The importance of a good night’s rest cannot be overstated. Poor sleep is linked to all-cause mortality, which means getting too little or too much sleep are “significant predictors of death,” according to a 2010 meta-analysis study. But good sleep is increasingly a privilege, as stress, workloads, and the trappings of a modern lifestyle squeeze out valuable shut-eye.

Naturally, there are medications that aim to fix this problem. Home remedies like extracts of valerian root, a pinkish-white flower, have existed in North America since the mid-19th century. Contemporary drugs like Ambien, an insomnia drug, or melatonin, a sleep-related hormone the body naturally produces, make up an industry generating $70 billion per year. But whether they actually help is a different question.

Here’s how sleeping pills actually work, the potential risk of side effects, and how they affect our circadian rhythm and sleep cycle.

How Do Sleeping Pills Work?

All sleeping pills work essentially the same way, by boosting production of a neurotransmitter known as GABA. GABA helps to quiet down the activity of neurons in our brains, and it’s an important part of our sleep cycles. 

Almost every drug that makes you drowsy, including barbiturates, benzos, valerian root, and even alcohol, utilizes this chemical. 

What Are the Side Effects of Sleeping Pills?

Though losing sleep can be unhealthy, some prescription sleep aids also come with rare but serious side effects, such as sleepwalking, driving asleep, rebound insomnia, or sleep aid dependency.

Sleep Walking and Driving

Some sleeping pills could cause sleepwalking as a potential side effect. In late April, the Food and Drug Administration put a black box warning — the agency’s most severe label — on three of the most popular insomnia drugs: eszopiclone (Lunesta), zaleplon (Sonata), and zolpidem (Ambien). The FDA logged 66 incidents of semi-conscious behavior after taking the drugs, such as sleepwalking or driving asleep, that resulted in serious injury or death.

Rebound Insomnia

To make matters worse, when you stop taking some sleeping pills, they can cause “rebound insomnia” which makes it even more difficult to fall asleep. These so-called Z drugs don’t work much better than a placebo, according to a 2012 meta-analysis of about 4,400 patients across 13 studies.

Sleep Aid Dependency

Another possible side effect of sleeping pills is building a dependency to sleep aids. As Walker explains in his book, the brain responds to drugs by trying to become less sensitive and alters its balance of receptors, creating a type of dependency. “This is also known as drug tolerance,” he writes. 

For this reason, Cash says discontinuing sleeping meds requires slowly tapering down the dose, rather than stopping immediately, and should be supervised by a doctor. “Generally it is recommended that sleep medications be adopted only for the short-term, for four consecutive weeks of use or less,” she says.

Not getting the right amount of sleep can be detrimental to one’s health. But while drugs for sleep may help in a pinch, their side effects may not be worth it. Overall, there really are no long-term substitutes for the real thing: deep, restful slumber.

Is It Healthy To Take Sleeping Pills?

Sleeping pills might not be the best path to a healthier relationship with sleep. Low levels of GABA have also been linked to insomnia and anxiety. As neuroscientist and “sleep diplomat” Matthew Walker explains in his 2017 bestseller Why We Sleep: “Sleeping pills do not provide natural sleep, can damage health, and increase the risk of life-threatening diseases.”

While taking drugs like Ambien may help you become unconscious, sedation is not the same as sleep. These hypnotic drugs can actually restrict the deeper brain waves produced during REM sleep, leading to grogginess and forgetfulness the following morning. Feeling sluggish the next day might lead people to consume more caffeine, making sleep difficult and perpetuating the cycle. 

How Does Melatonin Work?

Other people opt for a different route with melatonin supplements. Melatonin is a hormone produced by our bodies that tells our brains it’s time to sleep. Melatonin signals our brains that it’s dark out, and to prepare for sleep. Melatonin supplements have become popular among those looking for a good night’s rest. 

How Effective Is Melatonin?

Melatonin supplements may not actually induce better sleep, though, and the effects are modest at best. Some commercially-available supplements have issues with quality control as well.

The natural production of melatonin is part of our circadian rhythms, internal cycles of alertness and drowsiness that operate on a roughly 24-hour timetable.

What Happens When Circadian Rhythms Are Disrupted?

 Sleeping pills and melatonin supplements disrupt the body’s natural sleep-wake cycle, affecting circadian rhythms. When circadian rhythms are disrupted, studies show that it can have a range of negative effects on physical and mental health. Your body aims to follow a routine that fits with daytime, nighttime, meal times, and when you're active. When these routines don't line up, it can make it tough to fall asleep, and your sleep quality might suffer.

Circadian Rhythms and Mental Health

 Circadian rhythms have a significant impact on mental health, with mood disorders often linked to disruptions in these internal biological clocks. Factors like night-shift work or exposure to artificial light at night can worsen mood disorders, emphasizing the bidirectional relationship between circadian rhythms and mental well-being.

Cancer and Circadian Rhythms 

 Circadian rhythms could also lead to cancer if disrupted. Liz Cash, an assistant professor at the University of Louisville, studies circadian rhythms in people with cancer. She says patients with disrupted rhythms have worse overall survival rates than patients who maintain more regular cycles.

“When individuals experience disruptions in these rhythms over the long-term (many years), this can lead to changes in physical health and contribute to the development of disorders like obesity, diabetes and cancer,” Cash says.

Circadian rhythms are so important that the disruptions caused by working a late-night shift makes certain jobs likely carcinogens, according to the World Health Organization.

Sleeping Pills FAQ:

Always speak to a medical provider before starting any medication. If you feel that you or someone you know may be having issues with sleep medication, call 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. 

 Can You Overdose On Sleeping Pills?

Yes, taking too many sleeping pills can lead to an overdose. Always consult a medical provider before starting any sleep medication and never take more than prescribed. 

 What Happens If You Take Sleeping Pills Everyday?

Taking sleeping pills can have adverse side effects such as dizziness, memory loss, drowsiness, and a reliance on them. If you take them for prolonged periods of time, it can lead to intensified side effects along with high blood pressure, depression, and irregular heartbeat. 

How Long Do Sleeping Pills Make You Sleep?

Sleeping pills should only be taken if you can get a full seven to eight hours of sleep. According to the Cleveland Clinic, sleeping pills may help you fall asleep faster, but overall, you may only get an additional 35 minutes of sleep. Sleeping pills are generally used for short-term situations. Consult a medical professional if you’re having chronic issues sleeping. 

How Long Do Sleeping Pills Take To Kick In?

Sleeping pills take about 30 minutes to kick in. It’s best to take them about a half hour before you go to bed. 

Are Sleeping Pills Addictive?  

Yes, especially if taken for more than two weeks. If you start to notice these symptoms in yourself or a loved one, contact a medical professional right away:

• Detachment
• Isolation 
• Mood swings
• Sleeping pill cravings
• Withdrawal symptoms
• Lack of interest 
• Needing a larger sleeping pill dose

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For the first time, this research group have tested the several hypotheses on music simultaneously in a modern foraging society during their daily search for tubers—their staple food.

Origins of music

Why is music so prevalent and universal in human societies? Does music serve an adaptive function, or it is just "auditory cheesecake," as cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker infamously claimed: a delightful dessert but, from an evolutionary perspective, no more than a by-product of language?

The debate on the origins of music has intrigued scientists for centuries. The hypotheses range from music being a mating display in order to woo females, to a means to increase social bonding in group contexts.

Music has always been an evolutionary puzzle as the links to improving fitness in humans have not been direct yet, music has spanned several contexts and has been prevalent across all human societies and performed among all age groups. The researchers decided to test some of the hypotheses that could explain the role of music in a social or group context, in the context of predation, and in a parent-infant context.

Their primary selected hypothesis was the credible signaling hypothesis which consists of two aspects namely, the coalition signaling hypothesis and the predation hypothesis. The coalition signaling hypothesis posited that music could have emerged as a reliable signal in showcasing coalition strength (between and among groups), and the intention to cooperate with individuals.

Furthermore, the predation hypothesis stated that music could have emerged as a signal to deter possible threats such as dangerous animals including predators. The scientists also accounted for the parent-infant context to test whether these bonds through touch have an impact on singing probability.

In order to test this variety of hypotheses, a society was selected that displayed music performance in all the three contexts mentioned above and incorporated these performances as a part of their daily foraging activity. In addition, music production had to be spontaneous and an essential part of life in the studied society. As a result, the researchers tested their hypotheses in a foraging society, the Mbendjele BaYaka in the Republic of Congo.

To study the possible motivations of singing the researchers looked at the probability of singing (whether they would sing or not) in foraging women during tuber foraging expeditions—a daily activity that provides their staple food—and tested the effect of familiarity between individuals, foraging group size, and the duration of carrying a baby (as the women were often accompanied by their baby during foraging).

In order to achieve the collection of the required variables, Janmaat and her former Ph.D. student Haneul Jang had conducted unique continuous focal follows of the women whereby, they obtained permission from the women during their foraging trips into the rain forest for exceptional long time periods.

They registered the behaviors of these individuals along with other variables including whether they sang or not, how long did they carry an infant during foraging, the group composition while searching and digging tubers, and the likelihood of encountering dangerous animals.

Importance of singing in groups

"To understand what motivated the women to sing, we had to understand the group's dynamics," says Chirag Chittar, the first author of the paper who conducted this study as a part of his Master thesis at UvA. He elaborates, "The BaYaka are an egalitarian group who share food extensively and live in temporary forest camps with several kin and non-kin individuals including individuals they are not so familiar with. The BaYaka forage for food such as fish, meat, tubers, and mushrooms daily in largely sex-specific but age-general foraging groups.

