The idea behind the technology is that plots of such plants could be grown in areas that are being monitored for pollutants. Instead of having to repeatedly go in and obtain soil samples, scientists could just analyze aerial photos of the plots – if the plants were red, that would mean the targeted pollutant was present.

For the study, researchers from the University of California, Riverside genetically altered receptor proteins in the thale cress plant (Arabidopsis thaliana).

Ordinarily these proteins bind with and react to another protein known as abscisic acid (ABA), which the plant produces in response to drought conditions. When the receptor proteins detect ABA, they prompt the plant to close tiny pores (called stomata) in its leaves and stem – doing so helps keep water already in the plant from evaporating.

The UC Riverside scientists had previously discovered that it was possible to alter the receptor proteins in such a manner that they would bind with chemicals other than ABA, prompting different plant responses. For this study, the receptors were altered to bind with a banned highly toxic pesticide known as azinphos-ethyl. When the receptors do so, they cause the plant's normally green leaves and stem to turn red.

Importantly, the metabolism of the plant isn't adversely affected – for instance, it can still conserve water in dry conditions. Additionally, the technology could likely be adapted to detect other pollutants.

"We’re trying to be able to sense any chemical in an environment," said UC Riverside's Prof. Sean Cutler. "Other pesticides but also drugs like birth control pills or Prozac in the water supply, things people are worried about being exposed to. These are applications within reach now."

A paper on the research was recently published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

Source: University of California, Riverside

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A new planetary report card confirms that humans are making little progress on confronting the climate crisis.

“Humanity is failing, to put it bluntly,” says Bill Ripple, an Oregon State University ecologist. “Rather than cutting greenhouse gas emissions, we’re increasing them. So we’re not doing well right now.”

Ripple is co-author of research published on October 24 in BioScience that offers a snapshot of Earth’s status on 35 “planetary vital signs” with regards to climate. The analysis shows that humans have reached new extremes on 20 of these measurements, including global gross domestic product, fossil fuel subsidies, annual carbon pollution and glacier thinning. Overall, the report considers human activities, such as deforestation and meat consumption, as well as the planet’s responses to those activities, including characteristics such as ice loss and temperature changes.

Ripple also says that in addition to the 35 formal variables, most of which he and his colleagues began to track in late 2019, the team is closely watching global estimates of populations that are experiencing undernourishment. Though undernourishment can have political causes, it is often tied to climate factors such as droughts and floods that damage crops.

Where possible, the analysis is based on data through the present, although some variables without freshly reported measurements rely on slightly older data. But there’s no denying that the picture is grim. “Many climate-related records have been broken by enormous margins in 2023,” Ripple says. For example, July was the hottest month ever recorded, and September was the most anomalously warm month, both by a significant amount.

The researchers also noticed a steep increase in global disasters tied to climate, including flooding, wildfires, heat waves and landslides. Ripple and his colleagues identified 14 disasters since October 2022 that were “definitely” or “likely” exacerbated by climate change. For example, a separate analysis found that heat waves that baked parts of North America and Europe this summer would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. All told, these disasters killed thousands of people and affected millions; several individual events caused more than $1 billion in damage. In fact, the U.S. has already set a record for “billion-dollar disasters” this year, with several months left.

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “The 2023 State of the Climate Report: Entering Uncharted Territory,” by William J. Ripple et al., in BioScience. Published online October 24, 2023

“What we’ve been noticing is that as temperatures are creeping up, climate-related disasters are leaping up,” Ripple says. “We’re getting this big surge in climate disasters.”

Even more concerning, he says, is that many of these disasters are hitting communities that have historically produced very little carbon pollution.

Although the U.S. has been hit by extreme heat and wildfires, South America and Southeast Asia have also sweltered, while Libya and northern India have seen extreme floods. “The less wealthy countries that had little to do with creating climate change are having the most vulnerability to the climate disasters,” Ripple says.

Because of that, the report highlights the importance of confronting the climate crisis with justice in mind—a key aspect of this kind of work, says Joyeeta Gupta, a sustainability scientist at the University of Amsterdam, who was not involved in the new research. “We are repeating ourselves over and over again about the nature of the problem and the impacts,” Gupta says, noting that scientists have known for decades that the climate is changing because of human activity.

“Natural scientists very often don’t include justice issues,” she adds. “I think it’s really important that we bring this justice issue much more centrally to our narrative because otherwise we won’t solve these problems; we’ll just keep telling people that there are problems.”

Although many factors Ripple and his colleague studied are complex and difficult to tackle individually, not all are. For example, the team highlights that government subsidies of fossil fuels were at their all-time high in 2022, the most recent year out of the 13 for which data are available. The researchers cite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 as a destabilizing factor that prompted the steep increase that more than doubled subsidies over their previous level. “Governments are subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, which seems a little counterproductive,” Ripple says.  “Immediately, we can’t do a lot to stop the disasters, but we do have a lot of control over these subsidies.”

Without rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels and toward renewables, the concentration of carbon dioxide will continue to rise in the atmosphere, causing sea levels to continue to rise, ice to melt, more heat waves to occur and oceans to become more acidic.

Fortunately, Ripple and his colleagues have found that humans have made progress in developing wind and solar power. In another positive note in the report, deforestation globally and in the Amazon—a particularly vital region for climate—has decreased.

Ripple’s 35 “vital signs” are just one of several frameworks that scientists use to understand how the planet is changing as the climate crisis unfolds.

A separate project announced last month that humans have crossed six of nine planetary boundaries beyond which it becomes difficult to support the societies our species has built. The boundaries include variables, such as biodiversity and nutrient flow, that are not included in the new analysis, as well as some of the vital signs, such as deforestation and ocean acidification.

Ripple says he hopes that policymakers and citizens take the analysis seriously. “Life on planet Earth is under siege,” he says. “Whether you look at planetary boundaries or our planetary vital signs, it’s telling a similar story in that this is going to take major attention by humanity and big changes.”

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A shuddering supervolcano in California is simmering down, not ramping up, thanks to a giant lid that is covering its magma reservoir, new research finds.

The Long Valley Caldera in the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains has been unleashing earthquake swarms on a regular basis since 1978, raising concerns that it might be at risk of erupting. That would be a big deal, as the caldera was created 767,000 years ago with an explosion that released 156 cubic miles (650 cubic kilometers) of ash — enough to bury Los Angeles 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) deep in dust.

A new study published Oct. 18 in the journal Science Advances, however, finds that the volcano's piping-hot reservoir is covered with a layer of cooled, crystallized magma-turned-rock. The researchers found that as the upper layer of the reservoir cools, it releases volatile gasses in bubbles and burps that cause earthquakes and the ground to inflate — which suggests the seismic activity in the area is not caused by an impending massive eruption.

"We don't think the region is gearing up for another supervolcanic eruption, but the cooling process may release enough gas and liquid to cause earthquakes and small eruptions," study author Zhongwen Zhan, a geophysicist at Caltech's Seismological Laboratory, said in a statement.

Some of the Long Valley Caldera temblors are quite dramatic. For example, in May 1980 alone, there were four magnitude-6 earthquakes in the region, Zhan said. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the caldera produced earthquake swarms between 1978 and 1983, between 1990 and 1995, in 1996, and between 1997 and 1998. It also triggered a series of quakes around 2014 and 2019, though at a lower rate than during the earlier swarms.

There are two possible reasons why the Long Valley Caldera might make the earth shake. One is that magma is moving around the subsurface, which would raise the risk of a future eruption. The other is that in the process of cooling, the caldera's magma chamber is letting off liquid and gas that rises and deforms the ground.

To investigate which is responsible, Zhan and his colleagues used an earthquake-monitoring technique called distributed acoustic sensing. This method involves laying out long fiber-optic cables to sense even very small earthquakes. Over 12 months, the researchers detected more than 6,000 temblors. They used these waves to create images of the subsurface, much like an ultrasound uses sound waves to create pictures of internal organs.

The results showed that the less-hazardous hypothesis for the caldera's shaking is the most likely. A lid of crystallized magma about 5 miles (around 8 km) below the surface covers the cooling magma reservoir of the caldera, which is largely situated around 9.3 to 12.4 miles (15 to 20 km) deep.

Though this structure does not preclude the possibility that magma will move to shallower depths in the future, it suggests that the caldera is calming down rather than gearing up.

