Long Game

How, for instance, will each nation position its military and police its territory? How will the Arctic states deal with China and other nations that have no formal jurisdictional claims but have strong interests in exploiting Arctic resources? How will Arctic and non-Arctic states work together to manage those resources beyond national jurisdictions, on the high seas and in the deep sea?

NATO’s top military commander, Adm. James G. Stavridis of the United States Navy, warned in 2010 of an “icy slope toward a zone of competition, or worse, a zone of conflict” if the world’s leaders failed to ensure Arctic peace.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whose economy is reliant on its rich deposits of oil and natural gas, clearly understands the benefits of a northern sea route and of the hydrocarbon deposits on his nation’s continental shelf, and has emphasized the importance of peace and cooperation in the Arctic. So have leaders of other Arctic nations. But we have heard virtually nothing from President Obama, even as he has made the dangers of a warming earth a priority of his second term.

Catholicism in Latin America is under threat by the expansion of evangelical churches and various Afro-Latin American creeds. Still, the selection of a Latin American pope confirms that the church has ceased to be a preeminently European institution and is seeking to strengthen its influence outside the Continent.

The Jesuits have been characterized by two elements: their deep educational efforts -- the order founded thousands of schools and universities around the world -- and their active participation in politics.

Though he has criticized liberation theology, Bergoglio has also been a constant critic of social inequalities in his native Argentina. This stance has led the Argentine church to clash on numerous occasions with the governments of former President Nestor Kirchner and his wife, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

As criticism of austerity measures grows in Europe, the new pope will likely align with the demands of the peripheral governments. 

One of the biggest issues in Latin America where the Church could have real influence is violence. Some gangs in Mexico and Central America are actively religious, and the church could play a unique role in denouncing their violent tactics.

For his part, Francis faces the challenge of leading a church that is still physically and politically present around the world but the influence of which has been significantly diminished over the past century.

Curiously, even among those who claimed to know at least a little about the situation, a majority of 57% didn’t believe news outlets’ economic woes limited their ability to produce quality coverage.

Consumers are sending a message: They want the same quality of news they’ve always known, not excuses, and they’ll punish news outlets that fail to meet that standard by taking their business elsewhere.

The programme says that MI6 stood by claims that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger, though these were dismissed by other intelligence agencies, including the French.

During the second and third phases, more-advanced interceptors capable of targeting short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles would be deployed to Romania by 2015 and Poland by 2018.

In the fourth phase, the longer-range SM-3 Block IIB missiles would be deployed in Romania and Poland around 2022.

Compared to its predecessors in the Standard Missile-3 line, the SM-3 Block IIB would have enhanced seeking capabilities and a more powerful booster

 In an era of defense budget cuts, funding for the risky program became harder to justify. But regardless of Washington's exact reasons for the changes, they address at least some of Russia's concerns over the U.S. missile defense plans.

The White House would like to continue to reduce the stockpiles of nuclear weapons in Russia and the United States beyond the limits imposed by the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which places a ceiling on the number of deployed delivery systems and strategic warheads possessed by each country. To achieve this, the White House needs Russian participation in order to withstand opposition to the treaty from national security hawks in Congress.

Washington also wants Russian cooperation in a number of other issues, including the Iranian nuclear program and the conflict in Syria. The United States also needs to secure access to the Northern Distribution Network, the primary logistical route into Afghanistan, which will be critical to the U.S. withdrawal over the next two years.

Moreover, the United States may decide to focus on a different intercontinental ballistic missile defense system that would still provoke objections from the Russians. On March 15, for example, Hagel also announced plans to deploy 14 additional ground-based interceptors at Fort Greely, Alaska, -- missiles theoretically capable of defending against intercontinental ballistic missiles, although the program's development and deployment have been marred by numerous failed tests. The apparent demise of the SM-3 Block IIB could also lead to the deployment of additional missile defense systems along the U.S. East Coast.

Hagel said that the U.S. commitment to defending Europe remains ironclad, and other U.S. officials have been quick to emphasize that the first three phases of the European Phased Adaptive Approach remain in place and on track to cover all European NATO members by 2018.

So while the changes to the U.S. missile defense plan address a key issue for Russia, they do not resolve all of Moscow's concerns -- especially those related to developments in missile defense technology or the continued stationing of U.S. forces in Russia's near abroad.

