Bill Gates, the multibillionaire founder of Microsoft, argued for a pragmatic, technology-driven approach to fighting climate change on Thursday.

“If you try to do climate brute force, you will get people who say, ‘I like climate but I don’t want to bear that cost and reduce my standard of living,’” Mr. Gates said at the Climate Forward event hosted by The New York Times. “Without innovation, it’s unlikely, particularly in middle-income countries, that the brute force approach will be successful.”

Mr. Gates also said winning more bipartisan support was needed in order for policy to actually stick. “Republicans for climate change action are gold, you know,” he said. “That’s got to be a number that somehow we manage to increase over time.”

“You can’t have a climate policy that when one party is in charge goes full speed ahead and stops cold,” he added. “These are 30-year investments in steel factories, new ways of making meat.”

Mr. Gates, who in recent weeks has espoused an everything-will-be-fine approach to the climate crisis, was asked whether he could reconcile that stance with the reality of extreme weather around the globe.

“I’m the person who is doing the most on climate in terms of the innovation and how we can square multiple goals,” said Mr. Gates, a co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major donor to health- and climate-related causes. “There’s very limited money for causes to reduce inequity in the world. And no temperate country is going to become uninhabitable.”

Instead, he said, he is taking a more pragmatic approach and drawing a line at untested remedies like planting a trillion trees.

“Are we the science people or are we the idiots?” he said. “Which one do we want to be?”

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Myelofibrosis is a rare bone marrow blood cancer that can lead to severely low blood counts, including anaemia and thrombocytopaenia; constitutional symptoms such as fatigue, night sweats and bone pain; and splenomegaly (enlarged spleen). About 40% of patients have moderate to severe anaemia at the time of diagnosis, and nearly all patients are estimated to develop anaemia over the course of the disease. Myelofibrosis patients with anaemia often require transfusions and more than 30% will discontinue treatment due to anaemia. Patients who are transfusion dependent thus have a poor prognosis and shortened survival.

Ojjaara is an oral drug with a differentiated mechanism of action, featuring inhibitory ability along three key signalling pathways: Janus kinase (JAK) 1, JAK2 and activin A receptor, type I (ACVR1). Inhibition of JAK1 and JAK2 may improve constitutional symptoms and splenomegaly. Additionally, inhibition of ACVR1 leads to a decrease in circulating hepcidin, which is elevated in myelofibrosis and contributes to anaemia.

The FDA approval of momelotinib is supported by data from the pivotal MOMENTUM study and a subpopulation of adult patients with anaemia from the SIMPLIFY-1 phase III trial. MOMENTUM was designed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of momelotinib versus danazol for the treatment and reduction of key manifestations of myelofibrosis in an anaemic, symptomatic, JAK inhibitor-experienced population. The trial met all its primary and key secondary endpoints, demonstrating statistically significant response with respect to constitutional symptoms, splenic response and transfusion independence. SIMPLIFY-1 was designed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of momelotinib versus ruxolitinib in myelofibrosis patients who had not received a prior JAK-inhibitor therapy. Safety and efficacy results for SIMPLIFY-1 were based upon a subset of patients with anaemia.

“We are proud to add Ojjaara to our oncology portfolio and address a significant medical need in the community,” said Nina Mojas, Senior Vice President, Oncology Global Product Strategy at GSK. “We look forward to helping improve outcomes in this difficult-to-treat blood cancer.”

Momelotinib was originally invented at Cytopia, an Australian biotech founded in 1999 by Professor Andrew Wilks. The drug was the only asset of Sierra Oncology, which was ultimately acquired by GSK in 2022 for US$1.9 billion in an all-cash deal, making it the highest known acquisition amount paid for a drug invented in Australia.

According to Wilks, FDA approval for momelotinib is not only a personal victory but a triumph for the many scientists and clinicians with whom he worked across Australia. The molecule also has the potential to gain additional approvals for treating a number of inflammatory diseases, Wilks claims.

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Giving your phone or tablet to very young children to keep them occupied may seem like a good idea at the time, but experts advise looking for other ways to calm your kids. A study found that early screen use can have long-term negative effects.

Judging those who give young kids phones or tablets is easy when you're not a parent.

"You see people doing that and you're like, 'I'm never going to do that. I'm not going to be that kind of parent,'" said Chantall Dodd-Sanchez of San Jacinto.

As a new mom, it can be hard to stick to ideals.

"You're like, 'Oh my gosh! I need a little extra help,'" she said.

But new research finds too much help from screens could have detrimental effects. Researchers in Japan asked the parents of 8,000 babies to log digital usage.

"The study was very powerful, and it was a large group of individuals being followed across time," said Dr. Evita Limon-Rocha, a child psychologist with Kaiser Permanente Riverside Medical Center.

