on orange red. If you have a marking made with a red pen and mark your vote with a red pen, the voting machine will not read it. It will not understand it. The software itself is stored in two EEPROM chips, 128k and 64k chips. These are EEPROMs, not EEPROMs. EEPROM means that the chip can be erased only by using an intense ultraviolet light. The machine itself cannot erase the chip. Only way you can erase the chip and read program, you physically have to remove the chip from the voting machine, place it for 20 minutes under an intense ultraviolet light, and after it's erased, then you can use a universal programmer to write the new software into the chip. For this reason, the chips have a clear mirror for the ultraviolet light to reach the silicon chip, and always when the chips are programmed, a piece of paper or something has been put in top of the lens, preventing an accidental instability by a burst or ultraviolet light. Old camera flashes, for example, could cause an instability. This system doesn't have any traditional operating system. This is a special purpose computer. It's not PC compatible as such. The whole operating system is replaced with a microkernel, and the microkernel is living on the same chips as the applications of running the election. There is plenty of empty space on the chip, so the actual software is only 143 kilobytes, everything combined. This system doesn't have a hard drive or any other form, a flash memory, any kind of storage, which can be rewritten inside of the system to store stuff. Only place where you can store anything and where the election is living is an Epson-style J40 card edge connector, battery refresh static RAM card. Typically, these cards are manufactured in 32, 64 and 128K, but typically only the first 32K is in use on this card. The picture of that memory card is on the left. This is an extremely limited single-purpose computer, where an attacker's surface is very small. This is not because of the design of worrying about security. This is so old that at the time when this machine was designed, cyber warfare was bad science fiction. This is a hallmark of how old this computer is. This is even better than most of the hardened systems of today, just because how limited the capabilities of the system were at the time. Here's the picture of the voting machine's internals. There you see the two chips with a white stickers. Those are the RAM chips containing the software. The two chips, the left side of the chips with the white stickers, those are the RAM chips, 128K RAM chips 2, so 256. The square chip on the side, that is the V25 microcontroller. As you can see, this is from the era where a normal 74 series TL logic chips were used. This is a very, very old design. Also, I would like to point out that because of the limited horsepower, this machine cannot, even if you would introduce a wireless counter, this doesn't have the horsepower to drive Wi-Fi, this doesn't have a horsepower to drive Bluetooth. The only connections this machine was originally having was a RS232 serial port with a maximum speed of 9600 bits per second and a modem with a maximum speed of 2400 bits per second. But as a security measurement in New Hampshire, the modem has been physically removed, the sticker on the white sticker in top of the plastic, that's where the modem was before it was removed and also the cables for the serial port has been cut and removed. So in New Hampshire, this voting machine has no means of communicating with the outside world by any other means than the memory card. You can also notice the copper color inside of the plastic. This was the way how electromagnetic radiation shielding was done back those days. That is a Faraday cage, which has been done by spraying the inside of the plastic case with a copper. So this, from the electromagnetic emissions point of view, this is an extremely quiet and well-shielded machine. And of course, inside of the machine, there's additional shielding for a components, which might be radiating more. The compartment on the left is where the battery, so this machine is intended to be able to operate without an external power for limited time, so power cut wouldn't be stopping the election. I would also point out an interesting thing, which we will come back later, which is that when you look the center of the voting machine, you see a white line on the top of the metal casing. We will get back to that white line later. So this is the law, which was authorizing this audit, and as you can see, this is really a targeting, the Rockham district, number seven, which is Windham, and that a race only. But yes, a measurement, they are asking for recounting to other races just to make sure that whatever is the cause of the discrepancy wouldn't be affecting other races. So this was a security measurement to take into account a two wider races just in case it will reveal something. And the law called us to use all four machines in that county to count every single ballot, so it's a little bit different procedure than what is used in election day, where the ballots were divided between four machines, and then also take the custody of the ballots, understanding how the population of used, unused ballots, etc., is maintained, and then hand count everything, hand count those three races, the state representative governor and United States senator having a local race, statewide race, and federal race in hand count. This was the scope of the audit, and we were told and authorized if we find something, which expands a larger, we can follow the evidence wherever the evidence will lead us, because the intention was to find out what caused this discrepancy. Even when the discrepancy didn't change the outcome of the Rockham district seven race. The first order of business was that we machine counted every single ballot. There are a number of ways you can do the machine count. You could have a remove the cards from the voting machine, make an image of the voting machine with a third party device. We decided not to do that because this technology is arcane, so we would have needed to use a third party device, which nobody else have audited, so it would have raised a concerns potentially what happened when the cards were removed from the ceiling and placed to this device. We could have used the voting machine to make a copies of the memory cards, but since we were auditing the voting machines, it would be illogical to trust the voting machine to create a forensic evidence for us, when the voting machine is in doubt. Because New Hampshire had removed the cables, that was not an option, so the last thing which we chose to do was in order to have the best possible security for and also regaining the public trust. We only reset the counters of the previous election after printing on audit tapes, and we left the cards fully sealed into the machine with no physical access, reset the voting machine mode from post election back to pre-election and ran it as it is, and also setting up the clock of the voting machine back to the November election day. So when we started, when we process the paper ballots with the same memory cards, except that now we put all the ballots through every machine, we got the results which were a little bit different than what was the 2020 election. Remember at the time when we started this, we don't know which one is closer to true, is the hand counter problem, is the machine counter problem, are they both wrong? This is the starting point was we don't know what is the source of the discrepancy, was it the human counter or is it the machine counter? So first when we ran all the ballots through we found a plus minus two difference in 10,000 for the presidential race, we found in governor's race a 50 to 60 fewer planks between those four machines, because again all four machines had a little bit different results. The U.S. Senate, the Exit Council, very small changes, big issues in the state representative race, and then rest very small discrepancies. But these results were different than the 2020 election, so now these voting machines didn't even agree with themselves. So now we have to think of what has changed, with the memory card didn't change, what has changed, why we have a different kind of results. This was the first clue for us in our journey to follow the evidence. This is as a numbers, the hand counts between the 2020 hand count and 21 hand count and the machine counts. Now we see that the two machine, the two hand counts agree very closely to each other, which gives us a strong evidence that the hand count result was the right result, and the machine count results were the incorrect results. So this was the first critical piece, now we know that probably the main course is not hand count, probably the main course is the machine counting, wrong and the machine counting them different. The other part which we found immediately was