At least 200 million people worldwide have struggled with long COVID: a slew of symptoms that can persist for months or even years after an infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. But research suggests that that number would likely be much higher if not for vaccines.

A growing consensus is emerging that receiving multiple doses of the COVID vaccine before an initial infection can dramatically reduce the risk of long-term symptoms. Although the studies disagree on the exact amount of protection, they show a clear trend: the more shots in your arm before your first bout with COVID, the less likely you are to get long COVID. One meta-analysis of 24 studies published in October, for example, found that people who’d had three doses of the COVID vaccine were 68.7 percent less likely to develop long COVID compared with those who were unvaccinated. “This is really impressive,” says Alexandre Marra, a medical researcher at the Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital in Brazil and the lead author of the study. “Booster doses make a difference in long COVID.”

It is also a welcome departure from earlier studies, which suggested that vaccines provided only a modest defense against long COVID. In 2022 Marra’s team published a meta-analysis of six studies that found that a single dose of the COVID vaccine reduced the likelihood of long COVID by 30 percent. Now, that protection appears to be much greater.

A study published in November in the BMJ found that a single COVID vaccine dose reduced the risk of long COVID by 21 percent, two doses reduced it by 59 percent and three or more doses reduced it by 73 percent. Vaccine effectiveness clearly climbed with each successive dose. “I was surprised that we saw such a clear dose response,” says Fredrik Nyberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and one of the co-authors of the study. “The more doses you had in your body before your first infection, the better.” That lines up with the findings of several new studies, which similarly show this ladderlike benefit. Marra’s October 2023 meta-analysis found that two doses reduced long COVID likelihood by 36.9 percent and three doses reduced it by 68.7 percent. And in a study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, other researchers found that the prevalence of long COVID in health care workers dropped from 41.8 percent in unvaccinated participants to 30 percent in those with a single dose, 17.4 percent with two doses and 16 percent with three doses.

These studies were conducted in various countries with differing health care systems, demographics, COVID vaccination uptake and COVID prevalence. As such, Marra notes that the COVID vaccines’ effectiveness against long COVID will vary and may not be generalizable to other settings. Still, the consistency of the studies’ findings is telling—regardless of their settings, many studies agree that boosters provide potent protection against long COVID. Marra’s recent meta-analysis, for example, showed that the prevalence of long COVID in the early years of the pandemic was consistently above 20 percent. Today rates of long COVID have dropped, likely thanks to increased immunity, milder variants and improved treatment. Yet there is still a sharp divide between unvaccinated and vaccinated people. The prevalence of long COVID is currently 11 percent among those who are unvaccinated and 5 percent among those who have had two or more doses of the vaccine. “It is a significant difference for those who are unwilling to take the risk,” he says.

The question is why. It could be that these vaccines help prevent severe COVID itself, which is a risk factor for long COVID. But that does not appear to be the whole story—in part because the boosters have also been shown to shield people who had only a mild COVID infection. Unfortunately, the precise mechanisms at play are hard to disentangle because the cause of long COVID itself is still cloaked in mystery. One possibility is that the virus lingers in the body, hiding in various organs—such as the gut or brain—and causing chronic inflammation. Another is that long COVID is an autoimmune disease in which the immune response triggered by the initial infection wages an extended war against the body, causing symptoms long after the initial infection has been cleared.

For both scenarios, boosters give people the upper hand, argues Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University who is co-leading a clinical trial on long COVID. That is because boosters enhance antibodies—increasing both their numbers and their ability to bind to the virus—as well as T and B immune cells that help fight the virus. With both components, “people who take the booster shots have an improved ability to fight off infection,” Iwasaki says. And that is key, allowing the booster to quash a growing infection before it spirals out of control. “The more you can prevent the replication and spread of the virus within the body, the less chance the virus has to seed a niche—to establish reservoirs or cause excessive inflammation that leads to autoimmunity,” she says.

Although it will take time to pinpoint the exact reason behind vaccines’ protective effect against long COVID, many medical experts are hopeful that the new studies will help counter the spread of misinformation and disinformation about the COVID immunizations that has contributed to vaccine hesitancy. But experts also note that while vaccines reduce the risk of long COVID, they do not eradicate it, and protection may wane over time.

“Breakthrough infections can still occur, and the dynamic of the virus—including the emergence of new variants—add complexity to the situation,” Marra says. As such, he notes that it’s important to continue to follow public health guidelines to minimize the impact of COVID, including the risk of long-term symptoms.

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For Gastón Paladini, pork is a family affair. In 1923, his great-grandfather Don Juan Paladini moved from Italy to Santa Fe, Argentina, where he started putting a South American twist on classic Italian sausage recipes. Eventually, Don Juan’s company became one of Argentina’s largest meat producers. It still bears the family name: Paladini.

But in 2020, Gastón started having the kind of heretical thoughts that would have made his ancestors blush. What if you could capture the essence of pork—that meaty, umami sweetness—and put it inside of a plant? Paladini’s imagination ran wild with thoughts of a soybean that dripped blood: a chimera that packed all the flavor of pig meat into a seedling.

Today, Paladini is the CEO of Moolec Science, a molecular farming firm that uses crops to grow animal proteins. The idea is to turn plants into tiny, field-based factories that can produce high-value proteins and other molecules that might be used to supplement existing products, or provide a meaty heft to plant-based food. “This is the real thing. These are real meat-protein molecules,” says Paladini.

In June 2023, Moolec revealed that it had inserted genes from pigs into soy plants in order to make soybeans that expressed porcine proteins. The experiments were carried out at the company’s greenhouses in Wisconsin. In some of the soybeans, over a quarter of the soluble proteins were identified as pig. It’s not quite the bleeding soybean that he first imagined, but Palidini was still impressed with just how much pig protein his soybeans seemed to produce. The beans have a pinky hue and a meaty taste, he says, though the company is still awaiting a full analysis of their nutritional qualities. Next year, Paladini hopes to take the soybeans to outdoor field trials in Wisconsin.

Plant-based meat companies might be particularly interested in animal proteins grown this way. In the US, sales of plant-based products are flat-lining amid signs that consumers are underwhelmed by these animal-free offerings. As confidence wavers, more startups are hoping to create the killer ingredient that can help plant-based sausages and burgers rival their fleshy counterparts. Australian startup Nourish uses genetically-engineered yeast to produce animal-like fats, while UK-based Hoxton Farms grows fat from actual animal cells in bioreactors.

“I personally believe that the plant-based industry has slowed down because the cost, taste, and flavor are good—but not good enough,” says Paladini. “The plant-based companies still need to improve flavor and texture and get down the cost.”

Improving plant-based meat isn’t the only area that Paladini has his eye on. In fact, he’s more interested in the trillion-dollar global meat market. It’s an uncomfortable truth that many meat products contain a surprisingly small fraction of real meat. In the UK, for example, sausages only need to contain 42 percent pork to qualify for the label “pork sausages.” The rest is flavorings and filler—which often includes protein from soybean. Mixing in a meatier soybean could improve these products while keeping their costs down, says Paladini, who cofounded Moolec after a career in marketing. Moolec, which is a spin-out from the biotech firm Bioceres Crop Solutions, is also working on pea plants that contain beef proteins and safflowers modified to produce one of the main enzymes that helps milk coagulate into solid cheese.

One of the reasons Moolec is concentrating on soy and pea is because there are already huge markets for these commodities. Rather than introduce people to an entirely new ingredient, Paladini is hoping that they’ll be more responsive to a slightly tweaked version of a crop that they’re already familiar with. However, because the plants that Moolec is working on contain genetic material from at least two different species, they will fall foul of rules in the UK and the EU that tightly regulate genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Paladini hopes this will be less of a problem in Argentina and the US, where Moolec also has offices, and where regulators have a much more relaxed stance toward genetically-modified foods. “Sooner or later, I think we need to embrace science,” he says.

This article first appeared in the January/February 2024 edition of WIRED UK.

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India’s Aditya-L1 probe will arrive in a few days at a patch of space between Earth and the sun, almost a million miles away.

The location is remote yet isn’t very lonely. Four active spacecraft are already in orbit near the same spot—known as the Earth-sun system’s first Lagrange point, or L1—and others are parked nearby.

It’s a privileged place where the gravity of our planet, the gravity of the sun and the centrifugal force of a spacecraft’s orbit almost exactly cancel one another out, creating an “island” of comparative stability amid the solar system’s ever shifting gravitational fields, which constantly change as the planets move. The result is that spacecraft orbiting the sun near L1—actually a region a few hundreds of thousands of miles across—stay fixed in relation to Earth without having to expend much fuel.

“The first Lagrange point is a great place if you want to observe the sun,” says astrophysicist Neil Cornish of Montana State University, whose work on the subject has informed NASA’s definitive explanation of the Lagrange points. “You don’t have Earth in the way at any point in the orbit—you can just sit there, staring at the sun.”