A study in JAMA pediatrics compared the hours of screen time usage up to age 1 to developmental delays at ages 2 and 4.

Limon-Rocha said babies exposed to four hours a day fared the worst.

"There were difficulties with problem solving and communication," she said.

Scientists found the more electronics babies were given, the more likely they were to exhibit developmental delays. Limon-Rocha says the study shows the value of face-to-face interaction and how it conveys language and meaning.

"We learn a lot when we're interacting with each other. They're learning a lot in terms of facial expression," she said.

The good news? Limon-Rocha said some developmental delays can be reversed. Talk to your pediatrician if you notice any. The research didn't distinguish between educational versus entertainment videos.

Dodd-Sanchez puts strict limits on her son's screen time, always looks for engaging content and interacts with him.

"He's not just sitting there and just zoning out like a little zombie," Dodd-Sanchez said.

Except for video chatting, the American Academy of Pediatrics calls for no screen time for kids 18 to 24 months. For kids 2 to 5 years old, the recommendation is an hour or less. But doctors said don't feel bad if every now and then you need a digital time out.

"Life is busy. Life is hectic. This is new information to give us more tools for parents to make the best decisions that make the most sense for their individual families," said Limon-Rocha.

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But that does not mean scientists have stopped learning about it. In a scientific first, researchers said on Tuesday they have recovered RNA - genetic material present in all living cells that has structural similarities to DNA - from the desiccated skin and muscle of a Tasmanian tiger stored since 1891 at a museum in Stockholm.

Scientists in recent years have extracted DNA from ancient animals and plants, some of it upwards of 2 million years old. But this study marked the first time that RNA - much less stable than DNA - has been recovered from an extinct species.

While not the focus of this research, the ability to extract, sequence and analyze old RNA could boost efforts by other scientists toward recreating extinct species. Recovering RNA from old viruses also could help decipher the cause of past pandemics.

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and RNA (ribonucleic acid) - biomolecular cousins - are fundamental molecules in cell biology.

DNA is a double-stranded molecule that contains an organism's genetic code, carrying the genes that give rise to all living things. RNA is a single-stranded molecule that carries genetic information it receives from the DNA, putting this information into practice. RNA synthesizes the panoply of proteins that an organism requires to live and works to regulate cell metabolism.

"RNA sequencing gives you a taste of the real biology and metabolism regulation that was happening in the cells and tissues of the Tasmanian tigers before they went extinct," said geneticist and bioinformatician Emilio Mármol Sánchez of the Centre for Palaeogenetics and SciLifeLab in Sweden, lead author of the study published in the journal Genome Research.

"If we want to understand extinct species, we need to understand what gene complements they have and also what the genes were doing and which were active," said geneticist and study co-author Marc Friedländer of Stockholm University and SciLifeLab.

There were questions about how long RNA could survive in the type of conditions - room temperature in a cupboard - that these remains had been stored. The remains at the Swedish Natural History Museum were in a state of semi-mummification, with skin, muscles and bones preserved but internal organs lost.

"Most researchers have thought that RNA would only survive for a very short time - like days or weeks - at room temperature. This is likely true when samples are wet or moist, but apparently not the case when they are dried," said evolutionary geneticist Love Dalén of the Centre for Palaeogenetics.

The Tasmanian tiger resembled a wolf, aside from the tiger-like stripes on its back. The arrival of people in Australia roughly 50,000 years ago ushered in massive population losses. The 18th century arrival of European colonizers spelled doom for the remaining populations concentrated on the island of Tasmania, with a bounty later put on them after they were declared a hazard to livestock. The last-known Tasmanian tiger succumbed in a Tasmanian zoo in 1936.

"The story of the thylacine's demise is in a sense one of the most well-documented and proven human-driven extinction events. Sadly, Tasmanian tigers were declared as protected just two months before the last-known individual died in captivity, too late for saving them from extinction," Mármol said.

Private "de-extinction" initiatives have been launched aimed at resurrecting certain extinct species such as the Tasmanian tiger, dodo or woolly mammoth.

"Although we remain skeptical about the possibility of actually recreating an extinct species using gene editing on living extant animal relatives - and the time-scale to get to a final point might be underestimated - we do advocate for more research on the biology of these extinct animals," Mármol said.

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Also:  For the first time, researchers decoded the RNA of an extinct animal.

A letter, signed by 124 scholars and posted online last week1, has caused an uproar in the consciousness research community. It claims that a prominent theory describing what makes someone or something conscious — called the integrated information theory (IIT) — should be labelled “pseudoscience”. Since its publication on 15 September in the preprint repository PsyArXiv, the letter has some researchers arguing over the label and others worried it will increase polarization in a field that has grappled with issues of credibility in the past.