that this, the voting machines, the four voting machines didn't produce exactly same results between each other, so we had a variation of the results between the machines. We can see that two of the machines are closely matching each other, one machine is a little bit off and one machine is way off from the others. Another interesting data point. When we looked at the other hand counts, the governor and us senator, we saw that in the governor's race there was a little bit more discrepancy and discrepancy is a non-votes being lower and more votes found. So about the same amount of votes were found for both of the governor candidates and the voting machine had clearly in this vote failed to recognize votes when there was vote and when we have a US senator race, very small differences. When I go back to the previous one, we see that the same thing was in the US state reference. If you have, there's a thousand less non-votes for anyone. So now we are approaching the question, what means non-vote? And the non-vote can be two different things. It can be that the voter didn't vote anyone or the voter voted too many because the other way non-vote can happen is called over vote condition. It means that when the voter was asked vote for four, the voter for example voted for five or six and that cancels all the votes. So if you have a race vote for four and you vote for five, the result is nobody gets any votes. So this is the condition we started looking and focusing. Maybe we are seeing what caused this problem. This is all 10,000 ballots superimposed over each other. This whole red blob in the left was that before we started, we made every single ballot to be unique by placing a unique number to every single ballot. We originally were planning to use a bait stamp machine but the bait stamps broke down and eventually that's why we just then did it with the handwriting. But this made every single ballot unique and identifiable. And after this serial number was done, we didn't use the scans of the ballots for recount purposes. These were reference scans to be used for analysis and we didn't know at the time when we did the reference scan how useful this will be. I want to make sure that everybody understands that if you scan ballots with a separate scanner, you cannot trust those images. There are a lot of features in the scanners which have been shown to alter the ballots.  So when you have a filled oval, it can remove that. You also have to establish trust that your image population is a true representation of the physical ballots. So if you are creating ballot images for the purpose of, for example, making a recount, then you have to make extra steps to convince yourself that your image population is trustworthy. Just taking the images or hashing that, that is not nearly enough for this purpose. Anyway, when we superimposed the images, we saw two interesting things here. We see in Kirsten, Saint Laurent, I hope I pronounced her name correctly. We see a very high concentration of paper foldings going through her vote target. And we see on top of the ballot a way wider area of foldings, some of them being over the vote targets. I have to, the darkness of the folding is not representing how many foldings were in that place. This is purely maxing a type of superimposing just to find where they are. Other interesting thing is when you look the folding on the bottom through and going through the Kirsten's target, you don't see in a flip side of the ballot nearly a strong marking. So that was interesting. And the last but not least, we find that the folding machine seems to be a little bit, or the folder seems to be a little bit off-center. It doesn't go straight from the left to right. These ballots had a score line. Score line is a weaker than the perforation. It is a print shop created weakness on the ballot. And that weakness is created in a safe zone. So when you hand fold the paper, you automatically fold the paper always in a safe place and it doesn't ever hit the vote targets. So our question was, we know now that the folding, the correct folding line would be above the Julius Sotti's target. That's where the correct line is. The similar, the correct line is in above the candidates in the governor's race. So what caused a folding to appear in an incorrect place when the structure of weakness is forcing the hand folding to be always in a correct place. If you try to fold the paper incorrectly, hand folding incorrectly, you cannot absolutely do it because the weakness is where the paper wants to fold and you would need a tool like a ruler to make an incorrect folding. So the blood thickens. The other part of which we've started looking into the results, we found out that one machine, which was machine number two, processed 90 percent of the absentee ballots. And at the same time, that same machine had the highest error rate. So we had a perfect storm and coincidence where the absentee ballots which are folded are the ones which are going through a machine which have a highest error rate. Why we have a higher error rate in that one machine? The first discover we had was a paper folding machine. When the good people in Wynham started to have a high number of requests for absentee ballots, they had a hard time to cope with the demand and someone had remembered that they had rented a paper folding machine to be used in DMV, not in elections used in DMV. So in order for them to serve their voters better, they decided to use this paper folding machine and they use it as it is. They didn't change the settings of the folding machine. So it folded the paper exactly the same way as the DMV re-registration papers had been previously folded. And at that time nobody thought about the foldings. The Secretary of State had been conducting a few years earlier a testing of the foldings if they caused the voting machine to re-misregister those as a vote. And they hadn't found any problem at the time. So there was no knowledge that the folding can have a this kind of effect. But the folding machine is strong enough that it can fold the paper in the incorrect place. So now we found out what caused the folding to be in the correct place. Again, this was a machine which was rented by Wintham. We made a query to other jurisdictions to find out if they have been using folding machines and we couldn't find a single other township award which would have us the voting machine. So our query was not conclusive. We didn't ask all 3,320 but from the sample we did and asked the question we couldn't find another place with a fold. So that's a pointing that this folding machine is a unique occurrence. It's a black swan in this mix if you may. When we look at microscope what the folding machine looks, we found an unused ballot which had been folded on the election day. The folding on the right side is the folding which was done on the election day and the filing on the left was when we used the folding machine to recreate. And this is a bump and we discovered something else interesting. If the papers fold it up or down makes a huge difference. When it's up folded it creates a bump which creates a shadow and the shadow can be misinterpreted to be a marking on the ballot. While it's down folded it creates a bridge and it's almost invisible in the microscope that the folding was there. And this is consistent with what we saw in the superimposed image where the same strong folding which went through the Christie's oval on the front side. There was not a strong folding on the flip side and that was because the unknown factor was the direction it had been folded matters. And again we couldn't reconstruct from the Secretary of State office where they folded those up and down. They didn't know it makes a difference. Nobody knew it made a difference but now we found out what is the difference. This bump is permanent in the paper but it is not equal strength over time. So at this point of time we started looking into the bumps and we realized that why the machine count in 2021 and 2020 were different. The difference was that the ballots had been laying flat six months under the wake of the other ballots and it had straightened the ballots. So you still had the bump and it still created a false readings but it created less false readings because of the time the paper has been flattened under the wakes. Then we started looking something else and the question was why these voting machines have different results from each other. This scanner cannot be opened. There's no easy way to open it. So we used an endoscopic camera to look into the scanner to see what was inside of there and we saw a white powder. Well it looked like a dust so at the first time we didn't even know what we were looking. I used a highly compressed air cleaner and when we cleaned with the compressed air a massive amount of dust as you can see here came out. Only later we realized that this is not