As the first vaccines for Covid-19 rolled out at the end of 2020, messenger RNA catapulted into public awareness. Now, a few years later, interest in mRNA has exploded. Clinical trials are underway for dozens of mRNA vaccines, including ones for flu and herpes. And scientists are hoping to use mRNA to treat disease, not just prevent it. One of the biggest targets is cancer.

But a major obstacle is how to deliver the molecule to the place in the body that needs to be treated. Fatty bubbles called lipid nanoparticles can carry RNA into cells, and they can ferry it to a wide range of tissues but not to anywhere specific. That’s a problem for cancer, says Jake Becraft, cofounder and CEO of Boston-based Strand Therapeutics, because many cancer treatments “can be incredibly toxic in off-target tissues.” But his company may have found a solution.

Strand has figured out how to “program” mRNA much like computer code, allowing it to perform certain functions—such as turning on only in specific cell types, at specific times, and in specific amounts. Today, the biotech company announced that the US Food and Drug Administration has greenlit a clinical trial testing the approach in cancer patients with solid tumors. Strand plans to begin enrolling patients this spring. It will be the first time a programmable mRNA therapy will be tested in people.

Naturally found in every human cell, mRNA carries the genetic blueprints for making the proteins our bodies need to function. The synthetic versions used in Pfizer and Moderna’s Covid vaccines provide instructions to make a lookalike coronavirus spike protein. Immune cells in the arm muscle recognize the spike protein as foreign and sound the alarm. The immune system mounts a response and generates protective antibodies against it. That way, when the body encounters the spike protein on the actual Covid virus, it’s primed and ready to fight it.

Using mRNA to treat cancer works in much the same way. Tumor cells notoriously evade the immune system, going undetected. But synthetic mRNA can direct cancerous cells to make certain proteins that alert the immune system to the tumor’s presence.

Strand’s therapy uses mRNA to make an inflammatory protein called interleukin-12, or IL-12, that causes immune cells to spring into action and unleash a cascade of events that kill cancer cells when and where they detect the protein. “What our mRNA does is go into the tumor, and then it causes that protein to be secreted by the tumor,” Becraft says. “The tumor essentially becomes a factory.”

Researchers have long eyed IL-12 as a potential cancer therapy. But in the 1990s, early trials of IL-12 were halted when patients experienced toxic side effects. In those studies, the protein was delivered directly into the bloodstream, which activated a severe inflammatory response throughout the body. Several companies have tried to make safer versions of IL-12, but interest from Big Pharma seems to be waning. Last year, Bristol Myers Squibb dropped its effort, with AstraZeneca and partner Moderna following suit.

To keep IL-12 inside tumors, scientists at Strand designed a set of instructions called a genetic circuit that tells the mRNA to make the inflammatory protein only when it detects the tumor microenvironment. The circuit is designed to sense levels of microRNA—molecules that naturally regulate gene expression and give off different signatures in cancer cells versus healthy ones. The genetic circuit instructs the mRNA to self-destruct if it goes anywhere other than its intended target.

“We’ve engineered the mRNA so that they turn off if they go to someplace we don’t want them to be,” Becraft says.

Strand is initially targeting easy-to-reach tumors, including melanoma and breast cancer, to prove that the approach works and is safe. In this trial, doctors will inject the mRNA directly into the tumors and then check to see how localized the effect is. In the future, Strand envisions being able to do body-wide infusions of its programmed mRNA to treat tumors in more remote locations. The idea is that the therapy would selectively activate in certain cells and tissues.

Philip Santangelo, an mRNA researcher at the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, says there are benefits to Strand’s programmable approach even with injecting it at the site of a tumor. “If the drug goes outside the tumor when you inject it, then at least [its effect] will probably be restricted to the tumor,” he says.

IL-12 can be measured from the blood, so investigators will be able to take a blood draw and make sure the protein isn’t present there. Strand also plans to monitor various organs for the protein to see where it ends up. If the therapy works as intended, they shouldn’t find the protein anywhere outside the tumor.

But like computer circuits, genetic ones can occasionally make mistakes, says Ron Weiss, a professor of biological engineering at MIT who cofounded Strand and now acts as an adviser. “If your genetic circuit makes a mistake one out of 10 times, you do not want to use that as a therapy,” he says. “If it makes a mistake once every million times, that’s pretty good.”

Strand’s trial and other early attempts at these kinds of genetic circuits will see just how well they work. “The notion is that genetic circuits can really have a significant impact on safety and efficacy,” Weiss says.

Weiss pioneered the idea of genetic circuits, the first of which were based on DNA. When Becraft started graduate school in 2013, he joined Weiss’s lab to work on genetic circuits for mRNA. At the time, many scientists still doubted mRNA’s potential.

Now, Weiss imagines being able to use genetic circuits to program increasingly more sophisticated actions to create highly precise therapies. “This begins to really open up the door for creating therapies whose sophistication can match the underlying complexity of biology.”

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These severe cold events occur when the polar jet stream – the familiar jet stream of winter that runs along the boundary between Arctic and more temperate air – dips deeply southward, bringing the cold Arctic air to regions that don’t often experience it.

Surface temperatures at 7 a.m. EST on Jan. 16, 2024. Temperatures below freezing are in blue; those above freezing are in red. The jet stream is indicated by the light blue line with arrows. Image provided by Mathew Barlow/UMass Lowell, CC BY

An interesting aspect of these events is that they often occur in association with changes to another river of air even higher above the jet stream: the stratospheric polar vortex, a great stream of air moving around the North Pole in the middle of the stratosphere.

When this stratospheric vortex becomes disrupted or stretched, it can distort the jet stream as well, pushing it southward in some areas and causing cold air outbreaks.

The Arctic polar vortex is a strong band of winds in the stratosphere, 10 to 30 miles above the surface. When this band of winds, normally ringing the North Pole, weakens, it can split. The polar jet stream can mirror this upheaval, becoming weaker or wavy. At the surface, cold air is pushed southward in some locations. Image provided by NOAA

The January 2024 Arctic cold blast fit into this pattern, with the polar vortex stretched so far over the U.S. in the lower stratosphere that it had nearly split in two. There are multiple causes that may have led to this stretching, but it is likely related to high-latitude weather in the prior two weeks.

Surface temperatures and the jet stream at 7 a.m. EST on Jan. 16, 2024, with the stratospheric polar vortex also shown as the dark blue line. Image provided by Mathew Barlow/UMass Lowell, CC BY

A polar view of the winds in the lower stratosphere at 7 a.m. EST on Jan. 16, 2024. The winds shown are approximately 10 miles above the surface, in the lower stratosphere. Image provided by Mathew Barlow/UMass Lowell

No, cold doesn’t contradict global warming

After Earth just experienced its hottest year on record, it may seem surprising to set so many cold records. But does this cold snap contradict human-caused global warming? As an atmospheric and climate scientist, I can tell you, absolutely and unequivocally, it does not.

No single weather event can prove or disprove global warming. Many studies have shown that the number of extreme cold events is clearly decreasing with global warming, as predicted and understood from physical reasoning.