“I think it’s inflammatory to describe IIT as pseudoscience,” says neuroscientist Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK, adding that he disagrees with the label. “IIT is a theory, of course, and therefore may be empirically wrong,” says neuroscientist Christof Koch, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, and a proponent of the theory. But he says that it makes its assumptions — for example, that consciousness has a physical basis and can be mathematically measured — very clear.

There are dozens of theories that seek to understand consciousness — everything that a human or non-human experiences, including what they feel, see and hear — as well as its underlying neural foundations. IIT has often been described as one of the central theories, alongside others, such as global neuronal workspace theory (GNW), higher-order thought theory and recurrent processing theory. It proposes that consciousness emerges from the way information is processed within a ‘system’ (for instance, networks of neurons or computer circuits), and that systems that are more interconnected, or integrated, have higher levels of consciousness.

A growing discomfort

Hakwan Lau, a neuroscientist at Riken Center for Brain Science in Wako, Japan, and one of the authors of the letter, says that some researchers in the consciousness field are uncomfortable with what they perceive as a discrepancy between IIT’s scientific merit and the considerable attention it receives from the popular media because of how it is promoted by advocates. “Has IIT become a leading theory because of academic acceptance first, or is it because of the popular noise that kind of forced the academics to give it acknowledgement?”, Lau asks.

Negative feelings towards the theory intensified after it captured headlines in June. Media outlets, including Nature, reported the results of an ‘adversarial’ study that pitted IIT and GNW against one another. The experiments, which included brain scans, didn’t prove or completely disprove either theory, but some researchers found it problematic that IIT was highlighted as a leading theory of consciousness, prompting Lau and his co-authors to draft their letter.

But why label IIT as pseudoscience? Although the letter doesn’t clearly define pseudoscience, Lau notes that a “commonsensical definition” is that pseudoscience refers to “something that is not very scientifically supported, that masquerades as if it is already very scientifically established”. In this sense, he thinks that IIT fits the bill.

Is it testable?

Additionally, Lau says, some of his co-authors think that it’s not possible to empirically test IIT’s core assumptions, which they argue contributes to the theory’s status as pseudoscience.

Seth, who is not a proponent of IIT, although he has worked on related ideas in the past, disagrees. “The core claims are harder to test than other theories because it’s a more ambitious theory,” he says. But there are some predictions stemming from the theory, about neural activity associated with consciousness, for instance, that can be tested, he adds. A 2022 review found 101 empirical studies involving IIT2.

Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University, in Israel, who co-led the adversarial study of IIT versus GNW, also defends IIT’s testability at the neural level. “Not only did we test it, we managed to falsify one of its predictions,” she says. “I think many people in the field don’t like IIT, and this is completely fine. Yet it is not clear to me what is the basis for claiming that it is not one of the leading theories.”

The same criticism about a lack of meaningful empirical tests could be made about other theories of consciousness, says Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist and writer who lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, and who is a former student of Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is a proponent of IIT. “Everyone who works in the field has to acknowledge that we don’t have perfect brain scans,” he says. “And yet, somehow, IIT is singled out in the letter as this being a problem that’s unique to it.”

Damaging effect

Lau says he doesn’t expect a consensus on the topic. “But I think if it is known that, let’s say, a significant minority of us are willing to [sign our names] that we think it is pseudoscience, knowing that some people may disagree, that’s still a good message.” He hopes that the letter reaches young researchers, policymakers, journal editors and funders. “All of them right now are very easily swayed by the media narrative.”

Mudrik, who emphasizes that she deeply respects the people who signed the letter, some of whom are close collaborators and friends, says that she worries about the effect it will have on the way the consciousness field is perceived. “Consciousness research has been struggling with scepticism from its inception, trying to establish itself as a legitimate scientific field,” she says. “In my opinion, the way to fight such scepticism is by conducting excellent and rigorous research”, rather than by publicly calling out certain people and ideas.

Hoel fears that the letter might discourage the development of other ambitious theories. “The most important thing for me is that we don’t make our hypotheses small and banal in order to avoid being tarred with the pseudoscience label.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02971-1

References

1.  Fleming, S. et al. Preprint at PsyArXiv https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zsr78 (2023).

2.  Yaron, I. et al. Nature Human Behav. 6, 593–604 (2022).

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With just a sniff and a sip, trained sommeliers can often tell what region a wine came from: Douro in Portugal, Barossa in Australia, Napa or Sonoma in California. Experts in a specific locale can name the hillside—even how far up the hill—where a wine's grapes were grown because of the terroir, the combination of soil, topography and microclimate that imparts a characteristic taste. The geographic and genetic journeys that brought those grapes to those places, however, have been poorly understood.