Therefore, the United States has, in spite of recent statements, not militarily committed itself to the Syrian crisis, and when the French intervened in Mali the United States played a supporting role. The intervention in Libya, where France and the United Kingdom drew the United States into the action, was the first manifestation of Washington's strategic re-evaluation.

The issue is not whether the United States would intervene to protect Israel's existence; save from a nuclear-armed Iran, there is no existential threat to Israel's national interest. Rather, the question is whether the United States is prepared to continue shaping the dynamics of the region in areas where Israel lacks political influence and is not able to exert military control.

To put it differently, the Israelis' understanding of the American role is to control events that endanger Israel and American interests under the assumption that Israeli and American interests are identical. The idea that they are always identical has never been as true as politicians on both sides have claimed, but more important, the difficulties of controlling the environment have increased dramatically for both sides.

The problem for Israel at this point is that it is not able to do very much in the area that is its responsibility.

But the most shocking thing to Israel was how little control it actually had over events in Egypt and the future of its ties to Egypt.

But the power of the military will not be the sole factor in the long-term sustainability of the treaty. Whether it survives or not ultimately is not a matter that Israel has much control over.

Syrian President Bashar al Assad is a known quantity to Israel. He is by no means a friend, but his actions and his father's have always been in the pursuit of their own interest and therefore have been predictable. The opposition is an amorphous entity whose ability to govern is questionable and that is shot through with Islamists who are at least organized and know what they want.

Indeed, the hints of American weapons shipments to the rebels at some point concern Israel as much as no weapons shipments.

The Iranian situation is equally complex. It is clear that the Israelis, despite rhetoric to the contrary, will not act unilaterally against Iran's nuclear weapons. The risks of failure are too high, and the consequences of Iranian retaliation against fundamental American interests, such as the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, are too substantial.

It will continue to get aid that it no longer needs and will continue to have military relations with the United States, particularly in developing military technology. But for reasons having little to do with Israel, Washington's attention is not focused on the region or at least not as obsessively as it had been since 2001. 

Like Israel, the United States has realized the limits and costs of such a strategy, and Israel will not talk the United States out of it, as the case of Iran shows. In addition, there is no immediate threat to Israel that it must respond to. It is, by default, in a position of watching and waiting without being clear as to what it wants to see. Therefore it should be no surprise that Israel, like the United States, is focused on domestic affairs.

 Israel has lost the initiative and, more important, it now knows it has lost the initiative. It has looked to the United States to take the initiative, but on a much broader scale Washington faces the same reality as Israel with less at stake and therefore less urgency.

The Prince may be less a work of cynicism than an instructional guide to overcome fate -- the fatalism of the Roman Catholic Church at that time. Thus, Machiavelli, more than Michelangelo perhaps, was the true inventor of the Renaissance.

But it is with Machiavelli, more than with Hobbes, where the principles of Western modernity truly begin.

Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. Mansfield knows that it is more important to tell hard truths than it is to be liked and to get good reviews.

For by setting the terms for political reality, Machiavelli helps lay the foundation for geopolitics.

necessity frees people from religious faith. People may pray to God and go to church or synagogue or the mosque, but they must also acquire food and possessions for the sake of their loved ones, and thus they must enter into competition with their fellow human beings

Self-interest informs compromise with other human beings, and thus a state governed by self-interest is likely to compromise with other states: whereas a person or state governed solely by religious or moral virtue will tend to delegitimize as immoral those with whom he or it disagrees -- and therein lies conflict.

Yes, politicians may announce their intention to strive for truth and justice, but their unspoken concerns and desires, even in a democracy -- especially in a democracy -- are really about satisfying the selfish needs of their constituents.

A leader may be honest, unselfish and moral, but if he starts a war that later proved unnecessary and killed many people, he lacks virtue -- despite being on a personal level very sympathetic.

Conversely, a leader may be cynical, selfish and excessively ambitious, but if he keeps his countrymen away from danger he can still be said to have virtue -- despite being personally unappealing.

Machiavelli has his limits. For example, he could not have foreseen 20th century totalitarianism that mirrored the self-righteousness of the medieval Church with which he was in conflict, but on a much larger scale.