"However, they also engage in subsistence crop cultivation and trade. Almost every day the women search for tubers, fish and mushrooms while the men often hunt or climb trees to search for fruits and honey. It was the women that we observed during their search for tubers in groups ranging from five to 20 individuals.

"We categorized the data into 1,704 tuber searching and digging bouts which are repetitive units in which a tuber searching and digging activity takes place. This helped us to differentiate between behaviors associated with tuber foraging and behaviors that were not directly associated with foraging like walking between two tuber patches. The bouts are the unit for our research as all the variables are averaged on the level of bouts."

Chirag further states, "During our study we found that the BaYaka women sing in 19% of the bouts. During these bouts, the women are carrying an infant in 19% of the bouts."

Evidence for the coalition signaling hypothesis

The coalition signaling hypothesis (part of the larger credible hypothesis framework) posts that music has originated as a credible signal to indicate coalition strength and cooperative intent to group members. The researchers tested this by looking at the effect between foraging group size and dyadic association index (an index calculated to measure familiarity between individuals). The maximum value of the index would indicate high social closeness between individuals compared to low values which indicated less familiarity between individuals).

"Our results reveal that the foraging women were more likely to sing in large groups of less familiar individuals and less likely to sing in large groups of more familiar individuals. This supported for the coalition signaling hypothesis." He further states, "Formation of highly cooperative alliances is essential for the survival of the BaYaka who live in ever-changing precarious environments. They could especially help in tapping essential skills and knowledge of less familiar individuals.

"We think that in this way, music can act as an ice- breaker to gauge the skills or even encourage the enthusiasm of strangers as initiative is highly valued. Furthermore, trust is essential for this society to thrive as conflicts can occur between individuals co-residing in forest camps. We believe that in this way music can help in mitigating conflict and encouraging cooperation with individuals the focal individuals are socially less close to."

Lack of evidence for the predation deterrence sub-hypothesis

The study also hypothesized that singing in large numbers could have originated to deter predation as the foraging individuals are under potential risk from large animals like elephants, gorillas, and leopards. "However, we found no evidence for the predation deterrence hypothesis. This could be due to the possibility that the areas the women foraged in was already deprived of wild animals due to heavy bush meat trade," Janmaat said.

"Future studies should therefore study the BaYaka deeper in the forest, before these forests get emptied as well and we will never be able to investigate this potential function of the singing behavior of foraging women."

Possibility of touch playing a crucial role in infant-directed singing

Though the study does not make direct connections between singing and parent-infant bonds, it shows evidence that touch triggers singing. The researchers found that women were more likely to sing when they held infants of theirs or their relatives extensively.

Several studies have discussed the role of parental singing in either increasing the bonds between parent- child contexts or increasing the attention of parents towards their children. The results of the study can be incorporated into the larger picture of parent-child interaction studies by emphasizing the importance of touch as part of a possible multimodal communication cannot be ignored. In other words, focusing only on singing or speech during parent-child interactions provide a partial picture of the grander studies on the origin of singing in such contexts.

Music makes the forest happy

"We know from their communication about music that the BaYaka sing to 'please the forest.' They say, 'a happy forest provides us with more food.' What the BaYaka dislike most is conflict, as they believe it would make the forest spirits angry.

"Our behavioral observations nicely complement their verbal communication and expression through music. The women sing more frequently when they search for food in groups that are large and contain fewer 'friends,' in which conflicts about food are more likely to arise. To me, our study reveals that these foragers appear to use music as a tool to avoid potential future conflict. How amazing is that?" Janmaat says.

"This study gives important empirical insights in the possible origins of music, a topic that for long had to be mere speculation," says co-author Henkjan Honing, professor of Music Cognition at UvA. "It made us decide to intensify our interdisciplinary collaboration and to further study the role of music with the BaYaka in a project aiming to unravel the human capacity for music.

"We are excited to announce our plans to return to this captivating society next year, where music appears to occupy a central role that transcends language."

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October was a whopping 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the previous record for the month in 2019, surprising even Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European climate agency that routinely publishes monthly bulletins observing global surface air and sea temperatures, among other data.

“The amount that we’re smashing records by is shocking,” Burgess said.

After the cumulative warming of these past several months, it’s virtually guaranteed that 2023 will be the hottest year on record, according to Copernicus.

Scientists monitor climate variables to gain an understanding of how our planet is evolving as a result of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. A warmer planet means more extreme and intense weather events like severe drought or hurricanes that hold more water, said Peter Schlosser, vice president and vice provost of the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University. He is not involved with Copernicus.

“This is a clear sign that we are going into a climate regime that will have more impact on more people,” Schlosser said. “We better take this warning that we actually should have taken 50 years ago or more and draw the right conclusions.”

This year has been so exceptionally hot in part because oceans have been warming, which means they are doing less to counteract global warming than in the past. Historically, the ocean has absorbed as much as 90% of the excess heat from climate change, Burgess said. And in the midst of an El Nino, a natural climate cycle that temporarily warms parts of the ocean and drives weather changes around the world, more warming can be expected in the coming months, she added.

Schlosser said that means the world should expect more records to be broken as a result of that warming, but the question is whether they will come in smaller steps going forward. He added that the planet is already exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times that the Paris agreement was aimed at capping, and that the planet hasn’t yet seen the full impact of that warming. Now, he, Burgess and other scientists say, the need for action — to stop planet-warming emissions — is urgent.

“It’s so much more expensive to keep burning these fossil fuels than it would be to stop doing it. That’s basically what it shows,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. “And of course, you don’t see that when you just look at the records being broken and not at the people and systems that are suffering, but that — that is what matters.”

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These findings indicate the early beginnings of inflammatory bowel diseases start long before symptoms appear. Study authors from the Francis Crick Institute and Aalborg University in Copenhagen believe their work may one day provide an opportunity for doctors to take preventative action on IBD before symptoms begin, and prescribe medication at the most effective moment.

Today, both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis are considered incurable. Doctors stress the importance of early detection when it comes to improving long-term health outcomes, but that doesn’t always happen. For example, close to a quarter of the 25,000 IBD patients treated each year in the United Kingdom wait over a year for their initial diagnosis. Estimates show that about one percent of the U.S. adult population lives with a form of IBD.

To reach these new findings, the study authors used the electronic health records of individuals living in Denmark to compare 20,000 people with an IBD diagnosis with 4.6 million healthy people without IBD.

The majority of doctors and scientists nowadays believe most patients begin experiencing IBD symptoms roughly a year before their diagnosis, but significant bowel damage can often take place by then, suggesting internal shifts begin far earlier.

Study authors were able to confirm this hypothesis by analyzing a decade’s worth of test results before diagnosis. More specifically, they assessed changes in a series of minerals, cells in the blood, and markers of inflammation. This included fecal calprotectin, a molecule released into the gut during inflammation that is currently used as a marker to determine which people with bowel symptoms warrant further investigations. The team observed changes up to eight years before the diagnosis of Crohn’s disease and up to three years prior to an ulcerative colitis diagnosis.

The researchers looked at a number of clinical tests up to ten years before an inflammatory bowel disease diagnosis, comparing these to healthy controls.

( Vestergaard, M. Cell Reports Medicine.)

Crucially, most of the observed early changes were quite subtle and would have appeared within the normal range for standard blood tests, thus eluding medical detection. Researchers needed a massive dataset to see these subtle shifts across many different markers.

Moving forward, researchers say their next steps are to investigate if treatment or prevention has an impact before symptoms appear and determine if these findings can be further developed to predict who will develop IBD in the future.

“So many young people are affected by IBD. Their lives, hopes and aspirations for the future are turned upside down by a diagnosis and trying to live with a chronic disease. As a young person myself, it gets me. I am happy that our research might help predicting who could potentially suffer from IBD and thus start treatment earlier which would greatly improve their quality of life,” says first study author Marie Vestergaard, a PhD student at the Center for Molecular Prediction of Inflammatory Bowel Disease, PREDICT, at Aalborg University, in a media release.

“Our research shows that the bowel damage we’re seeing at the point of diagnosis is just the tip of the iceberg. So many changes are subtly taking place in the body before the disease takes hold,” explains James Lee, Group Leader of the Genetic Mechanisms of Disease Laboratory at the Crick.

“This has huge implications for prevention as it highlights that there’s a window of opportunity for treatment. We don’t yet know whether preventative measures like changing diet or stopping smoking would stop someone getting these diseases, but this opens the door to that possibility. It also underscores the importance of early diagnosis and treatment, as many of the changes in the gut are likely to have been happening long before people become ill.”

“Our findings are novel and go hand-in-hand with emerging evidence that chronic inflammatory bowel diseases likely have their onset years prior to diagnosis. These incurable diseases affect young individuals and are twice as common as type 1 diabetes. Understanding the exact mechanisms behind their development is essential to ultimately prevent the diseases from occurring. Our unique Danish data resources combined with cross-disciplinary and international collaboration help answering yet unanswered questions critical for patients worldwide,” adds Tine Jess, Director at the Center for Molecular Prediction of Inflammatory Bowel Disease, PREDICT, at Aalborg University.

“There are over 500,000 people in the UK with Crohn’s and Colitis. We know that earlier diagnosis leads to better outcomes for everyone, but waiting lists for diagnostic tests can be long. Not only that, many people put off going to the GP to get their symptoms checked out – either because they don’t realize how serious they could be, or through fear or embarrassment. Anything that could potentially speed up the process of getting an accurate diagnosis is a hugely positive step in the right direction,” concludes Sarah Sleet, CEO of Crohn’s & Colitis UK.

The study is published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine.

