Down at the level of atoms and electrons, quantum physics describes the behavior of the very smallest objects. Solar panels, LED lights, your mobile phone and MRI scanners in hospitals: all of these rely on quantum behavior. It is one of the best-tested theories of physics, and we use it all the time. 

On the face of it, however, the quantum realm is extraordinary: Within it, quantum objects can be “in two places at once”; they can move through barriers; and share a connection no matter how far apart they are. Compared to what you would expect of, say, a tennis ball, their properties are certainly weird and counterintuitive. 

But don’t let this scare you off! Much of quantum physics’ odd behavior becomes a lot less surprising if you stop thinking of atoms and electrons as minuscule tennis balls, and instead imagine any “quantum object” as something like a wave you create by pushing your hand through water.  You could say that, at small scales, everything is made of waves.

In the spirit of demystifying quantum behavior, here are three key types of “weird” quantum phenomena that normal water waves can do just as well, and the one thing that sets the quantum world apart. 

NOT WEIRD: HEISENBERG’S UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

Imagine throwing a tennis ball. If we wanted to, we could track the ball’s exact position and velocity throughout its flight. Strangely enough, if we were to shrink the ball down to the size of, say, an atom, this kind of tracking becomes impossible. 

This limitation is called Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. In quantum physics, it is impossible to know an object’s precise position and momentum (its velocity times its mass) at the same time. A tennis ball’s momentum is just its mass multiplied by its velocity, but for waves we determine momentum by measuring the distance between successive wave crests, a factor called the wavelength. 

Waves are fickle, however, making it impossible to determine their position and wavelengths with 100 percent precision. In practice, any wave, whether watery or quantum, will always cover a range of positions, and consist of a range of wavelengths. The more you restrict one of those ranges, the less you can control the other. 

Consider two extreme types of water waves: The first is an infinitely repeating wave of regularly spaced ripples made by the wind on an endlessly long canal. There you could measure the wavelength by identifying the repeating pattern of wave crests and troughs. But you can’t say anything about the wave’s “position” in the canal because it doesn’t have a start or end point. Conversely, for a wave consisting of a single, thin crest in an otherwise calm pond, you can measure its position, but it doesn’t have a well-defined wavelength because it never repeats.

In practice, all waves lie somewhere in between these two limits. Quantum waves are no different.

NOT WEIRD: SUPERPOSITIONS AND ENTANGLEMENT

A quantum object can “be in two places at once” by being in a so-called superposition of states. Thinking about waves, this is no surprise. A wave can be in two places at once. If you send a wave down a forked channel, it will easily split and flow through both channels at the same time. 

A related quantum concept is entanglement, which combines superpositions in two waves. In a salad dressing that has been left to stand, for example, oil will float on top of the vinegar. Carefully making a wave in the oil will then also cause a wave in the vinegar, which looks like ripples in their interface. Measuring the wavelength of the oil wave also tells us about the wavelength of the vinegar wave. In other words: the two waves are linked, and their properties depend on one another.

Pouring the separated salad dressing down a forked channel, this remains true, so that the combined oil-vinegar ripples move down two channels at the same time. Measuring the wavelength of just the oil wave in one channel, you immediately know all wavelengths in both channels, even if they are far apart. Had the salad dressing been quantum, you would say that the waves in the two channels are “entangled” with one another. Quantum technology uses entanglement to create unbreakable encryption or speed up computations. For your salad, breaking the entanglement by shaking the dressing into a vinaigrette is probably more useful.

NOT WEIRD: TUNNELING

Another seemingly peculiar feat of quantum objects is that with some probability they can pass through barriers. This is called tunneling. Throw a tennis ball at a wall and (as long as the wall remains standing) it will bounce back. Do this with an atom, and you might find it on the other side. 

In some cases, a water wave can move through a barrier just like a quantum particle, something you can demonstrate in your bathtub. To do so, build an underwater wall in the tub, one tall enough that it almost touches the water’s surface, but not quite. If you send a wave at this wall at a glancing angle, it will always bounce back from the wall. This is analogous to so-called total internal reflection of light rays. It depends only on the height of the barrier and the angle with which the wave approaches the wall. 

Although the wave cannot travel over the barrier, a small tail of it can probe the other side. If the wall is thin enough, you will see the tail remembering its original motion and magically reappearing as a traveling wave. Voilà, your water wave has tunneled through a wall! The same phenomenon of “broken” total internal reflection, but with light rays instead of water waves, is used in certain types of touch screen displays.

VERY WEIRD: QUANTUM MEASUREMENT

Whereas most weird quantum behaviors are demystified by thinking of small particles as waves instead of minuscule balls, genuine quantum weirdness arises when you measure a quantum object. Whether it’s a wave traveling through two different channels, or one that’s tunneled through a barrier, measuring a quantum wave results in the entirety of that wave suddenly appearing in a single location: in one channel and not the other, or on one side of the barrier and not the other. This doesn’t happen with salad dressing.

Funnily enough, the mathematical equations that describe quantum waves do not explain what happens when we measure them. Physicists don’t yet agree on how best to describe or interpret this process. Quantum measurement is the one thing that sets quantum behavior apart from water waves, truly making quantum physics strange.

To appreciate how unusual quantum measurement is, imagine someone speaking to a crowd of people. Sound waves spread out across the crowd, and everyone hears the speech. In the quantum world, however, the sound wave would spread out just as expected, but as soon as a single person in the crowd perceives (or measures) it, the entire sound wave would concentrate itself in that single person’s ear, and no one else would hear it. 

Now that is weird. 

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A retrospective of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has opened at London’s Hayward Gallery.

The exhibition showcases the artist’s works that draw inspiration from science. Examples include the series Conceptual Forms and Mathematical Models, in which Sugimoto photographs mathematical shapes. In Lightning Fields, he draws on the work of Michael Faraday and others, bringing a 400,000 volt Van de Graaff generator into his darkroom and using it to expose photosensitive film.

On show too is Sugimoto’s latest project, Opticks. Inspired by Issac Newton’s seminal work of the same name, Sugimoto built a prism to split sunlight into its constituent parts, photographing the results. The primary hues of red, blue and yellow are striking, yet subtle in tone, and in the bright, sunlit gallery, the images are a great way to contemplate physics, photography and the inquisitive scientific mind. “I’m just borrowing many, many important scientists’ experiences to be studied again and see where I can go,” says Sugimoto.

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Lord rutherford, the discoverer of the atomic nucleus, divided science into physics and stamp collecting. (He was, after all, a physicist.) But he had a point. Other sciences, such as astronomy, chemistry, geology and, most notably, biology, rely a lot on collecting things (not literally, in the case of astronomy) and classifying them in various ways that would delight philatelists. Physics, by contrast, relies on analysing phenomena.

That said, the philatelist branches of science have been pretty successful, biology especially. And this week sees the addition of a new album to biology’s collection, in the form of 21 papers about the brain and its cells. The work was done under the purview of the brain Initiative Cell Census Network, which is organised by the National Institutes of Health, in America. The papers are published in various bits of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s empire of journals, Science and its spin-offs. They are intended to help answer three, related questions: what and where are a brain’s cellular components; which cells are involved in neurological and psychiatric illnesses; and what makes the brains of Homo sapiens different from those of other animals?

Brains, particularly human ones, are the most complex objects in the known universe. That complexity is emphasised by the fact that, as these papers confirm, they are reckoned (depending on how you define such things) to contain about 3,000 different types of cell. For comparison, it was not so long ago that entire human bodies, brains included, were estimated to be built from just 300 cell types.

The estimate was confirmed by a team of researchers at the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, and the Allen Institute for Brain Science, in Seattle. They studied, post mortem, the brains of three men and a woman, taking 606 samples from nine regions of the organ and also one from the spinal cord. They then extracted the nuclei of individual cells and looked at the rna molecules therein.

rna is chemically similar to dna, and comes in many varieties, each with a different job. One of the most important is to act as a messenger, carrying instructions for how to make particular proteins from the nucleus, where the genes that encode protein recipes are stored as dna, to the cellular factories, called ribosomes, which churn those proteins out. Analysing those rna messengers reveals which proteins are being made. And the proteins a cell produces determine what type of cell it is.

On that basis, the two institutes’ researchers found 31 “superclusters” of cells with similar patterns of rna expression. These, in turn, divided into 461 clusters and 3,313 subclusters—in effect, individual cell types. Superclusters tended to be concentrated in one or a few brain regions (for example, the cerebral cortex had 16, the hippocampus had 12 and the cerebellum six). But there was an exception. This was a supercluster the team called “splatter neurons”. These turned up all over the place.

Other groups dug into the details. Bing Ren of the University of California, San Diego and his colleagues, for example, attempted to characterise cells not directly by their messenger rna but rather by differences in the way the dna in their chromosomes was packaged. By allowing—or forbidding—access to the dna, such packaging helps regulate which genes are transcribed into rna messengers.

This yielded 107 recognisable patterns. Intriguingly, some of these patterns could be correlated with neurological traits and illnesses. The team compared the locations of pieces of dna that control gene transcription, and which are known to have disease-associated variants, with the dna-packaging patterns of different sorts of cells. They found correlations with 19 conditions, including schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, Alzheimer’s disease and various forms of addiction.

A third group, meanwhile, led by Rebecca Hodge and Trygve Bakken of the Allen Institute, compared the brains of humans with those of chimpanzees, gorillas, macaques (a group of old-world monkeys) and marmosets (a group of new-world monkeys), looking for clues to the elusive question of what makes human brains human. They found that part of the answer may lie not in the neurons themselves, but in the supporting cast of non-neuronal brain cells, called glial cells.

Clues to humanity’s essence are likely to be found in parts of the genome called hars and hcondels. hars stands for “human accelerated regions”. These are bits of the genome that have remained unchanged in apes and monkeys, but which are altered in humans. hcondels—“human-conserved deletions”—are the opposite: places where dna found in apes and monkeys is missing in people. The team found that genes in and around both areas are often particularly active or particularly inactive in glial cells.

Glial cells come in three varieties: astrocytes, which regulate the flow of information across junctions between neurons; microglia, which prune links between neurons to keep the network in order; and oligodendrocytes, which insulate nerve fibres and tweak signals running along them. That suggests part of what gives human brains their humanness lies in these microscopic details of their architecture.

A good start, then. But this work only scratches the surface of the brain’s true complexity. To understand that properly requires not only listing and describing the various components, but also elucidating out how they are wired together into functional units. Collecting stamps is fine. But you need more than that to work out how a postal service operates.

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It’s been one of the wettest years in California since records began. From October 2022 to March 2023, the state was blasted by 31 atmospheric rivers—colossal bands of water vapor that form above the Pacific and become firehoses when they reach the West Coast. What surprised climate scientists wasn’t the number of storms, but their strength and rat-a-tat frequency. The downpours shocked a water system that had just experienced the driest three years in recorded state history, causing floods, mass evacuations, and at least 22 deaths.

Swinging between wet and dry extremes is typical for California, but last winter’s rain, potentially intensified by climate change, was almost unmanageable. Add to that the arrival of El Niño, and more extreme weather looks likely for the state. This is going to make life very difficult for the dam operators tasked with capturing and controlling much of the state’s water.

Like most of the world’s 58,700 large dams, those in California were built for yesterday’s more stable climate patterns. But as climate change taxes the world’s water systems—affecting rainfall, snowmelt, and evaporation—it’s getting tough to predict how much water gets to a dam, and when. Dams are increasingly either water-starved, unable to maintain supplies of power and water for their communities, or overwhelmed and forced to release more water than desired—risking flooding downstream.

But at one major dam in Northern California, operators have been demonstrating how to not just weather these erratic and intense storms, but capitalize on them. Management crews at New Bullards Bar, built in 1970, entered last winter armed with new forecasting tools that gave unprecedented insight into the size and strength of the coming storms—allowing them to strategize how to handle the rain.

First, they let the rains refill their reservoir, a typical move after a long drought. Then, as more storms formed at sea, they made the tough choice to release some of this precious hoard through their hydropower turbines, confident that more rain was coming. “I felt a little nervous at first,” says John James, director of resource planning at Yuba Water Agency in northern California. Fresh showers soon validated the move. New Bullards Bar ended winter with plumped water supplies, a 150 percent boost in power generation, and a clean safety record. The strategy offers a glimpse of how better forecasting can allow hydropower to adapt to the climate age.

Modeling studies have long suggested that better weather forecasts would be invaluable for dam managers. Now this is being confirmed in real life. New Bullards Bar is one of a half-dozen pilot sites teaming up with the US Army Corps of Engineers to test how cutting-edge forecasting can be used to optimize operations in the real world. Early tests of the methods, called forecast-informed reservoir operations, have given operators the confidence to hold 5-20 percent reserve margins beyond their reservoirs’ typical capacity, says Cary Talbot, who heads the initiative for the Army Corps.