SOLAR SENTINEL

Aditya-L1 isn’t set to arrive at its final destination until the first week of January, but the probe has already begun its observations of our home star with its first images of the solar disk. It will soon enter a “halo” orbit around L1, which will allow the probe to steadily circle the sun, maintaining its trajectory via small bursts from its thrusters every few weeks. That nearly stable region is so vast, Cornish explains, that the many spacecraft near L1 never even see one another, let alone experience close encounters. “There’s just no danger at all of running into anything out there,” he says.

The most tenured tenant of L1 is NASA and the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), an instrument-packed probe that arrived in 1996 to study different aspects of our star. Aditya-L1, too, will image the sun in visible, ultraviolet and x-ray wavelengths of light to give researchers further insight into the dynamics of the solar atmosphere.

According to India’s space agency, the probe will also study “space weather” that results from solar storms using four instruments pointed at our star itself and three others aimed elsewhere to monitor the solar wind and the effects of outbursts on the sun’s magnetic field.

Although Aditya-L1’s primary mission is set to last only five years, its L1 locale means the spacecraft could have a much longer operational lifetime. SOHO, for example, has operated at L1 for over 25 years, although it was originally planned to last just two; and a review a few years ago extended its mission through the end of 2025.

THE LAGRANGIAN ARCHIPELAGO

L1 is not the only island of comparative stability in space. A system of Lagrange points accompanies each planet around the sun. And moons and planets that co-orbit the sun—including our own moon and Earth—have them, too.

Scientists have known of such points since the 1760s, when Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler presented three of them as solutions to a special “three-body problem” arising from Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity. Italian-French astrophysicist Joseph-Louis Lagrange expanded on Euler’s work and, by 1772, had discovered five such points created by the gravitational pull between the sun and Earth. They are now known as Lagrange points in his honor.

The third Lagrange point, or L3, is directly on the far side of the sun and a little bit farther out than Earth’s orbit. Earth’s view of this Lagrange point is always blocked by the sun, preventing direct communications to and from our planet, so no spacecraft are stationed there.

The fourth and fifth Lagrange points, or L4 and L5, share our planet’s orbit around the sun but are exactly 60 degrees in front of and behind Earth, respectively. Observations show both L4 and L5 are occupied by transient populations of asteroids that piggyback on Earth gravity. Such space rocks are known as “Trojan asteroids,” and similar Trojans are found at the fourth and fifth Lagrange points of other planets, such as Jupiter.

The real gem of all the Earth-sun Lagrange points is L2, which lies about a million miles from Earth but outside our planet’s orbit, in the opposite direction of L1. Looking sunward from L2, Earth, the moon and the sun always appear clustered together in the heavens, allowing spacecraft to easily block science-scuttling stray light that any of the three might emit. Consequently, L2 has become the orbital destination of choice for several probes, including the James Webb Space Telescope. The point’s latest resident is ESA’s Euclid, a space telescope that arrived at L2 last year to measure the cosmic effects of dark energy and dark matter.

ESA’s director of science, astrophysicist Carole Mundell, says L2 allows Euclid to be visible at all times from ground stations on Earth and offers the spacecraft an unobstructed view. “The orbit is the best for radiation environment, thermal stability and availability of the entire sky,” she says. “These advantages combined are ideal for a high-precision survey mission like Euclid.”

AN INTERPLANETARY SUPERHIGHWAY

For Martin Lo, a spacecraft trajectory expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Lagrange points are gateways to an “interplanetary superhighway” that extends throughout the entire solar system.

There are seven major Lagrange points within 1.2 million miles of Earth, he notes: the L1 and L2 of the Earth-sun system and five “lesser” Lagrange points of the Earth-moon system. Because all seven of these nearby regions share similar orbital energies, a spacecraft needs only a small “nudge” to move from one to another—a bit like a person swinging from bar to bar on a jungle gym, Lo says.

These Lagrange points’ prospects for allowing high-efficiency orbital transfers have shaped Lo’s work on trajectories for NASA’s Artemis missions, which aim to return astronauts to the moon and to establish a crew-supporting lunar space station that orbits near the first Earth-moon Lagrange point. And he’s currently studying the complex trajectories that exist between the Lagrange points of Saturn and its many moons. One of these moons, Enceladus, may be the best place in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life.

“Enceladus emits icy plumes near its south pole, and we’re using these trajectories to determine how we get in orbit around it and capture [material from] them”—a matter of using the gentlest nudges possible to be at the right place, speed and time, he says.

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According to standard calculations, my husband's body mass index (BMI) is too high. Yet he is the fittest person I know—an athlete carrying plenty of muscle and very little fat.

Therein lies the problem with BMI. Derived by dividing someone's weight in kilograms by the square of their height in meters, a BMI number classifies a person as underweight (less than 18.5), normal weight (18.5 to 24.9), overweight (25 to 29.9) or obese (30 or more). But that simple formula obscures critical details such as the difference between muscle and fat. When it comes to individual health risks, those details tell the real story.

The shortcomings of BMI have been recognized for decades. Yet physicians kept using it as a quick way to diagnose obesity and as a proxy for overall health. “It made life really easy,” says clinical psychologist Cynthia Bulik, founding director of the University of North Carolina Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders. “It also led to a type of tunnel vision.”

Equating a slightly high BMI with poor health isn't always accurate. The American Medical Association acknowledged as much when it announced last June that BMI alone is an imperfect measure and that clinical practice needs to change.

The new thinking on BMI does not negate the need to address the health risks associated with a high body-fat percentage. In 2013 the AMA recognized obesity as a disease and noted that it often leads to many dangerous conditions, including cancer, diabetes and heart disease. The risks of obesity haven't changed. For the time being, however, insurers still rely on BMI to determine people's eligibility for bariatric surgery and most weight-loss drugs, including popular new options such as Wegovy.

A recent study showed just how imprecise BMI can be. Yftach Gepner, a physiologist and epidemiologist at Tel Aviv University, and his colleagues looked at data on about 3,000 Israeli men and women. Roughly one third of those whose BMI placed them in the normal range were found to be obese when their actual body fat was measured. And a third of those who were identified as overweight by their BMI had normal amounts of body fat. “If you are combining the misclassification on both sides,” Gepner says, using BMI to determine obesity “is like flipping a coin.”

Not only does BMI fail to distinguish between muscle and fat, but it says nothing about where that fat sits in your body, says Priya Jaisinghani, an endocrinologist and specialist in obesity at N.Y.U. Langone Health in New York City. With fat, as with real estate, location matters. Abdominal fat confers higher risk, as does fat around vital organs. A 2018 study looked at magnetic resonance imaging scans—the gold standard for body-composition research—collected by the U.K. Biobank, a large biomedical database. The results showed that people with fat concentrated in their abdomen had higher risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease and metabolic disease than did people with the same BMI and of the same age whose fat was spread through other parts of their body.

A further problem is that BMI is based on height and weight tables developed using data from non-Hispanic white people, mostly men. Yet researchers now know that race, ethnicity, sex and age affect body composition and health risks differently. For instance, Black people tend to have greater muscle mass and thus may be misclassified as obese on the basis of BMI. The opposite is true for Asians, who tend to have more body fat at lower BMIs, so their actual disease risks may be missed.

Although BMI has value for assessing obesity at a population level, better methods exist for individuals. “The key is not to use BMI on its own as an index of health,” Bulik says. To properly assess health, doctors should combine the index with measures such as waist circumference, blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Bioelectrical impedance analysis, which uses electric signals to tell fat from muscle in the body, is becoming more common in medical offices. “In a very few years it is going to become standard,” Gepner says. DEXA scans, a type of x-ray imaging that can distinguish between muscle and fat, and MRI also can be used to measure body fat, although they tend to be more costly and are therefore less accessible.

With so many alternatives available, no one, including health-care workers, should give BMI too much weight.

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In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their analysis of data from water collected from browning lake water samples over a 20-year period from 28 lakes in the Adirondacks region in upstate New York.

Browning is a term that has been developed to describe changes in lake water as material builds up in it, reducing its clarity. Prior research has shown that browning can also lead to heat entrapment at the surface, which can cause reductions in oxygen levels in the water. If enough reductions occur, a lake, or part of it, can become uninhabitable to fish and/or other marine creatures. Prior research has also shown that lake surface temperatures are increasing worldwide, along with associated reductions in oxygen levels, putting the creatures that live in them at risk, particularly those that need cold water to survive.

In this new effort, the research team wondered if New York's lakes may be experiencing an increase in browning due to rising temperatures associated with climate change. To find out, they obtained and analyzed Adirondack lake water data (involving 28 lakes) over the years 1994 to 2012 created by other researchers who have been studying the lakes in that region. They also looked at another set of data created by other researchers who conducted fieldwork involved in assessing water conditions at 15 lakes in the Adirondacks in 2021.

