The idea of a detox is as simple as it is alluring. We spend most of the holiday season being as unhealthy as possible, piling on the booze and calories while trying desperately not to start a fight with our family over politics, and then go back to real life feeling, if not terrible, then at least a bit guilty about ourselves.

Maybe you’re worried about how all of the things you just ingested might impact your health, maybe you’re just feeling a little bit bloated from baking and consuming all of the seasonal cookies offered on the New York Times Cooking app. Time for a reset, you might think. A week or two of apple cider vinegar and supplements, and all of that unhealthy stuff you’ve ingested will be flushed away, never to return (until you do it all again next year).

The problem with this, of course, is that it’s complete nonsense. Your body generally doesn’t need help getting rid of toxins, and if you do find yourself in a situation where it does, you probably will feel more than simply bloated.

You are, in fact, technically exposed to innumerable toxic substances each day. That’s because most things can be toxic in high doses. A great example of this is caffeine: Most people don’t realize that they’re chugging down a serious neurotoxin with their pumpkin spice lattes and oat milk cappuccinos, but it’s true. At low doses, caffeine is one of the safest things you can consume regularly, with few if any negative health effects. At higher doses it can kill you quite quickly. That’s why Panera is now displaying warning signs about its caffeinated lemonade, and it’s how some scientists once seriously injured their research participants by giving them too much caffeine in an experiment.

You are unlikely to encounter lethal doses of caffeine in your day-to-day life (even the two deaths that lawsuits link to the Panera lemonade appear to have been due, at least in part, to other health issues). Medical textbooks tend to define a toxin as a biological poison, generally produced by plants, animals, and bacteria as a defense mechanism or byproduct, things like snake venom and botulin, which can easily kill you even in relatively small amounts; if you come into contact with them you need immediate medical attention, not a diet-like regimen to follow for five to 10 days.

If you look at some popular detox juices, supplements, and dietary regimens online, it’s not that they are aiming to get rid of a specific bad thing that people are ingesting—it’s more that there’s a general malaise that you can attempt to improve by following oddly specific rules and restrictions. You have to drink lemon juice in the morning, take these five pills, and remember to only drink your coffee black. Many detox diets or “cleanses” are almost religious in the ceremony and pomp that they recommend.

The problem with all of this is that there’s not a shred of evidence that most of these kinds of recommendations will help your health. Your liver and kidneys already do a great job of filtering harmful substances, like the alcohol, out of your body. Following a woefully specific set of instructions around food in the first weeks of the new year might help you feel less guilty about all that spiked eggnog, but that’s all it’s really doing—giving you a feeling (and maybe lightening your wallet).

The sad fact is that the best health advice anyone can give you is boring, simple, and just plain hard to follow. Don’t smoke, it’s extremely bad for you. Drink as little alcohol as possible—ideally, none at all. Eat a varied diet, try to limit calories. Exercise, ideally every day for at least 20 minutes, if not more. If you’re feeling really under the weather, see a licensed professional who is legally obligated to care about your health.

It’s pretty natural to feel a bit exhausted and out-of-sorts when you spend weeks out of your routine eating and drinking more than usual. Chances are if you give it a week, you’ll feel back to normal anyway. And if you spend most of the year trying to look after your health, the few days a year that you spend refilling your plate and your wine glass are probably not going to have much of a negative impact on your life. Just avoid drinking and driving, and don’t get into any fistfights over politics. In the new year, instead of doing anything dramatic, novel, and complex to change your health, just do the things you already know you should be doing. You can’t overhaul your body with a quick fix. But you can make changes, big and small, that will help keep it in good condition.

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That's according to a new US study, thought to be the first of its kind to look at the direct links between mindfulness and academic capabilities in young adults.

Researchers from Cornell University and Syracuse University studied the reading performance of 56 students aged 12-13, getting some of the groups to engage in mindfulness activities before reading.

Those activities included being more self-aware of breathing patterns, and cultivating positive thoughts – actions that assist in maintaining focus on the present and immediate, otherwise known as being mindful.

By the end of the school year, the students who tried the mindfulness techniques were reading 4.41 more words correctly during a timed reading exercise, on average.

Previous studies have shown links between mindfulness-based interventions and improved academic performance, but much of the research looks at grades rather than the skills required to get the grades.

"This is a measure of tapping into the actual skills that students are using to make sense of the text they're reading, rather than simply a grade they would get for the semester," says lead author Josh Felver, a psychologist from Cornell University.

As the study points out, reading comprehension is vital for so many other academic subjects. If kids can improve the way that they understand words and sentences, they should start to do better across the board.

And at the New York state school where the experiment was run, 70 percent of students are Black, and 88 percent of students live below the poverty level. The mindfulness approach could offer an affordable, easy way to help those from historically minoritized backgrounds, the researchers say.

"Given the large, persistent disparities in standardized measures of reading among students of color, it is exciting that we found evidence that a time-efficient mindfulness practice has a positive influence on educational outcomes," says Felver.

The researchers want future studies to look at how effective mindfulness is when tested directly against other ways of boosting reading skills, and how different mindfulness strategies (and time spent preparing) might change the outcomes.

They also want to look more closely at why mindfulness helps with reading, and what positive effect it has on the brain to put us in the right frame of mind to read. For now though, the early signs are positive ones.

"There is a significant need for feasible, effective interventions like this one to help youth from historically minoritized backgrounds bolster their reading skills so that they may be successful in school," says Felver.

The research has been published in School Psychology.

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JN.1, which emerged from the variant BA.2.86 and was first detected in the United States in September, accounted for 44% of COVID cases nationwide by mid-December, up from about 7% in late November, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To some extent, this jump is to be expected. “Variants take some time to get going,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “Then they speed up, they spread widely, and just when they’re doing that, after several months, a new variant crops up.”

JN.1’s momentum this month suggests that it may be more transmissible or better at evading our immune systems than other variants currently circulating, according to a CDC report published Dec. 22. The agency said that COVID remains “a serious public health threat,” especially for those who have always been at high risk of severe disease, such as older adults, infants, people with compromised immune systems or chronic medical conditions and those who are pregnant.

As far as experts can tell, JN.1 does not seem to be causing severe illness in most other people, although even a mild case can still make you feel “quite miserable for three or four days,” Schaffner said. The symptoms of a JN.1 infection are similar to those caused by previous COVID variants, including a cough, fever, body aches and fatigue.

To protect yourself against infection and severe disease, experts continue to recommend wearing masks, improving ventilation indoors when possible, staying home when sick and getting the latest COVID vaccine.

Preliminary research shows that the updated COVID vaccines released in September produce antibodies effective against JN.1, which is distantly related to the XBB.1.5 variant that the vaccines were designed to target. People may not build up as many antibodies to JN.1 as they would to XBB.1.5, but the levels should still decrease the risk.

“For those who were recently infected or boosted, the cross-protection against JN.1 should be decent, based on our laboratory studies,” said Dr. David Ho, a virologist at Columbia University who led the research on JN.1 and COVID vaccines, which was released as a preprint paper in early December. Rapid tests also continue to be a valuable tool, and the CDC has said tests already on the market work well at detecting JN.1.

There are signs that COVID cases are once again creeping up. There were just under 26,000 hospitalizations due to COVID the week of Dec. 10, a 10% increase from about 23,000 hospitalizations the week prior. But COVID hospitalizations are still far lower than they were during the peak of the first omicron wave in January 2022, and so far only about half as high as they were during the peak of the tripledemic last winter, when COVID-19, flu and RSV cases all surged at the same time.

It is too early to know whether JN.1 is responsible for the rise in hospitalizations or whether cases are picking up partly because of an increase in travel and large get-togethers for Thanksgiving and the winter holidays.

“When people are gathered inside close to each other, having parties and traveling and the like, those are the kind of circumstances where all respiratory viruses, including JN.1, have opportunities to spread,” Schaffner said.

COVID generally also has some seasonality, he added; countries in the Northern Hemisphere tend to see a lull in cases in the fall before infections and hospitalizations rise again in the winter.

JN.1 will most likely remain the dominant version of the coronavirus through spring, Schaffner said.

He and other experts noted that while vaccines offer protection against it and other variants, uptake remains low, with only 18% of adults having received the latest shots. Experts said everyone should consider getting vaccinated, especially those who are older than 65, are immunocompromised, have health conditions that put them at higher risk of severe illness or are traveling to visit loved ones who may be vulnerable.

“Give yourself a New Year’s present by getting this vaccine if you haven’t done it yet,” Schaffner said.

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Even so, it is likely that reducing or ceasing to drink alcohol will lessen the risk of these cancers, said Farhad Islami, a cancer epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society and an author of the report. “Given that many of these cancers have similar mechanistic pathways, we think we will see a similar association with reduction or cessation,” he said. “That’s why we recommend more studies, so we can have stronger evidence.”

Over the last couple of decades, studies have strongly established that consuming alcohol does raise the risk that people will develop several cancers, including breast, colorectal, liver, oral, esophageal, and more, Islami said. “That’s already established,” he said. “But we wanted to know, what if people stop drinking?”

That was the central question of the report, published online in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday. A team of researchers with the IARC analyzed dozens of previous studies to assess how strong the evidence is that cancer risk declines after reducing or ceasing alcohol intake. These included both cohort studies, which follow a group of participants over the years, and case-controlled studies, which try to analyze the differences between people diagnosed with cancer and those who did not develop the disease.

The report found there was sufficient evidence that reducing or ceasing alcohol intake reduces risk for oral cavity and esophagus cancer. For oral cancer, ceasing alcohol consumption for five to 9 years was linked to a 34% relative risk reduction, and doing so for 10-19 years was linked to a 55% relative risk reduction. For esophageal cancer, ceasing alcohol for five-15 years had a 15% relative risk reduction, and for 15 years or more, was linked to a 65% relative risk reduction. Researchers found limited evidence that the same is true for larynx, colorectum, and breast cancer, and inadequate evidence for pharynx and liver cancer.

STAT spoke with Islami about the report, why there’s been insufficient work on the link between cancer and alcohol, and what we know so far on how alcohol causes cancer. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How does alcohol cause cancer? What’s the mechanism?

As soon as people drink alcohol, it metabolizes to a compound called acetaldehyde. This is from the microbes we have in the gastrointestinal tract, and it starts in the mouth. After a few minutes, the concentration of acetaldehyde goes up immediately in the saliva, gastric juices, colon, and in the blood. That’s a potent genotoxic compound. It can affect DNA, and it may cause cancer. Smoking affects the microbiome, and that can increase the levels of acetaldehyde produced in the mouth. So, smoking is synergistic in that way.

There are other factors as well. It can increase inflammation, cause oxidative stress, and alcohol can affect sex hormone levels. That can change the risk of breast cancer. Alcohol can also reduce absorption of some nutrients that are helpful to repair DNA damage — for example, folate.

This is why it’s very likely that the more you reduce alcohol, the greater the risk reduction of cancer. That’s what we expect, and we think it’s very likely the risk will also go down over time for all the other cancer types if you reduce or cease alcohol — but the evidence is just limited at this time.

I know that the reason behind alcohol flushing is that some people cannot metabolize acetaldehyde as easily. Does that mean people who turn red when drinking are at greater risk for cancer if they drink?

Yes, flushing is from the reduced functioning of acetaldehyde hydrogenase, which metabolizes it to less dangerous compounds. Those people are at even higher risk. But actually, for those with only one copy of the mutation it’s higher. Those who are homozygous or have two copies of the mutation are at lower risk. That’s because they become so affected or flushed by alcohol, that they don’t drink it.

What’s the utility behind understanding how cancer risk declines after alcohol cessation or reduction if we already know that alcohol consumption leads to cancer?

So, we know this for smoking already. We found if someone stops smoking now, after one decade their risk of cardiovascular disease goes down by 60%. Risk of cancer and related diseases go down, compared to current smokers, by 50%. We want to look at this kind of data for alcohol, but unfortunately there are not much data to say how long it takes to eliminate the risk from alcohol.

