The definition of a Kilogram has changed!

TheDefinition Of a Kilogram Changes Today — What That Means

By David Brynn Hibbert

UNSW  May 20, 2019

We measure stuff all the time – how long, how heavy, how hot, and so on – because we need to for things such as trade, health and knowledge. But making sure our measurements compare apples with apples has been a challenge: how to know if my kilogram weight or meter length is the same as yours.

Attempts have been made to define the units of measurement over the years. But today – International Metrology Day – sees the complete revision of those standards come into play.

You won’t notice anything – you will not be heavier or lighter than yesterday – because the transition has been made to be seamless.

Just the definitions of the seven base units of the SI (Système International d’Unités, or the International System of Units) are now completely different from yesterday.

How We Used to Measure

Humans have always been able to count, but as we evolved we quickly moved to measuring lengths, weights and time.

The Egyptian Pharaohs caused pyramids to be built based on the length of the royal forearm, known as the Royal Cubit. This was kept and promulgated by engineer priests who maintained the standard under pain of death.

But the cubit wasn’t a fixed unit over time – it was about half a meter, plus or minus a few tens of millimeters by today’s measure.

The first suggestion of a universal set of decimal measures was made by John Wilkins, in 1668, then Secretary of the Royal Society in London.

The impetus for doing something practical came with the French Revolution. It was the French who defined the first standards of length and mass, with two platinum standards representing the meter and the kilogram on June 22, 1799, in the Archives de la République in Paris.

Agreed Standards

Scientists backed the idea, the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss being particularly keen. Representatives of 17 nations came together to create the International System of Units by signing the Metre Convention treaty on May 20, 1875.

France, whose street cred had taken a battering in the Franco-Prussian war and was not the scientific power it once was, offered a beaten-up chateau in the Forest of Saint-Cloud as an international home for the new system.

The Pavilion de Breteuil still houses the Bureau International de Poids et Mesures (BIPM), where resides the International Prototype of the Kilogram (henceforth the Big K) in two safes and three glass bell jars.

The Big K is a polished block of platinum-iridium used to define the kilogram, against which all kilogram weights are ultimately measured. (The original has only been weighed three times against a number of near-identical copies.)

The British, who had been prominent in the discussions and had provided the platinum-iridium kilogram, refused to sign the Treaty until 1884.

Even then the new system was only used by scientists, with everyday life being measured in traditional Imperial units such as pounds and ounces, feet and inches.

The United States signed the Treaty on the day, but then never actually implemented it, hanging on to its own version of the British Imperial system, which it still mostly uses today.

The US may have rued that decision in 1999, however, when the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) went missing in action. The report into the incident, quaintly called a “mishap” (which cost $193.1 million in 1999), said: […] the root cause for the loss of the MCO spacecraft was the failure to use metric units in the coding of a ground software file, “Small Forces”, used in trajectory models.

Essentially the spacecraft was lost in the atmosphere of Mars as it entered orbit lower than planned.

The New SI Definitions

So why the change today? The main problems with the previous definitions were, in the case of the kilogram, they were not stable and, for the unit of electric current, the ampere, could not be realized.
And from weighings against official copies, we think the Big K was slowly losing mass.

All the units are now defined in a common way using what the BIPM calls the “explicit constant” formulation.

The idea is that we take a universal constant – for example, the speed of light in a vacuum – and from now on fix its numerical value at our best-measured value, without uncertainty.

Reality is fixed, the number is fixed, and so the units are now defined.

We therefore needed to find seven constants and make sure all measurements are consistent, within measurement uncertainty, and then start the countdown to today

Australia had a hand in fashioning the roundest macroscopic object on the Earth, a silicon sphere used to measure the Avogadro constant, the number of entities in a fixed amount of substance. This now defines the SI unit, mole, used largely in chemistry.

From Standard to Artifact

What of the Big K – the standard kilogram? Today it becomes an object of great historical significance that can be weighed and its mass will have measurement uncertainty.

From today the kilogram is defined using the Planck constant, something that doesn’t change from quantum physics.

The challenge now though is to explain these new definitions to people – especially non-scientists – so they understand. Comparing a kilogram to a metal block is easy.

Technically a kilogram (kg) is now defined: […] by taking the fixed numerical value of the Planck constant h to be 6.626 070 15 × 10^–34 when expressed in the unit J s, which is equal to kg m² s^–1, where the metre and the second are defined in terms of c and Δν_Cs.

Try explaining that to someone!

This is a guest post from David Brynn Hibbert, Emeritus Professor of Analytical Chemistry, UNSW.

Universe Is Expanding Faster!!!

The Universe Is Expanding Faster Than We Thought
Chanapa Tantibanchachai from Johns Hopkins University
May 24, 2019

New measurements from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the universe is expanding about 9 percent faster than expected based on its trajectory observed shortly after the Big Bang.

The new measurements reduce the chances that the disparity is an accident from 1 in 3,000 to only 1 in 100,000 and suggest that we may need new physics to better understand the cosmos.

"This mismatch has been growing and has now reached a point that is really impossible to dismiss as a fluke. This is not what we expected," says project leader Adam Riess, a professor of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University and Nobel Laureate.

In this study, Riess and his SH0ES (Supernovae, H0, for the Equation of State) team analyzed light from 70 stars in our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, with a new method that allowed for capturing quick images of these stars. The stars, called Cepheid variables, brighten and dim at predictable rates that are useful in measuring nearby intergalactic distances.

The usual method for measuring the stars is incredibly time-consuming; the Hubble can only observe one star for every 90-minute orbit around Earth. Using their new method called DASH (Drift And Shift), the researchers used Hubble as a "point-and-shoot" camera to look at groups of Cepheids, thereby allowing the team to observe a dozen Cepheids in the same amount of time it would normally take to observe just one.

With this new data, Riess and the team were able to strengthen the foundation of the cosmic distance ladder, which scientists use to determine distances within the universe, and calculate the Hubble constant, a value of how fast the cosmos expands over time.

The team combined their Hubble measurements with another set of observations, which the Araucaria Project, a collaboration between astronomers from institutions in Chile, the U.S., and Europe made. This group made distance measurements to the Large Magellanic Cloud by observing the dimming of light as one star passes in front of its partner in eclipsing binary-star systems.