paper dust. This is actually an offset printing powder. In offset printing when the ballot is printed the ink is not fully dry when it comes out of the printing machine and in order to prevent the ballots to stick to each other in that kind of printing technology a very very fine powder is sprayed to the sheets to keep them a little bit separated and allowing them to naturally dry. So this was what we found out. It's out of the printing technology and that explained why the machines were a little bit different. We conducted 32 test elections with the 16 elections used by a flat paper and 16 elections with the folded paper. When the paper was flat all machines, all four machines, regardless whether they had the paper dust or not inside, were 100 percent accurate and then at the time when we process the folded paper the differences came out and these differences seemed to be indicating the level of paper dust contamination in offset powder dust contamination inside of the machine. So we found a contributing factor and this is just a we made a sanity check. We found how many ballots are in each way. We found about 300 600 ballots where the folding mark goes through a Kirstis target. We found a about four where the folding line went through Mr Sotti's target. We found a different combinations of the foldings in different intensities and this showed us that there's enough ballots and this also proves us that the foldings can both add votes and subtract votes. When a voter voted for less than four candidates then if the line went through Kirstis target it created a phantom vote for her and the hand count corrected that's why she lost 99 votes in the hand count. But if a voter voted for a straight party line republican ticket and the line went through Kirstis then it created in certain intensity a over vote which then tossed all the votes out and cancelled the votes. So this folding line both explained why the republicans gained 300 votes and it also explains why Kirsti lost 99 votes in the recall. Yet another example here we have the folding line going through the governors race and of course now in if that vote is if that folding line is misinterpreted to be a misinterpreted to be a vote then it cancels those votes and we saw that 90 figure in earlier what was the time but these there were not very many ballots and not all folding lines are always interpreters of ballots. When we made the sanity check we found out that the probability of the strong folding to be misinterpreted into a vote is 0.44 and it is the same with the two different ways of counting so this is bow time our our hypothesis to be sane with the regardless of which way you are analyzed. Again this is just a close-up picture to show that the external connections were really removed and destroyed and there was no way of communicating with the memory card from outside world. Just to wrap up the last things we did a lot of things we added in addition we we looked about poll book recalls we looked absentee applications we made sure then that all ballots are genuine ballot printed ballots handmarked not printed printed we measured the thickness we did a complete software analysis of the e prompts using gizara an nsa open source a reverse engineering tool we looked through e prompts to find verify that there's no a unexplained data there with because that would be the only place where malware would be so we complete all these analyzes and we found no evidence of malware we found no evidence of a any kind of irregularities in the digital media and we found no irregularities in the paper ballots everything was authentic printed and handmarked. We livestreamed the entire event and we published a real-time huge amount of documents all along based on a request of products and so we tried to be as transparent as possible i have spent more time to be an observer and a monitor so i wanted to run this the way i would want to be i would be wanting to be observer as observer so we want to be as friendly as possible to the observers make sure everything is is transparent when we were doing the hand telling the spreadsheet was a google doc spreadsheet was a real-time accessible from the world everybody could see all the data entry as they go and in the video every single ballot was a uh with overhead camera uh photo so every single ballot of the 10 2006 ballot was shown in a live stream in a full hd so that everybody can follow that process i think that's wrap it up please ask questions in the discord and i hope this was explaining why in this case in on the very difficult circumstances windham elections were windham election was run uh very well of course when you have a close scrutiny we have a recommendations how to improve it but this was just a coincidence a conspiracy of coincidences very many things needed to happen in order to create this anomaly and now the anomaly is explained and there was no malicious intent or malicious activity thank you very much


So, colleagues, as you have noticed, the courts in Osaka are crowded with matters that involve those that were privileged to have served in the previous regime, a situation that I think the Zamban people are now getting used to. But allow me to take this opportunity first of all to inform the nation of the sad development that has emerged in our country. We have alerted the country of foreigners and the individuals that have been contracted by foreign entities that are influencing policy and are operating from state house. We are aware of people that are operating from the term player foundation, people that are operating from the Brenthurst foundation that are influencing policy, which is clearly state capture. But now what is also happening is that by extension we have foreigners that are beginning to participate in the operation and activities of the law enforcement agencies. We have white people that are participating even in the process of investigation. We are suspicious to investigating and zooming to check whether these are not CIA, these are not FBI agents that have now come in this country for a specific agenda. We also have noticed that a department that had been closed under the special division that in time past used to operate as an elimination department, seemingly it looks like it is activated. We are still under investigations, those allegations and suspicions are serious especially from those of us who are in opposition. We know that this government has been engaft in failure and so on. And these activities of having political leaders being followed around, strange people wandering around their homes, being monitored in terms of the times they finish their work and the times they go home, all these activities will be noticed that are being undertaken and we are monitoring. We want to advise Misaka in the HLMA that we should never, never, never, never go back to the days of one party state where strange things were happening, political opponents disappearing, some of them dying in very suspicious circumstances. This we are saying in good faith in the promotion of our democracy. If the allegation of some department under the special division being opened that was responsible for elimination in time past as actor been opened, this is a sad development. So we want that government clears, don't use the police to intimidate opponents, don't use law enforcement agencies to intimidate opponents, especially when we expose things that are inimical to the governance system of this country. Our democracy needs to be protected. Those who have chosen to save this country via politics, they need to be given the latitude to save and play their role in this case for those of us who are in opposition to provide checks and balances without any interference, without their lives being threatened, without our freedoms being taken away. That is what we want to co-op on Misaka in the two inshua because that's what he promised. So if we are going to have people's lives threatened because they have chosen to speak on behalf of the Zanmen people, that is very sad. Thank you very much and God bless.


Non-adiabatic holonomic quantum computation has gained attention due to its robustness against control errors and high-speed realisation. The original protocol of non-adiabatic holonomic one-qubit gates requires two non-commuting gates, doubling the exposure time of the gate to error sources and leaving it vulnerable to environment-induced decoherence. A single-shot protocol has been proposed to realise an arbitrary one-qubit non-adiabatic holonomic gate, which has been experimentally demonstrated using a superconducting X-monkutrit with all single-qubit Clifford gates carried out by a single-shot implementation. The single-shot gates reach a fidelity exceeding 99% as characterised by quantum process tomography and randomised benchmarking. This article was authored by Xingxing Zhong, PZ Zhao, Tenghuai Wang, and others.