In analyzing all the data, the team found a trend—lake surface temperatures in the Adirondacks have been slowly increasing, as has the degree of browning, particularly during the late summer—a finding that suggests reductions in habitat capable of supporting marine life as oxygen levels fall. More specifically, the researchers found that lacustrine brook trout (a cold-water fish) were facing reductions in viable habitats due to increases in water temperature and reductions in lake oxygen levels, putting their survival at risk.

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The study, published in Gastro Hep Advances, may assist caregivers and help shed light on how diet, lifestyle and genetics can affect the development and disease course of IBD, a term for two conditions – Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis – that cause chronic inflammation in the gastrointestinal tract.

“IBD has historically been a disease of Caucasian populations in Europe and North America, but now we’re seeing it among all races and in people all over the globe, so it’s now important to study how it manifests in different groups,” said Lea Ann Chen, an assistant professor of medicine and pharmacology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and senior author of the study.

The researchers reviewed records from all patients who underwent treatment for IBD at New York’s Belleview Hospital between 1997 and 2017, excluding any cases with insufficient data to confirm the diagnosis and looked for patterns among the remaining 525 patient files. As these patients were treated at a safety-net public hospital, they were of similar socioeconomic status, a factor that has complicated previous studies. This pool of patients was also very racially diverse: 29.8 percent white, 27.4 percent Hispanic, 21.7 percent Black and 13 percent Asian.

Among the most notable ways immigrants and minority patients differed from native-born whites (who were used as a reference group for comparison) were the following:

• Asian patients were more than twice as likely as white patients to be men, regardless of whether they had been born in the U.S. or immigrated.
• Black patients were more than twice as likely to undergo intestinal resection (surgery to remove part of the bowel) as white patients.
• US-born Black patients were more likely to suffer from Crohn’s disease, while Black patients who had immigrated to the U.S. were more likely to suffer ulcerative colitis.
• Foreign-born patients of all races suffered milder disease. They developed problems later in life, tended to suffer ulcerative colitis rather than Crohn’s disease, required less surgery and medication and endured fewer complications.

The study’s findings suggest cultural and environmental factors also influence IBD progression. 

“Foreign-born patients who immigrate from low-prevalence IBD countries have a milder IBD phenotype compared to patients of the same race who were born in this country,” Chen said. “This is particularly true among Black patients. Those who were born here were far more likely to develop Crohn’s disease and its complications compared to those who were born abroad.”

Other findings suggest genetic differences may affect patient vulnerability to IBD.

“The difference in case numbers between Asian men and women was striking, and that difference appeared both among US-born and foreign-born patients,” Chen said. “It appears that East Asian women — because most of the Asian patients in our study population were East Asian — may have some sort of genetic protection against IBD.”

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Many different medication classes have been linked to the risk of driving impairment, as anyone who has ever read the label warning "do not operate heavy machinery" might have guessed.

But the new study took a particularly rigorous approach to investigating the issue -- following older adults for up to 10 years and testing their driving skills with annual road tests.

And it turned out that those using certain classes of medications were at greater risk of failing the road test at some point.

When older folks were taking either antidepressants, sedative/hypnotics (sleep medications) or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), they were nearly three times more likely to get a failing or "marginal" grade than non-users.

The findings do not prove the medications are to blame, said lead researcher Dr. David Carr, a specialist in geriatric medicine at Washington University's School of Medicine in St. Louis.

It can be hard, he said, to draw a direct line between a particular medication and diminished driving skills: Is it that drug, or the medical condition it's treating or another medication an older adult is taking?

In this study, though, Carr and his colleagues were able to account for many factors, including participants' medical conditions, memory and thinking skills, vision problems and whether they lived in more affluent or disadvantaged neighborhoods.

And certain medication groups were still linked to poorer driving performance.

Beyond that, Carr said, many of the medications in question are known to act on the central nervous system -- with potential side effects, like drowsiness and dizziness, that could affect driving.

"The bottom line is, we need to pay attention to this and advise our patients," Carr said, adding that he doubts this is happening routinely.

Unfortunately, he added, during busy, time-limited doctor visits, discussions of medication side effects may fall by the wayside.

So that's where patients need to be proactive, Carr said: Ask questions about potential side effects when you get a new prescription. And if you're wondering whether your sluggishness or other symptoms could be due to a medication, talk to your healthcare provider.

"We wouldn't want anyone to just stop taking their medication on their own," Carr stressed. "Talk to your healthcare provider about any changes."

That point was echoed by Jake Nelson, director of traffic safety advocacy and research at the nonprofit AAA.

The good news, Nelson said, is that your doctor might be able to make some changes -- like switching to a different medication or adjusting the dose or time of day you take a particular drug.

"Don't feel like you're being a burden by asking these questions," said Nelson, who was not involved in the study. "This is about putting your health and safety first."

He also, however, stressed the role of the pharmaceutical industry in tackling the issue. There are better ways, Nelson said, to alert medication users to the risk of driving impairment -- which is typically buried in the "fine print."

The study -- published Sept. 29 in JAMA Network Open -- involved 198 adults who were 73, on average, at the outset. None had signs of cognitive impairment (problems with memory, judgment or other thinking skills).

Study participants had annual check-ups, which included a road test with a professional driving instructor, for up to 10 years (about five years, on average). During that period, 35% received a failing and marginal road test grade at some point.

Seniors on antidepressants, sleep aids or NSAIDs were at heightened risk. The odds were greatest for those on an antidepressant or sleep medication -- with 16% to 17% putting in a poor road performance per year overall. That compared with rates of 6% to 7% of their peers not using those medications.

There were a couple of surprises, Carr said. Researchers found no link between antihistamines or anticholinergic medications and seniors' driving performance.

Antihistamines are notorious for making users drowsy. Anticholinergic medications are used to treat a range of conditions, from overactive bladder to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) to Parkinson's symptoms. They can cause side effects like sedation and blurred vision.

But, Carr said, it's possible that older drivers in this study were using newer, non-drowsy antihistamines or there were too few people taking anticholinergics to detect a significant effect.

No matter which medications they may be using, Carr said older adults should talk to their doctor about any red flags -- like feeling drowsy or slower to react, or having a "close call" on the road.

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“We’re not the family we used to be,” says Rachel, as she reflects on the aftermath of discovering that her teenage son, Ben, had been the victim of online blackmail.

“He’s got an older sibling, so on weekends we used to do everything together, going out as a family. But when all this came about, that stopped. Ben wouldn’t go out, because he was always looking over his shoulder.”

Ben was just 14 when he was tricked on Facebook into chatting to someone he believed was the female friend of a friend. That person then revealed himself to be a man, and used threats and blackmail to coerce the boy into sending sexual images and performing sex acts live on Skype, with the videos then shared with five other men.

Ben endured spiralling demands for two years, and attempted suicide, before a police investigation prompted by another young victim revealed the main perpetrator’s web of extortion and he was eventually jailed.

Now in his early 20s, Ben has good days and bad days, says his mother, and still won’t talk at length about what happened to him.

As with so many other online offences, the past decade has seen a rapid growth of the crime of sexually coerced extortion, commonly referred to as “sextortion”.

Recent data from Police Scotland suggests offending has almost doubled from 2022, and while this crime can hit any demographic, analysis has found that teenage boys and young men are most at risk, and that they are also least likely to seek support from parents or the authorities.

As was the case with Ben. “We absolutely didn’t have a clue,” says Rachel. “Not until the police knocked on the door. Because when you’re 14 and somebody tells you they’re going to kill your parents if you say anything, you believe that’s going to happen.”

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has identified a similar “surge” in the targeting of young people, and Zara, a senior analyst, recognises a template in the cases she deals with.

“At the start of the chat it’s quite flirty, then they move offline to a video sharing platform, then quickly come demands for money or the images will be shared.” This is often accompanied by the threat of spreading ugly accusations, for example that the victim has raped young children, which further dissuades them from contacting the police.

These are highly targeted crimes, Zara explains, with contact established on trusted social apps mostly by criminal gangs based overseas. Aware that younger people may have restricted access to ready cash, the demands will often be for smaller amounts, frequently via Paypal transfers or gift cards like Amazon.

“They don’t give the young person time to react. They threaten to ruin their life and it must be absolutely terrifying”.

Joanne McEwan, superintendent for harm prevention at Police Scotland, is likewise attuned to the impact on young victims: “They may not have the maturity to put it in context and, because they are far less inclined to tell their family, they are then coping by themselves with a whole range of emotions: fear, shame, hopelessness.”

Her message is simple: don’t panic, you’re not alone and report it immediately to the police, who will treat the situation with respect. “They really mustn’t be ashamed.”

McEwan also urges victims not to pay their blackmailers: “It may be an empty threat, and even if they have the image they may well not have the ability to share it with anybody else.”

Zara also directs victims to Report Remove, an online tool for under-18s developed by IWF and Childline, which allows them to report anonymously any image or video which will then be placed on a watch list used by all the main social media players. If it has already been uploaded, Report Remove will send notice of takedown on the young person’s behalf.

It’s a constant challenge for parents to keep up with online risks, McEwan acknowledges. As a mother herself, she recommends openness to remove some of the stigma and secrecy around this crime.

