COSMOS
Fabiola Gianotti (Director-General of CERN) (video)
Berta Rubio (IFIC): The large infrastructure Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research, FAIR (video)
I will present the new large scale accelerator facility FAIR, Facility for Antiprotons and Ion Research. This new large infrastructure is being built on the foundations of the German National Laboratory GSI in Darmstadt, where important developments such as the first heavy ion radiotherapy installation or the discovery of a number of new chemical elements was carried out. The big step forward with the new facility relies on the increase in intensity of the heavy ion beams. Up to three orders of magnitude with respect to the present facility. This will allow us to reach very exotic nuclei, of astrophysical importance or to reach very highly condensed baryonic matter. It will also add the antimatter dimension with the antiproton ring. Some of the scenarios that will be produced at FAIR will help us understand both the early stages and present events in our Universe. The new facility, one of the largest in Europe, has only been made possible thanks to a broad international collaboration that I will present briefly. The Spanish nuclear physics community has been involved in this kind of research for several decades, first at the GSI facility and later in developing and preparing the instrumentation and the physics case for FAIR. Spanish high-tech industries have also participated in the project. Overall, I shall try to present all of these aspects as part of the broader picture of the whole enterprise.
Luisa María Lara (IAA-CSIC): Optional and mandatory programmes of ESA and the role of the Spanish space science and technology (video)
The European Space Agency (ESA) manages several programmes, mandatory and optional for the member states. These programmes are: (i) Science and Exploration, (ii) Safety and Security, and (iii) Applications. Each of those has sub-programmes in which Spain has an important contribution both in the technological and in the scientific side (Space Science, Space Weather, Asteroids, Earth Observation) . In this talk, I will briefly present the programmes, their objectives for the next decades, and the Spanish responsibilities to guarantee the success of the ESA programmes.
Mario Martínez (IFAE): Future Large Facilities for the study of Gravitational Waves: The Einstein Telescope Project (video)
Discussion (video)
SOCIETY
Round table: Public perception of science: communication in the digital era (video)
COVID
Raúl Rabadán (Columbia U./CNIO): A Topological Data Analysis perspective on coronavirus evolution (video)
COVID-19 is a disease caused by a coronavirus named SARS-CoV-2. As the virus has been spreading around the world, millions of viral genomes have been sequenced. Genomes provide an accurate record of variation and evolution and can inform how these viruses emerge and evolve. In this talk I will discuss how mutations and recombinations shape SARS-CoV-2 evolution, and how topological data analysis techniques can help to understand the role of these processes in the emergence of this and other potential future pandemics.
Mariano Esteban (CNB): Present and future of the COVID-19 pandemic (video)
The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic causing COVID-19 disease has highlighted the need for cooperation between public and private institutions to develop in record time a global mass vaccination program to control the virus infection and save lives. To date, some 257 million people have been infected, with more than 5 million deaths. This strong vaccine development would not have been possible without the important economic contribution and exchange of scientific information from the most developed countries and the transfer to the business sector for the production of billions of doses. Although global vaccination programs differ between the rich countries and the most needy ones, with rates ranging from over 90% of the population vaccinated to less than 5%, it is necessary to achieve very high vaccination rates if we want to protect ourselves and definitively control the virus. In this talkI will discuss aspects of how we have been able to develop different vaccines, the assessment of these vaccines, how they work and what are the global challenges that we have to address in the future.
Helen Cole (ICTA): Urban Inequalities in Covid-19 Vaccine Coverage: A comparative multi-scalar and political economy perspective (video)
As the release of newly developed Covid-19 vaccines, meant to aid countries in stopping the spread of the virus and returning to some form of normalcy, became imminent in the fall and winter of 2020, citizens around the world awaited announcements about when their turn to be vaccinated would come. Although strategies taken by many countries for the distribution of vaccines were similar in terms of prioritized groups by age, disability/health or status as frontline workers, political factors and differences in start-up times due to strategies employed for vaccine acquisition varied substantially. As vaccine coverage has increased, these differences have become apparent, and have been visibilized in the pace of vaccination, and in turn disease burden, between countries and within countries by social group or geography. For instance, despite a neoliberal strategy leading to a swift start to vaccination in the United States, a tendency toward politicized vaccine hesitancy and a history of systemic racism and other structural inequalities has led to extreme inequity in vaccine coverage by social groups and geographies. Similarly, rapid approval and acquisition, due in part to separation from the European Union, and quick rollout of vaccination campaigns was led by the national health system. However, within London, areas vary from 35% to 82% fully vaccinated and significant differences persist by race/ethnicity. Meanwhile, in Spain, which has remained one of the worst affected European countries throughout the pandemic, a slow but steady effort led by the nation’s public health system has resulted in coverage of over 95% among the elderly, one of the groups most at risk for morbidity and mortality resulting from the virus. Our project aims to compare and contrast the development of vaccine distribution schemes and progress across cities in 3 OECD countries (USA, UK, and Spain), taking into account the various types of health care systems, vaccine distribution strategies, local health communications, and political trends, and finally relating these trends to intraurban social and geographical inequalities in vaccine coverage.
