The “tree,” along with another deep-sky object known as the Cone Nebula make up the NGC 2264 cluster. It was discovered in January 1784 by the astronomer William Herschel and is one of the many nebulae to receive a nickname based on a resemblance to an earthly object or creature. To create the most pine-like image of the cluster yet, NASA researchers have compiled renderings from multiple sources, including the agency’s own Chandra X-ray Observatory. The Chandra telescope specializes in capturing X-ray emissions from stars at high temperatures, represented in the image by blue and white specks.

An animated version of NASA’s image showing overlays of each star’s variations via X-ray was created with the assistance of the Two Micron All Sky Survey, an infrared project supported by NASA at the turn of the century.

The stars that make up NGC 2264 are between one and five million years old, according to NASA, and the brightest among them are believed to have a mass equivalent of as many as seven of our suns. The triangular shape they form has been rotated in the image to better highlight its resemblance to a tree, while optical data from the National Science Foundation’s Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOIRLab Observatory captures the cloud of nebulous gas making up the leaflike bushiness of the holiday staple.

NGC 2264 lives in the Milky Way’s Monoceros constellation, roughly 2,5000 light-years from Earth. Though it isn’t prominent in NASA’s new image, NGC 2264 is also home to another seasonal set of stars nicknamed the “Snowflake Cluster.” This smaller structure is found within the larger Christmas Tree Cluster, and is made up of lines of young stars gradually drifting out from a center point. 

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Researchers at the University of California, San Diego conducted a study to explore how certain drugs, known as anticholinergic drugs, impact our brain function, particularly memory.

These drugs are widely used for various conditions, such as lowering high blood pressure and treating allergies and colds. Some are available over the counter, while others require a doctor’s prescription.

The study involved 688 older adults, averaging around 74 years old, who initially did not have memory problems. The researchers asked them about their medication usage, focusing on anticholinergic drugs, and how often they used them.

Over a period of up to 10 years, the team conducted annual memory tests on these individuals to observe any changes in their cognitive abilities.

The findings were quite startling. Those who regularly took these medications experienced more memory problems compared to those who didn’t.

Their likelihood of memory issues was nearly 50% higher.

But there’s more to it. Some individuals have biological indicators suggesting a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in the future.

In such individuals, the use of these medicines significantly increased the risk. They were four times more likely to encounter memory problems.

Additionally, people with a family history of Alzheimer’s disease, indicated by certain genetic markers, faced an even higher risk. If they used these medications, their chances of experiencing memory issues more than doubled.

Why is this important? Memory plays a crucial role in our identity and daily functioning. It helps us recognize faces, recall names, and navigate our surroundings.

When a commonly used drug for a simple ailment like a cold potentially impairs memory, it becomes a matter of concern.

This is particularly significant for older adults. As we age, our memory naturally tends to decline somewhat. If a medication exacerbates this decline, it could lead to serious consequences, like forgetting to turn off the stove or losing one’s way home.

If you or someone you know is taking these medications, it’s not a cause for immediate alarm. However, it would be wise to consult a doctor. They can advise whether to continue with the current medication or explore alternative treatments.

If you care about Alzheimer’s disease, please read studies that bad lifestyle habits can cause Alzheimer’s disease, and strawberries can be good defence against Alzheimer’s.

For more information about brain health, please see recent studies that oral cannabis extract may help reduce Alzheimer’s symptoms, and Vitamin E may help prevent Parkinson’s disease.

Copyright © 2023 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.

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In their study, they found that adults who are middle-aged or older and eat at least three servings of whole grains every day tend to have smaller increases in waist size, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels over time.

This research is a big deal because these factors are important in preventing heart disease.

The study used data from the Framingham Heart Study Offspring Cohort. This project started in the 1970s to look into what affects our risk of getting heart disease in the long run.

The team at Tufts focused on how eating whole grains and refined grains (like white bread and pasta) impacts five key risk factors for heart disease.

These include waist size, blood pressure, blood sugar, triglycerides (a type of fat in your blood), and HDL cholesterol (the good kind).

They looked at the health of 3,100 mostly white participants, who were in their mid-50s on average when the study began.

Over about 18 years, the researchers checked how these people’s health changed depending on how many whole grains they ate.

According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, we should eat at least three servings of whole grains each day. A serving could be a slice of whole-grain bread, half a cup of rolled oats, or half a cup of brown rice.

The results were pretty clear. People who ate fewer whole grains saw their waist size increase by more than 1 inch on average.

But those who ate more whole grains only saw about a ½ inch increase. Plus, the group that ate more whole grains had smaller increases in blood sugar and blood pressure.

There’s more: eating fewer refined grains was linked to a smaller increase in waist size and a bigger drop in triglyceride levels every four years.

So, what does this all mean? Eating whole grains can do more than just help us keep our weight in check as we get older. It seems to also help in controlling blood sugar and blood pressure, which are key in fighting heart disease.

If you’re interested in keeping your blood sugar healthy, there’s more to read.

For instance, studies show that what you drink at breakfast could affect your blood sugar for the rest of the day. And there are new ways being explored to reverse high blood sugar and muscle loss.

For those wanting more information about blood sugar and wellness, recent studies have looked into how common stomach drugs might help control blood sugar in diabetes and the importance of preventing low blood sugar in people with diabetes.

This study, published in the Journal of Nutrition and involving author Caleigh M. Sawicki, adds to our understanding of how what we eat affects our long-term heart health.

It’s a reminder that simple choices in our diet can make a big difference in our health as we age.

If you care about nutrition, please read studies about how Mediterranean diet could protect your brain health, and the best time to take vitamins to prevent heart disease.

For more information about nutrition, please see recent studies that olive oil may help you live longer, and vitamin D could help lower the risk of autoimmune diseases.

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Social anxiety has been found to be a risk factor for alcohol use disorder, but the relationship between social anxiety and drinking behaviors in real-world settings is unclear. Previous studies have used different methods and measures that often do not reflect authentic social settings to examine this relationship. Consequently these studies have produced mixed results.

Hence, the study team led by Eddie P. Caumiant from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign aimed to investigate how social-contextual features of real-world drinking contexts, such as the familiarity of the people present, might influence the relationship between social anxiety and alcohol consumption in everyday settings.

The researchers recruited 48 heavy social drinkers (drinking an average of 2–3 times per week, with an average of 3.8 drinks per occasion). They were aged 21 to 28, and they completed a measure of social anxiety at the beginning of the study via the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale.

These participants self-reported their alcohol consumption for the next seven days, in addition to wearing a transdermal alcohol monitor as an ankle bracelet, which monitored their alcohol consumption by tracking the amount of alcohol diffusing through their skin.

An app was downloaded onto their smartphone which administered surveys at random times of the day, during which they provided photographs of their surroundings. Participants later reported on their levels of social familiarity with the people visible in the photographs and categorized their relationship with each person, e.g. “romantic partner” / “friend” / “coworker” / “stranger”.

After statistical analyses, the results demonstrated that social anxiety and social context interacted to predict drinking. Among participants who were higher in social anxiety, drinking increased as the familiarity of the people in their environment decreased. In other words, they drank more when they were surrounded by strangers than when they were with friends or family.

However, among participants who were lower in social anxiety, the familiarity of the people in their environment did not affect their drinking.

Together, these results suggest that the presence of strangers in a given environment may play a role in the drinking behavior of socially anxious individuals. The researchers explain that socially anxious individuals may drink more in unfamiliar settings to relieve the stress of social situations, generate positive mood, or to facilitate social interaction.

Caumiant and colleagues noted that their findings may help explain why previous studies have found mixed results regarding the question of whether socially anxious individuals consume alcohol in greater quantities, as they did not take into account the social context of drinking.

The authors concluded, “alcohol consumption does not occur in a vacuum, but instead represents a product of individuals’ motivations to drink and the broader environmental contexts in which they consume alcohol. Consequently, in seeking to develop effective strategies for protecting against the development of alcohol use disorder in socially anxious individuals, an approach that integrates a consideration of both person and environment is essential.”

The study had some limitations, such as the small sample of participants who collectively had low levels of social anxiety, as well as an imperfect social context measure (not all individuals present in a particular environment were captured in the photographs).

The study, “Social anxiety and alcohol consumption: The role of social context”, was authored by Eddie P. Caumiant, Catharine E. Fairbairn, Konrad Bresin, I. Gary Rosen, Susan E. Luczak and Dahyeon Kang.

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Esther Oladejo knew she'd crossed an invisible boundary when she started forgetting to eat for entire days at a time. A gifted rugby player, Oladejo had once thrived on her jam-packed school schedule. But after she entered her teenage years, her teachers started piling on assignments and quizzes to prepare students for high-stakes testing that would help them to qualify for university.

As she devoted hours on hours to cram sessions, Oladejo's resolve began to fray. Every time she got a low grade, her mood tanked—and with it, her resolve to study hard for the next test. “Teachers [were] saying, ‘Oh, you can do much better than this,’” says Oladejo, now 18, who lives in Merseyside, England. “But you're thinking, ‘Can I? I tried my best on that. Can I do any more than what I've done before?’”

One morning, as Oladejo steeled herself for another endless day, her homeroom teacher passed out a questionnaire to the students, explaining that it would help assess their moods and well-being. Oladejo filled it out, her mind ticking forward to her upcoming classes.

Soon after that, someone called to tell her she'd been slotted into a new school course called the Blues Program. Developed by Oregon Research Institute psychologist Paul Rohde and his colleagues at Stanford University, the program—a six-week series of hour-long group sessions—teaches students skills for managing their emotions and stress. The goal is to head off depression in vulnerable teens.

Although Oladejo didn't know it at the time, her course was one in an expanding series of depression prevention programs for young people, including Vanderbilt University's Teens Achieving Mastery Over Stress (TEAMS); the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Resiliency Program; Happy Lessons, developed by Dutch social scientists; and Spain's Smile Program. The growing global interest in depression prevention is helping to establish the efficacy of a range of programs in diverse settings.

For researchers heading up depression prevention programs, the stakes of early intervention couldn't be higher. The earlier a first episode of depression begins, and the more episodes a person suffers, the more serious and disabling the condition is likely to be throughout life. People who recover from an initial depression have a 40 to 60 percent chance of a later episode; those with two episodes have a 60 to 70 percent chance of recurrence, and those with three episodes have a 90 percent chance—a vicious cycle that too often ends in chronic illness or disability. And since the COVID pandemic, teens' risk of falling into the cycle has climbed: 42 percent of U.S. high school students report lasting sadness or hopelessness in surveys by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, up from 28 percent a decade before.

Prevention courses like the one Oladejo took offer hope to halt this trend. Intervention during the teen years, studies suggest, can potentially stop the kind of depressive cascade that erodes human potential and imposes massive costs on health-care systems. “It's a chronic episodic illness, and relapse is very common,” says Brown University psychologist Tracy Gladstone. “If you can avoid that initial episode, I think you're really setting people on a much better path.”

Courses for at-risk young people have forestalled depression, numerous studies have found, reducing rates of onset by up to half in the months and years following the programs. Yet program developers have struggled to make a convincing case for prevention amid unprecedented levels of need for acute care during an ongoing global mental health crisis.

Feeling like she didn't have much to lose, Oladejo agreed to give the Blues Program a try. The message she was getting from teachers “was like, ‘You've got to get ready, we've got to do this.’ I was 15—I don't really know what I want to do in my life quite yet,” she says. “I was starting to spiral.”

Health experts and political leaders have been brainstorming ways to ward off mental illnesses such as depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia for decades. In a 1963 speech to Congress, President John F. Kennedy described plans for a comprehensive preventive approach at the federal level. The initiative would include “selected specific programs directed especially at known causes” of mental illnesses, Kennedy proposed, but would also involve “the general strengthening of our fundamental community, social welfare, and educational programs.”

Such plans stalled during economic crises in the 1970s. Under President Ronald Reagan, federal spending on social programs decreased, and national mental illness prevention mostly receded into the background.

But rising rates of mental illness through the 1990s, especially in young people, helped to rekindle broader interest in prevention. In a 1994 report called “Reducing Risks for Mental Disorders,” the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) argued for assessing people's mental health vulnerabilities early in life to stave off the worst outcomes.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s researchers were testing several prevention programs for depression, one of the most common mental disorders. Many of these programs were rooted in the cognitive-behavioral practice of correcting harmful thinking patterns—an approach that has consistently reduced depressive symptoms in studies. Among the first prevention offerings were the Penn Resiliency Program, a series of 12 group classes lasting 90 minutes each, and the Australia-based Resourceful Adolescent Program, consisting of 11 group sessions of 50 minutes.

Around this time Rohde was a young psychologist at the Oregon Research Institute (ORI), a small company with National Institutes of Health funding. Early in his career, Rohde had helped develop Adolescent Coping with Depression, one of the first standardized group treatments for depressed teens.

When psychologist Eric Stice joined Rohde's research group in the mid-2000s, Rohde and his colleagues started focusing on depression prevention. Stice specialized in preventing eating disorders, and his graduate student Sarah Kate Bearman wanted to see how much a similar approach could help teens on the cusp of depression. Bearman's graduate thesis described an early iteration of the Blues Program, teaching teens cognitive-behavioral skills in four one-hour sessions. Rohde liked the way this program component condensed cognitive principles into digestible lessons—and he liked that it took less time than competitors such as the Penn Resiliency Program, which could make it easier for schools and agencies to implement.

After Bearman graduated, Rohde, Stice and Stanford researcher Heather Shaw continued to develop the Blues Program and test it at a number of pilot sites. Having watched depression disrupt his clients' lives year after year, Rohde was fired up about the idea of bending teens' mental health curve for a lifetime. “We know that if we can prevent depression in young adulthood, we're going to prevent recurrent episodes of depression,” he says. “We're going to reduce future suffering.”

It makes intuitive sense that preventing a first depressive episode could reshape someone's mental health trajectory. Less intuitive, and less well known, are the biological stakes involved in keeping depression at bay. During each bout of depression, brain tissue can shrink—especially in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, which govern memory, emotion and higher-order thinking. It's unclear whether this brain atrophy can be fully reversed. The decrease in tissue is also linked to future bouts of depression. In recovered people who relapsed, the brain's cortical volume shrank over a two-year period, whereas recovered people who did not relapse showed no such change.

Brain changes during adolescence may make teens especially vulnerable to depression and the cellular havoc it wreaks. In a study from McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., young people who experienced hardship such as emotional abuse at age 14 or 15 were more likely to become depressed compared with those who faced such adversity earlier or later in life. Prolonged stress, research shows, may be more damaging to the brain during this time—and another study suggests that early stress-linked brain changes may make people more vulnerable to depression.

Rates of depression steadily climb during the teen years, so some specialists contend that the earlier teens enroll in prevention programs, the better. “The adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is really true in this setting,” says adolescent psychiatrist Elizabeth Ortiz-Schwartz of Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut. “We need to start looking at early adolescence.” Rohde concurs, which is why he, Stice and Shaw designed the Blues Program to serve students as young as 12. The first step in Blues—now offered at sites in Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah, as well as in the U.K.—is screening school populations for high-risk students like Oladejo. These students report sleep problems, low self-esteem or low interest in daily activities, but their symptoms aren't severe enough for a depression diagnosis. (Some symptoms rule teens out of the program; if they report feeling suicidal, they're referred to acute treatment.) Gauging students' distress from the questionnaire works better than probing into their family histories. “For us, it's easiest just to ask the student if they have some symptoms,” Rohde says, adding that when teens are struggling, “that provides motivation for working on skills.”

From there, facilitators organize qualifying students into small groups and teach them cognitive tactics they can use to process difficult events. Many of these measures resemble those therapists teach depressed clients, but the Blues Program introduces them as a kind of vaccination strategy. When teens learn how to keep stress in check, the theory goes, they'll be able to defuse new stressors before their emotional impact explodes.

One teaching tool in the program is the “triangle of feelings, thoughts and actions,” which illustrates that the way people think about what happens influences how they feel overall—and, by extension, how motivated they are to take helpful action. A negative thought—such as “No one loves me” after a romantic rejection—can make you feel miserable, and when you feel miserable, you'll be less likely to risk asking someone else out. Thinking of the rejection as a painful episode that you can get through, in contrast, can stop the cycle of misery.

The triangle concept clicked for Esther Oladejo. “It basically made you think, Do I want this small situation to dictate how the rest of my life's going to go?” Oladejo says. She could see how her own reactions followed the pattern: after she flubbed an assignment, she'd beat herself up and feel worthless, and that sense of worthlessness made it hard to tackle the next round of papers and tests.

In later sessions of Blues, facilitators explain how to challenge negative thoughts—for example, by brainstorming a new thought that's less exaggerated and more optimistic than the original. “Is there another way to think about this situation?” session leaders ask. “What advice would you give a friend who was feeling the way you do?”