Zara suggests engaging your children in conversation about who they are chatting to online and what sites they use. “Their online world can be a very private, insular place. Talk to them about how to be safe there and make them aware that they always lose control as soon as they send intimate images.”

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It's almost that time of year. Everyone you know will soon be hitting the gym, smiling while eating broccoli, or crushing out a last cigarette. For some, the gym really will become a new part of life, and that really will be the last cigarette they smoke. But most of us have probably experienced the letdown—perhaps even self-loathing—of failing to stick to a New Year's resolution.

I can't promise the advice I've collected will help—anyone who knows me would laugh hysterically at the idea of me guiding anyone toward successful habit formation—but there are some things you can do to set yourself up for success and make sure your resolutions become more than just that.

Updated January 2024: I added some more thoughts on training your will.

Forget Goals. You Want Systems

The first and most important part of changing something in your life is to forget the resolutions and forget the goals. Think instead of creating a system that allows you to do what you want to do.

This advice is something I picked up from James Clear's book Atomic Habits ($14 on Amazon). If you find this article whets your appetite for a deeper dive into how you can create better habits, Clear's book is a great next step. It has plenty of suggestions about how to set up systems that work for you and help build the habits you want.

Common sense can take you a long way. As WIRED editor Adrienne So says, “reduce friction wherever you can.” Make it easier to go for a run by keeping your shoes by the door. Make it easier to eat healthier by filling your fridge with healthy food. “It's easier to work out every day if you've prepped everything beforehand,” So says. “Then you can run into the basement and do a 30-min Peloton strength video in 32 mins, instead of spending another 20 minutes looking for a clean sports bra.”

It also helps to be honest with yourself about yourself. For example, while some people might run downstairs and actually do a Peloton video, even that seemingly simple act presents enough friction to me that I'd never actually do it. This is why, instead of getting into Peloton, I have picked an activity with even less friction: body weight exercises. My body is always there, ready to go. I don't have to go anywhere or find anything. I just start exercising.

Which is to say, if you have to rely on the power of your iron will, just gritting your teeth and toughing it out (which isn't actually your will, that's your will in conflict with itself, but never mind that), you're unlikely to turn it into a habit. That doesn't mean there won't be moments when whatever you're doing isn't hard, but it shouldn't be hard to start.

Progress Incrementally

WIRED editor Michael Calore suggests the app Couch to 5K to anyone who wants to build a running habit. It's a great app; stick with the personal trainer voices to keep you motivated. But you know what it won't have you do? Run a 5K on the first day you use it.

This goes along with the previous suggestion to ditch the goals. It takes a while to develop the strength and stamina to run 5 kilometers. If you're going to be disappointed every time you don't run 5K, that's not going to make you want to keep running.

The far better, and more encouraging, plan is to run a little bit more today than you did yesterday. No matter what your system is, do a little bit more than last time, even if it's only a tiny bit more. Read 21 pages instead of 20 pages, walk for 11 minutes instead of 10, and so on. Incremental progress is the goal.

Incremental progress is part of the reason I don't take days off from new habits, and I recommend you don't either, at least for the first 90 days. Your body could benefit from rest days if your habit is exercise-related, but if your new habit doesn't require physical exertion, don't stop for the first 90 days. Depending on which study you want to cite, it takes anywhere between 60 to 243 days to build a new habit. I've had good luck with about 90, and I strongly recommend you go at least that long on your first try.

On the internet of yore, there was an apocryphal story about Jerry Seinfeld supposedly giving advice to software developer and would-be comedian Brad Isaac. Isaac asked him if he had any tips on becoming a comic. Seinfeld's answer amounts to, well, build a habit of writing jokes.

That's fairly obvious, but Seinfeld had a technique. He reportedly told Isaac to get a big wall calendar and said every time he sat down and did the work, he should make a big X over that day. “After a few days, you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

Even if it's apocryphal, it's still excellent advice. It also sounds like something a Seinfeld character would say.

Reduce Friction Even More

One of the reasons we have trouble changing our habits is that we're highly emotionally invested in the habits we have. I like doing nothing in the morning. I don't want to read/workout/cook/etc. Overcoming this inertia and resistance to change is difficult, especially since this resistance is often not entirely conscious.

This is partly why I have avoided suggestions about stopping habits you don't like (grab Clear's book if you're interested in stopping a bad habit; he has plenty of good advice on that score) and focused on creating new habits. There's generally less emotional baggage.

But what if you could reduce your emotional baggage? That way, you could stop focusing on specific habits and train your will instead. This is a common theme in older texts ranging from Catholic meditation guides to the New Thought Movement of the early 20th century.

The will is like a muscle, and you need to build it up through strength training. I've seen countless versions of this exercise, but they all go something like this: Sit down in a chair facing a wall. Pick a spot on the wall. Get up out of the chair and go touch the spot in the wall. Return to the chair and sit down again. Rinse and repeat. Most books tell you to start out doing this 10 times and work your way up from there.

There are more interesting, fun variations on this idea—I know someone who would pick a random spot on the map, figure out how to use public transportation to get there, and then go to that spot at a specific time of the day—but the general idea is to will yourself to do something, but something you have no emotional investment in. This builds up a fortitude of the will that you can then apply to things you are emotionally invested in.

Out With the Old

This is the time of year when we focus on new beginnings (natch), but it's also worth spending some time reevaluating old commitments to see if you're still actually committed to them. This is one of the most useful lessons I took from David Allen's organizational classic Getting Things Done ($16, Amazon). Allen refers to everything you have to do, or want to do, as an “open loop.” Open loops, no matter how small, take up some space in our brain. That's space that you can't use for other things. So any time you can close one of those loops you get a little bit of energy back. As anyone who has done the exercises in Allen's book can tell you, there really is something very energizing about clearing your mind of all those loops (not only by doing them, but more importantly, by making a decision about what to do with them).

This applies not just to things you have to do, but also things you think you want to do. Maybe you think you should learn Spanish, but you haven't done anything to actually learn Spanish. Admitting that you aren't actually committed to the idea enough to do the work of learning Spanish can help close that loop. Letting go of that feeling that you should learn Spanish just might be the thing that frees up your mind enough that you decide to take up paddleboarding on a whim. The point is that the new year isn't just a time for starting something new. It's a time to let go of the things from that past that are no longer serving you.

In many ways this is the antidote to that ever-so-popular slogan “Just do it.” Just do it implies that you shouldn't think about it, instead of deciding what you really want to do or should do. Maybe spend some time remembering why you wanted to do it in the first place, and if those reasons no longer resonate with you, just don't do it.

If you like this idea, I highly recommend getting Allen's book. It goes into much more detail on this idea and has some practical advice on letting go. You can still keep track of those things, in case you do decide, years from now, when you're paddleboarding through the Sea of Cortez, that now you really do want to learn Spanish and are willing to do the work.

Do the Work

As one of my writing professors used to say, to be a writer you have to park your butt in a chair and actually write. To be a yogi, you have to do yoga. To run, you have to run. There's no easy way around it. You have to put on your grown-up pants and do the work.

However, on the flip side, as Clear points out early on in Atomic Habits, the way to change who you are is to change what you do. “Each time you write a page, you are a writer. Each time you practice the violin, you are a musician. Each time you start a workout, you are an athlete.” Each time you do the work, you become the future self you want to be.

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When Galileo Galilei, a mathematician at the University of Padua, trained a spyglass of his own creation on the sky, he was overwhelmed with what he saw—more than 500 new stars in the constellation Orion, in addition to the familiar three in the hunter’s belt and six in the sword.

In October, astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to zoom in on one of the middle stars in the sword and identified another 500 or so previously unseen spots. The worlds are so small and dim that they blur the line between star and planet. It’s an ambiguity that plagued Galileo, who referred to the moons of Jupiter as both “stars” and “planets” in the same page of his 1610 astronomical treatise, and it continues to trouble astronomers today.

“When we look at the solar system it’s all nice and neat. You get the sun, and you get planets,” said Samuel Pearson, an astronomer with the European Space Agency (ESA). There’s nothing in the middle. But “when you actually go and have a look,” Pearson said, “you realize there’s a full spectrum of [objects with] basically every mass in between.”

The JWST observation bolsters a growing catalog of isolated objects occupying this gray zone between giant planets and tiny stars. Sometimes called “free-floating” or “rogue” planets, these solitary worlds drift freely through space. While astronomers can estimate the mass of these dark, Jupiter-mass balls of gas, their origins remain mysterious. Are they actually planets—“Jupiters” that once orbited stars but were somehow spit out? Or are they more like micro-stars that failed to ignite?

Rather than answering this question, the JWST observation adds to the mystery: The telescope’s infrared eye found that dozens of the worlds appear to be in pairs orbiting each other—a puzzling arrangement that, if confirmed, would defy expectations.

A James Webb Space Telescope image of the Orion nebula reveals a chaotic, dusty place that cranks out newborn stars and planets.