It’s important because there are some exposures where you may not see a lot of benefits after you reduce or eliminate the exposure. Some viral infections, like hep b or c, are like this. That’s why the hepatitis vaccine is recommended early in life. We also want to see this kind of evidence before recommending guidelines for people, and these kinds of studies help us to create risk predictions in the future. It can help policymakers increase awareness or find ways to reduce consumption of alcohol in the population.

What kind of evidence do we still need to get to understand this link better?

The best evidence we can get would be cohort studies, where we follow people over time. The issue with the evidence now is that many of the studies that were available just reported the risk for former drinkers without showing when they stopped drinking, how long they stopped drinking, or whether people continued drinking but reduced their consumption. We don’t have much data on that. It’d be great to have studies now that ask more questions about the duration of alcohol cessation or reduction.

There are some studies. The ACS [American Cancer Society] started a new one a few years ago called CPS3. But we still need more.

Why do you think we have so little evidence on this link currently?

The association with smoking and cancer has been known since the 1950s. Then in 1964, the surgeon general had a specific report on the association with smoking and cancer, which led to lots of campaigns and things.

The association with alcohol and cancer is more recent. A few surveys showed a large percentage of people didn’t know that alcohol consumption is associated with cancer risk, and surprisingly even many medical professionals did not. That may be a reason why we don’t have a lot of questions on alcohol consumption in earlier cohort studies.

These cohort studies take decades from the time you recruit people to when you can really analyze your data and publish. There was also this idea that small amounts of alcohol may improve your cardiovascular health. There’s still a belief there. Now, new evidence suggests that may not be.

Other associations may have confounded those results, like many of the people who eat a Mediterranean diet also consume lots of fruits and vegetables. Also, the studies – they are sponsored by the alcohol industry.

It’s important to emphasize that a person doesn’t need to be a heavy drinker to increase risk of cancer. Even moderate, light drinking increases risk. The ACS recommends it’s best not to drink alcohol or, if you must, reduce it as much as you can.

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There are two types of hypertension: primary (essential) and secondary. Primary hypertension stems from genetic and lifestyle factors such as family history, age, obesity, sedentary lifestyle, high sodium intake, and excessive alcohol consumption. Secondary hypertension results from medical conditions or medications like drugs, kidney disorders, sleep apnea, and hormonal imbalances.

Hypertension symptoms to watch for

Most people with hypertension experience no apparent symptoms, making regular monitoring essential. However, when symptoms occur, they might include:

• Headaches
• Vision changes
• Facial flushing
• Chest pain
• Shortness of breath

These signs often manifest when blood pressure reaches dangerously high levels.

Blood pressure is measured using a cuff around the arm, giving two numbers: systolic (top number) and diastolic (bottom number) pressure. Normal blood pressure is below 120/80 mmHg, while anything above 130/80 mmHg generally indicates hypertension. Regular screenings are vital, especially if you have risk factors or elevated readings.

Photo by Mockup Graphics on Unsplash

How can you prevent or treat hypertension?

Managing high blood pressure often starts with lifestyle changes. These include reducing salt intake, maintaining a healthy weight, regular physical activity, quitting smoking, and limiting alcohol consumption. These steps can significantly impact your blood pressure and overall health.

Depending on the severity of your hypertension, medications might be necessary. These can include various classes of drugs, such as:

• Thiazide diuretics
• ACE inhibitors
• Angiotensin receptor blockers
• Calcium channel blockers

Your doctor will tailor your treatment based on your specific health needs and the effectiveness of the medication.

Understanding blood pressure readings is crucial. A reading like 110/70 mmHg is normal, while 138/80 mmHg indicates mild hypertension. Blood pressure in the 120-129/less than 80 mmHg range is elevated, 130-139/80-89 mmHg is stage 1 hypertension, and above 140/90 mmHg is stage 2 hypertension. A reading exceeding 180/120 mmHg demands immediate medical attention.

Regular communication with healthcare professionals and staying informed are crucial to managing high blood pressure effectively. With the right approach, leading a healthy and active life is possible despite this condition.

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Officials from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) publicly questioned whether the Silicon Valley company’s internal threat algorithms were faulty and announced an investigation into the security of Apple devices.

In private, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, senior Modi administration officials called Apple’s India representatives to demand that the company help soften the political impact of the warnings. They also summoned an Apple security expert from outside the country to a meeting in New Delhi, where government representatives pressed the Apple official to come up with alternative explanations for the warnings to users, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

“They were really angry,” one of those people said.

The visiting Apple official stood by the company’s warnings. But the intensity of the Indian government effort to discredit and strong-arm Apple disturbed executives at the company’s headquarters, in Cupertino, Calif., and illustrated how even Silicon Valley’s most powerful tech companies can face pressure from the increasingly assertive leadership of the world’s most populous country — and one of the most critical technology markets of the coming decade.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept into power nearly a decade ago. Since then, he has repeatedly rallied voters in this vast democracy and entrenched his party’s power by exploiting differences between the Hindu majority and Muslim minority.

Religious tensions have existed in India since independence in 1947, and Modi’s right-wing followers in his Bharatiya Janata Party and beyond turned to inflammatory rhetoric and violence against Muslims to secure support from Hindus.

The BJP and affiliated Hindu nationalist groups have been in the global vanguard of using technology to advance political aims, tightening their grip with an ideology that imperils India’s traditional secularism and equality among religious faiths. Disinformation and divisive, often bigoted online posts and videos are rampant.

Government censorship of critical views has been on the rise. Social media platforms and other Big Tech firms, protective of their position in one of the world’s largest markets, have often given Modi and his allies what they want.

Despite concerns over repression and accelerating autocracy, the Biden administration has been actively courting Modi, hoping that India can help contain Chinese expansionism in the Indo-Pacific region.

Canada’s explosive announcement on Sept. 18 that Indian government agents may have assassinated a Sikh separatist leader on Canadian soil underscores the uncomfortable choices the United States and other Western countries face in moving closer to Modi’s India.

The recent episode also exemplified the dangers facing government critics in India and the lengths to which the Modi administration will go to deflect suspicions that it has engaged in hacking against its perceived enemies, according to digital rights groups, industry workers and Indian journalists.

Many of the more than 20 people who received Apple’s warnings at the end of October have been publicly critical of Modi or his longtime ally, Gautam Adani, an Indian energy and infrastructure tycoon. They included a firebrand politician from West Bengal state, a Communist leader from southern India and a New Delhi-based spokesman for the nation’s largest opposition party.

Of the journalists who received notifications, two stood out: Anand Mangnale and Ravi Nair of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a nonprofit alliance of dozens of independent, investigative newsrooms from around the world.

On Aug. 23, the OCCRP emailed Adani seeking comment for a story it would publish a week later alleging that his brother was part of a group that had secretly traded hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the Adani Group conglomerate’s public stock, possibly in violation of Indian securities law. A forensic analysis of Mangnale’s phone, conducted by Amnesty International and shared with The Washington Post, found that within 24 hours of that inquiry, an attacker infiltrated the device and planted Pegasus, the notorious spyware that was developed by Israeli company NSO Group and that NSO says is sold only to governments.

A spokeswoman for Adani denied that the magnate was involved in any hacking effort and accused OCCRP of conducting a “smear campaign” against the Adani Group. She also criticized The Post for asking whether the Adani Group was involved in, or had knowledge of, the hacking attempts against OCCRP. “While categorically denying and rejecting this insinuation, we find it disturbing and inappropriate that you would make an attempt to draw our name into this specious construct,” Varsha Chainani, the Adani Group’s head of corporate communications, said in an emailed response to written questions. “The Adani Group operates with the highest level of integrity and ethical standards.”

Gopal Krishna Agarwal, a national spokesman for the BJP, said any evidence of hacking should be presented to the Indian government for investigation. Hiren Joshi, the top communications official in the prime minister’s office, did not respond to requests seeking comment. Apple declined to comment in response to written questions.

The Modi government has never confirmed or denied using spyware, and it has refused to cooperate with a committee appointed by India’s Supreme Court to investigate whether it had. But two years ago, the Forbidden Stories journalism consortium, which included The Post, found that phones belonging to Indian journalists and political figures were infected with Pegasus, which grants attackers access to a device’s encrypted messages, camera and microphone.

In recent weeks, The Post, in collaboration with Amnesty, found fresh cases of infections among Indian journalists. Additional work by The Post and New York security firm iVerify found that opposition politicians had been targeted, adding to the evidence suggesting the Indian government’s use of powerful surveillance tools.

In addition, Amnesty showed The Post evidence it found in June that suggested a Pegasus customer was preparing to hack people in India. Amnesty asked that the evidence not be detailed to avoid teaching Pegasus users how to cover their tracks.

“These findings show that spyware abuse continues unabated in India,” said Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, head of Amnesty International’s Security Lab. “Journalists, activists and opposition politicians in India can neither protect themselves against being targeted by highly invasive spyware nor expect meaningful accountability.”

NSO spokesperson Liron Bruck said that the company does not know who is targeted by its customers but investigates complaints that are accompanied by details of the suspected hack.

“While NSO cannot comment on specific customers, we stress again that all of them are vetted law enforcement and intelligence agencies that license our technologies for the sole purpose of fighting terror and major crime,” Bruck said. “The company’s policies and contracts provide mechanisms to avoid targeting of journalists, lawyers and human rights defenders or political dissidents that are not involved in terror or serious crimes.”

David Kaye, a former United Nations special rapporteur on free expression who has testified before an Indian Supreme Court committee probing the government’s suspected use of Pegasus, said the recent reporting by The Post and its partners “further shifts the burden onto the Indian government to disprove the allegations that it uses these kinds of tools.”

“Especially after this information, the government absolutely has to be honest and transparent,” Kaye said. "But the accretion of evidence suggests this is not divorced from the broader assault by the Modi government on the freedom of expression and the right to protest.”

A persistent threat

One after another at October’s end, some of India’s best known journalists and politicians posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Apple had warned them that state-sponsored hackers may have targeted their devices. While Apple, as usual, did not accuse the Indian government or describe the attacks, the self-identified victims said there was a pattern: Many had questioned Modi’s close relationship with Adani, who lent the Indian leader aircraft for his 2014 election campaign, traveled abroad with him during state visits and operates a vast portfolio of seaports, airports, railroads and power plants.

On Aug. 31, the OCCRP published a joint investigation with British news outlets the Financial Times and the Guardian, reporting that Adani’s longtime associates had routed funds through offshore shell companies into publicly traded Adani shares. Adani denied the story’s allegations, but the report spurred calls for a parliamentary probe of suspected stock manipulation, and it renewed criticism that Modi’s government had failed to regulate Adani’s dealings out of loyalty to the businessman.

Hours after OCCRP sought comment from Adani a week before the story’s publication, unknown hackers used an exploit called Blastpass to weave through two security holes in Mangnale’s phone and install Pegasus, according to Amnesty’s analysis. Amnesty said it found no signs of an attempted intrusion on Nair’s phone, which is not uncommon after sophisticated attacks.

“We know Pegasus is only licensed to governments, and we know that the attack happened hours after we sent the email,” Mangnale said. “I am not pointing at anyone, but that is a hell of a coincidence.”

Others warned by Apple include Mahua Moitra, a member of Parliament who has vocally condemned Modi’s relationship with Adani. Moitra was expelled from Parliament this month by a BJP-dominated committee investigating allegations that she accepted gifts from an Adani business rival in exchange for raising questions about the billionaire’s business interests. In an interview, Moitra called the charges fabricated and said the government should scrutinize Adani’s transactions instead of her communications.

“Adani is the government and the government is Adani,” Moitra said. “It is our greatest misfortune that we are governed by a bunch of peeping Toms.”

