Months of extraordinary heat are expected to make 2023 the hottest year in history, with droughts, massive wildfires and fierce storms ravaging swathes of the planet.

According to new data, global temperatures on November 17 were 2.07 °C above the pre-industrial average, the EU's Climate Change Service (C3S).

"This was the first day when global temperature was more than 2 °C above 1850-1900 levels," said Samantha Burgess, C3S Deputy Head on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Preliminary data suggests the record continued into Saturday, with temperatures around 2.06 °C above the pre-industrial average, Copernicus said on X.

The climate monitor will confirm the figure by Tuesday.

The 2015 Paris Agreement enshrined the goal of holding the increase in the global average temperature to "well below" 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to aim for a safer 1.5 °C.

If individual days go above 2 °C that does not mean that the Paris threshold has been breached – the deal instead refers to an average measured over decades.

Climate experts have urged the world to aim for the lower limit to avoid major climate impacts, such as heatwaves, super hurricanes and melting ice caps.

They defined warming as "the increase in the 30-year global average" relative to the average from 1850 to 1900.

The current climate is considered to have warmed by nearly 1.2 °C compared to that reference period.

'Warming limit 'getting closer'

The first day to exceed the 2 °C target is part of a series of records this year: October was the warmest ever recorded globally, as was every month since June, according to Copernicus, which said that 2023 would with "near certainty" surpass the hottest year on record set in 2016.

Beyond these official records, scientists say proxy data for the climate going back further – like tree rings or ice cores – suggests the temperatures seen this year could be unprecedented in human history, potentially the warmest in more than 100,000 years.

October was some 1.7 °C warmer than an estimate of that month's average for the pre-industrial era, Copernicus said earlier this month.

And global average temperatures since January have been the highest in records going back to 1940, the monitor added, registering 1.43 °C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average.

The UN Environment Programme's annual Emissions Gap report on Monday said that in the year to early October there have been 86 days recorded with temperatures exceeding 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

While that does not mean the Paris Agreement threshold has been breached, UNEP warned that the records "signal that we are getting closer".

Leaders meeting November 30 to December 12 in the United Arab Emirates for the COP28 conference will have to respond to a damning progress report on the world's Paris pledges after major scientific studies have made clear the world is far off track.

The conference is expected to draw up the first official assessment of the Paris Agreement and, if possible, corrective measures.

© Agence France-Presse

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[A personal note:  Whatever the causes of these observed facts of global warming may be, we all are affected by it nevertheless.  Thanks!]

Rapid revamp of the rocket

The SpaceX engineers also rapidly re-engineered the first stage of the Super Heavy booster to address issues with multiple failures of its Raptor rocket engines on the first flight. During Saturday’s launch, all 33 of these Raptor engines burned for their full duration, with nary a failure on the way to space.

 

Additionally, the company’s engineers gathered data on a brand-new component of the rocket called a "hot staging ring." This interstage sits atop the Super Heavy first stage and below the Starship upper stage. This new piece of hardware was intended to facilitate "hot staging," a difficult maneuver a couple of minutes into the flight at stage separation, in which the Starship upper-stage engines ignite before the Super Heavy first stage has completed its burn. This maneuver was captured with ground-tracking cameras, and it is stunning.

 

Remember, the first Starship launch was just under seven months ago. And in the time since then, the company—at Musk's direction, in a bid to increase the capability of Starship—implemented this radical engineering change. It is not trivial. Starship is still attached to its booster. The Starship engines, upon igniting, are blasting away at the top of this huge Super Heavy rocket that is still thrusting upward. It's kind of crazy, and it pretty much worked.

 

Although we don't have the details yet, the Starship upper stage successfully completed hot-staging and pulled away from Super Heavy. If you're not impressed, you should be. This is world-class engineering completed on an insanely compressed time scale.

Some things went wrong, of course

Perhaps most critically for SpaceX, on this flight, the Super Heavy booster appears to have performed a nominal flight. After Starship pulled away, the first stage had done its heavy-lifting job. If this were a normal expendable launch, the rocket would have fallen into the ocean.

 

But this was not a normal launch, of course. SpaceX intends for Starship to be fully reusable, and that means trying to recover both the booster and the upper stage. According to SpaceX, the Super Heavy rocket initialized its "boostback" burn, which is intended to slow the rocket down. This entails igniting a subset of the rocket’s 33 engines, similar to what happens with the Falcon 9 rocket at the top of the atmosphere. After that point, however, things went sideways. Perhaps the upper portion of the first stage was too damaged by the hot staging, as the ignition of Starship’s engines understandably singed the rocket below. It’s also possible there was an issue with tank pressures inside Super Heavy, as there was not much propellant left, and it's challenging to move the remaining fuel and oxidizer to the engines.

 

In any case, Super Heavy blew up spectacularly. So was this a failure? Hardly. SpaceX had just launched the largest rocket the world had ever seen, a flying skyscraper largely built with private funding. If it were almost any other rocket in the world, it would have been judged entirely as a success because first stages are disposed of. But because SpaceX took the next step, to experiment with recovery, the loss of the first stage after completing its primary mission was somehow viewed as a failure by some observers. I'm sorry to say it, but that's just dumb.

 

SpaceX has an incredible amount of work to do

I'm pretty sure that most non-space people do not really understand what Starship aspires to be. And that's OK, because there's really no precedent for this. Yes, NASA went to the Moon with the Apollo program half a century ago, and that was truly awesome. But it did so with funding that approached nearly 5 percent of the US federal budget and a workforce of about 400,000 people. Such resources are completely off the table today.

 

Moreover, every piece of Apollo hardware that landed astronauts on the Moon was never used again. The components of the big Saturn V rocket fell into the ocean or were jettisoned into deep space. The Apollo spacecraft splashed down into the ocean and ended up in museums.

 

With Starship, SpaceX is seeking to build a fully reusable launch system that is larger and more powerful than the Apollo rocket. SpaceX seeks to land hundreds of metric tons on the Moon, not 15 tons like Apollo. What SpaceX is trying to do is extremely challenging from a physics and funding standpoint, and the work is only beginning.

 

Beyond simply getting Starship to space, it must become an orbital vehicle, and both the booster and spacecraft must be made to reliably land. Then SpaceX must learn how to rapidly refurbish the vehicles (which seems possible, given that the company has now landed a remarkable 230 Falcon 9 rockets). The company must also demonstrate and master the challenge of transferring and storing propellant in orbit, so that Starship can be refueled for lunar and Mars missions. Starship must also show that it can light its Raptor engines reliably, on the surface of the Moon in the vacuum of space, far from ground systems on Earth.

 

But the first step is often the hardest step. And for SpaceX, getting Starship flying to gather that data was the critical step. Now that the company has shown the ability to launch Starship safely from South Texas, the regulatory process should ease up, allowing for a higher flight rate, yielding more data and starting to address all of those challenges cited in the previous paragraph. A high flight rate will solve a lot of ills, and with Saturday's flight SpaceX is on the cusp of doing just that.

Should we cheer for an Elon Musk company, though?

A lot of the media angst this weekend was undoubtedly driven by antipathy for SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The guy's a fraud, right? His companies are a grift, right? I can only really speak to SpaceX, but Musk is definitely not a fraud. He has his flaws, certainly. Some of his politics and public statements are deeply unsettling to many. But the dude founded SpaceX and remains the vital force impelling the company forward. He has dumb ideas. He has brilliant ideas. But mostly, he gets things done.

 

In the aerospace industry there are basically two types of people: checkers and doers. The checkers sit in meetings, write reports, and perform analysis. They serve an important role to be sure. Spaceflight is complicated and hard and risky, and prudence demands an extra set of eyes on work. But checkers are also the bane of progress.

 

Since its heady days during the Apollo program, NASA has steadily become an agency filled with checkers, rather than doers. That's part of the bureaucratization process, and today it's not a bad place for the agency to be as it manages a slew of traditional and new space contractors. However, it's a terrible place for a space company to be. Part of the magic of SpaceX is that it's filled with doers, with relatively few checkers, even after more than 20 years of existence.

 

That culture was created by Musk and is maintained by Musk. He is a hard-charging leader who pushes back on bureaucracy. He wants to move fast and break things. And he does break things. Those very public failures and his recent comments and actions have certainly hurt his reputation, and to some extent, that of SpaceX.

 

But to denigrate the prodigious rocket science on display in Texas this weekend for this reason, alone, is a mistake. The smart take is to look at it as a critical step on the path toward achieving something amazing, with the potential to unlock a future of spaceflight we have only dreamed about heretofore. The smart take is to cheer on the people out there who are actually doing.

 

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The world is on track for a “hellish” 3C of global heating, the UN has warned before the crucial Cop28 climate summit that begins next week in the United Arab Emirates.

The report found that today’s carbon-cutting policies are so inadequate that 3C of heating would be reached this century.