Because the stakes are arguably higher now because of weapons of mass destruction, there is a danger of taking Machiavelli too far and using his philosophy to justify all sorts of risky subterfuges.

What your culture might actually be saying is… We have implemented a loosely coordinated social policy to ensure homogeneity in our workforce. We are able to reject qualified, diverse candidates on the grounds that they “aren’t a culture fit” while not having to examine what that means - and it might mean that we’re all white, mostly male, mostly college-educated, mostly young/unmarried, mostly binge drinkers, mostly from a similar work background. We tend to hire within our employees’ friend and social groups. Because everyone we work with is a great culture fit, which is code for “able to fit in without friction,” we are all friends and have an unhealthy blur between social and work life. Because everyone is a “great culture fit,” we don’t have to acknowledge employee alienation and friction between individuals or groups. The desire to continue being a “culture fit” means it is harder for employees to raise meaningful critique and criticism of the culture itself.

What your culture might actually be saying is… We have a collective post-traumatic stress reaction to previous workplaces that had hostile, unnecessary, unproductive and authoritarian meetings. We tend to avoid projects and initiatives that require strict coordination across the company. We might have difficulty meeting the expectations of enterprise companies and do better selling to startups organized like us. We are heavily invested in being rebels against traditional corporate culture. Because we communicate largely asynchronously and through chat, it is easy to mentally dehumanize teammates and form silos around functional groups with different communications practices or business functions.

What your culture might actually be saying is… Our employees must be treated as spoiled, coddled children that cannot perform their own administrative functions. We have a team of primarily women supporting the eating, drinking, management and social functions of a primarily male workforce whose output is considered more valuable. We struggle to hire women in non-administrative positions and most gender diversity in our company is centralized in social and admin work. Because our office has more amenities than home life, our employees work much longer hours and we are able to extract more value from them for the same paycheck. The environment reinforces the cultural belief that work is a pleasant dream and can help us distract or bribe from deeper issues in the organization.

What your culture might actually be saying is… We have enough venture funding to pay people to work on non-core parts of the business. We are not under that much pressure to make money. The normal work of the business is not sufficiently rewarding so we bribe employees with pet projects. We’re not entirely sure what our business objectives and vision are, so we are trying to discover it by letting employee passions take root. We have a really hard time developing work that takes more than a few people to release. We have lots of unfinished but valuable projects that get left behind due to shifts in focus, lack of concentrated effort, and inability to organize sufficient resources to bring projects to completion.

What your culture might actually be saying is… Management decisions are siloed at the very top layers of management, kept so close to the chest they appear not to exist at all. The lack of visibility into investor demands, financial affairs, HR issues, etc. provides an abstraction layer between employees and real management, which we pretend doesn’t exist. We don’t have an explicit power structure, which makes it easier for the unspoken power dynamics in the company to play out without investigation or criticism.

What your culture might actually be saying is… We fool ourselves into thinking we have a better work/life balance when really people take even less vacation than they would when they had a vacation policy. Social pressure and addiction to work has replaced policy as a regulator of vacation time.

What your culture might actually be saying is… Features are the most important function of our business. We lack processes for surfacing and addressing technical debt. We have systemic infrastructure problems but they are not relevant because we are more focused on short-term adoption than long-term reliability. We prioritize fast visible progress, even if it is trivial, over longer and more meaningful projects. Productivity is measured more by lines of code than the value of that code. Pretty things are more important than useful things.

in 2008 China and Japan had signed a resource-sharing deal for a disputed oil field, called Chunxiao by Beijing and Shirakaba by Tokyo. Then, two years ago, Japan accused China of breaking its word by going ahead on its own.

Looking at who had sought oil or gas there previously - as far back as the 1980s -- points to who now might lose out under today's conditions.

A number of foreign firms have partnered with China in the ocean since the country began exploring there from 1983

China recently became the second largest net oil importer in the world behind the United States and the world's largest global energy consumer. Gas imports have also risen in recent years, and China became a net natural gas importer for the first time in almost two decades in 2007.

Japan is the third largest net importer of crude oil behind the United States and China, as well as the world's largest importer of liquefied natural gas (LNG), owing to few domestic energy resources.