To Talbot, FIRO could mean a paradigm shift in how the Corps and others run dams. Historically, dam operators under the Army Corps umbrella had to ignore weather forecasts and respond only to rain and snow that was already on the ground. This rule traces back to the notorious capriciousness of traditional forecasts: If an operator takes a bad gamble on a forecasted weather event, the results can be dangerous. But in practice, this forces operators to react later than their gut tells them to, says Riley Post, a University of Iowa researcher who spent over a decade as a hydraulic engineer for the Corps. They might, for example, be expected to hold water in a nearly full reservoir even as heavy rains approach.

Recent developments, however, have sharpened the trustworthiness of forecasts, particularly for atmospheric rivers on the West Coast. Leaps in computing power have enabled ever-more-muscular climate and weather modeling. To pump these models with data, scientists led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have since 2016 launched reconnaissance flights over atmospheric rivers of interest, where they release dozens of dropsondes, sensor packs shaped like Pringles cans. The result is a detailed profile of a storm’s strength, size, and intentions, which can then feed into FIRO.

These reports aren’t clairvoyant; all weather forecasts involve a measure of uncertainty. But a dam operator with increased confidence in when, where, and how much water will strike their watershed can take a more “surgical” approach to holding or releasing water, Post says.

And if they know how much time they have, they can also make the most of their existing water. Take Prado Dam, a vintage 1941 facility that was built to shield Orange County from flooding but can also distribute water to 25 groundwater-recharge stations. This past winter, forecasts showed a well-spaced parade of storms tracking its way. So operators pulsed water from the dam into storage at an optimal cadence, giving it time to soak into the landscape. Adam Hutchinson of the Orange County Water District, which manages the groundwater-recharge system, said publicly in July that these actions delivered an “exceptional” boost to water supplies for “those dry years we know are coming.”

Jinsun Lim is an analyst with the International Energy Agency think tank who studies climate resilience in the energy sector. Lim says that this sort of specificity is exactly what hydro officials in many countries wish for: tools that can translate climate impacts at a local level for their unique watersheds and infrastructure. Talbot hasn’t seen anything quite like FIRO deployed abroad, but he says that curious parties from the UK, Chile, Southeast Asia, Australia, and other regions have contacted him. Meanwhile, other corners of the hydro world are applying similar logic to their own climate challenges.

For BC Hydro, which serves 95 percent of British Columbia’s population, heat waves have proven a bigger problem than drought. Rivers and rains remain strong, but the province’s historically mellow springs and summers have warmed up, prompting many people to switch on air conditioners, which jacks up power demand. To keep the ACs humming, BC Hydro keeps a close eye on its fuel supply, that is, its watershed. About 150 monitoring stations, equipped with snow, climate, and surface-water sensors, enable a near-real-time picture of water flows. This helps operators store up water for demand spikes in summer and winter alike.

Tajikistan, which gets fully 98 percent of its power from hydroelectricity, is adapting its fleet with a mix of hard and soft measures. Renovations at the 126-megawatt Quairokkum power plant, built in 1956, were screened against a range of climate scenarios—such as the diminution of its source glaciers. Just replacing its six Soviet-era turbines will hike output to 170 megawatts; the dam will also be reinforced for a 10,000-year flood whose intensity could exceed the previous design standard by anywhere from 15 to 70 percent. Meanwhile, investments by international funders in HydroMet, the country’s long-dysfunctional meteorology service, are paying off: The agency recently gave power generators early notice of a dry year, enabling forward planning.

Recent trends have underlined the need for such changes. Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency said today’s hydropower facilities are on average 2 percent less productive than dams were from 1990 to 2016. Droughts have weakened flows at many plants, the agency said, leaving fossil-based energy to fill a gap the size of Spain’s annual power use. Other dams have been exposed to extreme events for which they weren’t strictly engineered, as in north India in 2021, when a crumbling glacier sent forth a wall of water that wrecked dams and towns downstream. Last month’s disaster in Libya, due to the failure of two flood-control dams hit by a supersized Mediterranean storm, further underlines the risks of maladapted facilities.

Even hydropower’s harshest critics take no issue with nip-and-tuck improvements at today’s dams. But amid a massive expansion planned in the Global South, they warn against overconfidence that hydropower can adapt its way out of climate change. In July, an environmental group in Namibia urged the government to rethink a large dam proposed for the Kunene River, saying it’s prone to the same climate extremes that have sapped the energy of Namibia’s other dams.

As climate disruption sets in, solar and wind can provide equivalent power with less risk, says Josh Klemm, co-executive director of International Rivers, a human rights organization focused on river communities. “We need to really reexamine plans to develop new hydropower,” he says. “We’re only going to deepen our reliance on a climate-vulnerable energy source.”

The Army Corps, meanwhile, is in the early stages of studying whether FIRO can be attempted at 419 other dams under its umbrella. Scaling up FIRO isn’t entirely straightforward; other parts of the US have different kinds of precipitation events than California does, and some of these are currently a lot harder to predict than atmospheric rivers. But Talbot is optimistic that the ever-improving forecast science can find efficiency gains there for the taking. “It’s making your existing infrastructure work harder for you,” he said. “In the face of climate change, this sounds like a great way to position ourselves for buffering that.”

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A view of the outside of the OSIRIS-REx sample collector. Scientists have found evidence of both carbon and

water in initial analysis of this material. The bulk of the sample is located inside.

NASA/Erika Blumenfeld & Joseph Aebersold

 

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Texas—As they unveiled the first samples recovered from an asteroid on Wednesday, scientists were giddy at the prospects of what this material will tell us about the origin of our planet and possibly even ourselves.

 

After seven years in space, a small spacecraft carrying samples from the asteroid Bennu landed in a Utah desert in late September. Following carefully choreographed procedures to prevent the contamination of the asteroid dust and rocks from life on Earth, the samples were transferred to a clean room at Johnson Space Center in Houston two weeks ago. Since then, scientists have examined some of the material that was collected outside of the primary container to glean some initial insights. They revealed some of their first data during an event at the center on Wednesday.

 

"Boy, did we really nail it," said Dante Lauretta, a scientist from the University of Arizona who is the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission.

 

Scientists have not even opened the main container yet, a process that will unfold in the coming weeks as cataloging all of this material begins. Before the launch of this mission, scientists said the recovery of 60 grams of material would be considered a success. While the effort to determine the overall mass is ongoing, Lauretta said early estimates are that the asteroid capture mission collected about 250 grams of pebbles and dust from the surface of Bennu.

 

After the material is cataloged, it will be loaned out in small quantities to 230 scientists across 35 countries who are members of the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-Rex mission team.

Digging into our origins

So what's the big deal about recovering pristine samples from the surface of an asteroid? The big deal is that Bennu, an asteroid in a near-Earth orbit that is about one-half kilometer across, is believed to be a time capsule for the types of rocks and chemicals that existed when the planets formed in our Solar System more than 4 billion years ago. By studying Bennu, scientists are looking back to that primordial era when Earth began transitioning from an extremely hot world with a hellish surface environment into something more like a mud ball.

 

Poking these pebbles and rocks with sophisticated equipment here on Earth may allow Lauretta and the other scientists to answer questions about how terrestrial planets like Earth and Mars formed and possibly whether asteroids seeded Earth with the building blocks for life.

 

In a preliminary analysis of some of the dust, Lauretta said scientists hit the jackpot with a sample that is nearly 5 percent carbon by mass and has abundant water in the form of hydrated clay minerals. It is highly plausible that asteroids like this delivered the vast majority of the water now found in Earth's oceans, lakes, and rivers billions of years ago.

 

By piecing together clues from the asteroid dust—both its water and organic molecules—the scientists believe they may better understand how Earth went from an uninhabited mudball to the world teeming with life today.

 

"This is incredible material," said Daniel Glavin, a co-investigator on the mission. "It’s loaded with organics. If we're looking for biologically essential organic molecules, we picked the right asteroid, and we brought back the right sample. This is an astrobiologist's dream."

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As the Israel-Palestine crisis unfolds, a massive barrage of disinformation has hit X-formerly-Twitter — and regulators are watching in horror.

Manipulated and fake images are widely circulating on the platform, a dire situation compounded by X owner Elon Musk's gutting of the company's workforce, including its content moderation team, following his chaotic takeover last year.

In an "urgent letter" addressed to X owner Elon Musk, Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the internal market, accused the platform of enabling the dissemination of "illegal content and disinformation in the EU" and ordered Musk to file a response "within the next 24 hours," ensuring "that your systems are effective, and report on the crisis measures taken."

Breton also wrote that the "violent and terrorist content that appears to circulate on your platform," after Musk made "changes in public interest policies" was leaving "many European users uncertain."

At 24 hours since Breton shared his letter, Musk has yet to show any indication of interest in making changes to X's policies.

It didn't take long for the outspoken billionaire to respond to Breton's request, albeit without actually addressing the issue.

"Our policy is that everything is open source and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports," Musk wrote in a confounding tweet.

"Please list the violations you allude to on 𝕏, so that that the public can see them."

Breton didn't take kindly to the suggestion, telling Musk that it's "up to you to demonstrate that you walk the talk."

By all indications, Musk has yet to officially write a response or make X's content policies sufficiently clear beyond telling Breton that "we take our actions in the open."

Musk's telltale gut reaction of doubling down on his laissez-faire vision is telling, especially he's been actively contributing to the issue himself. In a since-deleted tweet, Musk recommended that users follow two accounts that have historically spread dangerous lies and made antisemitic comments, as The Washington Post reports.

It's still unclear if the European Commission will end up taking action or imposing "penalties" due to non-compliance, as Breton's letter warns.

The EU's recently enacted Digital Services Act requires any platforms with more than 45 million monthly active users to scan for illegal content and take it down as well. Companies can get fined up to six percent of their global turnover if they don't comply with the new rules.

That kind of penalty could turn out to be a major hit for a platform that is already in deep financial turmoil.

In short, the Israel-Palestine conflict could be seen as the first major international crisis to stress test Musk's social media platform — and given his apparent disinterest in tackling disinformation, he appears to be failing miserably.

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How long humans can live, and what determines a long and healthy life, have been of interest for as long as we know. Plato and Aristotle discussed and wrote about the ageing process over 2,300 years ago.

The pursuit of understanding the secrets behind exceptional longevity isn't easy, however. It involves unravelling the complex interplay of genetic predisposition and lifestyle factors and how they interact throughout a person's life.

Now our recent study, published in GeroScience,, has unveiled some common biomarkers, including levels of cholesterol and glucose, in people who live past 90.

Nonagenarians and centenarians have long been of intense interest to scientists as they may help us understand how to live longer, and perhaps also how to age in better health. So far, studies of centenarians have often been small scale and focused on a selected group, for example, excluding centenarians who live in care homes.

Huge dataset

Ours is the largest study comparing biomarker profiles measured throughout life among exceptionally long-lived people and their shorter-lived peers to date.

We compared the biomarker profiles of people who went on to live past the age of 100, and their shorter-lived peers, and investigated the link between the profiles and the chance of becoming a centenarian.

Our research included data from 44,000 Swedes who underwent health assessments at ages 64-99 - they were a sample of the so-called Amoris cohort.

These participants were then followed through Swedish register data for up to 35 years. Of these people, 1,224, or 2.7%, lived to be 100 years old. The vast majority (85%) of the centenarians were female.

Twelve blood-based biomarkers related to inflammation, metabolism, liver and kidney function, as well as potential malnutrition and anaemia, were included. All of these have been associated with ageing or mortality in previous studies.

The biomarker related to inflammation was uric acid – a waste product in the body caused by the digestion of certain foods.

We also looked at markers linked to metabolic status and function including total cholesterol and glucose, and ones related to liver function, such as alanine aminotransferase (Alat), aspartate aminotransferase (Asat), albumin, gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT), alkaline phosphatase (Alp) and lactate dehydrogenase (LD).

We also looked at creatinine, which is linked to kidney function, and iron and total iron-binding capacity (TIBC), which is linked to anaemia. Finally, we also investigated albumin, a biomarker associated with nutrition.

Findings

We found that, on the whole, those who made it to their hundredth birthday tended to have lower levels of glucose, creatinine and uric acid from their sixties onwards. Although the median values didn't differ significantly between centenarians and non-centenarians for most biomarkers, centenarians seldom displayed extremely high or low values.

For example, very few of the centenarians had a glucose level above 6.5 earlier in life, or a creatinine level above 125.

For many of the biomarkers, both centenarians and non-centenarians had values outside of the range considered normal in clinical guidelines. This is probably because these guidelines are set based on a younger and healthier population.

When exploring which biomarkers were linked to the likelihood of reaching 100, we found that all but two (alat and albumin) of the 12 biomarkers showed a connection to the likelihood of turning 100. This was even after accounting for age, sex and disease burden.