Temperature records have already been obliterated in 2023 and intensifying heatwaves, floods and droughts have taken lives and hit livelihoods across the globe, in response to a temperature rise of 1.4C to date. Scientists say far worse is to come if temperatures continue to rise. The secretary general of the UN, António Guterres, has said repeatedly the world is heading for a “hellish” future.

The UN Environment Programme (Unep) report said that implementing future policies already promised by countries would shave 0.1C off the 3C limit. Putting in place emissions cuts pledged by developing countries on condition of receiving financial and technical support would cut the temperature rise to 2.5C, still a catastrophic scenario.

To get on track for the internationally agreed target of 1.5C, 22bn tonnes of CO2 must be cut from the currently projected total in 2030, the report said. That is 42% of global emissions and equivalent to the output of the world’s five worst polluters: China, US, India, Russia and Japan.

Inger Andersen, the Unep executive director, said: “There is no person or economy left on the planet untouched by climate change, so we need to stop setting unwanted records on emissions, temperature and extreme weather. We must instead lift the needle out of the same old groove of insufficient action, and start setting other records: on cutting emissions and on climate finance.”

Guterres said: “Present trends are racing our planet down a dead-end 3C temperature rise. This is a failure of leadership, a betrayal of the vulnerable, and a massive missed opportunity. Renewables have never been cheaper or more accessible. We know it is still possible to make the 1.5 degree limit a reality. It requires tearing out the poisoned root of the climate crisis: fossil fuels.”

He added: “Leaders must drastically up their game, now, with record ambition, record action, and record emissions reductions. No more greenwashing. No more foot-dragging.”

Guterres said countries must commit at Cop28 to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 and to phasing out fossil fuels with a clear timeframe.

He said the recent climate agreement between China and the US was a positive step, but that much more needed to be done to restore trust between developed and developing countries, after broken promises on delivering billions of dollars of climate aid.

The UN warned earlier in November that the world’s fossil fuel producers were planning expansions that would blow the planet’s carbon budget twice over, which experts called “insanity”. Another recent report found that the state oil company of the United Arab Emirates, whose CEO, Sultan Al Jaber, will preside over Cop28, has the largest net zero-busting expansion plans of any company in the world.

The Unep report, pointedly titled Broken Record, said that if all the long-term pledges by countries to cut emissions to net zero by about 2050 were achieved, then the global temperature rise could be limited to 2C. However, it concluded that these net zero pledges “are not currently considered credible”. None of the G20 countries, which together produce 80% of CO2, are reducing emissions at a pace consistent with their net zero targets, it said.

Another report, from UN Climate Change, published on 14 November, reached virtually the same conclusion as the Unep report. It found that existing national pledges to cut emissions would mean global emissions in 2030 were 2% below 2019 levels, rather than the 43% cut required to limit global heating to 1.5C.

“Governments are taking baby steps to avert the climate crisis – they [must] make bold strides forward at Cop28 in Dubai to get on track,” said Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of UN Climate Change.

Al Jaber said: “There is simply no time left for delays. Cop28 must be a historic turning point in this critical decade for [countries] to seize the moment to commit to raise their ambition and to unite, act and deliver outcomes that keep 1.5C within reach, while leaving no one behind.”

Tom Mitchell, the executive director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, said: “The world needs to take the brakes off when it comes to climate action. That means addressing deeply embedded aspects of the economic, legal and financial status quo.

“The international investment regime protecting the interests of big oil is one example,” he said, referring to the energy charter treaty, a system of secret courts that enables companies to sue governments over climate policies that would cut their future profits.

“Treaties and contracts that favour fossil fuel investors are holding back the green energy transition, even though we know most fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground if we are to prevent catastrophic heating,” Mitchell said. “The [treaties] must be reformed if we want to cut emissions and keep as much of Earth as possible habitable for our descendants.”

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New research led by a team from the University of Stockholm in Sweden outlines 14 different "evolutionary traps" that our global population could potentially be ensnared by, ultimately leading to our demise.

According to the team behind the study, part of the problem is that we've been doing too well for ourselves – our dominance and success is leading to dangerous consequences.

Now we're going through what's known as a polycrisis, where multiple threats – from climate change to global pandemics – are threatening to bring the Anthropocene era to an end sooner rather than later.

The traps are interlinked, with a multitude of contributory factors involved. (Søgaard Jørgensen et al., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2023)

"Humans are incredibly creative as a species," says anthropologist Peter Søgaard Jørgensen from the University of Stockholm.

"We are able to innovate and adapt to many circumstances and can cooperate on surprisingly large scales. But these capabilities turn out to have unintentional consequences."

Of the 14 possible evolutionary dead ends for humanity, five are labeled as global: simplification (systems becoming too specialized to adapt, such as monoculture farming), growth-for-growth (a non-stop pursuit of growth harming well-being), overshoot (using more than Earth can provide), division (international conflict), and contagion (infectious diseases, for example).

Another five are described as technology traps. They are infrastructure lock-in (as with fossil fuels), chemical pollution, existential technology (such as nuclear arms), technological autonomy (including AI), and dis/misinformation.

The remaining four are called structural traps by the researchers. These ones are short-termism, overconsumption, biosphere disconnect, and local social capital loss, where an increasingly digital world cuts off social interaction and potentially contributes to further division.

What's more, 12 of these are reckoned to be in an advanced state. Only technological autonomy and local social capital loss have yet to develop into concerning problems. Even more alarmingly, these dead ends tend to reinforce each other, meaning it's likely that we'll get trapped in more than one.

"Evolutionary traps are a well-known concept in the animal world," says Søgaard Jørgensen.

"Just like many insects are attracted by light, an evolutionary reflex that can get them killed in the modern world, humankind is at risk of responding to new phenomena in harmful ways."

It's a pretty bleak picture, but the researchers aren't giving up yet. What's needed now, the team says, is active transformation – not just an acceptance that we must go with the flow, but deliberate efforts in the other direction.

We may be short-sighted and destructive as a species, but we're also creative, innovative and collaborative, the researchers point out. That means there's hope that our fate isn't written yet.

"A very simple thing that everybody can do is to engage more in nature and society while also learning about both the positive and negative global consequences of our own local actions," says Jørgensen.

"There's nothing better than exposing yourself to what needs protecting."

The research has been published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

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This article was originally featured on Undark.

In 2018, Debra Halsch was diagnosed with smoldering multiple myeloma, a rare blood and bone marrow disorder that can develop into a type of blood cancer. Her doctors recommended chemotherapy, she said, but she feared the taxing side effects the drugs might wreak on her body. Instead, the life coach from Piermont, New York tried meditation.

A friend had told Halsch, now 57, about Joe Dispenza, who holds week-long meditation retreats that regularly attract thousands of people and carry a $2,299 price tag. Halsch signed up for one in Cancun, Mexico and soon became a devotee. She now meditates for at least two hours a day and says her health has improved as a result.

Dispenza, a chiropractor who has written various self-help books, has said he believes the mind can heal the body. After all, he says he healed himself back in 1986, when a truck hit him while he was bicycling, breaking six vertebrae. Instead of surgery, Dispenza says he spent hours each day recreating his spine in his mind, visualizing it healthy and healed. After 11 weeks, the story goes, he was back on his feet.

Halsch said she believes she can do the same for her illness. “If our thoughts and emotions can make our bodies sick, they can make us well, too,” she said.

In an email to Undark, Rhadell Hovda, chief operating officer for Dispenza’s parent company, Encephalon, Inc., emphasized that Dispenza does not claim meditation can treat or cure cancer. However, he does “follow the evidence when it is presented,” and has encountered people at workshops and retreats “who claimed to have healed from many conditions.”

For more than two decades, various studies have suggested that meditation and mindfulness—that is, being aware of the present moment—can help reduce and improve pain management, lending some credence to the notion that the brain can affect the body. Such results have helped the field grow into a multibillion-dollar industry, populated by meditation apps, guided workshops, and upscale retreats.

Yet the field has also faced sharp criticism from psychologists and researchers who say the health benefits are overstated and some of the research methodologically flawed. Meanwhile, claims that alternative approaches, including meditation can, by themselves, cure serious illness have been called dangerous by medical experts, who fear a true believer might forego a life-saving treatment. As researchers investigate meditation’s effect on nearly everything from chronic pain to ADHD to brain function post-stroke to emotional regulation, the practice continues to be popular among converts and curious alike. And while no scientific findings suggest that meditation can go so far as to cure cancer, some researchers are interested in precisely how the brain affects the body’s immune system.

Results from some research on meditation has helped the field grow into a multibillion-dollar industry, populated by meditation apps, guided workshops, and upscale retreats.

In fact, data collection for one of the largest research projects on the subject is being funded by none other than Dispenza, who is collaborating with scientists at the University of California San Diego and providing them with access to study attendees of his retreats. A study recently published by the group described an association between meditation and enhanced resiliency against Covid-19.