The combined measurements helped the SH0ES team refine the Cepheids' true brightness. With this more accurate result, the team could then "tighten the bolts" of the rest of the distance ladder that uses exploding stars called supernovae to extend deeper into space.

As the team's measurements have become more precise, their calculation of the Hubble constant has remained at odds with the expected value derived from observations of the early universe's expansion by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite based on conditions Planck observed 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

"This is not just two experiments disagreeing," Riess explains. "We are measuring something fundamentally different. One is a measurement of how fast the universe is expanding today, as we see it. The other is a prediction based on the physics of the early universe and on measurements of how fast it ought to be expanding.

"If these values don't agree, there becomes a very strong likelihood that we're missing something in the cosmological model that connects the two eras."

While Riess doesn't have an answer as to exactly why the discrepancy exists, he and the SH0ES team will continue to fine-tune the Hubble constant, with the goal of reducing the uncertainty to 1 percent. These most recent measurements brought the uncertainty in the rate of expansion down from 10 percent in 2001 to 5 percent in 2009 and now to 1.9 percent in the present study.

Additional authors came from the Space Telescope Science Institute; Johns Hopkins University; Texas A&M University; and Duke University. Funding for this research came from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration through programs from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which AURA, Inc. operates under NASA contract.


Constant Confusion: New Studies Deepen Mystery of Universe’s Expansion
By Robert Naeye
Discover magazine blog. July 16, 2019

If you’re confused by modern cosmology, you’re not alone. Cosmologists themselves are confused, and two new results, using very different methods, add to their collective bewilderment. The results are measurements of how fast the universe is expanding, known as the Hubble constant. In recent years, astronomers keep finding strangely different answers to this basic question.

In much-anticipated research released Tuesday and set for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, one group, led by Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago, found that our cosmos is expanding at a rate of 69.8 kilometers per second per megaparsec, where one megaparsec equals 3.26 million light-years.

But in another study published last week on the arXiv, an open-access website, an international consortium known as H0LICOW led by Kenneth Wong of the University of Tokyo and Sherry Suyu of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, measured the universe’s expansion rate at 73.3 kilometers per megaparsec.

The results are close, but they’re not the exact match that would make everyone happy. Both teams have essentially laid down new markers in a field that has been rife with controversy for decades. And they feed into a growing tension between groups that use different methods to measure cosmic expansion.

The stakes are high. Small changes to the Hubble constant affect science’s best estimate for the age of the universe by hundreds of millions of years. And if astronomers can nail down the Hubble constant to everyone’s satisfaction, they could help reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is causing cosmic expansion to accelerate.

A New Measure

Freedman and her team used a new method for determining the Hubble constant. They used the Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments to measure the brightnesses of the brightest red giant stars in the outskirts of other galaxies. These ancient suns are relatively simple objects with a nearly uniform and well-known luminosity, so astronomers can convert precise brightness measurements into distances.

This method differs from previous efforts, including Freedman’s own Hubble Space Telescope Key Project of two decades ago. Instead of studying red giants, other teams have tracked our expanding universe using Cepheids, which are young stars that periodically vary in brightness. Recent measurements using Cepheids have found the Hubble constant to be around 73. And in April, the SH0ES team led by Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, measured a rate of 74.

Astronomers would have expected the red giant and Cepheid methods to give the same answer. But they’re off by just enough to be cosmologically significant. The reason for this discrepancy, says Riess, is that his group and Freedman’s group used different methods to account for the dimming effects of dust.

Riess says that if Freedman’s team had used the same method, their Hubble constant result would nearly match that of SH0ES. “This result actually gives me more confidence in our result,” he says.

In stark contrast, the H0LICOW team uses a totally independent strategy that relies on geometry rather than observing individual stars in other galaxies. H0LICOW monitors distant quasars — active supermassive black holes at the hearts of large galaxies — that have been gravitationally lensed by foreground galaxies. The space-time warping effect of these massive galaxies create lenses that split light, creating multiple images of the same quasar. As a result, the light from each image takes a different path to reach Earth. By watching the different quasar images flicker in brightness over months and years, the H0LICOW astronomers measured a Hubble constant of 73.3.

“Our results agree very well with that of SH0ES,” notes Suyu.

The fact that H0LICOW and SH0ES derive the same expansion rate (within their margins of error) despite using radically different methods gives a great deal of confidence that the Hubble constant is somewhere around 73 to 74. If the red giant method can somehow be brought into line with these other methods, astronomers will probably consider the Hubble constant to be a solved problem.

Plank’s Puzzle

But there is yet another result that doesn’t quite fit into this rosy picture. Several years ago, an international team analyzing much different data from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite came up with a Hubble constant of 67.4, with only a tiny margin of uncertainty.

With Planck, cosmologists made ultra-precise measurements of the speckled pattern of the cosmic microwave background, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. The resulting map provides a trove of information about the dark matter, atomic matter, and dark energy that make up the universe. By measuring the ratios of these cosmic ingredients from Planck, cosmologists can predict what the Hubble constant should be.

But the H0LICOW and SH0ES results are higher than Planck’s prediction of 67.4, a mismatch that Riess says has only a 1-in-100,000 chance of arising from measurement errors. He thinks the discrepancy is probably due to some kind of unknown and perhaps very exciting new physics.

Freedman notes that her team’s result sits in-between the low and high end, but they’re still marginally closer to Planck’s. However, she is not discounting the possibility that slight measurement errors from one or more teams might be responsible for the different Hubble constants.

“I think these results show that if you only rely on one method, you may be missing something systematic that is difficult to uncover with one method alone,” she says. “That’s why you need independent methods.”

For her part, Suyu notes that the issue remains far from resolved: “The Hubble constant challenge continues as each probe/team tries to reduce their measurement’s uncertainties and control their systematic errors. Independent and new probes of the Hubble constant would also be very valuable.”

A Man and His Stick!

The story of how ancient people measured the circumference of the Earth...