Hydrocarbon reserves in the East China Sea are difficult to determine. The area is underexplored and the territorial disputes surrounding ownership of potentially rich oil and natural gas deposits have precluded further development.

China began exploration activities in the Each China Sea in the 1980's, discovering the Pinghu oil and gas field in 1983. Japan co-financed two oil and gas pipelines running from the Pinghu field to Shanghai and the Ningbo onshore terminal on the Chinese mainland through the Asian Development Bank and its own Japanese Bank of International Cooperation (JBIC).

Only the Pinghu field, operational since 1998, has produced oil in significant quantities to date. Pinghu's production peaked at around 8,000 to 10,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) of oil and condensate in the late 1990's, and leveled off to around 400 bbl/d in recent years. In the medium-term, the East China Sea is not expected to become a significant supplier of oil.

EIA estimates that the East China Sea has between 1 and 2 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) in proven and probable natural gas reserves.

In 2012, an independent evaluation estimated probable reserves of 119 Bcf of natural gas in LS 36-1, a promising gas field north of Taiwan currently being developed as a joint venture between CNOOC and U.K. firm Primeline Petroleum Corp.

The uncontested Pinghu field began producing in 1998, reaching a peak of approximately 40 to 60 million cubic feet per day (Mmcf/d) in the mid-2000's and declining in recent years.

China began producing at the contested Tianwaitian/Kashi field in 2006, claiming it as part of its Exclusive Economic Zone.

The Chinese government prioritizes boosting the share of natural gas as part of total energy consumption to alleviate high pollution from the country's heavy coal use. To that end, Chinese authorities intend to ramp up production and increase East China Sea gas to flow into the Yangtze River delta region, which includes Shanghai and Hangzhou, two large cities with growing gas demand.

In the 1990's, several foreign companies drilled a series of dry holes in uncontested waters.

In 2003, Unocal and Royal Dutch Shell announced a joint venture (JV) with CNOOC and Sinopec to explore gas reserves in the Xihu/Okinawa trough. However, Unocal and Shell withdrew from exploration projects in late 2004, citing doubts over the commercial viability of developing energy resources in the disputed area.

The companies plan to build pipelines and a 42 Mmcf/d onshore processing terminal at Wenzhou to accept the future gas supplies from the LS 36-1 field.

Despite multiple rounds of high-level negotiations between China and Japan, the two countries have thus far been unable to resolve territorial issues related to the East China Sea.

Until these disputes are resolved, it is likely that the East China Sea will remain underexplored and its energy resources will not be fully developed.

The Daioyu/Senkaku Islands consist of five uninhabited islets and three barren rocks. Approximately 120 nautical miles southwest of Okinawa, the islands are situated on a continental shelf with the Xihu/Okinawa trough to the south separating them from the nearby Ryukyu Islands.

For several decades after 1945, the United States administered the islands as part of the post-war occupation of Okinawa. The islands generated little attention during this time

Although China had not previously disputed Japanese claims, the PRC claimed the islands in May 1970 after Japan and Taiwan held talks on joint exploration of energy resources in the East China Sea.

China claims the disputed land based on historic use of the islands as navigational aids. In addition, the government links the territory to the 1895 Shimonoseki Peace Treaty that removed Japanese claims to Taiwan and Chinese lands after World War II.

Japan claims that it incorporated the islands as vacant territory (terra nullius) in 1895 and points to continuous administration of the islands since that time as part of the Nansei Shoto island group.

Japan defines its boundary as the UNCLOS Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extending westward from its southern Kyushyu island and Ryukyu islands.

China defines its boundary using the UNCLOS principle of the natural extension of its continental shelf.

Under UNCLOS, Article 121 (3), "Rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf". The Japanese have claimed that the disputed islands generate an EEZ and continental shelf. China has not taken an official position on the status of the Daioyu/Senkakus as rocks or islands.

The United States, with its array of advanced anti-submarine warfare assets and hydrographic research vessels deployed throughout the region, gives Beijing the unwelcome impression that Uncle Sam can’t stop peering into its nuclear nursery.

This concern helps explain China's growing intolerance to foreign military activities in the South China Sea. Tellingly, some of the most nerve-wracking standoffs involving US and Chinese forces have unfolded in close proximity to Hainan.