This amazing piece of art behind me by by our very own Isha Charles tells the story of the African-American business community in Columbia before the end of segregation of thriving amazing community just to the west of me of Washington Street Where there were African-American entrepreneurs? My name is Isha Charles I am a self-taught artist here from Columbia, South Carolina and also a muralist as you see behind me This is the Black Wall Street mural. This was something that was buried in history as far as our history Because I didn't even know we had a Black Wall Street So to create something recreating something that had already been here has been a huge accomplishment and great thing for me to do Miss Charles has captured the essence The vibrancy and the substance of the African-American movement in the city of Columbia this mural Sort of signifies and symbolizes the struggles of opportunity It is amazing That folk would remember this symbol Just thrilled that our mayor and council had the thoughtfulness to do such a project that I think for years to come will pay tribute to African-American culture and the history That our wonderful city has had for all these years the inspiration for commissioning the murals I think came from Mayor Benjamin who who wanted to present Murals that represented the African-American experience in Columbia that led to a conversation I think by city council as a whole along with Dr. Bobby Donaldson as we thought about the Significance of the placement of that building fortunate one that corner was the gateway to the African-American business district The eleven hundred the ten hundred and the nine hundred blocks of Washington Street bringing history African-American history To the doorsteps of our communities to help educate our young people and help them understand the history that has taken place I think was very impactful. So we're excited about this and looking forward to adding not just to the physical beauty aesthetic beauty of Columbia for years to come but also telling our story in the way that we Want our story told our story matters and this is a part of that story Today as you can tell behind me the families here from Sally Mae Fleming Brown Who decided one day that she wasn't gonna sit in the back of the bus and said she just wasn't gonna do it And didn't she opened up the gateway for the court case for Rosa Parks a lot of times We're bringing the meaning to places that we go really connecting with the community in this case There was already a really profound story of Sarah Mae Fleming And we're honored that we got to be a small part in helping tell that story on a community-wide scale We wanted to bring a life to bring a movement to this story Because we think it's still a story that is very much still living So there's a famous case called Fleming versus SCENG that it's filed 17 months Before the famous incident of Rosa Parks and so while many in this country know the piracy and work of Rosa Parks very few know of the precedent case of Sarah Mae Fleming I was sort of the lead in using a similar process to what one Columbia uses for all of its public art projects and I've learned more about her as a person through this process and I find that Really interesting how sort of self-sufficient she was These four pieces of art Tell the amazingly challenging Sometimes painful but beautiful story of the African seed and the American Sun right here in Columbia, South Carolina It allows an opportunity For our young people to be able to engage in African-American history where they live for some They may never go to a museum or they may never go to an art gallery, but they're gonna come to a local gym They're gonna come to a local Recreation facility and at that point we reach them where they are so we're excited about this opportunity to educate We're excited about this opportunity to be able to share history African-American history to those young people that may not get Opportunities to be exposed to this type of information So we're grateful to our mayor we're grateful to our city council We're grateful to our city manager for endorsing and supporting this process this mural The moment ten years after Brown vs. Board where these children were in the vanguard of Bringing Columbia into the 20th and 21st century. It's powerful. It's even more powerful to have some of the young people They're been here with us today and a wonderful example how Together we tell the real story of Columbia in a way that edifies and brings people together a conversation took place about What locations the city might have available and that kind of developed into looking at that area and that neighborhood and Exploring what kinds of civil rights activities or photos might exist as we thought about the history of rosewood in its Connection to civil rights. I was reminded of a powerful photograph that was featured in the New York Times in September of 1964 and so we shared that photograph with an artist and in Valencia Park now There's a powerful rendering of that photograph that captures young men and women as they entered the doors at Rosewood Elementary in the fall of 1964 they are among the first African-American students to desegregate Columbia schools in 1964 I'm really humbled to be given an opportunity to shine a light on these kids who I can't imagine What that must have felt like at that young age to walk up there these past couple years I've been You know, I've noticed that Though we have made some progress we still have a long way to go and I'm just really humbled to to be able to add something That is shines a light on the black community and and I want you know I think it's very important that that the black and brown community in Columbia see themselves Everywhere and feel like they're part of this community because you are I can still remember that day walking up the stairs Little frayed little excited, but you know what they expect That was 57 years ago Just Didn't realize the impact One of the things that we're doing was we wanted to ensure that we had representation From each council district. So these murals are depicted in all four districts Which is very very exciting the whole city of Columbia Parks Foundation initiative Murals in all districts. It's just been amazing to really talk about the history past present future From Main Street to every street That history is future generations So everything that we do to this like what the mayor says adds to our story and The more people we can make aware of our story I think just really creates a cohesiveness We're all part of this Really quilt that is Columbia This mural brings education To our community it brings education to the doorsteps of our community and highlighting Some significant African-Americans that contribute to society in a profound way Hyatt Park is historically a white part that actually practice segregation and as we thought about the changing demographics of that area Several people came to mind who lived in the proximity of the North Main area One person was named Benjamin J. Mack. Mr. Mack once lived on Monticello Road He once lived in an area called Ridgewood Mr. Mack was a very active member of the Ridgewood Baptist Church But he's probably best known as a staunch civil rights activist Who developed a program in collaboration with a woman named Septima Clark of what was called citizenship schools Deacon Mack and Ms. Clark Recognize that African-Americans were being deprived of the right to vote and so they engage in a campaign To prepare African-Americans about the purpose of voting how to register to vote and then going out to vote And so the mural on the Hyatt Park wall Pays tribute to Benjamin Mack a man who lived in that community It pays tribute to Septima Clark who Dr. King called the mother of the civil rights movement And it also pays tribute to a pioneering journalist whose name was Lister Belt Middleton. Mr. Middleton Lived on the Hyatt Park area He was the producer of a pioneering television show called for the people and in that show He showcased African-American history. He showcased African history So now the young men and women who enter Hyatt Park will know more about the important roles of Benjamin J. Mack Septima points at Clark and Lister Belt Middleton It means a lot that the work that he did because he dearly loved his people and He loved putting out the African and the African-American history and getting the truth of that out to people So to have this honor to have him more like this means a lot to us Long before the birth of this country Long before the birth of this city the African-American community has been actively involved in helping build the culture and in the in the economy of Columbia, South Carolina these murals tell that story I love this mural in particular because of the role that Lister Belt Middleton played in my Development as a young man as a young man trying to understand his place in space in the world He's a contemporary He was a leader and educator. He's a strong man Who who made sure that we all understood the internal power that we all had We were able to lift up the names of these ancestors these Community members that have been leaders here in Hyatt Park and celebrate black history of Hyatt Park It's a way of saying thanks also to People who have honestly touched other people's lives Seeking nothing in return Helping to a lot of times make a difference in those people's lives. We're fortunate that you know, we're adding we're able to add murals in city parks that are actually located within neighborhoods and We I think that it is important that murals and other forms of public art be added to neighborhoods because I think you can add so much to the character of a neighborhood and really represent what a neighborhood is all about showcase them and their identity as a community and also Increase the amount of people that may be spread beyond the downtown area to seek out of a car and hear the stories of Columbia Beyond just the downtown core


probiotics are live microorganisms that can help improve health when consumed. Previous studies suggest that probiotics may play a role in treating respiratory tract infections such as COVID-19. This study reviews the connection between probiotics and the immune system and explores their potential use as part of COVID-19 treatment. The authors found that probiotics bind to ACE2, a protein expressed in both the lungs and gut, suggesting that they could potentially be used to treat COVID-19. Currently, there are no formal guidelines recommending probiotic consumption during COVID-19, but further research is needed to determine whether probiotics should be included in the treatment of COVID-19. This article was authored by Ginter Dharmawan, Marshall Tendine, Adi Dharmawan, and others.