After that, students share their new thoughts with the rest of the group. For Oladejo, an initial gut reaction—“I tanked that test. I suck at school”—might morph into “This isn't my final exam. I can learn from this and do better on the end-of-year test.” It isn't the precise content of the revamped thought that matters. “There is not a single right counterthought to a given negative thought,” group leaders tell students. “Figure out whether a particular new thought makes sense to you.”

The Salt Lake County Department of Youth Services (DYS) occupies a cluster of squat tan buildings ringed by distant snow-topped mountains. Dozens of students congregate there every semester, virtually and in person, developing new cognitive skills designed to help them evade depression. A blue “Heroes Work Here!” banner hangs in the front lobby, where I meet Jodi Rushton, the effervescent social worker who heads up Salt Lake's version of the Blues Program. She leads me into a bright classroom, the table stacked with sandwiches and chip bags for the teens who'll drop in this afternoon.

Rushton tells me that the DYS serves a population at risk for mood disorders—about one in three Utah teens report depressive symptoms—and the Blues Program seemed like a natural fit when she saw it on a list of evidence-based options several years ago. “We were teaching pretty outdated programs,” Rushton says. “We needed a revamping.”

Enrollment in the program, which DYS staff have renamed “Me Time,” has climbed since its inception, and hundreds of local teens have so far completed the course. After COVID hit in 2020, Rushton and her colleagues scrambled to transfer the program online. They worried Me Time wouldn't translate well into virtual space, but their worries were unfounded. In fact, the opposite was true: As soon as DYS started offering online sessions, enrollment exploded. “It just took off. Transportation, space, time—all these obstacles were eliminated,” Rushton says. “Even after I close registration, I still just get referrals continuously.” She has let teens from other states sign up for Me Time because most have no similar option available locally.

Rushton has a cardinal rule when she leads a session, whether online or in person: Make sure each student gets at least one chance to hold the floor. “It's really interactive,” she says. “A lot of the effectiveness falls on how much attention you can give to everybody—drawing out the teens who maybe are more shy, handling the ones who want to talk all the time.”

Credit: Jen Christiansen; Sources: “Age at Onset of Mental Disorders Worldwide: Large-Scale Meta-analysis of 192 Epidemiological Studies,” by Marco Solmi et al., in Molecular Psychiatry, Vol. 27; June 2, 2021; “Global Prevalence and Burden of Depressive and Anxiety Disorders in 204 Countries and Territories in 2020 Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” by Damian Santomauro et al., in Lancet, Vol. 398; October 8, 2021 (data)

After chatting with Rushton, I meet a few local Me Time participants ranging in age from 12 to 17. To protect student privacy, the program is closed to outside observers, but the students told me about the dynamic it fosters. “Everyone knows, like, ‘Think really deeply about if a problem’s as big as you think it is,'” says Monica, the oldest of the group. But the program sessions, she continues, helped her transition from knowing what she should do to actually doing it. “It was really helpful to be able to discuss personal experiences and how we could have changed the way we were thinking,” she says. “Being able to have a group discussion allowed it to stick more. I've kind of taken it to self-reflect every day: ‘Is my reaction fitting the size of this issue?’”

Teens could also learn cognitive-behavioral skills one-on-one with a therapist. But in general, individual therapy can impose a high cost burden on families—and some Salt Lake teens say they like Me Time better than traditional therapy, which tends to have an uneven power dynamic between therapist and client. Me Time “just helps more,” one participant tells me. “You're not put on the spot, and you're able to form a connection with other people.” The give-and-take spirit of Me Time chats helped another student feel less isolated in their mental health struggles. “You could hear other people's situations—how they coped with it or what they did to solve the problem. If it was just one-on-one, I don't think I would have been helped as much.”

Having watched countless Blues Program sessions in action, Rohde agrees. There's something alchemical, he thinks, about teaching cognitive skills in a small-group context. “Part of the value is getting kids together,” he says. “As they feel comfortable, they can share the thoughts and feelings and actions that they're struggling with. That can be helpful for the other students because it normalizes that these kinds of problems are really, really common.”

Like her counterparts in Salt Lake City, Esther Oladejo drew more than she'd expected on the well of support from her small group. She didn't know most of the other students in her Blues class well at first, but their shared trust grew. When other group members shared school or family problems, she advised them as best she could—and felt gratified when they came back to report that her suggestions had helped. In return, they buoyed her in the same way. “I feel like that's really important—someone who's looking at you as if they actually see you,” she says.

School systems in Utah, the U.K., and elsewhere have adopted the Blues Program in part because of the evidence for its effectiveness, Rohde says. After the ORI team secured funding from the National Institutes of Mental Health, they launched a large-scale 2015 Blues Program trial that enrolled 378 Oregon students at risk of depression. Just 10 percent of students who finished the Blues Program had developed depression by the two-year follow-up mark, compared with 25 percent of control group members who read a cognitive-behavioral self-help book called Feeling Good.

A 2018 meta-analysis of four separate Blues Program trials showed that enrolled students were substantially less likely than control subjects to develop depression within two years. Other prevention programs for students at risk, including the Penn Resiliency Program, have also significantly reduced students' depressive symptoms, as have offerings such as Op Volle Kracht (At Full Force) in the Netherlands and Spain's Smile Program.

Salt Lake City's Blues Program site results have largely mirrored these broader ones. During the 2021–2022 school year, students scored notably lower on a standard depression symptom scale after finishing the program, and their scores remained almost as low three months later. And Me Time's new online format seems to work as well as the traditional one: after the program, online participants' depressive symptom scores actually dropped more than those of in-person students. Still, how long these benefits will last remains unknown because studies have not yet been done to assess how many depressive episodes any of these programs might prevent over a lifetime.

The programs that don't hold up as well in trials, at least so far, are those designed to prevent depression in entire school populations. A meta-analysis of more than 40 studies found that schoolwide prevention programs were significantly less effective at staving off depressive symptoms than targeted programs for at-risk young people. Schoolwide programs, Brown University's Gladstone notes, enroll more students who don't have symptoms—and who may therefore be less motivated to master the skills taught in depression prevention programs. “One of the things about these interventions is that they take work,” she says. “It's hard to engage in something when it doesn't have any resonance for you.”

Further trials are underway to determine which program components are most crucial for effective prevention. Along with her colleague Benjamin Van Voorhees, Gladstone has launched a controlled trial comparing two different online depression prevention programs for at-risk students: Teens Achieving Mastery Over Stress (TEAMS) and a self-guided course called CATCH-IT. The study—which has enrolled more than 500 teens from western Illinois, Chicago and Louisville, Ky.—will track not just their depressive symptoms after the programs but how they deal with stress and low moods. So far Gladstone hasn't had any trouble recruiting trial subjects. “It's really difficult to find mental health support,” she says. “Families are just excited about the trial. They want their kids in.”

Despite bursts of local enthusiasm for prevention programs, few school districts or agencies, whether in the U.S. or abroad, have programs like TEAMS or Blues available for struggling teens, and most people are not even aware that such programs exist.

The hard part of broadening the programs' reach, as Gladstone and Rohde have found, isn't convincing teens or families to give them a try. It's convincing those in power that the programs are practical and affordable for resource-strapped communities—and that prevention is worth investing in. Aside from a small one-time fee, schools and nonprofits don't need to pay licensing fees for Blues Program material. But ORI charges organizations $2,800 to train their staff on how to deliver the Blues content to teens, and each local facilitator who wants to instruct other staff must pay thousands more to get certified as a “trainer of trainers.” Administering the program adds to the workloads of counselors, social workers, and other staff, which can oblige managers to pay for more staffing hours or hire more employees.

In general, Gladstone says, depression prevention programs are easiest to implement in countries with national health insurance systems, such as the U.K. These systems, figuring the programs will eventually lead to lower costs for mental health care, are more apt to fund local agencies or nonprofits that offer the programs.

In the U.S., however, “insurance is generally attached to people's jobs, and people switch their jobs,” Gladstone says. “Often there's not really an incentive for insurance companies to fund prevention programs, because by the time somebody would develop the [condition] you're trying to prevent, somebody else will be paying for the treatment.” Although some U.S. insurance companies have started funding exercise programs that prevent physical illness, they don't reliably reimburse providers or agencies for depression prevention programs.

That typically leaves local governments, school districts and nonprofits on the hook to fund prevention efforts. Me Time is in a fortunate position, drawing from the DYS's annual mental health prevention budget of more than $570,000. Across the region, Rushton is trying to increase access to program resources by devoting more time to “training trainers”—briefing school staff members across the Salt Lake region so they can deliver the course to their own students. But this can be a challenging process, she says. “Social workers and counselors, people in schools, are really weighed down. And so even asking them, ‘Hey, we want you to teach this six-week class’—it's kind of a big ask.”

To help make the Blues Program more feasible on a local level, Rohde wants to do more real-world data collection on the practical side of depression prevention programs—how much they'll cost per student, for instance, and how that compares with the cost of treating an already depressed teen. Those kinds of concrete numbers could help convince local decision makers to support the program and health insurance companies to reimburse for it, he says. “It gives them the kind of data they need to say, ‘We're going to prevent this much future treatment cost down the road.’”

But Janet Welsh, principal investigator for Penn State University's Evidence-Based Prevention and Intervention Support program, points out that cost-savings numbers wouldn't necessarily drive wider adoption for depression prevention programs. “To be perfectly honest, I have those data for substance abuse,” says Welsh, who regularly evaluates research-based mental health programs. “I can show you how much it saves to do universal prevention. Yet people still won't do it.”

That reluctance, Welsh says, stems from a basic feature of human psychology: the tendency to value in-the-moment problem solving over avoiding future crises. “Prevention of anything—violence, drug abuse, mental health problems—is always going to be [the less favored option],” she says. If a depressed teen goes to therapy and gets well, her providers can document a clear trend of recovery. But if a student takes a depression prevention course and remains well, it's a different, lowercase kind of triumph, one that can be hard for funders to appreciate when their communities are in mental health crisis. “I can point to some really well-adjusted kids and say, ‘Look, they don't have substance abuse or mental health problems,’” Welsh says. “And you're like, ‘Yeah? So?’”

Despite the challenges of making the case for prevention, Rohde, Gladstone, and others hope that more communities will buy into it—especially given the strong enrollment Blues Program sites have seen since the COVID pandemic began. Clinicians also see opportunities for further honing the programs to attract newcomers, taking steps such as tailoring curricula for students from different backgrounds. A program that works well in California's Bay Area won't necessarily land in urban Detroit, rural England or Alaska Native communities. “Investing in the research and application of those programs is going to be essential,” Ortiz-Schwartz says, “so that districts can find solutions that are more on target with their population.”

Although more data and customized lesson plans may help make the case, those in charge of funding may ultimately look to the human element: how students like Esther Oladejo fare as they approach adulthood. Although Oladejo's mood still drifts up and down at times, she says disputing negative thoughts about her own abilities has given her courage to speak up more and take chances. “Before I probably would have hid away,” she says. “But the structure of being able to think, ‘Okay, what are the benefits? Am I going to be okay doing it?’ Yeah. Let's go.”

That willingness to advocate for herself led Oladejo to an unexpected breakthrough. After finishing the Blues Program and enrolling in college, she continued to flounder academically, and she grew more aware of the mismatch between the hours she put in and the results she was getting. If what you're doing isn't working, Blues lessons had prompted, what are some other ways of solving the problem? She decided to approach a tutor on her college campus to explain her dilemma, and the tutor referred her to the campus support team. After some tests, they told her she had dyslexia, which helped her get proper assistance—and finally make sense of why school had been such a struggle. (It's common for those at risk of depression, like Oladejo, to have other conditions like dyslexia, ADHD or anxiety; the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has called for kids and teens to be screened for both depression and anxiety so they can get fast, effective treatment.) “I'd put myself down, thinking, ‘Why can't I just get it the first time around?’” Oladejo says of her academic troubles. “But because I was able to use the skills, not be so anxious to ask for help, I was able to get a diagnosis.”

This progression reveals how the decisions people make in one moment, like Oladejo's choice to speak up and get evaluated for learning challenges, lead to a different array of options than those they'd have if they hadn't made that fateful decision. In that sense, it isn't just cognitive skills or stress regulation or a support group atmosphere that counts for teens at risk of depression. It's the way those things equip them to make choices that alter the decision tree itself. For adults who first slid into depression in middle or high school, it's an absorbing thought experiment: If I'd known how to approach that setback differently, how would my choices have been different? And what other choices would have opened up? And then, and then?

It's in the unfolding of these sequences that the promise of prevention is clearest. To help initiate such sequences for others, Oladejo has volunteered with the U.K.-based nonprofit Action for Children, speaking with local officials and lawmakers about her Blues Program experience. She might pursue a psychology doctorate so she can become a therapist—and she has a clear vision of the work she wants to do, helping clients build the kind of group support structure that got her through her own worst days. “I don't want to be like the usual therapist. If I do face-to-face, I want it to be an inclusive session,” she says. “I want to be able to give people that sense they're not alone.”

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Revolt against the machines began at Swingers. And at Bob’s Big Boy, where for weeks Drew Carey picked up the tab. Members of the Writers Guild of America, or WGA, met at both Los Angeles-area diners frequently during their 148-day strike, which hinged on protecting Hollywood’s scribes from being overrun by the march of artificial intelligence.

Members of the WGA were just a small part of the resistance. There were others. The Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, soon joined them on the picket lines, together forming a formidable uprising against the perceived threat of AI.

What each union was seeking was different. Writers wanted to make sure AI couldn’t be trained on their work or manipulate it without their say-so; actors wanted guardrails on how the technology could be used to recreate their performances. Both parties ended up setting a tone for how labor movements in the future could push back against encroaching automation.

“It is interesting that the Hollywood strikes became the highest-profile example of workers resisting AI in 2023,” says Brian Merchant, author of this year’s Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, a book about the Luddite movement.

At the same time, he adds, the unions’ confrontations with studios came at a time when the boom in AI technology was causing a lot of folks to be critical of Silicon Valley and new tools primed to take their jobs. Originally, the WGA’s AI stipulations didn’t seem like they’d be hotly contested demands—then they became a central issue. “Workers and unions have been fighting automation and certain uses of AI in the workplace for years, of course, but the Writers Guild were among the first to do so after the rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT,” Merchant says. Ultimately, it was the first big face-off between humans and AI, he adds, and “the humans won.”

Their timing couldn’t have been better. Throughout 2023, many trades and professions, from painters to coders and beyond, found themselves vulnerable to being replaced by machine learning. IBM’s CEO estimated out loud that some 7,800 jobs at the company could be done by bots in the next five years. A Goldman Sachs report from late March estimated nearly 300,000 jobs globally could be affected by automation. Radiologists, journalists (gulp), tax preparers—everyone, it seemed, spent at least part of 2023 wondering if robots were coming for their jobs.

That, in turn, led to increased interest in what protections organized labor could provide workers, even as some unions, like the United Auto Workers and Teamsters, seemed to fall behind on addressing AI’s potential to encroach on jobs. In a recent piece for Harvard Business Review, MIT engineering professor Yossi Sheffi argued short-sightedness on these issues affects both workers and employers, since disengaged staffers could become part of a workforce that’s even less prepared if and when automation comes to their industry.

Sheffi wrote the piece in September, when both SAG and WGA were deep into their strikes. At the time, he noted that other industries should “take to heart” what was happening in Hollywood. “Resolving these issues [between the actors and writers and the studios] will take time, but at least in this case, the parties have started the process before AI has become an industry mainstay,” he wrote. “But other unions don’t seem to be facing up to the ways technological advances will change jobs.”

AS THE ADVANCE of AI marched on throughout 2023, it became clear that unions were only part of the resistance. Authors, worried that large language models had been trained using their books, filed a handful of lawsuits against OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and others. So did visual artists, against Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and more. None of those suits has reached any kind of conclusion, and some argue copyright claims aren’t the way to stop the bots from absorbing creative work, but the suits did turn the courts into yet another battlefield, in addition to picket lines, on which humans pushed back against AI incursion.

By the end of 2023, governments entered the fray. In early November, US president Joe Biden signed an executive order attempting, among other things, to curtail AI’s impact on human work and provide “federal support for workers facing labor disruptions, including from AI.” Unions, including SAG, praised the move, which came as world leaders were heading to the UK for the AI Safety Summit, where, as my colleague Will Knight wrote, they sought to contain the threats of machine learning while also harnessing its power.

That has always been the tricky part. From weavers to writers, lots of people use machines to improve their work. Automation helps! As AI boosters will tell you, the technology can cultivate new forms of creativity. People can write books alongside AI, create new styles of visual art, build infinite Seinfeld generators. Some Hollywood writers use the tools for basic brainstorming tasks. Fear comes in when brainstorming evolves into a studio head asking ChatGPT to write a new movie about a cat and a cop who are best friends. No scribes needed.

Currently, chatbots can’t whip up fully formed scripts, or novels, or Caravaggios, but the tech is evolving so quickly it feels all but imminent. When Sam Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI in November, there was all kinds of speculation that the company was developing its tech too quickly, that its for-profit ambitions had overwhelmed its altruistic intentions. Altman is now back at the head of his company, but whether or not OpenAI is still evolving too quickly remains to be seen. But Microsoft does now have a nonvoting board seat.