Overall, there are still a lot of unknowns about how meditation can affect disease processes, wrote Emily Lindsay, a researcher who specializes in the biological effects of mindfulness meditation at the University of Pittsburgh, in an email to Undark. “We know it impacts stress and sometimes stress biology, and we know that it can impact certain disease processes, but there’s still a black box in between.”

Whether Dispenza’s collaboration with mainstream scientists will shed light into that black box is an open question, and many scientists are skeptical.

Over the last 20 years, meditation in the U.S. has gone from fringe hobby to mainstream. Between 2012 and 2017, according to the National Institutes of Health, the percentage of adults in the country who tried some form of the practice tripled, so that just over 14 percent of all Americans had meditated at least once in the last year. The American Heart Association has stated it may help reduce cardiovascular risk — while noting that further study is needed—and an article written by Mayo Clinic staff endorsed it as a “simple, fast way to reduce stress.”

With more use has come more study. In the last three decades, the NIH has funded more than 1,700 studies on meditation, at a cost of $570 million. And that number has swelled over time: In 2002, the agency devoted $5 million to study the practice. Last year, it earmarked $45 million.

While there are many different forms of meditation, most studies have looked at a type called mindfulness meditation, which has its roots in Buddhist practice and aims to achieve a state of calm by focusing on the present moment, accepting whatever thoughts and feelings arise without judgment—though definitions and approaches vary between studies.

“Scientists continue to make significant breakthrough discoveries on how meditation works, and whom it can benefit,” wrote J. David Creswell, a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in an email to Undark. “Our research shows that much of the health benefits can be attributed to meditation helping us become better stress managers.”

Much of the mindfulness research over the last two decades has focused on mental health and well-being, and studies suggest the practice can help with both. A seminal review assessing the impact of mindfulness meditation was published back in 2014: Researchers at Johns Hopkins University analyzed 47 randomized clinical trials involving more than 3,500 participants and found that there was moderate evidence meditation improved symptoms of anxiety, depression, and pain. Another meta-analysis, also from 2014, found that mindfulness-based interventions can reduce symptom severity in patients experiencing a depressive episode, while a 2015 review found that a meditative practice can help healthy individuals feel less stressed in their day-to-day lives.

Researchers have posited that meditation may help with stress and anxiety by increasing resiliency to challenging emotions through practicing awareness, acceptance, and non-judgment. “When you sort of open and broaden your awareness to everything that’s occurring, everything that you’re noticing, it sort of levels out the experience a bit and allows you to be less attached to that stress,” Lindsay said.

But not every study on meditation finds significant results. Lydia Brown is a clinical psychologist and researcher at the University of Melbourne, who, herself, is a meditator. She said she’s found the practice to be personally transformative, but when she analyzed results from 19 randomized controlled trials on how mindfulness improved heart rate variability—a physiological variable that’s indicative of how the body recovers from stress—she found that the evidence was mixed. Even so, if someone looked up meditation and heart rate variability, she said, they would see articles declaring that meditation can improve it. This can be problematic, Brown added, “because you might not be following the best evidence to improve your physical health or improve your mental health.”

“I would have loved this research to come up with a positive result,” she said, but as a researcher, she had to follow the data.

“Our research shows that much of the health benefits can be attributed to meditation helping us become better stress managers.”

Conflicting results isn’t a new problem in meditation research. The 2014 meta-analysis, for example, actually had somewhat disappointing results for those who expected significant effects, said Elena Salmoirago-Blotcher, an associate professor of medicine, psychiatry, and epidemiology at Brown University School of Medicine. While the review, which was notable for being published in a highly reputable medical journal, found moderate improvements in anxiety, depression, and pain, there was little evidence for its effects on stress and mental health-related quality of life.

Other researchers have called attention to poor research methods in the field. In a 2017 paper, 15 psychologists and cognitive scientists urged readers to “mind the hype” surrounding meditation research, noting that many studies lacked an active control group to make a valid comparison, and were inconsistent in how they defined “mindfulness.”

Another issue in the field, Salmoirago-Blotcher said, is something called researcher allegiance bias: When study authors develop the intervention themselves, their personal investment may skew the outcomes of their study. Meanwhile, studies that recruit people who are already practiced meditators—such as the ones taking place at Dispenza’s workshops—could have skewed results. “People that meditate tend to have healthier behaviors, tend to smoke less, they tend to exercise more, they’re usually more educated and also higher socioeconomic status,” Salmoirago-Blotcher said. “So there is a lot of what we call confounding there.”

The self-regulation gained from mindfulness may lead to better life choices, like eating better or choosing to exercise, but do people who meditate have fewer heart attacks? No one has studied that yet, Salmoirago-Blotcher said, adding that even the American Heart Association has been cautious in how it describes the benefits of meditation, writing in a 2017 statement: “Overall, studies of meditation suggest a possible benefit on cardiovascular risk, although the overall quality and, in some cases, quantity of study data are modest.”

What seems clear, Salmoirago-Blotcher said, is that meditation seems to have some positive effects on depression and anxiety. Whether and how such benefits might manifest physiologically, however, remains murkier. In cancer patients, for example, meditation can help with distress, quality of life, and sleep. But Salmoirago-Blotcher says she’s seen nothing to suggest it affects cancer cells. “I don’t think there’s anything absolutely proven yet,” she said.

While no studies have found that meditation can cure an illness such as cancer—and some researchers, including Salmoirago-Blotcher, emphatically underline this lack of evidence—an increasing amount of research has focused on mindfulness’s effect on the central nervous and immune systems.

One 2016 study, for example found that mindfulness practices may be associated with changes in immune system activity, as meditators showed improvements in stress-related markers like inflammation and immune cell aging. And a 2019 study found mindfulness may have led to a reduction in the production of pro-inflammatory molecules and been associated with a quicker restoration of immune function in women undergoing breast cancer treatments.

There is some logic, researchers suggest, underlying the idea that a regular meditation practice might help boost the immune system. Because mindfulness seems to help with how the body manages stress, and because stress can affect immunity, the theory goes that meditation could help boost the body’s defenses.

“If you look across the big studies of immune system function in general, the meta-analyses do suggest that meditation is beneficial to the function of the immune system,” said Melissa Rosenkranz, a psychiatry professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “And that almost certainly has something to do with its effects on distress.”

“People that meditate tend to have healthier behaviors, tend to smoke less, they tend to exercise more, they’re usually more educated and also higher socioeconomic status. So there is a lot of what we call confounding there.”

If the body’s stress responses are activated on occasion, that’s okay, said Liudmila Gamaiunova, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences of Religions at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. “But if it happens often, or if we get to this chronic state, of course then it has an effect on the immune system.”

Chronic stress has been linked to conditions such as heart disease and diabetes (the science on any connection to cancer is much less clear), but exactly how those illnesses manifest via stress is far from settled. One theory is that when the body has an acute stress response, the hormones norepinephrine, epinephrine, and corticosterone make sure immune cells are appropriately distributed throughout the body.

They also regulate inflammation, and while that can be useful at times, chronic inflammation has been associated with some diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer’s. That state of chronic inflammation can keep the immune system from operating efficiently, said David Victorson, a professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He likened the immune system to a hard drive on a computer and inflammation to having a lot of tabs open on the desktop at once. With all of those programs running in the background, the hard drive cannot operate efficiently, he said. “When the volume is turned down on those other areas, it just frees up more space for the immune system to function properly, like it needs to.”

Some studies from the last decade have suggested that meditation can help regulate certain bodily mechanisms that influence inflammation. And meditation seems to do that, Rosenkranz said, by changing the lens through which you experience the world and your reaction to the events in it.

“A state of psychological distress communicates something to your immune system that your immune system responds to,” she said. “When you change the way that you are filtering the environment, and what that means to you, as an entity, it really has a profound effect on your body.”

Reducing stress also can reduce the secretion of cortisol, a hormone that suppresses inflammation, regulates blood pressure, and regulates the immune system. But chronic elevations of it can lead to the immune system becoming resistant to it, compromising the immune response, research shows.

“These stress physiological systems didn’t evolve to be chronically activated. They evolved to respond to punctuated stressors and then turn off,” said Robin Nusslock, a psychology professor and director of the Affective & Clinical Neuroscience Lab at Northwestern University. But now, “we have the capacity to activate the same stress physiology of a zebra running away from a tiger by thinking about our 401K.”

“The best target for meditation’s effect on the immune system would involve attenuating inflammation,” said Nusslock. “And inflammation is the common soil which fertilizes many mental and physical health problems.”

Wherever one comes down on Dispenza—and views among experts are mixed—some researchers see his meditation retreats as an opportunity for study. After all, they can attract up to 2,500 people each—a fertile ground for finding volunteers who can participate in intensive studies.

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego are currently conducting about a dozen studies investigating how meditation affects the body, both physiologically and mentally.