This video is sponsored by Squarespace. So having a structure right here, let's see, 15 feet, we said, let's see, three, two, one, six, nine, 12 feet. Yeah, I mean, this area is raised up, that side is sloped.  Hi everyone, Nico from Nebula Photos. I'm here with Timothy Emerson, who is an architect, and he is going to give me some tips about building my backyard observatory that I have recently gotten some plans for, and I haven't started construction, so it was really great that Timothy reached out to me and offered this consultation because he has a lot of great ideas, and I think this is gonna be really helpful to anyone out there who is considering building their own custom observatory in their backyard. So, Timothy, first, just tell me a little bit about your background as an architect and sort of why you reached out to me. Yeah, so I got into astrophotography about a year and a half ago, and pretty much made all the beginner mistakes by the telescope that was too big, couldn't get them out working, tracking errors, of course, it was the middle of January, so I was really frustrated and cold, so I started watching a lot of videos, I came across your videos and some other people, and they were a lifesaver to me, like learning this hobby. And so, the work that you guys are doing on putting out free YouTube videos, I kind of wanted to give back a little bit, and so I reached out to you, I am an architect, I practice in Massachusetts, a little bit in New Hampshire, then you started doing videos on backyard observatories, I was like, I can definitely help you with that, something I could do, if nothing else, kind of give you my two cents, and maybe show you where you might have some problems. What would you say are the biggest problems that here in New Hampshire, we have to be aware of when building something like this? Yeah, so this is a good point because you've got people all over the country, all over the globe, and everybody has a different environment, right? And that's gonna be the biggest factor in planning your observatory build. Here in New England, we've got everything you could possibly imagine. We've got warm weather, we've got humid weather, we've got cold weather, frost, and having all of those things together makes it pretty challenging. I would say the biggest thing for us would be the wintertime and frost, and the secondary thing to that would be having a very humid environment in the summertime and in the fall, so moisture problems. Do you advise getting air conditioning for an observatory or is it because the roof rolls off, I guess, it's actually I should back up in the style that I wanna build, the roof is gonna roll off, that allows it to really cool off to ambient temperature quite quickly and sort of, but for I guess a lot of the time it's going to be the air will be trapped in there, and I guess also the humidity would be, so how do you go about sort of like dealing with moisture and things like that? Yeah, so having a roof that comes off makes it very tricky, especially a roll off roof, and that your primary issues are gonna be where the roof is connected to the walls where the roller bearings are gonna be. There's really no way to air seal something like that. Some people in like a prefabricated kind of insulated enclosure with maybe a pop-up roof or something like that where it's got a nice gasket that seals around, something like that would be worth dehumidifying in the summertime, but something like this, you know, air wants to be an equilibrium, right? So if we create this nice sealed box and try to dehumidify, or let's say we create this box and it's not quite sealed and we start to dehumidifying it, well we're gonna take the humid air that's in there, but that will force the air that's outside to drive inside the building. So you're really kind of not doing anything by trying to dehumidify a structure like this. So what I would recommend is actually make sure that there's a way of natural ventilation, right? So, you know, this is not a structure that you wanna be heated anyway. So, you know, in the summertime we wanna keep the humid air out. So, you know, a fan towards the gable end and at the bottom we can have some louvers to kind of pull in fresh air and get the air moving. If we can get the air moving, we're less likely to have condensation. So one thing I've seen is, you have an intake fan and an outtake fan or something like that and that maybe will move the air across the top but I've never heard about this louvers towards the bottom. Can you explain that a little? Yeah, so in a structure like this up towards the top the air is gonna be the warmest, right? Because the warm air is gonna rise. So the idea of having the louvers at the bottom is you're bringing cool air in. Now, this glass is a perfect example here in our humid climate. We've got condensation here. So the air around us has moisture in it, right? This water here didn't come from the inside of the glass, right? So we've got this warm air which can hold a lot of moisture and cold air has less moisture in it. So as soon as the air comes in contact with the glass it cools the air off and the moisture falls out of the air, right? So if we can put the louver, if we put the fan at the top we're pulling the warm humid air out and we're bringing in cooler, less moist air at the bottom. And what is a louver? A louver would be like a screen, right? It usually has metal fins on it. So when you've got driving rain it kind of protects the opening. It's not like a regular open window. And so you would build that right into the wall? Yeah, you could build it into the wall. You can get pre-manufactured metal louvers. You've probably seen a lot on gable vents. So like houses, right? So the attic vent is kind of sticking off the side there. That would be a louver. Oh, another thing sort of related to this maybe is you mentioned it might be a good idea as an observatory to have windows. Could you explain why? Yeah, so off-camera we were talking about our climate specifically. And because we have so much moisture in the spring and the fall, we often get mold and mildew, along with some rot, which we'll probably talk about later. But one thing is with that moisture and this particular structure that we're looking at, it's wood. Now mold, it's one thing that we're concerned about in New England quite a bit. And mold needs a few ingredients to grow. It needs a source of food. It needs water and it needs darkness. So it's nice when you close up the hatches and keep everything nice and sealed up in the daytime and the nighttime you roll it off. But in the daytime when you're not using your observatory, the most humid time in the warmest time, you're giving mold an opportunity to grow. So my recommendation would be to have a few windows in there to kind of keep the level of light up and kind of reduce at least one of the variables for a chance for mold to grow. Mold spores will, they'll feed on the wood, but that doesn't also mean that they can't get on all your equipment as well. So that reminds me that I've heard different things about sort of heat dissipation when you roll off the roof, you want the heat from the building to get out of there as quickly as possible. And so I've heard that wood is generally better for letting the heat off than concrete. But then I've also heard like the reason that a lot of people leave the inside of their buildings unfinished like that is because that will also help with getting the heat out quickly. Do you agree with all that or is there anything you could elaborate on? I would agree with that. Okay. Concrete is what we call a thermal mass. Once it warms up, it takes a while to dissipate, right? In older homes like this one, you probably have a big fireplace somewhere and fireplace made of stone, wintertime it warms up and it'll help disperse the heat and keep things warmer longer. The same is true for a concrete slab on grade. And in even some passive kind of low energy homes, we use concrete and dark flooring material like tile to kind of let the concrete absorb more light so that at night when the sun's gone and the temperature outside has cooled off, it releases that energy back into the building. So something like this, insulation is not really gonna help you a lot because you're gonna be rolling off the, the purpose is not to live in the space, right? The purpose is for astrophotography. So I would agree keeping the structure as light as possible. Even insulation will, I mean, the purpose of insulation is to slow down the transfer of air. And so when you roll off that roof, its job is to hold onto that warm air as long as possible. So yes, insulation would slow down the heat, the cooling of your observatory. Another question I had about these buildings is a lot of people with a roll-off roof, roll the roof off to the north. And my understanding is the main reason is just because it's important, more important to have a clear view to the east, west and south for astronomy purposes. I am gonna be pretty blocked by trees to the west. So I was thinking of instead rolling the roof off to the west because in terms of an obstruction, it's not gonna matter. But is there any engineering or structural reason to roll the roof off in a certain direction? No, not really. If you live in like a very open kind of flat region where you're susceptible to, you know, not like microbursts and like tornado quality, but like really heavy winds, it is, it would probably be beneficial for you to orientate your building kind of like a weather vane into the wind, right? So that you don't get kind of a side wind to try