Whether global warming may, contrary to expectations, be playing some supporting role in the intensity of these events is an open question. Some research suggests it does.

The February 2021 cold wave that severely disrupted the Texas electric grid was also associated with a stretched stratospheric polar vortex. My colleagues and I have provided evidence suggesting that Arctic changes associated with global warming have increased the likelihood of such vortex disruptions. The effects of the enhanced high latitude warming known as Arctic amplification on regional snow cover and sea ice may enhance the weather patterns that, in turn, result in a stretched polar vortex.

More recently, we have shown that for large areas of the U.S., Europe and Northeast Asia, while the number of these severe cold events is clearly decreasing – as expected with global warming – it does not appear that their intensity is correspondingly decreasing, despite the rapid warming in their Arctic source regions.

So, while the world can expect fewer of these severe cold events in the future, many regions need to remain prepared for exceptional cold when it does occur. A better understanding of the pathways of influence between Arctic surface conditions, the stratospheric polar vortex and mid-latitude winter weather would improve our ability to anticipate these events and their severity.

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On February 23, the United States was supposed to put a lunar lander on the Moon’s surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. The Peregrine Mission One had a smooth start as the new Vulcan rocket, built by United Launch Alliance, successfully completed its maiden flight on January 8.

But things took a turn just a few hours after the lander’s separation from the rocket. Astrobotic Technology, a Pittsburgh-based private company behind the lander, noticed an apparent failure within the propulsion system.

The issue sent the lander into a spin, making it difficult to keep the solar panels pointed toward the Sun. Additionally, the failure caused a fuel leak threatening the planned soft landing on the Moon.

Just 32 hours after the lander started its operations in space, Astrobotic admitted the Moon landing was impossible. The critical loss of propellant – hypothesized to be a valve that failed to close fully, leading to a subsequent rupture of the oxidizer tank – meant there was not enough fuel onboard.

Therefore, the Peregrine mission lasted only 10 days. On Friday, Astrobotic confirmed it had received independent confirmation of the lander’s safe, controlled re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere the day before. First, the Peregrine lander reached the Moon’s distance, then it circled back and burned upon returning to Earth.

A view of the Earth as the Peregrine lunar lander approaches it to burn in the atmosphere.

Astrobotic’s commercial mission was part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to advance capabilities for science, exploration, or commercial development of the Moon under the agency’s Artemis program. Despite that, Astrobotic had a final say over Peregrine’s fate.

The aforementioned leak was slowing down and there was still a substantial amount of propellant onboard to operate the vehicle in a spacecraft mode. Subsequent tests even indicated that Peregrine could avoid the re-entry of Earth’s atmosphere and extend its mission for potentially several more weeks.

However, there was a lot of uncertainty, as the damaged propulsion system could misbehave and the main engine and thrusters were out of their operating range or beyond their expected service cycles.

Based on these uncertainties and NASA’s recommendations, Astrobotic made a huge decision. They set aside their ambitions and chose not to attempt to avoid the Earth.

As Astrobotic explained, they made the difficult decision to protect satellites in Earth orbit and to ensure they don’t create debris in cislunar space: “By responsibly ending Peregrine’s mission, we are doing our part to preserve the future of cislunar space for all.”

Despite the inability to reach its ultimate goal, Peregrine’s 10-day-long journey will benefit future space missions toward the Moon.

Astrobotic worked hard to use its time on cislunar orbit to test all the experiments onboard. It successfully received data from all nine payloads designed to communicate with the lander, and all 10 payloads requiring power have received it (there were also 10 more passive payloads onboard).

For example, NASA payloads were making measurements of the radiation environment in interplanetary space around Earth and the Moon, said the agency at the time:

“The two instruments are measuring different components of the radiation spectrum, which provide complementary insights into the galactic cosmic ray activity and space weather resulting from solar activity. This data helps characterize the interplanetary radiation environment for humans and electronics.”

The real-life data will be invaluable for scientists and engineers, assuring them that their instruments work as planned and can be utilized in future missions.

There are seven additional CLPS missions planned for the upcoming months and years. One of them is another Astrobotic effort dubbed Griffin Mission One, aiming to land NASA’s VIPER rover on the Moon this November.

Images: Astrobotic Technology

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This mission is quite important because the more satellites that there are being sent up into space, the more junk there is. If not managed, it can lead to collisions. With more and more astronauts being in space than before, this debris is increasingly becoming a risk to people, so it has to be managed.

Tuesday, 23 January

• Who: Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)

   

• What: Kinetica 1
• When: 4:05 a.m. UTC
• Where: Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre
• Why: This will be the third launch of the Kinetica 1 rocket. It will put five satellites into orbit for MinoSpace. The satellites include Beijing Huanbao 1, Taijing 1-03, Taijing 2-04, Taijing 3-02, and Taijing 4-03.

Saturday, 27 January

• Who: Rocket Lab

   

• What: Electron
• When: 6:15 - 7:00 a.m. UTC
• Where: New Zealand
• Why: Rocket Lab will launch the first four Skylark Space Situational Awareness (SSA) satellites for Spire Global. These satellites are actually really interesting; they’re CubeSats operated by Spire for NorthStar Earth and will monitor space debris that can’t be observed from the ground. Customers will be able to get granular data about orbital debris problems.

Recap

• The first launch last week saw SpaceX launch a Falcon 9 carrying 22 Starlink satellites, which will beam internet to the Earth.

• The second launch was another Falcon 9 Starlink launch.

• The first launch this week from China was a Long March 7 carrying the Tianzhou 7 cargo spacecraft, which is resupplying the Chinese space station.

• For the fourth launch, we were back with SpaceX, which launched a Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying several Axiom Space astronauts to the International Space Station.

• Here’s footage of the crew unloading at the ISS.

That’s it for this week; check by next time.

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Humans aren’t the fastest or strongest species. We’ve no wings, fangs, claws, venom, or armour. Physically, we’re largely nature’s also-rans.

‘Also-ran’ is an ironic term, though, because humans do physically dominate all other species in one area: long-distance running. Our bipedal gait and unique sweat glands mean humans can keep running long after other species collapse from exhaustion.

Humans evolved to spend long periods physically exerting themselves, that is, exercising. But while many people do indeed enjoy exercising, they’re in the minority (as the less-crowded gyms and abandoned New Year’s resolutions of mid-February reveal).

So why, even though we’ve evolved to do it, doesn't everyone enjoy exercise? The baffling complexity of the human brain is to blame. Evolving an ability doesn’t automatically mean we’ll want to use it. Creatures with armour don’t actively want to be attacked.

While physical exercise isn’t that bad, it’s still typically unpleasant, and uncomfortable. It has to be; you’re pushing your body to its physical limits, which leads to significant discomfort – they’re limits for a reason.

How your brain thinks about exercise

Another issue is that the human brain is highly sensitive to wasted effort. Studies have shown that they contain dedicated circuits, within the insula cortex, that calculate the effort required for actions – they're there to ask "Is it worth it?"

It’s an evolved tendency to stop us from squandering vital resources on pointless endeavours, like walking 20 miles for a handful of berries.