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An analysis by NASA’s sea level change science team finds that if a strong El Niño develops this winter, cities along the western coasts of the Americas could see an increase in the frequency of high-tide flooding that can swamp roads and spill into low-lying buildings.

El Niño is a periodic climate phenomenon characterized by higher-than-normal sea levels and warmer-than-average ocean temperatures along the equatorial Pacific. These conditions can spread poleward along the western coasts of the Americas. El Niño, which is still developing this year, can bring more rain than usual to the U.S. Southwest and drought to countries in the western Pacific like Indonesia. These impacts typically occur in January through March.

The NASA analysis finds that a strong El Niño could result in up to five instances of a type of flooding called a 10-year flood event this winter in cities including Seattle and San Diego. Places like La Libertad and Baltra in Ecuador could get up to three of these 10-year flood events this winter.

This type of flooding doesn’t normally occur along the west coast of the Americas outside of El Niño years. The researchers note that by the 2030s, rising seas and climate change could result in these cities experiencing similar numbers of 10-year floods annually, with no El Niño required.

Data from the SWOT satellite shows sea level anomalies – how much higher or lower sea levels are compared to the average height – off the coast of Ecuador and Peru on Aug. 12, 2023, and Oct. 3, 2023. The data indicates the development of an El Niño along the west coast of the Americas.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

“I’m a little surprised that the analysis found these 10-year events could become commonplace so quickly,” said Phil Thompson, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii and a member of NASA’s sea level change science team, which performed the analysis. “I would have thought maybe by the 2040s or 2050s.”

Ten-year floods are those that have a one in 10 chance of occurring in any given year. They’re a measure of how high local sea levels become: The extent of flooding in a particular city or community depends on several factors, including a region’s topography and the location of homes and infrastructure relative to the ocean. Ten-year floods can result in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration classifies as moderate flooding, with some inundation of roads and buildings, and the possible need to evacuate people or move belongings to higher ground.

NASA’s coastal flooding analysis finds that by the 2030s, during strong El Niño years, cities on the west coast of the Americas could see up to 10 of these 10-year flood events. By the 2050s, strong El Niños may result in as many as 40 instances of these events in a given year.

Watching Sea Levels Rise

Water expands as it warms, so sea levels tend to be higher in places with warmer water. Researchers and forecasters monitor ocean temperatures as well as water levels to spot the formation and development of an El Niño.

“Climate change is already shifting the baseline sea level along coastlines around the world,” said Ben Hamlington, a sea level researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and lead for the agency’s sea level change science team.

Sea levels are rising in response to planetary warming, as Earth’s atmosphere and ocean are heating up and ice sheets and shelves melt. This has already increased the number of high-tide, or nuisance, flooding days coastal cities experience throughout the year. Phenomena like El Niños and storm surges, which temporarily boost sea levels, compound these effects.

Missions that monitor sea levels, including the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite and Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, help to monitor El Niños in the near term. SWOT in particular, collects data on sea levels right up to the coast, which can help to improve sea level rise projections. That kind of information could aid policymakers and planners in preparing their communities for rising seas in the next decades.

“As climate change accelerates, some cities will see flooding five to 10 times more often. SWOT will keep watch on these changes to ensure coastal communities are not caught off guard,” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, SWOT program scientist and director of the ocean physics program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.  

To learn more about how NASA studies sea level, visit:

https://sealevel.nasa.gov/

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The antifungal Amphotericin B (AmB) is an old and effective drug—it saved many COVID-19 patients whose compromised immune systems failed to stop secondary fungal infections. But it sometimes causes life-threatening kidney damage. Now, after more than a decade of sleuthing into this toxicity, researchers have not only found an explanation, but used it and a robotic “chemist” to devise a powerful antifungal alternative without any obvious side effects in mice and human cells. And the strategy that led to the discovery of the compound, described today in Nature, may offer a route for detoxifying other antimicrobial drugs.

“This is really inspiring work,” says Leah Cowen, a mycologist at the University of Toronto. “They leveraged molecular insights into how the drug works to dial up the properties they wanted and dial down properties they didn’t want.”

Worldwide, fungal diseases kill some 1.5 million people annually, about the same as tuberculosis or malaria. But in contrast with antibiotics, where dozens of classes of effective drugs are available, there are only three classes of antifungals, and each faces problems of toxicity, growing resistance, or limited effectiveness. “We are very much in need of new antifungals that are safe and effective,” Cowen says.

AmB, produced by a Streptomyces bacterium, was first isolated in 1955 from soils near the Orinoco River in Venezuela. But it wasn’t until 2012 that researchers led by Martin Burke, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), figured out that it kills fungi by stripping them of ergosterol, a key structural support in their cell membranes. Human cells don’t use ergosterol. But cholesterol, a closely related sterol, performs much the same function in human cells. And Burke and his colleagues found that AmB likely causes renal damage by stripping cholesterol out of the membranes of kidney cells and weakening them.

AmB is a large, complex compound that’s painstaking to make from scratch. But in 2015, Burke and his colleagues reported in Science that they had developed a robotic machine to synthesize novel drug compounds from hundreds of premade building blocks. The machine allowed Burke’s team to quickly build and test AmB analogs, each with a slight tweak to its chemical structure, to see whether any had reduced toxicity. One initially promising compound, abbreviated AmBMU, was safer but ultimately proved less effective in animal studies. “We pushed the pendulum too far,” Burke says. “We got rid of the toxicity but lost potency.”

Burke and his colleagues went back to the drawing board. They found that AmBMU’s lower potency wasn’t so much because of a looser binding between it and ergosterol, but the slower pace at which the molecule stripped out the membrane component. Fungi like yeast “could make new ergosterol faster than we could remove it,” Burke says.

They gained ideas on where tweaks to the molecule might speed up its action by studying high-resolution images of AmB binding to both ergosterol and cholesterol recently provided by Chad Rienstra’s group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The atomic resolution models were really the key to zoom in and identify these very subtle differences,” says Corinne Soutar, a UIUC graduate student and the paper’s co-first author.

Burke’s team turned back to its synthesis machine, generating more than 200 additional analogs. In the end, swapping the position of a hydrogen atom and a hydroxyl group on the backbone of the molecule blocked its ability to bind to cholesterol. They also tweaked a carboxylic acid group at the bottom of the molecule, speeding up how quickly the antifungal removed ergosterols. Today in Nature, Burke and his colleagues report that in cell culture the compound, dubbed Am-2-19, is at least as effective as AmB, if not more so, in killing more than 500 different fungal species. Studies on mice showed that Am-2-19 thwarted three common, hard-to-treat fungal infections with no signs of toxicity, even at high doses. And tests on human blood and kidney cells produced no warning signals. Am-2-19 has been licensed to Sfunga Therapeutics, which has launched a phase 1 human safety trial in New Zealand.

Beyond the hope that Am-2-19 will make a safer form of AmB, Burke says the same strategy of teasing out the key molecular interactions could help detoxify other antifungals that are in the same class as AmB and are already on the market. Several such compounds work through the same ergosterol-stripping mechanism and are similarly toxic. And the group’s synthesis machine could help discover them quickly. Burke says: “The lights have been turned on.”

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But then there are ultraprocessed foods. Both frozen chopped spinach and canned sausages are processed, but the latter has undergone much more processing than the former. Ultraprocessed foods undergo an industrial process to move from farm to table. This often includes steps such as hydrogenation, which produces semisolid oils, and hydrolysis, which enhances flavors. These foods also have a variety of additives that help bind the ingredients together, increase their shelf life or make them more palatable.

According to some estimates, nearly 60 percent of the daily calories U.S. adults consume are from ultraprocessed foods. It’s worse for kids and teenagers, whose diet is almost 70 percent ultraprocessed.

But a growing number of studies have linked higher consumption of ultraprocessed foods to a long list of health effects, and scientists are only just beginning to understand why.

WHAT ARE ULTRAPROCESSED FOODS?

Chicken nuggets, chips and hotdogs are considered ultraprocessed, but so are things such as fruit yogurts, mass-produced bread and even some canned foods.

As a rule of thumb, these are any foods that cannot be made in an ordinary kitchen—in other words, they contain an ingredient that is not typically found in homes or one that has undergone an industrial process that a home cook would not be able to replicate.

“A whole lot of things that you could never imagine can be done [to food],” says Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “You can’t tell simply by the ingredients.” For example, he says, “it’ll be flour, but you really don’t know that wheat flour has been decomposed in such complex ways and then put back together.”

Researchers commonly use a four-part scale known as NOVA to categorize foods based on the extent of industrial processing they involve. The categories are unprocessed or minimally processed foods (which include vegetables and eggs); processed culinary ingredients (those that are usually added to food and rarely eaten alone, such as oils, butter and sugar), processed foods (those that are made from a combination of the first two groups, such as homemade bread) and ultraprocessed foods (those made with industrially modified raw ingredients and additives).

When NOVA first came about in 2009, it offered a new way of looking at food beyond its nutritional value. Take fortified breads or protein-rich cookies, for example: Compared with their unfortified equivalents, they would be considered relatively nutritious. But through the lens of NOVA, both are ultraprocessed.

Other researchers, such as Julie Hess, a nutritionist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and former vice president of scientific affairs at the National Dairy Council, contend that NOVA is not the best or most consistent way to identify an ultraprocessed food. She argues that not all ultraprocessed foods are the same, in terms of nutrition. “When we say ultraprocessed food, are we going to include things like canned beans? Are we including canned oranges and dried peaches?” Hess says. “That question of nutrient density isn’t currently reflected in the NOVA categorization system.”