and lift up your roof or expose it to any more kind of severe wind than, you know, than normal. Something that I've heard from a number of people, including Alan, who I recently visited, you mentioned, is over time it becomes harder for the roof to roll off because of the roof, I mean, the building sort of changing over time. How do you, and it seems like people have different issues there, but what is sort of like general advice for how to prevent shift and for that to be a hard issue with a roll off roof building? Yeah, I mean, so most likely what's going on there is, I mean, in our climate, we have frost, right? And in some Southern climates and Western climates, they have what's called expansive soil, soil that holds moisture and water and the soil moves, right? So in either case, whether it's frost or expansive soils, we want to design a footing that is gonna best resist what we would expect to see in your local climate, right? So in our case, we're talking about piers. So we can't just build right on the ground like some Southern climates can. We have to dig deep and we have to dig below the frost line. So for New Hampshire, the code minimum is 48 inches. We've been talking about piers and just to make it clear, there's the piers that the telescope are gonna go onto and then there's the piers that the building are gonna go on to and in both cases, though, I have to dig a hole that's at least four feet deep and fill it with concrete. When I've been digging holes for other reasons, like my vegetable garden, I've noticed I have very rocky soil where I'm like taking out boulders like this big a lot. So what are your recommendations for digging holes if I want to do this myself? Yeah, so growing up in New England myself, I had to dig a lot of holes in this kind of ground. And what I recommend is you can get a post hole digger can help or just a spade shovel. A post hole digger is gonna help you dig a more straight hole. If you're using a long handled spade shovel, you'll have a more tapered hole just to be able to get down to the bottom.  It's about five feet long. It's a cylindrical rod at the bottom of it. It has a taper and at the top, it has a kind of a round flared end at the top. And it weighs about 50 pounds. And when you hit a rock, you know, you can pound the ground to kind of loosen it up. You can get beside the rock and kind of pry it into the hole. The idea here is that the girth of the hole can be large. The girth is not what we want to avoid. The depth of the hole we wanna be at four feet minimum to be below the frost line, but it's kind of imperative that when you're digging a hole that you don't go, the bottom of your concrete footing doesn't go below undisturbed soil. Soil that's been undisturbed has the highest compressive rate it's ever gonna have. Once you disturb it, there's no amount of pounding that you can do to kind of recreate that existing undisturbed capacity for the soil to resist load. In our conversation so far, what am I missing? What do you think are things that I haven't thought about and in building this myself? If we're doing a wood construction like you are, most cases people just dig the sonotube, they dig the holes, put the sonotube down and fill it and then they build their wood structure on top of it. But my recommendation to you and particularly in our climate where we have a lot of groundwater and moisture is to underneath of your building, remove all the organic material, not just where the posts are gonna go, but remove all the organic material and lay down plastic, a thick six mil or 10 mil plastic continuous underneath the whole thing. I hit a rock already, that's lovely. So the organic soil is this black stuff, right? And it's got the roots in it. Typically in New England, it's not gonna go very deep. When you're stripping the top soil, you'll just take the first 12 inches right off the top. And it's labor intensive, but you're removing all the ability for the soil to hold moisture in that spot. And you're replacing it with the plastic to keep the water from driving up and you're putting stone over the top to keep the plastic down. And something like that too, critters that do go under there aren't gonna be burrowing into that stone material. So it makes it less habitable for them. When I just had the plans, it was like sort of like a little bit loose in my mind and talking to you, it's like becoming a little bit more clear, I think. So this has been really helpful. Well, thank you so much, Tim. And hopefully this is helpful to other people building their observatories. I'm gonna be sharing my progress on the channel. And so hopefully people can give helpful advice in the comments and we can continue having discussions about this. Thank you very much, Nikol. This video is sponsored by Squarespace and I use Squarespace for my personal portfolio at NikolCarver.com because Squarespace makes it super easy with their website builder and their flexible but professional templates. There's a template for every kind of website you'd wanna make, but then of course you can customize them however you wish, quite easily with their drag and drop engine. And of course, since it's 2023, these designs look great on mobile devices like your smartphone through responsive design. I've also found Squarespace takes the hassle out of managing a website, no more fiddling with CSS for hours just to get something to look right. And there is a huge amount of included features with Squarespace, like if you need an online store, that's built in. So if you're looking for any kind of website, whether it's a portfolio of your photographs or a site for your business, I think you're gonna love Squarespace. You can get a free trial today at Squarespace.com and when you're ready to launch, use Squarespace.com slash Nebula Photos for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. All right, this has been Nico Carver at Nebula Photos. Clear skies, everyone.


The following is a production of New Mexico State University. Alive and dynamic, fragile and sensitive to change, the Earth's deserts offer us opportunity and challenge. Covering nearly one-third of the Earth's land surface, deserts contain resources that can help support and sustain today's rapidly growing populations. Yet to reap benefits from these fragile lands, their dynamics must be understood. How do climate and weather affect the nature of the land? How much human enterprise can desert soils support? Scientists conducting research on what has now become known as the desert project found that studying desert soils can yield an understanding of how deserts develop and change. Unlocking the past of these fragile ecosystems can help us understand the changes that are occurring today in deserts around the world. Until the 1950s, little scientific data had been gathered on desert soils. Instead, the bulk of scientific inquiry was on more agriculturally productive soils. Then, in 1957, the USDA Soil Conservation Service put science to work unlocking the secrets of the desert. For the next 15 years, a 400 square mile area here in southern New Mexico was, in a very real sense, put under a microscope. Soil scientists and geologists painstakingly map the types of soils and landscapes found in the area. Using radiometric and other techniques, they determine ages of various soils. Some as old as 2.5 million years, others less than 100 years old. Soils of the same age in different locations were compared and studied to find out why they were the same in some cases and in others, very different. During the desert project, an incredible amount of data was gathered. All this new knowledge documented five major concepts, concepts that are important for the way soil scientists around the world view arid lands. Just what are these concepts? First, arid lands are so fragile that they can degrade over a very few years due to human activity or even a very short period of drought. This process, called desertification, is a major concern around the world today. Second, looking over geologic time, that is, thousands to millions of years, natural climatic changes foster periodic desertification that radically alters the soil and the landscape. And third, the desert project researched a layer or horizon of desert soil that's common in arid regions around the world. It's a horizon that's cemented with calcium carbonate. It's this whitish horizon here. The desert project scientists found that much of the calcium in this calcium carbonate horizon did not originate from the local rock, but instead was brought in from the atmosphere in the forms of dust and rain. At the same time, they recognized that much of the clay in these desert soils are also brought in in the forms of dust and rain, like the calcium. The clay horizon in this case is the reddish horizon above the calcium carbonate horizon. And lastly, they recognized that whether or not this clay-rich reddish horizon forms at all in desert soils depends upon the amount of limestone in the original sediment in which the soils form. This is because there's a chemical reaction that takes place between the limestone and the clay. We wanted to pick a site to do this research that was representative of arid regions throughout really much of the world. The representative area and the variety of scientists and engineers that were asked to participate in the research led to a project that the ultimate result was a lot of spinoffs that have applications in the real world, third millennium real world. If you understand desert soils, if you understand their development over long periods of geologic time, you can move to