“We’re missing something,” said Nienke van der Marel, a researcher who studies planet formation at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, “and we don’t know what it is.”

These improbable duos cannot be easily explained by any known formation theories of either stars or free-floating planets. But within a week of the JWST announcement, researchers published a daring new idea describing how giant planets might be ejected from their home system in pairs—an event most researchers had thought all but impossible. Whether or not the proposal can fully account for the entire zoo of dim, starless worlds remains to be seen. But researchers expect that a refined understanding of free-floating worlds, and the star systems that create them, is at hand.

“If indeed [this discovery] is confirmed,” said Peter Plavchan, an astrophysicist at George Mason University who was not involved in detecting the pairs of Jupiters, “it will truly be groundbreaking.”

Dark Worlds Everywhere

Free-floating worlds escaped the notice of astronomers for centuries because they are extremely dark. To fuse hydrogen and shine brightly, stars need to be at least 80 times as massive as Jupiter. Rogue worlds are much lighter and are commonly defined as weighing less than 13 Jupiters. (Anything between 13 and 80 Jupiters can fuse a heavier variant of hydrogen and is classified as a brown dwarf, or what astronomers sometimes romantically call a “failed star”).

In fact, the relative invisibility of free-roaming planets once prompted some astrophysicists to wonder whether there might be enough of these objects to account for dark matter—the unidentified bulk of mass that appears to hold galaxies together. This question motivated astronomers to search for signs of such worlds in the 1990s, which they did by looking for the subtle ways in which their gravity would distort the appearance of stars they had passed in front of. The indirect nature of these “microlensing” surveys wasn’t well suited for identifying individual free-floating objects, but they showed that there wasn’t enough of whatever was out there to make up the dark matter.

The first images of rogue worlds came in the 2000s, when astronomers spotted a few objects still glowing in infrared light from the heat of their formation. Based on those observations, one possible origin emerged. In 2010, astrophysicists including Sean Raymond at the University of Bordeaux in France simulated the evolution of planetary systems and found that when one gas giant planet punts a sibling from their home system, as sometimes happens, the expulsion stretches the survivor’s orbit into an ellipse. Astronomers had seen these skewed orbits, which Raymond’s group and other researchers interpreted as scars of past interplanetary trauma.

The first substantial catalog of free-floating worlds came not from planet hunters but from star hunters searching for starlike objects with even less heft than brown dwarfs. Núria Miret Roig of the University of Vienna and Hervé Bouy of the University of Bordeaux were looking for the most dwarfish of brown dwarfs in the constellation Scorpius, which hosts a gassy nebula that cranks out lots of stars and planets. Amid more than 26 million pinpricks of infrared light in 80,000 images, they searched for dimly glowing objects that moved across their field of view in observations spanning 20 years. In 2021, they announced that they had found a bounty of around 100 candidate objects between 4 and 13 Jupiter masses—increasing the number of known rogue worlds by about a factor of five.

With more than just a handful of free-floating objects to analyze, the researchers could then begin to ask basic questions about where these worlds had come from. One possibility was that they had coalesced from the disc-shaped detritus that surrounds a newly born star, as planets do. And then some chance encounter with a neighbor had ejected them, in the style of Raymond’s 2010 simulations.

The second possibility was that they had formed alone, when an isolated cloud of hydrogen and helium became dense enough to collapse into a ball. This is how stars are born, and it would make these worlds less like planets and more like the galaxy’s tiniest brown dwarfs.

Núria Miret Roig went searching for tiny stars in the constellation Scorpius and found around 100 free-floating

worlds that can’t be neatly defined as either stars or planets.

Courtesy of Nuria Miret Roig

Miret Roig and Bouy concluded that their candidates likely contained worlds that had formed in both ways. The lightest objects were probably punted planets, although the astronomers had found too many of them to easily explain using planetary ejection models alone.

“There are many free-floating planets,” Miret Roig said, “and they probably form by different mechanisms.”

A mixture of both origins seemed likely. But how many of the 100 free-floating worlds were planets, and how many were starlike, the researchers couldn’t say.

Three days after Miret Roig and Bouy posted their results, JWST launched, along with a new era for free-floating-planet hunting.

Drops of Jupiters

Astronomers had suspected that JWST would be a free-floating-planet-finding machine. It sits far beyond the interfering murk of Earth’s atmosphere. Its giant mirror gives it far more sensitivity to the fine features of the universe than its forerunner, the Hubble Space Telescope. And it picks up infrared light, which makes it perfect for spotting dimly glowing worlds.

Pearson partnered with Mark McCaughrean, an ESA astronomer, to look more deeply for free-floating worlds than had previously been possible. They were fascinated by star formation and planet formation, and wanted to target objects—like brown dwarfs—in the “chaotic gray area” between the two. There, “you get the crossover of both worlds,” Pearson said. In October 2022, Pearson and McCaughrean spun the space telescope toward a central star in the sword hanging from Orion’s belt. For 35 hours.

JWST observed the Orion nebula for 35 hours and spotted 42 pairs of rogue worlds orbiting each other. Five of

those pairs are shown here.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine; source: Mark McCaughrean and Sam Pearson / NASA, ESA, CSA

It took Pearson months to align the resulting 12,500 JWST images of the Orion nebula, pixel by pixel. The formidable task was frustrated by the telescope’s exquisite sensitivity: Many of the faint objects typically used as landmarks blinded JWST’s ultra-sensitive eye.

“The brown dwarfs that are normally difficult to see were wiping out bits of the detector,” he said. It was “just not a problem I’ve ever encountered with any other telescope.”

After completing the cosmic mosaic, Pearson was rewarded with an abundance of the mysterious worlds he sought: More than 500 free-floating objects of a few Jupiter masses speckled the Orion nebula. But the real surprise was that, when he looked closely, he saw something that initially didn’t make much sense. Some of the blobs of light were pairs of Jupiter-mass objects. In all, he counted 42 pairs of whirling Jupiters—a striking number.

“Hang on, why is there all this faint stuff in pairs?” Pearson recalled wondering. “Then the penny dropped, and we realized we should look at this very carefully.”

From a theoretical perspective, these duos seemed nearly impossible. They were unlikely to be punted planets; when one planet kicks another out of a stellar system, the ejected planet almost always flies off alone. But they couldn’t be stars either, since many of them weighed as little as a single Jupiter—a mass too light for the object to have formed directly from a collapsing gas cloud. The team dubbed their mystery duos Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JUMBOs for short, and described them in a preprint posted on October 2.

The JUMBOs caught experts in both star and planet formation flat-footed. “This has not been predicted at all. There are no existing theories where we would have expected these wide, free-floating planetary objects in these numbers,” said Matthew Bate, an astrophysicist at the University of Exeter specializing in star formation.

Astronomers had previously observed that although many massive stars twirl through space with partners, the percentage of coupled-off stars falls with their mass. “We usually expect trends to continue,” van der Marel said. Thus, she said, the percentage of Jupiter-mass objects in pairs “should go to zero.” Leaping up to 10 percent hadn’t been on anyone’s JWST bingo card.

The catch is that at least some of the JUMBOs are probably mirages. The deeper an object lies in a dusty environment (and the Orion nebula is extremely dusty), the tougher it is to distinguish it from a distant, more massive star behind the nebula, which would be expected to have a partner. In previous studies, between 20 percent and 80 percent of what looked like free-floating worlds turned out to be vanilla stars. “One needs to be a bit cautious at the moment,” Miret Roig said.

In the spring, Pearson and McCaughrean will use JWST to again observe their batch of free-floating worlds, this time in a richer spectrum of colours. These follow-up observations will help confirm which JUMBOs are real by looking for traces of methane or water in their atmospheres, a telltale signature of Jupiter-mass worlds.

“Once you’ve got spectra,” Pearson said, “there’s basically no place to hide.”

Speedy Simulations

Even without confirmation, theorists are already racing to explain these perplexing worlds.

Rosalba Perna, an astrophysicist at Stony Brook University, heard about Orion’s JUMBOs in the news, before she even read Pearson’s paper. Perna and Yihan Wang of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, had been studying what happens when a star flies past another solar system. They had focused mainly on simulating systems with a single giant planet. But the JUMBOs got Perna wondering: What if there were two giant planets? She called up Wang and asked him to see what would happen if he stuck a second Jupiter into the simulations.

Wang set up his program to hurl digital stars at countless two-Jupiter stellar systems from all angles. He also set up the software to notify him if the “intruder” star sent both planets careening off into space together—creating a JUMBO. Then he sent the code off to a computing cluster at his university and went to lunch.

When Wang returned to his office and checked his computer, he found a list of alerts reading “binary planet formed!!!”

From tens of billions of simulations, the team saw that booting pairs of Jupiters was relatively easy if the planets happened to be quite close together when the marauding star swept by. This happened especially often for neighbors with tightly spaced orbits (think Uranus and Neptune). In such cases, up to 20 out of 100 ejections produced JUMBOs (the other 80 produced single planets)—more than enough to account for the 10 percent rate Pearson had seen in Orion. But for planets with more distantly spaced orbits (think Jupiter-Neptune), almost all ejections resulted in lone planets.