But regular exercise to get 'in shape’ requires constant and considerable effort – all for gradual progress and uncertain rewards (it’s impossible to guarantee ahead of time that you’ll succeed). So, your brain’s tendency to ask, "Is it worth it?" will be hard to quieten.  

This trait also means we typically prefer things which offer minimum effort for maximum reward. So we take the path of least resistance, stick to routines and dwell within our comfort zones.

Taking up exercise means changing all that, for uncertain results. To keep us safe, our brains typically tend to put more significance on risks rather than rewards, meaning we are even more reluctant to take up physically demanding activities.

So, while our bodies may be adapted to constant exercise, our brains have in many ways adapted to avoid it. And we’ve built a world for ourselves where avoiding physical activity is a viable option.

Thankfully, the human brain is a terrifyingly complex organ, so has a few tricks up its metaphorical sleeve. Most obviously, it isn’t ruled by its more primitive, immediate instincts and drives. While many species’ thought processes are limited to ‘Food, eat it!’, ‘Danger, run!’, ‘Pain, avoid!’, we’ve evolved beyond that.

Human brains can form multiple long-term goals and ambitions. We’re rarely content with just day-to-day survival: we can simulate a desirable future scenario, figure out how we’d achieve it, and… do just that. Or at least work toward it.

This directly impacts how our brain processes motivation and willpower, in many interesting ways. For one, it makes us capable of delayed gratification: we can recognise that rejecting a reward now can lead to a greater reward later, and act accordingly.

In this case, we understand that eating four family bags of crisps while bingeing TV will be enjoyable at the moment, but going to the gym will mean we’re fitter, stronger, and healthier later.

And then there's the ‘just world’ fallacy. This is where we assume the world is fair, which leads us to believe – and studies have shown this – that any suffering will surely lead to rewards later. No pain, no gain, as the saying goes.

How your brain gets motivated

So how does the brain process all these different motivations? The self-discrepancy theory suggests we have several ‘selves’ active in our minds at any given time; our ‘actual’ self, our ‘ideal’ self, and our ‘ought’ self.

Your ‘actual’ self is your current state, how you are right now. Your ‘ideal’ self is what you want to be. And your 'ought' self is the self that does all the stuff required to become your 'ideal' self. It’s the self that does what you ought to be doing. So, if your 'ideal' self is a professional footballer, and your 'actual' self isn’t, your 'ought' self is the one that spends a lot of time training, exercising, and getting better at football.

That’s just one framework for how motivation works when it comes to physical exercise. There are, of course, many other factors that play an important role, like time constraints, body image and mobility.

But as far as your brain is concerned, there are processes that discourage exercise, and processes that encourage it. Ideally, you’ll end up putting more weight on the latter than the former. And moving weights around is a go-to type of exercise, so it helps to start somewhere.

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The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) landed the moon's surface at around 12:20 a.m. (1520 GMT Friday), but its solar panels were not able to generate electricity, possibly because they are angled wrong.

JAXA prioritised the transfer of SLIM's data to earth as the probe relied only on its battery, which would last for "a few hours" despite "life-sustaining treatments" such as turning off its heater, Hitoshi Kuninaka, the head of JAXA's research centre, told a press conference.

JAXA will maintain the status quo rather than take risky actions and hopes a shift in the sunlight's angle will hit the panels in a way that can restore its functions, he added.

"It takes 30 days for the solar angle to change on the moon," Kuninaka said. "So when the solar direction changes, and the light shines from a different direction, the light could end up hitting the solar cell."

Signal from the SLIM was lost, data from NASA's Deep Space Network showed. It was not immediately clear whether the signal loss was temporary or a power-saving measure.

Dubbed the "moon sniper", SLIM attempted to land within 100 metres (328 feet) of its target, versus the conventional accuracy of several kilometres, a technology JAXA says will become a powerful tool in future exploration of hilly moon poles seen as a potential source of oxygen, fuel and water.

"Looking at the trace data, SLIM most certainly achieved a landing with 100-metre accuracy," Kuninaka said, although adding it will take about a month to verify it.

Japan is increasingly looking to play a bigger role in space, partnering with ally the United States to counter China. Japan is also home to several private-sector space startups and the JAXA aims to send an astronaut to the moon as part of NASA's Artemis program in the next few years.

But the Japanese space agency has recently faced multiple setbacks in rocket development, including the launch failure in March of its new flagship rocket H3 that was meant to match cost-competitiveness against commercial rocket providers like SpaceX.

The failure caused widespread delays in Japan's space missions, including SLIM and a joint lunar exploration with India, which in August made a historic touchdown on the moon's south pole with its Chandrayaan-3 probe.

< View the images at the source page. >

JAXA has twice landed on small asteroids, but unlike with an asteroid landing, the moon's gravity means the lander cannot pull up for another try, its scientists said. Three lunar missions by Japanese startup ispace, Russia's space agency and American company Astrobotic have failed in the past year.

In Sagamihara, a Tokyo suburb where JAXA's control centre is located, about 80 people gathered at a city hall for the public viewing of the midnight landing.

"There has been a series of launch failures (of JAXA’s rockets) so I really wanted this to succeed," said Toshie Yamamoto, an office worker in her 50s.

There was a tense atmosphere during the descent sequence, but they broke into applause when SLIM's landing on the moon was announced.

SOFT LANDING

Only four nations - the former Soviet Union, the United States, China and India - and no private company had achieved a soft landing on the moon's surface.

The 2.4m by 1.7m by 2.7m (7ft x 6ft x 9ft) vehicle includes two main engines and 12 thrusters, surrounded by solar cells, antennas, radar and cameras. Keeping it lightweight was another objective of the project, as Japan aims to carry out more frequent missions in the future by reducing launch costs. SLIM weighed 700 kg (1,540 lb) at launch, less than half of India's Chandrayaan-3.

As the probe descended onto the surface, it was designed to recognise where it was flying by matching its camera's images with existing satellite photos of the moon. This "vision-based navigation" enables a precise touchdown, JAXA has said.

The precision landing "won't be a game changer", but the cost-reduction effects of it and the lightweight probe manufacturing might open up moonshots to space organisations worldwide, Bleddyn Bowen, a University of Leicester associate professor specialising in space policy, said ahead of the touchdown.

Shock absorbers make contact with the lunar surface in what JAXA calls new "two-step landing" method - the rear parts touch the ground first, then the entire body gently collapses forward and stabilizes.

On landing, SLIM successfully deployed two mini-probes - a hopping vehicle as big as a microwave oven and a baseball-sized wheeled rover - that would have taken pictures of the spacecraft and were slowly sending them to the earth, JAXA said. Tech giant Sony Group (6758.T), opens new tab, toymaker Tomy (7867.T), opens new tab and several Japanese universities jointly developed the robots.

SLIM was launched on Japan's flagship H-IIA rocket in September and has taken a fuel-efficient four-month journey to the moon.

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But this year, things are different: the snow-clad mountains in the region are oddly brown and barren.

"This is unprecedented," Mr Ahmad, 50, says, and adds that tourists have stopped making reservations at his hotel.