A massive new study gives us the clearest picture yet of the prehistory of wine, overturning several commonly accepted narratives about when and where humans cultivated grapevines to make the world's wines. A large international group of researchers collected and analyzed 2,503 unique vines from domesticated table and wine grapes and 1,022 wild grapevines. By extracting DNA from the vines and determining the patterns of genetic variations among them, they found some surprises.

For centuries grape growers in different communities passed down lore about where their grapes came from. Some governments, particularly in Europe, designated appellations—strictly circumscribed regions with rules on how and where a varietal such as burgundy, rioja or barolo was legally allowed to grow and be produced. But genetic studies to discover where vines originated thousands of years ago began in earnest only 10 or 15 years ago.

Primitivo grapes are harvested in Puglia, one of Italy’s famous wine regions. Credit: Cosimo Calabrese/Getty Images

One theme that emerged from these studies was that wild grapes grew in central Asia and dispersed westward as early humans migrated in that direction. But the genetic data in the huge study correct this story, says Wei Chen, a senior research scientist at Yunnan Agricultural University in China and one of the study's leaders. Genetic data indicate that 400,000 and 300,000 years ago grapes grew naturally across the western and central Eurasian continent. Roughly 200,000 years ago a cold, dry, ice-age climate slowly killed off vines in the central Mediterranean Sea region, cleaving vine habitat into two isolated areas: one to the west of the sea (today Portugal, Spain and France) and one to the east (roughly Israel, Syria, Turkey and Georgia). Around 56,000 years ago the eastern region separated again into smaller isolated areas: the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) and western Asia (Israel, Jordon and Iraq).

Until recently, researchers also thought humans domesticated grapevines from wild progenitors as long as 8,000 years ago as an early agricultural revolution spread across what is now western Asia and Europe. Some experts thought vines were first cultivated in Iberia (primarily Portugal and Spain) around 3,000 years ago. Other investigators thought domestication first happened in the Caucasus. To make matters murkier (not a good trait in wine), there was disagreement on whether grapes were used first for food (“table grapes”) or for fermentation.

The recent study settles this debate: humans in western Asia domesticated table grapes around 11,000 years ago. Other people, in the Caucasus, domesticated wine grapes around the same time— although they probably didn't master winemaking for another 2,000 or 3,000 years.

Early farmers, the revised story goes, migrated from western Asia toward Iberia and brought table vines with them. Along the way the farmers crossbred the table vines with local wild grapevines. The earliest crossbreeding probably happened in what is now Israel and Turkey, creating muscat grapes, which are high in sugar—good for eating and fermenting. Gradually the table grape was genetically transformed into different wine grapes in the Balkans, Italy, France and Spain.

But if people in the Caucasus already had wine grapes, why didn't they bring them to Europe? “We just don't know yet,” Chen says. People migrating from there—notably Yamnaya nomads 4,000 to 5,000 years ago—might have brought vines, but the genetic analysis shows that Caucasus grapes have had very little influence on the makeup of European wine grapes.

Once farmers did begin cultivating wine grapes in Europe, they developed many of the varietals we enjoy today. Some grapes, such as cabernet sauvignon, have the same name everywhere they are grown. Other varietals farmed in different regions took on different names even though the grapes are genetically identical, such as zinfandel and primitivo. Sadly, it is almost impossible to trace a current varietal back to western Asia or the Caucasus, the two early domestication centers. Over the centuries grape growers crossbred table and wine grapes, as well as domesticated and wild grapes, and even back bred offspring with parents. “Once they had a superior vine, they usually destroyed the prior vines,” Chen says, making it hard to construct a family tree. You may never know where your favorite wine came from—really came from. In that sense, the mystique lives on.

Credit: Francesco Franchi; Source: “Dual Domestications and Origin of Traits in Grapevine Evolution,” by Yang Dong et al., in Science, Vol. 379; March 2023 (data); Consultant: Wei Chen/Yunnan Agricultural University

Credit: Francesco Franchi; Source: “Dual Domestications and Origin of Traits in Grapevine Evolution,” by Yang Dong et al., in Science, Vol. 379; March 2023 (data); Consultant: Wei Chen/Yunnan Agricultural University

Credit: Francesco Franchi; Source: “Dual Domestications and Origin of Traits in Grapevine Evolution,” by Yang Dong et al., in Science, Vol. 379; March 2023 (data); Consultant: Wei Chen/Yunnan Agricultural University

This article was originally published with the title "Wine's True Origins" in Scientific American 329, 3, 38-43 (October 2023)

doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1023-38

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How much stuff do people need to lead a decent life? It’s a hard, and subjective, question. But researchers have now estimated for the first time what it takes, quantitatively speaking, to keep one person out of abject poverty: about 6 tons per year of food, fuel, clothing, and other supplies, researchers report this month in Environmental Science & Technology.

