A cave on the northwestern coast of Sumatra holds a remarkable record of big tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. Scientists are using the site to help determine the frequency of catastrophes like the event of 26 December 2004.
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Complex Insight - Understanding our world
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A few things the Symbol Research team are reading. Complex Insight is curated by Phillip Trotter (www.linkedin.com/in/phillip-trotter) from Symbol Research
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Phillip Trotter
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Nation puts geospatial data system on the map
Phillip Trotter's insight:
Accurate maps and geospatial data is critical to success of first responders in disaster zones. Good to see China establishing a national system to support first responders. 
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Globally, antimicrobial drug resistance is rapidly rising, with resultant increased illness and death. In Europe, increasing proportions of bloodstream infections caused by E. coli are resistant to third-generation cephalosporins...
Phillip Trotter's insight:
Antibiotic use in agriculture tends to be a tension filled debate. Farmers want healthy stock and the use of antibiotics as with people has had a major impact. However use of antiobiotics in farming helps accelerate bacterial evolution and antibiotic resistance. The debate around antibiotic overuse on farms or over perscription in human medicine and the relation to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, how antibiotic resistant strains migrate from farms to elswhere is ongoing. The human and financial impact and cost of antiobiotic overuse in agriculture has until now been a grey area of discussion. A multi-national team of researchers recently published their findings to these questions in the open journal Emerging Infectious disease published by CDC. They found number of avoidable deaths and the costs of health care potentially caused by third-generation cephalosporin use in food animals is a staggering 1,518 deaths and 67,236 days in the hospital, every year, which would not otherwise have occurred. Considering those factors, they recommend the ongoing use of these antimicrobial drugs in mass therapy and prophylaxis should be urgently examined and stopped, particularly in poultry. The article and technical appendix are worth reading.
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A few years ago, I started looking online to fill in chapters of my family history that no one had ever spoken of.
Phillip Trotter's insight:
Maryn McKenna has been writing a number of articulate well informed and frankly terrifying articles in Wired on the rise of drug resistant antibiotics and their societal implications. This 4000 word essay on medium is certainly worth reading and explains her personal interest in the subject.
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Dromedary camels could be responsible for passing to humans the deadly Mers coronavirus that emerged last year, research suggests.
Phillip Trotter's insight:
Scientists looking for the vector for Mers coronavirus, published a study in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases appear to have found a candidate vector. After testing for antibodies in blood samples taken from livestock animals, including camels, sheep, goats and cows, from a number of different countries the team found low levels of antibodies in 15 out of 105 camels from the Canary Islands and high levels in each of the 50 camels tested in Oman. Scientists still need to isolate or sequence the virus from an infected animal to be definite but these findings will help direct new research.
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Phillip Trotter's insight:
Arsttechnica article describing research published in Geology where researchers used publicly available data from 33 deep wells drilled by the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico combined with seismic images of the region to identify massive Seafloor 'landslides' which occured as the result of the Chicxulub impact. The asteroid impact which ended the reign of the dinasaurs shook loose sediment along well over 2,000 miles of submarine slopes along the east coast of the United States as well as the Gulf of Mexico. Link to the orginal Geology paper at the end of the article.
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Sumatra's proximity to the Indo-Australia and Sunda tectonic plate boundary, and the giant earthquakes that occur there, means its shores are at risk of major inundations.Understanding how often these occur is important for policy and planning in the region. In the floor of the cave, encoded in the depositions of sand between layers of bat guano is a tsunami record providing detailed event histories from about 7,500 to 3,000 years ago that helps show the frequency of tsunamis in the region.