Every year, thousands of tourists visit Kashmir in winter to enjoy skiing and sightseeing. But the absence of snowfall this year has bought the region's tourism industry to its knees.

Close to 100,000 tourists visited Kashmir last January, but this year that number has reduced by more than half, officials say.

Experts say the snowless winter will have a disastrous impact on the territory's economy as the tourism sector accounts for about 7% of Jammu and Kashmir's GDP. It will also impact farming and water supply as scanty snowfall will not replenish groundwater reserves adequately.

Environmentalists say that climate change has been impacting the region, causing extreme weather events and prolonged dry spells in both winter and summer. Jammu and Kashmir's weather department recorded a 79% rainfall deficit in December and a 100% deficit in January.

The valley is also experiencing warmer weather, with most stations in Kashmir recording a 6-8C (43-48F) rise in temperature this winter.

Local business owners say that the lack of tourists is impacting them

Hotel owners say tourists have cancelled their reservations, while many left after visiting the place as they were unable to enjoy skiing or sleigh rides.

"Over 40% of hotel reservations have been cancelled and new bookings are currently on hold," Aqib Chaya, president of Gulmarg Hoteliers Club, says.

Raj Kumar, a resident of the western state of Maharashtra who visited Kashmir with his family for the first time, says that they were crestfallen.
"We came here to witness snowfall and go on a cable car ride…but we were disappointed to see a snowless Gulmarg," he says.

The decline in tourists is hurting local businesses, a majority of which rely on tourism in the winter months to survive.

Tariq Ahmad Lone, who heads the pony riders association in Gulmarg which has about 5000 members, says that they have not been able to earn much in the last three months. Pony rides are an enjoyable way to travel through the region's highlands and hence, a popular tourist activity.

"Our livelihood directly depends upon snow. A snowless season will bring miseries for our families," he says. He adds that since most of the riders have been engaged in this profession for decades, it's almost impossible for them to find another source of livelihood.

Otherwise covered with a white carpet of snow, the mountains are brown this winter

Showkat Ahmad Rather, who heads the Ski Association of Gulmarg, echoes this sentiment.

"I have been working as a ski instructor for the past 27 years, I can't switch to doing something else," he says.

Apart from tourism, experts say that the absence of snowfall will also impact generation of hydroelectricity, fisheries and farming.

The neighbouring territory of Ladakh - another popular tourist destination - is also experiencing a snowless winter.

"The farming here is dependent on glaciers. The glaciers are melting at a fast rate. No snowfall in the peak [winter] season means early that spring water will be a big problem," environmentalist Sonam Wangchuk says.

"This is one of the driest spells in the Himalayan region," Sonam Lotus, director of the Meteorological Centre in Leh, says. Irfan Rashid, an assistant professor at University of Kashmir, adds that a drought like situation "can't be ruled out".

The region normally receives heavy snowfall during peak winter - a 40-day period that lasts from 21 December to 29 January. During this time, mountains and glaciers get covered with snow and this ensures water supply throughout the year.

Residents are offering special prayers for an end to the dry spell

Some experts say that snowfall in the region has been declining for the past couple of years.

"Before the 1990s, we would witness heavy snowfall of up to 3ft (0.9m) and it wouldn't melt until spring. But we are now witnessing warm winters," Shakil Ahmad Romshoo, an earth scientist, says.

He is among those who believe that the Kashmir valley is facing the "brunt" of climate change.

"Our per capita greenhouse gas emissions are very less compared to other states. People in Kashmir have a very modest lifestyle. We are the victims of global climate change."

According to a study by Mr Romshoo and his team, the region, including Ladakh, could heat up to "catastrophic levels" by the end of the century - it could witness a rise in temperature by 3.98-6.93C.

Meanwhile, locals continue to hope for a miracle this winter.

The weather department hasn't predicted a spell of heavy snowfall until 24 January, but Mr Ahmad says that he's hopeful that nature will be "kind" to them.

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Also:  There is something amiss with snowfall in the Himalayas from Nepal to Hindu Kush.

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Surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania announced today that they successfully attached a genetically altered pig liver to a brain-dead person and found that the organ functioned normally for 72 hours. The experiment represents a step toward using pig organs to help extremely ill patients with failing livers.

The researchers behind the experiment think pig livers could be used to stabilize patients who need a liver transplant and are waiting for a donor. For patients whose own livers could recover, pig organs could also offer temporary support. “If you can provide some kind of way to increase the chance of recovery, maybe you can avoid transplantation,” says Abraham Shaked, a surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania Transplant Institute, who oversaw the study.

As the largest organ in the body, the liver carries out many vital functions. It makes bile, which is needed to digest food. It converts toxic ammonia into a substance that’s flushed out of the body in urine. It also regulates blood clotting, keeps blood sugar in check, removes waste, and helps fight infection.

But sometimes, the liver stops working. Alcohol abuse, viral infections, obesity, and drug overdose can cause the liver to fail. Each year in the United States, more than 330,000 people need treatment for liver failure. Some people recover, but those with long-term damage may require a transplant. Like other organs, livers are in short supply. More than 10,000 patients are on the US waiting list to receive a liver transplant.

During the experimental procedure, which took place in December, doctors kept the patient on a ventilator after determining that they had experienced brain death. The person’s own liver was kept intact while a pig liver was placed outside the body in a device called a perfusion machine. Tubes circulated blood from a vein in the groin through the pig liver on the machine and returned the blood to a vein in the neck.

Researchers conducted the experiment with the family’s consent and electively stopped it at the three-day mark. During that time, the pig liver produced bile and maintained normal blood acidity in the patient, who remained in a stable condition. “We were all taken by surprise because the liver still looked pretty good after three days,” Shaked says.

Scientists have long sought to use animals as a way to ease the human organ shortage. More than 103,000 people in the United States are on the national transplant waiting list, and 17 people die each day waiting for an organ. Pigs are being explored as donors because they’re readily available and have similar-sized anatomy. But their organs aren’t naturally compatible with the human body and would be swiftly rejected by a person’s immune system upon transplant.

Even with a pig organ sitting outside the human body, there’s still a risk of rejection because the patient’s blood is moved through the pig liver. Antibodies in the blood can recognize the organ as foreign and may try to attack it.

That has led researchers to genetically alter pigs in an attempt to make their organs a better match. The biotech company that bred the pig for the Penn study, eGenesis of Cambridge, Massaschetts, is aiming to do that with gene editing. Scientists at the company used Crispr to make a total of 69 genetic edits to the animal. These included knocking out three pig genes to prevent immediate immune rejection and inserting seven human genes involved in inflammation, immunity, and blood clotting. The remaining edits disabled innate viruses found in the pig genome that could hypothetically infect people. In October, eGenesis reported in the journal Nature that a kidney from a pig with the same edits functioned in a monkey for more than two years.

The idea of supporting patients with a pig liver outside the body isn’t new. In the 1960s and 1970s, more than 100 such procedures were attempted to help patients with liver failure. The method was abandoned once liver transplantation from deceased human donors became established.

In the 1990s, researchers at Duke University carried out a series of similar experiments in people with liver failure, but the procedures lasted only two to five hours before the pig livers failed.