The people in the lowest out of five groups for levels of total cholesterol and iron had a lower chance of reaching 100 years as compared to those with higher levels. Meanwhile, people with higher levels of glucose, creatinine, uric acid and markers for liver function also decreased the chance of becoming a centenarian.

In absolute terms, the differences were rather small for some of the biomarkers, while for others the differences were somewhat more substantial.

For uric acid, for instance, the absolute difference was 2.5 percentage points. This means that people in the group with the lowest uric acid had a 4% chance of turning 100 while in the group with the highest uric acid levels only 1.5% made it to age 100.

Even if the differences we discovered were overall rather small, they suggest a potential link between metabolic health, nutrition and exceptional longevity.

The study, however, does not allow any conclusions about which lifestyle factors or genes are responsible for the biomarker values.

However, it is reasonable to think that factors such as nutrition and alcohol intake play a role. Keeping track of your kidney and liver values, as well as glucose and uric acid as you get older, is probably not a bad idea.

That said, chance probably plays a role at some point in reaching an exceptional age. But the fact that differences in biomarkers could be observed a long time before death suggests that genes and lifestyle may also play a role.

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At long last, NASA’s curation scientists have revealed what OSIRIS-REx ferried back from an asteroid 100 million miles away. The seven-year mission scooped up a rock sample from Bennu in 2020, then returned it to Earth in September, parachuting it down into the Utah desert. Scientists painstakingly cleaned and shipped the capsule to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, making sure none of the rocks were contaminated by exposure to oxygen, moisture, or earthly bacteria, and they’re now analyzing the precious cargo.

This morning, NASA staged a public reveal in front of a small audience of reporters, policymakers, and students from local school districts, and also streamed it live on NASA TV and the agency’s website. Determining the scientific story of those space rocks—where did Bennu come from? Does it contain organic molecules or rare metals, and what’s their origin?—could now begin.

Standing at a podium on stage before a video screen, NASA administrator Bill Nelson set up the reveal. “Seven years, almost 4 billion miles of a journey throughout the solar system to the asteroid Bennu and back began,” he said, recapping the mission for the audience. Three weeks ago, he continued, “the sample-return capsule landed in Utah, right on the money. It was a picture-perfect mission. It’s a feat of engineering and it’s NASA’s first ever sample from an asteroid. So are you ready to see the results of the mission? Take a peek!”

As the audience cheered, the video screen behind him showed a photo of dark, coal-coloured asteroid pebbles and particles within the canister, but outside the main sample container. NASA’s first analysis shows that they contain water in hydrated clay minerals, as well as carbon and organic molecules, he said. This carbon is 4.7 percent of the sample by weight. “The carbon and water molecules are exactly the kinds of material that we wanted to find,” Nelson said. “They are crucial elements in the formation of our own planet and they are going to help us determine the origins that helped lead to life.”

Photos of asteroid material on the outside of the Tagsam head, which contains the sample.

Photograph: NASA

Following him, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta showed four more finely detailed images of the sample, all taken by an electron microscope, and spoke more about the significance of carbon. He described the material as clay minerals which have water locked inside their fibrous, serpentine crystal structures. “That is how we think water got to the Earth. The reason that Earth is a habitable world—that we have oceans and lakes and rain—is because these clay minerals landed on Earth 4 to 4.5 billion years ago, making our world habitable,” he said. “[And] not just Earth, but probably Venus and Mars,” which could have had water in the early days of the solar system.

As he flipped through the images, he showed how some of the material has a hexagonal shape characteristic of sulfur, which, he said, is critical for biology. “A lot of the amino acids that give structure to our cells use sulfur,” he said. He also showed images of both framboidal (raspberry-shaped) and platelike bits of magnetite. “Those platey ones might be important for organic evolution. They might catalyze certain reactions,” he said.

Daniel Glavin, the OSIRIS-REx sample analysis lead, then showed what it was like to look at a grain of the asteroid material under ultraviolet light. Under the light, the sample was bright blue, flecked with tiny white bright spots that he compared to stars. “The stuff’s lighting up,” he said, explaining that the fluorescence indicates carbonate minerals. “This is organic matter, called organic globules. This thing’s loaded with organics.”

The talk also included a prerecorded video from curation scientist Nicole Lunning standing outside a specially-constructed clean room at Johnson Space Center’s Building 31. The building is already home to the largest collection of asteroid materials in the world, and will be the permanent address for the Bennu sample. Because organics are such a focus of this mission, Lunning said, the clean room had been specifically designed to avoid contaminating the sample with biological materials from Earth.

Lunning described much of the material as fine dust and intermediate-size particles, about the width of short-grain rice. She pointed out that so far, NASA has examined only a tiny part of the sample, and they have not yet fully opened the sample container. She said they will continue taking the collection head apart, dividing the sample into handling trays “that look like deep dish pizza dishes.” In six months, she said, the agency will release a sample catalog to give scientists a chance to propose studies and request samples. Some 230 scientists around the world will work on sample analysis for two years, she said, and portions of the material will go on public display at the Smithsonian, Space Center Houston, and the University of Arizona.

Scientists’ work will include assessing the similarities and differences between Bennu and Ryugu, another carbon-rich asteroid from which the Japanese space agency’s Hayabusa2 mission successfully retrieved a small sample in 2020.

Curation scientists working on the sample container held inside the glovebox, which they access only through

a partition using gloved hands. This keeps the sample from becoming contaminated.

Photograph: NASA

NASA almost didn’t get a full sample. OSIRIS-REx’s robotic arm, called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, or Tagsam, initially collected so much material that some risked spilling into space. But the leak slowed after about 30 minutes, and engineers decided to skip some maneuvers that might have shaken more regolith loose.

Eileen Stansbery, Johnson Space Center’s chief scientist, stressed that the sample had been abundant, and that portions of it would be stored to be studied in the future with technologies that don’t exist today. “Analysis is not limited by ideas formed years before the missions were conceived,” said Stansbery. “Samples are then available for new questions, new techniques, new instrumentation far into the future, and they are the gift that keeps on giving.”

Addressing the students in the audience as the “Artemis generation,” Johnson Space Center director Vanessa Wyche told them: “The sample that we’re going to have today will unlock new insights into the origins of our solar system and answer questions about our own origins. A large portion will be stored for future scientists, and that could be one of you.”

Tomorrow, NASA’s asteroidal adventures will continue, as the agency’s Psyche probe is expected to lift off toward a metal-rich asteroid. (The launch, planned for 10:16 am Eastern time, will also be streamed on NASA TV.) This type of near-Earth object hasn’t been studied up close before. It may be the remnant of the core of a planet that never fully formed.

Asteroids are among the oldest astronomical objects in our neighborhood. They haven’t changed much over the past 4 billion or so years, so missions to study them may offer the best chance to learn about the history of the solar system, including Earth’s early years.

“OSIRIS-REx took aim at some of the biggest questions in exploration in science. How did our solar system form? How did life originate on Earth? It can’t get more exciting than that,” said Makenzie Lystrup, director of Goddard Space Center at today’s event. As the scientific analysis unfolds, she said, “the real journey begins now.”

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Around the world, there aren’t enough donor kidneys available for everyone who needs one. Scientists are hoping pig kidneys could help ease the shortage, but first they must make sure the organs can keep working after transplant. In a step toward that goal, Massachusetts-based biotech company eGenesis reports today that a kidney from a genetically engineered pig functioned in monkeys for more than two years. The results appear in the journal Nature.

Kidneys remove waste, produce urine, and balance fluids in the body. In the United States alone, nearly 88,000 people are waiting for a kidney donation, according to data from the federal Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. In 2022, only about 26,000 received one.

When the kidneys stop working, people need to go on a dialysis machine to remove excess fluids and water from the blood. Once on dialysis, around half of patients die within five years. “The global burden of kidney disease is staggering,” says Mike Curtis, CEO of eGenesis. “Cross species transplantation offers the most sustainable, scalable, and feasible approach for delivering new sources of organs.”

The idea of transplanting animal organs into people, known as xenotransplantation, stretches back at least a few hundred years. In the 1960s, doctors began transplanting baboon and chimpanzee kidneys into people, but the organs typically failed within days or weeks because of immune rejection or infection. In the 1990s, scientists turned to pigs as potential donors because their organs are closer in size to human ones, and pigs are already raised for agriculture. Their organs aren’t compatible with the human body, though, and even with immunosuppressant drugs, they would be swiftly rejected. Now, scientists are using genetic engineering to make pig organs more suitable for people.

In the Nature paper, eGenesis scientists used Crispr gene editing to make different combinations of edits in donor pigs. Some edits disabled three genes involved in hyperacute rejection, which occurs minutes after a transplant when the recipient’s immune system recognizes the new organ as foreign. Others disabled these three genes, plus added seven human ones that regulate inflammation, immunity, and blood clotting. The scientists then transplanted the gene-edited pig kidneys into 21 monkeys that had their own kidneys removed.

The donor kidneys with the human genes survived seven times longer than the ones that only had the three pig genes knocked out—a median of 176 days versus 24. This suggests that adding the human genes offers some protection against rejection, the study authors say. The longest-living monkey, which survived 758 days after the transplant, received kidneys that had the added human genes. “The animals tolerate these organs very well,” Curtis says.

Monkeys are often used in research as stand-ins for people because of their biological similarities. But Curtis anticipates that transplant outcomes for people will be even better, since the organs are edited with the human immune system in mind. Plus, people are better at following medical advice to recover after surgery. Curtis says his company’s initial goal is to get pig kidneys that last at least three years in people. Ultimately though, he hopes they will keep working for much longer.

An additional 59 edits were made to some of the donor animals to inactivate endogenous retroviruses, which are found in pig DNA. The possibility of these viruses spreading to human recipients has been a longstanding concern in xenotransplantation. Although these viruses have been shown to infect human cells in the lab, the health risks to actual patients is still theoretical. “The field has been torn between whether this is an issue or not,” says George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University and cofounder of eGenesis. “We just decided it was easier to address the issue than take a chance,” he said, so they eliminated those viruses with Crispr.

Compared to classic genetic engineering, which was a slow and inefficient process, Church says Crispr allows researchers to make many simultaneous edits and thus address multiple incompatibilities between pigs and humans at once. “It has certainly catalyzed the field,” he says.

Because these transplants are so risky, tests in humans have so far been extremely limited. In September, researchers from NYU Langone Health announced that they kept a genetically engineered pig kidney functioning in a brain-dead person on life support for two months, the longest documented such case. The group has also performed a handful of shorter studies with pig hearts and kidneys, and none of the organs have been rejected. These studies lasted days or weeks because of ethical concerns over how long experiments can be run on brain-dead people.

Adam Griesemer, a transplant surgeon on the NYU Langone team, says monkey studies are important because they help establish how pig kidneys will function over time. “The primate studies can be performed with longer follow-up than we could possibly do,” he says.

It’s not clear yet whether all 69 genetic edits—the 59 to delete viruses, the three that alter pig genes, and the seven that add human ones—will be needed for pig organs to last in people, Griesemer says. The kidneys used in the NYU experiments came from pigs with just a single edit—the removal of a gene responsible for immediate immune rejection. In the first pig-to-human heart transplant in 2022, scientists used a donor animal with 10 edits. The recipient, David Bennett, lived for two months following the procedure. Last month, a second person received a genetically engineered pig heart, also from an animal with 10 edits.

“Every time we do these transplants, we learn a lot, and we make improvements,” Griesemer says. He thinks the monkey studies, plus the experiments done in brain-dead people, show that genetically engineered pig kidneys are ready to be tested in patients.

Before eGenesis can do that, it will need to show the Food and Drug Administration that monkeys with an edited pig kidney can consistently survive a year or longer after a transplant. In the current study, five of the 15 monkeys with the three deleted pig genes and seven added human ones lived that long. Curtis says eGenesis plans to launch a clinical trial in 2025 to test its edited pig organs in human volunteers.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are also hoping to launch a clinical trial testing engineered pig kidneys in the next year or so. Like the NYU group, the Alabama team has been conducting studies in brain-dead individuals.

“Half the people on dialysis will die before they can get a kidney transplant. Those are terrible odds,” Griesemer says. “We can fix that if we have a larger supply of organs.”

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Sometimes, though, struggling to stay focused can be a sign of broader health issues. The common behaviour is mostly harmless ― but in some cases, it can be a sign of everything from stress to hypoglycemia.

So, we thought we’d share some potential causes behind the phenomenon:

1) You’re exhausted or stressed

”Zoning out may happen more frequently when a person is mentally exhausted from prolonged cognitive tasks or inadequate rest,” Medical News Today shared.

“When the brain is tired or overloaded with information, it may seek moments of mental rest, leading to zoning out to recharge and reduce cognitive load.” So, if you’re having a lot of sleepless nights and/or stressful days, you might be more likely to zone out during the day as your brain seeks some “off” time.

In fact, extreme stress can cause you to zone out even when doing important tasks. If your sleep pattern or stress levels are seriously disrupting your day-to-day, it’s a good idea to contact your doctor.