The first-of-its-kind estimate is “a remarkable step forward,” says Stefan Bringezu, an expert in sustainable resource management at the University of Kassel who was not involved with the research. “They shed light on the physical basis of our society and economy in a comprehensive and rather detailed way.” According to Bringezu, the findings contain good news: They suggest that ending poverty can be done without taking an unbearable toll on the planet itself.

The study comes as the United Nations wrestled this week with exactly that daunting challenge. The U.N. is trying to kick-start progress on its Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 grand ambitions that include ending poverty worldwide by 2030, while also preventing environmental degradation and fighting climate change. Fossil fuels get a lot of attention in this debate, but raw materials such as cement, metal, timber, and grain are also important because their production and refining contributes about 23% of carbon emissions and more than 90% of biodiversity loss.

To make the new estimates, environmental scientists Johan Andrés Vélez-Henao and Stefan Pauliuk of the University of Freiburg and colleagues turned to a common definition of basic living standards created in 2017. The list includes 15 square meters of living space, 2100 calories of food per day for adults, basic appliances such as a washing machine and a modern stove, a phone and laptop, and the means to travel to work or sell their wares.

The researchers calculated the rough amount of raw materials involved in each of these objects and services. From a societal perspective, they looked at two kinds of needs for materials, because they have different implications. The first is very large and essentially one-time investments, such as buying a house. The other is analogous to the ongoing maintenance costs to prevent it from falling into ruin.

The former challenge is large, because ending poverty requires a lot of basic infrastructure, such as building all the needed houses, schools, and roads that allow farmers and villagers to take their wares to market. And building hospitals, for example, that can treat the urban poor. It also includes manufacturing the construction equipment needed for those jobs. All told, these structures require about 43 tons of materials—technically called an “in-use stock”—for each person in currently living in poverty, or 51.6 billion tons of raw materials worldwide.

The second task is enabling poor people to maintain their share of these stocks and to meet daily needs for household life, education, work, and participating in public life, such as recreation. Figuring this amount required more detailed calculations. For food, the total included the biomass of crops as well as the fertilizer and pesticides needed to grow them. Estimating transportation needs involved a mix of modes, including bicycles, cars, buses, and trains, because the goal was a global average.

Maintaining minimum decent living conditions for all 1.2 billion people currently living in abject poverty would take 7.2 billion tons of raw materials per year, the researchers found—or about 6 tons per person every year.

How much is that, actually? This is the question that researchers and policymakers want to answer because providing all the raw materials to end poverty will cost money, require plans, and take a toll on the environment.

One key takeaway, Vélez-Henao and Pauliuk say, is that this new estimate is achievable without ruining the planet. The duo notes that the average ongoing amount of stuff is within the range—between 8 and 14 tons per year—of what previous studies have suggested would be sustainable.

Here's the catch: These studies assume that every person on the planet eventually consumes roughly the same amount of raw materials. So, in terms of what Earth can safely provide, using raw materials to provide a vibrant and comfortable life is a zero-sum game.

And rich countries already use a lot of raw materials. Take the United States and Germany, for example. To maintain their lifestyles, people in these countries require more than 70 tons of raw materials every year per capita—a much bigger share than the 8 to 14 tons per capita for everyone on the planet to have just and sustainable living standards. “This shows you that inequality reduction is so critical” for achieving the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, says Narasimha Rao, an expert in energy and poverty at Yale University.

In addition to lessening the gap, progress can also come from achieving greater efficiency, such as lighter vehicles and more durable products. And the new analysis shows that lifestyle changes—for example, cutting one’s meat consumption in half or taking public transportation—can decrease a person’s material footprint by 9% and 10%, respectively. “You really get a different picture,” Vélez-Henao says. “That impressed me a lot.”

doi: 10.1126/science.adk9666

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But we have discovered that déjà vu is actually a window into the workings of our memory system.

Our research found that the phenomenon arises when the part of the brain which detects familiarity de-synchronises with reality. Déjà vu is the signal which alerts you to this weirdness: it is a type of "fact checking" for the memory system.

But repetition can do something even more uncanny and unusual.

The opposite of déjà vu is "jamais vu", when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way. In our recent research, which has just won an Ig Nobel award for literature, we investigated the mechanism behind the phenomenon.

Jamais vu may involve looking at a familiar face and finding it suddenly unusual or unknown. Musicians have it momentarily – losing their way in a very familiar passage of music. You may have had it going to a familiar place and becoming disorientated or seeing it with "new eyes".

It's an experience which is even rarer than déjà vu and perhaps even more unusual and unsettling. When you ask people to describe it in questionnaires about experiences in daily life they give accounts like: "While writing in my exams, I write a word correctly like 'appetite' but I keep looking at the word over and over again because I have second thoughts that it might be wrong."