In academic medicine, it can sometimes take five years to recruit 150 people for a study, said Hemal Patel, a professor of anesthesiology at UCSD and one of the two principal collaborators on the studies. Those challenges aren’t an issue when Dispenza has a retreat, he said. “We would write up a study, we would solicit participants, we would get 800, 900 people volunteering to be involved in the study,” Patel said.

Study volunteers have donned skull caps to track electrical activity in their brain, worn devices to track their sleep data and heart rates, donated cheek cells to check DNA, and submitted stool samples to see changes in their microbiome. The idea is to see what, if anything, happens to their bodies after seven days of meditative practice. In an email to Undark, Patel noted that the meditation carried out at Dispenza’s retreats is not considered mindfulness and incorporates elements from different types of practices. “The goal of our research is to define exactly what this new type of [meditation] retreat is.” 

Dispenza’s sample sets are unique in that recruits stay in the same environment, controlling for some of the variables that can confound results. However, there are still limitations to this type of study, including self-selection bias. The population of Dispenza acolytes may well be primed to believe meditation works, so a placebo effect may come into play, said David Vago, a meditation researcher and professor at the University of Virginia who is not involved in the UCSD research.

“Self-selection bias is certainly a problem,” Vago wrote in an email. “One advantage of the study is the built-in controls they had with participants who were in the same setting but did not get meditation training.” One of the UCSD studies, for example, hopes to examine the emotional states of twins, when one is meditating and the other is not.

The first research published looked at whether the type of meditation practiced at Dispenza’s retreats could be used to improve resiliency to the Covid-19 virus. In that paper, which was published in the journal Brain, Behavior, & Immunity – Health, researchers surveyed nearly 3,000 people who had attended a retreat organized by Dispenza. They asked how many had received a Covid-19 diagnosis and how quickly their symptoms resolved. The UCSD researchers found that the longer people had been maintaining a regular meditation practice, the less likely they were to report testing positive for the virus. And among those that did get infected, they reported having fewer symptoms and recovering much faster than those that had less or no meditative practice.

Studies that depend on self-reporting are viewed as less reliable, but the study by the UCSD researchers also utilized other more objective measures to test whether meditation might improve health outcomes.

“One advantage of the study is the built-in controls they had with participants who were in the same setting but did not get meditation training.”

The group’s original hypothesis was that meditation could increase health resiliency because of the release of biological factors, like proteins or metabolites, into the bloodstream during meditation. They’d collected blood samples from retreat participants before the pandemic began, and then decided to pivot their focus specifically to SARS-CoV-2. To identify what those factors might be, the UCSD scientists created a pseudovirus to represent SARS-CoV-2, bearing the characteristic spike protein so it could enter a cell using the same mechanism as the real virus. While the pseudovirus did not contain any SARS-CoV-2 genetic material, it did include what’s called a “reporting protein” gene, which expresses a fluorescent red color. That way, researchers could see if and when the virus entered a cell.

The researchers then took blood from about 100 people at a Joe Dispenza meditation retreat—some who were experienced meditators, some who were new meditators, and some who did not meditate at all—then added plasma distilled from those blood samples into cultures of human lung cells. When they then exposed those cells to the pseudovirus they’d created and let them incubate for 24 hours, they found there were almost no viral particles inside the lung cells inoculated with the plasma of experienced meditators. There was some evidence of infection in the lung cells treated with novice meditator plasma, and in lung cells treated with non-meditator plasma, the virus appeared to have infected the cells unfettered.

“We showed that the blood of a meditator after the week-long event was able to keep the fake virus from entering the lung cells,” Patel said. The question then, was, how?

After further testing the participants’ plasma, the UCSD team found that the blood of meditators had elevated levels of a particular protein called SERPINA5, which inhibits a type of enzyme that the virus utilizes to infect a cell. In other words, that protein—which appeared to be increased in the bloodstream of experienced meditators during this type of meditative practice—seemed to give people an extra dose of protection against being infected.

“What I think is happening is that when you go into this elevated, emotional mental state during meditation, you’re releasing things from your neurons in your brain. And then ultimately, those neurons, whatever is being released, has to filter through and eventually ends up in the blood,” Patel said.

Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said he doesn’t believe the study answered that question.

“This study doesn’t give you enough information to say it’s anything more than a hypothesis that needs testing in a more rigorous manner,” Adalja said. While noting the study’s limitations, he added, “there’s biological plausibility in the sense that meditation decreases stress, and we know that stress responses do influence susceptibility to infectious diseases.”

Among other things, Adalja added, the UCSD team did not control for confounding variables that could have affected their results in the blood plasma study, like age or lifestyle habits, or whether a study participant had an immunocompromising health condition. By not taking into account each participant’s individual health status, Adalja said, the UCSD researchers cannot claim that the result they obtained was caused by meditation, because it may have been influenced by some other variable.

In theory, Adalja pointed out, it could be that people who meditate may also sleep eight hours a night, for example, and so perhaps they’re benefitting from the sleep and not the meditation. “Meditation could just be a marker for some other healthy behavior, or some other biological phenomenon that goes with it.”

Patel refuted Adalja’s critiques, saying his study only tested blood from individuals with no self-reported chronic or terminal disease so that there would be no confounding conditions to influence outcomes. He also noted that the survey portion of the study did control for confounding variables, and that a multivariate analysis was performed to address specific confounders in that data. “Our studies on the biological assays controlled for all of the issues that Amesh says we did not control for,” he said. “We were very careful to do this.”

Patel also argued that his team’s results pinpointed something specific about meditation. The group that did not meditate, he said, spent their days at the same resort as the meditators, during the same events, but instead of meditating, enjoyed a relaxing time away from work at the resort, in an environment that would be expected to also reduce stress. But the protective effect was only observed in the individuals who meditated, suggesting to Patel that it was the meditation—and not mere stress reduction—that mattered.

Disagreements over methodologies and results aside, the involvement of Dispenza, who was named as a co-author on the recently published study—and may be listed as one on future publications—has also raised eyebrows among some researchers.

“I’ve always been concerned about pseudoscience around meditation, and Joe Dispenza certainly created some red flags for me, personally,” said Vago, who is one of the co-authors of the 2018 “Mind the Hype” study. Vago cites Dispenza’s language in his workshops and videos, which he says can be exaggerated, with little to no science behind certain claims.

The podcast Conspirituality relates an instance where, at one retreat, Dispenza had a woman come up on stage who was having trouble getting pregnant because she feared she had waited too long and now felt guilty. Dispenza told her the guilt is stored in that same center of her uterus and that she could fix her infertility with her thoughts.

“He’s charismatic and talks about healing people from chronic health conditions and rare genetic disorders in one session of meditation,” said Vago. “Those words are enough for me to be skeptical of anything else that he claims.”

Dispenza has been a popular figure in the yoga, meditation, and self-transformation community ever since appearing in the 2004 documentary, “What the Bleep Do We Know,” which focuses on the connection between quantum physics and consciousness. Today, he boasts 2.8 million followers on Instagram, where he posts inspirational quotations and promotes his teachings.

“I’ve always been concerned about pseudoscience around meditation, and Joe Dispenza certainly created some red flags for me, personally.”

But critics take issue with the way Dispenza infuses scientific concepts into his lectures and books to make it sound like there is scientific evidence behind his theories.

“I think it’s science that demystifies the mystical,” Dispenza told podcaster Aubrey Marcus in December of 2020. “And if you can combine a little quantum physics with a little neuroscience with neuroendocrinology with psycho neuroimmunology, the mind-body connection, epigenetics, all of those sciences point the finger at possibility.”

Julian Walker, an author and co-host of Conspirituality, doesn’t buy it. “This is the thing about New Age pseudoscience,” he said. “The claims are so big and so bold that if any one of them were true, even in the smallest way, it would be such a massive change in terms of how we understand life itself.”

For his part, Patel says he and his co-lead author designed all of the UCSD studies, and that they have full autonomy on how they are done and implemented. “This is something I was very adamant about to make sure we are doing critical and unbiased science,” Patel said. In the Covid-19 paper’s author contributions, however, Dispenza is credited with helping conceive and design the study.

Dispenza has been involved in monthly meetings with the scientists, where he does, according to Hovda, “make suggestions to enhance the research.” In her email to Undark, Hovda also said that Dispenza had not made direct monetary contributions to the studies, but has supported the research through in-kind donations. That includes paying independent contractors to collect the data on his behalf, a process that involves the use of 18 EEG machines purchased at a cost of $20,000 each.

Despite some of the pause some meditation researchers may take when hearing Dispenza is involved, Vago said he respects Patel’s previous work, and found their latest results fascinating. “I wasn’t even familiar with that particular data, that the fake virus that they created and how they found that the blood of meditators, after a week-long event, was able to keep the virus that they created from entering the lung cells. That’s very impressive,” he said.

He noted that it is convincing to see that the research subjects’ meditation experience correlated with the findings, rather than something more objective.