“It didn’t work that great,” says Mike Curtis, CEO of eGenesis. In previous attempts with unmodified pig livers, swelling would occur and blood flow would stop within a matter of hours. In the Penn study, researchers observed stable blood flow and pressure. There were also no signs of inflammation. “The simple question was, would our organs perform better? And the answer now is yes,” he says.

Whether all 69 edits are needed is still up for debate. A study published in 2000 showed that organs from pigs with just two genetic modifications were able to support two liver failure patients for up to 10 hours before they were able to get a transplant from a human donor. Curtis thinks the added alterations will ultimately allow patients to be supported for longer.

The Penn team plans to refine the procedure on an additional three brain-dead people. Curtis says eGenesis is also meeting with the FDA this month to discuss plans for an early-phase trial to use its pig system on patients with liver failure. In lieu of a formal trial, the company is also considering one-off experiments in sick patients through the FDA’s “compassionate use” program, which allows an experimental medical product to be used when it’s the only option available for someone with a life-threatening condition.

In 2022 and 2023, surgeons at the University of Maryland used this pathway to perform two separate transplants on patients using hearts from genetically engineered pigs. Both recipients had suffered heart failure but weren’t eligible for a traditional transplant with a human organ. The first patient, David Bennett, lived for two months before passing away in March 2022. The second, Lawrence Faucette, died in October last year, six weeks after his transplant.

“When you’re talking about longer organ replacements, there’s a lot of complex immune responses,” Shaked says. “Here, it's a very different way of thinking.”

He says the eGenesis pig livers could probably keep functioning for five days, but beyond that, he’s not so sure. Human livers can typically only be preserved outside the body for nine or so hours. The machine used in the study, made by British company OrganOx, is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and has been shown to extend that window by several hours. No one knows how long a pig liver would last on the machine while hooked up to a person.

Parsia Vagefi, professor of surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who was not involved in the Penn study, says it remains to be seen whether the combination of genetic modifications and perfusion device will help support living patients.

“There’s been a push to innovate to help address the organ shortage,” Vagefi says. “But I think we have to be cognizant of the fact that more research is needed.”

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A new public information campaign against cultivated—or “lab-grown”—meat is being run by a group with close links to a controversial public relations firm. The group has launched TV adverts and a website purportedly to educate the public about cultivated meat, but its approach—which draws on a PR playbook previously used to discredit the plant-based meat industry—has been criticized by supporters of the cultivated meat industry who claim these campaigns are deceptive and unscientific.

The campaign was launched in 2023 by the Center for the Environment and Welfare (CEW)—a group led by executive director Jack Hubbard, who is also a partner at public relations firm Berman and Company, which has a long history of supporting nonprofits that defend the interests of the food and drink industry. Hubbard told WIRED that Berman and Company helps provide services for CEW, but he would not disclose a list of the campaign group’s funders.

“Everything we’re doing is designed to educate and inform consumers,” Hubbard says of CEW’s work. But Jessica Alamy, senior vice president of policy at the nonprofit Good Food Institute, which works to accelerate adoption of alternatives to animal protein, alleges that CEW is a source of misinformation. “I think it is attempting to stoke fear about a clear, safe choice that’s on a few restaurant menus in the United States and Singapore,” she claims.

One advert that ran on Fox News features some cultivated meat being presented at a fictional school science fair by a child, who says that the cells “grow like a tumor” and are “bath[ed] with chemicals.” CEW has also set up a website that compares the cells used to grow cultivated meat with tumor cells, drawing heavily from an article published by Bloomberg Businessweek in February 2023 that raised fears about immortalized cells. These are a type of cell prized by the cultivated meat industry because they duplicate indefinitely, making it much easier to grow large quantities of meat from small samples of cells.

An unlimited ability to grow is also a hallmark of cancer cells, although it is far from the only aspect that makes a cell cancerous. Scientists interviewed for the Bloomberg Businessweek piece stated that it was “essentially impossible” for people to get cancer from eating even cancerous animal cells. As cultivated meats made from immortalized cells have been assessed by food regulators in the US, Singapore, and Australia, these regulators have concluded that they are safe for humans to consume. (Meanwhile, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer lists red meat as “probably carcinogenic,” and beef from cows with cancer has found its way into the food system before.)

CEW’s campaign taps into fears that people might have already about novel foods, says Chris Bryant, a research consultant who specializes in cultivated meat. One section of the microsite set up by CEW lists a number of chemicals that it says might be used in the production of cultivated meat. “If one wants people to tend to reject cultivated meat more, that framing is there to be exploited. It’s entirely predictable,” Bryant says.

Alamy said that the suggestion that ingesting immortalized cells could be linked to cancer in humans was “so ludicrous as to be laughable.” “So few people have had cultivated meat or have access to it that it feels like these things that are being raised are more fearmongering than anything else,” she says. “It feels like it’s taking advantage of consumers’ unfamiliarity with this product.”

The CEW website and ad campaign is reminiscent of a similar campaign targeting the plant-based meat industry by the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), another US campaign group. One advert the CCF ran during the 2020 Super Bowl featured a mock spelling bee where students struggled to spell some ingredients found in plant-based burgers. “You might need a PhD to understand what’s in synthetic meat,” ran the voiceover. Founded by Rick Berman in 1996, the CCF has a long history of campaigning against plant-based meat, animal welfare charities, and legislation to ban the sale of animal fur.

The latest campaign from CEW also criticizes the environmental credentials of cultivated meat, citing a preprint study that found that cultivated meat could have 25 times the carbon footprint of regular beef. The study was widely picked up in the press and drew criticism from the Good Food Institute for detailing unlikely production methods relying on very high levels of ingredient purification. Other studies have found that cultivated meat could have much lower carbon emissions than conventional beef, although until manufacturers scale up production, it is difficult to know exactly how emissions-intensive production might be.

Bryant says that the CEW website seems to deliberately select material that puts cultivated meat in the worst possible light. “It’s presented information to inspire more concern than is warranted,” he says.

In response to the criticisms raised in this article, Hubbard says that “CEW is simply presenting existing research, the opinion of subject matter experts, and a commonsense perspective to Americans so they can make up their own minds. Consumers stand to benefit from a robust debate.”

The future of the nascent industry is still highly uncertain, with most work in cultivated meat being carried out by privately funded startups. There has been some government support for the technology, however. In 2021 the US Department of Agriculture gave a $10 million grant to Tufts University in Boston for work on cultivated meat, and there have also been government grants in the UK, Israel, and the Netherlands.

But some lawmakers are pushing back against cultivated meat. In November 2023, the Italian parliament passed a law prohibiting the use, sale, import, and export of feed “from cell cultures or tissue derived from vertebrate animals.” In Arizona, a bill seeking to prohibit the labeling of cultivated animal cells as “meat” was introduced by state representative Quang Nguyen in January, while legislation that would limit the labeling or sales of cultivated meat have also been proposed in Florida and Texas.