2) You have hypoglycemia

Hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar, can cause you to lose your attention span entirely for periods of time ― it can even make you faint.

Other signs of hypoglycemia include feeling dizzy, hungry, thirsty, sweaty, shaky, or having tingling lips.

3) You’ve got a migraine

If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to experience a migraine, you’ll know that it has some pretty brutal side effects. And, sometimes, they include losing focus.

“For many people with migraine, brain fog, and temporary memory loss are symptoms that come before, during, or after a migraine attack,” the American Migraine Foundation shared. In fact, it’s one factor that distinguishes migraines from regular headaches.

4) You’ve got hypotension

Hypotension, or low blood pressure, can cause everything from palpitations to dizziness. Sometimes, it can also affect your short-term memory or cause brain fog and zoning out.

5) You’re experiencing a kind of mini-stroke

Rarely, zoning out could be a sign of something called a transient ischaemic attack (TIA), or a small stroke-like effect that’s caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain.

“This can cause sudden symptoms similar to a stroke, such as speech and visual disturbance, and numbness or weakness in the face, arms and legs. But a TIA does not last as long as a stroke. The effects last a few minutes to a few hours and fully resolve within 24 hours,” the NHS says.

Some people don’t remember having them at all. “It’s important to call 999 immediately and ask for an ambulance if you or someone else has symptoms of a TIA or stroke. Even if the symptoms disappear while you’re waiting for an ambulance to arrive, you still need to be assessed in hospital,” the NHS adds.

6) You’re experiencing transient global amnesia

The term refers to “an episode of confusion that comes on suddenly in a person who is otherwise alert. This confused state isn’t caused by a more common neurological condition, such as epilepsy or stroke,” shared the Mayo Clinic.

You’re unable to form new memories during this time. “You can’t remember where you are or how you got there. You may not remember anything about what’s happening right now. You may keep repeating the same questions because you don’t remember the answers you’ve just been given.

You may also draw a blank when asked to remember things that happened a day, a month or even a year ago,” the Mayo Clinic says.

They add that though the condition itself is usually harmless, it can be tough to tell it apart from other, more serious conditions that can produce similar effects. So, if you notice someone (including yourself) going from aware to confused by their surroundings quickly, you should seek medical attention.

Zoning out can also be caused by some seizures and narcolepsy.

I’m not sure if I have any of these. When should I worry?

As we’ve said before, occasionally zoning out is completely normal. But if it’s becoming regular with no obvious cause, if it’s affecting your day-to-day, if it’s accompanied by unusual behaviours or a loss of bladder control, or if it happens after an injury, you might want to get it looked into further.

The terrors of brain ownership continue...

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Not only is the number of new infections steadily rising around the world, but outbreaks are becoming larger and less predictable. For example, 2019 saw the greatest number of dengue fever cases ever recorded—almost twice as high as the previous year. And in July 2023, there were a record number of deaths from the disease in Bangladesh.

Most people infected with dengue will suffer from flu-like symptoms, ranging from relatively mild to very unpleasant, with fever, headache and joint pain.

In more severe cases, though, blood vessels can become damaged by the virus, allowing blood to leak into the surrounding tissues. This condition, known as dengue hemorrhagic fever, can produce bruising, and bleeding from the nose and gums. It can ultimately lead to organ failure and death as the body slips into shock.

The principal agent, or vector, in the transmission of dengue, is the Asian Tiger mosquito Aedes aegypti, although its cousin Aedes albopictus is also capable of spreading the virus.

While Aedes aegypti is essentially a tropical mosquito, it is a very adaptable insect. In recent years, it has expanded its range out of the tropics into southern Europe and to several states in the US, including Florida, Hawaii, Texas and Arizona.

All mosquitos need water to breed, but another thing that has helped in its migration is its ability to use even the smallest of water containers to do so, something as small as a discarded plastic bottle cap will do.

Despite this capability, it is usually the lack of breeding sites that caps the number of mosquitoes in circulation and therefore their ability to spread the dengue virus. But in Bangladesh this year the rains arrived early and, coupled with an unusually high temperature and humidity, this led mosquito numbers to surge.

Because a large proportion of the population of Bangladesh spends a great deal of time outside and tends to have houses that are relatively simple for mosquitoes to enter, it took little time at all for dengue to take hold and then explode.

Although no one is certain about what's driving the increase and instability of dengue, climate change may be contributing as much of the world is getting both warmer and wetter.

Fortunately for most high-income countries, even areas within the current range of Aedes Aegypti, climate change will probably not lead to any major outbreaks simply because people spend so much of their time indoors and out of the reach of mosquitos. It takes a certain amount of biting pressure within a population to sustain transmission.

WHO warns of dengue spread to new places

However, a new report by the World Health Organization's chief scientist suggests that the disease may still be able to establish itself in parts of Europe, the US and Africa where it has previously been absent.

Something that is also likely to be seen more often is what happened recently in Bangladesh repeats itself across similar middle- and low-income countries where the opportunity for mosquitoes and people to mix is greater.

The solution is likely to be an affordable and effective vaccine. Indeed, the WHO has recently recommended the Qdenga vaccine for children living in areas where the infection is a major public health problem.

However, dengue is not the only concern as there are a variety of other mosquito-borne infections that kill around a million people every year.

Diseases like chikungunya, yellow fever and Zika virus are all transmitted by Aedes aegypti.

An increasingly warmer, wetter and less reliable climate is therefore probably going to be the precursor for many more—and less predictable—mosquito-related disease outbreaks, and ultimately deaths, in the future. As with most other life-threatening communicable diseases, it is once again the poorest communities in the global tropics that will have to bear the brunt of this.

Provided by The Conversation

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Professor Mark Hutchinson, Director of Director of the Centre for Nanoscale BioPhotonics, and the outgoing President of Science and Technology Australia, made his comments while giving the inaugural “Hope Oration,” at the Science Exchange in Adelaide.

Hutchinson told the invitation only guests that if we want our future scientists, engineers, and educators to be not just consumers but also creators, then hope must become an integral component of our educational fabric.

“This shift demands a radical rethinking of our pedagogical approaches, demanding time and space for inquiry-based learning, fostering creativity, and nurturing a culture that doesn’t just prize the right answers but also values the courage to ask the right questions,” he said.

“We’ve seen some astounding achievements coming out of Australian labs and institutions, from the invention of the cervical cancer vaccine to pioneering research in quantum computing and the creation of WiFi, the list is both extensive and inspiring.

“But here’s a challenging question: Are these successes the result of intentional, hope-fuelled systems, or are they merely the by-products of serendipity? Are we benefitting from a culture of hope, or are we just ‘lucky’?

“Clearly, in Australia we are falling behind other developed countries in our investments and expenditure on research and development. We simply need to do more. But we are clever, we are smart. Simply fuelling the system with more funding doesn’t engineer hope. It fuels luck. Let’s be clever.”

The Oration was hosted by the Royal Institution of Australia, which publishes  Cosmos Magazine and Australia’s online science news service Cosmosmagazine.com.

The editor in chief of Cosmos Magazine, Gail McCallum, pointed out to the guests that while they were listening to the unveiling: “We have just travelled 107,000 kilometres. “Science can take us to any future we want.”

The publication celebrated it’s 100th edition by commissioning “Reasons to Hope,” a wall sized mural depicting science, by artist Jenny McCracken. “We exist at a time in history when science has never been more important – when facts have never been more crucial – and when the white noise around these facts grows louder and more confusing day by day.,” McCallum said.

“We enter this field of conflict to confront using our most powerful weapon: words. The magazine has published writing by some of the planet’s most influential scientist/thinkers, including Paul Davies, Margaret Wertheim, Brian Cox and David Suzuki. It has made its own genre of Australian journalism by supporting scientists to talk about their research and also growing science journalism, bringing writers to tell stories in ways we hope entertain and energize.”

Referring to the artwork, which was unveiled by the Governor, Frances Adamson, Prof. Hutchinson said hope doesn’t operate in isolation.

“It’s deeply integrated into the scientific hypothesis and research methodologies that we employ. So when we discuss hope tonight, we’re not merely pondering a nebulous concept but exploring an actionable tenet deeply embedded in the scientific ecosystem.

“I was struck by a recent conversation with my daughter, Sophie. When I asked her where hope was taught in her science or maths classes, her response was candid: “Dad, you just have to know stuff.” It made me pause and ponder—are we, as educators, merely teaching the art of knowledge gathering, or are we instilling the skills of knowledge creation?

If we want our future scientists, engineers, and educators to be not just consumers but also creators, then hope must become an integral component of our educational fabric.

“The new $2.4 billion Australian Economic Accelerator program, alongside the $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund and other exciting developments like the transformative potential of the newly merged Adelaide University suddenly provide an opportunity to intentionally string together the brilliance of concept creation with the manufacturing and scaling of capability.

“These initiatives are not just massive injections of funding; or simple organisational restructuring, they are investments in hope. And just like any sound investment, they require a balance between risk and reward.

“We should not be so averse to risk that we stifle innovation; instead, we should plan for a headroom of non-linear explosion of hope. By that, I mean we need to build systems flexible enough to accommodate unforeseen, exponential advancements, without collapsing under the weight of their own complexity.”

Hutchinson says The Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics (CNBP) stands as an example of what intentional hope can achieve. “Rooted in the principles of convergence science, headquartered here at the University of Adelaide, the CNBP has been instrumental in orchestrating and transforming concepts into real-world applications across the globe.

“Our ambition isn’t only confined to scholarly articles gathering dust on a shelf but extends to delivering market-ready solutions that have a tangible impact on society. During its ongoing tenure, the CNBP has catalysed the creation of 22 startups with a staggering market impact exceeding $512 million. From developing the world’s smallest microscope—a ground-breaking tool that promises to revolutionise brain surgery and the diagnosis of heart disease—to devising meat quality probes that are globally employed to ensure premium protein products, to next generation IVF technologies for humans and animals, CNBP epitomises how science can be attuned to the needs and demands of end-users, whilst simultaneously breaking ground at the frontiers of fundamental knowledge AND training the future workforce of academic and industry innovators.

The T-shaped model of education—deep expertise in a single domain—has served us well but is increasingly inadequate for the complex challenges of the 21st century. Instead, we must strive for the education creating ‘comb-shaped’ individuals—those with deep expertise in multiple fields, all connected by a foundational layer of broad knowledge.

“Imagine the impact of a medical researcher trained in genomics but also versed in ethics, public policy, and data analytics. Or consider the promise of a civil engineer who understands not just the mechanics of building bridges but the environmental science of the ecosystems they cross, and the sociopolitical implications of connecting communities. This ‘comb-shaped’ model isn’t just an academic exercise; it’s a necessity for a future where challenges are as interconnected as the solutions they require.

“Let us commence this journey towards a hope-infused future. A future where silos are dismantled in favour of collaborative ecosystems. A future where our educational systems produce not just experts but polymaths. And most crucially, a future where hope serves as the foundational ethos guiding our collective endeavours in science, technology, and beyond.”

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The world at last has a public health tool it has been seeking for more than a century: a reliable vaccine against malaria that can protect at least two-thirds of the children who receive it from developing the deadly disease.

In fact, in an embarrassment of riches, the world now has two. Last week, the World Health Organization gave its recommendation to a vaccine formula called R21/Matrix-M, developed by the University of Oxford and the Serum Institute of India, following preprint publication of Phase 3 results that showed 68 to 75 percent efficacy. (The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.) That comes just three months after the rollout of a separate vaccine called RTS,S/AS01, developed by GlaxoSmithKline, which achieved 55 percent efficacy. The WHO approved that formula in October 2021.

The RTS,S vaccine is beginning to be distributed in 12 African nations. After some regulatory steps, the R21 vaccine is expected to debut next year. Together, they could make an extraordinary difference in the survival of children in tropical countries—though experts say it is far too soon to abandon traditional tools, such as bed nets, that have kept malaria imperfectly suppressed until now.

“Up to 620,000 people die of malaria every year. It’s a huge economic burden on countries,” says Lisa Stockdale, a senior immunologist in the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute and a member of the R21 research team. “If we can get everyone vaccinated, this has enormous potential to save lives.”

Achieving an effective vaccine has taken so long because malaria is a uniquely wily foe. The disease is caused by a parasite that is something of a shape-shifter. It enters the body through the bite of a mosquito. It migrates into the liver, multiplies there, and then moves into the circulatory system’s red blood cells. In each of those stages, it takes on a different form and produces thousands of different proteins. Interfering with this multi-stage infection is a complex maneuver, far more challenging than teaching the body to protect itself against viruses or bacteria.

“Vaccines provide information to the immune system so the immune system can learn about a pathogen,” says Steve Taylor, an infectious disease physician and associate professor at the Duke University School of Medicine who studies malaria. “A virus contains as much information as a pamphlet; you can provide its essence to the immune system quickly. But we have many fewer vaccines against bacteria, because they are more complex—like a nonfiction book. And malaria parasites are like a 1,000-page novel.”