“I guess my biggest problem is really with how Joe sells himself on the internet, because that comes across as pseudoscience, and some of the claims that he makes come across that way. But the research Patel is doing “all sounds pretty legitimate,” Vago said.

And it adds to a growing body of research showing meditation’s impact on immunity, from its effect on inflammatory markers like cytokines to its effect on parts of DNA, like telomeres on chromosomes. In fact, Vago is currently involved in a study at Vanderbilt University, where he was the former research director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, where they are looking at the effects of meditation and breath work on the glymphatic system, which eliminates waste from the central nervous system.

As researchers continue to investigate the mind’s impact on the body through meditation, the business shows no sign of slowing down. A 2022 market analysis report by Data Bridge Market Research predicts the global meditation market will grow from $5.3 billion in 2022 to an estimated $20.5 billion by 2029.

While Salmoirago-Blotcher has found personal value in meditation, she cautions against expensive retreats that target people facing personal crises. “These people craft these wonderful programs where desperate people go — because they have nowhere else to go, right?” she said. Retreats that can cost thousands of dollars, Salmoirago-Blotcher said, run “really contrary to the spirit of how these practices were generated, which is the practice of generosity.”

Walker, of the Conspirituality podcast, is even more blunt, calling those who peddle mindfulness as a panacea nothing more than modern-day faith healers. “To me, it’s no different than the faith healer who comes through town, sets up the big tent, tells people to bring their sick and disabled family members and that through the Holy Spirit, they’re going to be cured,” he said.

Like Salmoirago-Blotcher, Walker is himself a long-time meditator, but he said the practice is powerful because of its more subtle, everyday effects, including helping people manage stress better, become more aware of their bodies, and connect with emotions—not because it brings about miracles.

“This is the thing about New Age pseudoscience. The claims are so big and so bold that if any one of them were true, even in the smallest way, it would be such a massive change in terms of how we understand life itself.”

Such promises can be dangerous: Conspirituality recently featured an interview with a woman whose husband was undergoing chemotherapy to treat pancreatic cancer when he started attending Joe Dispenza retreats and almost decided to stop his treatments. Although he continued with the chemotherapy—and died from his illness at the age of 45—his wife was scared, the podcast said, by how pseudoscientific beliefs might affect his health outcomes.

In her email to Undark, Hovda stated that Dispenza does not recommend individuals dealing with an illness stop their current treatment plan. “There are many choices that people have during a treatment and cure for their disease,” she wrote, “and these evolve with time as well as how the disease is progressing. Meditation and self-regulation are paths that need further exploration, and it is one modality we are researching that should be considered in conjunction with traditional approaches to further assist one’s body in returning back to homeostatis.”

Whether results from the other ongoing UCSD studies will show significant effects remains to be seen. And while research has found meditation can improve some health outcomes—such as decreasing blood pressure and biomarkers of stress—its effect on the biological mechanisms underlying human health is less clear. It’s known to do some good in some situations, but it’s still unclear which situations and how.

As for Halsch, she attributes her improved health, in part, to her meditative practice. “I believe with my whole heart and soul it’s because I’m back on track meditating every day,” she said, “receiving healings, participating in healings—and eating plant-based.”Source

A certain fruit may be able to reduce your risk of developing type 2 diabetes, research has suggested.

Diabetes UK says 4.3 million people have been diagnosed with either type 1 or type 2 of the condition — and an estimated 850,000 more are unaware they even have it. But there are many things we can do to keep it at bay, such as maintaining a healthy diet, taking plenty of exercise, cutting down on smoking and limiting our alcohol intake.

Now, a recent study has shown that avocados could slash your risk of type 2 diabetes. Data analysed from more than 6,000 adults aged 45 to 84, revealed a potential link between eating the popular breakfast fruit and a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes - particularly in those displaying an 'avocado intake biomarker' in their blood. Published in The Journal of Nutrition, the findings suggest that our metabolic processes may play a significant role in influencing our overall health.

In the analysis of 6,224 older adults, researchers focused on the correlation between avocado intake, fasting blood sugar, and insulin levels. Specifically, they examined avocado-specific 'metabolites' (a substance produced during metabolism) in the blood, which show up when someone has eaten an avocado. The results suggested the fruit might positively influence blood sugar balance for certain individuals, though not necessarily for everyone, reports the Mirror.

This study aligns with prior research emphasising the positive impact of avocados on type 2 diabetes risk. Earlier this year, a study conducted at Baylor College of Medicine explored the relationship between eating avocados and the likelihood of developing diabetes. Dr Alexis Wood, assistant professor of paediatrics-nutrition, expressed interest in identifying easily accessible and popular foods to incorporate into diets for managing and preventing type 2 diabetes.

Published in the Journal of Diabetes Mellitus, the Baylor study used existing data from a large population of Hispanic adults in the United States. Participants were categorised as avocado consumers or non-consumers based on reported dietary habits over two typical days.

The research found a 20% reduction in the risk of developing type 2 diabetes over a six-year period among those who munched on avocados.

Additionally, the fruit was associated with positive effects on weight loss and cholesterol levels, attributed to the presence of monounsaturated fats that contribute to prolonged feelings of fullness and help maintain healthy HDL cholesterol while reducing LDL cholesterol levels in the bloodstream.

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A survey of parents found nearly one in five school-aged children and pre-teens use melatonin supplements to help them fall asleep; quite a jump from the 1.3 percent use reported in a broader age group five years ago.

"We are not saying that melatonin is necessarily harmful to children," explains Lauren Hartstein, a sleep and development scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

"But much more research needs to be done before we can state with confidence that it is safe for kids to be taking long-term."

Earlier this year, Hartstein and colleagues asked US parents of 993 kids aged 1 to 13 years about their children's use of melatonin over the past 30 days. The results were very different from 2017–2018 data, which included people aged 19 and under.

Among children aged 1 to 4, 5.6 percent had taken melatonin supplements within the past month. The rate increased to 18.5 percent in 5 to 9 year olds, and among those aged 10 to 13, 19.4 percent were using the sleep aid.

Children under 5 years old were given up to 2 mg, while those aged 10 to 13 were given as much as 10 mg. The duration of taking melatonin often exceeded 12 months.

"Parents are beginning to give melatonin at a relatively young age and for an extended period of time," Hartstein says.

"While in much of the world melatonin is a controlled substance that requires a prescription to obtain it, in the United States, it's considered a dietary supplement by the FDA and it therefore faces much looser regulation and doesn't require a prescription."

The pineal gland, located deep within our brain's center, secretes melatonin at the end of the day. The hormone signals to our bodies that it's time to wind down and get some sleep, helping keep our circadian rhythms regular.

People who have trouble sleeping often take melatonin supplements for a gentle nudge towards slumber. The available evidence says it's safe to use for a short time of one to three months and in doses of 0.5 to 1 milligrams (mg), but long-term effects are unknown.

The number of pediatric cases of melatonin ingestion reported to poison control centers rose by 530 percent between 2012 and 2021, mostly involving children under 5.

A recent study of 25 US-sold melatonin gummies found 22 misreported melatonin content, with one containing more than three times the dose stated on its label.

"Parents may not actually know what they are giving to their children when administering these supplements," says Hartstein.

There is evidence that supplementing with melatonin can help people with autism get a better night's sleep, and studies have uncovered abnormalities in melatonin physiology and circadian rhythm in this population.

But effectiveness, dosage, and long-term safety are not established in other populations, the authors say, and this will likely vary with age.

They're concerned high rates of melatonin use in children across the population might point to a more serious sleep disruption that should be properly diagnosed and treated.

"If this many kids are taking melatonin, that suggests there are a lot of underlying sleep issues out there that need to be addressed. Addressing the symptom doesn't necessarily address the cause," Hartstein says.

"We hope this paper raises awareness for parents and clinicians."

The study has been published in JAMA Pediatrics.

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There have been historically high sea temperatures, worrying lows in Antarctic sea-ice, and extreme weather events hitting every continent - the latest being an "unbearable" heatwave in Brazil.

It's now "virtually certain" that 2023 will be the hottest year on record. That's something that no major climate science body expected at the start of the year.

Scientists have long known that temperatures will continue to rise as humans keep releasing record amounts of planet-heating greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, mainly through burning fossil fuels. This is the main cause of global warming.

While they are struggling to fully explain 2023's "gobsmacking" surge in temperatures, here are four additional reasons that could be behind the increases.

A 'weird' El Niño

One key factor is the unusually rapid onset of a natural weather system known as El Niño.

During an El Niño, warmer surface waters in the eastern Pacific release additional heat into the atmosphere. This typically leads to a surge in global air temperatures.

The graph below shows how a new El Niño is strengthening. It has not yet reached the peak of the last major one in 2016, as you can see, but is expected to intensify in the coming months.

The ongoing 2023 El Niño may be releasing even more warmth than previous ones, because the world had previously been in an extended cool phase - an opposite weather system known as La Niña.