Discussion (video)
CLIMATE CRISIS
José Manuel Gutiérrez (IFCA): Large infrastructures for climate predictions: Insights from the IPCC Interactive Atlas (video)
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report includes a novel online tool, the Interactive Atlas, facilitating exploration of many of the observation and climate prediction datasets used as lines of evidence in the assessment. The report demonstrates climate change is affecting all regions and will increasingly do so over coming decades with each region experiencing a diverse and often unique combination of changes in climatic conditions with the potential to cause impacts affecting people or ecosystems. The production and availability of these datasets rely on international collaborations and infrastructures that are used both to run computationally expensive global and regional climate models (HPC infrastructures) and to store, post-process and make available the resulting scientific data and metadata (data-centric infrastructures). The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is the largest distributed data platform for climate predictions with worldwide open access. This international effort is based on different infrastructures (e.g. ENES in Europe, http://portal.enes.org) and is home to multi-model and multi-scenario climate projections obtained in successive Climate Model Intercomparison Projects (CMIPs and CORDEX). The results of the international CMIPs and CORDEX collaborations are the basis for climate change studies such as the IPCC reports. The exponential growth of data and processing requirements (including machine learning) pose new challenges to these data-centric infrastructures. This talk presents an overview of the major international climate data infrastructures and describes their future challenges from the perspective of the development of the IPCC Interactive Atlas (http://interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch).
Juan Manuel López (IPHES): 2.6 Million years of global climate changes influencing fauna, flora and humans (video)
The last 2.6 Ma of the Earth history is known as Quaternary Period. This period is the one that allows us to know the origins of modern environments, which would not understand without the knowledge of this moment of the past. The Quaternary is characterized by a series of over 50 glacial-interglacial climate cycles and is divided in two epochs, Pleistocene and Holocene. The Pleistocene, with and age between 2.6 Ma to 11.7 Kya, is climatically characterized by the occurrence of long ice ages or glaciations, separated by short warm intervals or interglacial periods. On the other hand, the Holocene is the current interglacial that began 11.7 Kya ago. The rapid climate changes produced during the Quaternary force to many world animals, like mammals another vertebrate, and plants to response to these environmental changes moving to better climates conditions, also producing some important extinctions. The most provident of its kind of extinctions event is related with large mammal’s disappearance at the final part of the Pleistocene (since 132000 years ago) and the early Holocene, where a rapid and at large global-scale, species disappearing without functional replacement occurs. Phenomena that can be explained in relation to two main factors, climatic changes and the beginning of the expansion of modern humans (Homo sapiens). One of the main research lines at IPHES, Maria de Maeztu Unit of Excellence, is focused in this climate changes produced during the Quaternary around the world, and how affected the faunal and past flora species and in relation to our human ancestors to reconstruct the diverse phenomena of human evolution, faunal and flora changes, extinctions and extirpations.
Aurelio Tobías (IDAEA): Temperature-related excess mortality under past and future climate change scenarios (video)
Climate change can directly affect human health by varying exposure to the non-optimal outdoor temperature. Therefore, research on the health impacts of climate change requires epidemiological evidence on associated health risks on a global scale. Multi-centre studies offer an excellent framework for this purpose. This contribution illustrates the experience of the Multi-Country Multi-City (MCC) Collaborative Research Network, an international collaboration working on a global research program on the associations between weather, climate, and health. The MCC Network is based on mutual contribution and data sharing, currently including daily time-series of weather indices and mortality counts from 768 locations in 44 countries, covering a wide range of regions and climates.
The MCC Network has provided relevant contributions to climate change and health research, reporting projections of temperature-related excess mortality under climate change scenarios (Gasparrini et al. 2017). This study indicates that, in high-emission scenarios, most regions are projected to experience a steep rise in heat-related mortality that will not be equalled by a reduction in cold-related deaths, resulting in a substantial positive net increase in mortality. However, the potential impact varies across areas, and populations living in warmer and potentially poorer regions are expected to sustain an increased burden. Furthermore, the increase in temperature-related excess mortality would be substantially reduced in scenarios involving mitigation strategies to limit greenhouse gas emissions and further warming of the planet.
Conversely, there have been no large-scale, systematic efforts to quantify the heat-related human health impacts that have already occurred due to climate change. Hence, the MCC Network recently estimated the mortality burdens associated with the additional heat exposure that has resulted from recent human-induced warming (Vicedo-Cabrera et al. 2021). The results showed that 37.0% of warm-season heat-related deaths can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change and that increased mortality is evident on every continent. However, again burdens varied geographically, ranging between 20.5 to 76.3%.
The evidence generated by the MCC Network denotes an urgent need for more ambitious mitigation and adaptation strategies to minimize the public health impacts of climate change. The evidence provided by the MCC Network is essential to help develop evidence-based climate and public health policies and inform the ongoing international discussion on the health impacts of climate change.
Discussion (video)