With input from Wang’s colleague Zhaohuan Zhu, the group worked around the clock (and in one case during a flight to Europe). The trio wrote up their results and posted a preprint on October 9, one week after the JUMBO find.

“The speed at which they wrote that is slightly frightening,” Pearson said.

Other theoretical astrophysicists have yet to fully digest the new results, but they find them plausible—and surprising. “I didn’t think [making a free-floating pair of planets] was possible to do from an ejection point of view,” Raymond said. “But then this paper came out.”

When Samuel Pearson (right) and Mark McCaughrean aimed JWST at the Orion nebula, they were startled to

see some 500 free-floating worlds.

Courtesy of Jürgen Mai (left); Victor See

Still, some details of the stellar-intruder theory will need further study. The Orion nebula is a dense place with lots of stars whizzing around, but is it chaotic enough to first make solar systems and then break them apart, all within a few million years? Also, many of Pearson and McCaughrean’s JUMBOs orbit one another at great distances; they are multiple times farther from one another than Pluto is from Earth. But according to Wang’s simulations, the only way to get such widely spaced JUMBOs is to start with similarly spaced-out solar systems, which astronomers rarely see.

“We know from direct imaging searches of young stars that very few stars have giant planets in [wide] orbits,” Bate said. “It is difficult to accept that there were many large planetary systems in Orion to disrupt.”

Rogue Objects Abound

At this point, many researchers suspect there’s more than one way to make these strange in-between objects. For instance, with some fiddling, theorists might find that supernova shock waves can compress smaller gas clouds and help them to collapse into pairs of tiny stars more readily than expected. And Wang’s simulations have shown that booting giant planets in pairs is, at least in some cases, theoretically unavoidable.

While many questions remain, the multitude of free-floating worlds discovered in the past two years has taught researchers two things. First, they form quickly—over millions of years, rather than billions. In Orion, gas clouds have collapsed and planets have formed, and some, perhaps, have even been dragged into the abyss by passing stars, all during the time in which modern humans were evolving on Earth.

Sean Raymond developed simulations that show how large planets can punt their siblings into space, thus

providing one potential explanation for the free-floating worlds.

Photograph: Laurence Honnorat

“Forming a planet in 1 million years is hard with current models,” van der Marel said. “This [discovery] would add another piece to that puzzle.”

Second, there are a ton of untethered worlds out there. And the heavy gas giants are the hardest to evict from their systems, much as a bowling ball would be the hardest object to knock off a billiard table. This observation suggests that for every Jupiter spotted, numerous free-floating Neptunes and Earths are going unnoticed.

We likely live in a galaxy teeming with banished worlds of all sizes.

Now, nearly half a millennium after Galileo marveled at the myriad pinpricks of light—moons, planets, and stars—in Earth’s skies, his successors are getting acquainted with the brightest tip of the iceberg of darker objects adrift between them. The tiny stars, the starless worlds, invisible asteroids, alien comets, and more.

“We know there’s a whole bunch of crap between stars,” Raymond said. This kind of research is “opening a window on all of that, not just free-floating planets but free-floating stuff in general.”

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You're welcome.

Sure, this fruit is full of potassium and makes a drink deliciously thick and creamy, but according to researchers from the University of California Davis (UCD), there's something in bananas that might overpower the antioxidants in berries.

The antioxidants in this case are called flavonols. They are found in plant-based foods like berries, tea, cocoa, apples, pears, and peaches, and many of us do not get enough of them in our diet.

When a person eats food rich in flavonols, the compounds are rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream, where they are processed.

The resulting metabolites have been associated with benefits like improved cardiovascular health and cognitive function.

But new experiments suggest when just a single banana is added to a berry mix, these metabolites are not nearly as abundant.

In a controlled, blinded study, researchers at UCD gave a small group of eight participants either a flavonol-rich berry smoothie or a simple flavonol capsule. Tests later showed an increase in levels of the flavonol metabolites in their blood.

When volunteers consumed a banana-berry smoothie, however, the metabolites in their blood were 84 percent lower than after a pure dose of flavonol.

"We were really surprised to see how quickly adding a single banana decreased the level of flavonols in the smoothie and the levels of flavanol absorbed in the body," says nutritionist Javier Ottaviani from UCD.

"This highlights how food preparation and combinations can affect the absorption of dietary compounds in foods."

The reason why bananas have this effect on flavonols probably has to do with an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase (PPO), which is involved in the oxidation process that turns bananas brown when they're peeled.

Exposed to the banana, the antioxidants 'mop up' PPO, preventing them doing all that good work inside our bodies.

When a banana-berry smoothie with high PPO was left at room temperature in experiments, researchers found it contained fewer flavonols than a pure berry smoothie after an hour of sitting.

When PPO in the bananas was inhibited, however, the flavonols persisted.

This suggests that PPO can limit the availability of flavonols before they enter the human body.

To see if bananas can 'disarm' antioxidants in the stomach, too, researchers had 11 participants consume two separate drinks at the same time: a banana drink and a berry drink.

This prevented PPO from interacting with the flavonols before ingestion. Even still, researchers found that flavonol metabolites were not as present in participants' bloodstreams after drinking the two smoothies separately, compared to when they drank none of the banana drink.

The research was only conducted among a small number of male participants, however, researchers at the UCD think that their initial findings deserve further scientific attention.

"[T]his study highlights that consideration needs to be given not only to the types of fruits and vegetables and plant-based products to recommend to increase intake, but also how they are prepared, stored, and consumed as part of a regular meal in order to maximize their potential to support health," the researchers conclude.

The study was published in Food and Function.

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For years, there has been speculation about the so-called "citizen developer" and how much they could really build for themselves, and the actual productivity of their work. After all, it's often left to IT department staff to clean up the messes. 

The time could be ripe for a blurring of the lines between developers and end-users, a recent report out of Deloitte suggests. It makes more business sense to focus on bringing in citizen developers for ground-level programming, versus seeking superstar software engineers, the report's authors argue, or -- as they put it -- "instead of transforming from a 1x to a 10x engineer, employees outside the tech division could be going from zero to one."

Future applications are likely to be built on English or natural-language commands, versus Python or Java, they predict. 

Adding to the growth of citizen developers is the likelihood that all employees will soon be technology employees. AI -- and related advanced analytics -- represent the future economy and its opportunities. Ninety-eight percent of executives believe that within the next 10 years, every job will be a tech job and tech skills will be crucial in every work sector, according to a recent survey of 650 C-suite executives, 100 hiring managers, and 1,500 office workers by Per Scholas, a nonprofit tech educational provider.    

Employees recognize what the future holds and are building their tech skills, the Per Scholas survey shows. These skills are the most pursued upskill with 43% of workers currently learning software, apps, AI, or coding and data science.

Depending on the pace of automation, "more employees should carry out basic technology tasks in the years to come or simply oversee automated digital processes," says Deloitte. As these more basic workloads are shifted to non-core or non-IT employees. "experienced engineers can focus on the highly complex tasks and novel builds on which they're excited to work."

Companies often hope "to hire 10x engineers, those who are 10 times as productive as the average developer," the Deloitte authors point out. "But searching for unicorns in the talent market is rarely a winning strategy."

Automated platforms and generative AI -- leveraged within an open and supportive corporate culture -- may amplify many human skills, they continue. "10x engineers could become much less rare. Especially as generative AI continues to bolster developer productivity and opens up a future of increased workplace automation, many of today's hindrances may not be relevant in the next five to 10 years."  

It's all about fostering a superior "developer experience," not just within IT shops, but across the enterprise as well. "As technology itself continues to become more and more central to the business, technology tasks and required talent will likely become central as well. Standardized tools and platforms -- as well as advanced low- or no-code tech -- may one day enable all employees of a business to become low-level engineers."

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Most start with a drug called metformin, but over time, it might stop working well enough. This is where a recent study from Thomas Jefferson University comes in, offering some hopeful news.

This study focused on a mix of two diabetes drugs: dapagliflozin and exenatide. Researchers wanted to see if this combination could help people whose diabetes wasn’t under control with just metformin.

Here’s what they did: they took 695 adults with Type 2 diabetes and divided them into three groups. One group got weekly shots of exenatide plus metformin.

Another took daily dapagliflozin pills with metformin, and the third group got both drugs. This study was a follow-up to an earlier trial, giving patients the chance to stay in the study for two years.

The cool thing about these two drugs is how they work together. Dapagliflozin gets rid of excess sugar through urine, while exenatide helps the body secrete insulin when needed, lowers sugar production in the liver, slows down food leaving the stomach, and makes people feel fuller.

When used together, these drugs not only control blood sugar better but also help in losing weight and lowering blood pressure.

And guess what? The study found that patients who took both drugs had better blood sugar control than those who took just one. Even better, this effect lasted for the whole two years of the study.