This kept a lid on global temperatures for an unusually long period, as warmth was less able to escape from the sea surface into the atmosphere.

During this time, the oceans continued to absorb record amounts of heat, some of which is now finally being released into the atmosphere.

During this time, the oceans continued to absorb record amounts of heat, some of which is now finally being released into the atmosphere.

Normally, scientists expect a delay of around three months between maximum El Niño strength and global air temperatures peaking, explains Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a science organisation in the US.

An intense heatwave in Brazil has strong links to long-term greenhouse gas emissions and El Niño

But air temperatures have risen much more quickly during this El Niño than with previous ones, and it's not even reached full strength yet.

As Dr Hausfather puts it, "this El Niño is weird."

Cutting aerosols

Cutting some air pollutants - aimed at cleaning the air that humans breathe - may actually be having an unintended consequence for warming.That's because some small airborne particles known as aerosols, like sulphate or dust, tend to reflect some of the Sun's energy back into space. Generally, this cools the Earth's surface.

Regulations introduced in 2020 to encourage cleaner shipping fuels have reduced global emissions of sulphur dioxide (SO2), a harmful air pollutant for humans to breathe, by an estimated 10%.

But this appears to have raised temperatures, especially in shipping hotspots like the North Atlantic.

"We saw quite rapidly from the satellite data that less sunlight was being reflected and more sunlight was being absorbed by the oceans," explains Leon Simons, a climate researcher at the Club of Rome group.

Not all scientists agree on how important aerosols are for explaining 2023's records.

"It's hard to make the case that the [new shipping fuel] regulation in 2020 would create a sudden jump in 2023 that we didn't see in 2022," Dr Hausfather argues.

A large volcanic eruption

In January 2022, there was a huge eruption of the underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano. The eruption plume reached an "unheard-of" 55km (35 miles) above the Earth's surface and triggered record underwater debris flows.

Importantly for the climate, it also released around 150 million tonnes of water vapour into the stratosphere. Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, like carbon dioxide, so may have added to warming.

Studies so far suggest the eruption may have only had a limited effect on global air temperatures, perhaps less than 0.05C. But scientists are still working to establish its full impact.

The eruption of Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha'apai formed the highest eruption column ever recorded, and may have made a contribution to record 2023 temperatures

An Antarctic 'radiator'?

The sea-ice surrounding Antarctica is well below any previous recorded winter level, satellite data showed in September.

Arctic sea-ice has long been in decline, but until 2017 Antarctic sea-ice had largely defied predictions and remained relatively stable. This could now be changing, with consequences for global temperatures.

Fewer areas of bright, reflective ice mean more of the Sun's energy is absorbed by the darker ocean surface. In turn, this accelerates warming.

"The concern is that the Antarctic has started to operate like the Arctic," working "like a radiator rather than a refrigerant" notes Martin Siegert, from the Grantham Institute for Climate Change.

It is unclear whether the Antarctic changes are a contributor to 2023 warmth, or a consequence.

But it indicates how warming could speed up in future, Prof Siegert says.

So is the world warming faster than expected?

While the rate of warming seems to have sped up in recent decades, this has not yet consistently exceeded the range of possible temperatures that scientists expected from climate models.

This provides some reassurance that the world hasn't yet tipped into a new phase of runaway climate change.

However, a group of leading climate scientists recently warned that the climate may change more quickly than expected in the future.

They suggest that the climate is yet to fully respond to the greenhouse gases already emitted. One reason could be the artificial cooling effect of aerosols. This leaves more warming "in the pipeline" than previously thought, they argue.

Not all scientists agree with this view, but the devastating climate impacts currently being experienced highlight the challenges the world is already facing.

Ahead of the crucial COP28 climate summit, this "should really spur action to accelerate the phase out of fossil fuels," explains Lili Fuhr from the Centre for International Environmental Law.

"It doesn't have to be worse than we expected to be a huge problem that society urgently needs to deal with," says Dr Hausfather.

"Climate change is as bad as we expected. And that's bad enough."

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In 2015 a lightning strike started what became known as the Rough Fire, which eventually burned more than 150,000 acres of forest east of Fresno and just west of Kings Canyon National Park.

The blaze burned into seven different sequoia groves in Sequoia National Forest, as well as a grove called the General Grant Complex in Kings Canyon National Park. As the flames died down and the smoke cleared, experts realized that an unusually large number of big sequoias had been killed by the blaze—27 on park land and 74 on national forest.

The deaths of so many sequoias in one year was unheard of, and it deeply alarmed people who research and care for redwoods, some of whom wept at the sight of dead giants that had stood for more than a thousand years. After the Rough Fire, said Ben Blom, director of stewardship and restoration for the Save the Redwoods League, the idea of immortal sequoias no longer seemed to be true.

While the impacts of the Rough Fire were worrisome, it wasn’t until 2020 and 2021 that “things changed [by] orders of magnitude,” said Blom. “We’re talking tens of thousands of big trees dying in those two fire seasons.” It was after those fires, Blom added, that “we realized the big trees were facing an existential crisis.”

The crisis is rooted in climate change—which has caused record heat and drought, more insect pressure, and more high-intensity fires in California—combined with a century-long history of suppressing frequent, low-intensity fire.

In response to the emergency, experts declared a code red and are now working quickly to try to save the giants that remain. Teams of biologists, Native American tribes, and government agencies are urgently thinning the overgrown woodlands that surround the big trees and conducting prescribed burns. Research shows that such efforts help prevent extremely hot fires that can reach the sequoia canopy.

But such “active management”—which includes logging with heavy equipment and chain saws in protected and unique ecosystems—has also sparked controversy. A bipartisan Congressional bill to further fund thinning efforts is being challenged by a coalition of conservation organizations who contend the legislation does not provide for adequate environmental review.

Giant sequoias are, by volume, the largest trees in the world, indigenous only to California. Reaching heights of 300 feet, they occur in 80 groves or grove complexes along the western flank of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Central California. All but eight of those groves occur in a narrow, 60-mile-long band at elevations between 4,000 and 8,000 feet. Coast redwoods, which are related to giant sequoias, are generally taller—reaching up to 350 feet—though not as big around.

For a long time, sequoias were thought to be indestructible. With their thick, flame-resistant bark and elevated crowns they are well adapted to wildfire. When a fire comes through, they aren’t usually killed. In fact, they thrive as their competitors for light, water, and nutrients are removed, and the fire’s heat opens the sequoia’s cones, facilitating the release of seeds for reproduction. Insects don’t kill them, nor does disease. That is why many of these trees live for thousands of years: The oldest sequoia is more than 3,200 years old. In North America, only bristlecone pines grow longer.

Sequoias have become vulnerable to fire primarily due to drought. From 2012 through 2016, California experienced the most severe drought since instrumental climate records have been kept. The last two years of rain and snow officially ended the drought, but the state’s climate continues to warm—average summer temperatures have increased 3 degrees F (1.8 degrees C) since the end of the 19^th century. As the temperature increases in a linear way, vapor pressure deficit—essentially, the thirstiness of the atmosphere—increases exponentially, pulling an increasing amount of water from trees, other plants, and soil.

As the drought continued, native bark beetles swooped in and began killing large tracts of California’s conifer forests, though not the sequoias. Vast tracts of white fir, red fir, and especially ponderosa pines—an estimated 147 million trees—died beneath the sequoias, their needles brown and tinder dry. And then the fires came.

“You got a sea of brown trees killed by beetles and drought, with the monarchs [trees at least 4 feet in diameter and often much bigger] interspersed among them,” said Blom. “The way fires kill giant sequoias is by ladder fuels that can get the fire up into the canopy. It was a perfect storm of conditions that allowed this all to happen.”

Another factor contributing to the forest’s vulnerability was the removal, during the settlement period, of Indigenous people from most of the American landscape, which ended their use of so-called good fire—frequent low-intensity blazes that increased forage for game animals. “All tribes throughout California have always done cultural burning, and it’s a practice we continue to use,” said Kenneth McDarment, a council member for the Tule River Indian Tribe. “It’s a good thing for the forest.”

Historical research shows that low- to moderate-intensity wildfire—sparked by either lightning or Indigenous peoples—occurred at six- to 35-year intervals, greatly reducing fuel loads. But that regime changed in the early 20^th century. Responding to a series of large-scale wildfires on public lands, federal agencies in 1935 adopted the so-called “10:00 am policy,” which decreed that all fires be extinguished by 10 o’clock on the morning after they were spotted. As fire science and forest ecology evolved, federal agencies took a more nuanced stance, allowing natural-caused fires to burn in some areas. Meanwhiles, fuels were building up.

“When I look at the National Park Service groves, we see over 50 suppressed lightning-caused fires that could have [beneficially] burned into these groves in the last 80 to 100 years,” said Christy Brigham, chief of Resources Management and Science at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. “And it’s true across the range.”