The researchers next plan to use more cable to get better images of the magma chamber itself, further delving into the question of whether the caldera will ever pose a danger to Central California.

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A new crystal can bend light like a black hole would, causing the light to bow away from its usual straight path.

This phenomenon, called pseudogravity, could be used in 6G communication technology, according to the authors of the new study, published Sept. 28 in the journal Physical Review A. This next-generation communication would transmit information wirelessly at ultrahigh speeds. Because the crystal mimics what happens when light passes by black holes and other ultradense space objects, the new technique could also be used to study so-called quantum gravity, a theory that would unite quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

According to relativity, light and other electromagnetic waves can be influenced by gravitational forces. This is called gravitational lensing, and astronomers use it all the time to study massive space objects such as quasars. Recreating such an effect in a laboratory environment is difficult, given the need for a huge amount of mass, but scientists have long suspected they could mimic the phenomenon using crystalline materials.

To do so, Kyoko Kitamura, a professor in the graduate school of engineering at Tohoku University in Japan, and her colleagues started with photonic crystals, which are crystals of two or more arrangements that are arrayed in a regular, grid-like pattern and are capable of slowing light as it passes through them. The team gradually distorted these crystals, disrupting the crystalline lattice, and then shined beams of light through the crystals and watched them deflect.

"Much like gravity bends the trajectory of objects, we came up with a means to bend light within certain materials," Kitamura said in a statement.

Manipulating light in this way is one potential pathway for next-generation communications technology, which will require sending information in the terahertz range, or above 100 gigahertz. (5G technology maxes out at 71 gigahertz.) Researchers believe that creative manipulation of light is one way to reach these frequencies. The new material could also have applications in research.

"Academically, the findings show that photonic crystals could harness gravitational effects, opening new pathways within the field of graviton physics," study co-author Masayuki Fujita, an associate professor at Osaka University in Japan, said in the statement.

A graviton is the hypothetical quantum particle that mediates the force of gravity. No such particle has been observed yet, nor have scientists entirely worked out what this particle would even look like in theory.

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A unique method of obtaining underground water enabled the Garamantes to thrive in the Sahara more than 2,000 years ago, long after the region became a desert. But their demise is a cautionary tale for modern regions, like California, that rely heavily on ancient groundwater for their modern supply.

"They were lucky to have this world-class aquifer," Frank Schwartz, a hydrogeologist at The Ohio State University, told Live Science. "But it was a non-sustainable system, and it eventually ran out."

Schwartz, who studies the hydrogeology of ancient civilizations, described the rise and fall of the Garamantes on Oct. 16 at the Geological Society of America's annual conference in Pittsburgh.

Historians once thought the Garamantian kingdom was a minor power in the Fezzan region of North Africa — now in southwestern Libya — until it was subdued by the expanding Roman Empire in the first century.

Related: Plantation slavery was invented on this tiny African island, according to archaeologists

But since the 1960s, archaeology has revealed that the kingdom was larger and more powerful than previously thought, with several cities fed by water transported by gravity in underground tunnels, or foggaras, from an ancient aquifer in the sandstone rocks of the nearby highlands — a major feat of ancient engineering.

"This was the first society that grew up in Africa without a river," Schwartz said. "In Egypt, they had the Nile flooding every year. But here there was no river, nothing."

Saharan kingdom

A diagram of a qanat, a water-tunneling technology from ancient Persia that spread to Libya more than 2,000 years ago.

(Image credit: Samuel Bailey via Wikimedia Commons)

Schwartz said the Garamantes descended from Neolithic cattle herders who lived in the region between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago, during the last "Green Sahara" phase — a relatively wet phase of the Saharan climate that occurs roughly every 23,000 years and is caused by changes in Earth's rotational axis.

But the climate changed and the Sahara became"hyper-arid" by the time the Garamantian kingdom arose in about 400 B.C., he said.

Archaeologists think the Garamantes extracted groundwater with different technologies at different times, including "shadoof" wells, in which water is lifted in a bucket using a counterbalanced lever, and "dalw" wells, in which water is lifted in a leather bag by harnessed animals.

But the greatest innovation was the foggaras, which carried water to the Garamantian cities.

Schwartz said the technology had originated in Persia, where the tunnels were known as qanats, and was probably transmitted to the Garamantes by traders on desert caravans. But most Persian qanats drained aquifers that were replenished each year from melting snow — something not seen in the Fezzan.

Instead, the Garamantian foggaras tapped an ancient subterranean aquifer that had formed in the nearby sandstone highlands tens of millions of years earlier and had been "topped up" during the Green Sahara phases.

Schwartz notes it was only a matter of good luck — "serendipity" — that the Garamantes lived near the aquifer and that the foggaras functioned at all. "This shouldn't have worked here," he said. But luckily, it did, and the water from the foggaras enabled the Garamantes to establish a powerful kingdom in the middle of a desert.

Digging for water

Archaeologists have now identified more than 460 miles (750 kilometers) of foggaras in the Fezzan region, and they were probably dug by people enslaved by the Garamantians, Schwartz said. Some of the longest foggaras are more than 4 miles (6.5 kilometers) long and cut through sand, gravel and solid sandstone; vertical access shafts descend to the underground tunnels roughly every 16 to 33 feet (5 to 10 meters).

Andrew Wilson, a professor of archaeology of the Roman Empire at the University of Oxford who wasn't involved in the presentation, said one of the oldest foggaras has been dated from organic matter in its mud-brick shaft lining to between 391 B.C. and 206 B.C. but many were younger.

Wilson told Live Science in an email that it wasn't clear how much water the foggaras extracted from the ancient aquifer and to what extent the aquifer was replenished by the region's occasional rains.

But there were "signs of stress" that reflected a falling water table, such as a deepening and extending of the foggaras, he said. But such measures could not compensate for the aquifer's overuse: "Ultimately the foggaras failed after several centuries."

The water level of the aquifer eventually fell below the levels that it could feed into the foggaras, leading to a decline in the Garamantian kingdom after about A.D. 100, Schwartz said. But the region's underground water is still being exploited by Libya's Great Man-Made River Project, which began in the 1980s and now supplies water to farmland and millions of people in the north of the country, he said.

The demise of the Garamantes illustrates the dangers of exploiting ancient supplies of groundwater, as is now being done in California and much of Iran, Schwartz noted.

"The Garamantes had serendipity for a while, but it was not sustainable," he said.

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Neglected dangers of thermal pollution — Science News, October 20, 1973

Most urban dwellers have experienced the swelter of a summer night in the city, but higher temperatures in the atmosphere over such “heat islands” may have more insidious effects, which urban planners seldom consider.… Urban-rural temperature differences can be as high as 18 degrees [Fahrenheit].

Update

Today, excess heat from pavement and buildings cause U.S. cities to run half a degree to 4 degrees Celsius (1 to 7 degrees F) higher on average than outlying areas. This heat island effect is expected to worsen as a side effect of climate change. Because urban areas are expanding, that means their growing populations are at risk for heat-related illness or death, scientists reported in 2019 in Environmental Research Letters. To stay cool, some cities are switching to roofs and surfaces that reflect a lot of sunlight and heat. Adding trees helps too: Trees provide shade and emit water vapor that lowers air temperature, almost like if a city could sweat (SN: 4/14/18, p. 18).

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The regions were selected across 32 states and Puerto Rico, and were designated after being recognised as having ‘high-potential’.

These high-potential regions are investing heavily in their specialized industries, which range from quantum computing and autonomous systems, to precision medicine and clean energy.

Investing in America

The CHIPS and Science Act (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) - a bipartisan act put in place to boost manufacturing and research surrounding semiconductors - authorized the incentive as part of the Biden-Harris administration's plans to invest in domestic industry.

These 31 designations were selected from 400 applications made by local governments, labor and workforce partners, and industry associations who submitted plans for enhancing industry in their respective regions.

Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development, Alejandra Y. Castillo, said, “These outstanding Tech Hubs Designees exemplify place-based economic development strategies at their best: combining federal resources with regional assets, expertise, and coalitions to implement transformational opportunities. As each region develops its own strategy to catalyze innovation and job creation, the entire nation grows more secure and more competitive.”