How the Ancient Greeks Knew the Earth Was Round
June 7, 2019
Written by Ashley Hamer

If you're not familiar with the flat Earth movement, we're sorry to be the ones to deliver the news: There's a small, vocal group of people who wholeheartedly believe that the Earth is flat. Any satellite photos of our orb-shaped planet are deemed a "round Earth conspiracy" orchestrated by the government, and the fact that the horizon doesn't appear to curve is used as evidence of their claims. The strangest part? We've known the Earth was round for 2,000 years, and we didn't need satellites to find out.

Because the World Is Round

To be fair, the Greeks assumed the Earth was round before they had very good evidence. The philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras is credited as the first to propose a spherical Earth back in 500 B.C., though he did so on aesthetic grounds: He believed the sphere was the most perfect shape. (We should note that Pythagoras was probably just the first Western thinker to propose this — it's reasonable to think that seafaring societies like those of the ancient Polynesians likely had some idea before that). A century later, the philosopher Plato suggested the same thing, which boosted the idea's popularity.

But when it comes to proving the Earth is round, Aristotle was the first Greek philosopher to put his money where his mouth was. When writing his book "On the Heavens" in 350 B.C., he laid out several pieces of evidence for the Earth having a spherical shape. For one thing, he pointed out, you can see the shadow of the Earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse — and since that shadow is always round regardless of where the Earth is in its rotation, you know the Earth is round.

For another thing, the stars are in different positions depending on where you are on Earth: There were stars in Egypt that couldn't be seen in Cyprus 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) away. That proved, he wrote, "not only that the earth is circular in shape, but also that it is a sphere of no great size: for otherwise the effect of so slight a change of place would not be quickly apparent."

Later, another scholar did Aristotle one better: He didn't just prove the Earth was a sphere; he actually measured its circumference. And he did it with only the sun and a stick.

A Man and His Stick

Eratosthenes was one of the most prominent scholars of his time, dabbling in almost all of the sciences. In 240 B.C., he was appointed chief librarian of the library of Alexandria — a universal reference center unparalleled in size that was pretty much the Google of its day. One of his many ambitions was to make a map of the entire world, and to do that, Eratosthenes knew he'd need to determine the size of the Earth.

He had heard stories about a well in the city of Syene that had a peculiar characteristic. At noon on the summer solstice when the sun is directly overhead, sunlight illuminated the entire bottom of the well without casting any shadows. To check if the same thing would happen in Alexandria, Eratosthenes placed a stick upright in the ground at noon on the summer solstice. The sun did cast a shadow, at an angle of 7.2 degrees.

Eratosthenes realized that he could just do some simple calculations with that measurement and easily find the circumference of the Earth; he'd just need to know the distance between Syene and Alexandria. Distance measurements were rough at the time, but he hired some bematists — professional walkers, basically, who could precisely measure their steps — and found that the distance between the cities was about 5,000 stadia. That's roughly between 500 and 600 miles (800 and 900 kilometers), depending on which version of that unit of measurement scholars think he used.

With that, he could do a quick back-of-the-scroll calculation. Since the sun hit straight-on in Syene and at a 7.2-degree angle in Alexandria, the distance between them should be a 7.2-degree chunk of the 360-degree sphere that is the Earth. He also knew that that 7.2-degree chunk was roughly 500 miles long. It turns out that 7.2 is to 360 what 500 is to 25,000 — and that was his answer. The Earth was 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) around.

So, was Eratosthenes right? Even though some of his assumptions were faulty and his distances were rough, he was only off by about 100 miles. Today, we know that the Earth is 24,901 miles (40,075 kilometers) around at its equator, a little bit less if you measure pole-to-pole. Not bad for a guy and his stick.

China's surveillance operation against native Muslims

Xinjiang, in northwest China, is in a state of surveillance lockdown. Every message, word, and movement is monitored for its extremist potential. A million Uyghur Muslims are being held in concentration camps. But in Istanbul, 3,000 miles away, a community of women who have escaped a life of repression are fighting a digital resistance.

Inside China's Massive Surveillance Operation
Isobel Cockerell
Back Channel, May 9, 2019


The woman remembers the first time she got a smartphone.

It was 2011, and she was living in Hotan, an oasis town in Xinjiang, in northwest China. The 30-year-old, Nurjamal Atawula, loved to take pictures of her children and exchange strings of emoji with her husband while he was out. In 2013, Atawula downloaded WeChat, the Chinese social messaging app. Not long after, rumors circulated among her friends:

The government could track your location through your phone. At first, she didn’t believe them.

In early 2016, police started making routine checks on Atawula’s home. Her husband was regularly called to the police station. The police informed him they were suspicious of his WeChat activity. Atawula’s children began to cower in fear at the sight of a police officer.

The harassment and fear finally reached the point that the family decided to move to Turkey. Atawula’s husband, worried that Atawula would be arrested, sent her ahead while he stayed in Xinjiang and waited for the children’s passports.

“The day I left, my husband was arrested,” Atawula said. When she arrived in Turkey in June 2016, her phone stopped working—and by the time she had it repaired, all her friends and relatives had deleted her from their WeChat accounts.

They feared that the government would punish them for communicating with her.

She was alone in Istanbul and her digital connection with life in Xinjiang was over. Apart from a snatched Skype call with her mother for 11 and a half minutes at the end of December 2016, communication with her relatives has been completely cut. “Sometimes I feel like the days I was with my family are just my dreams, as if I have been lonely all my life—ever since I was born,” she said.

Atawula now lives alone in Zeytinburnu, a working-class neighborhood in Istanbul. It’s home to Turkey’s largest population of Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim ethnic minority native to Xinjiang, a vast, resource-rich land of deserts and mountains along China’s ancient Silk Road trade route.

Atawula is one of around 34,000 Uyghurs in Turkey. She is unable to contact any of her relatives—via phone, WeChat, or any other app. “I feel very sad when I see other people video chatting with their families,” she says. “I think, why can’t we even hear the voice of our children?”