Patients also lost weight and saw their blood pressure go down. These are important because they can both affect Type 2 diabetes and overall health.

There were no big safety issues with using both drugs together. Other studies have shown that using these drugs can also improve things like cholesterol levels.

The researchers pointed out that many diabetes treatments don’t work as well over time. That’s why it’s so exciting to see that this drug combo kept working for over two years. It’s a big deal for people struggling to control their diabetes.

This research, led by Serge Jabbour and published in the journal Diabetes Care, offers a ray of hope. It shows that the combination of dapagliflozin and exenatide could be a powerful tool in managing Type 2 diabetes effectively over the long haul.

Copyright © 2023 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.

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For a long time, the continuous flow of cars on busy roads has been a characteristic of American cities. This constant movement releases a mix of pollutants, including exhaust fumes, brake and tire wear, and road dust.

Research has linked long-term exposure to these traffic-related pollutants with a higher risk of cardiovascular diseases, asthma, lung cancer, and premature death.

Joel Kaufman, a professor at the University of Washington and the study’s lead author, explains that the human body has complex systems to regulate blood pressure, and traffic-related air pollution seems to disrupt these mechanisms.

Earlier, Kaufman’s lab had found that diesel exhaust fumes could increase blood pressure in controlled settings. This latest study aimed to replicate these findings in a real-world environment.

Healthy participants aged between 22 and 45 were driven through rush-hour traffic in Seattle while their blood pressure was monitored.

During some drives, unfiltered road air was allowed into the car, while in others, the car was equipped with HEPA filters that blocked 86% of particulate pollution. The participants were unaware of whether they were breathing filtered or unfiltered air.

The results were concerning: breathing unfiltered air led to a net increase in blood pressure of more than 4.50 mm Hg compared to drives with filtered air.

This increase was rapid, peaking about an hour into the drive and persisting for at least 24 hours. The study did not explore effects beyond this time frame.

The magnitude of this increase is similar to what one might expect from a high-sodium diet.

Kaufman notes that even modest increases in blood pressure, when viewed across a population, are linked to a significant rise in cardiovascular diseases.

This study adds to the understanding that air pollution, even at relatively low levels, can significantly impact heart health.

A key focus of the study was ultrafine particles, a pollutant less than 100 nanometers in diameter and largely unregulated.

These particles, abundant in traffic-related pollution, were effectively filtered out during the study, suggesting their potential role in affecting blood pressure. However, further research is needed to establish this conclusively.

This study is particularly relevant as traffic-related air pollution is a major contributor to air quality variation in US metropolitan areas.

Michael Young, a former postdoctoral fellow and the study’s lead author, highlights the significance of this research in replicating real-world conditions and separating the effects of pollution from other factors like stress and noise.

The research underscores the health risks posed by everyday exposure to traffic pollution and suggests the need for more robust air quality control measures in urban settings.

The research findings can be found in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Copyright © 2023 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.

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he gasoline in your car began its life (for want of a better term) around 360 million years ago. That’s long before even the first dinosaurs wandered the Earth; despite the popular image of the typical automobile being “fueled by exploding T. Rexes”, it’s actually ancient algae and plankton. Given how long it’s been hanging around so far, then, it seems particularly unlucky for us that we got ahold of it so close to its expiration date.

How long does gasoline take to expire?

It’s true: whilst post-apocalyptic visions of the future like The Last of Us or Mad Max all seem to take place in worlds where years- or even decades-old gas is useable and valuable, the reality would probably involve less “jumping in an abandoned Chevy and making a speedy getaway” and more “trying in vain to start a gummed-up engine while breathing in one of the most disgusting odors you ever smelled.”

“Gas does have a shelf life,” confirmed Matt Crisara in a recent article for Popular Mechanics. “Left dormant in your vehicle’s tank, it can expire in as little as four weeks.” 

With proper storage, that can be extended some: “you can expect anywhere from three to six months with fuel that’s been stored in jerry cans – in proper conditions,” Crisara explained, while “fuel stabilizers can boost the shelf life from anywhere between one to three years in optimal conditions.”

Why does gasoline go bad?

To understand the different ways that your fuel can go bad, we first need to take a look at what gasoline actually is – and that’s no simple task.

The stuff you pump into your car’s fuel tank is a very different substance from the crude oil that was pumped out of the Earth a few hundred million years after those algae blooms originally died. Sure, at its most basic description, it’s the same: it’s a mixture of hydrocarbons of differing weights, which can be combusted to provide energy. 

However, in between that and the gas station, it goes through quite a few important changes. The heavier hydrocarbons are taken out, leaving the fuel as a mixture of paraffins (alkanes), olefins (alkenes), and cycloalkanes (naphthenes); impurities such as sulfur are removed in the refining process; and substances such as ethanol, anti-rust agents, and other things designed to improve vehicle performance are added.

It’s some of these additions which can cause one kind of problem with leftover gas. Ethanol, for starters: it’s put into the mix thanks to its high octane number, as well as its supposed ability to slightly reduce the carbon footprint of your fossil-fuel-guzzling automobile. However, it’s also hydrophilic – it likes to bond with water – and that can cause big problems for your car.

“If there’s ethanol in your gasoline, it could start sucking in water vapor from the air and putting it into your gasoline,” chemical engineer Richard Stanley told Live Science. “You don't want water in your engine, because it starts corroding the system.” 

Then there are the olefins. As hydrocarbons with a double bond between two carbon atoms, these molecules are particularly susceptible to a process called oxidation – they start to react with the oxygen in the air, creating a nasty gum-like solid that can jam up your car’s engine.

“Once [the bad gasoline] gets into the pipeline, that gum may separate out […] and maybe [it will] not block the gas line fully, but maybe [it will] start to block it,” James Speight, an independent fuel and environmental consultant and author of over 100 books and papers on oil refinement and processing, told Live Science.

"You can almost say that gumming of the gas lines is like atherosclerosis," he added, likening the glooping-up of your vehicle to cholesterol plaque buildup in the body’s arteries.

That’s not the only way gasoline goes bad, though. Because the fuel is made up of only the lightest hydrocarbons out of crude oil – generally consisting entirely of those chains with 12 or fewer carbon atoms – leaving it too long can actually result in some of those molecules evaporating away. This can be particularly problematic if you’re trying to start your car in the summer using gas that’s been in the tank since winter, Speight advised: petroleum companies change the blends of hydrocarbons in their gasoline from season to season, so as to better cope with heat or cold temperatures – and winter fuel is way more likely to evaporate than its summer equivalent.

“If you leave gasoline by itself, over time [...] it just doesn't perform the way you think it's going to perform,” Stanley told Live Science.

Gasoline is "like wine,” he said. “Once you take it out of the bottle, it starts going bad.”

What to do if your gasoline expires

So you’ve decided to go for a drive, only to be faced with a tank full of muddy orange gunk that smells like – in Crisara’s words – “an old gym sock that’s been soaked in milk and left to rot for years.” What do you do?

According to UK automotive services company The RAC, it depends on how full your tank is. “If your tank is full of old fuel (especially old diesel) have it drained by a garage or a professional mobile service,” they advise.

If you’re running on a bit less than that, you might have a cheaper option. “If you suspect your petrol [aka gasoline] or diesel is stale the best advice is to try topping up with fresh fuel from a filling station,” they write.

Of course, the better tactic is to store your gas in such a way as to maximize its shelf life. “The main enemies for fuel storage are oxygen, water, and heat,” William Northrop, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota, told Popular Mechanics – and so, to increase your fuel’s longevity, you’re going to want to reduce the impact of those effects in particular.

To that end, it’s a good idea to store gas in a fairly full container, Northrop advised: “You’ll evaporate some of the volatile components,” he explained, “but once the concentration of those volatile components gets high enough in the vapor, they no longer want to evaporate because they establish an equilibrium between their vapor phase and their concentration of liquid.” 

Even more important than a full container is its surrounding environment. Keep any gas you’re storing somewhere with a constant temperature and low humidity, Northrop advised – and remember: by its very nature, gasoline is really not something you want to treat carelessly. 

“Remember, gasoline is very, very volatile,” Speight told Live Science. “It's not worth trying to store large amounts. It can just result in trouble.”

“Anything that makes the gasoline a little more volatile than it normally is affects the gasoline,” he added – joking that “on a hot day… [that can include] looking at the stuff the wrong way.”

An earlier version of this article was published in March 2023.

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There’s no denying it: Farming had a rough year. Extreme weather spun up storms and floods, unseasonal freezes and baking heat waves, and prolonged parching droughts. In parts of the world in 2023, tomato plants didn’t flower, the peach crop never came in, and the price of olive oil soared.

To be a farmer right now—or an agronomist or an agricultural economist—is to recognize how closely those weird weather events are linked to climate change. In fact, when the United Nations Climate Change Summit, known as COP28, ran in Dubai earlier this month, it featured a 134-country pact to integrate planning for sustainable agriculture into countries’ climate road maps.