The strategy used by both new vaccines aims to overcome the parasite as it enters the body and before it hides in the liver to reproduce. At that point, it has made few copies of itself and is in a relatively uncomplicated form. Both vaccines make use of manufactured assemblages of circumsporozoite protein, or CSP for short—which the parasite expresses in that early stage—to teach the immune system to recognize the parasite and overcome it.

Both vaccines are meant to be given to infants via a three-dose series, then topped off by a booster a year later. They appear to protect children for years, although that protection is not expected to be lifelong. The older vaccine has not been deployed long enough for anyone to predict its durability, and the newer one remains in clinical trials.

The number of shots needed to protect a single child makes it clear how many doses will be needed. So far, 1.7 million children in three countries have received almost 5 million doses of the RTS,S vaccine through a pilot program. Now 18 million doses of that vaccine are being made available in a three-year allocation cycle. Yet the WHO has estimated that annual demand for both vaccines will be 40 million to 60 million doses per year to begin with, and could rise to as many as 100 million by 2030.

GSK, which developed RTS,S (now called Mosquirix), plans to transfer it to the Indian pharma company Bharat Biotech, a move that could increase manufacturing capacity. And once it comes into production, the newly recommended R21 could add 100 million doses to the total available, according to the Serum Institute of India, which is serving as its manufacturing partner. For that to happen, the WHO still needs to prequalify the vaccine, an assessment that tells nonprofit purchasers and national regulatory authorities that a new drug is safe and effective. Though no date has been set, prequalification is expected soon, with a goal of beginning distribution next year.

At that point, a delicate dance will begin. The agencies and nongovernmental organizations that ensure vaccine availability for low-income countries will need to stimulate enough production from enough manufacturers to avoid the kind of competition that kept the earliest batches of Covid vaccines from reaching poorer nations. Meanwhile, they will be trying to build production capacity in the countries where the vaccine is most needed.

Though homegrown malaria recently flared in the US, “there’s no high-income market for this product,” says Aurélia Nguyen, the chief program officer of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which has made an initial commitment of $155 million to bring the new formulas to market and is beginning work on what it calls an African vaccine manufacturer accelerator. “Let’s make sure we really optimize the two suppliers we have today. But over time, let’s make sure we build toward a diverse manufacturer base, including diversity in terms of geographic production.”

For now, experts say the arrival of the vaccines won’t mean that countries can stop using long-standing methods of controlling malaria: spraying insecticides, distributing treated bed nets, and ensuring that people receive affordable preventive drugs. Sustained promotion of those methods by international agencies since 2000 has forced malaria rates down, but that progress has stalled recently. So the vaccines are urgently needed—but at this stage, they can’t be considered a replacement.

“The vaccines focus on children under 5, so they don’t cover the entire population. The other interventions do,” says Michael Adekunle Charles, a physician who is CEO of the nonprofit RBM Partnership to End Malaria. “And their efficacy is not at 100 percent. So in order to really get the coverage that is needed, we need to combine it with other tools to get the maximum benefit.”

As the vaccines roll out, they will also face the hurdles that other campaigns have encountered: challenges in distributing doses to remote areas, keeping them within safe temperature limits, and ensuring that health care workers and parents will be enthusiastic about their arrival. But the biggest hurdle—as always, in global public health—will be money. Keeping up donor zeal, from philanthropy and from rich nations, has been a long-time challenge for multiyear vaccination campaigns such as those against measles and polio.

Supporters hope the vaccine can make the case on economic benefits, not just on humanitarian grounds. In some low-income countries, malaria prevention consumes 40 percent of health care budgets. The cost to global productivity is believed to be $12 billion per year. Currently, though, “malaria funding is not looking good,” Charles says. “We have 50 percent of the funding we need, a $3.6 billion shortfall every year. The mosquito is consistently evolving—and if we don’t get ahead of it, the mosquito will continuously outsmart us.”

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In a year already overloaded with so many climate-related superlatives, it’s time to add another to the list: September was the most anomalously warm month ever recorded.

And the steady heat building this year could make 2023 not only the hottest year on record but the first to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures, or the stable climate that preceded the massive release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. Under the landmark Paris climate accord, nations have pledged to try to keep global warming under that threshold. “It’s very worrying,” says Kate Marvel, a senior climate scientist at Project Drawdown, a nonprofit organization that develops roadmaps for climate solutions.

According to data kept by the Japan Meteorological Agency, this September was about 0.5 degree C (0.9 degree F) hotter than the previous hottest September in 2020. It was also about 0.2 degree C (0.4 degree F) warmer than the previous record high temperature anomaly—a measure of how much warmer or colder a given time period is, compared with the average—which had been set in February 2016 during a blockbuster El Niño.

The September anomaly “is so far above anything we’ve seen before,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist who works at the payment processing firm Stripe and wrote about September’s heat in a recent blog post. On X, formerly known as Twitter, he called the feat “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”

The milestone reached last month comes on the heels of July setting the record for the hottest month overall. (July is always the hottest month of the year globally because it occurs at the peak of the Northern Hemisphere summer. The Northern Hemisphere has much more landmass to soak up the sun’s rays than the Southern Hemisphere, so it has the bigger influence on the global annual temperature cycle.)

In a marker of just how much global temperatures have risen in recent decades, Hausfather observes, “this September will be hotter than most Julys before the last decade or two.”

Credit: Zeke Hausfather, restyled by John Knight; Source: Japanese 55-Year Reanalysis data on global mean temperature, processed by Ryan Maue

Two main factors are at play in driving temperatures to such extremes: their inexorable increase from burning fossil fuels and an El Niño event that is shaping up to be a strong one. El Niño is a part of a natural climate cycle that features a tongue of unusually warm waters across the eastern Pacific Ocean. Those waters release heat into the atmosphere and can cause a cascade of changes to key atmospheric circulation patterns linked to the weather around the world.

Heat waves have broken records all over the globe during the past few months, including prolonged events called heat domes that plagued the southern stretch of the U.S. and parts of the Mediterranean. Summerlike temperatures were even felt in South America during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter. Two of the heat waves—one in the U.S. Southwest and one in Europe—were found to be virtually impossible without global warming. And summerlike heat has continued in places into October.

The most drastic temperature anomalies typically come in the winter months, when El Niño peaks in strength. In fact, the previous most anomalously warm month was February 2016, during one of the strongest El Niños on record. But this year “we’re seeing these [big anomalies] in the Northern Hemisphere summer,” Hausfather says. That leaves open the possibility of even larger anomalies when this event peaks this winter, particularly if it ends up being another strong event.

It is possible there is also some influence from the phasing out of sulfur-containing fuels used by ships because the aerosols spewed into the air from burning those fuels tend to have a slight cooling effect. The eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcano in the southern Pacific Ocean last year may also be nudging up temperatures because of the huge amounts of water vapor—also a greenhouse gas—it injected into the atmosphere. But both factors have very small influences, compared with climate change and El Niño.

Given that this El Niño is expected to persist and likely to strengthen, there’s a good chance that 2023 or 2024—or both—will become the hottest year on record, besting 2016 (and 2020, which some agencies who monitor climate have tied with 2016). That isn’t surprising, given that there has been a tenth of a degree of warming since 2016, though it is “remarkable just how quickly we’ve seen warmth this year,” Hausfather says. Part of the apparent rapid warming is because 2023 began in the tail end of an unusual string of three back-to-back La Niña events. These tend to have a cooling impact on the global climate, though La Niñas today are hotter than even El Niños of several decades ago.

Beyond potentially becoming the hottest year on record, 2023 could also be the first year to top 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial temperatures (some individual months have already passed that threshold). But even if that happens, all hope is not lost for meeting the Paris accord goals. That threshold is measured as an average of several decades, and climate scientists have long expected that a single year would pass that mark a decade or so before the world could be considered permanently above that limit. “There is still time to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees,” Marvel says. “It is going to be incredibly difficult. The pathways are narrowing.”

But this year should be considered a warning of the future we face if we don’t take rapid, ambitious action. “This is what the world looks like when it’s 1.5 degrees hotter in a year, and it’s terrible,” she says. When the world does permanently pass 1.5 degrees C, the climate anomalies for individual years will reach higher than that mark.

To stave off that future, every bit of carbon we can keep, or take, out of the atmosphere is crucial. “Every tenth of a degree matters,” Hausfather says.

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The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new era of digital connection: In the absence of in-person gatherings, many people instead found themselves face-to-face with their co-workers and loved ones on a screen.

Videoconferencing has provided many benefits and conveniences. However, it isn’t surprising that constantly seeing ourselves on screens might come with some downsides as well.

Prior to the pandemic, studies showed that surgeons were seeing increasing numbers of patients requesting alterations of their image to match filtered or doctored photos from social media apps. Now, several years into the pandemic, surgeons are seeing a new boom of cosmetic surgical requests related to videoconferencing. In one study of cosmetic procedures during the pandemic, 86% of cosmetic surgeons reported videoconferencing as the most common reason for cosmetic concerns among their patients.

Despite the fact that many aspects of life have returned to some version of pre-pandemic normal, it’s clear that videoconferencing and social media will be with us for the foreseeable future. So what does that mean when it comes to appearance satisfaction and making peace with the image that’s reflected back at us?

For the past 10 years, I have worked as a specialist in obsessive-compulsive disorders, eating disorders and anxiety. Since the pandemic, I, too, have seen increasing numbers of therapy clients reporting that they struggle with appearance concerns related to videochatting and social media.

ZOOMING IN ON IMAGE AND APPEARANCE DISSATISFACTION

Every person has perceptions and thoughts about their appearance. These can be neutral, negative or positive. We all look at ourselves in the mirror and may have even experienced distress while looking at our reflection.

There are a number of factors that may lead to appearance dissatisfaction. A preoccupation with thoughts, feelings or images of one’s own appearance is linked to the action of “mirror gazing,” or staring at one’s reflection. Researchers suggest that this type of selective self-focused attention and mirror gazing can lead to negative fixations on specific attributes or minor flaws, which in turn intensify the preoccupation with these attributes.

Other factors that can contribute to appearance dissatisfaction include low self-esteem, societal beliefs around appearance, peer and parental influences, temperament and genetic predispositions to mental health conditions.

Appearance dissatisfaction and negative evaluations of self are associated with depression, lower self-esteem, habitual negative thinking and increased social anxiety. What’s more, research suggests that these preoccupations can contribute to the development of eating disorders and disordered eating behaviors, such as frequently restricting food intake or exercising without refueling.

THE ‘ZOOM’ EFFECT

With the ubiquity of Zoom meetings, FaceTime calls, selfies and the constancy of documenting our lives on social media, access to our own image can often feel inescapable. And for some people, this can magnify feelings of appearance dissatisfaction that may have been more fleeting before the Zoom era.

Since the pandemic, screen time has increased for both adults and children. What’s worse, recent research suggests that the video and photo reflections we see of ourselves are distorted.

Videoconferencing, taking selfies and posting on social media are visually based activities where appearance is often the primary focus. All of them have in common the fact that a person’s image is either live or shared in an immediate manner. Perhaps not surprisingly, these image-based platforms have been significantly associated with appearance dissatisfaction, anxiety, depression and eating disorders.

One study found that those who engaged in more videochatting appearance comparisons, meaning those who looked at others’ appearance during a video call and sized up their own appearance in comparison, experienced lower appearance satisfaction. This study also found that people who used more photo-editing features on videochat platforms were more likely to compare themselves with others and spend more time looking at themselves on video calls.

One thing that is unique to videoconferencing is that it allows people to easily compare themselves with others and watch themselves sharing and speaking in real time. A 2023 study found that discomfort with one’s appearance during videoconferencing led to an increased fixation on appearance, which in turn led to impaired work performance.

Researchers also suggest that appearance dissatisfaction is associated with virtual-meeting fatigue. The research reports that this could be due to negative self-focused attention, cognitive overload and anxiety around being stared at or being negatively evaluated based on appearance.

This last point is notable because of the difficulty videochatters have determining where other users are looking. Using the concept of the “spotlight effect” − our tendency as humans to overestimate how much others are judging our appearance − this difficulty may lead to more anxiety and individuals believing that others are evaluating their appearance during a video call.

HOW TO COMBAT APPEARANCE DISSATISFACTION IN THE DIGITAL AGE

If you find yourself criticizing your appearance every time you hop onto a videoconference call, it may be time to evaluate your relationship with your appearance and seek out help from a qualified therapist.

Here are some questions to consider to help determine whether your thought patterns or behaviors are problematic:

1. How much of my day is spent thinking about my appearance?
2. What sort of behaviors am I doing around my appearance?
3. Do I feel distressed if I do not perform these behaviors?
4. Does this behavior align with my values and how I want to be spending my time?