For Uyghurs in Xinjiang, any kind of contact from a non-Chinese phone number, though not officially illegal, can result in instant arrest. Most Uyghurs in Turkey have been deleted by their families on social media. And many wouldn’t dare try to make contact, for fear Chinese authorities would punish their relatives. It’s just one of the ways President Xi Jinping’s government maintains a tightly controlled net of surveillance over the Uyghurs in China, and it has a ripple effect on Uyghurs living all over the world.

Zeytinburnu, the Istanbul suburb where Atawula lives, lies behind the city’s winding expressways, and is dotted with restaurants and cafés serving Uyghur cuisine: wide, slippery noodles, lamb kebabs, and green tea. The Uyghur separatist flag — a light blue version of the Turkish flag—is a common sight. It’s a banned image in China, representing East Turkestan, the name for Xinjiang despised by the Chinese government that almost all Uyghurs here give to their homeland.

Xinjiang—meaning “new frontier” in Chinese—was brought under the Communist Party of China’s control in 1949. During the latter half of the 20th century, Uyghur independence was a threat that loomed over the party’s agenda. The government tried to stamp out separatism and “assimilate” the Uyghurs by encouraging mass migration of Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group, to Xinjiang.

During the ’90s, riots erupted between Uyghurs and Chinese police. In a white paper published in March, the Chinese government defined the riots as “inhuman, anti-social and barbaric acts” perpetrated by separatist groups. Amnesty International, meanwhile, described the 1997 protests in Gulja, Xinjiang, as a peaceful demonstration turned massacre, quoting exiled Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer. “I have never seen such viciousness in my life,” she said.

“Chinese soldiers were bludgeoning the demonstrators.”

After the 9/11 attacks, the Chinese government took a page from George W. Bush’s war on terror and began targeting separatist groups in Xinjiang. In 2009, bloody ethnic riots broke out between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital. Police put the city on lockdown, enforcing an internet blackout and cutting cell phone service. It was the beginning of a new policy to control the Uyghur population—digitally.

The WeChat Lockdown

In recent years, China has carried out its crackdown on Islamic extremism via smartphone. In 2011, Chinese IT giant Tencent holdings launched a new app called WeChat—known as “Undidar” in the Uyghur language. It quickly became a vital communication tool across China.

The launch of WeChat was “a moment of huge relief and freedom,” said Aziz Isa, a Uyghur scholar who has studied Uyghur use of WeChat alongside Rachel Harris at London’s SOAS University. “Never before in Uyghur life had we had the opportunity to use social media in this way,” Isa said, describing how Uyghurs across class divides were openly discussing everything from politics to religion to music.

By 2013, around a million Uyghurs were using the app. Harris and Isa observed a steady rise in Islamic content, “most of it apolitical but some of it openly radical and oppositional.” Isa remembers being worried by some of the more nationalist content he saw, though he believes it accounted for less than 1 percent of all the posts. Most Uyghurs, he said, “didn’t understand the authorities were watching.”

This kind of unrestricted communication on WeChat went on for around a year. But in May 2014, the Chinese government enlisted a taskforce to stamp out “malpractice” on instant messaging apps, in particular “rumors and information leading to violence, terrorism, and pornography.” WeChat, alongside its rival apps, was required to let the government monitor the activity of its users.

Miyesser Mijit, 28, whose name has been changed to protect her family, is a Uyghur master’s student in Istanbul who left Xinjiang in 2014, just before the crackdown. During her undergraduate studies in mainland China, she and her Uyghur peers had already learned to use their laptops and phones with caution. They feared they would be expelled from university if they were caught expressing their religion online.

Mijit’s brother, who was drafted into the Xinjiang police force in the late 2000s, warned her to watch her language while using technology. “He always told me not to share anything about my religion and to take care with my words,”

Mijit said. She did not take part in the widespread WeChat conversations about religion. If her friends sent her messages about Islam, she would delete them immediately, and performed a factory reset on her phone before coming home to Xinjiang for the university vacation period. Her precautions turned out to be insufficient.

The monitoring of Uyghurs was not limited to their smartphones. Mijit remembers first encountering facial recognition technology in the summer of 2013. Her brother came home from the police station carrying a device slightly bigger than a cellphone. He scanned her face and entered her age range as roughly between 20 and 30. The device promptly brought up all her information, including her home address. Her brother warned her this technology would soon be rolled out across Xinjiang. “All your life will be in the record,” he told her.

In May 2014, alongside the WeChat crackdown, China announced a wider “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism.”

It was a response to several high-profile attacks attributed to Uyghur militants, including a suicide car bombing in Tiananmen Square in 2013 and, in the spring of 2014, a train station stabbing in Kunming followed by a market bombing in Urumqi. Authorities zeroed in on ethnic Uyghurs, alongside Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang.

After being subjected to daily police checks on her home in Urumqi, Mijit decided to leave Xinjiang for Turkey. When she returned to China for a vacation in 2015, she saw devices like the one her brother had shown her being used at police checkpoints every few hundred feet. Her face was scanned by police the moment she arrived at the city gates. “I got off the bus and everyone was checked one by one,” she said. She was also greeted by devices affixed to the entrance of every supermarket, mall, and hospital.

Amina Abduwayit, 38, a businesswoman from Urumqi who now lives in Zeytinburnu, remembers being summoned to the police station and having her face scanned and inputted into the police database.“It was like a monkey show,” she said. “They would ask you to stare like this and that. They would ask you to laugh, and you laugh, and ask you to glare and you glare.”

Abduwayit was also asked to give DNA and blood samples to the police. This was part of a larger, comprehensive campaign by the Chinese government to build a biometric picture of Xinjiang’s Uyghur population and help track those deemed nonconformists. “The police station was full of Uyghurs,” Abduwayit says. “All of them were there to give blood samples.”

Finally, Abduwayit was made to give a voice sample to the police. “They gave me a newspaper to read aloud for one minute. It was a story about a traffic accident, and I had to read it three times. They thought I was faking a low voice.”

The voice-recognition program was powered by Chinese artificial intelligence giant iFlytek, which claims a 70 percent share of China’s speech recognition industry. In August 2017, Human Rights Watch found information indicating iFlytek supplied voiceprint technology to police bureaus in Xinjiang province. The company opened an office in Silicon Valley in 2017 and remains open about working “under the guidance of the Ministry of Public Security” to provide “a new experience for public safety and forensic identification,” according to the Chinese version of its website. The company says it offers a particular focus to creating anti-terrorism technology.