Funny thing about that: Microsoft actually offered jobs to OpenAI staffers during that brief period when Altman was voted off the island. So did Salesforce. OpenAI employees all but told Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to go screw, but the sentiment stood as a reminder that while AI is poised to take many jobs, it also creates jobs in AI. The “learn to code” crowd has all new ammo. Even Biden’s executive order was clear about the fact that the US government wanted to attract the best and brightest in the field.

But that’s job creation, not job displacement. New technologies create jobs all the time, but with AI, some of those jobs pay pennies. What’s more, AI can also ask you to train it to do your job before picking up your tools. Going forward, the likelihood that AI will displace many entry-level jobs while creating a few highly skilled gigs seems high. The biggest questions in AI right now nearly all revolve around what these machines are learning from people, whether it’s human skill or human bias.

Journalism requires a modicum of skill and an ability to tamp down bias—and AI has proven terrible at writing news. Going into 2023, I thought perhaps I would be old and retired before AI came for my gig. Then Keanu Reeves (of all people) told me I was dreaming and that AI could replace me before my next birthday. “The people who are paying you for your art would rather not pay you,” he said. “They’re actively seeking a way around you, because artists are tricky. Humans are messy.”

Six months after Reeves said that, SAG, the union of which he is a member, went on strike to make sure studios couldn’t find a way around him. (As if.) When the strike ended, as with the WGA resolution, many questions remained: Could studios be trusted to self-regulate? Would actors be able to loan out AI doubles of themselves for jobs that would have gone to human performers? Many of those questions won’t be answered for a long time. Perhaps the answers won’t come soon enough.

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Mindfulness is the practice of paying deliberate and non-judgmental attention to the present moment, cultivating awareness of one’s thoughts, feelings, and surroundings to promote mental clarity, emotional balance, and overall well-being. It is often used in psychotherapy as a therapeutic technique to help individuals manage stress, reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, enhance self-awareness, and develop healthier coping mechanisms by incorporating mindfulness practices and principles into their treatment.

Mindfulness-based interventions typically involve practices like meditation, deep breathing, and body scans to develop mindfulness skills. These interventions have been used to reduce stress, anxiety, depression, and improve overall mental health, as well as enhance one’s ability to cope with various life challenges. Studies have shown that they can also improve executive functioning by teaching individuals to not react to cognitive and emotional content.

Study authors Nur Hani Zainal and Michelle G. Newman wanted to systematically assess the strength of effects of mindfulness-based interventions on global cognition and the following unique cognitive subdomains: orienting, executive attention, working memory accuracy and latency, inhibition accuracy and latency, shifting accuracy and latency, sustained attention (accuracy or intra-individual coefficient of variation), subjective cognitive functioning, processing speed, verbal fluency, episodic memory, and cognitive error.

These cognitive subdomains encompass various aspects of mental functioning. Orienting involves directing attention to specific sensory stimuli.

Executive attention relates to cognitive control, aiding in planning and decision-making. Working memory measures the accuracy of temporary information storage and manipulation, with latency reflecting processing speed.

Inhibition assesses the ability to suppress irrelevant information. Shifting evaluates task-switching ability, while sustained attention measures focus stability. Subjective cognitive functioning involves self-perception of cognitive abilities. Processing speed gauges how quickly individuals process information. Verbal fluency assesses language-related skills. Episodic memory relates to recalling past experiences, and cognitive error identifies and quantifies thinking mistakes.

The researchers acknowledged a key limitation of prior meta-analyses: the inclusion of studies lacking randomization and adequate experimental control. To address this, they conducted a meta-analysis focusing solely on randomized controlled trials to evaluate the efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions.

The study authors searched for published papers on randomized controlled trials involving participants without prior meditation experience, employing control groups, and including pre-and post-assessment as well as at least two mindfulness-based training sessions. This search in scientific journal databases yielded 111 studies fitting these criteria. In their analysis, the researchers considered various factors: the participants’ characteristics (age, health conditions, etc.), the nature of the treatment, and the overall attributes of the study, including its quality and the presence of fidelity checks.

The combined studies analyzed included 9,538 participants, averaging 34 years in age. However, there was a wide age range among participants, from 4 to 81 years. Females constituted 58% of the study participants. The size of the individual studies varied, ranging from 14 to 424 participants. These studies were conducted across 22 countries, with 41% originating from the United States. Among the studies that reported on participants’ ethnicity, 61% of participants were identified as white.

The analysis of effect sizes revealed that mindfulness-based interventions positively influenced global cognition, executive attention, working memory, accuracy in inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility, sustained attention accuracy, and subjective cognitive functioning, in comparison to control groups. The magnitude of these effects varied across studies, ranging from small to large, with effects on global cognition generally being more substantial.

Effects were weaker on older individuals and females. Studies of better quality tended to report stronger effects of mindfulness-based interventions compared to controls. The size of the effect did not depend on the number of sessions, treatment duration, or on the percentage of participants that completed the study.

Non-standard mindfulness-based interventions had stronger effects than standard ones on global cognition, sustained attention accuracy and subjective cognitive functioning. Treatments delivered face-to-face were substantially more effective than self-guided interventions.

“MBIs [mindfulness-based interventions] showed positive effects on executive attention, inhibition accuracy, WM [working memory] accuracy, shifting accuracy, sustained attention accuracy, intra-individual coefficient of variation, and subjective cognitive functioning,” the study authors concluded.

“However, MBIs did not significantly positively affect orienting, WM latency, inhibition latency, shifting latency, processing speed, verbal fluency, episodic memory, and cognitive error. Overall, MBIs improved EF [executive functioning] and sustained attention accuracy-based rather than latency-based outcomes, likely because mindfulness practices promote present-moment awareness and effective goal attainment over efficiency”.

The study sheds light on the effects of mindfulness-based interventions on cognition. However, it also has limitations that need to be taken into account. Notably, study authors were not able to account for variations in the delivery of the training i.e., the quality of the training and how well it was conducted in practice. Additionally, it remains unknown which components of mindfulness-based interventions produce the observed effects.

The paper, “Mindfulness enhances cognitive functioning: a meta-analysis of 111 randomized controlled trials”, was authored by Nur Hani Zainal and Michelle G. Newman.

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This issue took on new urgency in May 2023 when the U.S. surgeon general issued a major public advisory over the links between social media and youth mental health.

Research shows that images of beauty as depicted in movies, television and magazines can lead to mental illness, issues with disordered eating and body image dissatisfaction.

These trends have been documented in women and men, in the LGBTQ+ community and in people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Experts have long suspected that social media may be playing a role in the growing mental health crisis in young people. However, the surgeon general’s warning is one of the first public warnings supported by robust research.

Social media can be toxic

Body dissatisfaction among children and adolescents is commonplace and has been linked to decreased quality of life, worsened mood and unhealthy eating habits.

As an eating disorder and anxiety specialist, I regularly work with clients who experience eating disorder symptoms, self-esteem issues and anxiety related to social media.

I also have firsthand experience with this topic: I am 15 years post-recovery from an eating disorder, and I grew up when people were beginning to widely use social media. In my view, the impact of social media on diet and exercise patterns needs to be further researched to inform future policy directions, school programming and therapeutic treatment.

The mental health of adolescents and teens has been declining for the past decade, and the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to worsening youth mental health and brought it into the spotlight. As the mental health crisis surges, researchers have been taking a close look at the role of social media in these increasing mental health concerns.

The pros and cons of social media

About 95% of children and adolescents in the U.S. between the ages of 10 and 17 are using social media almost constantly.

Research has shown that social media can be beneficial for finding community support. However, studies have also shown that the use of social media contributes to social comparisons, unrealistic expectations and negative mental health effects.

In addition, those who have preexisting mental health conditions tend to spend more time on social media. People in that category are more likely to self-objectify and internalize the thin body ideal. Women and people with preexisting body image concerns are more likely to feel worse about their bodies and themselves after they spend time on social media.

A breeding ground for eating disorders

A recent review found that, as with mass media, the use of social media is a risk factor for the development of an eating disorder, body image dissatisfaction and disordered eating. In this review, social media use was shown to contribute to negative self-esteem, social comparisons, decreased emotional regulation and idealized self-presentation that negatively influenced body image.

Another study, called the Dove Self-Esteem Project, published in April 2023, found that 9 in 10 children and adolescents ages 10 to 17 are exposed to toxic beauty content on social media and 1 in 2 say that this has an impact on their mental health.

Eating disorders are complex mental illnesses that develop because of biological, social and psychological factors. Eating disorder hospitalizations and the need for treatment have dramatically increased during the pandemic.

Some reasons for this include isolation, food scarcity, boredom and social media content related to weight gain, such as the “quarantine15.” That was a reference to the weight gain some people were experiencing at the beginning of the pandemic, similar to the “freshman 15” belief that one will gain 15 pounds in the first year of college. Many teens whose routines were disrupted by the pandemic turned to eating disorder behaviors for an often-false sense of control or were influenced by family members who held unhealthy beliefs around food and exercise.

Researchers have also found that increased time at home during the pandemic led to more social media use by young people and therefore more exposure to toxic body image and dieting social media content.

While social media alone will not cause eating disorders, societal beliefs about beauty, which are amplified by social media, can contribute to the development of eating disorders.

‘Thinspo’ and ‘fitspo’

Toxic beauty standards online include the normalization of cosmetic and surgical procedures and pro-eating-disorder content, which promotes and romanticizes eating disorders. For instance, social media sites have promoted trends such as “thinspo,” which is focused on the thin ideal, and “fitspo,” which perpetuates the belief of there being a perfect body that can be achieved with dieting, supplements and excessive exercise.

Research has shown that social media content encouraging “clean eating” or dieting through pseudoscientific claims can lead to obsessive behavior around dietary patterns. These unfounded “wellness” posts can lead to weight cycling, yo-yo dieting, chronic stress, body dissatisfaction and higher likelihood of muscular and thin-ideal internalization.

Some social media posts feature pro-eating-disorder content, which directly or indirectly encourages disordered eating. Other posts promote deliberate manipulation of one’s body, using harmful quotes such as “nothing tastes as good as thin feels.” These posts provide a false sense of connection, allowing users to bond over a shared goal of losing weight, altering one’s appearance and continuing patterns of disordered eating.

While young people can often recognize and understand toxic beauty advice’s effects on their self-esteem, they may still continue to engage with this content. This is in part because friends, influencers and social media algorithms encourage people to follow certain accounts.

How policy changes could help

Legislators across the U.S. are proposing different regulations for social media sites.

Policy recommendations include increased transparency from social media companies, creation of higher standards of privacy for children’s data and possible tax incentives and social responsibility initiatives that would discourage companies and marketers from using altered photos.

Phone-free zones

Small steps at home to cut down on social media consumption can also make a difference. Parents and caregivers can create phone-free periods for the family. Examples of this include putting phones away while the family watches a movie together or during mealtimes.

Adults can also help by modeling healthy social media behaviors and encouraging children and adolescents to focus on building connections and engaging in valued activities.

Mindful social media consumption is another helpful approach. This requires recognizing what one is feeling during social media scrolling. If spending time on social media makes you feel worse about yourself or seems to be causing mood changes in your child, it may be time to change how you or your child interact with social media.

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China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) early last month disclosed ambitious plans to mass-produce humanoids that will be as "disruptive" as smartphones, Business Insider reported.

The MIIT added that the robots would "reshape the world."

Beijing's ambition, though, has as much to do with its economy as it does with showcasing its technology prowess.

President Xi Jinping and his fellow communists are determined not to let China’s economy suffer due to failure to keep up with the technological revolutions happening in other countries, as happened in the 19th century, The Economist reported.

"China's impressive economic growth in recent decades was a result of three main factors: a soaring urban workforce, a big increase in the capital stock and rising productivity," The Economist said.

"Today, though, less new infrastructure is needed. And the working-age population, those between 15 and 64, is shrinking. It is projected to drop by over 20% by 2050."

Various Chinese technology firms have announced plans for humanoid robot development and production in the past year, Hong Kong's South China Morning post reported. However, considerable progress is needed to achieve high volume production and commercial application.

Many of China's current robots are mechanical arms that can be programmed to weld, drill, or assemble components on a production line.

But last year, the Chinese produced "service robots" that can accomplish such tasks as moving boxes at warehouses, cleaning hotels, and cooking and serving food.

Lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic further motivated China to focus on robots after factories closed and Western firms reconsidered their supply chains, The Economist reported.

Humanoids also could help on farms, where few young people want to work.

"Some aspects of agriculture, such as milking cows, can be automated fairly easily," The Economist said. "Others are trickier, but appear possible on a small scale. The south-western city of Chengdu has developed an unmanned vegetable farm which could, in theory, produce ten harvests a year."

Last year, half of all the industrial robots installed worldwide were fitted in China, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

Basic tasks for humanoids to start will include picking up and moving items either individually or contained within totes or boxes, The RobotReport reported during the summer.

Advanced functions eventually will include manipulating door knobs, opening and closing doors and drawers, and using tools designed for humans.

The RobotReport added that creating a functional humanoid for the real world remains a difficult task due to power consumption, power-to-weight optimization, mechanical stiffness, edge computing, component reliability and safety.

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For most of humankind’s existence, Earth was the only known ocean-draped world, seemingly unlike any other cosmic isle.

But in 1979, NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft flew by Jupiter. Its moon Europa, a frozen realm, was decorated with grooves and fractures—hints that there might be something dynamic beneath its surface.

“After Voyager, people suspected that Europa was weird and might have an ocean,” said Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Then, in 1996, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft passed by Europa and detected a strange magnetic field coming from within. “We didn’t understand what it was,” said Margaret Kivelson, a space physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was in charge of the spacecraft’s magnetometer. Eventually, she and her team realized that an electrically conductive fluid—something inside the moon—was convulsing in response to Jupiter’s immense magnetic field. “The only thing that made any sense,” Kivelson said, “was if there was a shell of liquid melt beneath the surface of the ice.”

In 2004, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn. When it observed Saturn’s small moon Enceladus, it found coruscating icy plumes erupting from vast chasms at the moon’s south pole. And when Cassini flew through these spouts, the evidence was unmistakable—this was a salty ocean vigorously bleeding into space.

Now Earth’s oceans are no longer unique. They’re just strange. They exist on our planet’s sunlit surface, while the seas of the outer solar system are tucked beneath ice and bathed in darkness. And these subterranean liquid oceans seem to be the rule for our solar system, not the exception. In addition to Europa and Enceladus, other moons with ice-covered oceans almost certainly exist as well. A fleet of spacecraft will explore them in detail over the next decade.

All of this raises an apparent paradox. These moons have existed in the frosty reaches of our solar system for billions of years—long enough for residual heat from their creation to have escaped into space eons ago. Any subsurface seas should be solid ice by now. So how can these moons, orbiting so far beyond the sun’s warmth, still have oceans today?

Saturn’s small moon Enceladus is spraying its saltwater ocean into

space. The plumes, as seen by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, surprised

scientists with their ferocity.

Photograph: Kevin M. Gill/NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS

Mounting evidence indicates that there may be multiple ways to sustain liquid-water oceans over billions of years. Decoding those recipes could accelerate our quest to determine how easy, or troublesome, it is for life to emerge throughout the cosmos. Freshly analyzed data from old spacecraft, plus recent observations by NASA’s Juno spacecraft and the James Webb Space Telescope, are adding to the growing evidence that these warm oceans contain chemistry beneficial to biology, and that the inner solar system is not the only place life could potentially call home.

These oceanic moons also offer a grander possibility. Temperate, potentially livable oceans could be an inevitable consequence of planet formation. It may not matter how far a planet and its moons are from their star’s nuclear bonfire. And if that’s true, then the number of landscapes we might explore in our search for life beyond Earth is nearly limitless.

“Oceans under icy moons seem weird and improbable,” said Steven Vance, an astrobiologist and geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

And yet, defiantly, these alien seas remain liquid.

A Mirror-Wrapped Ocean

Scientists suspect that a handful of moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn—and maybe even some spinning around Uranus and Neptune—harbor oceans. Hefty Ganymede and crater-scarred Callisto produce weak, Europa-like magnetic signals. Saturn’s haze-covered Titan, too, very probably has a liquid-water subsurface ocean. These “are the five that most scientists in the community feel pretty confidently about,” said Mike Sori, a planetary scientist at Purdue University.

With her colleagues, Margaret Kivelson, a space physicist at UCLA, determined

that a global ocean is likely hiding beneath Europa’s surface.

Courtesy of Margaret Kivelson

So far, the only absolute oceanic certainty is Enceladus. “That’s a no-brainer,” said Carly Howett, a planetary scientist at the University of Oxford.