The 31 Tech Hub regions were selected as part of ‘Phase 1’ of the programme. Strategy Development Grants were also awarded by the Economic Development Administration (EDA) to 29 regions to help boost planning and coordination for prospective Tech Hub regions. 

“Innovation, cutting-edge research, and creativity can be found in every community across America. Thanks to President Biden’s Investing in America Agenda, the Tech Hubs program is seizing that potential and investing in regional consortia that will boost U.S. manufacturing, create more good-paying jobs and bolster U.S. global competitiveness,” said Deputy Secretary of Commerce Don Graves.

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Xue, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Ashvin Vishwanath, a professor at Harvard University, won the award together for their pioneering theoretical and experimental studies on the collective electronic properties of materials that reflect topological aspects of their band structure.

The award is acknowledged as the highest international honor in the field of condensed matter physics. As China's first winner of the award, Xue is highly regarded by the international physics community for his contributions to the field of topological insulators and his work on the quantum anomalous Hall effect.

He is also a professor at Tsinghua University and president of the Southern University of Science and Technology. He and his team were the first to experimentally observe the quantum anomalous Hall effect in 2012, and they published their findings in the journal Science in 2013.

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A medical doctor pleaded guilty to using the dark web in a murder-for-hire plot against his girlfriend.

The individual paid a total of over $25,000 worth of bitcoin to carry out the murderous plot, which was averted by authorities.

$25,200 in Bitcoin for a Murder Plot

According to a press release by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), James Wan, a 54-year-old medical doctor from Georgia, tried to employ the services of a hitman through the dark web marketplace to have his girlfriend killed.

The medical doctor started interacting with the dark web marketplace on April 12, 2022, and placed an order to murder his girlfriend. Wan transferred half of the full payment amounting to $8,000 in BTC to an escrow wallet and provided personal details of his girlfriend, including her name, Facebook account, address, and car license plate, to make it easy for the hitman to do their job.

However, the initial 50% down payment went to the wrong BTC address, causing the medical doctor to transfer another $8,000 worth of bitcoin, this time to the correct address. Wan sent another bitcoin payment worth $8,000 a week later to complete the payment for the job and also preferred the murder to look like an accident.

The medical doctor, meanwhile, seemed to grow impatient, wanting the murder to happen as soon as possible.

“How soon should work be done? I have submitted an Order and curious how quickly it should be carried out? Is there a way I can find out any progress? If there is anyone in my location?”

According to the DOJ, Wan sent an additional $1,200 in Bitcoin on May 10, 2022, following BTC’s price drop, to make sure that the escrow account contained the full amount required for the murder job.

More Individuals Paying in BTC for Murder

Unfortunately for the medical doctor, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stopped the murder from happening, with Wan confessing to his sinister move and canceling the order he placed on the dark web marketplace. His sentencing is expected to happen on Jan. 18, 2024.

According to a statement by Keri Farley, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta:

“Despite his cowardly concealment on the dark web, Wan’s cold-hearted murderous plot was averted due to the exceptional work of our team. He will now face the full consequences of the criminal justice system.”

Meanwhile, Wan is not the only individual who has paid a hitman in BTC to kill a person. In August 2022, a Mississippi woman received a 10-year sentence for hiring an assassin to kill her husband. The woman paid $10,000 worth of BTC to carry out the job.

Another medical doctor was sentenced to eight years in prison for paying hitmen BTC valued at over $60,000 to kidnap his wife and beat up a former colleague. Another individual also got a six-year jail term for paying bitcoin to a hitman to kill a child.

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PARKERSBURG, W.Va. (WTAP) - Everyone feels sad or anxious from time to time. But when is it time to search for professional behavioral health care?

Dr. Amelia McPeak, the Medical Director of the Behavioral Health Unit at Camden Clark Medical Center, said it’s important to know when you or someone you know is in a mental health crisis. “If they’re making statements that they want harm themselves or kill themselves,” McPeak said. “If they’re feeling completely hopeless and worthless. Or if they are having thoughts of how they’re going to kill themselves.”

In these cases, McPeak said you should reach out to the 988 crisis hotline.

Outside of crisis, McPeak said mental health issues can warrant seeking treatment when they start to affect your ability to have healthy relationships or perform necessary tasks at work or at home. “Let’s say, all of sudden you’re arguing and aggravated by your significant other when you aren’t normally,” she said. “All the sudden you don’t have the energy to get up and go to work anymore.”

McPeak said experiencing severe sadness and a loss of interest in activities for more than two weeks could be diagnosable as a major depressive episode.

“So if that lasts for several weeks in a row and is interfering with your relationships and work, then, you need to get treatment,” McPeak said.

Outside of depression, McPeak said there are warning signs for psychosis that could be associated with other severe mental illnesses. “People starting to show sort of erratic, agitated and aggressive behaviors,” she said. “Talking about things like wanting to seek revenge on people or wanting to harm people. People not sleeping at all, right? Starting to isolate and pulling themselves away from other people.”

Knowing warning signs is one thing, but actually seeking treatment is a big step. McPeak said there’s still a lot preventing people from seeking treatment. “I think the fundamental thing is there’s a lot of stigma still about mental health conditions,” McPeak said. “And people think that they will be judged as sort of somehow defective or less than if people know that they’re seeking mental health treatment.”

Despite that stigma, McPeak said seeking treatment can make a huge difference in people’s lives. “Even mild mental health conditions can be treated very effectively,” she said. “And people don’t realize that if you get treatment for your generalized anxiety disorder, for your major depressive episode, then you can really thrive despite that.”

McPeak said people sometimes worry a therapist will tell them how to live their lives. She stresses this isn’t the case. “Therapy is about empowering you to make the best decisions for you,” McPeak said. “It’s not the therapist’s job to tell you and dictate every part of your life, or to make you in this child-parent role with your therapist. Your therapist is like a life coach that helps you figure out what you want to do for you.”

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Psychologists will tell you that this is completely normal. Relationships are dynamic entities—as much as we’d like to bottle the initial love and excitement and make those feelings last forever, that’s not the reality of marriage. There are highs and lows, ups and downs, and sideways and backward. The only predictable part of marriage is the change you will both inevitably experience as time goes on.

Relationship scientists have devised various assessments to take stock of the current state of your marriage or long-term relationship. One such test, called the Marital Satisfaction Scale, is shown below. Think about how much you agree/disagree with each statement to see if your relationship might need extra care.

1. My partner and I understand each other perfectly.
2. I am pleased with the personality characteristics and habits of my partner.
3. I am happy with how we handle role responsibilities in our marriage.
4. My partner understands and sympathizes with my every mood.
5. I am happy about our communication and feel my partner understands me.
6. Our relationship is a success.
7. I am happy about how we make decisions and resolve conflicts.
8. I am happy about our financial position and how we make financial decisions.
9. My needs are being met in my relationship.
10. I am happy with how we manage our leisure activities and the time we spend together.
11. I am pleased with how we express affection and relate sexually.
12. I am satisfied with the way we each handle our responsibilities as parents.
13. I have never regretted my relationship with my partner, not even for a moment.
14. I am satisfied with our relationship with my parents, in-laws, and friends.
15. I feel good about how we each practice our religious beliefs and values.

While the results of tests like these can offer a present-moment snapshot of the state of your relationship, it’s important to remember that your partnership is in a perpetual state of evolution. And, while that means different things to different couples, researchers have identified a common sequence of marital evolution. Here’s what that looks like for many couples.