Human Rights Watch believes the company has been piloting a system in collaboration with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security to monitor telephone conversations. “Many party and state leaders including Xi Jinping have inspected and praised the company’s innovative work,” iFlytek’s website reads.

Halmurat Harri, a Finland-based Uyghur activist, visited the city of Turpan in 2016 and was shocked by the psychological impact of near-constant police checks. “You feel like you are under water,” he says. “You cannot breathe. Every breath you take, you’re careful.”

He remembers driving out to the desert with a friend, who told him he wanted to watch the sunset. They locked their cellphones in the car and walked away. “My friend said, ‘Tell me what’s happening outside. Do foreign countries know about the Uyghur oppression?’ We talked for a couple of hours. He wanted to stay there all night.”

To transform Xinjiang into one of the most tightly controlled surveillance states in the world, a vast, gridlike security network had to be created. Over 160,000 cameras were installed in the city of Urumqi by 2016, according to China security and surveillance experts Adrian Zenz and James Leibold.

In the year following Chen Quanguo’s 2016 appointment as regional party secretary, more than 100,000 security-related positions were advertised, while security spending leapt by 92 percent—a staggering $8.6 billion increase.

It’s part of a wider story of huge domestic security investment across China, which hit a record $197 billion in 2017.

Around 173 million cameras now watch China’s citizens. In the imminent future, the government has laid out plans to achieve 100 percent video coverage of “key public areas.”

For Uyghurs, “the employment situation in Xinjiang is difficult and limited,” said Zenz. A lot of the good jobs require fluency in Chinese—which many Uyghurs don’t have. Joining the police force is one of the only viable opportunities open to Uyghurs, who are then tasked with monitoring their own people.

China’s Uyghur Gulags

The government’s efforts to control the people of Xinjiang were not only digital; it also began to imprison them physically. In August 2018, a United Nations human rights panel said it believed one million Uyghurs were being held in what amounts to a “massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy.”

At first, China denied the existence of the camps entirely. But then, in October 2018, the government announced it had launched “a vocational education and training program” and passed a law legitimizing what they termed “training centers.”

In a September 2018 report, Human Rights Watch found human rights violations in Xinjiang to be of a scope and scale not seen since the Cultural Revolution and that the creation of the camps reflected Beijing’s commitment to “transforming Xinjiang in its own image.”

Gulbahar Jalilova, 54, a Uyghur clothes retailer from Kazakhstan, spent one year, three months and 10 days in detention centers and camps in Urumqi. She now lives in Istanbul. According to her arrest warrant in China, issued by the Urumqi Public Security Bureau, she was detained “for her suspicious involvement in terrorist activities in the region.” Police accused her of money laundering via one of her employees in Urumqi, who was also arrested. Jalilova denies the charges, saying that they were a mere pretext.

Jalilova was taken to a kanshousuo, one of the many temporary detention centers in the Xinjiang capital. Over the next 15 months, she was transferred to three different jails and camps in Urumqi. She is precise and exacting in her memory of life in detention: a 10-by-20 foot cell, with up to 50 people sitting in tightly packed rows, their feet tucked beneath them.

Jalilova, who has struggled with her memory since being released in August 2018, keeps a notebook where she has written down all the names of the women who were in the cell with her. She also notes the reasons for their arrest, which include downloading WhatsApp — a blocked app in China —storing the numbers of prominent Uyghur scholars, and being caught with religious content on their phones.

She remembers how the cell was fitted with cameras on all four sides, with a television mounted above the door. “The leaders in Beijing can see you,” the guards told her. Once a month, Jalilova said, the guards would play Xi Jinping’s speeches to inmates and make them write letters of remorse. “If you wrote something bad, they would punish you,”

Jalilova said. “You could only say ‘Thank you to the Party’ and ‘I have cleansed myself of this or that’ and ‘I will be a different person once I am released.’”

She was set free in August 2018 and came to Turkey, no longer feeling safe in Kazakhstan, where the government has been accused of deporting Uyghurs back to Xinjiang.

Escape to Turkey

Though no official statistics for the camps exist, the volunteer-run Xinjiang Victims Database has gathered more than 3,000 Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Muslim minorities’ testimonials for their missing relatives. It shows that around 73 percent of those recorded as being in detention are men.

It follows that the majority of people who have escaped Xinjiang for Turkey in recent years are women. Local activists estimate 65 percent of the Uyghur population in Turkey is female, many separated from their husbands.

Some Uyghur women made their clandestine escape from Xinjiang by fleeing overland, through China and Thailand to Malaysia, before flying to Turkey. In Zeytinburnu, they live in a network of shared apartments, making whatever money they can by doing undocumented work in the local textile industry, as tailors or seamstresses.

The women who arrived without their husbands are known among other Uyghurs as “the widows.” Their husbands are trapped in Xinjiang, and they do not know if they are alive, imprisoned, or dead.

Kalbinur Tursun, 35, left Xinjiang in April 2016 with her youngest son Mohamed, the only one of her children who had a passport at the time. She left her other children and husband in Xinjiang. She was pregnant with her seventh child, a daughter called Marziya whom she feared she would be forced to abort, having already had many more children than China’s two-child policy allows.

When Tursun first arrived in Turkey, she video-called her husband every day over WeChat. Tursun believes Chinese police arrested him on June 13, 2016—as that was the last time she spoke to him. She was then told by a friend that her husband had been sentenced to 10 years in jail as a result of her decision to leave. “I am so afraid my children hate me,” she said.

Turkey is seen as a safer place to go than other Muslim-majority countries, including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, whose leaders have both recently dismissed the Uyghurs’ plight. Uyghurs have come to Turkey in waves from China since the 1950s. They are not given work permits, and many hope they will eventually find refuge in Europe or the United States.

Though Turkey has traditionally acted as protector for Uyghurs, whom they view as Turkic kin, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been reluctant to speak up for the Uyghurs in recent years as trade relations with China have improved. (By the same token, the Trump administration has declined to press China on human rights issues in Xinjiang as it negotiates a trade deal with Beijing.)