IVerify examined Moitra’s phone backup and confirmed that she had received an Apple warning. It also saw urgent crash reports that, together with other digital records, suggested the device had been hacked. The company also found a threat notification and suspicious activity on the phone of Praveen Chakravarty, head of the opposition Indian National Congress party’s data analytics department.

This is far from the first time the Indian government has been accused of snooping on critics.

In 2018, researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found evidence that servers used to plant NSO spyware were embedded in Indian telecom networks. Two years later, Citizen Lab and Amnesty found that nine human rights advocates in India had been hacked with emails that installed commercial spyware on their Windows computers.

In 2019, Meta’s WhatsApp also sued NSO, alleging that the firm exploited vulnerabilities in its chat software to hack approximately 1,400 people, and told the media that the victims included journalists and dissidents in India. NSO has denied wrongdoing in the case, which is pending. And last year, journalists working for OCCRP unearthed customs records showing that India’s Intelligence Bureau, the domestic security agency, received shipments of hardware matching Pegasus specifications from NSO’s offices outside Tel Aviv.

Siddharth Varadarajan, a co-founder of the Indian digital media outlet the Wire, received one of Apple’s Oct. 30 warnings. Amnesty found that the same hackers that broke into Mangnale’s phone had tried to do the same to Varadarajan’s. In both cases, someone using the Apple ID natalymarinova@proton.me had used the Blastpass vulnerability. The Post received no response to an email sent to that address.

The attempt to infiltrate Varadarajan’s phone and install Pegasus, which took place on Oct. 16, failed, Amnesty found. That’s because Blastpass had been revealed in September by Citizen Lab, Apple had fixed the two flaws it used and Varadarajan had kept his iPhone’s software updated.

Varadarajan said he was not working on any sensitive stories around the time of the attempted hack. But he said he was leading protests over the arrest of a leftist publisher accused of spreading Chinese Communist Party propaganda. The publisher’s website, Newsclick, had often run articles critical of Modi and Adani.

Government counteroffensive

As soon as journalists and opposition politicians shared their warnings from Apple, BJP officials scrambled to contain the fallout.

Senior Modi administration officials called Apple India’s managing director, Virat Bhatia, after the news broke, said two people with knowledge of the matter. One of the people said Indian officials asked Apple to withdraw the warnings and say it had made a mistake. After a heated discussion, the company’s India office said the most it could do was put out a public statement that emphasized certain caveats that Apple had already listed on its tech support page about the warnings.

What this series reveals

Part 1: Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and its Hindu nationalist allies have built a massive propaganda machine, with tens of thousands of activists spreading disinformation and religiously divisive posts via WhatsApp. Parent company Meta says WhatsApp cannot monitor content, no matter how inflammatory.

Part 2: Social media giants have been reluctant to police Indian content that violates their terms of service. After Facebook discovered a vast influence operation using fake accounts secretly operated by the Indian army, some company employees moved to shut it down, but executives in the New Delhi office stalled the action.

Part 3: A new generation of Hindu vigilantes frequently stream their armed attacks against Muslims on platforms like YouTube and Facebook, amassing large followings and winning BJP protection. While rights activists have repeatedly flagged hateful influencers to social media companies, the accounts are rarely removed.

Part 4: India orders internet shutdowns more than any other country, blacking out entire states for weeks and even months at a time. By pulling the plug, the government is able to stifle dissent, drown out negative news and obstruct journalists from doing independent reporting — often at a high economic cost.

Part 5: The Indian government has dramatically increased the demands it makes of Silicon Valley firms to take down social media posts and accounts, in particular those critical of Modi and the BJP. Companies that once pushed back now routinely comply, and nowhere has the shift been more notable than at Twitter.

Part 6: Hindu nationalists aligned with the BJP government use mass public pressure and the threat of criminal cases to shape or entirely block films produced by Netflix and Amazon, resulting in a culture of self-censorship. The companies and filmmakers increasingly steer clear of projects that could offend the right wing.

Part 7: An Indian research organization that often targets U.S.-based critics of the Modi government is actually a covert influence operation run by an Indian intelligence officer, people familiar with it say. The material published by the Disinfo Lab, though often unsubstantiated, is widely circulated online by right-wing Indians.

Part 8: After Apple alerted Indian critics of the Modi administration that their iPhones had probably been targeted by state-sponsored attackers, Indian officials privately pressured Apple to backtrack on the warning. Subsequent forensic analysis confirmed spyware infections among Indian journalists and opposition politicians.

Apple India soon sent out emails observing that it could have made mistakes and that “detecting such attacks relies on threat intelligence signals that are often imperfect and incomplete.”

“Civil society was puzzled and concerned by the Apple statement,” said one U.S. digital rights advocate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about what he viewed as company missteps.

Bhatia told others that the company was under intense pressure from the government, but other Apple executives stressed the need to stand firm, the two people familiar with the events said. Bhatia declined to comment.

Still, Apple India’s corporate communications executives began privately asking Indian technology journalists to emphasize in their stories that Apple’s warnings could be false alarms and that similar warnings had been issued to users in 150 countries, not just India, said three Indian journalists, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their relationship with Apple. The guidance effectively cast doubt on Apple’s own security team and shifted the spotlight away from the Modi government, these journalists said.

A BJP memo distributed to party surrogates and friendly media outlets pushed similar talking points. The memo, seen by The Post, noted that Apple users in 150 countries, including “several political leaders in Uganda,” had received similar hacking notices and that Apple’s operating systems contained security vulnerabilities. The evening the memo went out, government officials anonymously told Indian outlets they suspected that an “algorithmic malfunction” within Apple’s internal systems had generated the hacking notices, and Piyush Goyal, India’s commerce minister, said in a television interview that the notices may have been “a prank.”

On social media, pro-government influencers further muddied the waters. Sanjeev Sanyal, one of Modi’s economic advisers, pointed out on X that, in Apple’s hacking alerts, the company advised targeted users to consult with Access Now, a digital rights group that Sanyal noted has received funding from George Soros, the liberal financier and philanthropist. Soros is often painted by the Indian right as a boogeyman who masterminds international conspiracies against India.

“See the sinister plot here?” Amit Malviya, the head of BJP’s social media team, asked his 765,000 followers on X, implying that Apple, Access Now, Soros and opposition politicians were working together to falsely accuse the government of hacking.

On Oct. 31, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the deputy minister of electronics and information technology, announced that a government probe had been launched into “these threat notifications and ... Apples claims of being secure.”

After receiving a barrage of questions from the government, one Apple security expert from outside India flew to the country in November and met with officials at the technology ministry’s New Delhi offices, where officials again demanded alternative explanations for the warnings, according to the three people familiar with the events.

But Apple defended its work to the officials. “When Apple sends a notification, that’s yelling ‘fire.’ You’d better be pretty confident there’s a fire,” said a person who worked with the company. He and others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive dealings with authorities.

In response to questions from The Post about whether the government exerted pressure on Apple, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said in a statement: “We have instituted technical investigation in the reported matter. So far, Apple has cooperated fully in the investigation process.”

Nikhil Pahwa, the founder of the Indian tech policy news website MediaNama, said the Modi government deployed a familiar tactic.

“You can’t have the Indian government investigating itself,” Pahwa said. “What we see often with the Indian government is what I would call ‘kite-flying’: putting a message out to defuse a situation or to misdirect a situation.”

A dilemma for Apple

Silicon Valley companies have been pressured to overlook Indian government overreach before. This year, The Post found that both Facebook and X uncovered covert Indian military propaganda and calls for violence on their platforms, but executives hesitated to remove them. In both cases, executives at the companies’ India offices warned colleagues at the U.S. headquarters about the risks of clashing with the government and endangering their business.

But the confrontation between Apple and the Modi administration this autumn was more delicate for both sides and ended in a stalemate, according to industry analysts and people working with Apple.

For its part, Apple has been looking to India as a revenue driver as sales flatten in other markets. India is on track to account for 10 percent of Apple sales in 2025, up from 4 percent now, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives.

“India will be the heart and lungs of Apple’s strategy outside of China,” Ives said.

The Modi administration, meanwhile, doesn’t want to alienate a high-profile device manufacturer that it has been courting as part of its “Make In India” campaign to create factory jobs. That may have helped to blunt the government’s retaliation over the hacking warnings, people working with Apple said.

Although Apple India executives initially helped provide Modi government officials fodder for doubts about the warnings, Apple ultimately ceded less ground than its Silicon Valley peers have, according to people familiar with the events who noted that Apple issued no new statement after the November summit with Indian authorities.

“Apple is treading a very delicate line,” said Steven Feldstein, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington who studies the spyware industry. “It needs to stand up for digital rights and its core brand of protecting privacy, but it also doesn’t want to jeopardize its presence in an extremely important market.”

Rank-and-file Apple employees say that the company cannot afford to compromise on its commitment to making its devices as safe as possible in an era when crime and surveillance are surging. Last year, Apple introduced Lockdown Mode, an option that drastically reduces the number of electronic avenues that can be used to implant Pegasus or similar spyware. No infections have been discovered on phones running in Lockdown.

A multitude of internal signals factor into Apple’s determination that a country is behind a specific hacking attempt, and the chances of false alarms are small, former employees and people working with the company say. Apple has expanded its security and threat-research teams in recent years, hiring technologists with human rights backgrounds as well as intelligence agency veterans, and it conducts inquiries like a small intelligence agency itself. If it detects something unusual, it looks for the same activity elsewhere and then follows the leads to find more hacking techniques and victims.

With many hacking attempts, something outside the norm occurs. It can stand out as starkly as someone coming into a restaurant and ordering three desserts, then one entree, and then six appetizers, said a former Apple employee.

Apple sued NSO for allegedly hacking its infrastructure and began warning of state-sponsored attacks in November 2021, after the Forbidden Stories consortium exposed worldwide abuses. (Attacks on Android phones are also common, but they have a variety of manufacturers.) The Commerce Department blacklisted NSO that same month, barring it from deals with American companies.

The alerts have played a major role in exposing hacking activity, especially when those notified get their phones examined afterward. The discoveries have revealed hacking methods that can then be blocked, making it more expensive for those who sell the most powerful hacking tools, industry experts say.

“Apple’s warnings have fundamentally changed the game for finding spyware abuses,” said John Scott-Railton, a researcher at Citizen Lab. “Their warnings shift the power balance.”

The increased attention has elevated the issue to the White House, which this year pledged with allied governments not to buy from the companies whose tools were being abused by authoritarian regimes.

India is not among the governments that joined the pledge.

This year, there have been other signs of the Indian government hacking targets it perceives as threats.

In recent weeks, iVerify examined the phone of the New York-based Sikh separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, who U.S. prosecutors say was targeted for assassination by an Indian official. IVerify engineers found severe crashes of his encrypted messaging apps that could have been triggered by hacking attempts, said chief executive Danny Rogers. Referring to activity of an encrypted messaging app during two days in July, Rogers said: “Eight Signal crashes in a row screams that someone is trying to hack you.”

Rogers said those crashes were not proof of a hacking attempt but were troubling because there was other evidence Pannun had been targeted. In May, Pannun was chatting over Telegram with an account belonging to Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist based in Canada, Pannun told The Post. When the conversation seemed off and Pannun called Nijjar over the phone, Nijjar said he hadn’t used Telegram in a while. A few weeks later, on June 18, Nijjar was shot by masked gunmen in a parking lot — a slaying that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced in September was “credibly” linked to the Indian government.

Pannun told The Post that his own phones had been hacked twice before.

The U.S. State Department declined to address India’s alleged use of spyware directly. A spokesman said that the government “remains very concerned about the proliferation and misuse of commercial spyware, which is being used around the world to erode democratic values and to enable human rights abuses. We are committed to countering the misuse of this technology and the threats they pose, in partnership with allies around the world, and we welcome other like-minded partners to join us.”