As the agriculture sector looks toward 2024, crop scientists are working to get ahead of ruinously unstable weather. They are envisioning adaptations for both growing systems and plants themselves. But time is not on their side.

“Plant breeding is a slow process,” says James Schnable, a plant geneticist and professor of agronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “It takes seven to 10 years to develop and release a new corn variety. But we know that as a result of climate change, the depletion of aquifers, changes in policies and commodity prices, the environment seven to 10 years from now is going to be very different. And we really have no way of predicting what are the varieties that should be developed today to meet those challenges then.”

Concern about climate change outpacing agricultural innovation isn’t new. In 2019, the Global Commission on Adaptation—an independent research group sponsored by the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—predicted that climate change would reduce farming yields by up to 30 percent by 2050, and that the impact would fall hardest on the 500 million small farmers worldwide. That same year, scientists from Australia and the US found that shocks to food production—sudden unpredicted drops in productivity—have increased every year since the 1960s, and a research team in Zurich showed that extreme heat waves stretching across nations at the same latitudes—rare before 2010—are becoming common.

If those authors had been looking for examples, 2023 provided them. In the spring, the United Kingdom and Ireland experienced a shortage of tomatoes after extended cold weather in Spain and Morocco cut into harvests, and the price of the fruit rose 400 percent in India after crop failures.

In June, potato farmers in Northern Ireland said dry weather had shorted their harvest by 4.4 million pounds. In India, torrential rains left farmers unable to harvest corn for livestock feed. In September, agricultural authorities in Spain said the country, which leads the world in olive oil production, would have a below-normal harvest for the second year in a row. In October, authorities in Peru, the world’s leading exporter of blueberries, said that the crop would be half its normal size. Meanwhile, in Europe, Australia, and South America, wine production fell to the lowest levels since 1961. The US Department of Agriculture revised its “plant hardiness zone” map for the first time in 11 years, indicating that growing areas in roughly half the country had warmed as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Those were abrupt insults—but agricultural production has also been suffering under the slow stress of rising temperatures and shrinking water supplies. As fast as precision breeding produces better traits in food crops, climate change takes them away. “For every degree Celsius, the yield of oats reduces by about 1.8 bushels per acre and 0.5 pounds per bushel of test weight,” says Juan David Arbelaez, a small-grains scientist and assistant professor at the University of Illinois. (This is a measure of how hefty the grains are.) “That’s just about how much we gain in oats every year with breeding. So every gain we make, we lose it with that extra degree of temperature.”

An alternative to changing crops is moving them, and crop scientists can already see that happening. Arbelaez, an oats specialist, says that Midwestern production of oats—for human consumption, animal feed, and straw—used to occupy more than 47 million acres. Now that has shrunk to 2 million. Most of the oats Americans consume today are grown in Canada.

The loss of traditional growing areas—which in a moderate-warming scenario has been predicted to be 30 percent of current production—doesn’t only affect the major staple crops. Specialty crops such as olives and oranges are also at risk, and so are the crops that provide the basis for luxuries. Beer, for instance: In 2018, a multinational research team used a model to predict that future droughts could cut barley production by as much as 17 percent globally. Barley is the basis of beer, but it’s also an important livestock feed; the team predicted that a conflict between those two uses could drive beer prices up threefold.

One solution to letting plants wilt under increasing heat and drought is to move them. A study published in 2020 confirmed that crop relocation is already happening. Across the globe between 1973 and 2012, corn, wheat, rice, and soybean crops all shifted northward, escaping the most damaging effects of climate warming on what were their home ranges. But adaptation by migration has limits, says Steven Davis, an Earth system scientist and professor at UC Irvine who helped lead that work. You can, for instance, move a crop in search of lower temperatures but not find the water that it needs to grow.

Soil quality is another concern, Davis says. “You might find the right temperature and precipitation, but it’s an area where the soil hasn’t developed, it’s rocky and not a place you’d want to try to grow a crop.”

Plus, moving crops to cooler areas—away from the equator into either hemisphere—moves them away from the band of production where most of the world’s subsistence farmers live. Out of the global south, in other words, and into the already-richer global north. “There will definitely be disproportionality between wealthier countries gaining more favorable climates to grow crops and countries in the global south that heavily rely on crops as a significant part of their income,” says Robert Fofrich, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “Not only does that have implications for regional food security—it also has implications for the overall economy.”

If crops can’t be moved—or if that would undermine farmers’ earnings and a country’s GDP—then another possibility is to ask whether they’re still the right crops. Breeders are always working to improve existing plants, but there are many varieties that agriculture hasn’t bothered to exploit. Some might possess valuable traits such as pest resistance or drought tolerance.

Take wine, for example. Most varieties depend on narrow ranges of varietals, and in France, the home of viticulture, the varietal “recipes” for wines made in specific regions are strictly policed by authorizing bodies. Nevertheless, in 2021 France’s Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité allowed six new cultivars developed to accommodate global warming—four grapes for red wine and two for white—to be added to the approved list of varietals included in the designation for Bordeaux.

The US and other wine-producing regions such as Australia have no such requirements, and that ought to allow greater exploitation of climate-friendly grapes, according to Elisabeth Forrestel, an evolutionary ecologist and assistant professor of viticulture at UC Davis. “There are over 5,000 cultivars of wine grapes available to us, and we don't leverage that diversity,” she says. “There are very few that constitute the vast majority of production, and that's a dangerous thing to do.”

Yet another possibility is to find an entirely different crop that fills the same niche and can adapt to warming conditions better than the one it replaces. In the breadbasket of the US, that might be millet—specifically proso millet, because “millet” as a category describes multiple genera of cultivated grains. Proso millet is an ancient grain used in health foods and as a component of livestock feed; it’s also those little white balls that linger in a feeder after birds scoop out the bigger seeds. Because it has a short growing season, it can fit into a crop rotation with wheat or soybeans—and crucially for farmers’ adoption, it can be harvested with equipment scaled for soybeans, which they are likely to already own.

Schnable and his father founded a proso millet startup, Dryland Genetics, almost 10 years ago. They saw it as one answer to the Midwest’s ongoing loss of precipitation and groundwater. Under ideal conditions, proso millet is less productive per acre than corn or sorghum, of which it’s a relative—but under dry conditions it produces twice as much grain per unit of water.

“As corn productivity has gone up, its need for water has increased in lockstep. We can increase the productivity, but we’re always having to put more resources in,” Schnable says. “But proso millet uses water really efficiently. And in a lot of western Nebraska, eastern Colorado, and a growing amount of Kansas, we are more limited by water than land.”

Millet isn’t the only crop that may be better suited to new climate conditions; researchers and farmers in the Midwest have also been trial-growing oil seeds such as canola and sunflowers, fiber plants such as hemp, other components of birdseed, and even another type of millet, known as pearl millet, which thrives in temperatures that kill corn pollen. They are all examples of ways in which growing areas are being transformed—not just by climate change but by human efforts to work with it and succeed against it. And that does sound like growth.

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Monday, 1 January

• Who: NewSpace India Limited (NSIL)
• What: PSLV DL
• When: 3:40 a.m. UTC
• Where: Dhawan Space Centre
• Why: NSIL will be launching the XPoSat satellite in this mission. The satellite is India’s first polarimetry mission that will study bright astronomical X-ray sources. The satellite will be carrying two scientific payloads called POLIX and XSPECT.

Wednesday, 3 January

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• When: 2:13 a.m. UTC
• Where: Vandenberg AFB
• Why: SpaceX will be conducting a launch that should have taken place last week but got delayed. A Falcon 9 will be carrying Starlink’s first direct-to-cell satellites which means that the internet can be directly delivered to devices. The other 15 satellites will be standard Starlink satellites.

Recap

• The first launch last week was on Christmas Eve. SpaceX used a Falcon 9 to launch the SARah-2 and SARah-3 reflector satellites before landing the Falcon 9 first stage back on the pad.

• Next, private Chinese space firm ExPace launched a Kuaizhou 1A rocket carrying four Tianmu 1 meteorological satellites from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre. The satellites were numbers 11 to 14. They will be used to provide commercial data services.

• On Christmas Day, the Chinese National Space Administration launched a Long March 11 rocket carrying three Shiyan-24C satellites from a sea-based platform. These satellites will be used for space science and technology experiments.

• On Boxing Day, a Long March 3B was launched carrying two backup BeiDou-3 navigation satellites. These backup satellites will operate in a medium Earth orbit and are the second and third satellites to act as backups for the BeiDou-3 Navigation Satellite System (BDS-3).

• Following this, ExPace launched another Kuaizhou 1A carrying four more Tianmu 1 satellites, these were number 19 to 22.

• Probably the most interesting launch of the week was a SpaceX Falcon Heavy carrying the Boeing X-37B spy plane for the US government. We don’t get that many Falcon Heavy launches so they’re nice to watch.

• Finally, SpaceX launched more Starlink internet satellites before landing the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket.

That’s all for this week, check back next time.

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