In daily life, it can be provoked by repetition or staring, but it needn't be. One of us, Akira, has had it driving on the motorway, necessitating that he pull over onto the hard shoulder to allow his unfamiliarity with the pedals and the steering wheel to "reset". Thankfully, in the wild, it's rare.

Simple set up

We don't know much about jamais vu. But we guessed it would be pretty easy to induce in the laboratory. If you just ask someone to repeat something over and over, they often find it becomes meaningless and confusing.

This was the basic design of our experiments on jamais vu. In a first experiment, 94 undergraduates spent their time repeatedly writing the same word. They did it with twelve different words which ranged from the commonplace, such as "door", to less common, such as "sward".

We asked participants to copy out the word as quickly as possible, but told them they were allowed to stop, and gave them a few reasons why they might stop including feeling peculiar, being bored or their hand hurting.

Stopping because things began to feel strange was the most common option chosen, with about 70% stopping at least once for feeling something we defined as jamais vu. This usually occured after about one minute (33 repetitions) – and typically for familiar words.

In a second experiment we used only the word "the", figuring that it was the most common. This time, 55% of people stopped writing for reasons consistent with our definition of jamais vu (but after 27 repetitions).

People described their experiences as ranging from "They lose their meaning the more you look at them" to "seemed to lose control of hand" and our favourite "it doesn't seem right, almost looks like it's not really a word but someone's tricked me into thinking it is."

Try writing 'the' 33 times. (Christopher Moulin, CC BY)

It took us around 15 years to write up and publish this scientific work. In 2003, we were acting on a hunch that people would feel weird while repeatedly writing a word. One of us, Chris, had noticed that the lines he had been asked to repeatedly write as a punishment at secondary school made him feel strange – as if it weren't real.

It took 15 years because we weren't as clever as we thought we were. It wasn't the novelty that we thought it was. In 1907, one of psychology's unsung founding figures, Margaret Floy Washburn, published an experiment with one of her students which showed the "loss of associative power" in words that were stared at for three minutes. The words became strange, lost their meaning and became fragmented over time.

We had reinvented the wheel. Such introspective methods and investigations had simply fallen out of favour in psychology.

Deeper insights

Our unique contribution is the idea that transformations and losses of meaning in repetition are accompanied by a particular feeling – jamais vu.

Jamais vu is a signal to you that something has become too automatic, too fluent, too repetitive. It helps us "snap out" of our current processing, and the feeling of unreality is in fact a reality check.

It makes sense that this has to happen. Our cognitive systems must stay flexible, allowing us to direct our attention to wherever is needed rather than getting lost in repetitive tasks for too long.

We are only beginning to understand jamais vu. The main scientific account is of "satiation" – the overloading of a representation until it becomes nonsensical.

Related ideas include the "verbal transformation effect" whereby repeating a word over and over activates so-called neighbours so that you start off listening to the looped word "tress" over and over, but then listeners report hearing "dress," "stress," or "florist".

It also seems related to research into obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which looked at the effect of compulsively staring at objects, such as lit gas rings. Like repeatedly writing, the effects are strange and mean that reality begins to slip, but this might help us understand and treat OCD.

If repeatedly checking the door is locked makes the task meaningless, it will mean that it is difficult to know if the door is locked, and so a vicious cycle starts.

Ultimately, we are flattered to have been awarded the Ig Nobel prize for literature. The winners of these prizes contribute scientific works which "make you laugh and then make you think".

Hopefully our work on jamais vu will inspire more research and even greater insights in the near future.

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Can a mouse learn a new song?

Such a question might seem whimsical. Though humans have lived alongside mice for at least 15,000 years, few of us have ever heard mice sing, because they do so in frequencies beyond the range detectable by human hearing. As pups, their high-pitched songs alert their mothers to their whereabouts; as adults, they sing in ultrasound to woo one another. For decades, researchers considered mouse songs instinctual, the fixed tunes of a windup music box, rather than the mutable expressions of individual minds.

But no one had tested whether that was really true. In 2012, a team of neurobiologists at Duke University, led by Erich Jarvis, a neuroscientist who studies vocal learning, designed an experiment to find out. The team surgically deafened five mice and recorded their songs in a mouse-size sound studio, tricked out with infrared cameras and microphones. They then compared sonograms of the songs of deafened mice with those of hearing mice. If the mouse songs were innate, as long presumed, the surgical alteration would make no difference at all.