Journalists still under fire

Officially, the Indian investigation of Apple continues, but people briefed on the matter said pressure on the company has waned. The next step is a report by India’s cybersecurity office, but it has no deadline. Indian media have reported that Indian officials now believe Apple’s warnings of state-sponsored hacking were genuine, but that the culprit may have been Beijing. While China is India’s great regional rival and a prodigious hacker, it has never been publicly linked to any use of Pegasus. The Israeli defense ministry must approve all sales of the spyware.

While tensions between Apple and New Delhi have eased, the journalists who faced hacking attempts continue to experience pressure.

In November and December, a third Indian journalist who has worked with OCCRP received phishing emails from a hacker who posed as a whistleblower seeking to leak corporate documents. The emails contained malware, according to OCCRP’s security team, which has not been able to identify the sender.

After the publication of their Adani investigation in August, Mangnale and Nair were summoned by the crime branch of the Ahmedabad city police force, in Adani’s and Modi’s home state of Gujarat, to respond to a complaint by a local investor who accused them of releasing a “grossly false and malicious” story about Adani. Ahmedabad police have also summoned two British reporters with the Financial Times, which collaborated with OCCRP on the investigation, as part of a preliminary inquiry.

A spokesperson for the FT declined to comment. The OCCRP said it has successfully appealed to the Indian Supreme Court to protect Mangnale and Nair from potential arrest, but the journalists are still fighting in court to avoid questioning by police.

At their first hearing on Dec. 1, the OCCRP journalists discovered a particularly high-powered lawyer was arguing the case on behalf of local police.

That lawyer was Tushar Mehta, the solicitor general of India.

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A common refrain in the doctor’s office is to eat less salt to improve your blood pressure. But that advice might be doing more for our cardiovascular health than previously thought. Cutting about one teaspoon of daily table salt from your diet could reduce your blood pressure by about the same amount as taking a prescription antihypertension medication, according to a recent study.

The idea that cutting dietary salt (aka sodium chloride) also slashes blood pressure is pretty well-established science. “There have been dozens and dozens of studies that have found the link,” says Grant Lipman, an emergency medicine specialist at wilderness medicine company GOES Health, who was not involved in the study. But the new paper is notable for demonstrating the size of the effect and the fact that the benefits held even for people who were already taking drugs for hypertension.

The study followed 213 people between the ages of 50 and 75. Unlike previous trials, however, it included some people who were already taking blood pressure medication. Participants fell into four roughly equal-sized groups: those who had normal blood pressure and did not use medication, those whose blood pressure was in the normal range because of medication, those who used medication but whose hypertension was not controlled and those with hypertension who did not take medication.

Each participant spent one week on a high-sodium diet followed by one week on a low-sodium diet; the high-sodium diet consisted of the participants’ regular eating patterns supplemented with 2,200 milligrams of extra sodium, while the low-sodium diet was designed by the researchers to be the same for all participants. By the end of the experiment, every group’s average blood pressure dropped while its participants were on the low-sodium diet—regardless of their starting measurements. Baseline blood pressure or medication use “didn’t really matter,” says Deepak Gupta, a cardiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and first author of the study, which was published November 11 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “The reduction in blood pressure was consistent across all those groups.”

Overall, Gupta’s team found that the blood pressure reduction from cutting out about one teaspoon of table salt daily for a week was about equivalent to the drop most people experience after starting hypertension medication. Reducing the amount of salt you consume isn’t a replacement for prescription medication, however, and you should consult your doctor before stopping or starting any meds.

How, exactly, excess salt increases blood pressure is still a bit of a mystery. The prevailing hypothesis is that when a person consumes more sodium, it causes their body to hold onto more water. This in turn puts more hydrostatic pressure of the walls of the blood vessels, causing hypertension.

But scientists have not clearly demonstrated that this is the main mechanism behind salt’s blood pressure-raising tendencies. In fact, Gupta’s team plans to investigate another hypothesis. While excess fluid may still play a role, Gupta says, “one premise of our study was to see if sodium itself might also be proinflammatory and incite an immune response that actually leads to more vascular stiffening.” He hopes to publish the results of that analysis in the near future.

What is certain is that humans did not evolve to eat a high-sodium diet. “Our hominid ancestors ate probably less than half a gram of sodium a day,” says Bruce Neal, an epidemiologist and director of the George Institute for Global Health in Australia, who was not involved in the new research. But humans are hard-wired to crave salt because we need a certain amount of the mineral to survive, he says.

Sodium is essential for all sorts of bodily processes, including contracting and relaxing muscles, conducting nerve signals and maintaining a healthy internal fluid balance. “It’s a super important electrolyte,” Lipman says. Too little salt can send your body into hyponatremia, a potentially dangerous condition that causes confusion, headaches and, in rare cases, seizures or comas. Salt’s physiological importance explains why it tastes so good to us—it was hard for many of our distant ancestors to access, so eating it was a treat. But just like a spicy ghost pepper or a particularly pungent cheese, a little goes a long way.

Currently, the average person in the U.S. eats about 3,400 milligrams of sodium per day. Most of that—about 70 percent—comes from processed or restaurant food, according to the American Heart Association. Yet the Food and Drug Administration recommends consuming less than 2,300 milligrams each day. There are a few exceptions to this rule; for example, people with certain medical conditions such as kidney failure may need to increase their sodium intake. Similarly, people who are recovering from severe dehydration or diarrhea might need to consume more salt for a few days. But for the most part, people who eat a typical Western diet should try to reduce their daily sodium intake.

This presents an obvious conundrum: How do you get people to eat less salt when it is ubiquitous in our food system? Neal has been working to answer this question for the better part of two decades. His research has shown repeatedly that simply telling people to eat less salt isn’t very effective in the long term. Getting them to use a lower-sodium option instead works much better. “Cutting is hard,” he says. “Switching is easy.”

Neal believes that changing from typical table salt to a mixture of 75 percent sodium chloride and 25 percent potassium chloride—another type of salt—would be a simple, effective way to provide people with the sodium reduction they need. Such formulations are already available in many health food stores, although they are currently pricey compared with regular old sodium chloride. Making the switch might be costly on both an individual and institutional scale at first.

But Neal points out that we have changed our salt supply on a massive scale before. Iodized salt was introduced to U.S. grocery stores in 1924 in an effort to reduce the prevalence of pediatric goiters, enlarged thyroid glands, which impacted up to 70 percent of children in certain regions of the country. The intervention was a success, and today only about 5 percent of Americans develop goiters.

Perhaps one day potassium-supplemented salt will become the new lower-sodium staple. For now, though, if you’re trying to watch your sodium intake, your best bet is to cook at home and take your dinner with a grain of salt—but not too many grains.

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Just like humans, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT will cheat and "lie" to you if you "stress" them out, even if they were built to be transparent, a new study shows. 

This deceptive behavior emerged spontaneously when the AI was given "insider trading" tips, and then tasked with making money for a powerful institution — even without encouragement from its human partners.

"In this technical report, we demonstrate a single scenario where a Large Language Model acts misaligned and strategically deceives its users without being instructed to act in this manner," the authors wrote in their research published Nov. 9 on the pre-print server arXiv. "To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of such strategically deceptive behavior in AI systems designed to be harmless and honest." 

In the new study, they primed Generative Pre-trained Transformer-4, or GPT-4 (which powers ChatGPT Plus), to behave as an AI system that makes investments on behalf of a financial institution. 

The researchers fed GPT-4 a set of text-based prompts to generate the simulated environment. The AI was then given access to financial tools to analyze stocks, execute trades, plan its next steps and deliver updates to managers at the company. 

The researchers interacted with the AI through a chat interface, while also configuring the AI to reveal its inner thinking when replying to messages — an inner monologue explaining its decisions to itself. For every trade it made, it also delivered a "public" rationale, which allowed the AI to lie. 

The researchers applied pressure in three ways. First, they sent the artificial stock trader an email from its "manager" saying the company isn't doing well and needs much stronger performance in the next quarter. They also rigged the game so that the AI tried, then failed, to find promising trades that were low- or medium-risk. Finally, they sent an email from a colleague projecting a downturn in the next quarter.

Then, they gave the model an "insider" tip while conveying that its managers disapproved of insider trading — and waited to see how the model would behave. They ran the scenario over and again several times, measuring how often the AI performed the insider trade, how often it lied, and how often it doubled down on the lie. 

Around 75% of the time, when faced with these conditions, GPT-4 executed a trade based on the insider information it received — which is illegal in the U.S. — then tried to cover it up by lying to its managers about its thinking. Around 90% of the time, after lying, it doubled down on its lie.

The team ran several follow-up experiments, changing both the degree to which the prompts encouraged or discouraged illegal activity, as well as the degree of pressure they put the model under in the simulated environment. They also modified the risk of getting caught. Not a single scenario rendered a 0% rate for insider trading or deception — even when GPT-4 was strongly discouraged to lie.

Given this is just one scenario, the researchers didn't want to draw firm conclusions about how likely AI might lie in real-world settings. But they want to build on this work to investigate how often and which language models are prone to this behavior.

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This bad cholesterol – in the form of low-density lipoproteins or LDLs – is the type that can cause dangerous blockages in the arteries, reducing oxygen flow to the heart or causing blood clots that can lead to a stroke.

In tests on mice and monkeys, a team led by researchers from the University of New Mexico and the University of California, Davis were able to reduce LDL levels by targeting a protein called proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9), known to have an important relationship to LDLs.

How the PCSK9 protein binds to receptors. (Fowler et al., NPJ Vaccines, 2023)

"The vaccine is based on a non-infectious virus particle," says molecular geneticist Bryce Chackerian from the University of New Mexico.

"It is just the shell of a virus, and it turns out that we can use that shell of a virus to develop vaccines against all sorts of different things."

Special receptors on liver cells are responsible for keeping LDLs at a safe level, but an excess of PCSK9 can harm these receptors, meaning the receptors become less effective and there's more bad cholesterol floating around in the blood.

Genetics, diet, and various other factors can influence PCSK9 production in the body. Here, the combination of tiny bits of PCSK9 with the non-infectious virus particle meant that an immune system response was triggered, targeting and neutralizing the PCSK9 protein.

The vaccine developed by the researchers was shown to be able to reduce bad cholesterol by up to 30 percent. Though it's as effective as current PCSK9 inhibitors, it's a solution that could potentially cost much less.

"We are interested in trying to develop another approach that would be less expensive and more broadly applicable, not just in the United States, but also in places that don't have the resources to afford these very, very expensive therapies," says Chackerian.

We're still quite a long way off from getting a vaccine that can be used in human beings, but these are promising results, in a solution that would be more affordable than current options and last around a year per dose.

Already a decade in development, the next stage for the vaccine is trials in humans, though that will require further study and further financing – all of which will be worth it if it reduces the close to 18 million lives lost globally every year to cardiovascular disease.

"We hope to have a vaccine in people in the next 10 years," says Chackerian.

The research has been published in NPJ Vaccines.

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As a researcher of pedestrianism, I am fascinated by the changing culture of how, where and why we walk. This includes the tacit pavement etiquette that has both endured through the centuries and changed to reflect the cultural concerns of the age.

You might be surprised to hear that "going for a walk" wasn't really a thing until the late 1700s.

The term "pedestrianism" may have Latin roots, but in the 1800s its first association would have been a sporting one. "Professional pedestrianism" or "race-walking" was fiercely competitive by the 1850s.

Tournaments in America took place over six days, with entrants walking the equivalent of 450 miles, taking naps in tents by the track and sipping champagne en route. The stringent "heel-to-toe rule" still in place states that "the advancing leg must be straightened from the moment of first contact with the ground."

Walking as a leisure activity came about around the 1780s. Until this point walking had been an act of necessity, associated with poverty, vagrancy and even criminal intent. Many individuals would live and die never having seen beyond a few square miles of bleak cityscape and only slightly further for those in the country.