Another strategy is to be intentional about focusing on what other people are saying in a videoconference instead of peering at your own face.

When it comes to helping others who might be struggling with appearance dissatisfaction, it is important to focus on the person’s innate qualities beyond appearance. People should be conscious of their comments, no matter how well intentioned. Negative comments about appearance have been linked to worsened self-esteem and mental health. When viewing yourself or your peers on video and social media, try focusing on the person as a whole and not as parts of a body.

Reducing screen time can make a difference as well. Research shows that reducing social media use by 50% can improve appearance satisfaction in both teens and adults.

When used in moderation, videoconferencing and social media are tools to connect us with others, which ultimately is a key piece in satisfaction and well-being.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Sunday, 8 October

• Who: Arianespace
• What: Vega
• When: 1:36 a.m. UTC
• Where: French Guiana
• Why: Arianespace will be launching a Vega rocket carrying 12 satellites including THEOS 2, Triton, and ProbaV-CC to orbit. Of these, THEOS 2 is the main payload; it was built by Airbus Defense for Thailand and it will complement THEOS 1 which was launched in 2008. It is an Earth observation satellite.

Monday, 9 October

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• When: 12:37 a.m. - 5:07 a.m. UTC
• Where: Space Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral, Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX is launching 2 Starlink mini satellites into a low-Earth orbit where they will provide internet connectivity to customers on Earth. The satellites being launched this time are known as Starlink Group 6-22 - this identifier can be used on various satellite-spotting apps to find these exact satellites that are being launched.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• When: 7:13 a.m - 11:25 a.m. UTC
• Where: Vandenberg AFB, California, US
• Why: SpaceX regularly performs numerous Starlink launches each week but it’s a little less common to see two launches on one day. Well, that’s what is happening this week. In both cases, the satellites will be covered in anti-reflective coatings to have less impact on astronomy.

Thursday, 12 October

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon Heavy
• When: 2:16 p.m. UTC
• Where: SpaceX LC-39A, Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will be launching a mission for NASA called Psyche. The spacecraft will head to an asteroid called Psyche and enter orbit with the body in 2029. Apparently, Psyche is the first craft to explore a metal-rich asteroid so there could be some interesting discoveries to be made. If you decide to tune in to the launch of SpaceX’s website, look out for the Falcon Heavy’s two side boosters performing a landing.

Recap

• The first launch we got this week was a Long March 2D rocket carrying the third Yaogan-39 mission from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in China. It is a remote sensing satellite used for observing the Earth.

• Next, we got the launch of a Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites to space to beam internet to the Earth. The first stage of the rocket also landed.

• This week, Amazon’s Project Kuiper got off the ground after United Launch Alliance launched some prototype satellites on an Atlas V rocket.

• Next, we got another commercial launch from Virgin Galactic which carried passengers to the edge of space where they could experience microgravity.

• Finally, PLD Space launched the MIURA 1 suborbital launch vehicle on its first test flight. PLD Space is a Spanish company that is developing reusable rockets to orbit commercial satellites.

That’s all for this week, be sure to check in next time!

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There was a time when we human beings used to put animals on trial for their alleged crimes against us. The earliest of these prosecutions in the Western tradition of law appears to be a case against moles in the Valle d’Aosta, Italy, in 824 AD, and legal actions continued into the 1900s. In the centuries between, a killer pig was dressed in human clothing and hanged in Falaise, France; Marseille put dolphins on trial for crimes unknown; and a rooster—in what must have been a case of mistaken identity—was burned at the stake in Basel, Switzerland, for the witchery of laying an egg while male.

The classic investigation of this subject, E. P. Evans’s 1906 book The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, finds no evidence that these trials were carried out for comedic effect, or in fact that the litigation was anything but gravely serious. That said, things obviously did get weird.

In 1522, “some rats of the diocese” of Autun, France, were charged with criminally eating and destroying barley crops. A skilled legal tactician, one Barthélemy de Chasseneuz, was assigned to defend the rats.

The case is remembered for its procedural twists and turns. When his clients—guess what?—didn’t show up for their day in court, de Chasseneuz noted that the summons had mentioned only “some rats.” But which ones, specifically? The court ordered that a new summons be addressed to all the rats of Autun. When the rodents still failed to appear, their nimble lawyer had a second defense at the ready. His clients, he said, were widely dispersed, and for them the trip to court amounted to a great journey. The rats needed more time.

Again proceedings were rescheduled, and again the rats missed their date with the law. Of course they did, said de Chasseneuz. To arrive at court, the rats faced the twin perils of vindictive villagers and their bloodthirsty cats; his clients needed guarantees of safe passage. This tested the patience of the villagers’ legal team and, with the two sides unable to settle on a fourth trial date, the court decided in favor of the accused by default. The rats won.

Preposterous? Absolutely. Yet one lesson of de Chasseneuz’s victory is this: If we’re asked to see the world through a rat’s eyes, the results may surprise us. Suppose the trial had continued and a full defense of the rat was heard?

Some 16 human generations (and many more rat generations) later, I find myself pressed to pick up where de Chasseneuz left off. I do so for two reasons.

The first is that the charges against the rat have only grown stronger.

Rats today are widely seen as filthy, thieving vectors of deadly diseases like plague and hantavirus. They raid our food supplies, gnaw electrical wires, invade our homes, and undermine critical infrastructure with their burrows. No one knows how much rats cost people worldwide each year, but the total is likely in the hundreds of millions of dollars—and possibly much more.

The two most widespread and infamous rat species are the black rat (Rattus rattus) and brown rat (Rattus norvegicus). The former originally came from India, while the latter expanded out of northern China and Mongolia. Aided by our boats, most dramatically in the age of European imperialism, each species transformed into a peculiar kind of marine mammal, one that stows away to reach distant ports. They now inhabit every continent but Antarctica.

As an invasive species, rats are voracious destroyers of wildlife. This is especially true on islands—and they have reached 80 percent of the planet’s island clusters, ranging from the subarctic Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic to several subantarctic isles. Rats have been implicated in nearly one-third of recorded bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions, making them the worst nonhuman invasive species on the planet, followed by cats and mongooses. Ironically, mongooses have often been introduced to new lands in the hope that they will eat the rats.

Rats are better known, of course, as our immediate neighbors in cities, in towns, and on farms. Science defines the rat’s relationship to humans as commensal: an association between two species in which one benefits and the other is neither helped nor harmed. The label is awkward, however, since many people feel harmed by the mere existence of rats. When they shuffle and scratch in our walls at night, rats assail our mental health. Some feel physical disgust at the mere sight of rats’ ball-bearing eyes and maggot-coloured tails. As one rat researcher recently put it in an interview with The New York Times, we tend to place rats in a “special category of things we don’t want to exist.”

We have responded with vigilantism. Humans’ relationship with rats is often described as the “war on rats.” But like our wars on drugs and terrorism, the war on rats has proved to be an unwinnable “forever war”—a term popularized, appropriately enough, in a 1974 sci-fi novel about a 1,000-year conflict between humans and an alien species.

It is a brutal war. A recent comment in an online forum about rat-catching captures the rules of engagement: “Worrying about how to kill rats ethically is of concern only to people who do not have a rat problem.” We do things to rats that most of us would find abhorrent, and would often be illegal, if they involved almost any other animal capable of feeling. We snap them in traps that can fail to kill instantly, leaving the animals maimed. We lure them into pails of water, where they swim until they can’t anymore, then drown. We bait them into patches of glue, where they tear skin and break bones in their efforts to escape, or even gnaw off their own limbs; some glue traps kill by slow suffocation. We use poisons against them that cause death only after days of painful internal bleeding. Online videos of people siccing dogs and minks on rats receive millions of views.

In a world at war with the rat, a defense of the enemy might seem hopeless. Yet the second reason to mount that defense is that there is new evidence in the rat’s favor. A growing body of research paints a picture of the accused that is far less vile than has been portrayed, and that may even charm the jury. To begin, we must dust off the closed case that marked rats with their original sin again us: the Black Death.

Lars Walløe was a teenager in the 1950s when he first read about the raging plague that struck his hometown of Oslo, Norway, in 1654. The dread disease arrived in the summer of that year; before long, the townsfolk needed to add a new graveyard. Nearly 40 percent of Christiania, as Oslo was then called, died.

Walløe went on to become a polymath scientist, and one of his interests—“kind of a hobby,” he says now—was demography. In the early 1980s, he began computer modeling the population decline in the Middle Ages that occurred in Norway and across most of Europe. He wanted to help solve the mystery of what caused it and why it had persisted across centuries. Walløe suspected that the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, might be to blame.

In what is now remembered as the Black Death, plague killed nearly one-third of Europeans between 1347 and 1351. Less well known is that many lesser plague outbreaks, like the one that struck Norway, followed into the early 18th century. All of them, Walløe knew, had the same cause: Rats would develop the plague, then die swiftly in large numbers, at which point their disease-carrying fleas—which normally didn’t bite people—would switch to human hosts. This had been known since 1898 when Paul-Louis Simond, a French scientist working in what is now Pakistan, proved that plague was rat-borne during a widespread pandemic in Asia.

Walløe soon learned, however, that the conventional plague narrative had been questioned. In 1970, a retired British bacteriologist, J. F. D. Shrewsbury, made the case that other diseases, not plague, must have been largely responsible for what was remembered as the Black Death and similar later epidemics in Great Britain. The reason, Shrewsbury said, was simple: At the time of those outbreaks, there weren’t enough rats there to spread the disease.

Walløe was intrigued. It turned out that Cambridge historian Christopher Morris had promptly and convincingly shown that Shrewsbury was wrong about the illness involved: It really was the plague. It was harder, though, to push aside his claim that Britain hadn’t had a lot of rats.

Brown rats were certainly innocent—they established themselves in Europe only in the past 500 years and didn’t put down roots in the British Isles until the early 1700s. Black rats made it there several centuries earlier, also as stowaways, but by most accounts lived mainly in small, often temporary colonies around ports. This appeared to be true not only of Britain, but of Europe as a whole north of the Mediterranean.

In the warmer countries of Asia, rats visibly suffered from outbreaks of plague. Records from India and China describe delirious rats coming out of hiding, hemorrhaging blood, and dying. A Chinese poet, writing during an epidemic in 1792, made the connection between sick rats and their human neighbors: “Few days following the death of the rats men pass away like falling walls.”

Shrewsbury believed that rats and plague were inextricably linked, and even his harshest critic, Morris, acknowledged that the bubonic form of plague—which strikes the lymph nodes—required the presence of infected rats. Yet no one in Britain had recorded dead rats falling from roof beams or staggering through the streets. Not even London’s famously meticulous diarist, Samuel Pepys, mentioned mass deaths of rats in London during plague outbreaks, or individual rats behaving oddly in broad daylight. Later, archaeologists rarely found rat bones in digs from that era. If Shrewsbury had been wrong about the bacterium causing plague epidemics in Britain, it appeared he might be correct that rats weren’t to blame for spreading it.

But if rats weren’t the culprit, what was?

Walløe widened his research. “I found it quite typical that the English did not read the French literature,” he says. He found studies from the early 1940s in which two French doctors showed that plague could spread person to person through parasites such as lice and Pulex irritans (the human flea), both much more common in the past than they are today. He also discovered that by 1960, a leading plague scientist at the World Health Organization had accepted that human fleas played an important role in the transmission of plague in areas where rats were uncommon or absent.

Even Simond, discoverer of rats’ link to plague in Asia, had written, “The mechanism of the propagation of plague includes the transporting of the microbe by rat and man, its transmission from rat to rat, from human to human, from rat to human, and from human to rat by parasites.”

In 1982, Walløe published his findings in a Norwegian science journal. His work would ultimately lead to what is now known as the “human ectoparasite hypothesis” of the plague’s spread—meaning that the illness swept across Europe not on a wave of rat fleas abandoning the carcasses of their rodent hosts but via human fleas and lice profiting from our own unhygienic habits and tendency to provide the poor with only squalid, unsanitary housing. Walløe’s paper became something of a sleeper success and, in 1995, was printed in English. That brought his clash with the prevailing narrative to a much wider scientific audience, which reacted more with noise than substantial counterargument.

“The response was very negative, but it wasn’t very strong,” Walløe recalls. “It was more like, ‘Here is a fool from Norway, and we don’t have to take him very seriously.’”

Since then, further lines of evidence have supported the human ectoparasite theory. In 2018, Katharine Dean, a Norwegian biologist, published research that modeled plague epidemics in nine European cities where detailed records were kept. They ranged in latitude from Stockholm, Sweden, to the Mediterranean island of Malta, and across time from 1348 to 1813. In seven of the nine locations, the spread of the disease fit best with human fleas and lice as the carriers; the other two outbreaks proved too small to clearly parse causes. A genetic study, meanwhile, found that plague was present in Europe for approximately 1,200 years without the presence of rats. Historical research notes that plague pandemics throughout Europe’s Little Ice Age (roughly 1300 to 1850) and in winter aren’t compatible with large, active populations of black rats or their fleas, both of which struggle in cold climates, not to mention outbreaks of “plague without rats” in medieval Iceland. The theory of rat-borne plague in medieval Europe now suffers in many places from what a 2021 paper published by The Lancet described as “the absence of its protagonist.”