Similarly, the USNS Impeccable incident, during which a US hydrographic vessel was dangerously harassed by five Chinese ships, took place approximately seventy miles to the south of Hainan. During the confrontation, Chinese sailors reportedly attempted to unhook the Impeccable’s towed acoustic array sonars.

Thus in the course of a discussion with a former Chinese official, I was told that “even though territorial issues are of importance, our major concern is the sanctity of our future sea-based deterrent.”

He then went on to describe, with a flicker of amusement, how fishermen off the coast of Hainan regularly snag US sonars in their nets, and are encouraged to sell them back to the local authorities in exchange for financial compensation.

Needless to say, this location is hardly ideal.

Absolute control over the remote Spratly islands, in addition to the more proximate Paracels, would greatly facilitate this concentric defensive configuration.

Until not long ago, China’s strategic submarine force wasn’t really taken seriously.

China could soon equip its new class of Jin submarines with the JL-2 ballistic missile, which has a range of approximately 4 600 miles. This would enable Beijing, the report adds, to establish a “near-continuous at-sea strategic deterrent”.

Other cases have not been as blatant as those involving Abdo and Pimentel. However, they have involved individuals who were radicalized or motivated by Inspire.

Some commentators have noted that most of the suspects arrested in connection with these plots were fairly hapless and clueless -- the type of individuals we have long referred to as "Kramer jihadists." Though partly incompetent, these grassroots operatives are exactly the demographic al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is targeting for radicalization and mobilization.

Like all propaganda and political rhetoric, its assertions must not be taken at face value. But to claim that the magazine tells us nothing about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is simply lazy analysis.

Clearly, the concept of reaching out and attempting to radicalize and equip English-speaking jihadists was not something promoted only by Anwar al-Awlaki and Khan. English-speaking outreach has continued after their deaths. The group maintains that traveling to places such as Yemen for training is too dangerous.

The copyediting in Inspire 10 was also cleaner than the previous edition, which had a major typo on the front cover. The new editor, who uses the nom de guerre Yahya Ibrahim, has worked with Khan since the first edition of the magazine.

In Inspire 10, for example, Ibrahim attempts to replicate the insulting one-page "advertisements" that Khan included in earlier editions of the magazine -- one in particular racially derided U.S. President Barack Obama -- but they lack the bite and general snark of Khan.

Another thing we can ascertain from Inspire 10 is that, despite al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's continued commitment to foment grassroots terrorism in the West, the group is clearly disappointed by the response it has gotten.

The Open Source Jihad section also continues to show the low view that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's professional terrorist cadre has for grassroots operatives. They see them as not-so-exceptional individuals

Inspire 10 can also tell us some important things about what tactics we can expect the group to use and what locations we can expect it to target.

it’s hard not to note that cancer and heart disease are primarily diseases of aging, and life expectancy was so much lower back in the day that a much smaller percentage of the population lived to advanced ages than is the case today.

Over the last decade, Cordain has become the most prominent promoter of the so-called “Paleo diet,” having written The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat and multiple other books advocating a paleolithic-mimetic diet as the cure for what ails modern humans.

But how does one determine what the prevalence of cardiovascular disease was in the ancient past?

there have been indications that the idea that ancient humans didn’t suffer from atherosclerosis is a comforting myth, the most recent of which is a study published a week ago online in The Lancet by Prof. Randall C. Thompson of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute and an international team of investigators entitled Atherosclerosis across 4000 years of human history: the Horus study of four ancient populations.

So, although there was a fair amount of evidence from studies of Egyptian mummies that atherosclerosis was not uncommon, in Egypt it was mainly the wealthy and powerful who were mummified after their deaths. Conceivably, they could have lived a very different lifestyle and consumed a very different diet than the average Egyptian living around that time.

So the authors obtained whole-body CT scans of the 137 mummies, either pre-existing scans or scans prospectively done, and analyzed them for calcifications.

Figure 2 summarizes the findings nicely: There’s also this video featured in a Nature report on the study showing the reconstructed scan of one of the mummies with atherosclerotic plaques in the coronary arteries.

As expected, more atherosclerosis correlates with advanced age, and the amount of atherosclerosis in the young and middle-aged (although the times in which the people who became these mummies after death lived age 50 was old) was less.