In the 1980s, some scientists suspected Enceladus had plumes; Saturn’s E ring was so clean and shiny that something—perhaps from one of its moons—must be leaking into space and constantly refreshing it. After Cassini finally witnessed that planet-garnishing magic in action, scientists briefly questioned whether the moon’s south-polar plumes might be the work of sunlight vaporizing ice in the moon’s shell—a bit like dry ice boiling away when heated, perhaps by sunlight.

“For a while, there was this argument about whether there needed to be an ocean at all,” Nimmo said. “What really nailed that was when [Cassini] flew through the plume and they found salt—sodium chloride. That’s an ocean.” There was still a chance that these plumes could be erupting from a smaller, more isolated sea. But further Cassini observations revealed that Enceladus’ shell is rocking back and forth so acutely that it must be separated from the moon’s deeper interior by a global ocean.

The plumes also pump out hydrogen and quartz, signs of deep-sea hydrothermal vent activity, said Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at the Free University of Berlin. On Earth, such vents produce the heat and chemistry needed to power ecosystems that exist beyond the reach of sunlight—communities of organisms that scientists once thought could not exist in our photosynthetically dependent world.

But what could be powering a vent system strong enough to heat an entire ocean? Another moon—this one of the fiery variety—would provide those clues.

The Eternal, Infernal Tides

In June 1979, a month before Voyager 2’s close flyby of Europa, scientists announced that Voyager 1 had glimpsed titanic, umbrella-shaped plumes billowing into space above Io—the eruptive fingerprints of several volcanoes.

This observation should have been baffling: Volcanism requires an internal heat source, and Io, like the other icy moons, should have been nothing more than embers. But a few months earlier, an independent team of scientists had correctly predicted that Io might be a hyperactive volcanic world.

Two upcoming space missions will study Jupiter’s moon Europa, considered one of the best places to look

for alien life in the solar system. The spacecraft will characterize the moon’s surface and the sea that’s

thought to hide beneath its icy crust.

Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute

They’d based their prediction on the orbital dance of Jupiter’s largest moons. For every four orbits that Io completes, Europa makes two and Ganymede one. This orbital configuration, known as a resonance, causes Io to wobble back and forth, making its orbit elliptical. When Io is closer to Jupiter, the planet’s gravity yanks on it more intensely. When it’s farther away, Jupiter’s tug is weaker. That never-ending gravitational tug-of-war makes the rocky surface of Io move up and down by 100 meters, the same height as a 30-story building. These are tides, like Earth’s—just in solid rock, not water.

Those tides create friction within the moon that generates heat. And that tidal heating is strong enough to melt the rock deep inside Io. “Io doesn’t have a water ocean, but it probably has a magma ocean,” Nimmo said. (Galileo picked up on a secondary magnetic field there too, generated by a global subterranean reservoir of molten rock.)

Francis Nimmo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, wants

to solve the mysteries of the outer solar system’s icy ocean worlds.

Photograph: UCSC Science Center

Europa also experiences some tidal heating. But how much those tides warm an ocean depends on where within the moon they occur; in other words, enough of that heat needs to get to the ocean to keep it liquid. “The tidal heating could be happening in the ice shell itself, or it could be happening in the rocky core underneath,” Nimmo said. Scientists don’t know which is correct—so they can’t say for sure how much tidal heating contributes to Europa’s liquid interior.

Enceladus, too, is stretched and squeezed by its gravitational tango with a neighboring moon called Dione. In theory this could produce tides that warm the moon’s interior. But the tides created by its resonance with Dione, at least on paper, do not seem to be sufficient to explain its ocean. The numbers don’t yet work, Sori said, and the amount of heat produced isn’t enough to maintain a global ocean for the billions of years since the solar system’s birth. Perhaps, as with Europa, scientists don’t quite know where the tides are creating heat within Enceladus.

Another confounding factor is that orbits aren’t fixed over astronomical time. As planetary systems evolve, moons migrate, and “tidal heating can turn on and off as things drift in and out of different resonances,” said David Rothery, a planetary scientist at the Open University in the United Kingdom. Scientists suspect this happened with Miranda and Ariel, two Uranian satellites that may be former dance partners; these moons look as if they were once geologically active but are now arguably frozen to their cores.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine;

source: NASA

In a similar vein, Enceladus may not always have had Dione as its dance partner: Perhaps their Saturn-circling boogie kicked off more recently and warmed a previously solid moon. But that scenario is also troublesome to explain. “It’s easier to keep an ocean around and maintain it, rather than freeze and remelt it,” Sori said. Thus, if tidal heating is exclusively responsible for Enceladus’s ocean, then the moon is a veteran dancer that has bopped for several billion years.

For now, the only certainty about this moon’s ocean is that it exists. How it came to be, and how it’s still around today, “is one of the really big unsolved questions,” Sori said. “Enceladus is tough to figure out.”

Radioactive Renegades

Fortunately, warm moony interiors don’t exclusively depend on tides.

Half of Earth’s internal heat came from its birth. The rest comes from decaying radioactive elements. Similarly, the rock-rich depths of icy moons should contain a decent amount of uranium, thorium, and potassium—radioactive stores that can cook their surroundings for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of years before they decay into stable elements and stop releasing heat.

Bigger moons will have started out with more bountiful caches of radioactive matter. And perhaps that is all their oceans require. “For larger moons like Ganymede and Callisto and Titan, they’re sort of inevitable because of this radiogenic factor,” Vance said. Some scientists even argue that Pluto has a subsurface ocean. Like the three moons, this dwarf planet is likely insulated by a sufficiently thick crust that slows the leaking of its radioactive furnace into space.

The most volcanic body in the solar system, Jupiter’s moon Io offers some

clues to how icy ocean worlds might maintain their liquid interiors.

Photograph: Ted Stryk/NASA/SwRI/MSS

Yet the relatively small hearts in Lilliputian moons like Enceladus don’t contain enough radioactive matter to keep them toasty for billions of years. One unsatisfactory resolution to this conundrum is that maybe Enceladus just got lucky: Radioactivity could explain an early portion of its oceanic past, and its dance with Dione a more recent episode. Maybe “we’re now at the point of crossover, where the radiogenic [heating] gets so low that the tidal heating takes over,” Postberg said.

If so, perhaps Enceladus is a microcosm of the universe: a serendipitous combination of tidal heating and radioactivity. That would mean that oceanic moons could exist everywhere—or, conversely, almost nowhere.

Youthful Oceans

Alternatively, and controversially, some scientists argue that Enceladus could be remarkably young.

Hiding in the reams of data gathered by the Cassini spacecraft are hints that Saturn wasn’t born with its iconic rings. Instead, many scientists are now convinced that the rings formed just a few hundred million years ago. New research using supercomputers to simulate moon-on-moon violence suggests that Saturn’s rings formed when two ancient moons collided around the time that stegosaurs roamed the Earth. This smashup littered Saturn’s orbit with legions of icy shards; while many formed the rings, others busted up existing moons and created new ones. And if the rings are young, Enceladus and a handful of other moons might be young too.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine; source: NASA

“It feels like people are becoming more open to considering that the moons are young,” said Jacob Kegerreis, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and a coauthor of the recent ring formation study.

In a twist that supports this idea, it turns out that scientists don’t know how old some of Saturn’s moons are. “Enceladus could be only a few hundred million or tens of millions of years old,” Rothery said. If so, then the heat from its frenzied birth may still be keeping its young ocean liquid.

But the young-moons story is far from certain—the sheer number of craters many display suggests that the moons have been around to experience the solar system’s pinball-like pandemonium for many an eon. “I do think, in the Saturn system, something bizarre happened a few hundred million years ago,” Nimmo said. “But my guess is that all the satellites are 4.5 billion years old.”

Satellite Soothsayers

With the Galileo and Cassini missions long dead, scientists are now pinning their hopes on two spacecraft: the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, which recently launched, and NASA’s Europa Clipper, which has not. Both will arrive at Jupiter at the start of the next decade.

And that brings us back to Europa, the moon that first forced a reimagining of the cosmic context in which Earth’s seas exist.

NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, currently being assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

will launch for Europa in 2024.

Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech

One of the goals for the Clipper spacecraft—set to fly in October 2024—is (in the words of the mission’s objective list) to “confirm” that Europa’s ocean exists. “There were a lot of arguments about that word,” Nimmo said. Clipper could find something other than an ocean; there may instead be a frozen sea filled with pockets of meltwater. Or “it could be a thin layer of gold,” Nimmo joked. “I think it’s 99 percent sure there’s an ocean there.”

Assuming that Clipper confirms the existence of Europa’s ocean, it will get to work characterizing the moon and its subsurface sea. To do that, the spacecraft will start by figuring out which molecules are on the moon’s surface—and, if scientists are lucky, in the ocean below. As it flies by the moon, Clipper will ingest any microscopic dust, ice, or water vapor wafting off the moon’s surface. Those particles will be studied by its surface dust analyzer instrument: As grains hit its metal plate, they are vaporized and electrically charged, allowing the instrument to unveil the chemical identity of the grain.

The hope is that plumes are gently venting Europa’s ocean into space, which would make Clipper’s quest considerably easier. Such spouts may exist, but they won’t be like those of Enceladus; they may be more intermittent and geographically sporadic. Or they may not be present at all—in which case, the hope is that micrometeorite impacts may be chipping away at the icy shell, liberating soupçons of the ocean and spraying it toward Clipper.

And it might turn out that when it comes to staying warm, Europa and the other moons rely on chemical tricks that are not as alien as we might expect. In winter, “we salt the roads to lower the melting temperature,” Sori said. Maybe Europa’s ocean is especially salty, which would lower the freezing point. Other compounds would be more effective antifreeze, though—“ammonia, in particular,” Sori said, which is more abundant farther from the sun’s vaporizing glare.

Tides, radioactivity, chemistry and youth: These ingredients, when mixed in the right way, can produce—and sustain—oceans on these icy moons. “With all these things, I don’t think it’s either/or,” Howett said. The specific recipe for each satellite might be different. There could be hundreds of ways to make an ocean-filled icy moon.

The discovery of Europa’s secret ocean “really did change the way people thought about moons,” Kivelson said. And it set science on a course to determine if alien life forms might populate these alien seas, and perhaps bring about a discovery that will forever alter our conception of our place in the universe.

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What to do when surrounded by people who are losing their minds about the Newest New Thing? Answer: reach for the Gartner Hype Cycle, an ingenious diagram that maps the progress of an emerging technology through five phases: the “technology trigger”, which is followed by a rapid rise to the “peak of inflated expectations”; this is succeeded by a rapid decline into the “trough of disillusionment”, after which begins a gentle climb up the “slope of enlightenment” – before eventually (often years or decades later) reaching the “plateau of productivity”.

Given the current hysteria about AI, I thought I’d check to see where it is on the chart. It shows that generative AI (the polite term for ChatGPT and co) has just reached the peak of inflated expectations. That squares with the fevered predictions of the tech industry (not to mention governments) that AI will be transformative and will soon be ubiquitous. This hype has given rise to much anguished fretting about its impact on employment, misinformation, politics etc, and also to a deal of anxious extrapolations about an existential risk to humanity.

All of this serves the useful function – for the tech industry, at least – of diverting attention from the downsides of the technology that we are already experiencing: bias, inscrutability, unaccountability and its tendency to “hallucinate”, to name just four. And, in particular, the current moral panic also means that a really important question is missing from public discourse: what would a world suffused with this technology do to the planet? Which is worrying because its environmental impact will, at best, be significant and, at worst, could be really problematic.

How come? Basically, because AI requires staggering amounts of computing power. And since computers require electricity, and the necessary GPUs (graphics processing units) run very hot (and therefore need cooling), the technology consumes electricity at a colossal rate. Which, in turn, means CO2 emissions on a large scale – about which the industry is extraordinarily coy, while simultaneously boasting about using offsets and other wheezes to mime carbon neutrality.

The implication is stark: the realisation of the industry’s dream of “AI everywhere” (as Google’s boss once put it) would bring about a world dependent on a technology that is not only flaky but also has a formidable – and growing – environmental footprint. Shouldn’t we be paying more attention to this?

Surprisingly, training AI models remains much, much more carbon-intensive than use of them

for inference

Fortunately, some people are, and have been for a while. A study in 2019, for example, estimated the carbon footprint of training a single early large language model (LLM) such as GPT-2 at about 300,000kg of CO2 emissions – the equivalent of 125 round-trip flights between New York and Beijing. Since then, models have become exponentially bigger and their training footprints will therefore be proportionately larger.

But training is only one phase in the life cycle of generative AI. In a sense, you could regard those emissions as a one-time environmental cost. What happens, though, when the AI goes into service, enabling millions or perhaps billions of users to interact with it? In industry parlance, this is the “inference” phase – the moment when you ask Stable Diffusion to “create an image of Rishi Sunak fawning on Elon Musk while Musk is tweeting poop emojis on his phone”. That request immediately triggers a burst of computing in some distant server farm. What’s the carbon footprint of that? And of millions of such interactions every minute – which is what a world of ubiquitous AI will generate?

The first systematic attempt at estimating the footprint of the inference phase was published last month and goes some way to answering that question. The researchers compared the ongoing inference cost of various categories of machine-learning systems (88 in all), covering task-specific (ie fine-tuned models that carry out a single task) and general-purpose models (ie those – such as ChatGPT, Claude, Llama etc – trained for multiple tasks).

The findings are illuminating. Generative tasks (text generation, summarising, image generation and captioning) are predictably more energy- and carbon-intensive compared with discriminative tasks. Tasks involving images emit more carbon than ones involving text alone. Surprisingly (at least to this columnist), training AI models remains much, much more carbon-intensive than use of them for inference. The researchers tried to estimate how many inferences would be needed before their carbon cost equalled the environmental impact of training them. In the case of one of the larger models, it would take 204.5m inference interactions, at which point the carbon footprint of the AI would be doubled.

This sounds a lot but, on an internet scale, it isn’t. After all, ChatGPT gained 1 million users in its first week after launch and currently has about 100 million active users. So maybe the best hope for the planet would be for generative AI to topple down the slippery slope into Gartner’s “trough of disillusionment”, enabling the rest of us to get on with life.

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This pioneering study, set to be published in JAMA Network Open, used a unique approach by studying 22 pairs of identical twins, allowing for control over genetic and environmental factors.

Christopher Gardner, Ph.D., the Rehnborg Farquhar Professor and a professor of medicine at Stanford, led the research team.

The study was conducted from May to July 2022 with 44 participants, all healthy identical twins without cardiovascular disease, selected from the Stanford Twin Registry.

Each twin pair was assigned either a vegan or an omnivore diet, both of which were healthy and included vegetables, legumes, fruits, and whole grains.

The vegan diet was completely plant-based, excluding meat, eggs, milk, and other animal products. The omnivore diet included animal-sourced foods like chicken, fish, eggs, cheese, and dairy.

During the first month of the study, participants received 21 meals per week from a meal service. For the remaining four weeks, they prepared their own meals, guided by a registered dietitian.

The success rate was high, with 43 participants completing the study. This high adherence rate suggests that learning to prepare a healthy diet is feasible within a month.

The results were clear: participants on the vegan diet had significantly lower levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), insulin, and body weight compared to those on the omnivore diet.

These factors are closely associated with better cardiovascular health. For instance, the average baseline LDL-C level for vegans was 110.7 mg/dL, dropping to 95.5 mg/dL by the end of the study, while omnivores started at 118.5 mg/dL and decreased to 116.1 mg/dL. Optimal healthy LDL-C levels are below 100 mg/dL.

The study also found that vegans experienced about a 20% drop in fasting insulin and lost an average of 4.2 more pounds than the omnivores.

These findings suggest that a vegan diet could be beneficial for long-term health and longevity, particularly in improving heart health.

Gardner noted the importance of reducing saturated fats, increasing dietary fiber, and losing weight for cardiovascular health, all of which were achieved by the vegan participants.

While acknowledging that not everyone will adopt a vegan lifestyle, Gardner emphasized the health benefits of incorporating more plant-based foods into the diet.

He suggests exploring vegan multicultural foods like Indian masala, Asian stir-fry, and African lentil-based dishes as enjoyable ways to start transitioning to a more plant-based diet.

This study highlights the potential of a vegan diet to significantly improve cardiovascular health in a relatively short period, offering a promising path for those looking to enhance their heart health and overall well-being.

If you care about blood pressure, please read studies about Scientists find link between high blood pressure drugs and this skin disease and findings of common high blood pressure medication may not be the best choice.

For more information about heart health, please see recent studies about Right diet can be the key to survival for people with heart failure and results showing that Diets high in proinflammatory foods linked to heart diseases.

The research findings can be found in JAMA Network Open.

Copyright © 2023 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.

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Met Police figures show that staff in the capital's hospitals have endured almost 1,000 violent offences since the start of April 2022.

Between April 2022 and March 2023, 578 such offences took place.

The frequency of offences has increased since April 2023, with 406 offences recorded in the eight months up to the end of November this year.
The figures do not include violence against security guards, but do include cleaners, porters and receptionists.