The 6 Stages Of Marriage Evolution

1. The loving relationship. In this initial stage, each partner finds joy in fulfilling the other's needs. There’s an expectation that each partner’s needs will be reciprocated and marriage serves to solidify this sense of love and care. The couple is able to deepen their understanding of each other irrespective of the distractions of daily life.
2. The honeymoon is over. In this stage, the dynamics shift as one partner fails to meet the other’s expectations, leading to disappointment and pain. The belief in mutual responsibility for each other’s well-being persists, but behaviors become more manipulative, with attempts to please the partner aimed at restoring the initial state of complete love. Love and care are no longer unconditional, and partners oscillate between being critical and feeling hurt or disappointed when the relationship falls short of the ideal state.
3. Getting even. Disappointment and resentment transform into anger, leading to a power struggle marked by frequent retaliatory measures. The struggle serves as a defense mechanism against ongoing disappointment in the inability to reclaim the initial loving relationship. Arguments center around control issues, such as money, sex or time spent together. In extreme cases, extramarital affairs may occur as a means of hurting the spouse. The power struggle reflects a reaction to unmet expectations of unconditional love and acceptance, with couples attempting to control each other through power dynamics.
4. Hanging in. Spouses, emotionally worn out and facing the threat of separation, divert their attention to other aspects of life rather than addressing existing conflicts. Despite the diminishing romantic love, commitment to the marriage remains, and the couple focuses on shared interests for the benefit of the family, like building a house, raising children or job advancement. While satisfaction in the relationship declines, there’s a positive connection as the couple collaborates on joint enterprises.
5. Doing you’re own thing. Spouses acknowledge the fantasy of expecting the other to fulfill their dependency needs. This realization prompts increased independence and self-confidence as individuals seek gratification alone. The pursuit of happiness shifts from the spouse to external sources, marking a phase of reawakened passion but also a recognition of the limitations of the relationship.
6. Growing up. The final stage is characterized by an acceptance of reality, with a shift in focus to the present. Individuals in this stage develop self-reliance and recognize the necessity of maintaining a separate emotional identity for a mature relationship. Success in this stage involves accepting responsibility for one's pleasures and pains and an increased availability to relate to others, especially one's mate, in a more complete way.

Keep in mind that it is not guaranteed that every couple will experience each of the stages. It is not even guaranteed that they happen in this order.

The most important thing to take away from research on marital evolution is that all marriages and long-term partnerships have the potential to improve. Even when you feel like all hope is lost, remember that your relationship is constantly evolving. Psychologists don’t have all the answers, but we can say this for sure: How you feel about your marriage next year will be different than how you feel about it today.

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Bitcoin was last up 10% at $33,030. Smaller rival ether was up 6% at $1,763.

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Few places are as inhospitable as the top of Llullaillaco, a 6700-meter volcano on the border between Chile and Argentina. Winds howl nonstop and no plants live there; daytime temperatures never get above freezing and plummet even more come nightfall. Oxygen levels are just 40% of those at sea level, too low for mammals to live there —or so biologists thought until 3 years ago when a research team captured a live leaf-eared mouse at its summit. Now new work shows this animal was not a fluke. The team has found other leaf-eared mice on additional volcano tops, and genomic studies of these summit dwellers and their lower elevation relatives confirm the rodents make their homes nearly 7000 meters above sea level, making them the highest dwelling vertebrate found so far. (Some birds soar higher but appear not to dwell at those elevations.) The team has also come across five other mouse species living above 5000 meters on various mountains in the Central Andes.  

The genomic results and other evidence reported today in Current Biology  “lay to rest any doubt that mammals live at these really extreme altitudes,” says Grant Mcclelland,  a comparative physiologist at McMaster University who was not involved with the work. “It expands our understanding of the environmental limits of animals, especially mammals.”

The cold temperatures and low oxygen associated with high altitudes have long been thought to set a limit on the heights where cold-blooded and even warm-blooded animals can permanently live. “Mammals in general are not very good at dealing with low oxygen environments,” says Catherine Ivy, a comparative physiologist at the University of Western Ontario. They require oxygen to convert food into energy and the colder the environment, the more energy they need. So, whereas a 1000-kilogram hairy yak can thrive at 5000 meters, small animals living at those heights shed heat faster and were expected to have trouble generating enough energy to keep warm, says Sahas Barve, an evolutionary ecologist at  Archbold Biological Station. (The previous elevation record holder for mammals was pikas, a rabbit relative, found nearly 6200 meters up on Mount Everest a century ago).  

Hints that some rodents could live at even higher altitudes emerged 50 years ago, when archaeologists studying Inca religious sites in Andes mountain summits came across mice naturally mummified by the dry cold. But researchers assumed the rodents were not local and had instead hitchhiked a ride with Inca people visiting the remote sites. Then in 2013, two mountaineers summitting Llullaillaco filmed a mouse scurrying across the snow. That and other mouse sightings by climbers prompted Jay Storz, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln who specializes in high-altitude adaptations, to investigate. He; Guillermo D'Elía, a systematist and mammalogist at the Austral University of Chile; and other South American colleagues went on their first 3-week expedition in 2020. D’Elía had to leave the trip early, so Storz sent him a text message about catching the record-high, leaf-eared mouse. “I couldn’t believe it,” D’Elía recalls.  

On that expedition and four subsequent forays up 21 peaks in the Central Andes, they and colleagues found the mummified remains of 13 leaf-eared mice above 6000 meters and photographed or caught dozens of live members of the species (Phyllotis vaccarum), as well as other mouse species at above 5000 meters. Overall, the group trapped almost 500 mice—about half were P. vaccarum—representing 18 species. For five species, the collected specimens established new elevation records, the team reported on 23 August in bioRxiv.

For the humans, the extremely cold nights and low oxygen levels made sleep and concentration difficult and slowed their progress. Even so, “every new place we have a new mix of species,” Storz says. “It’s a little bit like the deepest depths of the ocean.”

The new Current Biology study focuses on genomes of these mice. Jeffrey Good, an evolutionary genomicist at the University of Montana, and colleagues sequenced P. vaccarum from different elevations in depth. The mice have not diverged much genetically, they found. “I’m surprised that one species goes from sea level to 6739 meters,” D’Elía says. Biologists often find that along such a large elevation gradient, an animal specializes into subspecies and even new species. Storz thinks the leaf-eared mouse originally evolved in up high and is gradually expanding into lower elevations.

Still, the DNA analyses did reveal some differences within the species. Leaf-eared mice living above 6000 meters had genomes more similar to one another than to their lower-dwelling kin, the team reports. “It’s really cool to see that they were closely related,” Ivy says. “It helps solidify that these mice were actually breeding and residing at these altitudes.” 

A view from the summit of Volcán Salín (6029 meters) where researchers found mummified leaf-eared mice.JAY STORZ

Other lines of evidence back this conclusion. The team found several burrows above 6000 meters, and soil samples taken along paths thought to be traveled by mice revealed the DNA of rodent-specific microbes there, but not off those paths. And radiocarbon dating of the naturally mummified mice showed they lived no more than 350 years ago—long after the Incas stopped visiting the summit.

These mice “likely inhabit these locations permanently rather than being temporary visitors,” agrees Matthew Webster, an evolutionary geneticist at Uppsala University.

Because the mice live at least 650 meters above the volcanoes’ vegetation line—and sometimes thousands of meters above—what they eat is a mystery. A preliminary analysis of the DNA in the animal’s stomachs suggests lichens are big part of their diet, Storz says.

It’s also not clear how the mice stay warm. Early data suggest the Andes mice do not have the same genetic alterations that help deer mice living 4350 meters high in the Rocky Mountains cope with the cold, Storz says. He and colleagues have established a lab colony of the Llullaillaco rodents and other high-altitude mice in Chile to study their unique physiologies.

Whatever their adaptations, “I might add leaf-eared mice to my list of ‘extremophiles’ normally reserved for microorganisms,” Mcclelland says. Their existence shows it’s important “to not underestimate the capacity for species to invade and adapt to seemingly inhospitable environments.”

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In the study, the researchers interviewed pre-school children aged 3–6 years about their experiences of family life and conflict. The interviews focus on children's emotional experiences. The study included 17 children whose parents participated in the voluntary "Triple P" parenting program through municipal pre-schools in Uppsala. The children were permitted to withdraw their participation at any time during the interviews to go to their parents who were in an adjacent room.

The results show that the children were able to describe both negative and positive aspects of their family relationships. They talked about escalating conflicts with their parents, but also about positive moments together.

"We have titled the article 'They yell and I yell back' because we think that quote captures how the children perceived that they were responding to their parent's angry tone. The children gave several examples of situations that escalated, where the parent and child got stuck in conflicts that ended with fighting and shouting; situations that the children described as difficult experiences," explains Anton Dahlberg, one of the researchers behind the study.

Several children sought comfort from their siblings or pets when things got tough at home, such as after a fight with their parents or when they got hurt.

"We found that the children looked for help from others around them when they were sad or angry. While that could be deemed positive, conflicts between parents and children often remained unresolved. But the children also described positive experiences of making up after a fight, and how the relationship could be repaired in a good way," adds Karin Fängström, co-author of the study.