other places and say, well, gee, this area is old, this area is young, and close at home, you don't build in a royal channel. You go out on the mesa to worry about wind-blown dust, but it's not going to wash away. If you're locating an area that you want to have stable for many tens of thousands or millions of years like a high-level or low-level radioactive waste site like the Nevada test site or the website, these in fact have used, these people working in those sites have in fact used desert project research in aspects of selection of those sites. Determining this history of landform development so we could get at how fast soils formed and all that was the side offshoot of that research allowed us to go in and start characterizing the aquifers. And there we're concerned not only about water supply, but how we can live with what Mother Nature gave us and how we can keep from polluting it with improper waste management. In many parts of the desert project, especially the basin floor where we are now, but also on the slopes going up to the mountains and the valley border, the desert is punctuated by sandy corpus dunes, seemingly held in place by dense bushes like this mesquite shrub. Now in 1857, a land surveyor walked this very land that we're on now. He made notes about the vegetation, he made notes about the condition of the landscape right at this section marker where I am now. He made no mention of dunes. Instead he described the land and vegetation like this, land level, sandy plain, some mesquite bushes, grama grass good. Aerial photos, some taken as early as the 1930s, show the same section corner. The dots that you see are thousands of corpus dunes. So in less than one lifetime, this major change in the desert had taken place. Grassy plain to corpus dunes. What happened? You really might say that the desert here suffered from an episode of information deprivation. Even though we've had humans living in this environment really for thousands of years, but in particular for the last three to four hundred years, we really didn't have a human presence or a strong component of agriculture in our deserts until really after the Civil War and the development of technologies that allowed people to use our desert lands, basically the ability to deliver water and stock water out onto the plains. And so people that were then expanding after the Civil War, the cattle industry in this region came from other environments and they really didn't understand the limits of an arid environment like the one here in New Mexico where ten inches of rain in a year is a lot of moisture. And by not understanding the limitations of this arid environment, the impact of that industry grazing in this area was huge and that impact was very severe and it really occurred in just a couple decades and it's well documented. We don't see those kinds of impacts today. People understand those limits much, much better. But we know that those impacts were huge and there was a lot of grazing and overgrazing in this country at the end of the last century. Desert Project scientists studied soil from the corpus dunes and by looking at the structure and age, they were able to piece together a scenario of the changes that had occurred to the landscape after the arrival of European livestock. Flat to rolling land was covered with gramma grass that efficiently used the limited rainfall. The cattle ate the grass and when it became scarce, they nibbled at the occasional mesquite, spreading mesquite seeds with their manure. As the mesquite spread and became more prominent in the area, it competed with the grass and won the fight for the limited moisture. With no grass to hold it, the sandy soil was blown by seasonal winds. In other places, grass was covered with sand and killed. The mesquite, however, put out more roots and continued to thrive. Overgrazing, of course, played a role in the desertification, the degradation of this environment that we've documented over the last century or so. But we know that it is just one player, one actor in this scenario. There are many in this complex environment. One of the things that we have learned over time is how important it is to maintain vegetation cover on these sites. And there's lots of different factors then, lots of different environmental influences, both human and natural, that can impact that vegetative cover. Overgrazing is one, but in particular in this environment is the effect of drought. We had substantial droughts in the 1890s, again in the teens, in the 1930s, of course, but a major drought in the 1950s, a six to seven year drought, probably the most severe drought in the last 350 years, had a huge impact in this environment. Really what we've learned from all this is that, besides this being very complex environments, that we have to understand that these environments have tremendous limits that are driven by their arid nature. We can't interact with these environments like they're farm ground in the Midwest, in Iowa. We have to understand natural processes that occur here. And when we think about trying to manage these systems sustainably, we have to work with those natural processes. And that's what I think a lot of research has generated, is knowledge about those processes and how we can utilize those processes in living sustainably in this arid environment. The knowledge that arid lands are fragile is increasingly important as population numbers grow and with the population comes pressure to develop arid areas around the globe. Scientists, governments and citizens are becoming more and more interested in finding ways to use the resources that deserts provide while sustaining those environments for future generations. During the desert project, scientists found evidence of soil changes, such as the formation of Copa stones, that formed in historically related events, such as overgrazing and drought. But they also found evidence of prehistoric desertification events that were probably related to alternating dry climates with wet climates. For example, the ridge behind me is a remnant of a Pleistocene fan. In theory, that fan would have formed during a dry period in the Pleistocene, when vegetative cover due to the dryness was very sparse and there was a lot of bare and exposed ground. So that during an episodic rainfall event, much water moved down the slope, carried the sediment with it and deposited the fan. Now during wetter periods, when there's more moisture, there's more vegetative cover and the landscape is then stabilized and erosion is curtailed. There's less erosion that takes place. And also in this environment, you have one Pleistocene fan and another Pleistocene fan and between those fans is a topographic low area. And in those topographic low areas are valley fields. There's sediments that record climatic changes that have occurred in the last 10,000 years during the Holocene. This is the spot where the Desert Project research team originally found charcoal in the early 1960s. And this particular bed has yielded carbon-14 ages from bits of charcoal like in this chuck that I'm holding here, ranging from about 7,000 years to about 4,500 years ago. And then we found another layer of charcoal right at the base of that very coarse gravelly layer that dated around 21 to 2200 years ago. And then across the arroil, there's a channel that cuts down through much of this section that's back filled with this kind of material. And it, at the base of that channel and in that channel is charcoal that's around 1,100 years old. So we have evidence of about three episodes of aridity, torrential rainfall. It is the hallmark of the Holocene. It's dry, poor vegetative cover, but you get these really major months, summer monsoons and the sediments from the older fans that are to the east and the mountain slopes are washed into these interfan valleys and gullies to the west, and they backfill them. And pollen work from these sediments and mollusks from these sediments indicate that this was a very dry climate. The finer grain intervals represent more of a grass vegetation. The coarser intervals represent a more shrub dominated vegetation, but all in the climate regime like we have today. And so this is kind of a Rosetta stone type site for the desert project. It's the key to a lot of our understanding of processes that go on in the desert. So the soils in this valley tell a story of three climatic changes that occurred in the last 10,000 years and the response of the landscape to those climatic changes. Of course, there were no scientists here thousands of years ago to document the gradual increases in temperature. If there had been, maybe they would talk of global warming and the impact that it would have on the world as they knew it. Today, some scientists think that the gradual increase in temperature that we've seen during this century is actually a natural increase in temperature, part of a natural cycle, just like the natural cycles that precipitated the deposition of the alluvial fans in this area. Other scientists argue that the increase in temperature is not natural, but instead it's the result of increased carbon dioxide emitted as the result of burning fossil fuels in our automobiles and in our factories. The jury is still out, but the research here in southern New Mexico desert made a large step in understanding natural cycles of climate change. Because of the fragile nature of these desert ecosystems, even subtle changes are recorded in the soils and landscape. The desert project helped unlock and read those records, and perhaps holds the key to understanding current and future climatic trends. When