The highest number of offences in the first year of the data were committed in Lambeth, where 59 incidents were reported. The borough is home to St Thomas' Hospital in Waterloo and King's College Hospital in Camberwell.

Since April 2023, the highest number of offences have been committed in Redbridge with 35 reports. Among other medical facilities, the borough includes the King George Hospital in Goodmayes.

A small number of offences included in the data do not necessarily include physical violence, for example sending letters or other written communications "with intent to cause distress or anxiety".

The most frequent offence recorded was common assault and battery, comprising 234 of the 984 (23%)incidents recorded since April 2022.
'No justification for violence'

The statistics were requested by Dr Onkar Sahota, a Labour member of the London Assembly.

He said: "These figures are very worrying, and even more so when you consider that these are only the crimes that have been reported - the true figures across London are likely to be higher.

"Patients should realise that staff are doing the best they can, often under very difficult circumstances, and there's no justification for violence."

In July, The Observer revealed that a record 170,000 workers left their jobs in the NHS in England last year, including more than 41,000 nurses.

The number of NHS staff who in 2022 quit their roles citing work-life balance stood at 27,546 (including staff who may have moved to another job in the health service), which was more than those who left because they had reached retirement age (24,143).

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Just ahead of Christmas, the festival of giving, Google might play the role of the Grinch and steal its employees' happiness. According to a report, as many as 30000 employees may face layoffs soon in Google and the reason behind it might shock you. It is said that the AI innovation by the company has led to those positions being surplus, so the company is planning to trim its workforce accordingly. The ad sales department of the company will be restructured during the reported layoffs.

According to a report by Live Mint, which quoted The Information, many job roles in Google's ad sales department are becoming redundant after Google introduced new AI tools. These AI tools can give suggestions as well as create ads for its clients that have the capability of performing well. These ads require next to zero human intervention and can operate entirely autonomously.

Google to layoff 30000 employees

This AI ads tool, called Performance Max was unveiled by the company at the Google I/O 2023. As per the report, an increasing number of advertisers are now leaning towards Performance Max, which lets them have more control over the output of the ad generated. Since the tool can work without needing a human to assist in the task, Google is finding the need for human employees specializing in selling ads for its services such as YouTube, Search, Maps, etc., redundant.

Google's president of the Americas and Global Partners, Sean Downey, internally disclosed the restructuring of the ad sales unit during a meeting last week. The Information reported that Downey did not specify whether this reorganization would result in additional layoffs.

Describing Performance Max, Google said at I/O, “Performance Max is a new goal-based campaign type that allows performance advertisers to access all of their Google Ads inventory from a single campaign”. 

Performance Max helps customers drive performance based on their specified conversion goals. The company claims it can deliver more conversions and value by optimizing performance in real-time and across channels using Smart Bidding. Performance Max uses Google AI across bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more.

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• JPMorgan Chase, Accenture, and Disney have been among the companies posting AI-related jobs.

• Listings tend to offer base pay of more than $100,000 — with salaries going as high as $338,000.

AI developers, engineers, and consultants are seeing a lot of new job opportunities — even at companies outside the traditional tech world. And the pay is very good, with many AI-related job postings listing salaries of well over $100,000.

Companies are on the hunt for job candidates whose knowledge of AI can help them use their in-house data more extensively — for instance, to make better predictions and decisions, said Aaron Sines, a director at the Austin-based tech-recruiting company Razoroo. One agriculture client was looking to potentially use AI to help estimate crop yields, he said earlier this year.

"The demand for professionals with knowledge in AI research, machine learning, deep learning — it truly outpaces the available supply of candidates," Sines said. 

That means companies are offering salaries above six figures to attract experienced candidates: The base salary for AI researcher roles, even at non-tech companies, could range from $150,000 to $250,000, Sines said. 

"There's certainly a scarcity, I think, and our clients are acutely aware of that, which inherently is driving upward pressure on compensation," he said. 

JPMorgan Chase is hiring for a software engineer who can develop generative AI models with a base pay of $194,750 to $285,000. Experience working with machine learning algorithms and knowledge of the latest generative AI research are listed as preferred qualifications.

Meanwhile, Disney is looking to hire a senior machine-learning engineer with expertise in machine learning, algorithms, and statistical methods; the entertainment giant is offering an annual salary of $145,400 to $199,870, its listing says.

A few months prior, the insurance company Travelers listed a data-engineer role that sought AI expertise, with a base pay of $113,900 to $188,000. The company's CEO, Alan Schnitzer, affirmed the company's push into AI on an earnings call the month the job was posted, saying that "we have a very significant number of our employees engaged on the objective of making sure that we're leading when it comes to AI." 

AI-related jobs don't always require engineering or coding skills.

Consulting giant Accenture is currently looking for an advisor manager for its global responsible AI team who will guide the company's clients on their AI projects. The ideal candidate – who would make from $93,400 and $338,300 depending on the applicant's skills and location – would have experience working as a lawmaker and possess a deep understanding of AI policy, the listing said.

Companies across industries are even specifically including ChatGPT experience as a plus in job listings.

As of December, Crossover, a job site for remote work, is searching for an AI prompt engineer for $50 an hour who has "substantial experience" using generative AI models like GPT-4. That same month, AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company behind the COVID-19 vaccine, posted a job listing for a generative AI adoption manager with experience working with AI tools like ChatGPT.

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The two prototypes had entered orbit over the Atlantic Ocean at 2:24 p.m. Eastern on Oct. 6. An Amazon antenna on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius made contact with both, but during a subsequent handoff to another station, only one vehicle checked in. Amazon scanned the sky behind the first satellite for a signal from the second one but heard silence. 

The incident threatened to kill the mood for employees who’d gathered to celebrate the launch at Postdoc Brewing, not far from Amazon’s Seattle-area space operation. The team had spent years building satellites from scratch and endured months of delays launching them.

Now that they were aloft, Amazon needed to make contact to ensure their solar panels had deployed. If not, the batteries would run out, and the satellites would fail, a major setback for the retail and cloud-computing giant, already a late entrant in the race to build a profitable business selling internet access from low Earth orbit.  

Inside Amazon’s Mission Operations Center, a conference room stuffed with big video displays, computers and cases of energy drinks, satellite operations chief Yonina DeKeyser and her deputies worked to piece together the scraps of data they’d collected. Between the third and fourth contacts, the guidance, navigation and control team made the call: The missing satellite was fine. The information streaming in could only have come from a pair of healthy spacecraft. Rajeev Badyal, the project’s leader, yelled in triumph.

At the brewery, an Amazonian looking at his phone broke through the din, raising clenched fists as he bellowed “We’re power positive!” His colleagues cheered. The team would later discover that some of Amazon’s ground-based antennas had been looking in the wrong place, mistaking the second satellite to pass for the first.

Amazon executives tend to describe their satellite venture, Project Kuiper, in philanthropic terms, emphasizing its potential to connect people in remote or impoverished areas with education and global commerce. Less altruistically, Amazon also hopes the $10-billion-plus project can transform it into a global telecommunications giant. The company plans to sell rooftop antennas to individual internet users, cloud-computing and data-recovery services to business, and connectivity to wireless companies to link remote cell towers to their networks starting in 2025. 

Project Kuiper is among the company’s biggest bets, one of just a few that have survived two years into a cost-cutting drive that has eliminated many of the speculative projects started late in Jeff Bezos’ tenure as CEO. It’s an enormous undertaking in an arena that has had more bankruptcies than successful businesses. Broadband is already widely available and, in many places where it isn’t, it’s not clear people will be able to afford space-based internet.

Some Amazon observers see Project Kuiper as another front in the rivalry between Bezos and fellow billionaire Elon Musk, whose SpaceX operates the Starlink constellation of internet satellites.

Amazon is betting its system can offer the capacity and internet speeds to compete not just with Starlink, which has a big head start, but with terrestrial telecommunications companies. At the very least, Amazon is building an alternative to Musk’s service at a time when governments and corporations alike are looking for ways to reduce their reliance on the erratic and controversial businessman.  

Over the last two months, Amazon engineers have put their maiden satellites through a battery of tests. They’ve made a video call, bought a toy rocket set from Amazon.com and tested a system of lasers designed to extend the reach of each satellite. Now comes the hard part. To meet the terms of its license with regulators, Amazon has to build — and find a ride to space for — the equivalent of two satellites a day, every day, through July 2026.

“Building two satellites is very hard,” Badyal said. “Building 3,000-plus is exponentially harder.” 

Project Kuiper, named for the belt of dwarf planets, ice and rock beyond Neptune, was born of a thought experiment, according to longtime Amazon consumer electronics chief Dave Limp. Bezos had periodically asked executives to ponder far-off hurdles that might slow the company down, an exercise that led Amazon to spend billions on warehouse robots and fleets of aircraft, big rigs and delivery trucks.  

About six years ago, Amazon’s leaders grew fixated on broadband internet. Their disparate range of businesses, including retail sites, film studios and business software, all depend on access to the web.

“It became, if you wanted to grow, you had to find these hundreds of millions of people that are not currently Amazon customers,” Limp said in an interview. “Well, what’s the constraint to getting them there?”

Among other ideas, Amazon explored internet-broadcasting drones and balloons, approaches tried and abandoned by Facebook, now Meta Platforms, and Alphabet’s Google. Amazon decided to deliver the internet from satellites.

The idea wasn’t novel.

In the 1990s, not far from the suburban Seattle garage where Bezos founded Amazon, a company called Teledesic had set out to launch a constellation of hundreds of satellites. Most communications satellites at the time rested in a geostationary orbit, which matched the Earth’s rotation, fixing each craft in place from the perspective of someone on the ground. Such satellites power GPS, weather tracking and in-flight web browsing.   

Teledesic figured satellites in a much lower orbit, the domain of space stations, could take advantage of the shorter trip to the ground to better compete with terrestrial phone and internet companies. Despite backing from Microsoft’s Bill Gates and wireless mogul Craig McCaw, the company folded after the dot-com bust. Rockets were expensive, and the aerospace industry preferred to keep making bespoke satellites for governments.

About a decade later, Musk took up the idea and cut out the middlemen. His rocket company, SpaceX, was reducing the cost of getting to orbit, and opted to build satellites in-house. Musk hired Badyal, the future Kuiper chief, to bring that to life.   

Badyal was born in India and spent much of his childhood in Kuwait, where his architect father was posted. He came to the U.S. for college, earning a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Oregon State University. He found work at a nearby Hewlett-Packard campus, helping design the printhead that transfers ink to the page on inkjet printers. Later, he worked on the first optical mice, sparing future generations the task of cleaning a grimy tracking ball, before moving to Microsoft, where he helped create the company’s ill-fated Zune music player.   

Rapid technological advances in consumer electronics made it possible for companies outside the aerospace industry to build satellites. People like Badyal, adept at navigating on-the-fly design changes and mass manufacturing, had the right tools for a new generation of satellites that could be built quickly and on the cheap. After joining the Starlink project in 2014, Badyal set up shop in Redmond. The first two satellites launched on a SpaceX rocket four years later.

In June 2018, Musk flew to Seattle. Soon after, Badyal and much of his team were out. Colleagues were told they’d been fired. Badyal says he and Musk simply decided to part ways. Musk put another lieutenant in charge and ordered him to strip the design down to the bare minimum in an effort to get a bare-bones system operating as quickly as possible. 

Today, SpaceX says it’s building six satellites a day. There are more than 5,000 in orbit, serving more than 2 million customers.

It’s a Bezos maxim that Amazon only enters new fields when it has expertise — or can acquire it quickly. Amazon’s satellite initiative was a two-page outline when Limp heard Starlink’s founding team was looking for work. He called Badyal in August 2018.   

Two months later, Badyal and five fellow Starlink alums were at Amazon, sketching out a new constellation in a pair of conference rooms obscured by a black curtain that curious employees saw as an invitation to pop their heads through.

“It was very secure,” deadpanned Naveen Kachroo, one of the first hires. When their plan — 3,236 satellites crisscrossing the globe at an altitude of between 590 and 630 kilometers — became public months later, Musk called Bezos a copycat on Twitter.   

Amazon engineers designed a terminal, the gadget that customers will someday use to receive data from satellites, that they figured they could manufacture for about $750. Bezos sent them back to the drawing board. It needed to be even cheaper.

Amazon’s antenna chief, Nima Mahanfar, and his team combined some antenna functions, and the company says it can now build its main, 11-inch-square terminal, for less than $400. It offers internet speeds of up to 400 megabits per second, roughly twice the median broadband speed in U.S. homes.

Project Kuiper employs more than 1,600 people, a mix of consumer electronics veterans and career aerospace experts. DeKeyser, the satellite operations chief, holds a master’s in aeronautical engineering and says winding up at Amazon would have been unfathomable earlier in her career.

The team is the rare organization inside Amazon run mostly by people who hail from elsewhere. Chief satellite engineer Paul O’Brien, Kachroo and Mahanfar all worked on Microsoft’s Zune.

“You have to innovate at a much faster pace” than traditional space manufacturing, said Badyal, a mustachioed, gray-haired engineer with a gravelly voice and a thing for classic cocktails. His office at Project Kuiper headquarters in Redmond, in a building that once made forklifts, overlooks a research and development lab where engineers fabricate custom aluminum parts, assemble circuit boards and test antennas in a cavernous echo-free chamber.  

Amazon’s satellites pair technology that pushes the cutting-edge — including optical satellite links, more commonly called space lasers — with simple, proven components that limit cost or weight. 

“Kuiper is designing spacecraft that are fewer in number, bigger in size, higher in power” than SpaceX’s first generation of vehicles, said Caleb Henry, who tracks private-sector space companies for Quilty Space. “There’s a real difference in design philosophy between the two.”  

The satellites will enter space packed inside the nose of a rocket and start their first orbit in a tumble until an automated system reorients them toward Earth. By that point, the solar panels, folded at launch, should be deploying automatically, relying on an almost century-old technology: actuators that heat a plug of wax, which expands to push on a bolt that releases the array.

When a customer loads a website, the home terminal beams a signal up to a circular array of thousands of antenna modules, which look like tiny, green two-dot Legos. Bowl-shaped gateway antennas route the request down to Amazon’s ground stations, the conduit to the internet. Data is fired back upward, and then down to the terminal from one of the set of arrays of Lego bricks.

All of this happens in milliseconds as the craft speeds by at 17,000 mph. By the time the satellite zooms out of sight, another should be in view. Each has its own propulsion system. Amazonians liken the power of the thruster to a flap of a dragonfly’s wings, which, fired for hours in the vacuum of space, can overcome gravity’s pull. 

Amazon at one point aimed to produce the satellites for $500,000 apiece, and keep their weight under 1,100 pounds, according to two people familiar with the matter. The size and weight of Amazon’s upcoming production models couldn’t be learned. Based on Amazon’s launch vehicles, Quilty Space estimates Kuiper satellites weigh between 1,2,866 and 3,858 pounds. A photo Amazon published of its prototypes en route to launch showed each enclosed in a cubical steel crate about the height of a human. 

Kachroo, now Kuiper’s business development chief, says Amazon will sell connectivity directly to individual internet users, as well as through wireless and broadband service providers, depending on the country. Amazon has announced partnerships with Verizon in the U.S., Vodafone in Europe and Africa, and Japan’s NTT. Service tests will start in the second half of next year, and Amazon ultimately anticipates selling to tens of millions of customers.

“We want to serve enterprise, governments, schools, hospitals, mobile operators, so we don’t have a single channel, or segment, on which we make money,” said Kachroo. Amazon, which hasn’t disclosed pricing, has licenses so far to operate in more than 15 countries, including Brazil, Canada, France, Mexico and the U.S.  

The company will offer businesses and governments private connectivity through its Amazon Web Services unit, and make service quality guarantees that SpaceX has yet to offer. AWS, the largest seller of rented computing power and data storage, will in the coming years be able to offer packages of products that include internet access, a perk that Amazon’s cloud-computing rivals can’t match on their own. 

Kuiper staff tend not to bring up Starlink (another Bezosism: Don’t obsess over the competition), but analysts say Amazon has an opportunity to set itself apart simply by operating a satellite business devoid of Musk’s personal drama or business entanglements. Other companies are building what the industry calls megaconstellations, but Starlink’s is by far the largest and most capable.  

SpaceX, which didn’t respond to requests for comment, also avoids the long-term contracts and exclusivity agreements that business customers tend to seek, said Lluc Palerm, an analyst with researcher NSR. “They are not perceived as the best partner in the industry,”

In an interview, Julie Zoller, Kuiper’s regulatory chief, didn’t specify how Amazon would navigate political entanglements, saying the company would defer to the State Department. Zoller, who started her career installing satellite gear at U.S. military bases, did concede that Amazon doesn’t envision CEO Andy Jassy negotiating service terms by text message. “Customers are literally saying ‘Why can’t you all go faster,'” Kachroo said.