The researchers are now calling for the inclusion of children's perspectives in future research on parenting and parenting support to better understand and support families. This would represent an important step towards improving parenting and family life.

"We think the results could be useful for people working with children, such as pre-school teachers and health care professionals, but also serve as a general encouragement for people to listen to children," notes Dahlberg.

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The 2023-2024 US Winter Outlook map for precipitation.

NOAA

 

As its name implies, the jet stream is essentially a river of fast-moving air in the atmosphere at about the altitude where airplanes fly. It is typically a few hundred miles across, and jets can indeed save a lot of fuel if they can fly within this air current, generally from west to east.

 

Jet streams also have significant implications for our weather on the ground, as they more or less steer storm systems that affect the mid-latitudes. That is, they in large part determine whether parts of the United States—which lies almost entirely in the mid-latitudes between the tropics and poles in the Northern Hemisphere—will see stormy or serene weather.

 

As always with weather, the situation is complex. But one of the more useful signals in a forecaster's arsenal is the El Niño–Southern Oscillation in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which vacillates between warmer sea surface temperatures (El Niño), cooler ones (La Niña), and neutral conditions. This broad pattern has widespread weather implications, including the location of the jet stream.

 

You probably know that we've been in an El Niño pattern since late spring. This is one reason why the summer of 2023 was so incredibly hot, as the addition of El Niño goosed the background warming of climate change after several La Niña years. Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Columbia University, who specialize in the Southern Oscillation, now predict that El Niño will peak late this fall into the winter months. It will be a fairly strong El Niño, with implications for this winter and—more speculatively—for next summer, which should be hot again.

Winter outlook

When El Niño is present during the winter months, it generally has a pronounced effect on the Pacific jet stream. Instead of being variable in its track, often entering North America near the state of Washington and southern British Columbia, it more consistently tracks into California and Mexico's Baja peninsula. This brings a more southerly storm track.

 

Since this pattern is what we'll see this winter, we can have a reasonably high confidence in a seasonal forecast for the United States. So when NOAA released its official outlook for the coming winter last week, it's no surprise that they're predicting a warmer and mild winter for the northern United States (and southern Canada, although it is not explicitly included in the US government agency's forecast). The southern half of the country should see near-normal conditions.

 

The more interesting change comes in precipitation. Consistent with a more southerly jet stream, the northern tier of the United States should see a fairly dry winter. This may well mean less snow in the Great Lakes region of the country. However, the more southerly part of the country is likely to see an enhanced storm pattern, which generally means more rainfall.

 

This should be beneficial to parts of New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, which are in the throes of an "exceptional drought" after an extremely hot summer in which high pressure dominated and there was relatively little precipitation.

 

“During late October, heavy precipitation is likely to result in drought improvement for the central US," said Brad Pugh, operational drought lead with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. "El Niño with its enhanced precipitation is expected to provide drought relief to the southern US during the next few months."

The bigger picture

These are only broad, background patterns, of course. This does not mean the upper Midwest won't see some snowstorms or seriously cold weather this winter. Texas, you may recall, saw one of its coldest winter storms in the last half century in early 2021, which knocked out power to millions in the state. This very cold weather came amid a La Niña winter, which is supposed to bring milder conditions to the southern United States. So, as always, the utility of seasonal forecasts is relatively low.

 

The other wild card, of course, is climate change. We saw unprecedentedly hot conditions this summer for much of the world, including the hottest temperatures ever recorded in parts of the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. What this all means for older, established weather patterns, we can't really say. All we can really know is what George R.R. Martin told us decades ago: "Winter is coming."

 

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In the last hard days of World War I, just two weeks before world powers agreed to an armistice, a doctor wrote a letter to a friend. The doctor was stationed at the US Army’s Camp Devens west of Boston, a base packed with 45,000 soldiers preparing to ship out for the battlefields of France. A fast-moving, fatal pneumonia had infiltrated the base, and the ward he supervised was packed full of desperately sick men.

“Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face,” he wrote to a fellow physician. “It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible.”

No one knew what was slaughtering the men, killing 100 a day just at Devens and more than 57,000 by the time the last military companies were demobilized in 1919. It took years to understand that the illness was the roaring return of a mild flu that had sprung up in Kansas the year before and traveled to Europe with the earliest US deployments, a crushing second wave that would sweep the world.

The death toll of the “Spanish” flu (which did not arise in Spain but was covered in its newspapers because they had no wartime censorship) counted at least 50 million people, many times the recorded deaths from Covid-19. Amid that toll, the account of its assaults on Camp Devens has always stood out—not just for the dread it embodies but also for the victims it describes. It is assumed in medicine that infectious outbreaks preferentially kill the very old and the very young, a curve that looks like a U when you plot ages and deaths together. But the mortality curve of the 1918 flu was a W, with a middle peak of people between 20 and 40—young and healthy, as the Devens military recruits would have been.

Ever since, the narrative of the 1918 flu has been that it was a unique killer, taking down all ages no matter the state of their health, and mysteriously most lethal to people whose immune systems were most robust. Now, though, an analysis of skeletons of people who died in 1918 shows that story may not be correct. Their bones retain evidence of underlying frailty, from other infections or malnutrition. That finding could both rewrite the history of 1918 and affect how we plan for pandemics to come.

“This has a generalizable conclusion, which is that epidemics don’t strike neutrally, a bolt out of the blue,” says Andrew Noymer, a demographer and epidemiologist and associate professor at UC Irvine, who was not involved in the work but studies the interplay between tuberculosis and the 1918 flu. “They strike differentially, and people who are worse off to begin with are going to be even worse off at the far end.”

The analysis, publishedby biological anthropologists Amanda Wissler of McMaster University in Canada and Sharon DeWitte of the University of colourado–Boulder, uses a set of more than 3,000 skeletons preserved in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The bones, collectively known as the Hamann-Todd Human Osteological Collection, came from people who died between 1910 and 1938 but whose bodies were never claimed. Because they had been hospital patients or residents of the county workhouse, the bodies retained their identities and other data, including not just names, ages, and sex, but also ethnicities, causes of death, and measurements taken while they were autopsied. In 2006, the museum said it was the largest and most data-rich skeletal collection in the world.

Among the 3,000 skeletons, 81 are from people who died when the pandemic hit Cleveland, roughly September 1918 through the following March. The researchers took those, along with a control group of 288 from people who died before the flu arrived, and looked for evidence that they had experienced health stress. The indicators they chose were unhealed lesions on the surface of the tibias, the front bones in the shins. Those lesions would indicate that the normal process of remaking bone, which occurs throughout life, had been disrupted by trauma, malnutrition, or chronic illness—but not by flu infection, because it killed too rapidly to have any effect on bones.

If the historical narrative of 1918 was correct, then the flu victim skeletons would include more healthy individuals than frail ones, compared to the skeletons of people who died before 1918. Or if the shock of young healthy people dying in such numbers had distorted memories—making it seem that more fell ill than really did—then perhaps healthy and frail would have been present in equal numbers. But neither of those were true. The bones showed that, during the seven months the flu visited Cleveland, people of any age who had visible signals of frailty were 2.7 times more likely to die.

Which is not to say that healthy people did not die also. A tricky aspect of the analysis was that the 1918 flu killed more of every class of people: healthy and sickly, young and old. So many died that “there was actually less of a difference in risk compared to what was seen prior to the pandemic,” says DeWitte, a professor of anthropology at colourado who uses burial sites to study selective mortality in the Black Death. “Yes, the 1918 flu disproportionately killed frail people. But this was a novel pathogen that killed a huge number of people—so there were more people who appeared healthy who died during the 1918 flu than would have died prior to 1918 flu.”

The researchers have to allow for the chance that the Cleveland collection may be unique. Because their remains were left unclaimed, the individuals may have been poor or disconnected from social networks—though given conditions in 1918, they may have had families who died before they did. And because they lived in an urban area, they may have belonged to minority groups who found opportunity in cities—and who might have suffered discrimination that further undermined their health.

But even those caveats would reinforce, rather than undermine, the study’s central finding: that the mortality of 1918 was not different from other epidemics, which disproportionately harmed the vulnerable as well as the young and old.