Popkin is proposing another way to identify foods as ultraprocessed in a forthcoming paper. He says that having just one of 12 types of additives—including specific flavors, emulsifiers, foams, thickening agents and glazing agents—as an ingredient is a feature of all ultraprocessed foods. The presence of artificial colouring and flavorings would already be a telltale sign for about 97 percent of these foods, he says.

ARE ULTRAPROCESSED FOODS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH?

Many people believe that eating ultraprocessed food will make them gain weight or cause a host of other health issues, and some evidence backs this up. Research has tied ultraprocessed food consumption to a slew of health conditions, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, some cancers, cardiovascular disease, and even mild depression and anxiety, but a clear mechanism for harm hasn’t been identified.

A landmark paper in 2019 was the first to show a cause-and-effect link between ultraprocessed foods and weight gain. A group of 20 healthy volunteers was confined to a ward at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., where the participants were randomly assigned to receive a diet of either ultraprocessed or minimally processed food for two weeks and then were switched to the other diet for the next two weeks. For example, a person receiving the ultraprocessed diet would start their day with foods such as packaged cereal and a blueberry muffin or croissants and turkey sausages. Someone on the minimally processed diet would instead get Greek yogurt and fruit or a fresh omelet and sweet potato hash.

On average, people in the ultraprocessed diet group consumed about 500 calories more per day, compared with those in the minimally processed diet group. Participants in the former group also ate faster and gained about two pounds after two weeks. On the minimally processed diet, participants ate less and lost about the same amount of weight as they gained on the processed diet. In both settings, participants were given access to about double the number of calories they needed and were told to eat as much as they wanted.

Kevin Hall, the study’s principal investigator and a clinical researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, says he designed the investigation because he thought the NOVA classification system—which doesn’t account for the nutrients contained in different foods—was “nonsense.” He says he matched the foods in both diets to have the same total amount of nutrients, including fat, carbohydrates and fibre, “because I thought the nutrients were going to drive the effects,” Hall says. “And I was wrong.”

Hess, who was not involved in the study, notes some limitations. There were “very, very different” foods in the two groups, she says—in other words, the study didn’t match the diets for quality. Hall says the two diets used different foods because it would have been “very difficult to make homemade versions of many popular ultraprocessed foods while also maintaining precise control over their nutrition content.” Hess’s own lab designed a diet in which 90 percent of the calories were from ultraprocessed foods, and it still met most national guidelines for nutrients—calling into question how useful NOVA is for determining the healthfulness of a food when existing dietary guidelines are used as a benchmark.

Others say findings such as Hall’s study suggest that processing may change how a food affects our body, independent of the nutrients that food contains. “It goes to show how much the [U.S. dietary] guidelines are focused on nutrients,” says Filippa Juul, a nutritional epidemiologist at the New York University School of Global Public Health. “You could have any food and just tune up the nutrients; it doesn’t mean the food is necessarily healthy ... or has the same activity as nutrients that are in [unprocessed] foods.”

Studies have also suggested a link between higher consumption of ultraprocessed foods and a profound change in the composition of gut microbes.

And an altered gut microbiome has been linked to mental health conditions.

The negative effects of these foods might also be a result of what they lack: fibre. The act of industrially processing a food can lower its fibre content, which can make one less satiated after eating it. fibre also feeds bacteria in the gut, and the absence of this nutrient may explain the link between diet, depression and gut health, too.

“There are probably some subcategories [of ultraprocessed foods] that are perfectly fine—maybe even really good for you—and others that are particularly damaging,” Hall says. “I just don’t think we know which ones [are which].” Part of the problem with ultraprocessed foods is that they’re often packed with calories yet leave us craving more.

WHY DO WE LIKE ULTRAPROCESSED FOODS SO MUCH?

Scientists still don’t know for sure why humans gravitate toward ultraprocessed foods. One hypothesis, according to Hall, is that we might not be able to resist their combination of ingredients. Think about the last time you ate just one chip out of a bag—it’s almost impossible not to eat more.

In a 2021 study Hall attempted to compare a low-carbohydrate diet with a high-carbohydrate one to examine the effect on energy intake. When people were presented with meals that were high in both fat and sugar, fat and salt or carbohydrates and salt, people tended to eat more calories, he says. “These are so-called hyperpalatable foods,” Hall adds.

Such foods essentially have artificially enhanced palatability that exceeds the palatability any ingredient could produce on its own—in other words, they have a combination of fat, salt or sugar “that would never exist in nature,” Juul says. Previous research has shown that foods combining fat and carbohydrates were better at activating the brain’s reward system than foods with just one of those ingredients. The ultraprocessed meals in Hall’s study also had more calories per bite than the minimally processed diet.

Some researchers hypothesize that certain foods are addictive. People don’t lose control over eating bananas, but with ultraprocessed foods, they show all the hallmarks of addiction, says Ashley Gearhardt, a professor of psychology and a nutritionist at the University of Michigan. Addictive drugs activate the striatal dopamine system—the brain’s pleasure center—by creating a dopamine spike followed by a rapid crash. “It’s like a quick hit that isn’t sustaining,” Gearhardt says. Ultraprocessed foods mimic nicotine and ethanol in the magnitude of that effect in the brain.

“That makes sense because the reward system of the brain was really shaped by the need to get calories,” Gearhardt says. The addictive agent in food could be one of many things, she says—taste, smell, sugar, fat and additives are all potential culprits. Studies in animals have shown that stopping the consumption of ultraprocessed foods—much like other addictive substances—elicits withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety and agitation.

SHOULD ULTRAPROCESSED FOOD BE REGULATED?

There are people who want to do away with ultraprocessed foods altogether and others who say there are not enough data to warrant any action, according to Hall. “It’s not realistic to say, ‘Well, we’re just going to cut out 50 percent of the food,’” he says. “Who's going to make everybody’s meals?” Ultraprocessed foods are a lot cheaper and more convenient than less processed ones, Hall says. In his study, the minimally processed meals cost 40 percent more to buy and took the chefs longer to prepare.

Spending hours hunched over a kitchen bench to churn butter is not the answer. But reducing consumption of ultraprocessed foods doesn’t mean we have to make everything from scratch.

“There’s an enormous number of things you can do,” says Popkin, who eats unprocessed foods apart from an occasional iced tea sweetened with the sugar substitute Splenda. “There’s a hell of a lot of packaged real food out there.” He suggests looking for minimally processed options that make cooking faster, such as a salad mix or chopped vegetables.

We have to do our best to make healthy choices, Gearhardt says, but everything is stacked against us. As a food scientist herself, she leaves the grocery store befuddled. “It’s easy to say we should just tell the individual to do better while everything in the environment is set up for the industry to profit,” she says.

In an ideal world, we would focus on making healthy alternatives convenient and affordable and reducing marketing to kids, Gearhardt says. “We need to take some courageous action and have some common sense that this food environment is not good for anybody,” she adds.

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Boom and bust don’t hit much harder than in the Bering Sea. After reaching historically high numbers, the population of snow crabs there cratered by 90 percent following a heat wave in 2018 and 2019. Some 10 billion disappeared. Water temperatures had risen 3 degrees Celsius, but that probably didn’t kill the crabs by overheating them, as you might assume.

“It looks like starvation was likely a key player in the collapse,” says fishery biologist Cody Szuwalski of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fishery Science Center, lead author of a recent paper describing the collapse. “There were record numbers of crab, something we've never seen before. And it was also hotter than we've ever seen before. That boosted their metabolism, which meant they needed more food. And that's what points at starvation.”

Metabolic change is a less-talked-about, yet brutal and widespread, consequence of global warming. As ocean temperatures rise, so do the metabolisms of animals from fish to crustaceans to zooplankton. They need more food, and it isn’t always available, which is what appears to have contributed to the snow crabs’ population collapse.

“You heat up a crab or anything else, everything gets faster, up to a certain point when it can't handle it anymore,” says Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution evolutionary biologist Carolyn Tepolt, who studies metabolism but wasn’t involved in the snow crab work. “It isn't just those really high extreme temperatures. It's what happens when you increase that need for energy, essentially, beyond the point that the environment can provide it.”

“Metabolism” refers to the chemical processes that keep a living thing … a living thing. “I usually just define it as kind of the sum of all the chemistry inside the body that provides us energy,” says Earth scientist Curtis Deutsch of Princeton University, who studies metabolism in marine organisms but wasn’t involved in the new study. “For most organisms on Earth—all ectotherms, so pretty much anything except for mammals, which is the vast majority of everything on land and in the ocean—that rate of metabolism accelerates in a kind of exponential way with temperature.”

On average, an organism’s rate of energy consumption goes up by 6 percent for every degree Celsius of warming. “If you're metabolizing—converting energy from food into activity and cellular repair, and all the things that a living thing uses energy for—if that rate has gone up by 6 percent, it means that you need to feed 6 percent faster,” Deutsch says. “It also means that you need to breathe 6 percent faster.”

That’s doubly problematic because of what happens chemically and biologically as the ocean warms. Hotter water is less dense, so it tends to form a layer at the surface, while cooler water sinks to the depths. This is known as stratification. Think about swimming in a lake in the summer—take a dive and the warm water gets real cold real quick.

This warm water at the surface forms a sort of cap that prevents nutrients from mixing upwards. That deprives the microscopic plants known as phytoplankton of the nourishment they need to properly proliferate. That means less phytoplankton to feed the tiny creatures known as zooplankton, and then less zooplankton to feed larger animals like fish. Even the creatures down on the seafloor, like snow crabs, rely on life growing at the surface, which becomes a crucial source of energy once it dies and sinks. Stratification interrupts that dynamic, reducing the flow of organic material into the depths.