“They love the fact that there’s competition.”    

Executives insist Kuiper is on schedule, but the company hoped to have its prototypes aloft almost a year earlier. The proof is in orbit: Etched onto an aluminum body component of each craft are the names of the people working on the project as of August 2022.  

Amazon’s initial ride to space — on a new rocket built by a startup — exploded on the launchpad. Its second, the new Vulcan Centaur built by United Launch Alliance, the U.S. space stalwart, was supposed to take off this summer before an explosion during testing. Desperate to get its satellites flying, Amazon chartered an Atlas V, a 21-year-old ULA rocket capable of carrying much heavier loads. The launch was the rocketry equivalent of hiring a city bus to take two people to the movies.    

Now Amazon has to get the rest of the satellites up there. Project Kuiper’s is the biggest commercial launch order in history, which in addition to 47 ULA launches, includes rockets from ArianeGroup and Bezos’ Blue Origin. But only one of those rockets — the Atlas, which Amazon has booked for eight more launches — has flown. Blue Origin has never sent a spacecraft to orbit, and the rocket it hopes to get there is years behind schedule. (Limp, Badyal’s old boss, left Amazon this month to lead Blue Origin.) 

This month, Amazon booked three launches with SpaceX, an awkward deal necessitated by Kuiper’s tight launch schedule and the lack of alternatives. Amazon says it has been in discussions with every major launch provider for years. It also denies the decision was influenced by a lawsuit filed by a pension fund alleging Amazon didn’t consider using SpaceX thanks in part to the Bezos-Musk rivalry — pushing up costs. Amazon says the claims are without merit.

ULA is expanding a factory in Alabama, and retrofitting a facility in Cape Canaveral, Fla., to quickly stack Kuiper satellites on rockets and ferry them to the launchpad. Suppliers of rocket motors and avionics equipment are ramping up production. 

“It’s all on track to be done in time,” said ULA CEO Tory Bruno. “As long as we don’t have to completely change the design, we’re going to be fine.” 

However Amazon’s satellites get to space, Project Kuiper’s Federal Communications Commission license requires that 1,618 of them be there by July 2026, and the other half three years later. Amazon plans to build them at a dedicated manufacturing site in Kirkland, where crews are still installing machinery and doing utility work. So Amazon’s first satellites are being assembled at Kuiper’s headquarters, which is being reconfigured from a research and development facility into a crash production line.

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The discoveries about their reproductive strategies, survival mechanisms, and distinct metabolic mechanisms – similar to mitochondria – may one day be useful in developing sustainable energy technologies and increasing efficiency in agriculture.

Epulopiscium bacteria live symbiotically in the guts of a fish, Naso tonganus, in tropical ocean environments. Where most bacteria are too small to be seen without a microscope, these single-celled mammoths have a million times the volume of their well-known relatives, E. coli, meaning they can just be made out with the naked eye.

"This incredible giant bacterium is unique and interesting in so many ways," says microbiologist Esther Angert from Cornell University in the US. "Revealing the genomic potential of this organism just kind of blew our minds."

The first member of Epulopiscium – whose name comes from the Latin words for "a guest" and "of a fish" – was discovered in 1985.

Angert and her US colleagues named the species they studied Epulopiscium viviparus: The second word refers to reproduction that results in live births.

While bacteria typically split in half to make two new ones, E. viviparus can make up to 12 copies of itself inside the parent cell, which then swim out into the world.

Micrograph of a group of Epulopiscium viviparus bacteria. (Esther Angert)

Unable to be grown in a lab, such giant bacteria remain a curiosity of the biological world. So to study E. viviparus, the researchers had to capture the fish it lives in and carefully collect cells as quickly as possible for DNA sequencing and transcriptome analysis.

Most bacteria either respire using oxygen or obtain energy from their environment through fermentation, which generally results in less energy production.

E. viviparus happens to be a fermenter, but that's puzzling because it's huge, reproduces rapidly, and can swim – all requiring relatively large amounts of energy.

It looks like the bacteria have optimized their metabolism to a fish gut environment that's rich in sodium ions. The flow of sodium ions across cell membranes generates a powerful 'sodium motive force' for making energy and spinning their hairlike appendages called flagella for movement.

This sodium motive force also powers flagella movement in Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that cause cholera.

The team also found a large chunk of the genetic code of E. viviparus makes enzymes that are highly efficient at nutrient extraction from their host fish, especially carbohydrates called polysaccharides from the algae that forms a large part of N. tonganus's diet.

E. viviparus has plentiful enzymes that make ATP too, the 'energy currency' that supports a wide variety of cellular processes. They discovered space for these molecules in a unique membrane, similar to the mitochondria of more complex organisms.

"We all know that phrase "the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell", and amazingly, these membranes in E. viviparus have kind of converged on the same model as the mitochondria," Angert says.

"They have a highly folded membrane that increases surface area where these energy-producing pumps can work, and that increased surface area creates a powerhouse of energy."

E. viviparus's efficient ways of harnessing the nutrients in algae could have a lot of uses in the future. Algae is becoming more popular as a source of renewable energy, a food source for livestock, and for people too, because its growth doesn't interfere with land-based farming.

There are still some mysteries to be solved. As Angert and colleagues point out, further study is required to completely understand how E. viviparus uses its arsenal of enzymes. But this provides a solid foundation for understanding their growth requirements.

"We find it remarkable that the largest known bacteria have thus far eluded isolation," the authors write. "This suggests that bacterial behemoths are highly tuned to survive in the environments in which they evolved."

The study has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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It was a cloudy July afternoon in Alaska's Kobuk Valley National Park, part of the biggest stretch of protected wilderness in the U.S. We were 95 kilometers (60 miles) from the nearest village and 400 kilometers from the road system. Nature doesn't get any more unspoiled. But the stream flowing past our feet looked polluted. The streambed was orange, as if the rocks had been stained with carrot juice. The surface glistened with a gasolinelike rainbow sheen. “This is bad stuff,” said Patrick Sullivan, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Sullivan, a short, bearded man with a Glock pistol strapped to his chest for protection against Grizzly Bears, was looking at the screen of a sensor he had dipped into the water. He read measurements from the screen to Roman Dial, a biology and mathematics professor at Alaska Pacific University. Dissolved oxygen was extremely low, and the pH was 6.4, about 100 times more acidic than the somewhat alkaline river into which the stream was flowing. The electrical conductivity, an indicator of dissolved metals or minerals, was closer to that of industrial wastewater than the average mountain stream. “Don't drink this water,” Sullivan said.

Less than a dozen meters away the stream flowed into the Salmon River, a ribbon of swift channels and shimmering rapids that winds south from the snow-dimpled dun peaks of the Brooks Range. This is the last frontier in the state known as “the last frontier,” a 1,000-kilometer line of pyramidlike slopes that wall off the northern portion of Alaska from the gray, wind-raked Arctic Coast.

One of the most remote and undisturbed rivers in America, the Salmon has long been renowned for its unspoiled nature. When author John McPhee paddled the Salmon in 1975, it contained “the clearest, purest water I have ever seen flowing over rocks,” he wrote in Coming into the Country, an Alaska classic. A landmark 1980 conservation act designated it a wild and scenic river for what the government called “water of exceptional clarity,” deep, luminescent blue-green pools and “large runs of chum and pink salmon.”

Now, however, the Salmon is quite literally rusting. Tributary streams along one third of the 110-kilometer river are full of oxidized iron minerals and, in many cases, acid. “It was a famous, pristine river ecosystem,” Sullivan said, “and it feels like it's completely collapsing now.” The same thing is happening to rivers and streams throughout the Brooks Range—at least 75 of them in the past five to 10 years—and probably in Russia and Canada as well. This past summer a researcher spotted two orange streams while flying from British Columbia to the Northwest Territories. “Almost certainly it is happening in other parts of the Arctic,” said Timothy Lyons, a geochemist at the University of California, Riverside, who's been working with Dial and Sullivan.

Scientists who have studied these rusting rivers agree that the ultimate cause is climate change. Kobuk Valley National Park has warmed by 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.32 degrees Fahrenheit) since 2006 and could get another 10.2 degrees C hotter by 2100, a greater increase than projected for any other national park. The heat may already have begun to thaw 40 percent of the park's permafrost, the layer of earth just under the topsoil that normally remains frozen year-round. McPhee wanted to protect the Salmon River because humans had “not yet begun to change it.” Now, less than 50 years later, we have done just that. The last great wilderness in America, which by law is supposed to be “untrammeled by man,” is being trammeled from afar by our global emissions.

Scientists compare data at a “burn”—a stretch of thawing ground where seeping water is so acidic it kills vegetation, turning it black. The orange color comes from the presence of iron mobilized by thawing. Credit: Taylor Roades

But how, exactly, permafrost thaw is turning these rivers orange has been a mystery. Solving it is crucial for understanding what the sweeping ecological impact could be and to help communities adapt, such as the eight Alaska Native villages that depend on rivers in the western Brooks Range for fish and drinking water. Some researchers think acid from minerals is leaching iron out of bedrock that has been exposed to water for the first time in millennia. Others think bacteria are mobilizing iron from the soil in thawing wetlands.

I had joined a group of scientists and wilderness buffs for a six-day trip down the Salmon to try to figure out which, if either, of these hypotheses explained the pollution in this once spotless waterway. We'd paddle downriver about 25 kilometers a day, passing from the treeless tundra near its headwaters to the boreal forest at its confluence with the broad, sluggish Kobuk River, then follow the Kobuk to the nearest village. Along the way we'd stop at as many tributaries as possible to take notes, collect vials of water and pick invertebrates off the rocks for the first comprehensive sampling of an entire rusting watershed. If the acid-rock hypothesis proved true, the fish downstream of certain mountains could be in lethal danger. If the bacteria hypothesis was right, the rusting could gradually smother streams almost anywhere there's permafrost—an area that includes about one fourth of the Northern Hemisphere.

To get close to the Salmon, two graduate students and I took a six-seater bush plane inland from the Arctic coast. The ice close to the Salmon had broken up in late spring, so any gravel bars on the river where a fat-tired bush plane might land were still under water. The best the pilot could do was to land on a long, flat gravel ridge in the mist-covered mountains north of the river. The rest of the group, who had been taking data in another watershed, was waiting there for our cargo of inflatable pack rafts, paddles, personal flotation devices, food and 52 water-sampling kits. We strapped the rafts, which folded down to the size of a gallon of milk, to the top of each pack for the hike to the river.

A strip of test paper dipped into a seep at a burn site indicates an acidity around 2.5—like vinegar. Fish and fish eggs in such water would die.

Credit: Taylor Roades

“This is the heaviest my backpack has ever been,” graduate student Maddy Zietlow said before we powered through 20 kilometers of windswept ridges, ankle-twisting tussocks and scratchy brush. We finally descended toward the luminescent braids of the Salmon to camp for the night as half a dozen white-coated Dall Sheep bounded away over a ridge.

The highest reaches of the Salmon still have clear water, but they're too rocky and shallow to float on, so the next morning we sloshed a few kilometers down the nascent river until we found a spot deep enough to launch our pack rafts. We stuffed the food and gear into oval storage tubes in the rafts and blew them up taut. During the first few kilometers of paddling, we had to lift our butts off the bottom of the rafts to keep from getting stuck every time the current scraped us over a ledge of rapids. We dodged aquamarine marble rocks the size of couch cushions.

When McPhee was here, he wrote that the river was so clear and full of fish that “looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.” These days, however, looking over the side is like staring down into a sky full of thick haze. An hour downstream from where we embarked, a large tributary called Kanaktok Creek was pumping in murky water over orange rocks, turning the Salmon green. The next incoming stream was so full of iron that the main stem ran half orange and half green. For the rest of the trip the river had the color and opacity of pea soup. “Most climate change is subtle,” said Forrest McCarthy, a former U.S. Antarctic Program field-safety coordinator, who was helping with water samples. “This is like, bam!” he continued, snapping his fingers.

The first investigators to document the rusting rivers were U.S. Geological Survey and National Park Service personnel studying how permafrost changes in the Brooks Range are affecting fish such as the Dolly Varden, a big, silvery green char with red spots that local villages prize above all others. In August 2018, when biologist Mike Carey flew by helicopter to retrieve a water sensor he had left in a clean stream east of the Salmon, he saw that the bottom was blanketed in orange slime. He couldn't find any fish or insects. “Biodiversity just crashed,” he recalled.

Carey thought the weird situation was a one-off until the following July, Alaska's hottest month on record. The Agashashok River, 96 kilometers west of the Salmon, turned from turquoise to orange-brown along part of its course. In the winter of 2019 the snowpack was abnormally high; that can insulate the ground, further encouraging permafrost thaw. Then came another hot summer and another snowy winter, and the rusting spread.

Dial and Sullivan, who had been studying the northward march of the tree line in the warming Brooks Range, were shocked by how fast streams there started transforming. On one 2020 expedition the water in a stream called Clear Creek was so acidic it curdled the powdered milk Zietlow used for her nightly tea. A loose network of interested scientists began to coalesce. For Dial, a kind of wilderness beatnik with a face of white stubble and a stream-of-consciousness manner of speaking, the expanding project was personal: he had been climbing mountains and floating rivers in the Brooks Range for more than 40 years. “It's fascinating from a scientific point of view, but from an emotional point of view, it's sad,” he said of the changes he's witnessing. “The alarming thing is how far our human reach is, in a big way.”

Rivers in the Brooks Range flow to the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. The Salmon and Wulik Rivers are rusting, compromising fishing and water supply for people in villages such as Kiana and Kivalina. Red Dog Mine is one of the world’s largest zinc and lead producers. Credit: Daniel P. Huffman

After about four hours on the water, we came to a wide bend where the river looked as if it were disappearing into a tunnel. The current had eaten deep into the softening shore, creating an overhang of earth at least 30 meters long. Muddy roots hung down like strands of a beaded curtain.

Globules of watery dirt plopped into the river, and the air smelled like a mix of moldy towels and rotting vegetables—the unmistakable scent of thawing permafrost. “I don't remember that,” Sullivan said, frowning.

Permafrost ranges from isolated patches in Anchorage to a near-continuous sheet in the Brooks Range. If you set a fire and then dug down into the warmed area like gold miners did, under about a meter of seasonally thawed topsoil you'd find ground as hard as concrete and as many as 600 meters deep in places like Prudhoe Bay, much of which has been frozen since the last ice age. Within that layer is animal and plant matter holding twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does. When permafrost thaws, microbes begin to digest this matter and emit carbon dioxide and methane; that rotting-vegetable smell means the planet is cooking.

The ice contains other surprises as well. In Russia in 2016, anthrax reactivated by permafrost thaw led to the death of a 12-year-old boy. The softening earth could also unleash viruses, chemicals or mercury, a recent study warned—a Pandora's icebox of unexpected consequences. Still, the rusting of rivers blindsided the Alaska scientists. They suspected that the thaw was driving it, but they weren't sure how. Then David Cooper, an ecologist at Colorado State University, suggested what they now refer to as the “wetlands hypothesis”—the idea that microbes in the soil are producing not just methane but also soluble iron.

Cooper has known Dial since 1979, when, as a teenage climber, Dial wandered into Cooper's research camp in the Brooks Range soaked, freezing and hungry. He gave the young Dial warm clothes and food, perhaps saving his life. In 2021 Dial invited Cooper on a research trip to Timber Creek, 30 kilometers west of the Salmon. On the first day Cooper tried some fly-fishing and found more iron than fish. “I looked at the creek,” he recalled, “and I said, ‘This creek is dead. It's just blanketed with metals.’”

He wondered whether bacteria might be to blame. The chemical process of breaking down carbon compounds for energy produces hydrogen atoms with an extra electron each. Many bacteria rely on oxygen molecules to accept that extra electron in a process known as reduction. But in waterlogged environments, where there is no free oxygen, bacterial respiration can reduce other elements, such as sulfur, or it can reduce the oxidized iron that, along with organic matter and manganese, gives soil its brown color.

The thaw of permafrost soil under a wetland allows bacteria to start reducing that oxidized iron, Cooper thinks. And reduced iron, unlike oxidized iron, is soluble in water. If it's carried by groundwater out into an oxygenated stream, it can once again be oxidized. When that happens, it will fall out of the water as “rust” and turn the stream orange. While digging trenches on marshy ground near Timber Creek this past August, Cooper and Dial found water as deep as 1.5 meters under the once frozen soil, as well as dirt the gray color of reduced iron. New groundwater flows have developed in the thawing earth, Cooper said, and they have “really awakened a lot of these geochemical processes that have been basically stalled out for 5,000 years because the ground's been frozen.”

The second night, we camped among spindly spruce trees on the gravel shore across from where Anaktok Creek, a toxic orange tributary, runs through a long, winding valley and into the Salmon. Dial and Sullivan, who knew the Anaktok from previous trips, wanted to hike half a dozen kilometers up into the valley and float back down, sampling the creek and the tiny streams that feed it. The next morning we grabbed several water-sampling kits each, paddled across the river, packed up our rafts and started up the northern slope. As we got higher we could see across to the southern side of the valley, and we discovered a startling sight. An expanse of green tundra maybe 100 meters long looked as if it had been burned—only there hadn't been any wildfire.