On February 9, 2019, Hami Aksoy, a spokesman for Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, broke the diplomatic hush. “It is no longer a secret that more than one million Uyghur Turks incurring arbitrary arrests are subjected to torture and political brainwashing in internment camps and prisons,” Aksoy’s statement read.

Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, rebuffed these claims two days later, calling the statement “a groundless accusation based on lies.” She highlighted the threat of “three evil forces”—terrorism, extremism and separatism—in China and abroad.

As a result of China’s policy in the region, Hua said, Xinjiang residents “now have a stronger sense of security, happiness, and fulfillment… the radiant smile on the faces of local people is the most eloquent response to those rumours.”

Hua also underlined the terrorist threat Turkey faces as a multi-ethnic country. “If it adopts double standards on counter-terrorism, it will only end up hurting itself as well as others,” she said.

Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman from Urumqi, was afraid to speak freely when she arrived in Turkey in 2015. For the first two years after she arrived, she did not dare to greet another Uyghur. “Even though I was far away from China, I still lived in fear of surveillance,” she said. Though she now feels less afraid, she has not opened her WeChat app in a year and a half.

Others tried to use WeChat to contact their families, but the drip-feed of information became steadily slower. In 2016,

findings by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a research center that monitors methods of information control, showed how the app was censoring its users by tracking their keyword usage. Among the search terms that could trigger official suspicion are any words relating to Uyghur issues such as “2009 Urumqi riots,” “2012 Kashgar riots,” and anything to do with Islam.

In Zeytinburnu, seamstress Tursungul Yusuf, 42, remembers how phone calls and messages from relatives in Xinjiang became increasingly terse as 2017 went on. “When we spoke, they’d keep it brief. They’d say, ‘We’re OK, safe.’ They’d speak in code—if someone was jailed in the camps, they would say they’d been ‘admitted to hospital.’ I’d say ‘understood.’ We could not talk freely. My older daughter wrote ‘I am helpless’ on her WeChat status. She then sent me one message, ‘Assalam,’ before deleting me.”

A kind of WeChat code had developed through emoji: A half-fallen rose meant someone had been arrested. A dark moon, they had gone to the camps. A sun emoji—“I am alive.” A flower—“I have been released.”

Messages were becoming more enigmatic by the day. Sometimes, a frantic series of messages parroting CPC propaganda would be followed by a blackout in communication. Washington, DC-based Uyghur activist Aydin Anwar recalls that where Uyghurs used to write “inshallah” on social media, they now write “CPC.”

On the few occasions she was able to speak with relatives, she said “it sounded like their soul had been taken out of them.” A string of pomegranate images were a common theme: the Party’s symbol of ethnic cohesion, the idea that all minorities and Han Chinese people should live harmoniously alongside one another, “like the seeds of a pomegranate.” By late 2017, most Uyghurs in Turkey had lost contact with their families completely.

Resilience, Resistance, Resolve

In a book-lined apartment in Zeytinburnu, Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur activist and poet, coaches Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman who fled Xinjiang after police took her DNA. They’re filming a video they plan to upload to Facebook.

Ayup films her on his smartphone, while she sits at a table and recounts how her home city of Urumqi was a “digital prison.”

Abduwayit describes how they were afraid to turn the lights on early in the morning, for fear the police would think they were praying. She then lists all the members of her family whom she believes have been transferred to detention centers.

Abuwayit is just one of hundreds of Uyghurs in Turkey—and thousands across the world—who have decided to upload their story to the internet.

Since this time last year, a kind of digital revolution has taken place. The Finland-based Uyghur activist Halmurat Harri believes he was the first person to film a testimonial. “I want freedom for my parents, freedom for Uyghur,” he said in a cell phone video recorded in his bathroom in Helsinki last April, before shaving off his hair in protest.

“Then I called people and asked them to make their own testimony videos,” Harri said.

Videos filmed on smartphones from Uyghur kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms began appearing on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Ayup described how at the beginning, people would “cover their faces and were afraid of their voices being recognized,” but as 2018 progressed, people became braver.

Gene Bunin, a scholar based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, manages the volunteer-run Xinjiang Victims Database, and has cataloged and gathered thousands of testimonials from Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Muslim minorities targeted in Xinjiang.

Bunin noticed that unlike private attempts to make contact, public exposure of missing relatives seemed to push the Chinese authorities to respond. This is particularly true for cases where victims had links to Kazakhstan, where the government has been exerting pressure on China to release ethnic Kazakhs. “There’s evidence the Chinese government is willing to make concessions for those whose relatives give video testimonies,” Bunin said.

He was told of people being released as little as 24 hours after their relatives posted testimonies online. “It’s a strong sign the Xinjiang authorities are reacting to these videos,” he said.

China has recently stepped up its defense of practices in Xinjiang, seemingly in response to broader Western attention.

In March, Reuters reported that China would invite European diplomats to visit the region. That followed a statement by Xinjiang governor Shohrat Zakir that the camps were in fact “boarding schools.”

Harri recently started a hashtag, #MeTooUyghur, encouraging Uyghurs around the world to demand evidence that their families were alive.

Large WhatsApp news groups, with members from the international Uyghur diaspora, have also been a vital source of solidarity for a community deprived of information.

On December 24, 2018, Kalbinur Tursun—the woman who left five of her children in Xinjiang—was sitting in the ladies’ clothing shop she manages in Zeytinburnu, scrolling through a Uyghur WhatsApp group. She checks it first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and dozens of times throughout the day, as several hundred Uyghur members post near-constant videos and updates on the crisis in Xinjiang.

She tapped on a video of a room full of Uyghur children, playing a game. An off-camera voice shouts “Bizi! Bizi!

Bizi!”—Chinese for “Nose! Nose! Nose!” and an excited group of children tap their noses. Tursun was astonished.

On the left, she recognized her 6-year-old daughter, Aisha. “Her emotion, her laugh … it’s her. It’s like a miracle,” she said. “I see my child so much in my dreams, I never imagined I would see her in real life.” It had been two years since she had last heard her daughter’s voice.