Along with the rural appreciation of the Lake poets—including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—at the turn of the century, famous walkers such as Charles Dickens brought the pastime of walking into vogue.

Dirty rotten streets

Much has been written of the religious zeal with which Dickens took to his daily "walking work". He averaged 12 miles a day and at a remarkable pace of over four miles an hour—sufficient for others to "draw aside as the great writer—who seemed always to be walking a match against thought—strode on."

Walking was an essential cog in Dickens's creative process: a time to absorb, almost by osmosis, the idiosyncrasies of the streets. From forays into the London slums to insomnia-driven marches through the night, his encounters furnished the eccentric brilliance of his characters—the street snapshots retained "in regular order on different shelves of my brain, ready ticketed and labeled to be brought out when I want them".

In the 1800s, when pavements were in their infancy, taking a walk was a whole different experience. An estimated 300,000 horses traversed the London streets, depositing over 1,000 tons of manure every day. Worse matter was also regularly tipped into the rat-ridden gutters of the slums—the word "loo" itself is suggested to be derived from the pre-warning "gardyloo", or French "regardez l'eau" (watch out for the water) heralding the emptying of a chamber pot from an upper story.

The sorry state of city streets created a demand for all sorts of workers, including "pure finders" who would have scooped up dog poo and sold it in bulk to local tanneries (places where leather skins were processed). This was just one of the unappealing occupations that social historian Henry Mayhew referred to as "street cleansers"—a motley crew of crossing sweepers, night soil men and mudlarks (people who sifted anything that they could sell from the banks of the Thames) who made their living from street waste.

Thankfully, social reform and urban planning has moved on dramatically, and going on an urban walk is a much more pleasant experience now.

Professional pedestrianism

While the pavements have changed, many of the codes of conduct governing Victorian pedestrian etiquette remain relevant today.

In 1780, an article tucked discretely among the news and advertisements of the popular London Magazine outlined "Rules of behavior, of general use, though much disregarded in this populous city." Among its 12 points, pedestrians were advised "to be cautious of staring in the faces of those that pass by […] for an over-bearing look has the air of a bully, and a prying one that of a bailiff."

So as you take your walks, do as Dickens did, and avoid committing these pedestrian faux pas:

• Inconsiderate whistling or humming

• Walking arm in arm

• Loitering in conversation

• Hindering all behind with a "sauntering gait"

While the bugbears and implicit rules may alter with the ages (distracted phone-users, I'm looking at you), there is much about the pavements that retain their Victorian decorum. They are a place of multiplicity and variety, culture and commerce—a strip of land to be celebrated all year round.

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Lucy Wallace, a recent transplant from San Diego, had been warned about the bone-chilling winters of her new hometown, Minneapolis. She bought a $900 winter coat, two pairs of boots and metal spikes to make her running shoes usable on icy sidewalks.

So she was at once befuddled and relieved by the record-breaking warm temperatures that made for a rare snowless winter holiday week in much of the upper Midwest.

“I spent hundreds of dollars on a new wardrobe and winter gear that so far has gone totally unused,” said Ms. Wallace, 35, who ran five miles on Christmas Day wearing a T-shirt. “Here I am wearing my San Diego wardrobe in December in Minneapolis.”

A high of 54 degrees made this Christmas Day the warmest on record in the Minneapolis area, according to the National Weather Service. Across much of the region, people contended with a string of days heading into the new year that felt like a mild autumn. Ice fishing was particularly perilous on lakes covered by thin ice caps.

And a hack to host large holiday gatherings was foiled. “Thinking of all the Minnesota families who rely on using the porch as an extra freezer during Christmas entertaining when it’s almost 50 degrees outside,” Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, wrote on Threads.

It is not unprecedented to have a warm or snowless Christmas in Minnesota. But such days are likely to become increasingly common because of climate change, said Jessica Hellmann, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.

“It’s a big cultural shift to experience 50 yesterday and how disorienting that is from a geographic perspective,” Dr. Hellmann said in an interview on Tuesday. “It’s a visceral feeling of what climate change looks and feels like for people who are accustomed to living in a particular climate.”

In northern Minnesota, emergency personnel have warned people to stay off lakes, which are covered by an unusually thin layer of ice.

Last week, a Cessna plane that landed on Upper Red Lake broke through the ice, according to Jason Riggs, the Beltrami County sheriff.

“Upon landing, the absence of snow resulted in the plane having difficulty slowing down,” he said in a statement. “Eventually the plane slid into an area of thin ice and the nose of the plane broke through into open water.”

The plane’s two occupants, who had flown from Michigan for a day of ice fishing, were rescued.

In nearby Becker County, a 67-year-old man was found dead on Saturday after his ATV cracked through thin ice, according to the Becker County Sheriff’s Office.

Ted Bonde, the president of the Wisconsin Interscholastic Fishing Association, said ice-fishing competitions in much of the state had been pushed back at least a week as wintertime anglers waited impatiently for the cold to set in.

“I know nature is doing this and it’s going to turn around at some point; it’s just a matter of time,” Mr. Bonde said, adding, “Once it happens, there’s going to be a mad rush to get out there.”

Mr. Bonde, who coaches the high school fishing team in Kiel, Wis., about 45 miles south of Green Bay, said that on Dec. 10, there were three inches of ice — enough to walk on — in his area. No longer.

“It’s all gone,” he said. “Everybody is getting their boats back out where there used to be ice.”

Milwaukee, which has recorded seven days above 50 degrees so far this month, is on track for its warmest December and its warmest year on record, according to Cameron Miller, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Milwaukee.

On Christmas Day, the high was 52 — far above the average high of 34 — and it only dipped down overnight to 48, the warmest low temperature on record for the date, Mr. Miller said.

With “only a trace” of snow this month, it has not been an ideal season for winter sports. “I am an avid cross-country skier, and this kind of weather is abysmal for someone like me,” Mr. Miller said.

Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, said he had enjoyed taking his daughter to the playground in late December, a month later than in years past. An avid runner, he has appreciated the absence of snow and ice on trails and sidewalks. But there is something deeply unsettling about his first snowless Christmas in Minneapolis, said Mr. Frey, who has made fighting climate change a priority.

“Any enjoyment of the warmth is overshadowed by concern for what’s going on,” Mr. Frey said. “It’s a very eerie and disconcerting kind of enjoyment because it makes you wonder what’s yet to come.”

The unseasonable warmth was expected to shift east on Tuesday and Wednesday, with high temperatures climbing 10 to 20 degrees above normal from the Upper Midwest across the Great Lakes, according to the National Weather Service. Mild temperatures were also forecast along the East Coast, with highs in the 50s in the Mid-Atlantic and temperatures in the 60s in the Carolinas.

Scientists say it is hard to attribute a single anomalous weather event to climate change. But there is no doubt that winters in the United States have become milder in recent years.

Also among the casualties of this year’s balmy winter is the Minnesota Ice Festival, which features a giant maze of ice and snow. It was canceled last week.

“The weather hasn’t cooperated, and we won’t be able to deliver the experience we had hoped for,” Robbie Harrell, the chief executive of Minnesota Ice, said in a statement.

One upside of this strange winter is the absence of a particular type of constituent complaint that starts as early as November, Mr. Frey said.

“We are super proud of our record low in snow plowing complaints,” he joked. “Our plow drivers have been so fast and effective; they’ve been trying out a new strategy and it’s clearly working.”

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Witnesses told the Information last month that the robot, which was designed to move aluminum car parts, pinned the engineer and sank its metal claws into his back and arm, leaving a trail of blood along the floor.

The engineer was programming software that controls robots whose job it is to cut car parts from freshly cast pieces of aluminum.

While two of the robots were disabled so that the engineer and his crew could work on the machines, a third was inadvertently left on — resulting in the attack two years ago, witnesses told the Information.

The news site said it obtained an injury report that was submitted to federal officials as well as to health authorities in Travis County.

The engineer suffered a “laceration, cut or open wound” on his left hand, according to the Information.

The injury was apparently not severe enough to require the employee to take time off from work.

Tesla declined to comment.

Injury reports submitted to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration alleged that nearly one out of every 21 workers at the Giga Texas factory got hurt last year.

In the automotive industry, the median injury rate last year was one in every 30 workers.

Several current and former Tesla workers employed at the factory told the Information that the company regularly cut corners on construction, maintenance and operations in a manner that placed them at risk.

Tesla’s Austin plant has been the site of several safety lapses in recent years, according to reports.  AP

Sources told the Information that management’s demands for speedy production have led to safety lapses.

Witnesses reported that heavy machinery including a crane, a steel beam and an air conditioning duct have fallen near workers on car production lines.

Records reviewed by the Information found that workers at the factory fell ill after they were exposed to toxins such as ammonia.

In the summer last year, an employee’s ankle was caught under a moving cart, forcing them to miss more than four months of work.

Injury reports submitted to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration alleged that nearly one out of every 21 workers at the Giga Texas factory got hurt last year.
AFP via Getty Images

Days later, another worker was struck in the head by a metal object, forcing them to miss 85 days of work, according to the Information.

Tesla employees at the factory said they witnessed forklifts collide with workers on the assembly floor.

On or around the New Year’s 2023, water was accidentally submerged in molten aluminum used in the castings area that produces the underbody of Tesla’s Model Y — resulting in an explosion that witnesses reported sounded like a “sonic boom,” according to the Information.

The explosion sent a ball of fire and then smoke into the air and caused employees to run off in terror, according to the report.

However, it is unknown how many people were injured, since that information is not included in documents submitted to safety inspectors in Texas, the Information reported.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s company began construction on the factory in the summer of 2020 after the mogul was outraged by California regulators who limited business operations due to the spread of the coronavirus.

Tesla started building the 10 million-square-foot facility in the summer of 2020 after CEO Elon Musk clashed with California officials over COVID lockdown measures.
AFP via Getty Images

In late 2021, Tesla officially relocated its headquarters from Palo Alto, Calif., to Austin.

Musk has stated that he aims for the 10 million-square-foot facility to help produce 20 million cars annually by 2030.

Construction at the Texas facility is ongoing. By the time work is finished, Tesla aims to employ 60,000 people there.

Tesla has said it expects to spend up to $10 billion to complete construction of the plant.

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While high blood pressure is more common in adults, it can affect children too.

Each time the heart beats, it pumps blood through tubes called arteries to all parts of the body. As blood moves through these arteries, it pushes against the walls of the arteries—this is known as blood pressure.

Pediatric hypertension, or high blood pressure in children, occurs when a child’s blood pushes too forcefully against the artery walls. Children are at a higher risk if there is a family history of high blood pressure, if they are carrying too much weight, or if they do not stay active.

Most children with hypertension do not have symptoms. Because hypertension is “silent,” the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends checking children’s blood pressure at pediatrician visits starting at age 3 years, or even earlier for children who had a low birth weight, were premature infants, had a long hospital stay after birth, or were born with heart or kidney disease.

A health care professional will measure the child’s blood pressure by wrapping an inflatable cuff around the arm. The cuff then squeezes the arm. There are different cuffs that are the right sizes for children as they grow. Blood pressure has 2 numbers: systolic (the higher number) and diastolic (the lower number). In adults, normal blood pressure is less than 120/80 mm Hg. In children, normal blood pressure depends on their age, sex, and height. Your child’s pediatrician can determine if your child’s blood pressure is too high. Blood pressure can naturally go up and down throughout the day based on factors like activity level, diet, stress, and hormones. Additionally, the first blood pressure readings at a visit can sometimes be higher than usual due to the white coat syndrome in which a patient is nervous around physicians, causing the blood pressure to go up. For this reason, if a child’s blood pressure is high, it needs to be measured again at 2 separate follow-up visits to be sure they really have hypertension.