At the same time, less gas dissolves in warmer water than in colder water. Unfortunately for the inhabitants of a warming ocean, that means less oxygen is available. But for every degree of warming, an oceanic creature needs on average 6 percent more oxygen as its metabolism speeds up. “So it's sort of a double whammy,” says Deutsch. “You need more and you get less.”

Throw ocean acidification into the mix, and now there are even more problems. As humanity pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more of that gas dissolves in the ocean, which increases the acidity of the water. This is the acidification that’s threatening corals, since it makes it harder for them to build their calcium carbonate skeletons. Creatures with exoskeletons, like crustaceans, are also struggling with acidification, as they have to spend more energy to construct their armor. That, in turn, affects their metabolism. “They have to pay some energetic or metabolic cost for it,” says Deutsch.

What organisms eat might change as well. In lab experiments, marine ecologist Wave Moretto has exposed brown box crabs to different temperatures and offered them clams and mussels. The former prey required twice the force for crabs to crack open with their claws than the latter.

“What we found was that despite the crabs in the warmer temperature being able to generate stronger pinch scores, they were selecting the mussels preferentially that had the lower breaking force, so the easier prey item to eat,” says Moretto, who did the research while at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography but is now at Oregon State University. “Then we saw the crabs in the cold treatment had a really strong preference for the clams, which have a higher breaking force.”

The preference change might have had something to do with the crabs’ nutrient needs changing as their metabolism speeds ramped up. If they’re generating higher pinch forces at higher temperatures, that might also expand the list of the kinds of prey they can tackle. But that may not hold true for other crab species. Other groups of animals, like zooplankton and fishes, might undergo their own subtle dietary transformations as temperatures rise.

Certain species might actually benefit from rising temperatures. “Ultimately, there are going to be winners and losers in climate change—this shake-up of ecosystems in the ocean,” says Szuwalski, the author of the snow crab paper. “So the snow crab was a big loser this time through. But in the Bering Sea, we also had a few other species that seem to benefit from the marine heat wave. Sablefish, they're more in the Bering Sea than we've seen before.” (Sablefish are a deep-water species native to Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.)

Ocean heat is transforming ecosystems; some species are moving north, for instance, as the Arctic rapidly warms. That may introduce new predators for native species to contend with—or alternatively provide more prey for native species to dine upon. The issue of metabolism change adds an extra wrinkle. It shows that a species can be harmed even if it’s not killed outright. These are known as “sublethal effects”: If an animal’s metabolism goes up and it can’t find enough food, it may not starve to death, but its growth might be stunted. “If you have a limited amount of energy to go around, your energy preferentially goes to maintenance,” doing just what it takes to survive, says Tepolt. “Then anything extra can go to extras, essentially—to you doing a little bit better than surviving, maybe growing more or growing faster.”

That may be the difference between being able to reproduce or not. Especially for females, who have to develop eggs, reproduction is extremely expensive in terms of energy. It’s one of the first things a body sacrifices when there’s an energy shortfall. “Life cycle and development rate, as a function of temperature, does matter in terms of whether they can reach some critical life stage or not, and whether they can maintain the population,” says Rubao Ji, a senior scientist also at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “You're more vulnerable, but in the meantime, there are more needy predators.”

Put another way: Higher temperatures mean hungrier mouths to feed. If a fish can’t eat enough to grow big and strong, it might be less likely to escape a bigger predator, and less likely to reproduce. If an invasive species moves into its habitat, that native fish’s population might get squeezed both by supercharged predation and decreased reproduction.

All of this can add up to a mass die-off, driven by the changes in how energy moves through ecosystems. What happened to the snow crabs is but a hint of the wild population swings to come.

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Of course, that isn’t the only area from which items need to be recovered every year. In data recently released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as obtained by FOX News, nearly 300,000 people had to go to the emergency room in 2021 for foreign objects in their bodies, making it the ninth top cause of hospitalizations for unintentional injury.

“Orifices are not made for foreign object intrusion unless it’s a doctor doing it for investigative medical purposes,” Dr. Marc Siegel, a New York University professor, told FOX News.

But despite warnings from health care professionals, it’s eye-opening to learn what has been lodged inside the human body. Mining the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s database reports for specific foreign objects, one Defector blogger offered up an unbelievable list from last year.

We’re talking gummy worms and cheese up noses, steak knives and flashlights down throats, a plastic sword found lodged in an ear and more.

When it comes to rear ends, men are more likely than women to enlist doctor’s removal services, the reported first-of-its-kind American Journal of Emergency Medicine study found. Sex toys account for more than half the items needed to be retrieved from that specific orifice.

The average age of those needing items taken out of their bottoms was 43, and researchers found there was an increase in hospital visits from 2012 to 2021, going from 1.2 per 100,000 people to 1.9.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission’s 2022 data did not necessarily report how people got items stuck in any orifice or how long it took to remove them, but those that did have explanations — such as “patient says he forgot to take foil off foil-wrapped burrito” for foil stuck in throat — are worth the read.

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Climate change would be much worse if it weren’t for the oceans, which have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat humanity has pumped into the atmosphere. That warming of the oceans has already been devastating for the organisms that live there, but it’s also come back to bite us in a more unexpected way: It’s contributing to the destruction of ice sitting on top of Greenland.

That ailing ice sheet (the bit resting on land) contributed more than 17 percent of observed sea level rise between 2006 and 2018, and new research delivers yet more ominous news. (Greenland has much less ice than Antarctica but is losing 270 billion tons of it a year, compared to Antarctica’s 150 billion tons.) Greenland’s northern ice shelves—the ice that floats on the ocean instead of resting on land—have actually lost more than a third of their volume since 1978, thanks to warm sea water eating away at their bellies. Three of these northern ice shelves have completely collapsed since the year 2000, and the five that remain are rapidly deteriorating, in turn destabilizing nearby glaciers.

While ice shelves themselves don’t really contribute to sea-level rise, since they’re already floating in the ocean, they act like dams to regulate the amount of ice discharged into the ocean from the interior of the ice sheet on land. “We see that the ice shelves are getting weaker and weaker and weaker,” says Grenoble Alpes University glaciologist Romain Millan, lead author of a new paper in Nature Communications. “We have observed that in response to this increased melting, the glaciers are retreating, and they are already discharging more ice into the ocean.”

Millan and his colleagues used satellites and modeling to check several aspects of the health of northern Greenland’s ice shelves. For one, satellite imagery allowed them to determine how the total volume and area of ice has declined over the decades. More deeply, they were able to track the “grounding line,” where the ice sheet lifts off land to become a floating ice shelf. As tides go in and out, the ice heaves up and down, movement that is tracked by satellites to pin down the exact location of the grounding lines.

Since ice shelves are shrinking and getting thinner, those lines are quickly retreating inland, where the topography adds still more troubles. Moving from the coast inland, the bedslope is retrograde, meaning the surface of the ground under the ice gets deeper as you move toward the center of the island. “If the grounding line starts to retreat, it may enter an unstoppable retreat because it’s on a retrograde bedslope,” says Millan.

If, by contrast, the slope went up as you traveled inland, it would be harder for the grounding line to retreat. Imagine how far inland floodwaters can travel if the terrain is flat compared to mountainous. “When the grounding moves toward a deeper bed, the amount of ice from the bed to the surface is thicker, which means that the quantity of ice discharged into the ocean is larger,” says Millan. “When moving downward, you are also exposing more ice to a warmer ocean, and consequently more melting, more speedup, more discharge.”

As those northern Greenland grounding lines retreat—by up to 8 kilometers, or 5 miles, in the most extreme cases that the researchers measured—more of an ice shelf’s belly is exposed to saltwater, which is getting warmer and warmer. “The atmospheric circulation which pushes the ocean currents around has been changing, and that has been trending toward putting more water of subtropical origin along the coast of Greenland,” says Eric Rignot, a glaciologist and remote sensing scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who wasn’t involved in the new paper. That means the water can heat up super fast. “You change the winds and it starts pushing more warm water, that’s faster than the time it would take to warm up all these ocean waters along Greenland.”

Indeed, the new study found that melt rates along the bottom of northern Greenland’s ice shelves have been rising dramatically since the year 2000, peaking in 2015. That corresponds with a peak in ocean temperatures in the area. “It’s the case for all the remaining ice shelves across northern Greenland,” Millan says. “This increase in basal melting rate is really well correlated with the increase in ocean temperature in this area of the Greenland ice sheet. What we see is that ice shelves are getting thinner and losing mass.”

Going forward, this insight will help scientists better model the decline of northern Greenland’s ice, and the consequent sea-level rise. “Being able to show how the timing of these large calving, or disintegration, of ice shelves corresponds to increased ocean temperatures, we can get a sense of how sensitive the remaining ice shelves will be,” says Michalea King, a glaciologist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center who studies Greenland’s ice sheet but wasn’t involved in the new paper.

Imagine if you started chipping off the concrete from the face of a dam, bit by bit. As it gets thinner, it weakens, until it can no longer hold water and collapses. Same goes for these ice shelves that act like floating dams, only they’re thinning from the ocean below. And they’re holding back way more water than is held in a reservoir, in the form of Greenland’s ice sheet. “We have already seen examples of some glaciers in northern Greenland, and their floating extensions collapsed,” says Millan. That doubled the discharge of ice into the sea. “If the other glaciers lose their floating ice, we can expect the same kind of behavior.”