The video appears to come from one of the so-called “Little Angel Schools” in Hotan province, around 300 miles from Tursun’s native Kashgar, where it’s been reported nearly 3,000 Uyghur children are held. Tursun wonders whether her four other children may have been taken even further afield. Speaking to Radio Free Asia, a Communist Party official for the province said the orphanages were patrolled by police to “provide security.”

Unlike almost everyone in the global Uyghur diaspora, Nurjamal Atawula managed to find a way to contact her family after the WeChat blackout. She used one of the oldest means possible: writing a letter. In late 2016, she heard of a woman in Zeytinburnu who regularly traveled back and forth between Turkey and her parents’ village in Xinjiang. She asked the woman to take a letter to her family. The woman agreed. Atawula wrote to her brother and was careful not to include anything border inspection or police might be able to use against him.

“When I was writing the letter, I felt I was living in the dark ages,” Atawula said. She gave it to the woman, along with small presents for her children and money she had saved for her family.

A month later, she got a reply. The Uyghur woman, who she calls sister, smuggled a letter from her brother out of China, hidden in a packet of tissues.

Atawula sent a reply with her go-between—but after the third trip, the woman disappeared. Atawula doesn’t know what happened to her. She still writes to her family, but her letters are now kept in a diary, in the hope that one day her children will be able to read them.

It has now been more than two years since Atawula received her brother’s letter. She keeps it carefully folded, still in the tissue it came in. In that time, she has only read the words three times, as if by looking at them too much they will lose their power.

My beautiful sister,

How are you? After you left Urumqi we couldn’t contact you, but when we got your letter we were so pleased. I have so many words for you… maybe after we reunite we will be able to say them to one another. You said you miss your children.

May Allah give you patience. Mother, me, and the relatives all miss you very much. We have so many hopes for you. Please be strong and don’t worry about the children.

This article is a co-production with Coda's Authoritarian Tech channel.

Exercising according to body type...

A fresh new perspective on exercise regimen...

Should You Exercise According to Your Body Type?
Ashley Hamer
October 26, 2018

If you've ever started a workout regimen and found yourself down an internet rabbit hole of fitness tips, you're likely aware of the three body types, or "somatotypes." Common advice dictates that the best way to achieve your fitness goals is to customize your exercise and nutrition plan to your unique somatotype. But is this true? Here's what the science says.

Brain vs. Brawn

Like many ideas about human "types" (shout-out to the Myers-Briggs test), somatotypes got their start in the 1940s. They were conceived by a psychologist and doctor named William Herbert Sheldon who believed that a person's psychology had roots in biology. In a 1940 publication entitled "The varieties of human physique," he analyzed 4,000 nude photos of male college students. (Where did he get 4,000 nude photos of college students? It turns out that incoming freshmen to Ivy League schools had to pose for these "posture photos," as the images were believed to divine something about their health and intellect.) From this data, Sheldon classified the human form into three types:

• Endomorphs are rounded and soft, and predisposed to storing fat.
• Mesomorphs are square and muscular, and predisposed to building muscle but not storing fat.
• Ectomorphs are thin and fine-boned, and aren't predisposed to storing fat or building muscle.

But that wasn't all. Sheldon went on to make predictions about psychology from these physiological descriptions; endomorphs were supposed to be relaxed and extroverted, mesomorphs were more assertive and aggressive, and ectomorphs were more introverted and thoughtful. He even used these associations to say that teenage delinquency was a result of a mesomorphic body type (and, alarmingly, that "selective reproduction" was its solution). Sheldon's concept of "constitutional psychology," as it was called, has since been discredited.

Sure, linking the way someone looks to the way they think is pretty far-fetched. But linking the way they look to the way they should exercise — doesn't that make more sense? It doesn't really, and here's why.

Make Your Own Destiny

Beyond their unsavory origins and lack of scientific validation, the glaring problem with somatotypes is that they're just a description of a person's body at one point in time, and, well, bodies change. An ectomorph can start lifting weights and become a mesomorph; an endomorph can kick their diet and exercise regimen into high gear and become an ectomorph. Studies bear this out: When researchers put untrained men on a weightlifting program, the people who started with the least muscle at the beginning had the biggest gains at the end of 12 weeks. Even though you might call these individuals ectomorphs and conclude they shouldn't have much capacity for building muscle, build muscle is exactly what they did. Likewise, a recent study showed that even identical twins end up with different bodies (and even different muscle fibers) after enough training.

There's little evidence to support the idea that having one type of body means you should follow one type of training program. In fact, many of these body-type recommendations smack of the Barnum effect: lots of seemingly specific advice that could, in reality, apply to anybody. For example, this article recommends doing weight-lifting exercises with compound movements for all three body types, and this one tells every body type to strive for high repetitions. Good fitness advice is good fitness advice, regardless of your so-called somatotype.

That's not to say workouts shouldn't be tailored to the individual. If you have a lot of fat to lose, cutting your calories and doing high-intensity interval training is better than the high-calorie, low-cardio program that's ideal for someone who wants to get bigger. But your body type is not your destiny. You'll gain and lose fat and muscle at different rates depending on your training, diet, and countless other factors, and you can become a different body type with enough work. When it comes to the right training plan for you, it's less about what you were born with and more about what you want to become.

The concept of Segmented Sleep cycle...

New perspective on person-specific sleeping habits and cycles...

Maybe You Should Be Sleeping Twice a Day Like They Did in Olden Times
Ashley Hamer
June 8, 2018

If you're among the third of Americans who have some trouble staying asleep through the night, we have good news: maybe you don't have to. It's totally possible to plan a sleep schedule that keeps you rested even if you hit a three-hour insomnia patch every night. In fact, that's how pretty much everyone slept through most of history.

We've Had First Sleep, But What About Second Sleep?

Historian A. Roger Ekirch brought the trend of segmented sleep to light in 2001. His findings revealed that people used to divide their sleep into two separate periods, often referred to as "first sleep" and "second sleep." Between these periods, people would do chores, read, pray, or even go outside to visit friends.

