Tag Archives: estimates

Independent Estimates of Gaza’s Death Toll Exceed Official Figures

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Buildings destroyed in Gaza, February 2025

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According to an independent survey derived from household interviews, about 75,000 individuals (3.6% of the population) in the Gaza Strip lost their lives due to violence between October 7, 2023, and January 5, 2025. This figure exceeds the Gaza Health Ministry’s estimate of 46,000 violent deaths in the same timeframe.

The research also indicated that approximately 9,000 additional non-violent deaths occurred during this period compared to expected norms in the Gaza Strip. This marks the first estimate of indirect deaths stemming from the conflict that began in October 2023.

The survey involved interviews with 2,000 randomly selected households, which detailed the current and prewar conditions for all household members. “We were present on-site and gathered data directly from the population,” says Debarati Guha-Sapir at Louban Catholic University in Belgium.

The research team encountered restrictions in several locations due to ongoing combat and Israeli evacuation orders, but they believe these limitations likely understate the actual figures rather than exaggerate them.

Guha-Sapir notes that Gaza’s Ministry of Health maintains strict death counting standards. For instance, deaths of unidentified bodies, such as those buried in tunnels, are excluded from the counts. This leads her to conclude that their estimates may closely reflect the true numbers.

Another independent study published in February determined that the death toll up to June 24, 2024, surpassed the official count. However, this study relied on online research and social media obituaries, making Guha-Sapir regard the current research approach as more credible.

Francesco Checchi from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, which conducted the February research, disagrees, stating, “The findings aren’t necessarily more accurate than ours.” Nonetheless, he acknowledges that Guha-Sapir’s research is more recent and includes indirect deaths, providing a more comprehensive mortality picture.

The estimated 9,000 indirect deaths from the conflict is lower than previous estimates. For example, a letter in The Lancet in 2024 suggested that for every direct death, there could be four indirect deaths in Gaza, projecting a death toll of around 186,000.

However, Guha-Sapir points out that the direct death rates observed in countries like Sudan, where extreme poverty and inadequate healthcare predate the conflict, do not apply to Gaza’s context prior to the war. This distinction is crucial in interpreting the current situation.

Nevertheless, changes may occur if conditions continue to deteriorate. “As the situation worsens, the rate of non-violent deaths could escalate quickly,” warns team member Michael Spagat from Royal Holloway University in London.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Top US Crypto Exchange Estimates Recent Cyberattack Costs Could Hit $400 Million: Our Response to Cybercrime

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The leading cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S. estimates that cyber attacks compromising account information for a “small subset” of users will incur costs ranging from $180 million to $400 million. Coinbase noted that this estimate does not factor in the $20 million ransom demanded by hackers, which the firm opted not to pay.

As the largest platform for cryptocurrency transactions in the United States, Coinbase reported that while attackers accessed sensitive information like names, addresses, and emails, they did not acquire login credentials or passwords. Nevertheless, the company is refunding customers who were tricked into sending funds to the attackers.

The hackers engaged various contractors and employees based outside the U.S. to extract information from internal systems. In response, Coinbase promptly terminated the implicated employee.


Furthermore, Coinbase has also declined to pay the ransom and is actively collaborating with law enforcement. Instead, they have offered a $20 million reward for information regarding the perpetrator.

“We are committed to investigating this case, enhancing security measures, and providing reimbursements to affected customers instead of funding criminal activities,” the company stated in its blog post.

On May 11, the company received an email from an unidentified threat actor claiming to possess information about certain customer accounts and internal documents. This revelation comes just days before Coinbase is poised to enter the Benchmark S&P 500 Index, representing a historic milestone in the cryptocurrency sector.

Security remains a significant issue for the cryptocurrency industry. In February, BYBIT, the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange globally, disclosed that an attacker had stolen approximately $1.5 billion worth of digital tokens.

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In 2024, the total amount of funds stolen from hacking of cryptocurrency platforms reached $2.2 billion, according to a report from the blockchain analytics firm Chain Orisys. This marks the fourth year in a row that such hacks have surpassed $1 billion.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Uncovering the Impact of the LA Wildfire: Key Estimates Lacking After Trump’s Management Changes

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As President Donald Trump took office, the wildfires in Los Angeles were still burning, prompting a return to previous Biden-era directives for federal agencies addressing the climate crisis. Flip

January’s fire conditions, exacerbated by climate change, played a significant role in igniting wildfires in Palisades and Eton. Nearly 40,000 acres were affected. By March, Adam Smith, the chief investigator of the $1 billion weather and climate disaster program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was still assessing the severe impact of the LA wildfires when he received informal orders to cease all work-related communications.

Each month, Smith’s team maintained an extensive online database tracking losses from over 400 natural disasters since 1980, all causing more than $1 billion in damages. Following the LA wildfire, Smith reported having received restrictions that prevented him from updating this database and sharing initial findings with the public. The wildfire incurred damages amounting to at least $50 billion.