The 2020 and 2021 fire seasons were a wake-up call: Flames had killed between 13 and 19 percent of all giant sequoias more than 4 feet in diameter, and many trees were far larger. Before fire killed the King Arthur tree in Sequoia National Park, it was the eighth-largest giant redwood in the world.

In 2022, officials who oversee groves in national forests and national parks declared an emergency and initiated large-scale mechanical and hand thinning of the sequoia forest, followed by the burning of the slash and prescribed burning. Removing this material has an added benefit—making more precipitation available to the trees that remain, increasing their resilience.

A recent review of the literature on the value of thinning and burning to mitigate wildfire hazard, published in Ecological Applications, found that “a range of proactive management actions”—including managed wildfire, prescribed burning, and mechanical thinning—“are justified and necessary to keep pace with changing climatic and wildfire regimes.” The paper acknowledged that these actions weren’t necessarily appropriate in all kinds of forest, and it warned that if thinning is poorly executed it can exacerbate wildfire damage.

According to Blom, whose group favors thinning dense stands of young trees and reducing accumulations of vegetation and woody debris from the forest floor through prescribed burns or mechanical methods, there are about 26,000 acres of land to be cleared in all 80 sequoia groves on federal land, with some 8,000 acres already treated.

On their reservation, the Tule River Indian Tribe has been managing eight sequoia groves for 40 years. McDarment believes those efforts limited tree damage when the recent wildfires swept through. The tribe is planning to reintroduce beavers next spring; their dams will help keep more water in the meadows near the groves.

Meanwhile, foresters are studying the best way to add trees to already burned areas. Researchers have established seedling plots to study which genomes, from sequoias as well as other conifers, will survive the best in anticipated future conditions. “We’ll check those over time and see which ones grow well,” said Joanna Nelson, director of science and conservation planning at the Save the Redwoods League.

Earlier this year, US lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill called Save Our Sequoias that would provide additional funding for sequoia thinning. The bill received support from forest products, ranch, farm, and recreation groups. But a coalition of 80 environmental groups opposed the bill, in a letter to members of Congress, saying it would set a nationwide precedent that allowed federal agencies, under the guise of an “emergency,” to waive the environmental reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other environmental laws.

Without those reviews, and community and scientific input, the group said, the bill would “lead to rushed and poorly planned projects with major impacts on soil, streams, and wildlife that would result in increased wildfire risk.” No hearings have been held; the bill remains in limbo as the Forest Service and National Park Service continue to thin.

But not without pushback. In 2022, the Earth Island Institute sued the National Park Service to stop thinning activities in Yosemite National Park, claiming the agency had short-circuited environmental review. And in September, Wilderness Watch, the Tule River Conservancy, and the Sequoia ForestKeeper filed suit against mechanized logging in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, claiming it violated the Wilderness Act.

The debate is sure to intensify as the Biden administration has committed $50 billion over 10 years to reduce fuel loads on 50 million acres in 11 Western states.

But advocates say action is urgently needed. “These forests we care deeply about could be converted to shrubland with repeated high-severity fires of the kind we are seeing,” said Nelson, of the Save the Redwoods League, citing a recent study that evaluated dry conifer forests of the western United States. “We know what we need to do in responding to climate disruption, and we need to do everything we know how to do. We need limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and we also need active management to have giant sequoias around.”

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Sunday, 19 November

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• When: 6:55 a.m. UTC
• Where: Vandenberg AFB Space Launch Complex 4, California, US
• Why: SpaceX will be launching 22 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. They will be covered with anti-reflective coatings to reduce the sun’s reflection to help astronomers. This batch is Starlink Group 7-7 if you decide to have a look for it on satellite trackers such as ISS Detector - even with the coating, you may still be able to see them but they will be dimmer.

Tuesday, 21 November

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• When: 5:50 a.m. - 10:44 a.m. UTC
• Where: Space Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral, Florida, US
• Why: This is yet another Starlink satellite launch, the batch this time is Starlink Group 6-29. The idea behind these frequent launches is to establish a huge constellation are satellites so that the internet can be beamed down anywhere on the planet.

Wednesday, 22 November

• Who: CNSA
• What: Long March 2D
• When: Unknown
• Where: Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center
• Why: China will be using a Long March 2D to launch the Shijian 19 new generation recoverable satellite. The satellite will conduct microgravity research with physical science, materials science, and biological experiments.

Saturday, 25 November

• Who: China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology
• What: Jielong SD-3
• When: Unknown
• Where: South China Sea
• Why: CALT will launch a Jielong SD-3 rocket carrying the Xiangang hyperspectral remote sensing satellite for the Advanced Manufacturing Center of the Hong Kong Science Park. The satellite is equipped with a high-res optical camera which can take sub-meter visible light remote sensing images and provides high-precision data for the Internet of Things, disaster prevention and reduction, emergency safety, remote sensing, smart city contraction, and more.

Recap

• The first launch last week was a Falcon 9 carrying the fifth and sixth O3b mPOWER satellites for SES. The first stage proceeded to land on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

• The next to launch was a Long March 2C carrying the Huanjing-3 01 satellite. This will be used for monitoring the oceans to help improve the understanding of marine waters.

• The third launch was a Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites. This was Group 6-28 and included 23 satellites. They join the Starlink constellation and beam the internet back to Earth.

• Finally, SpaceX performed a test flight of Starship. It failed to launch properly earlier in this year as it exploded mid-flight and it also destroyed the launch pad. This time, the launch was an improvement over the first attempt but both stages of the rocket both ended up getting destroyed after they successfully separated. SpaceX will now use this data to try and improve on a third test flight.

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

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On the left, LiqudPiston's High Efficiency Hybrid Cycle engine, on the right, a 25 hp Kohler KDW1003 diesel engine.

LiquidPiston

 

Rotary engines have an aura of cool. In games of Top Trumps, the V12 might have been king, but a rotary was a joker, a wild card. A lack of mainstream success no doubt contributes; there are reasons they were never commonplace, including their oil-burning apex seals, which created emissions and fuel-consumption headaches.

 

LiquidPiston thinks it has those problems solved, however, and in the process, it created a new internal combustion engine that's small and efficient. It has demonstrated its tech on the bench and in a go-kart, but also in uncrewed aerial vehicles for the US military.

 

While little about the rotary engine merits the word, in a "traditional" Wankel rotary, a triangle-shaped rotor turns within a chamber during its combustion cycle. Apex seals are fitted at the apices of the rotor, but they need constant lubrication with oil, plenty of which burns during combustion. So, a Wankel engine needs constant oil top-ups while dealing with the products of that burnt oil. And those apex seals wear down.

 

"[The Wankel] has this long, skinny, moving combustion chamber. It's probably the worst thing you can do for an engine," explained Alec Shkolnik, founder and CEO of LiquidPiston. "Combustion kind of develops like a ball and then when it hits the wall, the wall is cold, and it extinguishes. So imagine trying to grow a flame through a narrow corridor, and you see that you get really bad combustion," he told me.

 

The solution involves turning the engine inside out. Instead of an oval-shaped combustion chamber and a triangular rotor, now the combustion chamber is triangular and the rotor is an oval, which contains a pre-chamber.

 

"So instead of a long, skinny, moving combustion chamber, we now have a stationary combustion chamber inside of the housing," Shkolnik said. "What that means is we can make it smaller, and that drives a higher compression ratio. And because it's stationary, it's suitable for direct injection of fuel," he said. And since the seals are stationary, the oil problem should be fixed.

 

"We can directly interface the apex seals with the face seals. Now that there are no gaps anymore, the blow-by is significantly reduced, and... we can directly lubricate the seals by metering tiny amounts of oil... right to the ceiling surface," Shkolnik said.

It’s not just the engine design—it’s thermodynamics

LiquidPiston isn't just playing with engine shapes—in its own words, it's also trying to reinvent the thermodynamic cycle. "The HEHC [High Efficiency Hybrid Cycle] cycle is a four-stroke cycle. Basically, we are cherry-picking features of other cycles. We're trying to stretch the PV diagram in every direction to get more energy, more work extracted from a given amount of fuel," Shkolnik told me.

 

"What we're trying to do is capture the compression ratio of a diesel with a constant-volume combustion process of an Otto cycle, a true Otto cycle. And beyond that, we also want to over-expand; we want to have a larger expansion ratio compared to the compression ratio. Those are the three pieces of our cycle. So we just pick things we like, and we call it a high-efficiency hybrid cycle," Shkolnik said.

 

The HEHC engine turns out to be pretty adaptable. LiquidPiston has two- and four-stroke variants, for instance, and is currently concentrating on the former. "The difference is that in the four-stroke variant, one part of the rotor does combustion, and the other part does intake and exhaust. On the two-stroke variant, both sides of the rotor each do combustion. So every time the rotor spins around, we get six firing events. That's pretty remarkable in terms of power density," Shkolnik told Ars.