Ekirch delved further into this phenomenon by studying modern non-Western cultures, including indigenous communities in Nigeria, Central America, and Brazil. He found that many of them also slept in segments. "During the period of nighttime wakefulness, Ekirch showed, different cultures elaborated rituals — of prayer, lovemaking, dream interpretation, or security checks — and while the rituals varied, the pattern itself was so pervasive as to suggest an evolutionary basis that somehow became disrupted in the modern West," Benjamin Reiss writes in New York Magazine.

What Changed?

There are a few elements Ekirch points to that may have caused this radical shift in our sleep schedules, but the most prominent is the electric light. Before artificial lighting, you had to turn in when the sun went down since it was too dark to see what you were doing. But once powerful light came on the scene, more and more activities were possible later and later into the night, so bedtime got later and later. Wake-up times didn't, so something had to give, leading to the shrinking and eventual disappearance of that waking time between first and second sleep.

Modern research supports his theory: experiments in 1993 by psychiatrist Thomas Wehr showed that when people were deprived of artificial lighting for long periods of time, they began to wake up for a period in the middle of the night. When his participants were exposed to a light cycle with an extended period of darkness — 14 hours, to be exact — they naturally began a pattern of sleeping for four hours, waking for one to three, then sleeping again for another four. It suggests that a pattern of segmented sleep is hard-wired into our brains.

A Siesta for the Rest of Us

Maybe two-phase sleep cycles are better for your brain. But with electric lighting and modern technology, how can you apply that information to your own sleeping patterns? It all depends on how flexible your schedule is. If you're a 9-to-5 worker, you'd likely have to go to sleep a few hours after you get home from work to really reap the benefits — but if you work nights, there's another option.

We've already told you about how harmful working the night shift can be to your health, and some researchers believe that segmented schedules might be a solution that satisfies both staffing and biological needs. Split-shift work schedules would divide the 24-hour period into smaller sections of alternately working and resting. Research has shown that getting roughly seven to eight hours of sleep scattered over the course of a 24-hour period is pretty much equivalent to getting eight hours all at once. In any case, if you find yourself jolting awake at 2 a.m. every morning, you may want to give segmented sleeping a try.

For more ways to get a more restful night's sleep, check out "The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It" by W. Chris Winter, M.D., dubbed the "sleep whisperer" by Arianna Huffington. We handpick reading recommendations we think you may like. If you choose to make a purchase, Curiosity will get a share of the sale.

Why Do We Sleep? from: The Good Stuff

• There is no solid scientific consensus on why we sleep.
• Black rhinos sleep for one to two hours laying down, and three to four hours standing up.
• Dolphins engage in unihemispheric sleep, which means that one half of the brain is resting while the other half is alert.

Measuring the depth of "Deep Web"...

A general brief overview of what Deep Web is all about...

The Deep Web Is The 99% Of The Internet You Don't See

The internet contains at least 4.7 billion websites that have been indexed by search engines, according to one Dutch researcher. That huge number barely scratches the surface of what's really out there, however. The rest is known as the deep web, which is 400 to 500 times larger than the surface internet, according to some estimates. Most of that is made up of innocent content, such as emails, social media profiles, subscription sites, and anything that you need to fill out a form to access. But because the deep web is hidden from search engines, some people use it for more nefarious purposes.

The dark web is the subset of the deep web that's known as a haven for criminal activity. Ranging from drug transactions like those of the now shut-down Silk Road to resources for hitmen, terrorists, and pedophiles, the dark web's illicit marketplaces generate more than $500,000 per day. That's made possible by its near total anonymity, thanks to the lack of DNS and IP addresses that usually make websites identifiable. Users can only access sites on the dark web through special software that encrypts their activity and routes them through random nodes to get to where they're going, making it harder for anyone to track them. Still, even accessing the dark web can be enough to set off red flags at the FBI, and it's easy to make mistakes that can tip off law enforcement.

The Deep Web Is the 99% of the Internet You Can't Google

Written by Mae Rice

May 22, 2018

The internet contains at least 4.5 billion websites that have been indexed by search engines, according to one Dutch researcher. That huge number barely scratches the surface of what's really out there, however. The rest is known as the deep web, which is 400 to 500 times larger than the surface internet, according to some estimates.

What Makes the Deep Web ... Deep?

It's not deep like sad, non-rhyming poetry, nor is it deep like the unexplored depths of the ocean. The deep web is actually so accessible that you use it every time you check your email. What sets it apart is that its sites can't be reached via search engine; the "let me Google that for you" meme, delightful as it is, doesn't apply. You need to know the URL or have access permissions to view a deep-web site.

The deep web is about as mundane as the surface web, really — it's just wrapped in a thin layer of secrecy. Mostly, it's emails, social media profiles, subscription sites like Netflix, and anything you need to fill out a form to access. But because the deep web is hidden from search engines, some people use it for more nefarious purposes.

Welcome to the Dark Web

The dark web and the deep web aren't synonymous. The dark web is a sliver of the deep web made up of encrypted sites. Here, near-total anonymity reigns. Encrypted sites lack the DNS and IP addresses that usually make websites identifiable. More confusing still: To access them, users have to use encrypting software that masks their IP addresses, making the users hard to identify, too.

Unsurprisingly, many dark-web sites specialize in illegal goods and services. The now-defunct Silk Road, for instance, was an online drug store — and not in the CVS sense. When its creator, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested in 2013, Silk Road had 12,000 listings for everything from weed to heroin. (Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison.) The dark web also provides shady resources for hitmen, terrorists, and other criminals; overall, its illicit marketplaces generate more than $500,000 per day. Just accessing the dark web can set off red flags at the FBI.

This is ironic, since Tor, the most popular software for making and accessing dark web sites, was originally created by the U.S. Navy. Even today, Tor is funded by the U.S. government. Washington isn't secretly supporting the online heroin trade, though — there are actually plenty of other, less shady uses for Tor's encrypting services. When activists speak out against authoritarian regimes, for instance, Tor can help them protect their privacy; the same goes for whistleblowers, and Average Joes spooked by Facebook's forthcoming eye-tracking feature. Never forget: Tor can also get you into ... dark web bookclubs? If you're into that.