Greenland’s ice sheet and shelves aren’t just contending with higher ocean temperatures. Air temperatures are also skyrocketing as the Arctic warms up to four times faster than the rest of the planet. That melts the ice from above as it’s also melting from warmer waters below. “It is definitely getting warmer,” says Earth system scientist Shfaqat Abbas Khan of the Technical University of Denmark, who studies Greenland’s ice but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “But also this region is where you have, I would say, more or less a year-round sea ice. The ice shelves are protected by sea ice, and this is also slowly disappearing.”

This is also happening in Antarctica, which has seen record low levels of sea ice this year. Sea ice is distinct from ice shelves, coming and going seasonally. (It’s that floating, broken-up ice, as opposed to the more cohesive ice shelf.) Though ephemeral, it’s extremely important, acting as a sort of buffer to keep wind and waves from battering and weakening ice shelves. If it disappears as air and sea temperatures rise, that’s yet another threat to the ice shelves of Greenland and Antarctica.

Relatively warm seawater is also eating away at the undersides of Antarctica’s ice shelves, causing grounding lines to retreat and generally accelerating the decline of ice sheets there. Just one of the glaciers down there could add several feet to sea levels if it totally collapsed. Last week, researchers reported how they used a robot to study crevasses on the underside of those ice shelves. Whereas a perfectly flat icy belly would form a protective layer of cold water, preventing warmer seawater from eating away at the ice shelf, these undulations lead to more movement of water. That could help explain why Antarctica’s glaciers are melting faster than predicted by models.

For Greenland, many factors are conspiring to degrade the ice sheet: hotter air and ocean temperatures, less sea ice, and weaker ice shelves to hold back the glaciers on land. But the speeding up of glaciers flowing into the sea is a uniquely daunting threat. “Down the line, that will be the dominant factor,” says Rignot. Melting is crucial, of course, but if “you can make the glaciers flow 10 times faster in the north,” Rignot adds, “that’s something else.”

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Official educational materials aimed at teaching India’s students about Chandrayaan-3, the nation’s third lunar exploration mission, are drawing sharp criticism from some of the nation’s scientists. The teaching guides contain technical errors, misleading content, and pseudoscientific claims rooted in religious texts, the critics say.

“This is a great disservice to science and technology, to education, and the scientific temper,” says Satyajit Rath, president of the All India People’s Science Network (AIPSN), a network of science organizations that has called on India’s Ministry of Education to withdraw the materials.

The ministry has defended the 10 modules for elementary and high school students. “Mythology and philosophy put forward ideas and ideas lead to innovation and research,” the ministry said in a 25 October statement. The guides, it said, reflect “the whole gestalt of India’s association with sky and space.”

The materials, released in English and Hindi on 17 October by the National Council of Educational Research and Training, a body that sets India’s educational curriculum and textbooks, focus on the Chandrayaan-3 mission, which successfully placed a lander and rover on the Moon in August.

Modules for younger students introduce basic concepts about spaceflight and suggest classroom activities, such as building a paper model of the spacecraft. Those aimed at older students discuss the mission’s technology and scientific goals.

The modules also repeatedly highlight India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, with each containing at least one photo of him. Modi’s leadership “played a crucial role in the triumph of Chandrayaan-3 and landed our country’s name on the surface of the moon,” reads one module.

Several modules also suggest India developed advanced space technologies centuries ago—a concept promoted in recent years by Hindu nationalists. One, for example, suggests the mention of flying chariots and palaces in ancient Sanskrit epics “seemingly reveals that our civilization had the knowledge of flying vehicles.” Other ancient texts and myths, it adds, “contain treasures of scientific knowledge on various disciplines including aeronautics (that can make the younger generation feel proud of the legacy inherited by them and take this knowledge system further for new uses).”

“The claim that mythologies … lead to innovation in research is a deeply troubling one on a variety of levels,” says Rath, who calls the materials “a publicity campaign for a triumphal cultural nationalism that treats facts as disposable.”

The modules also contain glaring scientific mistakes, researchers say, many of which AIPSN listed in a 30 October statement. “They have made simple errors like saying Chandrayaan-2 discovered ice sheets on the surface of the Moon,” when in fact instruments detected only water molecules, says Aniket Sule, a science education specialist at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. He fears many teachers “are just going to parrot” those errors to their students because they lack scientific training. “Hardly any teacher is in a position to understand the mistakes,” he says, “and correct them while they are explaining in the class.”

Despite such issues, Rath doubts that the ministry will revise the materials. “In this matter,” he says, “I don’t think that there is going to be any course correction.”

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The floating shelves play a crucial role in regulating the flow of ice into the ocean from glaciers hosting enough ice to ultimately raise sea levels by 2.1 metres (seven feet).

These ice shelves have lost more than 35 percent of their total volume since 1978, with three of them collapsing completely, the study found.

With continued global warming driven by fossil fuel pollution expected to further heat ocean waters, the ice shelves are "extremely vulnerable" to further retreat and even collapse, according to the study published in Nature Communications.

"This could have dramatic consequences in terms of SLR (sea level rise)," the authors said.

They added that this is the area of Greenland with the greatest potential to raise ocean levels, possibly over centuries.

The melting of the ice shelves themselves does not contribute to sea level rise but they exist as "dams" regulating the discharge of ice into the ocean from the ice sheet.

If these natural barriers disintegrate, it may cause the glaciers to dump more ice into the oceans, the study found.

'Significant' rise in melting

Glaciers in this region had previously been considered stable by scientists, unlike other parts of Greenland's ice sheet that began to weaken in the mid-1980s.

But the authors found that the glaciers have started to discharge ice in response to weakening ice shelves, which have been melting from below by warming oceans.

"We have identified a very significant increase in melting since the 2000s which clearly corresponds to a rise in ocean temperatures in this area during that time," lead author Romain Millan, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), told AFP.

The researchers based in Denmark, France and the United States used thousands of satellite images combined with field measurements and climate models to reconstruct the nature of these buoyant glacier extensions.

Greenland's northern glaciers have only started to destabilise in the last 20 years, meaning more ice has been lost than gained.

"The glacier Zachariae Isstrom, for example, which broke loose in 2003 almost doubled the amount of ice it discharged into the ocean," said Millan.

The Greenland ice sheet is a major contributor to global sea level rise, accounting for some 17 percent of the observed rise in water levels between 2006 and 2018.

"What happens to the poles and sea levels in the future depends on the decisions taken by politicians to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," said Millan.

World leaders and climate negotiators will gather in Dubai from November 30 for the latest United Nations summit (COP28) as record-shattering temperatures, rising wildfires and worsening natural disasters heighten alarm about the fate of the planet.

© Agence France-Presse

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It's something that we do naturally, transporting ourselves to other places, recalling past events, or visualizing future scenarios in our minds. This seem to mostly take place in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, and researchers have now shown similar activity in the hippocampus of rats, too.

A team from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) used virtual reality (VR) combined with a brain-machine interface to determine if the rodents could think about traveling to a certain location to pick up a reward of water, even if they weren't actually moving there.

"To imagine is one of the remarkable things that humans can do," says neurologist Albert Lee from HHMI. "Now we have found that animals can do it too, and we found a way to study it."

Here's how the experiments worked: the researchers fitted a custom brain-machine interface to the rats, which mapped their movements through a virtual reality environment via 'imagined' activity in their hippocampus. The rats were placed on top of a spherical treadmill, so they could navigate in VR without actually moving from the same spot.

As the rats 'moved' around, their brain activity was monitored and translated into a personalized "thought dictionary" that linked places in virtual reality with hippocampus activity. This meant that the researchers could link certain patterns of activity to certain places in the virtual space – giving them a window into what was on the minds of the rats.

The setup was then tweaked so that physical movement on the treadmill didn't influence the VR world. It forced the rats to intentionally and voluntarily imagine moving to certain places or moving objects to certain places to get their water – and the brain scans suggested this is indeed what they were doing.

"The rat can indeed activate the representation of places in the environment without going there," says neuroscientist Chongxi Lai, from HHMI.

"Even if his physical body is fixed, his spatial thoughts can go to a very remote location."

The inference is that if the rats can imagine being in a different place, they might also imagine something in the future or remember something from the past – though it's still difficult to be certain about what's going on in the minds of animals. This VR system could enable future research in this area.

Also of note is the fact that the animals didn't need much training to imagine moving through VR, and that they could keep up their mental activity for around 10 seconds, a significant length of time.

"The stunning thing is how rats learn to think about that place, and no other place, for a very long period of time, based on our, perhaps naïve, notion of the attention span of a rat," says biochemist Timothy Harris, from HHMI.

The research has been published in Science.

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Years before she was even sure the James Webb Space Telescope would successfully launch, Christina Eilers started planning a conference for astronomers specializing in the early universe. She knew that if—preferably, when—JWST started making observations, she and her colleagues would have a lot to talk about. Like a time machine, the telescope could see farther away and farther into the past than any previous instrument.

Fortunately for Eilers (and the rest of the astronomical community), her planning was not for naught: JWST launched and deployed without a hitch, then started scrutinizing the early universe in earnest from its perch in space a million miles away.

In mid-June, about 150 astronomers gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for Eilers’ JWST “First Light” conference. Not quite a year had passed since JWST started sending images back to Earth. And just as Eilers had anticipated, the telescope was already reshaping astronomers’ understanding of the cosmos’s first billion years.

One set of enigmatic objects stood out in the myriad presentations. Some astronomers called them “hidden little monsters.” To others, they were “little red dots.” But whatever their name, the data was clear: When JWST stares at young galaxies—which appear as mere red specks in the darkness—it sees a surprising number with cyclones churning in their centers.