Alamy says that she hopes the campaigning from CEW doesn’t stymy the opportunity for customers in the US and beyond to eventually try cultivated meat and decide for themselves whether they’ll buy it again. “This is about consumer choice and innovation. We’re really excited to see cultivated meat come to market, and hopeful that consumers, once they have an opportunity to try it, are going to find that it fits into their life and it’s delicious and affordable.”

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Previous studies have found that about 5,000 gigatons of ice has been lost from the surface of the Greenland ice sheet in the past two decades, a major contributor to rising sea levels.

In the new study, researchers in the United States compiled nearly 240,000 satellite images of glacier terminus positions – where glaciers meet the ocean – from 1985 to 2022.

"Nearly every glacier in Greenland has thinned or retreated over the past few decades," lead author Chad Greene, a glaciologist from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told AFP.

"There really aren't any exceptions, and this is happening everywhere, all at once."

They found that over 1000 gigatons (1 gigaton is equivalent to 1 billion tons), or 20 percent, of ice around the edges of Greenland had been lost over the past four decades and not been accounted for.

"The Greenland ice sheet has lost appreciably more ice in recent decades than previously thought," researchers said in the journal Nature.

Because the ice at the island's edges is already in the water, the authors stressed that this would have had a "minimal" direct impact on sea level rise.

But it could herald further overall ice melt, allowing glaciers to more easily slip towards the sea.

Researchers found that the Greenland glaciers most susceptible to seasonal changes – that is expanding in winter and retreating in summer – are also the ones most sensitive to the impact of global warming and experienced the most significant retreat since 1985.

The melting of Greenland's vast ice sheet – the world's second-largest after Antarctica – is estimated to have contributed more than 20 percent to observed sea level rise since 2002.

Rising sea levels threaten to intensify flooding in coastal and island communities that are home to hundreds of millions of people, and could eventually submerge whole island nations and seafront cities.

Warming

Last year was the hottest on record, and ocean temperatures were "persistently and unusually high", according to Copernicus, Europe's climate monitor.

The Arctic, warming roughly four times faster than the rest of the planet, saw its warmest ever summer in 2023, the result of accelerating human-caused climate change.

Warming of the atmosphere can cause the surface of glaciers to melt and trickle down into the bottom of the ice sheet, which makes it easier for more ice to be lost.

"It's like putting water between the tire and the road, and the ice just starts to slide right off into the ocean," said Greene.

Warmer oceans, which have absorbed around 90 percent of the excess heat caused by humanity's carbon pollution, are linked to the melting of crucial ice shelves buffering the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.

Researchers also raised concerns about another potential impact: the disruption of the deep-water currents that are key drivers of global weather patterns.

They said this flood of extra freshwater melting into the ocean could affect the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a vast system that regulates the global transfer of heat from the tropics into the northern hemisphere.

A consortium of international scientists last year warned that AMOC changes and melting ice sheets were among some two dozen climate tipping points presenting humanity with an "unprecedented" threat.

© Agence France-Presse

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Over 700 out-of-control wildfires in the province demanded the attention of Canadian firefighters—and international crews to mitigate the burn area. The arson took resources away from critical firefighting efforts.

Thirty-eight-year-old Brian Paré admitted to having started all fourteen fires. The 700 fires were ignited by lightning strikes in the boreal forests of Quebec, not deliberately created by the government as Paré alleged. He was not the only one pushing the lie; even the Albertan Premier dished out the bullpucky. MAGA isn’t just for simple-minded Americans anymore.

Check out the CBC article where MAGA untruths are being spread to upend Canadian military aid to Ukraine by claiming the Trudeau government requires Ukraine to pay a carbon tax. 

The McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside above a lakefront home in West Kelowna, BC,  Canada, on Friday, Aug. 18, 2023.

From The Guardian:

Fire officials investigated a string of five blazes in June that had no possible natural cause and broke out days after the province had implemented a fire ban. The 38-year-old Paré quickly became a suspect when he was spotted in the location of the fires and “demonstrated a certain interest in fires” after an interview with police, said Charron.

In June police began watching his social media posts, which frequently focused on the province’s wildfires. He shared content suggesting the record-breaking fire season was the result of government intervention, not climate change. The prosecution said police specialists developed a suspect profile based on the fires – and increasingly, Paré’s seemed a match.

Police later obtained a warrant to install a tracking device on Paré’s vehicle and found he travelled to locations where other fires were started.

After he was arrested in September, he admitted to starting nine fires and “claimed he was doing tests to find out whether the forest was really dry or not”, Charron told the court.

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A year and a half has passed since Google first pledged to delete all location data on users’ visits to abortion clinics with minimal progress. The move would have made it harder for law enforcement to use that information to investigate or prosecute people seeking abortions in states where the procedure has been banned or otherwise limited. Now, a new study shows Google still retains location history data in 50% of cases.

Google’s original promise, made in July 2022, came shortly after the supreme court’s decision to end federal abortion protections. The tech giant said it would delete entries for locations deemed “personal” or sensitive, including “medical facilities like counseling centers, domestic violence shelters, and abortion clinics”. It did not provide a timeline for when the company would implement the new policy. Five months after that pledge, research first reported by the Guardian and conducted by tech advocacy group Accountable Tech in November 2022 showed that Google was still not masking that location data in all cases.

At the time, Google said it prioritized user privacy and that it had implemented the changes to its location retention policies in early 2022 “as promised” but that the system must not have detected that the user had visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in some of the cases.

In its newest study, which the Guardian reviewed exclusively, Accountable Tech found that the company still wasn’t deleting location history in all cases as promised, though Google’s rate of retention improved slightly. The rate of retention of location information decreased from 60% of tested cases, a measurement taken five months after Google’s pledge, to 50% of tested cases in the most recent experiment. The director of product of Google Maps, Marlo McGriff, disputed the findings of the study.

“We are upholding our promise to delete particularly personal places from Location History if these places are identified by our systems – any claims that we’re not doing so are patently false or misguided,” McGriff said in a statement.

Accountable Tech replicated its 2022 study to measure Google’s progress. Researchers used a brand new Android device to direct themselves to abortion clinics then tested what location data was stored about their trip. This time the researchers ran eight tests in seven states: Pennsylvania, Texas, Nevada, Florida, New York, Georgia and North Carolina. In four out of eight of the tests, the route to the Planned Parenthood was retained in the device’s location history, though the name of the clinic was scrubbed. Data on searches for for abortion clinics was still retained in the web and activity history as in the researchers’ first test.

“With the same odds as a coin flip, an abortion seeker’s location data might still be retained and used to prosecute them,” the study reads. “On top of that, as we’ve seen through the experiments, Google still retains location search query data, and likely other incriminating data as well – from email to Google search data.”

In examples from the study the Guardian shared with Google, McGriff said the system did not detect a visit to Planned Parenthood and thus did not delete the route. In another case, Accountable Tech researchers visited the Central Harlem Sexual Health Clinic run by New York City Health and Hospitals. Google said a general health facility that provides several services other than abortion care may not be categorized as a “personal” location under the new policy, meaning the information could be retained.

Google’s policies governing the storage of location and other user data sparked renewed concern in the wake of the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health case that reversed Roe v Wade. The company receives and responds to tens of thousands of law enforcement requests for access to its vast troves of user data and complies with 80% of those requests with some level of information, according to the company’s government transparency report.