In early May, Smith resigned due to concerns about the agency’s plans for the future. The billion-dollar weather and climate disaster online database Smith had developed over 15 years at NOAA was subsequently shut down. Days later, NOAA confirmed it would cease updates for this important resource, which provides essential data for scientists, citizens, and insurance firms evaluating climate risk.

A NOAA spokesperson stated that the database would no longer be updated “due to changing priorities and staffing adjustments.” The White House did not provide any comments regarding the matter.

According to Smith, the database’s economic losses are particularly vital, as billion-dollar disasters like hurricanes and widespread wildfires are increasingly common. In 2023, the US set new records for billion-dollar disasters, with the database indicating a staggering $28 billion event. Over the past five years, the US has averaged about $24 billion in disasters annually, a significant rise from just $3 billion average during the 1980s.

“We need to be more prepared than ever,” Smith told NBC News. “Some have access to the data and insights for better preparation. Unfortunately, discontinuing resources like these creates a gap in knowledge.”

Researchers have identified rising global temperatures as a key driver in these changes over recent decades. Long-term droughts and increased wildfire risks are affecting regions across the western United States, where warming atmospheres retain more moisture, resulting in more intense storms and hurricanes.

This increase in extreme weather events presents significant challenges for insurance policyholders in areas susceptible to natural disasters. Rates in hurricane-prone states like Louisiana and Florida have surged, with some homeowners facing nearly $10,000 in annual insurance premiums. In California, major insurance firms, including State Farm, have rescinded policies due to escalating fire risks.

A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research revealed that the heightened risk of disasters would drive up annual insurance costs for households affected by climate issues by an estimated $700 over the next three decades. On a global scale, reports from German insurance giant Munich RE indicated that natural disasters resulted in record insurance losses of $140 billion worldwide in 2024.

“You cannot conceal the costs of climate change from those who are already incurring those costs through their insurance premiums,” stated Carly Fabian, a civic policy advocate from a consumer rights nonprofit. “The insurance and reinsurance sectors are built to withstand a limited number of major multi-billion dollar disasters, but are not equipped for consecutive disasters occurring with such frequency.”

Data compiled in the multibillion-dollar disaster database illustrates the financial toll of hurricanes, severe storms, and wildfires across the nation, serving as a critical resource for private insurers modeling climate risks and establishing rates for homeowners in vulnerable areas. Although insurance companies utilize various datasets for their climate risk assessments, the scale of NOAA’s database remains unmatched.

Jeremy Porter, a climate risk expert at the First Street Foundation, emphasized that the database is one of the most effective tools for illustrating the economic impact of climate-related disasters. First Street utilizes the $1 billion disaster database for its national risk assessment reports.

The NOAA database also serves as an essential resource for homeowners facing rising rates, non-renewals, and cancellations in home insurance.

“We are navigating an industry where insurers have extensive access to private data while the average consumer lacks insight into that data,” remarked the policy director for Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit advocating for stricter regulations. “The removal of public data sources exacerbates this imbalance, hindering individuals’ ability to understand their risks and the challenges they face from financial service providers.”

Madison Condon, an environmental law professor at Boston University, highlighted that the cuts to NOAA’s $1 billion disaster database are part of a broader trend involving rollbacks of national climate assessments and data resources, including the annual report detailing the impacts of climate change in the US released in late April. The Trump administration notably rejected numerous scientific contributions to these reports.

Additionally, the Trump administration has eliminated data products related to melting Antarctic glaciers and sea ice cover, marking yet another setback for US Antarctic research. Leaked documents obtained by ProPublica indicated that Trump intended to reduce NOAA funding by 27%, particularly for innovative climate-related initiatives, and proposed nearly 75% cuts to the Bureau of Ocean and Atmospheric Research, responsible for maintaining global climate models essential for insurers’ climate risk assessments.

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Source: www.nbcnews.com

The age of Saturn’s rings may surpass our previous estimates

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Saturn and its rings photographed by the Cassini spacecraft in 2016

NASA/JPL-California Institute of Technology/Space Science Institute

Modeling studies suggest that Saturn's rings are much older than previously thought and may have formed around the same time as Saturn. But not all astronomers are convinced, and the researchers who were part of the team that calculated that Saturn's rings are relatively young insist that the new findings do not change their findings. are.

For most of the 20th century, scientists believed that Saturn's rings formed with the planet about 4.5 billion years ago. But when NASA's Cassini spacecraft visited Saturn in 2004, it found its rings to be noticeably free of contamination from tiny space rocks known as cosmic dust. This innocent appearance indicated that they were much younger. Estimates for 2023 put their age between 100 million and 400 million years.

now, Ryuki Hyodo in Japan Space Science Institute He and his colleagues calculated that Saturn's rings should be much more resistant to contamination from space dust than previously thought, allowing them to maintain a pristine appearance for long periods of time. Hyodo and his team haven't calculated a new age for the ring, but they suggest it could be as old as Earth, as astronomers once believed.