“If you are compromised by infectious diseases, like tuberculosis or whooping cough or measles, early in life, or if you are not able to get enough protein or fats into your body, then by the time you're 20 to 30, you're going to be really susceptible to an acute novel virus, like the one we saw in 1918,” says Taylor van Doren, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alaska–Anchorage who studies the impact of the 1918 flu on Newfoundland. “Health in early childhood can determine underlying frailty and vulnerability.”

Researchers with no connection to the work see clear lessons in it. As far back as the Black Death, and as recently as Covid, the people who suffered the most were the least affluent, the least socially powerful, the least able to advocate for themselves in municipal systems that were not built to serve them. The results reinforce that protecting the probable victims of future epidemics requires changing the conditions that put them at risk.

“At the time of a pandemic, there is always an assertion that it’s a great equalizer, that the wealthy will be dropping to the same degree as the poor. And in retrospect, that is never true,” says Rachel Mason Dentinger, a historian of biology and medicine and an assistant professor at the University of Utah. “What emerges every time is that social determinants of health play a huge role in how diseases affect people disproportionately.”

The story told about the 1918 flu was that it was so different from past epidemics, and so apocalyptic in its onslaught, that nothing could be done to counter it. The skeletons of 1918 rebuke that notion. What they demonstrate instead is that the health of individuals helps protect a whole society—and that ensuring the public’s health between epidemics may be the best defense against the havoc they wreak when they arrive.

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It was about 3am on a night shift in May last year when Amazon worker Christine Manno tried to retrieve a box stacked high in the warehouse in St Peters, Missouri. She was 30ft in the air, strapped to a harness and standing on the edge of the raised platform of a truck.

She was recovering from operations on her injured hands for carpal tunnel syndrome, a neurological disorder, and the weight of the box shot pains through her neck and back. “It was like an electric shock,” she said.

Manno was initially on restricted duties but has been stuck at home from her injury since last July on sick pay. A few years ago, a worker like Manno would have had scant chance of redress, but she is now part of an organising committee at the St Peters warehouse demanding action over Amazon’s working conditions.

“People are getting their parcels in one or two days, but behind the scenes it’s exhausting,” said Manno last week. “The [targets] are unsustainable. I am leaning off a truck attached by a harness lifting cases weighing 40 to 50lb. And this is over a 12-hour shift. Amazon is breaking down our bodies, young or old.”

It is not just Manno and her fellow workers calling Amazon to account. From her Missouri workplace to fulfilment centres in the UK and Europe and warehouses in India, workers are demanding union rights and an overhaul of the digital giant’s working practices. They also want a greater slice of Amazon’s global revenue, which was $514bn (£423bn) in 2022.

This week, campaigners, politicians and unions will gather at a summit in Manchester called Make Amazon Pay to call for international action over workers’ rights, market abuse and tax. It will convene at a conference centre at the Mechanics’ Institute, where the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was founded in 1868.

Protests are planned around the world on 24 November, Black Friday. The GMB union has announced four days of strikes in November, including Black Friday, of more than 1,000 workers at Amazon’s Coventry warehouse.

Amazon is also under pressure from regulators. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced last month it was suing Amazon for anti-competitive strategies, including overcharging sellers, stifling innovation and suppressing competition.

“We haven’t tried to rein in a monopoly this large for decades,” said Emily Peterson-Cassin, digital rights advocate at Public Citizen, a US advocacy organisation supporting the Make Amazon Pay summit. “This could and should be a tipping point.”

It is a potential crisis for Amazon, with growing calls for it to be broken up. Some believe it has got too big and should no longer be the “referee” and a retailer on a marketplace it controls.

The FTC, headed by Lina Khan, a prominent expert in the anti-monopoly movement, seeks a permanent injunction to “pry loose” Amazon’s monopolistic control.

In Jeff Bezos’ first letter to shareholders after Amazon went public in 1997, he said the company was vigilant and maintained a sense of urgency in its long-term pursuit of market dominance, with a relentless focus on customers. More than two decades later, Amazon has more than 200 million Prime members and dominates online retail. The customers it zealously pursued, with a typically seamless service, are now a captive market.

Critics say that service quality has slumped and its sellers are being squeezed for fees. A recent Washington Post article said the proliferation of ads on product searches meant that as a place to find items it was becoming “a tacky strip mall filled with neon signs pointing you in all the wrong directions”.

Cory Doctorow, the commentator and author of The Internet Con, describes how Amazon has gone through a digital lifecycle he calls “enshittification”. Financial surpluses, he says, are first directed to users; then, once the users are locked in, to suppliers; and finally to shareholders, at which point the platform becomes degraded, or in Doctorow’s words “a useless pile of shit”.

“Amazon boasts about its $31bn advertising business, but it’s not really advertising,” said Doctorow. “It’s ‘pay for play’ where merchants buy the right to be shown on the search result page ahead of the best match. These are often deceptive offers, similar to what you may have wanted, but lower quality or higher price.”

He added: “These digital monopolists are not smarter than people who cornered markets before. They’re not wizards or geniuses. They’re the same sharp operators we’ve always had, operating with less constraint and more powerful tools.”

Richard Allen, a campaigner for retailers against online market abuse, said he refused to sell his products on Amazon when he operated a record business. “I said: ‘You’ll get to see my sales. You’ll get to know my customers. Why would I do that?’ But people fell for this idea that Amazon was a better platform to have their goods on because it was more visible.”

As a retailer, Amazon had the upper hand over every seller on its platform, he said, because it operated the marketplace: “I don’t think you should be allowed to operate a platform and also be a retailer on it. The conflict is too great.”

A report in June by the Amsterdam-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations found that, between 2017 and 2022, Amazon tripled earnings from fees for independent sellers in Europe.

It’s not just small retailers who are counting the cost of doing business with Amazon. Its employees around the world complain they are suffering from inadequate pay and burnout.

Rachel Fagan, GMB organiser, said there were now about 1,000 union members at the Coventry warehouse, where the workforce last year was the first to take legally mandated strike action against Amazon in the UK. Fagan said workers were demanding better pay but also considered performance targets were unfair.

She said: “In the middle of winter, people are dressed like they are going to the gym, with T-shirts, shorts and trainers, because of the physical work. It’s really hard work and it has a toll.

“If you work in any other warehouse, you get a target on how many boxes you pack a day. But at Amazon the algorithm bases [the target] on the average picking that day. People don’t know the target, so everyone is working at full capacity, and this is the reason people get worn out.”

Workers in Amazon centres across the world are calling for a change in workplace practices. One worker in India who spoke to the Observer said she would take part in action on Black Friday to press for work targets to be achievable, for working hours to be no longer than eight hours a day and for better pay rates. She works 10-hour days, five days a week, earning about £100 a month.

Amazon said in a media briefing last week it planned to automate many repetitive tasks at warehouses with robots. It is testing Digit, a two-legged robot that can grasp and lift items. Union officials say whatever innovations are in the pipeline, the workforce needs better representation.

Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union, an international union for service industries, said: “Amazon’s unchecked power needs to be curbed. One step governments should take is stronger labour laws and stronger enforcement that would help stop Amazon’s union-busting.”

Between January and August, the US Department of Labor has cited Amazon for workplace violations on six occasions, including violations at warehouses in Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, New Jersey and New York. Bernie Sanders, chair of the senate committee on health, education, labour and pensions, which is investigating Amazon’s workplace practices, says conditions in US warehouses are dangerous and illegal. Amazon has said it strongly disagrees with Sanders’s assertions.

Amazon says it is a trusted partner for millions of sellers worldwide and the FTC action was misguided. It said its platform was good for competition, consumers and sellers.

The company said working in a warehouse was a rewarding job at Amazon, with excellent pay, workforce support and comfortably paced work with breaks. A spokesperson said: “We invest, invent and innovate in safety, going above and beyond the basics right across our business. Performance metrics are regularly evaluated and built on benchmarks based on real-life and attainable performance history.”

In response to reports of the proliferation of ads on product searches, the company said: “We offer hundreds of millions of items to millions of customers, and it’s our job to bring together each individual customer with the best single product for them – all in a matter of seconds. This is no easy feat, and we work hard every day to strike the right balance between organic search results, merchandising and advertising.”