 

It has been tested with both compression- and spark ignition, too. "The advantage of spark ignition is that we can run a variety of different fuels. So in our small engine—the five horsepower engine—we've run on gasoline, kerosene, jet fuel, diesel, and even gaseous fuels like propane and most recently hydrogen," he explained.

 

Much of LiquidPiston's more recent work has been on developing a two-stroke, 25 hp (18 kW) variant, with intended use by the military. The startup started working with DARPA in 2016 and, in the last two years, has had contracts worth $55 million with the Department of Defense.

 

One application is part of a hybrid powertrain for a UAV, where the engine can charge the battery during flight. Take-off, landing, and up to 30 minutes of the UAV's flight can be on electric power alone. Another is for a portable 10 kW generator, which is 75 percent lighter and far more compact than the US Army's current Advanced Medium Mobile Power Source generator, as well as being about 8 percent more efficient.

 

But LiquidPiston has designs on applications outside of low-volume, hand-built drone engines or military generators that are exempt from emissions regulations. That's where a recent $30 million funding round comes in.

 

"That's a big reason why we are raising outside capital, to cross these productionization and emissions bridges so that we can get to the commercial market. I would estimate about two years to where we are hopefully delivering with the DoD and then maybe one or two years after that for broader commercial markets," Shkolnik said.

 

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Millions of people over the age of 65 likely have mild cognitive impairment, or MCI—minor problems with memory or decisionmaking that can, over time, turn into dementia. But a pair of recent studies both concluded that 92 percent of people experiencing MCI in the United States are not getting diagnosed at an early stage, preventing them from accessing new Alzheimer’s treatments that may be able to slow cognitive decline if it’s caught soon enough.

“We knew it was bad. But we didn’t know it was that bad,” says Ying Liu, a statistician at the University of Southern California’s Center for Economic and Social Research and a researcher on both studies.

In the first, published this summer in Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy, Liu’s team aimed to figure out how often MCI is being diagnosed—and how often it’s overlooked. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, a longitudinal survey of some 20,000 people in the US about a wide range of age-related factors, Liu built a model predicting the number of expected MCI diagnoses for the over-65 population overall: about 8 million. Then, Liu’s team pulled data from all Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 and up who were enrolled from 2015 to 2019, to see how many were actually diagnosed with the condition. They found that only 8 percent of the people whom their model predicted would be candidates for MCI, based on their health demographics, actually received a diagnosis. This number was even lower for Black and Hispanic beneficiaries and among lower-income people. (The team used eligibility for Medicaid, health coverage that supplements Medicare, as a marker of income status.)

A second study, published in October by Liu’s team, looked at Medicare claims submitted by 226,756 primary care physicians and compared their MCI detection rates with those predicted by their model. Again, they found that only about 8 percent of predicted cases were actually diagnosed, and only 0.1 percent of clinicians diagnosed the condition as often as the team calculated that they should.

Autopsies reveal that most people who die in old age have some kind of brain pathology that impairs cognition, from traces of stroke to the amyloid plaques that characterize Alzheimer’s. Not everyone who has these anatomical markers of neurodegeneration experiences memory problems, but “the more of these things you have in your brain, the more likely you are to manifest dementia,” says Bryan James, an epidemiologist at the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, who was not involved in this research. If someone does experience problems like forgetting who family members are, or getting lost while walking familiar paths, a combination of cognitive tests, brain scans, blood work, or a spinal tap can pinpoint the cause of their dementia.

Diagnosing mild cognitive impairment is much trickier. People might notice that something is off, but they’re still able to function independently. Most are seen by primary care physicians, not researchers in specialized memory care clinics. Because these doctors don’t see many dementia patients, their confidence in giving someone a potentially life-shattering diagnosis can be low. “They don’t want to make a mistake,” says Sarah Kremen, a neurologist at the Jona Goldrich Center for Alzheimer’s and Memory Disorders, who was not involved in this research.

“We are still struggling, as a healthcare profession, with how to best identify mild cognitive impairment,” adds primary care physician Barak Gaster, who is also a professor of medicine at the University of Washington. Many doctors in Gaster’s field know they lack the training to handle cognitive concerns, and they are eager to learn. However, annual Medicare wellness visits are time-constrained—often just 15 minutes—and cover a lot of ground. Cognitive assessments are too cursory to detect the subtleties of MCI. “It’s really challenging to ask a community health provider to do another thing, because they’re already doing everything,” says Nancy Berlinger, a senior research scholar at the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institute in New York. Plus, people generally don’t want to be told they have memory problems. “Because of the stigma surrounding dementia, primary care providers may just avoid the topic,” says Berlinger.

“We’re failing a lot of people,” says Sarah Banks, a neuropsychologist at the University of California, San Diego, and director of their Memory Disorders Clinic. “I’m not surprised that it’s being underdiagnosed, but I was surprised by how much.”

Even if both the doctor and the patient notice something is off, Gaster adds, “the elephant in the room is that, if a cognitive concern comes up, most primary care providers still aren’t sure what to do.” Until very recently, an MCI diagnosis didn’t come with any actionable treatment options—just the knowledge that a patient may develop dementia someday. The same question has plagued efforts to develop blood tests for Alzheimer’s risk: Will they unnecessarily stress a person who can do little to change their outcome?

But this summer, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the new Alzheimer’s medication lecanemab-irmb, or Leqembi, which clears amyloid plaques from the brain and slows the progression of cognitive decline. Liu calls it “a big game changer.” Donanemab, another potential treatment developed by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, also reduced amyloid levels and slowed cognitive decline in Phase 3 clinical trials of people with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.

While these new medications are a big deal, “they’re not a panacea,” Kremen cautions. In Phase 3 clinical trials, lecanemab slowed cognitive decline by 27 percent over the 18-month study, a relatively modest improvement. And it’s not an easy treatment—patients need infusions at a clinic every two weeks. The drug can have potentially life-threatening side effects like brain swelling and seizures. As a consequence, “I think a lot of us in the field are a little skeptical about how helpful they’ll be,” Banks says. James adds, “There’s a risk-benefit balance that I don’t think we’ve worked out yet.”

Drug treatment also depends on early detection. Amyloid plaques kill brain cells, which can’t grow back. If you don’t try to get rid of the plaques until they’ve already killed a bunch of cells, James says, “You’re trying to put out a fire after the house burned down.”

More clinical testing will be necessary to determine exactly how effective these drugs will be for people who start taking them as early as possible. “Dementia is not a problem that we can quickly solve through a pill,” Berlinger says, but “we may be in an era of promising interventions in early stages, which rely on the ability to detect early symptoms.”

Still, James predicts that in five years, as these treatments become more effective and accessible, the diagnostic rate for MCI will skyrocket. “Diagnostic practices are driven by the availability of treatment,” he says. “People don’t just diagnose in a vacuum. They diagnose for a purpose.”

Even if these treatments work, the US healthcare system is not currently equipped to handle the demand for them. Lecanemab currently costs $26,500 per year, and Medicare covers 80 percent of the cost. If all of the people whom Liu’s studies estimate are experiencing mild cognitive impairment are diagnosed and seek treatment, James says, “it would bankrupt Medicare.” Memory clinics will also struggle to handle the onslaught of referrals. (Rush Memory Clinic, where James works, already has a yearlong waitlist.)

These studies were limited to demographic basics like age, sex, race, and Medicaid eligibility. Age is one of the greatest risk factors for developing MCI—the older you are, the more likely you are to have it. Autopsy studies also show that women seem to develop neuropathology linked to dementia more than men, but in Liu’s studies, detection rates were not dramatically different across sexes or age groups.

Race, however, was one of the strongest predictors of whether or not MCI is accurately diagnosed, with Black people getting diagnosed at half the rate of white people. It’s unclear whether the stark racial divide in detection rates Liu’s team observed is due to differences in MCI prevalence itself, or to differences in healthcare access. Cognitive screening measures were largely developed by white people, for white people, Banks says, likely reducing their sensitivity in other populations. Factors like lower-quality childhood education, the chronic stress of systemic racism, and lack of access to healthy food can all contribute to dementia risk, James adds. Liu’s team is currently building predictive models that account for more of these factors.

Even if a person’s MCI never escalates into full-blown dementia, doctors say there is value in screening for it, because it can let them help alleviate symptoms or weed out other possible confounding causes. For example, doctors can review medications with patients to make sure nothing they are taking lists brain fog as a side effect. Hearing loss is a major contributor to dementia risk, and doctors can help people access hearing aids. Basic lifestyle changes like eating well, exercising, getting good sleep, and nurturing social connections address both brain health and overall well-being.

Doctors need to normalize talking about brain health with patients of all ages, says Elizabeth Head, a program manager at the Georgia Department of Public Health, who led their campaign for early detection of dementia. “We don’t have to ‘break the ice’ to talk about heart disease, cancer, or other chronic conditions,” she says. “It should be talked about like any other type of disease.”

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