Jarvis and his researchers slowed down the tempo and shifted the pitch of the recordings, so that they could hear the songs with their own ears. Those of the intact mice sounded “remarkably similar to some bird songs,” Jarvis wrote in a 2013 paper that described the experiment, with whistlelike syllables similar to those in the songs of canaries and the trills of dolphins. Not so the songs of the deafened mice: Deprived of auditory feedback, their songs became degraded, rendering them nearly unrecognizable. They sounded, the scientists noted, like “squawks and screams.” Not only did the tunes of a mouse depend on its ability to hear itself and others, but also, as the team found in another experiment, a male mouse could alter the pitch of its song to compete with other male mice for female attention.

Inside these murine skills lay clues to a puzzle many have called “the hardest problem in science”: the origins of language. In humans, “vocal learning” is understood as a skill critical to spoken language. Researchers had already discovered the capacity for vocal learning in species other than humans, including in songbirds, hummingbirds, parrots, cetaceans such as dolphins and whales, pinnipeds such as seals, elephants and bats.

But given the centuries-old idea that a deep chasm separated human language from animal communications, most scientists understood the vocal learning abilities of other species as unrelated to our own — as evolutionarily divergent as the wing of a bat is to that of a bee. The apparent absence of intermediate forms of language — say, a talking animal — left the question of how language evolved resistant to empirical inquiry.

When the Duke researchers dissected the brains of the hearing and deafened mice, they found a rudimentary version of the neural circuitry that allows the forebrains of vocal learners such as humans and songbirds to directly control their vocal organs. Mice don’t seem to have the vocal flexibility of elephants; they cannot, like the 10-year-old female African elephant in Tsavo, Kenya, mimic the sound of trucks on the nearby Nairobi-Mombasa highway. Or the gift for mimicry of seals; an orphaned harbor seal at the New England Aquarium could utter English phrases in a perfect Maine accent (“Hoover, get over here,” he said. “Come on, come on!”).

But the rudimentary skills of mice suggested that the language-critical capacity might exist on a continuum, much like a submerged land bridge might indicate that two now-isolated continents were once connected. In recent years, an array of findings have also revealed an expansive nonhuman soundscape, including: turtles that produce and respond to sounds to coordinate the timing of their birth from inside their eggs; coral larvae that can hear the sounds of healthy reefs; and plants that can detect the sound of running water and the munching of insect predators. Researchers have found intention and meaning in this cacophony, such as the purposeful use of different sounds to convey information. They’ve theorized that one of the most confounding aspects of language, its rules-based internal structure, emerged from social drives common across a range of species.

With each discovery, the cognitive and moral divide between humanity and the rest of the animal world has eroded. For centuries, the linguistic utterances of Homo sapiens have been positioned as unique in nature, justifying our dominion over other species and shrouding the evolution of language in mystery. Now, experts in linguistics, biology and cognitive science suspect that components of language might be shared across species, illuminating the inner lives of animals in ways that could help stitch language into their evolutionary history — and our own.

For hundreds of years, language marked “the true difference between man and beast,” as the philosopher René Descartes wrote in 1649. As recently as the end of the last century, archaeologists and anthropologists speculated that 40,000 to 50,000 years ago a “human revolution” fractured evolutionary history, creating an unbridgeable gap separating humanity’s cognitive and linguistic abilities from those of the rest of the animal world.

Linguists and other experts reinforced this idea. In 1959, the M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky, then 30, wrote a blistering 33-page takedown of a book by the celebrated behaviorist B.F. Skinner, which argued that language was just a form of “verbal behavior,” as Skinner titled the book, accessible to any species given sufficient conditioning. One observer called it “perhaps the most devastating review ever written.” Between 1972 and 1990, there were more citations of Chomsky’s critique than Skinner’s book, which bombed.

The view of language as a uniquely human superpower, one that enabled Homo sapiens to write epic poetry and send astronauts to the moon, presumed some uniquely human biology to match. But attempts to find those special biological mechanisms — whether physiological, neurological, genetic — that make language possible have all come up short.

One high-profile example came in 2001, when a team led by the geneticists Cecilia Lai and Simon Fisher discovered a gene — called FoxP2 — in a London family riddled with childhood apraxia of speech, a disorder that impairs the ability of otherwise cognitively capable individuals to coordinate their muscles to produce sounds, syllables and words in an intelligible sequence. Commentators hailed FoxP2 as the long sought-after gene that enabled humans to talk — until the gene turned up in the genomes of rodents, birds, reptiles, fish and ancient hominins such as Neanderthals, whose version of FoxP2 is much like ours. (Fisher so often encountered the public expectation that FoxP2 was the “language gene” that he resolved to acquire a T-shirt that read, “It’s more complicated than that.”)

The search for an exclusively human vocal anatomy has failed, too. For a 2001 study, the cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch cajoled goats, dogs, deer and other species to vocalize while inside a cineradiograph machine that filmed the way their larynxes moved under X-ray. Fitch discovered that species with larynxes different from ours — ours is “descended” and located in our throats rather than our mouths — could nevertheless move them in similar ways. One of them, the red deer, even had the same descended larynx we do.