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China's natural resources department also conducted on-site investigations on the land use of Foxconn enterprises in Henan and Hubei provinces and elsewhere, the nationalist tabloid the Global Times reported. It did not elaborate on the investigations or the timing of them.

"Legal compliance everywhere we operate around the world is a fundamental principle of Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn)," the company said in a statement, without addressing the allegations. "We will actively cooperate with the relevant units on the related work and operations."

Zhang Wensheng, deputy dean of the Taiwan Research Institute of Xiamen University, told the Global Times the audit and land use investigations was a normal procedure that would apply to any enterprise suspected of violating laws and regulations.

"Foxconn's subsidiaries are obliged to actively cooperate with audits and investigations, and if there are indeed violations of laws and regulations, they should admit mistakes and accept penalties and step up rectification," Zhang said.

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Hold a conversation while emotional, intoxicated, or sleepy, you might notice one's voice can be affected by a host of biological factors; a fact that opens up the opportunity for AI to spot subtle changes that might develop with shifts in health.

We should note that the study was carried out by scientists from Klick Labs, who have a vested interest in developing and selling this AI detection technology. However, their findings have been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and are well worth taking a look at to see if type 2 diabetes detection can be improved.

"Current methods of detection can require a lot of time, travel, and cost," says Jaycee Kaufman, a research scientist at Klick Labs. "Voice technology has the potential to remove these barriers entirely."

The team asked 267 participants – some with type 2 diabetes, and some without – to record a fixed phrase six times a day into a phone app, for a period of two weeks. A total of 18,465 recordings were then processed to extract 14 different characteristics from the vocals, including pitch and intensity.

The researchers used a set of these recordings to train the AI on what a person's voice sounds like, based on factors like their sex, age, BMI, and whether they had type 2 diabetes or not. They used the remaining samples to test what the AI had 'learnt'.

Factoring in considerations like age and sex, the model was able to spot type 2 diabetes to an accuracy level of 89 percent for women and 86 percent for men.

Interestingly enough, the key vocal signals that identified type 2 diabetes were different for men and women. In men, intensity and amplitude variation were most important; in women, variations in pitch were the main giveaway.

The researchers admit larger and more diverse groups of people need to be tested to validate these results, but the early findings are positive. Right now, diagnosing type 2 diabetes requires blood to be taken, followed by a lengthy wait for analysis and a report. This method requires little more than access to a smartphone app.

While 1 in 11 adults worldwide have been diagnosed with the condition, researchers think hundreds of millions of people don't know they're living with type 2 diabetes. Being able to reduce that number would also mean being able to put treatments in place earlier, and reducing the costs of managing diabetes in the population.

"Our research highlights significant vocal variations between individuals with and without type 2 diabetes and could transform how the medical community screens for diabetes," says Kaufman.

The research has been published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Digital Health.

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The COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing, but in May officials ended its designation as a public health emergency. So it's now fair to ask if all our efforts to slow the spread of the disease—from masking, to hand washing, to working from home—were worth it. One group of scientists has seriously muddied the waters with a report that gave the false impression that masking didn't help.

The group's report was published by Cochrane, an organization that collects databases and periodically issues “systematic” reviews of scientific evidence relevant to health care. This year it published a paper addressing the efficacy of physical interventions to slow the spread of respiratory illness such as COVID. The authors determined that wearing surgical masks “probably makes little or no difference” and that the value of N95 masks is “very uncertain.”

The media reduced these statements to the claim that masks did not work. Under a headline proclaiming “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing,” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote that “the mainstream experts and pundits ... were wrong” and demanded that they apologize for the unnecessary bother they had caused. Other headlines and comments declared that “Masks Still Don't Work,” that the evidence for masks was “Approximately Zero,” that “Face Masks Made ‘Little to No Difference,’” and even that “12 Research Studies Prove Masks Didn't Work.”

Karla Soares-Weiser, the Cochrane Library's editor in chief, objected to such characterizations of the review. The report had not concluded that “masks don't work,” she insisted. Rather the review of studies of masking concluded that the “results were inconclusive.”

In fairness to the Cochrane Library, the report did make clear that its conclusions were about the quality and capaciousness of available evidence, which the authors felt were insufficient to prove that masking was effective. It was “uncertain whether wearing [surgical] masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses.” Still, the authors were also uncertain about that uncertainty, stating that their confidence in their conclusion was “low to moderate.” You can see why the average person could be confused.

This was not just a failure to communicate. Problems with Cochrane's approach to these reviews run much deeper.

A closer look at how the mask report confused matters is revealing. The study's lead author, Tom Jefferson of the University of Oxford, promoted the misleading interpretation. When asked about different kinds of masks, including N95s, he declared, “Makes no difference—none of it.” In another interview, he called mask mandates scientifically baseless.

Recently Jefferson has claimed that COVID policies were “evidence-free,” which highlights a second problem: the classic error of conflating absence of evidence with evidence of absence. The Cochrane finding was not that masking didn't work but that scientists lacked sufficient evidence of sufficient quality to conclude that they worked. Jefferson erased that distinction, in effect arguing that because the authors couldn't prove that masks did work, one could say that they didn't work. That's just wrong.

Cochrane has made this mistake before. In 2016 a flurry of media reports declared that flossing your teeth was a waste of time. “Feeling Guilty about Not Flossing?” the New York Times asked. No need to worry, Newsweek reassured us, because the “flossing myth” had “been shattered.” But the American Academy of Periodontology, dental professors, deans of dental schools and clinical dentists (including mine) all affirmed that clinical practice reveals clear differences in tooth and gum health between those who floss and those who don't. What was going on?

The answer demonstrates a third issue with the Cochrane approach: how it defines evidence. The organization states that its reviews “identify, appraise and synthesize all the empirical evidence that meets pre-specified eligibility criteria.” The problem is what those eligibility criteria are.

Cochrane Reviews base their findings on randomized controlled trials (RCTs), often called the “gold standard” of scientific evidence. But many questions can't be answered well with RCTs, and some can't be answered at all. Nutrition is a case in point. It's almost impossible to study nutrition with RCTs because you can't control what people eat, and when you ask them what they have eaten, many people lie. Flossing is similar. One survey concluded that one in four Americans who claimed to floss regularly was fibbing.

In fact, there is strong evidence that masks do work to prevent the spread of respiratory illness. It just doesn't come from RCTs. It comes from Kansas. In July 2020 the governor of Kansas issued an executive order requiring masks in public places. Just a few weeks earlier, however, the legislature had passed a bill authorizing counties to opt out of any statewide provision. In the months that followed, COVID rates decreased in all 24 counties with mask mandates and continued to increase in 81 other counties that opted out of them.

Another study found that states with mask mandates saw a significant decline in the rate of COVID spread within just days of mandate orders being signed. The authors concluded that in the study period—March 31 to May 22, 2020—more than 200,000 cases were avoided, saving money, suffering and lives.

Cochrane ignored this epidemiological evidence because it didn't meet its rigid standard. I have called this approach “methodological fetishism,” when scientists fixate on a preferred methodology and dismiss studies that don't follow it. Sadly, it's not unique to Cochrane. By dogmatically insisting on a particular definition of rigor, scientists in the past have landed on wrong answers more than once.

We often think of proof as a yes-or-no proposition, but in science, proof is a matter of discernment. Many studies are not as rigorous as we would like, because the messiness of the real world prevents it. But that does not mean they tell us nothing. It does not mean, as Jefferson insisted, that masks make “no difference.”

The mask report—like the dental floss report before it—used “standard Cochrane methodological procedures.” It's time those standard procedures were changed.

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Shock waves from the war between Israel and Hamas are rocking the scientific community in the region and around the world.

In Israel, universities are mourning scientists and others killed in the 7 October surprise attack by Hamas militants. Hamas, widely considered a terrorist organization, rules the Gaza Strip. Academic laboratories are emptying as foreign graduate students return home and young academics report for military service. Some science continues, says Asher Cohen, president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI), but “we cannot maintain full research facilities.”

In the Gaza Strip, researchers say many of the Palestinian enclave’s few and already beleaguered scientific institutions have been damaged by Israeli air attacks, and scientists are struggling to find safe havens. “The priority isn’t science—the priority is staying alive,” says Marwan Awartani, president of the Palestine Academy for Science and Technology, which is based on the West Bank.