Police and law enforcement agencies have also made increasing use of a novel category of search warrant called “reverse search warrants”. In that category are geofence location warrants, which police use to come up with a list of suspects by seeking out information on all users whose devices have been detected in a certain place at a certain time. Many activists worry law enforcement would use these search warrants to collect data to find and prosecute or investigate those seeking abortions.

Just weeks ago, Google announced that it planned to change the way it stored location history data for all users in a way that could render responding to geofence warrants effectively impossible. The changes include storing location data on users’ devices by default; encrypting any location data that is backed up to Google’s cloud storage and deleting location data after three months.

While Accountable Tech felt Google’s announcement is a “step in the right direction”, the group said the company’s inability to follow through on previous commitments to protect location data shows Google “cannot be trusted to meet its public commitments on the timeline it promises”.

“We cannot take the company on its word,” the group wrote in its study.

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The Greenland ice cap is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour due to the climate crisis, a study has revealed, which is 20% more than was previously thought.

Some scientists are concerned that this additional source of freshwater pouring into the north Atlantic might mean a collapse of the ocean currents called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is closer to being triggered, with severe consequences for humanity.

Major ice loss from Greenland as a result of global heating has been recorded for decades. The techniques employed to date, such as measuring the height of the ice sheet or its weight via gravity data, are good at determining the losses that end up in the ocean and drive up sea level.

However, they cannot account for the retreat of glaciers that already lie mostly below sea level in the narrow fjords around the island. In the study, satellite photos were analysed by scientists to determine the end position of Greenland’s many glaciers every month from 1985 to 2022. This showed large and widespread shortening and in total amounted to a trillion tonnes of lost ice.

< View the graphic at the source page. >

“The changes around Greenland are tremendous and they’re happening everywhere – almost every glacier has retreated over the past few decades,” said Dr Chad Greene, at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US, who led the research. “It makes sense that if you dump freshwater on to the north Atlantic Ocean, then you certainly get a weakening of the Amoc, though I don’t have an intuition for how much weakening.”

The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years and in 2021 researchers spotted warning signs of a tipping point. A recent study suggested the collapse could happen as soon as 2025 in the worst-case scenario. A significant part of the Greenland ice sheet itself is also thought by scientists to be close to a tipping point of irreversible melting, with ice equivalent to 1-2 metres of sea level rise probably already expected.

The study, published in the journal Nature, used artificial intelligence techniques to map more than 235,000 glacier end positions over the 38-year period, at a resolution of 120 metres. This showed the Greenland ice sheet had lost an area of about 5,000 sq km of ice at its margins since 1985, equivalent to a trillion tonnes of ice.

The most recent update from a project that collates all the other measurements of Greenland’s ice found that 221bn tonnes of ice had been lost every year since 2003. The new study adds another 43bn tonnes a year, making the total loss about 30m tonnes an hour on average.

The scientists said: “There is some concern that any small source of freshwater may serve as a ‘tipping point’ that could trigger a full-scale collapse of the Amoc, disrupting global weather patterns, ecosystems and global food security. Yet freshwater from the glacier retreat of Greenland is not included in oceanographic models at present.” The influx of less dense freshwater into the sea slows the usual process of heavier salty water sinking in the polar region and driving the Amoc.

Prof Tim Lenton, at the University of Exeter, UK, and not part of the study, said: “This additional freshwater input to the north Atlantic is a concern, particularly for the formation of deep water in the Labrador and Irminger Seas within the subpolar gyre, as other evidence suggests these are the regions most prone to being tipped into an ‘off’, or collapsed state.”

“That would be like a partial Amoc collapse, but unfolding faster and having profound impacts on the UK, western Europe, parts of North America, and the Sahel region, where the west African monsoon could be severely disrupted,” he said. “Whether this previously unaccounted source is enough freshwater to make a difference depends on how close we are to that subpolar gyre tipping point. Recent models suggest it could be close already at the present level of global warming.”

However, Prof Andrew Shepherd, at the University of Northumbria, UK, said: “Although there was a step-change in glacier retreat at the turn of the century, it’s reassuring to see that the pace of ice loss has been steady since then and is still well below the levels needed to disturb the Amoc.”

The discovery of the extra ice loss is also important for calculating the Earth’s energy imbalance, ie how much extra solar heat the Earth is trapping due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, said Greene. “It takes a lot of energy to melt 1tn tonnes of ice. So if we want very precise energy balanced models for the Earth, this has to be accounted for.”

The glaciers analysed in the study were mostly below sea level already, so the lost ice was replaced by sea water and did not affect sea level directly. But Green said: “It almost certainly has an indirect effect, by allowing glaciers to speed up. These narrow fjords are the bottleneck, so if you start carving away at the edges of the ice, it’s like removing the plug in the drain.”

Chad and colleagues also analysed the extent of Antarctic ice shelves over time in a study published in 2022. It found that the total lost from the ice shelves since 1997 was doubled to about 12tn tonnes when the shrinking areal extent of the shelves was accounted for and added to the thinning of the shelves.

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It was a flight fit for Samuel L. Jackson.

Passengers on a Thai AirAsia scrambled out of their seats after a small snake was seen slithering in the overhead luggage bins.

The video has been viewed millions of times since it was uploaded to social media.

The flight was headed from Bangkok to Phuket on Jan. 13 when the chaos broke out, the Independent reported.

A member of the flight crew was seen using an empty plastic bottle to capture the snake.

Some people who watched a video of the incident on TikTok likened the situation to the 2006 action film “Snakes on a Plane,” starring Jackson.

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The incident prompted pilots of the plane with 159 passengers on board to turn back over the Pacific to Haneda airport, where the man was handed over to police, according to ANA.

Japanese broadcaster TBS quoted the passenger as telling investigators that he "doesn't recall at all" his behavior.

The incident left some social media users likening it in mock horror to the "beginning of a zombie movie."

Others lamented the litany of Japanese aviation woes so far this year — with four other incidents making headlines in just over two weeks.

The most serious was a near-catastrophic collision at Haneda between a Japan Airlines aircraft and a smaller coast guard plane on January 2. All 379 people on board the JAL Airbus escaped just before the aircraft was engulfed in flames. Five of the six people on the smaller aircraft, which was helping in a relief operation after a major earthquake in central Japan, died.

Then on Tuesday, the wing tip of a Korean Air airliner struck an empty Cathay Pacific plane while taxiing at an airport in the northern island of Hokkaido. Korean Air said the accident, which caused no injuries, happened after "the third-party ground handler vehicle slipped due to heavy snow."

A similar mishap took place on Sunday when an ANA aircraft came into "contact" with a Delta Air Lines plane at a Chicago airport, the Japanese airline told AFP, also causing no injuries.

Another ANA flight reportedly had to turn back on Saturday after a crack was discovered on the cockpit window of the Boeing 737-800.

"Wing strike" incidents "do happen" because many airports are handling bigger planes than they were built for, Doug Drury, aviation expert at Central Queensland University, told AFP.