The researchers then modeled how these particles moved through Saturn's magnetic field, and found that only a small portion settled on the rings, while the majority were drawn into Saturn's atmosphere. It turned out that the object was either destroyed or bounced back into space. “The accretion efficiency of Saturn's rings is only a few percent, which is much smaller than previously assumed,” says Professor Hyodo. This could extend previous ring age estimates by hundreds of millions to billions of years, he said.

Sasha Kemp A member of the team at the University of Colorado Boulder that calculated an earlier, much younger estimate of the age of Saturn's rings, he and his colleagues considered not only the ring's contamination efficiency, but also its contamination efficiency, taking into account the time it would take. He said he used a more complicated method. This is because matter reaches the ring and disappears. The values ​​calculated by Hyodo and his colleagues do not change the overall results for that age, Kempf said. “I'm sure this doesn't mean we really have to go back to square one.”

However, Hyodo argues that times should change dramatically as pollution efficiency declines. “They assumed an efficiency of 10%, but we reported 1%. The equation tells us that it's a billion years, or a billion years.”

Kemp also said that while the new simulation assumes that Saturn's rings are made of solid ice particles, the actual rings are made of soft particles that are much larger in size than what was modeled in the study. He said there was. “If you fire particles into these fairly complex and soft structures, the outcome of such collisions will be very different,” he says.

Hyodo argues that this assumption is standard for many similar studies. “No one knows what kind of effect the difference in ice will have,” says Hyodo. “It may or may not be more efficient.”

Lotfi Ben Jaffer A professor at France's Paris Institute of Astrophysics, who was not involved in either age-estimation study, said the study suggests the rings are not as young as recently claimed. “This is a positive step toward a lack of modeling efforts needed to adequately address the fundamental question of planetary ring system formation and evolution,” he says.

But Hyodo and his team need to improve their modeling to more accurately estimate the ring's contamination, he says, so they can more accurately determine its age.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

A New Study Estimates the Volume of Water Flowing Through Earth’s Rivers

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Accurate assessments of global river flows and water storage are important to inform water management practices, but current estimates of global river flows represent a significant spread, and river storage Estimates remain sparse. Estimates of river flow and water storage are hampered by uncertainty in land runoff, an unobserved quantity that provides water withdrawal to rivers. In a new study, geoscientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and elsewhere leverage an ensemble of global streamflow observations and land surface models to create a globally gauge-corrected monthly streamflow and storage dataset. Generating. They estimate the average global river storage capacity to be 2,246 km .3 (This is equivalent to half of the water in Lake Michigan, about 0.006% of all fresh water, which itself is equivalent to 2.5% of the Earth's volume) and 37,411 km of the world's continental streams.3 per year.

collins other. Estimates flows through 3 million river segments characterized by intense human water use, including the Colorado River, Amazon River, Orange River, and parts of the Murray-Darling River basin (shown here in gray) identified locations around the world. Image credit: NASA.

Rivers are considered the most renewable, most accessible, and therefore most sustainable sources of fresh water.

Therefore, several studies have attempted to quantify the world's river waters.

However, surprisingly little is known about the average and temporal variation in global river water storage, and even more so, about the temporal variation in global river discharge.

“Over the years, researchers have made numerous estimates of how much water flows from rivers to the ocean, but estimates of how much water rivers collectively hold (known as water storage) “There are fewer and more uncertainties,” said Dr. Cedric David. A researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“We don't know how much water we have in our accounts. Population growth and climate change are further complicating the problem.”

“There are many things we can do to manage our water usage and ensure there is enough water for everyone, but the first question is: How much water do we have? It's the basis of everything else. is.”

In this study, Dr. David and colleagues used a new methodology that combines flow meter measurements with computer models of about 3 million river segments around the world.

They identified the Amazon Basin as the region with the most river water storage, with approximately 850 km of water storage.3 Water amount – approximately 38% of global estimates.

The same basin discharges the most water into the ocean: 6,789 km3 per year. This corresponds to 18% of the emissions into the world's oceans, which average 37,411 km.3 Years from 1980 to 2009.

Although it is impossible for a river to have a negative flow rate, the study's computational approach does not take into account upstream flows, but it is possible that some river segments receive less water than they enter. It may leak.

Researchers found similar findings in parts of the Colorado, Amazon, and Orange river basins, as well as the Murray-Darling basin in southeastern Australia. These negative flows mainly indicate heavy water use by humans.

“These are places where we see evidence of water management,” says Dr. Elissa Collins, a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

of study Published in a magazine natural earth science.

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Elle Collins other. Global patterns of river water storage dependent on residence time. nut.earth science, published online March 15, 2024. doi: 10.1038/s41561-024-01421-5

Source: www.sci.news