Elsewhere, the war is forcing research funders to remake plans. Yesterday, for example, the European Commission announced it would be giving all applicants an additional week or more to complete upcoming requests to several major grant programs. “We offer our support to those affected by the recent hostilities,” Iliana Ivanova, the European commissioner for innovation, research, culture, education and youth said in a statement.

Israel declared war on Hamas on 8 October, soon after the group’s operatives murdered more than 1300 Israelis and foreign nationals, most of them civilians, and kidnapped 200 others. The death toll in Gaza stands at more than 3500, according to Palestinian officials.

After the Israeli military called up more than 300,000 reservists, colleges and universities in Israel postponed the start of the fall semester until at least early November. Some have turned their dormitories into housing for reservists or shelters for Israelis displaced by the war.

At Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, most of its 242 international postdoctoral students have departed, often at the insistence of their home countries, said President Daniel Chamovitz. The university is located just 41 kilometers from the Gaza border and within reach of rockets fired by Hamas and its allies. At least 50 Ben-Gurion students, staff, and faculty were killed in the Hamas attack, university officials say, including theoretical physicist Sergey Gredeskul and mathematician Viktoria Gredeskul, who were married. Others are being held hostage by Hamas.

The large number of dead has forced Chamovitz to develop a mourning protocol for the university. It ensures that at least one member of the administration attends every funeral and every shiva–the 7 days of Jewish mourning.

Several of Ben-Gurion’s research labs are still functioning, but at less than peak capacity, Chamovitz said. Postdocs in data science or who are writing journal articles continue to work, and the university has decided to continue paying scholarships for the next month, in the hope that the situation will stabilize.

At HUJI, biomedical researcher Yuval Dor says five of the 20 members of his laboratory, which focuses on diabetes and disease detection, have left for military service. “Everybody’s distracted. … Everyone knows people who were hurt or killed or kidnapped,” Dor says. “Experiments have pretty much come to a halt.” The lab was also starting a new company, but Dor fears potential investors will now shy away.

Dor says he’s been heartened by the “dozens and dozens” of messages of support he’s received from colleagues abroad. Still, he says, “It is heartbreaking to shift from focusing on disease diagnosis to contemplating methods for identifying the DNA of victims."

At the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, some international students have insisted on staying despite warnings to leave, President Uri Sivan says. Their support “is inspiring,” he says.

In Gaza, the situation is dire, says Awartani, a former education minister for the Palestinian Authority, which presides over the West Bank. Even before the current war, Israel’s blockade of Gaza made it extremely difficult for Palestinian researchers to receive funding or attend conferences overseas, and for foreign researchers to work in Gaza’s universities. Israel often blocked the importation of scientific equipment, citing security concerns.

Now, much of Gaza’s limited scientific infrastructure is in ruins, Awartani says. Two major institutions–the Islamic University of Gaza and Al-Azhar University–have suffered extensive damage from Israeli air strikes. “It is clear that many students and faculty are dead or wounded,” Awartani says.

“The long-term ramifications of this war on Gaza’s higher education system are incalculable,” the Palestine Academy for Science and Technology said in a statement. “The psychological, intellectual, and cultural fabric necessary for a thriving academic community has been torn asunder, and it will take years, if not generations, to mend.”

doi: 10.1126/science.adl4713

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Every human on Earth has the same 24 hours to spend in a day—but the way we divide those hours for work and sleep and school and play varies a lot. Scientists recently compiled the available data about how people around the world allocate their time and used them to define the average “global human day.” More than a third of our hours are spent in bed, they found, with the rest split among three categories the researchers devised based on whether the time directly affected humans, the physical world, or where and what people are doing. Activities such as agriculture took up much more time in poorer countries than in wealthier ones, whereas others such as human transportation were fairly constant everywhere. Ultimately the study found that relatively little time—about five minutes per average human day—goes to activities that directly alter the environment and climate change, such as extracting energy and dealing with waste, suggesting an opportunity to put in more time to help the planet. “We have to switch off fossil-fuel energy and construct more renewables,” says study co-author Eric Galbraith of McGill University. “If it turned out that the changes we want to make required huge allocations of time to activities we're not doing now, then it would be impossible. But we can tackle this with just a couple of minutes per day. I think that's hopeful.”

Credit: Studio Terp; Source: “The Global Human Day,” by William Fajzel et al., in PNAS, Vol. 120; June 2023 (data)

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When the Israeli bombing intensifies and the wounded swamp the Gaza City hospitals where Dr. Nidal Abed works, he treats patients wherever he can — on the floor, in the corridors, in rooms crammed with 10 patients instead of two. Without enough medical supplies, Abed makes do with whatever he can find – clothes for bandages, vinegar for antiseptic, sewing needles for surgical ones.

Hospitals in the Gaza Strip are nearing collapse under the Israeli blockade that cut power and deliveries of food and other necessities to the territory. They lack clean water. They are running out of basic items for easing pain and preventing infections. Fuel for their generators is dwindling.

Israel began its bombing campaign after Hamas militants surged across the border on Oct. 7 and killed over 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and abducted more than 200 others. Israel’s offensive has devastated neighborhoods, shuttered five hospitals, killed thousands and wounded more people than its remaining health facilities can handle.

“We have a shortage of everything, and we are dealing with very complex surgeries,” Abed, who works with Doctors Without Borders, told The Associated Press from Al Quds Hospital. The medical center is still treating hundreds of patients in defiance of an evacuation order the Israeli military gave Friday. Some 10,000 Palestinians displaced by the bombing have also taken refuge in the hospital compound.

“These people are all terrified, and so am I,” the surgeon said. “But there is no way we’ll evacuate.”

The first food, water and medicine trickled into Gaza from Egypt on Saturday after being stalled on the border for days. Four trucks in the 20-truck aid convoy were carrying drugs and medical supplies, the World Health Organization said. Aid workers and doctors warned it was not nearly enough to address Gaza’s spiraling humanitarian crisis.

“It’s a nightmare. If more aid doesn’t come in, I fear we’ll get to the point where going to a hospital will do more harm than good,” Mehdat Abbas, an official in the Hamas-run Health Ministry, said.

Across the territory’s hospitals, ingenuity is being put to the test. Abed used household vinegar from the corner store as disinfectant until the stores ran out, he said. Too many doctors had the same idea. Now, he cleans wounds with a mixture of saline and the polluted water that trickles from taps because Israel cut off the water.

A shortage of surgical supplies forced some staff to use sewing needles to stitch wounds, which Abed said can damage tissue. A shortage of bandages forced medics to wrap clothes around large burns, which he said can cause infections. A shortage of orthopedic implants forced Abed to use screws that don’t fit his patients’ bones. There are not enough antibiotics, so he gives single pills rather than multiple courses to patients suffering terrible bacterial infections.

“We are doing what we can to stabilize the patients, to control the situation,” he said. “People are dying because of this.”

When Israel cut fuel to the territory’s sole power plant two weeks ago, Gaza’s rumbling generators kicked in to keep life-support equipment running in hospitals.

Authorities are desperately scrounging up diesel to keep them going. United Nations agencies are distributing their remaining stocks. Motorists are emptying their gas tanks.

In some hospitals, the lights have already switched off. At Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis this week, nurses and surgical assistants held their iPhones over the operating table, guiding the surgeons with the flashlights as they snipped.

At Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s biggest, where Abed also worked this week, the intensive care unit runs on generators but most other wards are without power. Air conditioning is a bygone luxury. Abed catches beads of sweat dripping from his patients’ foreheads as he operates.

People wounded in the airstrikes are overwhelming the facilities. Hospitals don’t have enough beds for them.

“Even a normal hospital with equipment would not be able to deal with what we’re facing,” Abed said. “It would collapse.”

Shifa Hospital — with a maximum capacity of 700 people — is treating 5,000 people, general director Mohammed Abu Selmia says. Lines of patients, some in critical condition, snake out of operating rooms. The wounded lie on floors or on gurneys sometimes stained with the blood of previous patients. Doctors operate in crowded corridors filled with moans.

The scenes — infants arriving alone to intensive care because no one else in their family survived, patients awake and grimacing in pain during surgeries — have traumatized Abed into numbness.

But what still pains him is having to choose which patients to prioritize.

“You have to decide,” he said. “Because you know that many will not make it.”

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