We scrambled up a hill and began moving along the broad ridgeline, and after more than an hour we came across an ugly black sore on our side of the valley. Twigs of dead lingonberry and dryas shrubs drooped onto dirt the color of fresh asphalt. A channel of water trickled out of the dark ground. It was too shallow to measure with the sampling kit, so McCarthy offered to sacrifice his Nalgene water bottle. He took one last swig and dumped its contents, then slowly refilled it from the seep. When Sullivan dipped a sensor into the bottle, it showed a pH of 2.95, like vinegar. The burn was from acid. “If it's got that low of a pH ... it's actively burning,” Sullivan said. “There's at least a dozen burns in this valley,” Dial added.

Roman Dial, David Cooper, Dan Gregory and Timothy Lyons (left to right) discover water flowing through iron-rich soils in burns as well as wetlands, suggesting different sources of the rusting. A crack indicates the ground is shifting as underlying permafrost thaws. Credit: Taylor Roades

We stumbled on another burn among the raking willow shrubs as we descended toward the creek, and the trickle from the lumpy black crust there was strongly acidic, too. Below the black spots, an orange slime covered the rocks of the Anaktok, rubbing off on the hands of Alexander Lee, an Alaska Pacific University philosophy professor who was helping to sample fish and invertebrates. A small stream coming down from the hills had a highly acidic pH of 3.5. “Wow, this is crazy,” Dial said.

“And not much rust. It's probably still in solution,” Sullivan said. Although the wetlands hypothesis offered a reason for the orange staining, it couldn't explain the acidification. In late 2022 Lyons had contacted Dial with the idea that water was reacting with minerals in the bedrock—the “acid-rock drainage hypothesis.” He had seen a web article with a photograph Dial had taken of the Salmon in autumn, as bright yellow as the Balsam Poplar trees next to it, and he was reminded of research he'd done for NASA on Spain's infamous Rio Tinto, which is so orange and full of acid from upstream mining that it's considered a potential analogue for acidic sites on Mars.

Most ore deposits are rich in sulfide minerals such as pyrite (“fool's gold”), a compound of sulfur and iron. If a sulfide mineral is exposed to water and oxygen, as will happen when miners start breaking up rock, the sulfur splits off the metal and bonds with hydrogen and oxygen molecules, forming sulfuric acid. The resulting contamination by acid and metals, including iron, is a problem in flooded mines and in ponds full of tailings (the waste product from processing mined ore) around the world. Acid-rock drainage can also happen naturally when streams weather sulfide rock in ore deposits. Alaska Natives have spotted occasional orange streams around the Brooks Range for years—though not in the numbers appearing now. Lyons thinks permafrost thaw is lifting the icy lid off the bedrock, allowing oxygenated water to reach pyrite-rich shale for the first time in thousands of years. That's forming sulfuric acid and oxidizing the leftover iron, which would normally precipitate out of the water as rust. The acidity dissolves the oxidized iron, allowing it to flow with the ground seep just as reduced iron does.

But the Brooks Range also happens to have a lot of alkaline limestone, which makes water more basic. If the acidic water from a seep reaches an alkaline river or stream, its pH will rise, and the iron will fall out as what miners would call yellow boy. “It's like a one-two punch,” Lyons said. “You have the shaley rocks with pyrite that source the acid and the iron, and then the limestones neutralize that acid and cause the iron to come out of solution.”

What's really scary is that the acid might also be leaching out other metals, such as copper, zinc, cadmium, lead and even arsenic, that are then carried far downstream. Mining areas often hold enough sulfide minerals to fuel these reactions for millennia. Hillside seeps from permafrost might “turn on” only in years of greater thaw, or they could continue for decades or centuries. “That's why this problem is so challenging from a remediation point of view,” says Brett Poulin, an environmental toxicology expert at the University of California, Davis. “As long as you have water and oxygen and there's still a mineral, it will just keep going.”

For the next two days we kept paddling and sampling tributaries as hills coated only by low groundcover gave way to lowlands of teeming conifers. The Salmon, widening, seemed almost devoid of fish, and the sky was eerily free of birds. After three days of trying, Lee, the philosophy professor, caught only one Dolly Varden, coring a small tissue sample from its polka-dotted side to test it for metals.

The murky water started to clear slightly; clean tributaries were diluting the colored flows. But on our second-to-last day, just before the Salmon joined the Kobuk River, we found the ugliest stream yet, coming out of a marshy woodland. It was more a hideous maroon than orange. Almost like an ooze, it clogged the filter of the water-sampling kit. Saplings along the bank had been chewed by beavers, which have been moving north with the advancing tree line, their ponds further thawing the permafrost. “It's a massive wetland,” Dial said after paddling partway up the stream. “I think what we've got is the wetlands hypothesis.”

This burn may have begun recently because much of the vegetation within it is still green. Credit: Taylor Roades

We pulled into the Alaska Native village of Kiana on the Kobuk at 3:00 A.M. on our final day. By that time we had rafted more than 145 kilometers and sampled more than 20 streams, but we still hadn't solved the mystery. There appeared to be evidence for both hypotheses. In the “valley of the burns,” permafrost thaw seemed to be allowing water to leach iron out of the bedrock, which turned our campfire discussions toward the acid-rock drainage hypothesis. Around the ugly stream, though, it was more likely that permafrost thaw was activating iron-reducing soil bacteria, as the wetlands hypothesis would suggest. In many places, both mechanisms are probably playing a role.

Although the Salmon is a good place to investigate these interactions, it's relatively far from human habitation, and its effluent gets diluted by the massive Kobuk. But as the rusting metastasizes to other rivers in the Brooks Range, it threatens to harm settlements, first and foremost the coastal town of Kivalina.

Like the Salmon, the Wulik River flows down from the Brooks Range, and many of its tributaries have been turning orange. The difference is that at the mouth of the Wulik there is a village, Kivalina, whose 444 residents rely on the river for water and fish. Small changes in water quality could have significant consequences for them.

I flew in a small airplane to the shrinking barrier island north of the Bering Strait where Kivalina is located, about 160 kilometers northwest from where our paddling had ended. The first things I saw on arrival were crosses marking graves on the narrow strip of land along the runway. Behind that was the lagoon where the Wulik empties into the sea.

The next evening Jared Norton, a 25-year-old in a Los Angeles Dodgers cap and white hoodie, pulled up a fishing net across the bow of an aluminum boat, a drizzling rain falling across the lagoon. Like many residents, Norton spends a lot of his time hunting and fishing. The first few fish were silvery Chum Salmon, also known as dog salmon because they're the primary pet food in Alaska Native villages. Then a big fish with a turquoise back and sides came into view. “There's the one I'm looking for!” Norton said. “There is the one I need.” It was a Dolly Varden.

Dolly Varden are a big part of Kivalina's way of life. They're also likely to be the first fish affected by rusting rivers. Chum Salmon leave freshwater for the ocean days or weeks after emerging from the streambed and return only at the end of their life, but Dolly Varden take years to make it to the sea. Once they do, they return to rivers and lakes every year to overwinter. Some “residents” never leave freshwater at all. As a result, they're more exposed to changes in the streams.

A mature Dolly Varden is green with red spots—a beautiful fish, even more striking than its cousin the Brook Trout. The name comes from a Charles Dickens character who beguiles men with her cherry-colored clothes or, more likely, from a red polka-dot fabric inspired by her. Anglers will pay thousands of dollars to fish for one in the Wulik, where a 12-kilogram world-record breaker was caught in 2002. Alaska Natives value the Dolly for its flavorful orange flesh. They say Kivalina's Dolly Varden “taste the sweetest” of all, especially after they've been left to age for two weeks along the shore. Residents trade bags of fish with northern villagers for blubber and with southern villagers for venison.

David Cooper tests for pH levels and for electric conductivity, which can indicate dissolved toxic metals such as copper, cadmium and arsenic. Roman Dial pushes a metal probe a meter down into the ground, where permafrost would have been as hard as concrete if it were still frozen. The gun is for protection against Grizzly Bears.

Credit: Taylor Roades

Norton put the Dolly Varden in a metal bucket to take home to his mother. After a few more Chum, a second Dolly came up in the net. This one was smaller, with a reddish mark on its pale belly, like a wound that had healed. Norton hurled it back into the lagoon.

Kivalina is a hard place. With no plumbing, residents have to haul water in barrels. Several houses—prefab wood structures built on short stilts—are cracking as the land sinks and gets eroded, weakened by the melting of sea ice above and permafrost thaw below. Hoping to eventually get enough funding to retreat from the sea, the village has built a school 13 kilometers inland. The “evacuation road” leading to it is already cracking in places from thaw.

Like several other Alaska Native villages, Kivalina depends on rivers flowing out of the Brooks Range for fish and drinking water. For hundreds of years seminomadic Inupiat people came here in the spring to go after northbound whales, then moved inland to hunt Alaska's largest caribou herd as it headed south in the fall. They relied on late-autumn Dolly Varden to get through the nine months of cold.

The people here have managed to keep these hunting and fishing traditions alive despite forced settlement, Christianization, devastation of the whales and a long succession of epidemics. To this day, four fifths of their food come from the land and sea—now via snowmobile and motorboat. But tributaries of the Wulik have begun rusting, possibly jeopardizing the Dolly Varden. “It would be a real big hurt on us,” says Replogle Swan, president of the Kivalina Volunteer Search and Rescue. “That fish is just a part of our lives.”

Iron and other metals can starve fish by smothering invertebrates they eat, such as mayflies, and fish eggs could suffocate if the streambed is covered in iron. Researchers have found that iron and aluminum on fish gills hinder respiration. Cherelle Barr, a mother of two who works for the regional native corporation, fishes rod and reel for Dolly Varden every fall at her family's cabin near the mouth of the Salmon River. Of the 30 Dollies they caught last year, about 10 were deformed, she said. Some had big bumps on their back; others had pus behind their gills. Even bears on a small island in the river were wary. “You could tell they were not eating the [fish] that had that stuff by their gills” or the ones that were deformed, Barr said. The pus could be caused by a parasite or disease, but it is concerning. State scientists who track fish have seen them avoid streams with elevated iron, manganese and acidity.

Since 1989 Red Dog, one of the world's largest zinc mines, has been fundamental to the region's economy. Every year after the ice starts breaking up, the mine, 64 kilometers inland, discharges treated wastewater into Red Dog Creek, which flows into the Wulik and to the sea. Kivalina residents accuse the mine, which in the past has been found guilty of violating the Clean Water Act, of spoiling their water. Some people haul drinking water by boat from another nearby river rather than filling up at the tank supplied from the Wulik.

The researchers collect water samples and data at a rusty seep. They think the straight orange lines may be trails left by caribou, Dall Sheep or wolves. Credit: Taylor Roades

In some ways, however, Red Dog Creek got cleaner after the mine opened because the creek was a natural source of acid-rock drainage before the mine was there. In fact, the creek's orange color was what led a bush pilot to report the likelihood of valuable minerals there in the 1960s.

Concentrations of heavy metals downstream declined after the mine installed pipes to divert Red Dog Creek and other streams around the ore deposits, according to annual monitoring by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The creek also became less acidic. At the same time, the concentration of “total dissolved solids” increased, mainly because of sulfates and calcium hydroxide the mine was adding to remove metals from the wastewater.

During the hot summer of 2019 the concentration of total dissolved solids downstream rose so much it reached the limit set by Red Dog's permit, forcing the mine to stop discharging its wastewater into the creek for more than a year. The problem was that creeks upstream of the mine were beginning to rust, feeding milky yellow water into the Wulik. Red Dog couldn't start discharging again until it built a $19-million reverse-osmosis treatment system that released cleaner wastewater.

Since then, more streams above the mine have turned orange because of permafrost thaw, Fish and Game says. Total dissolved solids have continued to rise despite the treatment system. “Fish swimming in or through this water would not probably die right away, but it is a chronic stressor,” says Brendan Scanlon, a biologist with Fish and Game in Fairbanks.

Permafrost has become a bigger polluter than the mine, and not much can be done to clean up the problem. Lime is often dumped into tailings ponds at old mines to buffer acid, but you can't “lime” an entire mountain stream, just as you can't refreeze the ground around it. Perhaps the only real hope is that once all the permafrost has thawed and all the iron has rusted, these wild rivers will be able to flush out the contamination and restore themselves, although that would take decades at least.

When we were floating the lower Salmon, in the round-the-clock sunshine of the Arctic summer, I had asked Dial what still fascinated him about the Brooks Range after all these years. He replied that it's how much the vast ecosystem here is changing but also how it has the power to heal. “It's resilient,” he said. Given enough time, he hoped, the wilderness might prove “big enough to clean itself up.”

This story is part of the Pulitzer Center's nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

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Hands up those who use their smartphone in bed. From frantically scrolling to catch up on the latest news, to browsing social media channels at night – the blue light of the smartphone is never far away.

Yet studies show replacing bedtime with screentime is having a devastating impact on our sleep. The reason is all down to melatonin, a hormone produced in the brain's pineal gland. Melatonin has a key role in regulating the body's sleep-wake cycle. It is sometimes referred to, rather spookily, as "the hormone of darkness", as levels are low during daytime, but rise at night once darkness descends.

Anything that increases light at bedtime – such as the suffuse blue glow of electronic screens – will therefore hamper melatonin production, and make sleep ever more elusive. That may help explain why as many as one in three US adults aren't getting the seven to eight hours of sleep that most people need.

It's no surprise, then, that millions of people are turning to melatonin supplements to help them combat insomnia, jet lag, or difficulty sleeping following night shifts. While melatonin in the UK requires a prescription, in the US it is freely available over the counter, and found on shelves next to vitamin supplements. Children are even given melatonin "gummies" from a young age to help them sleep through the night.

Millions of people are turning to melatonin supplements to help them combat insomnia, jet lag, or difficulty sleeping (Credit: Getty Images)

Yet there is mounting disquiet amongst some doctors and physicians that melatonin may not be as safe as it is marketed to be.

During the coronavirus pandemic, Michael Toce, a paediatric emergency medicine doctor at Boston Children's Hospital, noticed an alarming trend. The number of children admitted to his department having taken an overdose of melatonin was rocketing.

"We were seeing young children who had accidentally swallowed melatonin, and adolescents who presented after consuming melatonin in an attempt to self-harm," Toce told BBC Future.

A 2022 study co-authored by Toce found that between 2012 to 2021, the number of yearly calls to poison control for child melatonin overdoses rose by 530%. By 2020, poison control services were receiving more calls about children overdosing on melatonin than for any other substance.

It's important to note that the majority of children across both studies suffered no symptoms at all

This finding was echoed in a later June 2023 study, which reported that the number of children attending emergency departments in the US from melatonin overdose increased by 420% over a decade.

"The increase in poisonings is most likely secondary to the increase in the use of melatonin," says Toce.

"Melatonin sales have increased in recent years, as has paediatric melatonin use. Kids get poisoned by what is in their environment; thus, increased availability of melatonin will lead to increased poisonings."

Melatonin has a key role in regulating the body's sleep-wake cycle (Credit: Getty Images)

It's important to note that the majority of children across both studies suffered no symptoms at all. If they did have symptoms they were mild, such as an upset stomach, vomiting, and some drowsiness.

However in Toce's wider study, which looked at 260,435 cases of melatonin ingestion, nearly 300 children required intensive care. Five had to be put on ventilators, and two children died.

Melatonin has been linked to other infant deaths too. A 2019 study documented two separate cases involving one nine-month-old and one 13-month-old child, both of whom were found unresponsive. Blood toxicology tests showed high levels of melatonin in both cases, with melatonin found in the sippy cup of the 13-month-old infant. However, in both cases there were other factors that may have played a role in the deaths. The first baby was found co-sleeping with an older sibling, while the second was left in a hot room – both known risk factors for sudden infant death syndrome (Sids). (Read more about the causes and prevention of Sids.)

Meanwhile there have also been reports of adverse effects in adults too. A study in May this year reported the case of a 21-year-old woman who died as a result of taking an overdose of melatonin and diphenhydramine (DPH), an over-the-counter antihistamine and sedative mainly used to treat allergies, insomnia, and symptoms of the common cold. Meanwhile another adolescent developed severe hypotension (low blood pressure), after trying to overdose on melatonin.

It's really the Wild West out there – David Ray

However, it's possible that these deaths or serious adverse reactions weren't caused by melatonin at all, but an unrelated or unknown condition.

Part of the problem is that, as it is classed as a supplement, melatonin isn't regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Rigorous clinical trials have not been performed, so we don't fully understand the impact that the hormone has on our bodies. We don't know how it interacts with other medications and supplements, and the amount of melatonin in different products varies wildly.