we think of desert soils, we commonly think of sand. And while many desert soils do contain a lot of sand, generally they are infinitely more diverse. For example, one of the major horizons that occur in desert soils around the world is the carbonate horizon. It's this whitish horizon here. It contains a lot of calcium carbonate. But the desert rocks in this soil contain little calcium. So where did all of this calcium carbonate come from? For 10 years, researchers working on the desert project set up dust traps during the windy seasons. They discovered that the dust blown into the area contained calcium, and rainwater itself contained dissolved calcium. During the rainy periods, water carried dissolved calcium into the soil. When the water evaporated, the calcium remained. It combined with the dissolved carbon dioxide in the soil pourers, forming calcium carbonate crystals that cling to sand and pebbles. At the same time, soil microorganisms were also creating calcium carbonate. With the process of respiration, carbon dioxide was released into the soil and excess calcium excreted by the microbes. This caused calcium carbonate to crystallize, forming shells on their external surfaces. So over thousands of years, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, the calcium carbonate crystals become so dense that they plug up the soil pour space. So they odor the soil, the denser and the thicker, the calcium carbonate horizon. Depth of carbonate accumulation in the soils is closely related to the amount of rainfall. This is shown by three soils that size four, five, and six, a transit from the arid to the semi-arid part of the desert project. The three soils are about the same age, several thousands of years old. Site four is in the arid part of the desert project. Elevation at this site is 4,350 feet, where it rains about eight inches per year. Here, the top of the carbonate horizon is at a depth of 10 inches and can be seen just above the one-foot marker on the tape. Site five is closer to the mountains and elevation is 4,730 feet. This soil receives several inches more rain per year than the soil at site four. Because of increased moisture, the carbonate horizon is deeper. Here, it's top is at 20 inches, compared to 10 inches at the more arid site four. At site six in Soledad Canyon of the Oregon Mountains, elevation is 5,700 feet and rainfall is nearly 16 inches per year. Here, the carbonate horizon is still deeper and its top is below 41 inches. All three soils are about the same age and have formed in the same kind of sediments derived from the Oregon Mountains. As we move from 4,350 feet to 5,700 feet in elevation, the only factor that changes is the rainfall. This shows that increasing rainfall gradually moves carbonate deeper into the soil. In older soils, the relation between carbonate depth and rainfall are more complicated but still evident. For example, soils in the arid zone and of middle places in age have stage four carbonate horizons in which the carbonate horizon is plugged with carbonate and has a laminar zone at its top. In contrast, soils of the same age in the semi-arid mountains have stage one carbonate in which carbonate occurs only as thin coatings on pebbles. The notion of calcium and desert soils combining with atmospheric CO2 to make calcium carbonate may have radical importance for questions people are asking today about global warming. Just what is the role of desert soils in the emissions of CO2 given off by automobiles and factories? Well, two things. First, desert soils may be a sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide, but on the other hand, they're a source for atmospheric carbon dioxide.  Well, the same thing happened when acidic rain comes into contact with exposed calcium carbonate. It's the same process occurring in cases and deserts around the world where exposed carbonate horizons contact with acidic rain. We don't yet know the answers. Additional research on soils that are sensitive to climate change may help us find the answers to questions of environmental importance to us all. Another important component of desert soils in addition to calcium carbonate is clay. Individual clay particles are so small that they can't be seen without the aid and the microscope. Early in this century, it was generally believed that clay was formed through the weathering process. That is, over the years, wind and rain gradually decomposed rocks and sediments into smaller and smaller and finer and finer particles. Through the desert project, scientists discovered that, like the carbonate in desert soils, much of the clay also comes from the atmosphere. Blown in from elsewhere as fine dust that settles onto the landscape. During seasonal rains, the clay particles percolate into the soil, gradually accumulating in the pore space in the soil to form a clay layer or horizon. At lower elevations, the clay horizon is just above or slightly into the calcium carbonate layer. As you move mountainward and precipitation increases, the clay layer becomes thicker. Scientists believe what happens in deserts is that both the calcium and the clay move downward into the soil with moisture. The clay particles suspended in water, the calcium dissolved in water. Because the calcium is dissolved, it moves deep into the soil. When the water evaporates, the calcium stays behind, forming the carbonate horizon. With the clay horizon just above it. Those scientists who worked on the desert project were sometimes asked, with thousands of square miles of desert in the United States alone, why was this particular area of desert in the southern New Mexico chosen for study? The answer is because many features of deserts around the world are found in this region. And that the effects of parent material, time, topography, vegetation, and climate can be studied in this area and then applied to other areas. For example, the area contains semi-arid mountains as well as arid basins between the mountains. So scientists can study how differences in climate and topography affect soils of the same age and from the same parent materials. The area also has a river valley. Its soils and landscapes can be compared to those of the basins and mountains. And lastly, the area has many landforms typical of arid regions. These were created when materials were deposited by river water or by erosion from the mountains upslope. Those materials deposited by moving water are called alluvium. They are the parent materials from which the area's soils were formed. Just like your traits and characteristics are dependent upon those of your parents, a soil also inherits traits from its parent material. Especially important is the chemistry of the parent material. Soils formed from the Oregon Mountains and the Doniana Mountains tend to have red clay horizons. In contrast, soils formed from alluvium derived from the San Andres and Robledo Mountains lack this red clay horizon. They're both the same age. So why does one have a clay horizon and one not have a clay horizon? The answer lies in the parent material. The soils that form from alluvium downslope from the Robledos and the San Andres are high in calcium carbonate, like limestone. One theory for the difference is that a striking chemical reaction occurs between the clay and the abundant calcium. This unique chemistry causes the clay particles to clump together and stick to the calcium-rich soil particles. So in the case of soils formed in limestone alluvium, the clay stays mixed in with the soil as percolating water travels through the soil the clay does not move with the water and it does not separate out into horizons. Now in the case of igneous soils like we have here, there isn't as much calcium to keep the clay stuck together, flocculated. So in that case, the clay can move with the percolating water and it can separate out into these reddish brown clay-rich horizons. In the late 1800s, soil scientists making maps of soils in Russia recognized that there were many different types of soils and that each soil type was repeatedly found in unique situations. And in those unique situations, the soils were a function of parent material, of vegetation, of climate, of topography and the age of the land. That was the beginning of modern soil taxonomy, the study of soils as an organized, natural body or system. Since then, scientists have added many new discoveries to our knowledge of soil. Each addition helps as we make decisions about how to use and sustain our natural resources. The pioneering efforts of scientists who worked on the desert project added invaluable information to this body of knowledge. We now know that the desert is so fragile that even very small changes in climate and activity can trigger desertification. That periodic global warming triggered major episodes of desertification that radically changed the soils and landscape. And that significant amounts of calcium and clay were transported into desert soils from dust and rain. Parent materials, especially those containing limestone, yielded chemical reactions between calcium and clay that changed the soil in different ways. As global population increases, the need for resources and space puts pressure on once unoccupied and little used arid lands. The knowledge yielded by the desert project and research that builds on this knowledge can help decision makers understand the impact of our decisions and make wise ones for the future. The preceding was a production of New Mexico State University. The views and opinions in this program are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the NMSU Board of Regents.