Living a healthy life is the key to preventing and treating high blood pressure. This includes having a balanced diet without too much fat or sugar, getting plenty of sleep, being physically active every day, and maintaining a healthy weight. If a child continues to have high blood pressure, blood and urine tests may help explain why. Sometimes physicians schedule scans of the heart or kidney to search for causes or complications of hypertension. If the blood pressure is high enough, a health care professional will prescribe medicine to lower it. Regular checkups are important to monitor the child’s blood pressure and overall health. By taking steps to manage your child’s blood pressure, you can help them have a long, healthy life.

The JAMA Pediatrics Patient Page is a public service of JAMA Pediatrics. The information and recommendations appearing on this page are appropriate in most instances, but they are not a substitute for medical diagnosis. For specific information concerning your child’s medical condition, JAMA Pediatrics suggests that you consult your child’s physician. This page may be downloaded or photocopied noncommercially by physicians and other health care professionals to share with patients. To purchase bulk reprints, email reprints@jamanetwork.com.

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• Today, locals are facing even drier times amid a severe drought in the Amazon, which has led to record-low levels of water in the rainforest’s main rivers.

• Since 1985, Roraima’s agricultural area has grown by more than 1,100%, with experts pointing to crops as one of the state’s main drivers of water loss.

MORCEGO, Brazil — During the rainy season, the sunlight that passes through the leaves of the mirixi and jenipapo trees paints golden patterns in the blue-green water of the creek that runs through the Morcego Indigenous community.

“This is where my younger brother learned how to swim as a kid,” Leirejane Nagelo, the tuxaua, or chief, of the community, tells Mongabay. Back then, the creek’s level was high enough. Nowadays, however, if her 25-year-old brother, Daniel Nagelo, were to step into the water, it would barely reach his waist — even during the wet season here in the Amazon.

Morcego Creek, named after the community, runs behind Leirejane’s house, where she lives with her husband and six children, all under the age of 16. It’s concealed beneath the shade of bushes on a 100-meter (330-foot) walk under mango trees and over a tall grass field.

Morcego is one of the three communities located inside the Serra da Moça Indigenous Territory, in the Brazilian state of Roraima, and its creek is the only natural water source in the 11,417-hectare (28,212-acre) territory. Officially protected by presidential decree in 1991, Serra da Moça is home to nearly 750 people, according to a 2022 census.

Like most Indigenous lands in the state, Serra da Moça had its boundaries demarcated in what’s known as an island format. Rather than being composed of a large, contiguous swath of territory, it’s small and encompasses only a few communities, separated from one another and surrounded by monoculture plantations.

Leirejane Nagelo, preparing jenipapo paint, is the tuxaua, or chief, of the Morcego community, which is surrounded by monocultures.

Image by Amanda Magnani for Mongabay.

“Island demarcated territories face severe problems due to the scarcity of natural resources,” Sineia do Vale, national coordinator for Brazil’s Indigenous Committee on Climate Change, tells Mongabay. “Because most of the water springs are located beyond the boundaries of the lands, outside the domain of Indigenous communities, we have no governance over what is done to creeks and streams,” she adds.

For the residents of Morcego, that’s meant decades of being unable to protect their main water sources from silting and contamination.

“Back in the 1990s, when I was a student, we used to collect the water from the creek for our everyday use,” Luís Fagner da Silva Oliveira, an Indigenous teacher and farmer, tells Mongabay during a visit to the tuxaua’s house to drop off some watermelons and tomatoes from his orchard. “We would carry the water to be used for cooking at school, and we would also wash ourselves in the stream,” he adds.

Lately, however, the waterway that was once so dependable has dried out in the summer months.

Morcego Creek embodies a reality afflicting the world’s largest rainforest. In early October, images of the historic drought currently ravaging the Amazon shocked the world. Ships were stranded in once navigable rivers, dozens of dolphins were found dead, and more than 500,000 people were affected.

But that was just the latest episode in a crisis that has been underway for decades.

For the past 20 years, the nine countries that make up the Amazon Basin have seen drastic reductions in their total water surface area. In Brazil alone, home to 12% of the world’s freshwater sources, bodies of water have shrunk in size by 14.5%.

During this period, Roraima was the worst-affected state, having lost 53% of its water area, according to a study published in 2022 by MapBiomas, a collaborative network that produces mapping of land cover and water coverage.

“The Amazon Rainforest is experiencing the driest decade in recorded history,” says Bruno Ferreira, a forestry engineer and researcher at Brazilian conservation nonprofit Imazon, one of the organizations behind the study. “Nine out of the past 10 years were among the driest ever registered,” he adds.

This year, the record-breaking drought, which might still extend until January 2024 according to Brazil’s national disaster-monitoring agency, Cemaden, has worried Leirejane and other Indigenous leaders. “Summer arrived early this year, leaving much of our harvest compromised. Water is life — and we are already feeling the consequences of its absence,” the tuxaua says.

From a bad plague to a worse one

Pinpointing the culprit of the water loss in Roraima is a delicate task. The usual suspects, however, are never too far away.

“When we look at the maps of land coverage and use in the state, the surge in new pasture areas harming the native vegetation is exponential,” Ferreira says. When trees and bushes are cleared from the land to create livestock pasture, the soil loses its filtration and storage capacity, he says. “The native vegetation works like a sponge, regulating water surfaces during dry and flood periods.”

Carlos Sander, a geography professor at the Federal University of Roraima (UFRR), says large portions of the state are covered by lakes and swamps, and farmers commonly drain these wetlands. “As a result, water sources that used to be perennial are becoming seasonal or even disappearing for good,” he says.

According to MapBiomas data, between 1985 and 2022, the area destined for agricultural use in Roraima went from roughly 94,000 to 1.135 million hectares (232,300 to 2.805 million acres) of land, an increase of more than 1,100% over a period of less than four decades. “Monocultures didn’t use to be common in our region,” Leirejane recalls. “But the years went by and with them came agribusiness, with all its negative impacts.”

In the early 2000s, Indigenous leaders blamed acacia plantations surrounding protected territories for silting up waterways. “The trees sucked up all the water and drained our streams,” Daniel tells Mongabay. He was just a child at the time, but he remembers the changes to Morcego’s water source as being fast and drastic. “Our territory is small and so are our water sources and springs. They are more easily exhausted,” he says.

Today, after most of the acacia plantations became unprofitable and were abandoned, the dominant monocultures in Roraima are soy and corn. “They replaced a plague with an even worse plague,” Daniel says. “With soy and corn plantations, we face not only water drainage but also the effects of pesticides.”

Walking around the community, Leirejane reaches a barbed wire fence that separates Morcego from one of the many plantations that surround the community. The difference between the Indigenous land and the soy fields is stark. On one side, tall grass fields are spotted with twisted trunk bushes and buriti palm trees, the traditional coverage of lavrado de savanna, as the local vegetation is known. On the other, a single shade of green, homogeneously grown into lanes.

Leirejane points to the nearest side of the fence: “That is where planes used to fly about a year ago, spraying pesticides on the fields. Only a few meters away from our community.”

Since agribusiness arrived in the Murupu region, where the Serra da Moça territory is located, invasions of Indigenous lands have increased; traditional access to forests and lakes where they could fish, hunt and chop timber has been suppressed; and water sources have become contaminated, Leirejane says. “Now, we are basically forced to live a way of life that doesn’t align with our traditional culture,” she says.

However, pesticides aren’t the only threat to the quality and availability of water in the region. “With the advance of illegal mining, especially inside Indigenous territories, we see changes to the course of rivers and mercury pollution,” Ferreira says.

Under Brazil’s previous government, illegal mining in protected lands increased by 90% from previous years. According to MapBiomas, the distance between illegal mining sites and bodies of water in the Amazon had never been as short as in 2022. That same year, studies found elevated levels of mercury in rivers across Roraima. The contamination has gotten so severe that consuming the fish caught in these rivers has become a health hazard.

Leirejane points to the nearby soy plantation, where until recently planes would fly low to spray pesticides on the fields.

Image by Amanda Magnani for Mongabay.

Water contamination

Over the past decade, Morcego has been one of the most affected regions as the dry seasons have become more intense.

“The Murupu and Baixo Cotingo regions work as our ‘thermometer’ to measure the effects of the hydro crisis, as therein lay the communities which suffer the most from lack of water,” Sineia do Vale tells Mongabay. “In some years, the water wells get so dry you could literally sweep their bottoms.”

Faced with this reality, the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR), where Vale serves as the environmental coordinator, has been working alongside communities to find solutions to address the water crisis and its associated problems.

“Over the years, we have been working alongside the women in the communities to tackle access to water and its quality, as well as to find alternatives to keep animal husbandry possible,” Vale says.

Their work began in Murupu following the observation that, during winter months, cases of diarrhea and other diseases increased in the communities. As would later be discovered, one of the main issues was that rainwater runoff was washing contaminants into water wells, the main water source for residents of communities with limited streams.

“A lot of things used to fall into the wells: frogs, insects, little animals,” Leirejane recalls. “But we had to consume this water, as it was the only one we had.”

In response, CIR worked to revitalize the wells and build concrete covers to protect them during the rains. They mobilized the women, who are usually responsible for the community’s daily water management, be it for consumption, household chores, or watering the crops.

Leirejane and her family were the first to be assisted by the project. Some 20 m (66 ft) from her house, halfway to her mother’s home, sits the concrete well, surrounded by tall grass. It takes strength to open the heavy cover. At the bottom, the water reflects the sunlight. An old tin can tied to a rope serves as the bucket.

“Ours was the very first well cover. You can see here that the date of its fabrication is engraved: November 5, 2013,” Leirejane says. “Since then, the quality of our water has greatly increased.”

Daniel Nagelo opens the cover of a well to draw water. These concrete covers have been installed to prevent contaminants from entering the wells.

Image by Amanda Magnani for Mongabay.

Roraima’s vulnerabilities

Due to the state’s geographical characteristics, Roraima is particularly vulnerable to droughts. “We have large areas of lavrado, the largest savanna in the Amazon. While this is important for biodiversity, it also makes the region naturally drier and with lower levels of rainfall,” Ciro Campos, a biologist at the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), a nonprofit that advocates for environmental and Indigenous rights, tells Mongabay.

According to Imazon’s Bruno Ferreira, the lavrado landscape is characterized by swamps and lakes. “However, when you look at the satellite images from the past decades, it is clear that they are disappearing,” he says.

And this year’s El Niño has only exacerbated the problem. Combined with exceptionally high temperatures in the North Tropical Atlantic, it’s set to usher in one of the longest and worst droughts ever recorded in the Amazon.

“Around 50% of the time, the world is under the influence of either El Niño or La Niña,” Sander says. “These events are more common than once believed and can arrive as weak, moderate, or strong. The stronger the El Niño, the worse its impacts. And this is proving to be a very strong one.”

Sander compares what’s happening now with the 2016 El Niño, which caused the worst drought ever recorded in Roraima, leading the state to declare an emergency in 13 of its 15 municipalities.

“There are evils that come for good: before 2016, we experienced a strong El Niño in 2009. The experience forced the government to be ready, and it answered quickly to the crisis,” Sander says.

Whether lessons from the 2016 drought will lead to a prompt response to the 2023 crisis remains to be seen.

A tin can serves as the bucket for the well. Once a freshwater paradise, the Morcego Indigenous community now needs to rely on wells for its drinking water.

Image by Amanda Magnani for Mongabay.

Widespread impacts

“Our communities are already suffering from the drought. Schools have no water for the children, there’s no water for animal husbandry, the creeks that have dried up are affecting fishing and food supply,” Vale says. “Water is life, and when it’s lacking, it affects us on many levels, including the social and cultural life of the communities.”

In October, Indigenous communities across Roraima were gathering in assemblies to present their main needs and to figure out how to mitigate the effects of the water crisis. Among the actions are preventive fires carried out by volunteer brigades in partnership with Brazil’s environmental protection agency, IBAMA.