Other recent research tracked the timeline of plague flare-ups in Europe. The scientists didn’t find a match with rat populations. Instead, they synched the pattern to climate-driven irruptions of another plague-carrying rodent—perhaps Rhombomys opimus, or the great gerbil, which was abundant along the Silk Road caravan route from Asia to the Mediterranean. In the case of the notorious plague in Europe, the event that forever marked rats as public enemy number one, the animals may be almost entirely innocent.

“They are sweet, small animals,” Walløe says about rats. “I have nothing against them.”

Critics will point out that even if we exonerate the rat for the Black Death, it doesn’t mean rats are not verminous. It remains a historical fact that rats were patient zero in horrendous outbreaks of plague in warmer parts of the world, killing millions of people across centuries. Set aside plague altogether, which modern hygiene and medicine have rendered rare and curable across most of the world, and rats are still carriers of dozens of diseases with the potential to spill over to humans.

“They have this incredible sponge capacity,” says Chelsea Himsworth, a veterinary pathologist and epidemiologist in Abbotsford, British Columbia. “They traverse all sorts of different environments, they come into contact with microbes from humans, different domestic animals, sewage, garbage, et cetera, and then they have the ability to carry these pathogens and potentially transmit them back to humans or other animals.”

This is not, as it turns out, a blanket condemnation of rats. Himsworth’s interest turned toward the rodents more than a decade ago, as scientists began to focus on the potential disease risks presented by wildlife in environments like rainforests and grasslands. She looked instead at the research into rats and disease, and discovered little contemporary science on the subject.

“That struck me as particularly odd,” she says. “If people are going to come into contact with a wild animal, it’s more likely going to be a rat than something more exotic.”

In 2011, Himsworth founded the Vancouver Rat Project, a research body dedicated to better understanding the true disease risk that rats pose in British Columbia’s largest city, which the pest control company Orkin has named as Canada’s second “rattiest” metropolis, after Toronto. She has since drawn a stark conclusion about the perception that every rat we meet is a superspreader: “It’s inaccurate from a scientific standpoint,” she says.

To understand what patterns of disease in rats really look like, we first must confront the myth that rats are swarming invaders, a vision often promoted in books and film (a recent example appears in the Netflix hit Stranger Things). In fact, they tend to be homebodies. The Vancouver Rat Project found that, in a typical day, the city’s brown rats stay within the length of a city block. They generally do not cross roads, and research in other urban areas shows that rats even prefer to stick to one side or the other of alleys.

This means, Himsworth says, that even a ratty block of downtown Vancouver could have no diseased rats at all, while on another block every rat might carry sickness. For similar research in Vienna, Austria, published in 2022, researchers captured rats across two years at a popular riverwalk, a touristed square, and a cruise-ship port. They then tested them for eight types of dangerous virus known to be harbored in rats, including strains of hepatitis, coronavirus, hantavirus, and the influenza virus that causes global flu outbreaks. They found not a single rat that carried any of the diseases. The authors noted that studies that don’t find the presence of disease in rats are rarely published, and argued that this could lead to a “misconception of the reality”—a false belief that urban rats are all teeming with contagion.

Misconception is the order of the day with rats. Rats are aggressive, right? Bobby Corrigan, a legendary rodentologist and pest control expert in New York, has said that rats have never attacked him, “and I’ve put myself right in the thick of those animals, as thick as I can get.” But rats are filthy, right? In fact, they are such fastidious groomers, one scientist who researches laboratory animal welfare told me, that when she tried to use “permanent” ink to make identifying marks on rats’ tails, those marks were quickly cleaned away.

Even more surprising is how little we know about how often rats spread disease to humans. “We have no idea,” says Himsworth. She is, however, prepared to venture an educated guess. “Any rat you meet has the potential to have a disease,” she says. “But know that, in general, the risk—particularly for people in countries like Canada—is low.” Most people in wealthier nations live in sturdy, clean homes and have the resources to respond if faced with a serious rat infestation. On the other hand, a person who is living, say, in poor-quality housing, whose hygiene is affected by mental health struggles, and whose landlord refuses to act as rat problems worsen, is definitely at an increased risk.

Furthermore, if our main concern is the real (if overweighted) risk of rat-borne disease, then our current tactics may be counterproductive. Killing rats with traps can disrupt their social structures, creating chaos in which rats may spread disease through behaviors such as fighting for dominance. The result can be an increase in sickness among the surviving rats. A study in Chicago, declared America’s rattiest city for eight years running, found that poisoning had a similar effect. Modern rodenticides kill rats in a process that may take five to 10 days. Live-trapped rats that had been poisoned were three times more likely than other rats to carry disease. The poison likely weakens their immune systems, making them more susceptible to illness.

“The interspecies genocide approach—it’s not effective, it’s never worked. It’s just silly to carry on the way we have been,” says Himsworth. “I also don’t think it’s good for us as people and as communities to be dealing with another species in that manner.”

The rat, meanwhile, isn’t just another species. It’s one that we might reasonably learn to see as a fitting companion for human society.

When it comes to rats winning your heart, let me not hold back: Rats can learn to play hide-and-seek with humans. They will do so for no other reward than tickles and fun. And they will laugh.

This is not woo-woo hearsay but scientific fact. Researchers at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin found that rats can learn, with surprising quickness, how to play both the “hide” and “seek” roles in games against a human experimenter. To ensure that the rats’ motivation was play rather than profit, the animals were not given food rewards when they found, or were found by, their human. Instead, they were “tickled”—given a brief bout of light roughhousing by the researcher’s fingertips, which previous studies had shown that most rats enjoy.

It was clear, in any case, that rats were engaged by the game. They made eager playmates. When it was time to seek, they scampered out of a lidded box, carried out a systematic search of the game space, then beelined toward their quarry the moment they spotted the hider. When the rats were doing the hiding, some—behaving like human children—took off to hide again as soon as they were caught, lengthening the thrill of the chase.

The rats teased the humans. They performed freudensprung, a German word that means “joy jumps.” They also emitted the kind of ultrasonic chirps that have been linked to what scientists dryly call “positive affective states.” (“You can say it’s laughter, but it’s not sounding really like human laughter,” says Sylvie Cloutier, an ethologist who pioneered research into rat tickling but was not involved in the hide-and-seek study. “They’re more like little happy chirps when you can hear them.”) After the experiment, and rather chillingly, the researchers euthanized the rats that played with humans in order to further study their brains.

Paradoxically, much of what we now know about rats’ emotional and intellectual worlds is grounded in the fact that we experiment on them. A cottage industry of breeding brown rats for use in laboratory experiments emerged in Europe in the 1840s, making rats the first mammal to be domesticated mainly for scientific purposes. Industrial-scale production of “lab rats” began in 1906 at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even today, nearly half of all lab rats descend from the original Wistar colony. They are mainly albinos, favored for their genetic uniformity and calm dispositions.

At the outset, Wistar researchers Milton Greenman and Louise Duhring sought to make lab rats “contented and happy.” Their animals were “carefully gentled” to human handling and ate a diet that ranged from macaroni to kale to breakfast sausages, or even hot cocoa if a rat was feeling under the weather. The rodents enjoyed abundant direct sunlight—“unfiltered through glass windows”—and fresh air. “Most albino rats,” they noted, “are susceptible to the soothing influence of soft, sweet music, especially the higher notes of the violin.”

The rats’ cages, as you might by now have guessed, included some amenities. Each was furnished with material the rats could burrow in and had one of those exercise wheels familiar from hamster cages, except that the wheels were the size of bicycle wheels. The rats often spun the equivalent of more than eight kilometers a day in them.

A century later, modern lab-rat life is defined by what’s known as the “shoebox”—a cage too small for rats to carry out such natural behaviors as burrowing, climbing, or even standing upright. No more hot chocolate—they mainly eat a standardized laboratory rat chow. An estimated 3 million rats are used in laboratory experiments each year in the United States alone, with about 1.2 million of those experiments classified as painful or distressing.

Over time, scientists’ use of rats as test subjects began to reveal the possibility that rats, and therefore other animals, have qualities previously thought to be the exclusive domain of human beings. In 1959, American experimental psychologist Russell Church found that rats learned to stop pressing a lever that provided them with a tasty treat when doing so also delivered an electric shock to a rat in an adjacent cage. It was the first study to suggest that rats might recognize when one of their own kind was suffering and alleviate that suffering if they could.

The debate about whether rats and other animals really care about others or only act in ways that resemble empathy has gone on ever since. But picture this recent study: Rat A is safe and secure. Rat B is distressed, because it’s in a separate chamber where it has no option but to stand in a pool of water. Rat A will release Rat B from that chamber even if liberating Rat B does not provide Rat A with access to the water, or the other rat, or any kind of reward. It becomes difficult to propose motivations for Rat A that don’t involve a capacity to put itself in Rat B’s position.

Scientists who claim that animals share human qualities like empathy are often condemned for anthropomorphism—the sin of awarding human characteristics to things that are not human. In 2021, two researchers from the Medical University of South Carolina reviewed the numerous studies on empathy in rats and concluded that refusal to recognize the rodents’ empathic abilities now amounted to “anthropodenial.” The term was coined by primatologist Frans de Waal in 1997 to refer to a stubborn tendency to dismiss humanlike characteristics in animals, no matter how convincing the evidence.

Other laboratory experiments have shown that rats can solve complex puzzles, recognize cause-and-effect relationships, feel regret, make judgments based on perception, and understand time, space, and numbers. In online videos posted by owners of pet rats, you’ll find trained rats completing agility courses, raising tiny flags by pulling tiny ropes with their delicate fingers, and “reading” placards that instruct them either to jump onto a box or spin around. Rats even appear to engage in metacognition, meaning rats know that they think.

Rats have personalities, too. Nearly every researcher I spoke to who had worked directly with the animals recalled individuals whose distinctive way of being in the world stands out in their memories. Lazarus, for example, was a favorite of Kaylee Byers, who captured and released about 700 different rats for the Vancouver Rat Project. As the rat’s name suggests, Byers thought Lazarus was dead when she first found him motionless in one of her traps. It turned out he was simply unusually chill. After being captured that first time, he returned to be caught again and again. He would eat the peanut-butter-and-oats bait, then wait to be released, apparently grasping that Byers would do him no harm.

If rats have begun to remind you of another animal—you know, the one we increasingly treat with overweening kindness and respect, and rarely hesitate to anthropomorphize—then, well, there’s good reason for that.

Joanna Makowska, an animal welfare scientist, remembers a veterinarian once sharing with her the advice he gives to people who are looking for a very small dog. “He tells them, ‘Get a rat.’”

If the rat was not the bête noire of the Black Death; if it poses a low risk of disease in many places, and, where it is poses a higher risk, is a better reflection of how poorly our societies care for the vulnerable than the real dangers of the animal itself; if the rat is not aggressive or filthy; if the rat is not a shadow of our worst qualities but instead can reflect our best; and if—perhaps most important of all—we cannot win our cruel war against them, then an obvious question remains. What are we to do about rats?

The surprising answer—one that recalls Barthélemy de Chasseneuz’s demand that the voice of rats be heard—may be this: Communicate with them.

“If we don’t want rats in the area, we should be more mindful of the signals that we’re sending to them, which are like, ‘Hey, there’s a bunch of food that we don’t really care about, and we usually put it out here at this time,’” says Becca Franks, an assistant professor in environmental studies at New York University who has studied rats and once had a wild rat gnaw through the wall of her home. “If we don’t actually want them there, I don’t think that’s the message that we’re sending in a way that they understand.”

The real, lasting solution to rats damaging our homes and eating our food, Franks says, is “unsexy infrastructure stuff.” Design buildings to exclude rats. Put garbage in rat-proof containers, as New York is only now beginning to require. Pass bylaws that give tenants the right to live in rat-free housing, holding neglectful landlords to account. If the scale of such changes seems overwhelming, history provides inspiration.

In the days of sail, rats truly infested ships, harrowing seafarers’ minds with their scraping and scurrying and sometimes getting hungry enough to lick or bite the hands and feet of crew in their bunks. Anthropologist Jules Skotnes-Brown writes that “their occasional gnawing away at extremities caused spine-chilling discomfort and pain.” Sailors sometimes returned the favor by eating shipboard rats.

In the 1920s, mariners made a hard turn toward rat-proofing their boats. This required thinking like a rat, said Skotnes-Brown: blocking their runways, storing food in impenetrable containers, and closing out hollows and nooks used for nesting. One early success reduced the rat population on a ship from 1,177 to zero. Through a combination of financial incentives and government regulations, rat-proofed ships were widespread by the mid-1930s, and the use of poisonous fumigants to kill ship rats steadily declined. Rodents are still a part of maritime life today, but a much smaller one than they once were.