"It's really the Wild West out there," says David Ray, professor of endocrinology and co-director of the Sir Jules Thorn Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford.

One in three adults surveyed in a US poll said they weren't getting the seven or eight hours of sleep a night they needed (Credit: Getty Images)

"People have done studies where they've gone and bought these products and measured the amount of melatonin in them, and in not one case did it match what it said was present on the packet."

There's no known mechanism by which melatonin could be causing these deaths and extreme adverse reactions. Studies in rats and mice show that melatonin has toxic effects if given at extremely high doses (more than 400 mg/kg), but this is tens of thousands of times more than the recommended dose for treating sleep disorders, which varies between 2-10 mg.

We do know that melatonin receptors are found throughout the body, including in the reproductive, cardiovascular, and immune systems, but its effects outside of the brain are little understood. However, millions of people take melatonin every day without any known adverse effects.

"All medications have side effects, so relative to other drugs used for treating sleep it is considered to be very safe," says Sanford H Auerbach, an associate professor and director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Boston Medical Center.

"However, I think the concerns are about what is not known. If you're giving it to a developing child, what is the effect of that going to be 10 years from now? We don't know. We don't even know how much melatonin is too much because those studies just haven't been done."

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British people have become the second-biggest cocaine users in the world, an international study has found.

The UK is the cocaine hotspot of Europe and second only to Australia internationally, with as many as one in 40 adults in Britain taking the class A drug.

Experts have said that getting hold of the drug is “as easy as ordering a pizza” and that a night’s supply can be bought for as little as £10.

The high drug use is fueled by a culture of heavy drinking, the Times has reported.

A global league table of cocaine use has been put together using the latest data from 36 countries by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The study found 2.7 per cent of adults in the UK use cocaine each year, with men twice as likely to be users than women.

The international average for the drug is 1.2 per cent while 4.2 per cent of adults in Australia use cocaine.

Addiction specialists have called on the government to launch a public health campaign warning of the dangers of the drug to try and stop an “epidemic of cocaine use”.

They have called for adverts in pub toilets and at football stadiums to warn of the risk of heart attacks and paranoia.

Office for National Statistics data shows 857 people in England and Wales died due to cocaine in 2022, up from 112 deaths in 2011. Eight in ten of those who died were men.

Cocaine use is highest among 16 to 24-year-olds, with 5.1 per cent of the age group using the drug in 2022.

Ian Hamilton, an associate professor of addiction at the University of York, told the Times cocaine was “better value and more available than it’s ever been”, and that British drinking culture was fueling high cocaine use.

Mr Hamilton warned that cocaine “is far more potent than it’s ever been. For a naive user, that can lead to a risk of overdose.

“The purity of cocaine has increased in recent years, partly due to a crackdown on the importation of powders used as ‘cutting agents’ to dilute the drug.

“A public health campaign could target areas you know cocaine use is happening. You could see adverts in pub toilets, nightclubs, wine bars, and sports grounds and football stadiums.”

Heavy cocaine users can end up in A&E with heart arrhythmia and can also develop depression, anxiety, paranoia and psychosis.

The Home Office said: “Our ten-year drug strategy, backed by a record £3 billion of investment, is tackling the supply of illicit drugs while building a world-class system of treatment for those who abuse drugs to help turn their life around.

“This is a whole-of-government strategy and we are committed to supporting people who suffer from the clutches of addiction and the vulnerable people who are exploited by gangs to fuel their violent trade.”

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According to an Indian Express report, Somanath said on Friday that it is targeting to launch the first module for the space station, called 'Bharatiya Space Station', by 2028.

"By 2028, we will launch the first module, that is the target. In another seven years, that is by 2035, we will build further modules and make the space station fully operational," the ISRO chief said.

He added that the ISRO is developing a launch vehicle to carry heavier loads to have the space station ready by 2035.

"This is because, for the 2028 launch (of the first module), we do not have a powerful rocket. We have a rocket called LVM-3, which can only take 10 tonnes, so the first module will be an eight-tonne mass module, which we will launch by 2028," Somanath was quoted as saying.

The ISRO chief said a new rocket is being developed, which will be able to “carry a load of 20 of 1,215 tonnes" because "they cannot be launched in the current rocket (which can only take 10 tonnes)." 

Somanath said the Indian space organisation will seek approval for it and it will take about seven years to develop it.

"The 2028 launch will be a robotic module, a satellite, where we can dock, conduct experiments and come back. A human being going (to the space station) can happen only after 2035. This is the plan as of today," he was quoted as saying.

“By 2023, we should be able to send an ISS into space with human beings," he was quoted by the Times of India as saying. "A human being going (to the space station) can happen only after 2035. This is the plan as of today," he reportedly said.

Meanwhile, the ISRO announced a major update in India's first solar mission, Aditya-L1. The space agency said that the Aditya-L1 spacecraft is expected to reach its destination on January 6.

The mission, the first Indian space-based observatory to study the Sun from a halo orbit L1, was launched by the ISRO on September 2 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) at Sriharikota.

"Aditya-L1 will enter the L1 point on January 6. That is what is expected. The exact time will be announced at the appropriate time," Somanath told media persons in Ahmedabad on Friday on the sidelines of the Bharatiya Vigyan Sammelan.

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First detected in Luxembourg in August, it is currently present in about 41 countries, including in India.

Due to its rapid spread, the World Health Organization (WHO) has classified JN.1 as a separate variant of interest (VOI) from the parent lineage BA.2.86. It was previously classified as VOI as part of BA.2.86 sublineages.

The WHO said JN.1 could increase the burden of respiratory infections in many countries.

The variant is also driving the number of infections in India. On Saturday, India saw a single-day rise of 752 coronavirus infections, the highest since May 21, 2023, while the active caseload has increased to 3,420, according to Union Health Ministry data.

Twenty-two cases of JN.1 (21 from Goa and 1 from Kerala) have been detected in the country till December 21.

JN.1 is a descendent lineage of BA.2.86, with the earliest sample collected on 25 August, 2023. In comparison to BA.2.86, JN.1 has the additional L455S mutation in the spike protein, making it more transmissible.

However, no signs of new or unusual symptoms caused by the virus have been reported yet. So far, the symptoms reported are mostly restricted to upper respiratory tract infections.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), changes to the symptoms being caused by different Covid variants depend on the now wide-ranging variety of antibodies that people have from either vaccinations, prior infections by different variants, or both.

“The types of symptoms and how severe they are usually depend more on a person’s immunity and overall health, rather than which variant causes the infection,” the CDC said in a report earlier this month on the JN.1 strain.

Dr. Dipu T.S., Associate Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases, Amrita Hospital, Kochi, told IANS that “common symptoms associated with JN.1 include fever, coughing, tiredness, nasal congestion, runny nose, diarrhoea, and headaches”.

Since other seasonal respiratory illnesses like influenza and RSV are doing the rounds, how these symptoms differ depend on whether people are specifically testing positive for Covid versus other infections, U.K. Health Security Agency’s Jonathon Mellor said on X.

JN.1 now makes 44 per cent of cases in the US, as per CDC estimates

“JN.1’s continued growth suggests that the variant is either more transmissible or better at evading our immune systems than other circulating variants. It is too early to know whether or to what extent JN.1 will cause an increase in infections or hospitalisations,” the CDC said on Friday.

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Also:  JN.1—a new, highly mutated COVID variant—could cause one of the largest U.S. waves yet, experts say. When each state could see the variant peak. & A new coronavirus variant may be behind California’s COVID rise &  Seven things you need to know about the JN.1 COVID-19 variant

In September, Elon Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink announced the much-anticipated news that it would start recruiting volunteers for a clinical trial to test its device. Known as a brain-computer interface, or BCI, it collects electrical activity from neurons and interprets those signals into commands to control an external device. While Musk has said he ultimately wants to merge humans with artificial intelligence, Neuralink’s initial aim is to enable paralyzed people to control a cursor or keyboard with just their thoughts.

Rival efforts to connect people’s brains to computers are also moving forward. This year, Neuralink competitor Synchron demonstrated the long-term safety of its implant in patients. Other startups tested novel devices in human subjects, while new ventures came on the scene.

“It can definitely feel like a breakout year, but in fact it’s the result of decades of work in academia,” says Sumner Norman, a visiting researcher at the California Institute of Technology who’s also the cofounder and CEO of Forest Neurotech, which launched in October. “I think we’re really just starting to feel the effects of that exponential growth.”

The origins of BCIs stretch back to the 1960s and 1970s, when the first ones were tested on lab animals. As researchers began to understand the brain better, these systems evolved to be more sophisticated, allowing paralyzed people to move robotic arms, play video games, and communicate with their minds. Once a largely academic pursuit, BCIs are now of interest to a growing cadre of companies that have emerged since Neuralink’s founding in 2016.

“Science and technology have reached a level of maturity where we can begin to have real, dramatic effects on the human condition,” says Jacob Robinson, CEO and founder of startup Motif Neurotech and a professor of engineering at Rice University. “People like Elon Musk recognize these inflection points and they put capital into commercializing it.”

Even amid controversy over its treatment of monkey test subjects, Neuralink recently raised an additional $43 million in venture capital, bringing the amount the company has raised to more than $323 million, according to filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Government investment, particularly from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Initiative, has also helped propel the field forward. The latter has pumped more than $3 billion into neuroscience research since its initial funding in 2014.

In their quest to commercialize practical systems that patients can use at home, companies are designing wireless systems with implants that are smaller, more flexible, or able to capture more neural data than the rigid, comblike Utah array that’s been the mainstay in BCI research.

New York–based Synchron is one of those. The company is developing a stentlike brain implant and has raised $145 million since it was founded in 2016.

In January, Synchron published key data from four paralyzed patients in Australia showing that its device can safely transmit neural signals from inside a blood vessel in the brain for a year without any serious side effects. Signal quality also remained stable over the 12-month study period. The device has allowed the participants to text, email, and browse the web.

Its novelty is that it doesn’t require open brain surgery. Instead, it’s implanted through a slit at the base of the neck and threaded up through the jugular vein into the motor cortex—the part of the brain that directs movement. The device is powered by a small battery pack placed under the skin of the chest. Synchron has implanted 10 patients, including six in a US feasibility trial supported by the Brain Initiative.

The Chasing Pack

This year other companies carried out human experiments of novel devices. In the spring, New York–based Precision Neuroscience placed its brain implant in three people for about 15 minutes. The patients were undergoing brain surgery for other reasons—two were awake at the time—and Precision wanted to see if its implant could successfully read, record, and map electrical activity from the surface of the brain. The startup has since carried out similar tests in two more patients and plans to expand the study in 2024 to more sites.

Cofounded in 2021 by Benjamin Rapoport, who was also a cofounder of Neuralink, Precision has developed a thin film array that is one-fifth the width of human hair and adheres to the surface of the brain. The technology is designed to be less invasive than implants such as the Utah array that sit deeper in the brain. Penetrating arrays can cause inflammation and scarring of the brain tissue, which can lead to a loss of signal quality over time.

In its studies earlier this year, Precision says it demonstrated that its array can record brain activity in more detail and at higher resolution than current surface electrodes, which are used for monitoring epileptic seizures and mapping the brain. When patients need to undergo brain surgery, such as to remove a tumor, doctors place electrodes on their brain to identify the boundaries of areas involved in speech and movement so they can avoid those vital regions while operating.

“We’ve already been able to create a picture of the awake human brain at a higher resolution than ever before,” says Michael Mager, Precision’s cofounder and CEO.

In October, the company announced it had acquired a facility to manufacture its arrays at a bigger scale. A team of 11 people is making a few hundred arrays a month, Mager says. Initially, Precision plans to use its device to help paralyzed people operate a computer and communicate digitally. Eventually, it intends to treat a range of neurological and neurodegenerative illnesses, including anxiety, depression, and dementia.

Motif Neurotech is also tackling mental illness. Its device is designed to emit pulses of electrical stimulation to restore healthy circuit activity. A future version will read brain state data and react to it.

In September the Houston-based company announced that surgeons temporarily installed its pea-sized device in the skull of a patient who was having a brain tumor removed. In results that have yet to be peer-reviewed, Motif showed that it could effectively deliver stimulation to the brain without actually coming into contact with it. The implant was over the brain for just a few minutes.

The researchers also found that they could deliver safe and effective brain stimulation in pigs for a month. Motif wants to use the device to help people with treatment-resistant depression, which affects millions of people in the US.

“I think there’s an opportunity to be less invasive,” Robinson says. Placing an implant in the skull instead of in the brain could avoid tissue damage, bleeding, and infection. Neuralink’s device is also meant to fit into the skull but it has thin threads that reach into the brain tissue. Motif’s device sits in the skull just above the dura, the protective membrane that envelops the brain tissue. The device will target the prefrontal cortex, which is impaired in patients with major depressive disorder.

The implant is powered by wireless magnetoelectric technology that Robinson developed at Rice University, eliminating the need for a battery. A special cap that’s worn for about 20 minutes a day charges the stimulator.

Good Vibrations

Forest Neurotech in Los Angeles also launched this year to address psychiatric and cognitive disorders. The nonprofit startup is aiming to miniaturize ultrasound in a neural implant. It’s actively working on a first-generation device with partner Butterfly Network, a Massachusetts ultrasound company. Instead of capturing electrical activity, Forest’s proposed device will use sound waves to read the brain and deliver therapeutic stimulation.

Ultrasound works by emitting high-frequency sound waves in the body and measuring the “echoes” of those sound vibrations. Sound waves travel at different speeds through different tissue types. Bone isn’t permeable to sound waves, so Forest plans to embed its device in the skull. Norman says he imagines the installation process involving a short outpatient procedure rather than an invasive brain surgery.

Norman and his collaborators published a proof-of-concept study in November showing that ultrasound can power a BCI. They used functional ultrasound to measure changes in blood flow in the brains of two rhesus macaques while the animals performed hand and eye movements. The monkeys were taught to either plan to move their hand to direct a cursor on a screen or plan to move their eyes to look at a specific part of the screen. After training, they only needed to think about performing the task to control a computer.

Robert Gaunt, a researcher in the Rehab Neural Engineering Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh who studies BCIs, is excited about the variety of devices in the pipeline. “For certain applications, it may be that you don’t have to penetrate the brain,” he says. “But a fairly large chunk of our brain is in those folds and creases.” Performing more complex actions may require new technologies that get deeper into the brain without damaging delicate tissue.

For now, he thinks simple devices have a better shot at being effective because the fewer moving parts the less likely it is that things could go wrong.

“We are at a stage where there’s been enough demonstrations of feasibility that companies have stepped in to try to make real products and medical devices,” Gaunt says. “Whether or not any of them will be successful is a different story entirely.”

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CTS arises when the median nerve, which runs from the forearm into the hand, is compressed at the carpal tunnel part of the wrist, resulting in numbness, tingling or pain. It is one of the most common nerve-related disorders, specifically affecting individuals who perform repetitive hand movements, such as office staff who work with keyboards, assembly line workers, and sportspersons.

Doctors currently use ultrasound to visualise the median nerve, and assess its size, shape, and any potential abnormalities.

“But unlike X-rays and MRI scans, it’s hard to detect what’s going on in ultrasound images and videos,” said Karan R Gujarati, first author and former MTech student at the Department of Computational and Data Sciences (CDS), IISc.

“At the wrist, the nerve is quite visible, its boundaries are clear, but if you go down to the elbow region, there are many other structures, and the boundaries of the nerve are not clear.”

Tracking the median nerve is also important for treatments that require doctors to administer local anaesthesia to the forearm or block the median nerve to provide pain relief.

To develop their tool, the team turned to a machine learning model based on transformer architecture, similar to the one powering ChatGPT.

They collaborated with Lokesh Bathala, Lead Consultant Neurologist at Aster-CMI Hospital, to collect and annotate ultrasound videos from both healthy participants and people with CTS, to train the model. Once trained, the model was able to segment the median nerve in individual frames of the ultrasound video.

The model, described in the journal IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control, was also able to automatically measure the cross-sectional area of the nerve, which is used to diagnose CTS. This measurement is performed manually by a sonographer.

“The tool automates this process. It measures the cross-sectional area in real-time,” explained Bathala. It was able to report the cross-sectional area of the median nerve with more than 95 per cent accuracy at the wrist region, the researchers said.

Although many machine learning models have been developed to screen CT and MRI scans, very few have been developed for ultrasound videos, especially nerve ultrasound.

“Initially, we trained the model on one nerve. Now we are going to extend it to all nerves in the upper and lower limbs,” Bathala said. He adds that it has already been deployed as a pilot test in the hospital.

“We have an ultrasound machine connected to an additional monitor where the model is running. I can look at the nerve, and at the same time, the software tool is also delineating the nerve. We can see its performance in real-time.”

Bathala said that the next step would be to look for ultrasound machine manufacturers who can integrate this into their systems.

“This kind of tool can assist any doctor. It can reduce the inference time,” he says. “But of course, the final diagnosis will need to be done by the physician.”

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