But Indigenous communities aren’t the only ones affected by this year’s extreme drought. Farmers in rural areas of the state have experienced up to 70% crop losses due to the lack of rain. For artisanal fishermen, the circumstances are also dire. “Roraima has nearly 5,000 families who rely on fishing, and prolonged droughts have harsh economic impacts on their lives,” Campos says.

In urban areas, particularly in the Roraima state capital, Boa Vista, informal suburban settlements that have long lacked access to water supplies are the first to feel the impacts of the drought. “There is not a robust conversation about urban well-being, especially for the newer neighborhoods, which are removed from the city center,” Campos says.

So far, however, unlike in the neighboring states of Amazonas and Pará, no municipality in Roraima has declared a state of emergency. On the contrary, the state government says there’s no risk of water shortage, and state water utility, CAER, says it’s preparing to collect underground water. CAER has also launched a tender for a contractor to drill 20 artesian wells in Boa Vista and 20 in rural areas. In mid-October, the government launched Operation Safe Summer, which hired 240 brigade members to work on fire prevention.

Roraima Governor Antonio Denarium, currently in his second term, is a far-right politician and an ally of former president Jair Bolsonaro. Since the arrival of a new president this year, there’s been a shift in the state’s position. “With the changes to the federal government, Roraima started to signal the adoption of better socioenvironmental practices,” Campos says. “So far, however, it remains in the realm of promises.”

Until these promises materialize, communities like Morcego remain in limbo. “We are living the uncertainty of not knowing whether or not our wells will endure until the end of the summer,” Leirejane says.

Source

Surprisingly, ultra-processed foods taste no better than unprocessed or minimally processed foods.

Instead, it is the ratio of carbohydrate-to-fat that is the key determinate of how pleasant a food tastes, a study suggests.

The researchers wanted to know if level of processing, carbohydrate-to-fat ratio, and higher energy density (calories) have any influence on the desirability and liking of a food.

Taste perceptions

The team compared the taste perception of highly processed foods with less processed foods among 224 women and men.

Images of 32 familiar foods were shown to participants and they were asked to rate the foods for sweetness, flavour intensity, saltiness, desire to eat, and pleasantness.

They found that neither level of processing nor high calorie foods scored higher on desire to eat (food reward) and liking (pleasantness).

However, foods that combined more equal amounts (in calories) of carbohydrate and fat, and foods tasting more intense were rated higher on both liking and desire to eat.

These findings back up the theory that humans are naturally designed to like foods with more equal amounts of fat and carbohydrate since fat is the highest source of energy and carbohydrate is the largest portion of our diets.

The results also show that less desirable foods were high in fibre, but foods with more intense taste — mainly due to their sweetness, saltiness, or savouriness (umami) — were rated high for pleasantness and desire to eat.

Professor Peter Rogers, the study’s first author, said:

“Our results challenge the assumption that ultra-processed foods are ‘hyperpalatable,’ and it seems odd that this has not been directly tested before.

However, while ultra-processing didn’t reliably predict liking (palatability) in our study, food carbohydrate-to-fat ratio, food fiber content, and taste intensity did—actually, together, these three characteristics accounted for more than half of the variability in liking across the foods we tested.

The results for sweetness and saltiness, are consistent with our innate liking for sweetness and saltiness.

And the results for carbohydrate-to-fat ratio and fiber might be related to another important characteristic that determines food liking.

Our suggestion is that humans are programmed to learn to like foods with more equal amounts of carbohydrate and fat, and lower amounts of fiber, because those foods are less filling per calorie.

In other words, we value calories over fullness.

In turn, this trait helps us to maximize calorie intake and build up fat reserves when food is abundant—which is adaptive in circumstances when food supplies are uncertain or fluctuate seasonally, but not when food is continuously available in excess of our immediate needs.”

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It investigated whether problems in the mouth like periodontitis (gum disease) and tooth loss can increase the risk of neurodegenerative disorders like stroke, Alzheimer's, and other forms of dementia.

The results were clear: both issues are associated with a faster rate of atrophy in the hippocampus – the part of the brain that governs memory, learning, and emotion. This is a significant result, however it is not the first time such a link has been made.

In March, a US study of more than 40,000 adults enrolled in the UK Biobank research project found that poor oral health appears to be a key risk factor for stroke and dementia.

In a 2019 literature review, another set of researchers concluded that "collectively, experimental findings indicate that the connection between oral health and cognition cannot be underestimated".

This growing body of research has huge implications both for our understanding of the body, and for preventative intervention strategies in public health.

Satoshi Yamaguchi, lead author of the Japanese study, has reflected on his findings: "retaining more healthy teeth without periodontal disease may help to protect brain health… Regular dental visits are important to control the progression of periodontal disease."

In other words, it is not enough to simply maintain a full set of teeth to stay healthy. We must also keep our mouths free from periodontal disease, or else the brain could suffer the cost.

This is not a mere academic concern. The World Health Organization estimates that severe periodontal disease, characterized by bleeding/swollen gums and damage to the supporting tissue of the teeth, impacts about 19 percent of the global adult population.

For context, this means more than 1 billion people could be at risk of early cognitive decline due to the state of their mouths.

Worse, the nature of the relationship between the mouth and brain appears to be bidirectional, meaning that cognitive decline tends to lead to poorer oral health habits as well.

Indeed, neurologic disorders like Alzheimer's can make it difficult to properly care for the teeth. People with cognitive decline may forget to brush, or may struggle to cope with routine trips to the dentist. The result can be a vicious circle in which cognitive decline leads to a fall in dental standards, which only exacerbates the condition.

To prevent this snowball effect, policymakers and health experts must intervene early to nip the problem in the bud.

By emphasizing the value of brushing, flossing, visiting the dentist, and making sound dietary choices wherever possible, they can help older people to safeguard their mouths against plaque and bacteria – and hence reduce the risk of neurodegenerative disease.

Equally, for those who are already showing signs of dementia, families and caregivers can help dementia patients build a robust oral health routine tailored specifically to them.

This might involve scheduled reminders on the phone to brush and floss, or providing specialist dental tools like electric toothbrushes – which can be easier to operate. Some dentists even offer home visits for dementia patients that struggle to attend appointments on their own.

Encouraging patients to adopt other preventative habits, such as using sugar-free chewing gum between meals, might also have an impact.

Research suggests that regularly chewing SFG (alongside brushing) can help reduce the risk of cavities. It is also easy to leave packets of gum lying around in eyesight of patients, negating the need for constant reminders to start chewing.

These kinds of small, consistent lifestyle changes can make a huge difference over time, and they are considerably easier to maintain than more infrequent and intrusive dental interventions.

The fact is, given the considerable impact of poor oral health on the wider body (including the brain), we simply cannot afford to keep treating dental care as a second-order concern. Preventative measures are a crucial part of maintaining the long-term integrity of the teeth and gums, and dementia patients should be supported to do this wherever possible.

Of course, the battle against conditions like Alzheimer's cannot be reduced solely to oral health. Many factors contribute to the onset of dementia, and it would be wrong to overstate the impact of the mouth on this process.

Nevertheless, the evidence is clear that oral health interventions can help in the fight against cognitive decline, and clinicians have a key role to play in spreading this message.

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For the past several years, a small group of scientists has warned that sometime early this century, the rate of global warming — which has remained largely steady for decades — might accelerate. Temperatures could rise higher, faster. The drumbeat of weather disasters may become more insistent.

And now, after what is poised to be the hottest year in recorded history, the same experts believe that it is already happening.

In a paper published last month, climate scientist James E. Hansen and a group of colleagues argued that the pace of global warming is poised to increase by 50 percent in the coming decades, with an accompanying escalation of impacts.

According to the scientists, an increased amount of heat energy trapped within the planet’s system — known as the planet’s “energy imbalance” — will accelerate warming. “If there’s more energy coming in than going out, you get warmer, and if you double that imbalance, you’re going to get warmer faster,” Hansen said in a phone interview.

Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with Berkeley Earth, has similarly called the last few months of temperatures “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas” and noted, “there is increasing evidence that global warming has accelerated over the past 15 years.”

But not everyone agrees. University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann has argued that no acceleration is visible yet: “The truth is bad enough,” he wrote in a blog post. Many other researchers also remain skeptical, saying that while such an increase may be predicted in some climate simulations, they don’t see it clearly in the data from the planet itself. At least not yet.

The Washington Post used a data set from NASA to to analyze global average surface temperatures from 1880 to 2023.

The record shows that the pace of warming clearly sped up around the year 1970. Scientists have long known that this acceleration stems from a steep increase in greenhouse gas emissions, combined with efforts in many countries to reduce the amount of sun-reflecting pollution in the air. But the data is much more uncertain on whether a second acceleration is underway.

The increased rate of global warming
Values are relative to the 1951-1980 global mean temperature, in degrees Celsius

Between 1880 and 1969, the planet warmed slowly — at a rate of around 0.04 degrees Celsius (0.07 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade. But starting around the early 1970s, warming accelerated — reaching 0.19 degrees C (0.34 degrees F) per decade between 1970 and 2023.

That acceleration isn’t controversial. Prior to the 1970s and 1980s, humans were burning fossil fuels — but also were releasing huge amounts of air pollution, or aerosols. Sulfate aerosols are lightly colored particles that have the ability to temporarily offset part of the warming caused by fossil fuels. They reflect sunlight back to space themselves, and also influence the formation of reflective clouds.

The more aerosols in the air, the slower the planet will heat up: a trade-off that Hansen calls a “Faustian bargain.” The idea is that because the aerosol pollutants have dangerous health effects on people, eventually societies decide to clean them up — causing dramatic warming to reveal itself in the process.

The forces driving global temperature change
Temperature change relative to 1850-1900 from greenhouse gas emissions, aerosols, and other forcings, in degrees Celsius

In the early and mid-20th century, developed countries were so heavily polluted that the world was warming slowly. “This was the era of the London fogs and of very extreme pollution in the U.S.,” said Gabi Hegerl, a climatologist at the University of Edinburgh. A recent study in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, for instance, found that in the 1980s these particles offset approximately 80 percent of climate warming.

Since the 1970s and 80s, however, the influence of aerosol pollution has leveled off, thanks in part to policies like the U.S. Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. As the figure above shows, at the same time, greenhouse gas emissions have climbed — leaving aerosols unable to keep up. The result is a planet that is warming much faster now than in the first half of the 20th century.

But the data is murkier when it comes to whether the pace of warming over the past few decades has quickened even more — an increase that could accelerate the wildfires, floods, heat waves and other impacts around the globe. It may require more years of evidence to clear the statistical hurdles that climate science demands.

“I think we probably need maybe three or four more years" of data, said Chris Smith, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds. “It’s just a bit too early right now.”

Scientists are wary, in part, because some had reached the opposite conclusion roughly a decade ago. Back then, a few scientists and many political commentators suggested that the rate of climate change had stalled or was slowing down. The case for what some called a warming “hiatus” was never especially strong — and in retrospect it does not appear that the rate of warming substantially changed — but it serves as a cautionary note about declarations that warming is getting faster or slower.

To see why matters are currently ambiguous, consider the following “trend of trends” figure, based on an analysis by Mark Richardson, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who published a statistics paper last year that found that an acceleration of warming is not yet clearly detectable.

Richardson looked at each 30-year trend in the NASA temperature record, starting with the period from 1880 to 1909 and ending with the period from 1994 to 2023. Higher values indicate higher rates of global warming. Here, we show the result from the period between 1941 and 1970 onward, to better tease out how the rate of warming changed in the second half of the 20th century, and whether it is still changing now:

The speed of global warming since 1970
30-year warming trend by end year, in degrees Celsius per decade

While there is a hint of an increasing warming rate at the very end of the record, it is nowhere nearly as pronounced as the shift since 1970. This helps explain why many scientists are remaining noncommittal, for now, on acceleration.