We are relearning how to coexist with other wildlife species that were once dismissed as vermin or “man-eaters,” including wolves and bears, coyotes and beavers. Along the way, we’re finding that, as Aldo Leopold put it, “Wildlife management is comparatively easy; human management difficult.” Bears can be excellent neighbors, but not if they’re hooked on eating garbage from bins they can easily break into. Wolves can live almost unseen alongside us, but not if we feed them by hand to get a good selfie. Rats can be our shadow companions, but not if we openly discard so much food that some rats—and this is true—develop a taste for Chinese over Italian, or vice versa.

But Franks is prepared to imagine forms of communication that go beyond unsexy infrastructure and antilittering campaigns.

Franks recalls visiting a researcher who kept her lab rats in a small room—“almost like a broom closet,” said Franks. The researcher closed the door behind them, then opened the rats’ large cage. Scenes that seemed clipped from the film Ratatouille began to play out. The rodents, about 15 in all, tumbled out onto a table, then streamed down its legs to the floor. A few climbed one after another up a broomstick to the top, where the uppermost rat suddenly let go, sending every other rat playfully sliding down. The researcher used a bat detector to listen in on the rats’ ultrasonic voices. They could hear them, “chittering and laughing and squealing and having just a wild time,” says Franks.

Suddenly, Franks realized she had another meeting to get to, and here she was in a room full of free-ranging rats. She couldn’t just open the door and leave—rats would surely escape. But catching each rat and putting it back into the hutch would take forever.

“I think, you know, we should probably get them back in the cage,” Franks said.

“Oh, okay,” said the researcher.

She opened the cage door. The rats streamed back up the table legs and into confinement, where they continued to romp and play. Franks made it to her meeting.

It was an example of how building relationships and channels of communication with rats might allow us to come to understandings with them. “Rats can be quite responsive to human interests that potentially are not even in alignment with what the rats want,” said Franks. (It turns out that this has been shown in laboratory experiments as well, where rats have been trained to participate in procedures they cannot possibly enjoy, such as tube-feeding.)

I admit, and so does Franks, that we are entering unexplored territory here. What does it look like to form social relationships with wild rats? Do we hire rat-catchers who tickle rather than kill? Draw hard territorial lines where they’re most important—in homes, offices, restaurants—while accepting rats on a downtown street or in a park in the same way that we do a pigeon or any other commensal animal?

An idea that seems absurd is sometimes a truth that we haven’t yet accepted. Years after de Chasseneuz represented rats in the court of Autun, one of the strangest animal prosecutions on record gave hints of how the famous lawyer might have fully defended the rats had their trial proceeded.

The case in question was launched against beetles of the species Rhynchites auratus—handsome golden-green weevils—in Saint-Julien, France, in 1587. As with the rats of Autun, the accused were charged with ravaging crops, this time the local vineyards. Again, counsel was appointed to defend the verminous pests.

The prosecution relied on Biblical passages that give humankind dominion over “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth”: Since weevils surely creepeth, we were free to decide their fates. The defense, meanwhile, made the case that weevils were a part of divine creation, and God had made the earth fruitful “not solely for the sustenance of rational human beings.”

The trial lasted more than eight months, and at one point the restless citizens of Saint-Julien offered to mark out an insect reserve where the weevils could feed without harming the vineyards. The weevils’ advocates were not placated. They declared the land inadequate, turned down the offer and, as lawyers will, sought dismissal of the case cum expensis—that is, with the accusers paying the weevils’ legal costs. No one today knows how the matter was finally decided, because the last page of the court record is damaged. It appears to have been nibbled by rats or some kind of beetle.

Preposterous? Absolutely. Yet by putting weevils on trial, both defense and prosecution came to agree on one point that eludes us today: Creatures have a right to exist in accordance with their nature, even if it is their nature to make trouble for humankind.

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Amazon is set to launch two satellite prototypes for its Project Kuiper network, which will eventually number more than 3,200 orbiters. Project Kuiper could become a rival to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, which is now nearly 4,800 strong. Amazon’s launch is planned for 2 pm Eastern time today, with a backup launch window tomorrow. This rapid growth of the satellite industry has come at a cost for astronomers and fans of the night sky, as two new studies and panels at an international astronomy conference stressed this week. 

All spacecraft in low Earth orbit reflect sunlight, and some glint enough to be visible to the naked eye—artificial constellations that compete with stellar ones. Satellites can cause problems for astronomers when they streak across images, interfere with radio observations, or make hard-earned data less scientifically useful. By one estimate, there could be some 100,000 satellites swarming the skies in the 2030s. While scientists are mainly concerned about this aggregate effect, some individual satellites are very bright indeed. A study published in the journal Nature this week shows that a prototype of AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird swarm has become one of the brightest objects in the heavens. Another study documents how even deliberately darkened satellites are still twice as bright—if not more—than the limit astronomers have called for to minimize effects on space science.

Such concerns prompted a major conference this week, organized by the International Astronomical Union’s Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference, known as CPS. It’s being held in the Canary Islands, where there are several observatories. It’s the first in-person meeting of its kind, bringing together scores of astronomers, as well as satellite industry representatives, advocates of Indigenous and environmental perspectives, and policy experts.

“We’re on the cusp of a new era with a crowded, large zoo of satellites. Having a bunch of bright satellites in the sky will be very disruptive to astronomy,” says Aparna Venkatesan, an astrophysicist at the University of San Francisco who spoke at the meeting about environmental and cultural views of the night sky. She coauthored an earlier study about how satellite proliferation boosts the risks of collisions in low Earth orbit and increases the amount of space junk. The CPS meeting was delayed multiple times because of Covid and a volcano eruption, so it’s long overdue, Venkatesan says. “But in a way, waiting has been a gift, because the astronomers and modelers and data takers have been able to organize.”

FILE–The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is transported from the Vertical Integration Facility to Space

Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, in preparation to launch Amazon's Project Kuiper Protoflight

mission.Photograph: United Launch Alliance

Astronomers are concerned that bright satellites can photobomb images and interfere with radio receivers, degrading astronomical data. A team working on the Vera Rubin Observatory in the Chilean Andes, which will become one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth when it opens next year, has proposed a brightness limit of apparent magnitude 7. (Apparent magnitudes describe how bright something appears on Earth, not its absolute brightness. A distant galaxy can have a fainter magnitude than a nearby star or a much closer satellite.) But most members of satellite constellations glow much brighter than that, at least part of the time.

Satellite networks also create a diffuse light in the night sky, even from orbiters that aren’t individually visible. That light will only brighten if satellites collide, creating reflective bits of flying junk that can’t be masked in images. Starlink satellites have been involved in many near misses, including flying near China’s Tiangong space station. 

While ground telescopes are the most impaired, a few space telescopes, especially Hubble, have been affected too. Since Hubble orbits slightly below some networks of satellites, a small but increasing percentage of its images have streaks in them.

The conference organizers emphasize that astronomers generally don’t oppose satellite constellations, which can deliver broadband access, navigation, and other important services. “The potential benefits to humanity are great, but so are the associated concerns. Creative solutions and technological innovation are needed to confront and solve these problems,” the conference’s website states. But the attendees are struggling to address interference thanks to satellites’ growing numbers. “From the astronomy point of view, there’s nothing we can do to stop this. It’s time to mitigate the effects and reduce the impacts,” says Mike Peel, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, who co-leads the CPS’s group focused on adapting observation strategies.

Astronomers like Harrison Krantz at the University of Arizona are using telescopes to bear witness to these challenges. “These satellites are going to make astronomy more difficult, but not impossible. Let’s assess the situation and see what tools we have at our disposal,” Krantz says. For example, sometimes astronomers can use software that masks pixels affected by streaking. They can also time some observations to avoid clusters of satellites, or avoid pointing their telescopes where satellites are brightest. Krantz and his colleagues recently published the results of a 2.5-year comprehensive survey finding that, despite some astronomers’ assumptions, satellites tend not to be brightest at zenith, or directly overhead, where they’re closest in range. Instead they’re brightest at mid-elevations opposite the sun. Adapting observations isn’t always possible, though—meaning some crucial data will be lost. 

Satellites also have a long history of interfering with radio telescopes, including the LOFAR network of low-frequency antennas and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. Radio signals and electromagnetic radiation from satellites can create static that mimics signs of the cosmic phenomena astronomers are trying to study. 

“It was always clear that satellites would have this effect, because all electronics have this. It’s inevitable. We knew there would be leaked radiation, but we didn’t know till now how much,” says Benjamin Winkel, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, who is attending the conference. 

Winkel coauthored a study published earlier this year about the radiation levels and frequencies measured from 68 Starlink satellites that passed through the LOFAR station’s beam during an hour of observation. Winkel says SpaceX has attempted to move radio traffic to other frequencies when their satellites fly above telescopes, and to keep their radio beams from being pointed too closely at them. But Winkel’s paper concluded those efforts were insufficient, because telescopes are still sensitive to satellites’ internal electronics. “When we looked, something popped up, much brighter than anticipated. It’s not a needle in the haystack,” Winkel says, referring to the electromagnetic radiation from satellites’ onboard electronics.

Astronomers at the conference have some key fixes they want from the space industry: to darken satellites to at least magnitude 7, to avoid interfering with “radio-quiet zones” around telescopes, to avoid radio frequency bands near the ones telescopes use, and to share more information with the astronomical community. Winkel points out that international regulations limit how much electromagnetic radiation smartphones and TVs can leak—but so far these rules haven’t been applied to satellites.

National regulations and international policies have been moving slower than innovation. Only voluntary changes have emerged so far. For example, SpaceX attempted to add visors to its satellites to block sunlight from hitting the bottom of the chassis, according to a company white paper in 2022. The visors did seem to dim the glint, but they got in the way of a new optical communications system, so the company abandoned the visors, according to SpaceX’s paper. 

SpaceX has also tried adding coatings to the body of its spacecraft to darken them, and Krantz’s team concluded that it did make them a bit fainter. That’s significant progress, though the satellites are still 2.5 to 6 times brighter than the magnitude 7 threshold astronomers can live with, Krantz says. SpaceX has also begun experimenting with a “dielectric mirror film” to further darken its newest generation of satellites and allow radio waves to pass through them, according to the white paper.

Representatives from SpaceX did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. But Patricia Cooper, a former SpaceX vice president, told WIRED: “SpaceX has put a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of thought into its corrections.” Cooper is now the president of Constellation Advisory LLC, a group that advises satellite companies on policies and regulations. “I am concerned that persistent calls to alarm without a meaningful focus on solutions will deter companies from trying,” she says.

In an emailed statement, Amazon spokesperson Brecke Boyd wrote: “As part of our prototype mission, we’ll test an anti-reflection method on one of the two satellites to learn more about whether it’s an effective way to mitigate reflectivity.” The company also plans to use steering and maneuvering capabilities to orient the solar array and spacecraft to minimize reflection from surfaces, according to that statement.

Starlink now comprises more than half of all satellites in orbit, and SpaceX is seeking regulatory approval for 30,000 more. Amazon has some catching up to do, though the company plans to fill out its fleet of more than 3,000 by 2029. Both companies’ networks will fly at similar altitudes: between 342 and 392 miles above the Earth. Other networks include OneWeb, which has more than 630 satellites orbiting at a much higher altitude—750 miles. They are therefore dimmer, but take longer to pass out of a telescope’s field of view. 

AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird network of communications satellites could number 150 or more, with more than 100 planned for launch by the end of next year. The new Nature paper, produced by a team of about 40 researchers, found that its prototype, BlueWalker 3, launched in 2022, reflects more light than almost any star. It is also rather large by satellite standards, at nearly 700 square feet including its broad solar array. “BlueWalker was a shock to us as to how bright it was. We are also very worried about the impact to radio astronomy,” since one of its downlink frequencies is next to a protected radio band at 42.5-43.5 gigahertz, says John Barentine, one of the study’s coauthors and a conference attendee. A Tucson, Arizona-based astronomer, he is also the executive officer of Dark Sky Consulting, which advises companies and government officials on outdoor lighting to preserve dark night skies.

“We are working to address the concerns of astronomers,” wrote Scott Wisniewski, AST SpaceMobile’s chief strategy officer, in an email to WIRED. That includes using roll-tilting flight maneuvers to reduce the satellites’ brightness, and preventing them from transmitting near radio telescopes. The company is also planning to equip its next-generation satellites with anti-reflective materials, Wisniewski wrote.

Astronomers and industry representatives have more work to do to find solutions. “Maybe the best we can hope for now is a somewhat uneasy coexistence” with industry, Barentine says. The two have to share a single resource: the night sky. “My hope is that we can find a way to do it that minimizes harm to astronomy,” he says.

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