"The cracked window incident may have been caused by a faulty window heat system as the temperatures are quite extreme at altitude," he added.

"This is not uncommon and has happened to me during my career."

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To date, the effects of climate change on global rainfall has been uncertain. This has hampered our capacity to adapt to climate change and prepare for natural disasters.

Our method overcomes this uncertainty. We identified the regions where multiple climate models make similar projections about future rainfall impacts, and so reveal the global hot spots for drier and wetter conditions in future.

Our findings, published in Nature Communications, have deep implications for a large proportion of the world's population—including millions of Australians.

Navigating the uncertainty of rain projections

Climate models are one of the main ways scientists understand how the climate behaved in the past and might change in future. They comprise millions of lines of computer code and use mathematical equations to represent how energy and materials move through the ocean, atmosphere and land. For future projections, climate models are driven by emissions scenarios representing various possible emissions trajectories.

Using climate models to simulate future rainfall patterns is a difficult task. Rain is influenced by complex factors, such as radiative balance (how much of the sun's energy is coming in versus how much is leaving), as well as climate drivers linked to specific sea surface temperature patterns, such as El Niño and La Niña. This means different climate models often produce different rainfall projections, especially at a regional level.

We wanted to investigate the extent to which climate models "agree," or produce similar projections, about how CO₂ emissions may affect future rainfall around the globe.

There are several ways to do this. The usual method is to average out data collected over time—say, two decades. But this approach can eliminate important information and obscure vital insights into how rainfall will behave in future.

We used an innovative and more comprehensive approach based on "time-series" data, or data collected at regular intervals over time—comprising historical and future projections from 1980 to 2100. This approach accounts for continual changes over time, both in the recent past and out to the end of this century.

We analyzed both the current and previous generations of climate models—146 in all.

The global hotspots

Our analysis showed several countries facing drier conditions in future. The top five most affected were Greece, Spain, Palestine, Portugal and Morocco, where at least 85% of models projected significantly reduced annual rainfall by the end of this century, under a worst-case scenario of very high emissions.

In contrast, for Finland, North Korea, Russia, Canada and Norway, more than 90% of models agreed on a trend towards increasing annual rainfall.

The picture was similar for most parts of the highly populated nations of China and India, which are together home to more than 2.7 billion people. In those nations, 70% of models agreed on projections for increasing rainfall.

Our analysis showed some European countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany and France, were generally projected to experience less rainfall in summer and more in winter. These increases and decreases offset each other, which means no change in total rainfall, but substantial changes in seasonal distributions over the year.

Using our approach, rainfall projections remained unclear for some parts of the world. These include most of Australia, as well as central Europe, southwest Asia and parts of the African west coast and South America.

All up, the regions getting wetter or drier under global warming cover a vast proportion of the globe. Under scenarios where emissions remain intermediate (where emissions decline to about half of 2050 levels by the end of the century), 38% of the current world's population, or three billion people, would be affected by changes in rainfall.

If we experience very high emissions instead, 66% of the world's population—or 5 billion people—would be affected. Many of these regions are already experiencing the wetting and drying effects of climate change.

A spotlight on Australia

Our analysis for Australia found climate models agree on a significant drying hotspot over the Indian Ocean, engulfing Australia's southwestern and south coasts. Spring was the season with the greatest rainfall reduction over this region.

What about at a state level? Under a very high emissions scenario, half of models indicate future drier conditions for Victoria. This is driven by changes in winter and spring rainfall. Other states and territories with agreement for a drier future winter, also under a high emissions scenario, include the Australian Capital Territory and Western Australia. The models also project a reduction in spring rainfall in Tasmania.

Some 1.9 million Australians would be affected by these drying patterns, under an intermediate emissions scenario. They comprise those in southwest WA including Perth and the Wheatbelt region. Under very high emissions, as the impacted region expands fourfold towards western Victoria, around 8 million Australians could be affected.

Looking ahead

As climate change accelerates, it's essential to understand the potential changes in global rainfall and the consequences on human populations.

My colleagues and I hope our findings reduce uncertainty about how rainfall patterns will shift around the world, and help governments and communities to design effective ways to adapt.

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Fujitsu yesterday apologized for its role in the British Post Office scandal, acknowledging that its buggy accounting software contributed to the wrongful prosecutions of hundreds of postal employees.

"Fujitsu would like to apologize for our part in this appalling miscarriage of justice," Paul Patterson, co-CEO of Fujitsu's European division, said in a hearing held by the UK Parliament's Business and Trade Committee. "We were involved from the very start. We did have bugs and errors in the system and we did help the Post Office in their prosecutions of the sub-postmasters. For that we are truly sorry."

The committee hearing focused on possible compensation for victims of what has been called "the worst miscarriage of justice in British history." Patterson said that Fujitsu has "a moral obligation" to contribute to the compensation for victims.

A BBC report explains that between 1999 and 2015, "more than 900 sub-postmasters and postmistresses were prosecuted for theft and false accounting after money appeared to be missing from their branches, but the prosecutions were based on evidence from faulty Horizon software. Some sub-postmasters wrongfully went to prison, many were financially ruined. Some have since died."

So far, "only 93 convictions have been overturned and thousands of people are still waiting for compensation settlements," the BBC wrote. The wrongful prosecutions have been linked to several suicides.

Fujitsu exec is “personally appalled”

Horizon software is made by Fujitsu subsidiary International Computers Limited (ICL). In 1996, ICL won a contract to design, build, and operate computer systems to be installed in the UK's 19,000 post offices. The project was plagued by delays but started rolling out to post offices in 1999. Fujitsu bought an 80 percent stake in ICL in 1990 and became the sole owner in 1998.

As Patterson told Members of Parliament (MPs) yesterday, Fujitsu provided data to the Post Office to support the wrongful prosecutions. "I am personally appalled by the evidence that I have seen," he said.

Patterson reportedly joined Fujitsu in 2010 and was promoted to his current position in 2019. He was quoted as saying that he doesn't know why Fujitsu didn't fix the errors when they were discovered.

"Asked why Fujitsu didn't do anything about glitches in the Horizon system when the company knew about them at an early stage, Mr. Patterson said: 'I don't know. I really don't know,'" according to the BBC.

Fujitsu did not live up to the company's values, he said. "I believe we are an ethical company. The company today is quite different to the company in the early 2000s, and clearly we need to demonstrate that both to our customers, to government, and to the wider society here in the UK," Patterson said. Fujitsu stock lost over $1 billion in value after Patterson's testimony.

Post Office hasn’t tracked down money

The Parliament hearing also featured testimony from Post Office Chief Executive Nick Read, who was hired in 2019. According to Sky News, Read "said the company has still 'not got to the bottom of' what happened to the cash paid by sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses in a bid to cover the false financial black holes created by the faulty Horizon software."

"However, he admitted it is a possibility the money taken from branch managers could have been part of 'hefty numeration packages for executives,'" the report said.

"It's possible, absolutely it's possible," Read told the committee.

Jo Hamilton, one of the victims who had her conviction overturned, reportedly said that trying to get compensation from the Post Office felt "like being treated like a criminal all over again."

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