“There seems to be an abundant population of sources we didn’t know about,” said Eilers, an astronomer at MIT, “which we didn’t anticipate finding at all.”

In recent months, a torrent of observations of the cosmic smudges has delighted and confounded astronomers.

“Everybody is talking about these little red dots,” said Xiaohui Fan, a researcher at the University of Arizona who has spent his career searching for distant objects in the early universe.

The most straightforward explanation for the tornado-hearted galaxies is that large black holes weighing millions of suns are whipping the gas clouds into a frenzy. That finding is both expected and perplexing. It is expected because JWST was built, in part, to find the ancient objects. They are the ancestors of billion-sun behemoth black holes that seem to appear in the cosmic record inexplicably early. By studying these precursor black holes, as three record-setting youngsters discovered this year, scientists hope to learn where the first humongous black holes came from and perhaps identify which of two competing theories better describes their formation: Did they grow extremely rapidly, or were they simply born big? Yet the observations are also perplexing because few astronomers expected JWST to find so many young, hungry black holes—and surveys are turning them up by the dozen. In the process of attempting to solve the former mystery, astronomers have uncovered a throng of bulky black holes that may rewrite established theories of stars, galaxies, and more.

“As a theorist, I have to build a universe,” said Marta Volonteri, an astrophysicist specializing in black holes at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics. Volonteri and her colleagues are now contending with the influx of giant black holes in the early cosmos. “If they are [real], they completely change the picture.”

A Cosmic Time Machine

The JWST observations are shaking up astronomy in part because the telescope can detect light reaching Earth from deeper in space than any earlier machine.

“We built this absurdly powerful telescope over 20 years,” said Grant Tremblay, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “The whole point of it originally was to look deep into cosmic time.”

One of the mission’s goals is to catch galaxies in the act of forming during the universe’s first billion years (out of its roughly 13.8-billion-year history). The telescope’s initial observations from last summer hinted at a young universe full of strikingly mature galaxies, but the information astronomers could wring from such images was limited. To really understand the early universe, astronomers needed more than just the images; they hungered for the spectra of those galaxies—the data that comes in when the telescope breaks incoming light into specific hues.

Galactic spectra, which JWST started to send back in earnest at the end of last year, are useful for two reasons.

First, they let astronomers nail down the galaxy’s age. The infrared light JWST collects is reddened, or redshifted, meaning that as it traverses the cosmos, its wavelengths are stretched by the expansion of space. The extent of that redshift lets astronomers determine a galaxy’s distance, and therefore when it originally emitted its light. Nearby galaxies have a redshift of almost zero. JWST can handily make out objects beyond a redshift of 5, which corresponds to roughly 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Objects at higher redshifts are significantly older and farther away.

A theorist at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, Marta Volonteri

has long searched for ways to explain how black holes in the

early universe bulked up so quickly.

Photograph: Renata Charikiopoulos

Second, spectra give astronomers a sense of what’s happening in a galaxy. Each hue marks an interaction between photons and specific atoms (or molecules). One colour originates from a hydrogen atom flashing as it settles down after a bump; another indicates jostled oxygen atoms, and another nitrogen. A spectrum is a pattern of colours that reveals what a galaxy is made of and what those elements are doing, and JWST is providing that crucial context for galaxies at unprecedented distances.

“We’ve made such a huge leap,” said Aayush Saxena, an astronomer at the University of Oxford. The fact that “we’re talking about chemical composition of redshift 9 galaxies is just absolutely remarkable.”

(Redshift 9 is mind-bogglingly distant, corresponding to a time when the universe was a mere 0.55 billion years old.)

Galactic spectra are also perfect tools for finding a major perturber of atoms: giant black holes that lurk at the hearts of galaxies. Black holes themselves are dark, but when they feed on gas and dust, they rip atoms apart, making them beam out telltale colours. Long before JWST’s launch, astrophysicists hoped the telescope would help them spot those patterns and find enough of the early universe’s biggest and most active black holes to solve the mystery of how they formed.

Too Big, Too Early

The mystery began more than 20 years ago, when a team led by Fan spotted one of the most distant galaxies ever observed—a brilliant quasar, or a galaxy anchored to an active supermassive black hole weighing perhaps billions of suns. It had a redshift of 5, corresponding to around 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang. With further sweeps of the sky, Fan and his colleagues repeatedly broke their own records, pushing the quasar redshift frontier to 6 in 2001 and eventually to 7.6 in 2021 ­—just 0.7 billion years after the Big Bang.

The problem was that making such gigantic black holes seemed impossible so early in cosmic history.

Like any object, black holes take time to grow and form. And like a 6-foot-tall toddler, Fan’s supersize black holes were too big for their age—the universe wasn’t old enough for them to have accrued billions of suns of heft. To explain those overgrown toddlers, physicists were forced to consider two distasteful options.

Decades ago, Xiaohui Fan, an astronomer at the University of Arizona,

helped discover a string of quasars — bright supermassive black holes

— whose extreme youth and size defied standard theories of black hole

formation.

Photograph: Tod Lauer

The first was that Fan’s galaxies started off filled with standard, roughly stellar-mass black holes of the sort supernovas often leave behind. Those then grew both by merging and by swallowing up surrounding gas and dust. Normally, if a black hole feasts aggressively enough, an outpouring of radiation pushes away its morsels. That stops the feeding frenzy and sets a speed limit for black hole growth that scientists call the Eddington limit. But it’s a soft ceiling: A constant torrent of dust could conceivably overcome the outpouring of radiation. However, it’s hard to imagine sustaining such “super-Eddington” growth for long enough to explain Fan’s beasts—they would have had to bulk up unthinkably fast.

Or perhaps black holes can be born improbably large. Gas clouds in the early universe may have collapsed directly into black holes weighing many thousands of suns—producing objects called heavy seeds. This scenario is hard to stomach too, because such large, lumpy gas clouds should fracture into stars before forming a black hole.

One of JWST’s priorities is to evaluate these two scenarios by peering into the past and catching the fainter ancestors of Fan’s galaxies. These precursors wouldn’t quite be quasars, but galaxies with somewhat smaller black holes on their way to becoming quasars. With JWST, scientists have their best chance of spotting black holes that have barely started to grow—objects that are young enough and small enough for researchers to nail down their birth weight.

That’s one reason a group of astronomers with the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey, or CEERS, led by Dale Kocevski of Colby College, started working overtime when they first noticed signs of such young black holes popping up in the days following Christmas.

“It’s kind of impressive how many of these there are,” wrote Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astronomer at the Rochester Institute of Technology, during a discussion on Slack.

“Lots of little hidden monsters,” Kocevski replied.

Illustration: Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine

A Growing Crowd of Monsters

In the CEERS spectra, a few galaxies immediately leapt out as potentially hiding baby black holes—the little monsters. Unlike their more vanilla siblings, these galaxies emitted light that didn’t arrive with just one crisp shade for hydrogen. Instead, the hydrogen line was smeared, or broadened, into a range of hues, indicating that some light waves were squished as orbiting gas clouds accelerated toward JWST (just as an approaching ambulance emits a rising wail as its siren’s soundwaves are compressed) while other waves were stretched as clouds flew away. Kocevski and his colleagues knew that black holes were just about the only object capable of slinging hydrogen around like that.

“The only way to see the broad component of the gas orbiting the black hole is if you’re looking right down the barrel of the galaxy and right into the black hole,” Kocevski said.

By the end of January, the CEERS team had managed to crank out a preprint describing two of the “hidden little monsters,” as they called them. Then the group set out to systematically study a wider swath of the hundreds of galaxies collected by their program to see just how many black holes were out there. But they got scooped by another team, led by Yuichi Harikane of the University of Tokyo, just weeks later. Harikane’s group searched 185 of the most distant CEERS galaxies and found 10 with broad hydrogen lines—the likely work of million-solar-mass central black holes at redshifts between 4 and 7. Then in June, an analysis of two other surveys led by Jorryt Matthee of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich identified 20 more “little red dots” with broad hydrogen lines: black holes churning around redshift 5. An analysis posted in early August announced another dozen, a few of which may even be in the process of growing by merging.

“I’ve been waiting for these things for so long,” Volonteri said. “It’s been incredible.”

But few astronomers anticipated the sheer number of galaxies with a big, active black hole. The baby quasars in JWST’s first year of observations are more numerous than scientists had predicted based on the census of adult quasars—between 10 times and 100 times more abundant.

Dale Kocevski, an astronomer at Colby College and a member of the CEERS team, was stunned to find that

so many galaxies in the early universe appear to be anchored to voracious supermassive black holes.

Photograph: Gabe Souza

“It’s surprising for an astronomer that we were off by an order of magnitude or even more,” said Eilers, who contributed to the little-red-dots paper.

“It always felt like at high redshift these quasars were just the tip of the iceberg,” said Stéphanie Juneau, an astronomer at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab and a coauthor of the little-monsters paper. “We might be finding that underneath, this [fainter] population is even bigger than just the regular iceberg.”

These Two Go to Almost 11

But to catch glimpses of the beasts in their infancy, astronomers know they’ll have to push well beyond redshifts of 5 and look deeper into the universe’s first billion years. Recently, several teams have spotted black holes feeding at truly unprecedented distances.

In March, a CEERS analysis led by Rebecca Larson, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin, discovered a broad hydrogen line in a galaxy at a redshift of 8.7 (0.57 billion years after the Big Bang), setting a new record for most distant active black hole ever discovered.