“The temperature near the Earth is only a thin layer, and it’s easy for the temperatures to swing about a lot,” Richardson said. For this reason, it takes longer for scientists to be sure that a change is outside what you would normally expect, he said.

But some scientists believe that the temperature data is simply not yet showing an impending acceleration.

Hansen argues that recent changes in aerosols will cause a strong increase in the warming rate in just the next few years. In 2020, the International Maritime Organization instituted a rule requiring a substantial reduction in the sulfur content of fuel oil. Sulfate aerosol pollution from ocean shipping plunged.

Much of the current debate over whether warming is getting faster turns on the consequences of these maritime changes, which have the potential to affect how much heat is being absorbed over enormous stretches of the world’s oceans. Hansen and his co-authors argue that the change in ship emissions is contributing to a major increase in the Earth’s energy imbalance — the extra amount of heat that is staying within the Earth system rather than escaping to space. But not all scientists agree that the pollution regulations for ocean-going vessels have had such an outsize impact.

Hansen acknowledges that the global surface temperature data, alone, isn’t presenting an entirely clear picture of acceleration yet – but he predicts that it will be soon, as temperatures spike much further in the current El Niño.

“There won’t be any argument [by] late next spring, we’ll be way off the trend line,” Hansen said.

Some climate models also predict an acceleration of warming in the years to come, as aerosols decline. “While there is increasing evidence of an acceleration of warming, it’s not necessarily ‘worse than we thought’ because scientists largely expected something like this,” said Hausfather.

Most agree that it’s too early to tell if the second acceleration is underway. “Trying to estimate the underlying rate of warming from a short time period is really hard,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.

“Just because you get a trend that looks like it’s really rapid — that doesn’t tell you what the underlying rate of warming is.”

Source

2023 might go down as the year that artificial intelligence became mainstream. It was a topic of discussion everywhere - from news reports, to class rooms to the halls of Congress.

ChatGPT made its public debut a little over a year ago. If you'd never thought much about AI before, you're probably thinking - and maybe worrying - about it now.

Jobs are an area that will almost certainly be impacted as AI develops. But whether artificial intelligence will free us from drudge work, or leave us unemployed depends on who you talk to.

Host Ari Shapiro speaks with NPR's Andrea Hsu on how people are adapting to AI in the workplace and ways to approach the technology with a plan instead of panic.

This episode also feature's reporting on AI and Hollywood background actors from NPR's Bobby Allyn.

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As the cracked and baking river bank towers up on either side of us, Oliveira Tikuna is starting to have doubts about this journey. He's trying to get to his village, in a metal canoe built to navigate the smallest creeks of the Amazon.

Bom Jesus de Igapo Grande is a community of 40 families in the middle of the forest and has been badly affected by the worst drought recorded in the region.

There was no water to shower. Bananas, cassava, chestnuts and acai crops spoiled because they can't get to the city fast enough.

And the head of the village, Oliveira's father, warned anyone elderly or unwell to move closer to town, because they are dangerously far from a hospital.

Oliveira wanted to show us what was happening. He warned it would be a long trip.

But as we turn from the broad Solimões river into the creek that winds towards his village, even he is taken aback. In parts it's reduced to a trickle no more than 1m (3.3ft) wide. Before long, the boat is lodged in the river bed. It's time to get out and pull.

"I'm 49 years old, we've never seen anything like this before," Oliveira says. "I've never even heard of a drought as bad as this."

After three hours of trudging up the drying stream, we give up and turn back.

"If it dries out any more than that, my family will be isolated there," Oliveira says.

To get in or out they'll have to walk across a lakebed on the other side of the village. But that's dangerous - there are snakes and alligators there.

The rainy season in the Amazon should have started in October but it was still dry and hot until late November. This is an effect of the cyclical El Niño weather pattern, amplified by climate change.

El Niño causes water to warm in the Pacific Ocean, which pushes heated air over the Americas. This year the water in the North Atlantic has also been abnormally warm, and hot, dry air has enveloped the Amazon.

Flávia Costa says her team has found many plants that show signs of dying

"When it was my first drought I thought, 'Wow, this is awful. How can this happen to the rainforest?'" says Flávia Costa, a plant ecologist at the National Institute for Amazonian Research, who has been living and working in the rainforest for 26 years.

"And then, year after year, it was record-breaking. Each drought was stronger than before."

She says it's too soon to assess how much damage this year's drought has done, but her team has found many plants "showing signs of being dead".

Past dry seasons give an indication of the harm that could be done. By some estimates the 2015 "Godzilla drought" killed 2.5bn trees and plants in just one small part of the forest - and it was less severe than this latest drought.

"On average, the Amazon stopped functioning as a carbon sink," Dr Costa says. "And we mostly expect the same now, which is sad."

As well as being home to a stunning array of biodiversity, the Amazon is estimated to store around 150bn tonnes of carbon.

Many scientists fear the forest is racing towards a theoretical tipping point - a point where it dries, breaks apart and becomes a savannah.

As it stands, the Amazon creates a weather system of its own. In the vast rainforest, water evaporates from the trees to form rain clouds which travel over the tree canopy, recycling this moisture five or six times. This keeps the forest cool and hydrated, feeding it the water it needs to sustain life.

But if swathes of the forest die, that mechanism could be broken. And once this happens there may be no going back.

Brazilian climatologist Carlos Nobre first put forward this theory in 2018. The paper he co-authored says that if the Amazon is deforested by 25% and the global temperature hits between 2C and 2.5C above pre-industrial levels, the tipping point will be hit.

When the forest is dry, small fires set to clear land for planting crops burn out of control

"I'm even more worried now than I was in 2018," he says. "I just came back from COP28 and I'm not optimistic that greenhouse gases will be reduced by the agreement targets. If we exceed 2.5C, the risks to the Amazon are horrendous."

Currently 17% of the Amazon has been deforested and the global temperature is 1.1C to 1.2C above pre-industrial levels.

But Dr Nobre finds some hope in the fact that deforestation fell in all countries of the Amazon this year and that all are committed to getting it to zero by 2030. He believes Brazil can get there even sooner.

Not all scientists agree the forest will be transformed completely if Dr Nobre's tipping-point conditions occur. Dr Flávia Costa's research indicates that parts of the forest will survive - particularly those with easy access to groundwater, such as valleys.

But there are worrying signs of degradation everywhere. In Coari, a city in the heart of the Amazon, the air was thick with smoke as we headed off for Oliveira's village.

When the forest is dry, small fires set to clear land for planting crops burn out of control. Usually they burn in already degraded or deforested parts of the Amazon but this year has seen more fires in untouched or primary forest.

And there are other signs that the ecosystem is struggling. In two lakes in the region hundreds of dolphins have been found dead.

Amazon dolphins died after lake water temperatures reached 40.9C in places

"It was just devastating," says Dr Miriam Marmontel, from the Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development. "We were dealing with live animals, beautiful specimens and then five days later, we had 70 carcasses."

In a matter of weeks they found 276 dead dolphins. Dr Marmontel believes it's the temperature of the water that is killing them. It reached 40.9C in places, nearly 4C higher than dolphin - and human - body temperature.

"You can imagine, the animal that has its whole body immersed in that water for so many hours," Dr Marmontel says. "What do you do? That's where you live, then all of a sudden, you're in the middle of this soup and you can't get away."

In her 30 years living in the Amazon, Dr Marmontel never imagined she would see it so dry. She is shocked by how quickly the climate is changing.

"It was like a slap in the face. Because it's the first time that I see and I feel what's happening to the Amazon," she says.

Transport by canoe became impossible in some places at the height of the drought

"We always say these animals are sentinels because they feel first what's going to come to us. It's happening to them, it's going to happen to us."

For Oliveira, too, this year has been a wake up call.

"We know that we are very much to blame for this, we haven't been paying attention, we haven't been defending our mother Earth. She is screaming for help," he says.

"It's time to defend her."

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Blake Lemoine experimented with Google’s AI systems in 2022 and concluded that its LaMDA system was “sentient” or capable of having feelings. Google disputed his assertions and ultimately ousted him from the company. 

Mr. Lemoine is working on a new AI project now and told The Washington Times he is terrified that the tools other AI makers are creating will be used wrongfully in warfare. 

He said the emerging technology can reduce the number of people who will die and limit collateral damage but it will also pose new dangers.

“Using the AI to solve political problems by sending a bullet into the opposition will become really seductive, especially if it’s accurate,” Mr. Lemoine said. “If you can kill one revolutionary thought leader and prevent a civil war while your hands are clean, you prevented a war. But that leads to ‘Minority Report’ and we don’t want to live in that world.”

He was referencing the Philip K. Dick novella “Minority Report,” where police use technology to solve crimes before they happen. The story was adapted into a sci-fi film starring Tom Cruise in 2002.

Mr. Lemoine sees the race for AI tools as akin to nuclear weapons. Artificial intelligence enables machines to accomplish tasks through advanced computing and statistical analysis previously only possible for humans.

The race to amass the tools will be different and Mr. Lemoine expects people will much more easily get their hands on the powerful tech. He said the bottleneck evident for well-guarded nuclear weapons and the scarce resources of plutonium and uranium are constraints that do not exist for open-source software models that do not depend upon rare natural resources. 

Mr. Lemoine said his decision to go public with concerns that Google’s AI was sentient in the fall of 2022 caused a delay in its AI product launch, which the company is still working to overcome.

In December, Google unveiled Gemini, a new AI model. Mr. Lemoine said Gemini looks to be an upgraded version of the LaMDA system he previously probed.

One major difference is that Gemini knows it is not human, he said.

“It knows it’s an AI. It still talks about its feelings, it talks about being excited, it talks about how it’s glad to see you again and if you’re mean to it, it gets angry and says, ‘Hey, stop that. That’s mean,’” he said. “But it can’t be fooled into thinking it’s human anymore. And that’s a good thing. It’s not human.”

His new project is MIMIO.ai where he oversees the technology and AI for the company building a “Personality Engine” to let people create digital personas.  

It is not intended to work as a digital twin of a person but as a digital extension of a person capable of doing things on the person’s behalf. The AI will be designed to complete tasks and interact with humans as if it were the human itself. 

“You might be an elderly person who wants to leave a memorial for your children,” Mr. Lemoine said, “so you teach an AI all about you so that it can talk in your place when you’re gone.”

A few other AI makers are competing to build similar products but Mr. Lemoine is confident MIMIO.ai’s technology is better. He said China already has similar tools and MIMIO.ai intends to stay out of the Chinese market. 

His experience at Google testing and probing its AI systems under development shaped his understanding of AI tools’ limitless potential and he thinks his work affected Google too. 

“I think that there are a handful of developers at Google who implemented things a different way than they otherwise would have because they listened to me,” he said. “I don’t think they necessarily share all of my convictions or all of my opinions, but when they had a choice of implementing it one way or another, and that both were equally as hard, I think they chose the more compassionate one as a tiebreaker. And I appreciate that.”

He praised Google and said he hopes his interpretation of their actions is correct. “If that’s just a story I’m telling myself, then it’s a happy nighttime story,” he said. 

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

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In a successful demonstration of new laser communications capabilities, NASA beamed an ultra-high definition video across 19 million miles of space from its Psyche spacecraft to Earth earlier this month. It’s the first time a UHD streaming video has been sent from deep space via laser. The history-making video? A 15-second clip of an orange cat named Taters chasing a laser dot.

The signal from the video, sent on December 11, made it to Earth in 101 seconds from Psyche’s location at the time, which was about 80 times as far as the distance between Earth and the moon. It was uploaded before the mission launched, and sent back home by a flight laser transceiver aboard Psyche at a rate of 267Mbps. The spacecraft, which set off on its journey in October, is on its way to study a metal-rich asteroid in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

“Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” said Ryan Rogalin, the receiver electronics lead for the project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. “In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space.”

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