As is noted in Thompson’s article, ancient Egyptians and Peruvians were agricultural cultures with farms and domesticated animals, Ancestral Puebloans were forager-farmers, and the Unangans were hunter-gatherers without agriculture. Indeed, the Peruvians and Ancestral Puebloans predated the written word and were thus prehistoric cultures.

One notes that no one, including the authors of this study, is saying that lifestyle and diet are not important factors for the development of atherosclerotic heart disease.

I actually think that the authors probably went too far with that last statement in that, while they might be correct that atherosclerosis is an inherent component of human aging, it is quite well established that this inherent component of aging can at least be worsened by sedentary lifestyle and probably certain diets.

One notes that, although the Paleo Diet is not, strictly speaking, always sold as CAM/IM, the ideas behind it are popular among CAM advocates, and the diet is frequently included as part of “integrative medicine,” for example, here at the University of Connecticut website, where it’s under integrative nutrition.

In particular, the appeal to ancient wisdom and ancient civilizations as yet untouched by the evil of modernity is the same sort of arguments that are made in favor of various CAM modalities ranging from herbalism to vegan diets rebranded as being somehow CAM to the appeal to “natural” cures.

The book is by Marlene Zuk and entitled Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. Zuk is an evolutionary biologist, and in particular she points out how the evolutionary arguments favored by advocates of the Paleo diet don’t stand up to scrutiny.

The interview begins with Zuk confronting Cordain at a conference on evolution and diseases of modern environments. At his lecture, Cordain pronounced several foods to be the cause of fatal conditions in people carrying certain genes.

Blue eyes arose 6,000 to 10,000 years ago

Rapid selection for the CCR5-D gene variant that makes some people immune to HIV

Lactase persistence (production past the age of weening of the lactase enzyme that digests lactose in milk) probably dates back only around 7,500 to 10,000 years, around the time that cattle were domesticated

Zuk detects an unspoken, barely formed assumption that humanity essentially stopped evolving in the Stone Age and that our bodies are “stuck” in a state that was perfectly adapted to survive in the paleolithic environment. Sometimes you hear that the intervention of “culture” has halted the process of natural selection. This, “Paleofantasy” points out, flies in the face of facts. Living things are always and continuously in the process of adapting to the changing conditions of their environment, and the emergence of lactase persistence indicates that culture (in this case, the practice of keeping livestock for meat and hides) simply becomes another one of those conditions.

For this reason, generalizations about the typical hunter-gatherer lifestyle are spurious; it doesn’t exist. With respect to what people ate (especially how much meat), the only safe assumption was “whatever they could get,” something that to this day varies greatly depending on where they live. Recently, researchers discovered evidence that people in Europe were grinding and cooking grain (a paleo-diet bugaboo) as far back as 30,000 years ago, even if they weren’t actually cultivating it. “A strong body of evidence,” Zuk writes, “points to many changes in our genome since humans spread across the planet and developed agriculture, making it difficult at best to point to a single way of eating to which we were, and remain, best suited.”

Oh, and, as Zuk tells us, paleolithic people got cancer, too.

we humans have long been known to abuse and despoil our environment, even back in those “paleo” days. Indeed, when I took a prehistoric archeology course, which was largely dedicated to the period of time of the hunter-gatherers, one thing I remember my professor pointing out, and that was that what he did was largely the study of prehistoric garbage and that humans have always produced a lot of it.

Dark energy, a mysterious force thought to be responsible for accelerating the expansion of the Universe, accounts for less than previously thought.

The Planck data also set a new value for the rate at which the Universe is expanding today, known as the Hubble constant. At 67.15 kilometers per second per megaparsec, this is significantly less than the current standard value in astronomy. The data imply that the age of the Universe is 13.82 billion years.

oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when it was just 380 000 years old.

This cosmic microwave background (CMB) — shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities at very early times, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today.

According to the standard model of cosmology, the fluctuations arose immediately after the Big Bang and were stretched to cosmologically large scales during a brief period of accelerated expansion known as inflation.

The asymmetry and the cold spot had already been hinted at with Planck’s predecessor, NASA’s WMAP mission, but were largely ignored because of lingering doubts about their cosmic origin.