But Larson’s record fell just a few months later, after astronomers with the JADES (JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey) collaboration got their hands on the spectrum of GN-z11. At redshift 10.6, GN-z11 had been at the faintest edge of the Hubble Space Telescope’s vision, and scientists were eager to study it with sharper eyes. By February, JWST had spent more than 10 hours observing GN-z11, and researchers could tell right away that the galaxy was an oddball. Its abundance of nitrogen was “completely out of whack,” said Jan Scholtz, a JADES member at the University of Cambridge. Seeing so much nitrogen in a young galaxy was like meeting a 6-year-old with a five o’clock shadow, especially when the nitrogen was compared to the galaxy’s meager stores of oxygen, a simpler atom that stars should assemble first.

The JADES collaboration followed up with another 16 or so JWST observing hours in early May. The additional data sharpened the spectrum, revealing that two visible shades of nitrogen were extremely uneven—one bright and one faint. The pattern, the team said, indicated that GN-z11 was full of dense gas clouds concentrated by a fearsome gravitational force.

“That’s when we realized we were staring right into the accretion disk of the black hole,” Scholtz said. That fortuitous alignment explains why the distant galaxy was bright enough for Hubble to see in the first place.

Extremely young, hungry black holes like GN-z11 are the exact objects astrophysicists hoped would resolve the quandary of how Fan’s quasars came to be. But in a twist, it turns out that not even the superlative GN-z11 is young enough or small enough for researchers to conclusively determine its birth mass.

“We need to start detecting black hole masses at way higher redshift even than 11,” Scholtz said. “I had no idea I would be saying this a year ago, but here we are.”

A Hint of Heaviness

Until then, astronomers are resorting to more subtle tricks for finding and studying newborn black holes, tricks like phoning a friend—or another flagship space telescope—for help.

In early 2022, a team led by Ákos Bogdán, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, started periodically pointing NASA’s Chandra x-ray Observatory at a galaxy cluster they knew would be on JWST’s short list. The cluster acts like a lens. It bends the fabric of space-time and magnifies the more distant galaxies behind it. The team wanted to see if any of those background galaxies were spitting out x-rays, a traditional calling card of a voracious black hole.

Over the course of a year, Chandra stared at the cosmic lens for two weeks—one of its longest observation campaigns yet—and collected 19 x-ray photons coming from a galaxy called UHZ1, at a redshift of 10.1. Those 19 high-octane photons most likely came from a growing black hole that existed fewer than half a billion years after the Big Bang, making it by far the most distant x-ray source ever detected.

Jan Scholtz and Aayush Saxena are members of the JADES team, which analyzed the spectrum of a distant

galaxy and found it to contain a vigorously feeding black hole.

Photograph: Clarissa Cahill (left); Tucker Jones

By combining the JWST and Chandra data, the group learned something strange—and informative. In most modern galaxies, almost all the mass is in the stars, with less than a percent or so in the central black hole. But in UHZ1, mass seems evenly split between the stars and the black hole—which is not the pattern astronomers would have expected for super-Eddington accretion.

A more plausible explanation, the team suggested, is that UHZ1’s central black hole was born when a giant cloud crumpled into a humongous black hole, leaving little gas behind for making stars. These observations “could be consistent with a heavy seed,” said Tremblay, who is a member of the team. It’s “crazy to think about these giant, giant balls of gas that just collapse.”

It’s a Black Hole Universe

Some of the specific findings from the mad spectra scramble over the last few months are bound to shift as the studies go through peer review. But the broad conclusion—that the young universe cranked out a host of giant, active black holes extremely quickly—is likely to survive. After all, Fan’s quasars had to come from somewhere.

“The exact numbers and the details of each object remain uncertain, but it’s very convincing that we’re finding a large population of accreting black holes,” Eilers said. “JWST has revealed them for the first time, and that’s very exciting.”

For black hole specialists, it’s a revelation that has been brewing for years. Recent studies of messy adolescent galaxies in the modern universe hinted that active black holes in young galaxies were being overlooked. And theorists have struggled because their digital models continually produced universes with far more black holes than astronomers were seeing in the real one.

“I always said my theory is wrong and observation is right, so I need to fix my theory,” Volonteri said. Yet maybe the discrepancy wasn’t pointing to a problem with the theory. “Perhaps these little red dots were not being accounted for,” she said.

Now that blazing black holes are turning out to be more than just cosmic cameos in a maturing universe, astrophysicists wonder if recasting the objects in meatier theoretical roles could alleviate some other headaches.

After studying some of JWST’s first images, some astronomers quickly pointed out that certain galaxies seemed impossibly heavy, considering their youth. But in at least some cases, a blindingly bright black hole could be leading researchers to overestimate the heft of the surrounding stars.

Another theory that may need tweaking is the rate at which galaxies churn out stars, which tends to be too high in galaxy simulations. Kocevski speculates that many galaxies go through a hidden-monster phase that sets up a star formation slowdown; they start off cocooned in star-crafting dust, and then their black hole grows powerful enough to scatter the star stuff into the cosmos, slowing star formation. “We might be looking at that scenario in play,” he said.

As astronomers lift the veil of the early universe, academic hunches outnumber concrete answers. For as much as JWST is already changing how astronomers think about active black holes, researchers know that the cosmic vignettes revealed by the telescope this year are but anecdotes compared with what’s to come. Observing campaigns like JADES and CEERS have found dozens of likely black holes staring back at them from slivers of sky roughly one-tenth the size of the full moon. Many more baby black holes await the attention of the telescope and its astronomers.

“All of this progress has been made in the first nine to 12 months,” Saxena said. “Now we have [JWST] for the next nine or 10 years.”

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Tuesday, 7 November

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• When: 6:47 p.m. UTC
• Where: Space Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral, Florida, US
• Why: This is SpaceX’s Transporter 9 rideshare mission. The company will be launching several payloads including the Vigoride 7 space tug and several other satellites. The payloads will be delivered to a Sun-synchronous orbit.

Wednesday, 8 November

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• When: 3:00 a.m. UTC
• Where: Space Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral, Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will be launching 23 Starlink satellites to bolster its Starlink constellation. If you want to have a look at this batch of satellites on apps like ISS Detector then you’ll need to look for Starlink Group 6-27. Like other recent Starlink satellites, these ones have an anti-reflective coating so that they don’t interrupt astronomers as much.

Thursday, 9 November

• Who: CNSA
• What: Long March 3B/E
• When: 11:30 a.m.
• Where: Xichang Satellite Launch Centre
• Why: It’s not clear what the purpose of this mission as the payload is unknown.

Friday, 10 November

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• When: 1:28 a.m. UTC
• Where: SpaceX LC-39A, Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will be launching a Dragon 2 spacecraft on a cargo delivery mission to the International Space Station. It will be carrying the Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE), and the laser communications terminal ILLUMA-T. This mission is part of the Commercial Resupply Service contract that SpaceX has with NASA.

Saturday, 11 November

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• When: 11:08 p.m. UTC
• Where: Space Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral, Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will be launching two O3b mPOWER broadband internet satellites to a medium Earth orbit for SES of Luxembourg. They will provide internet services over much of the world and were built by Boeing.

Recap

• The first launch last week was a Falcon 9 carrying 22 Starlink satellites to orbit. This group of satellites is Starlink Group 7-6.

• Next up, SpaceX launched Starlink Group 6-25 consisting of 23 Starlink satellites.

• The third launch was a Long March 6A carrying the TianHui 5 satellite. It’s going to be used for geographic mapping, land resource survey, scientific experiments, and other missions.

• This week we also got the fifth commercial spaceflight and sixth successful human space mission in six months from VIrgin Galactic.

• In China we got an interesting test mission from private space firm iSpace which did a test flight and landing of its Hyperbola 2 rocket.

• Next, China launched a Long March 7a carrying the TJSW-10 comms tech test satellite. It will be used for multi-band and high-speed comms tech experiments.

• Lastly, SpaceX launched another group of 23 Starlink satellites to orbit. This group is Starlink Group 6-26.

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

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The downside: Next week across most of the U.S., the sun will set well before many folks step foot out of the office, leaving them to run errands or take walks in utter darkness. Come Nov. 5, daylight saving time is out and standard time is in, and will last until March 10.

No need to wait till the midnight hour to prepare for the time change that clocks in early Sunday, when 2 a.m. becomes 1 a.m. Before bed beckons Saturday night, rewind the clock on the microwave, oven, car, or any other device not yet clever enough to make the leap on its own.

Besides scheduling stumbles and sleep habit disruptions, experts say the twice-yearly ritual can have more serious effects on human health.

Many Americans are already sleep-deprived, and a change in time messes with sleep schedules even more, says Dr. Phyllis Zee, a sleep researcher at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, although she says “falling back” and gaining an extra hour is generally easier on the body than “springing forward” and losing one.

Chronic sleep deprivation can increase levels of stress hormones that boost heart rate and blood pressure, and of chemicals that trigger inflammation, research suggests.

“Just that one hour can change the amount of sleep you get, the quality of sleep that you get,” Zee said. Off-kilter sleep can affect people’s ability to multitask, stay alert, and even maintain their balance, making them more prone to accidents.

Molly Hart, spokeswoman for AAA’s Auto Club Group, warned that there may be an uptick in accidents on the road following the time change.

“With daylight savings coming to an end, what people really need to be focused on is their driving now in the afternoon when it’s darker earlier,” and when they may be feeling drowsy, she said.

Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and most of Arizona do not observe daylight saving time.

Some members of Congress have pushed to end the back-and-forth and make daylight saving time permanent.

The U.S. Senate in March 2022 passed a bipartisan bill named the Sunshine Protection Act, but it stalled in the House. The bill was re-introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio in March of this year, then referred to committee, where it has remained idle.

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