Fitch and his then-colleague at Harvard, the evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser, began to wonder if they’d been thinking about language all wrong. Linguists described language as a singular skill, like being able to swim or bake a soufflé: You either had it or you didn’t. But perhaps language was more like a multicomponent system that included psychological traits, such as the ability to share intentions; physiological ones, such as motor control over vocalizations and gestures; and cognitive capacities, such as the ability to combine signals according to rules, many of which might appear in other animals as well.

Fitch, whom I spoke to by Zoom in his office at the University of Vienna, drafted a paper with Hauser as a “kind of an argument against Chomsky,” he told me. As a courtesy, he sent the M.I.T. linguist a draft. One evening, he and Hauser were sitting in their respective offices along the same hall at Harvard when an email from Chomsky dinged their inboxes. “We both read it and we walked out of our rooms going, ‘What?’” Chomsky indicated that not only did he agree, but that he’d be willing to sign on to their next paper on the subject as a co-author. That paper, which has since racked up more than 7,000 citations, appeared in the journal Science in 2002.

Squabbles continued over which components of language were shared with other species and which, if any, were exclusive to humans. Those included, among others, language’s intentionality, its system of combining signals, its ability to refer to external concepts and things separated by time and space and its power to generate an infinite number of expressions from a finite number of signals. But reflexive belief in language as an evolutionary anomaly started to dissolve. “For the biologists,” recalled Fitch, “it was like, ‘Oh, good, finally the linguists are being reasonable.’”

Evidence of continuities between animal communication and human language continued to mount. The sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010 suggested that we hadn’t significantly diverged from that lineage, as the theory of a “human revolution” posited. On the contrary, Neanderthal genes and those of other ancient hominins persisted in the modern human genome, evidence of how intimately we were entangled. In 2014, Jarvis found that the neural circuits that allowed songbirds to learn and produce novel sounds matched those in humans, and that the genes that regulated those circuits evolved in similar ways. The accumulating evidence left “little room for doubt,” Cedric Boeckx, a theoretical linguist at the University of Barcelona, noted in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. “There was no ‘great leap forward.’”

As our understanding of the nature and origin of language shifted, a host of fruitful cross-disciplinary collaborations arose. Colleagues of Chomsky’s, such as the M.I.T. linguist Shigeru Miyagawa, whose early career was shaped by the precept that “we’re smart, they’re not,” applied for grants with primatologists and neuroscientists to study how human language might be related to birdsong and primate calls. Interdisciplinary centers sprang up devoted specifically to the evolution of language, including at the University of Zurich and the University of Edinburgh. Lectures at a biannual conference on language evolution once dominated by “armchair theorizing,” as the cognitive scientist and founder of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Language Evolution, Simon Kirby, put it, morphed into presentations “completely packed with empirical data.”

Illustration by Denise Nestor

One of the thorniest problems researchers sought to address was the link between thought and language. Philosophers and linguists long held that language must have evolved not for the purpose of communication but to facilitate abstract thought. The grammatical rules that structure language, a feature of languages from Algonquin to American Sign Language, are more complex than necessary for communication. Language, the argument went, must have evolved to help us think, in much the same way that mathematical notations allow us to make complex calculations.

Ev Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at M.I.T., thought this was “a cool idea,” so, about a decade ago, she set out to test it. If language is the medium of thought, she reasoned, then thinking a thought and absorbing the meaning of spoken or written words should activate the same neural circuits in the brain, like two streams fed by the same underground spring. Earlier brain-imaging studies showed that patients with severe aphasia could still solve mathematical problems, despite their difficulty in deciphering or producing language, but failed to pinpoint distinctions between brain regions dedicated to thought and those dedicated to language. Fedorenko suspected that might be because the precise location of these regions varied from individual to individual. In a 2011 study, she asked healthy subjects to make computations and decipher snatches of spoken and written language while she watched how blood flowed to aroused parts of their brains using an M.R.I. machine, taking their unique neural circuitry into account in her subsequent analysis. Her fM.R.I. studies showed that thinking thoughts and decoding words mobilized distinct brain pathways. Language and thought, Fedorenko says, “really are separate in an adult human brain.”

At the University of Edinburgh, Kirby hit upon a process that might explain how language’s internal structure evolved. That structure, in which simple elements such as sounds and words are arranged into phrases and nested hierarchically within one another, gives language the power to generate an infinite number of meanings; it is a key feature of language as well as of mathematics and music. But its origins were hazy. Because children intuit the rules that govern linguistic structure with little if any explicit instruction, philosophers and linguists argued that it must be a product of some uniquely human cognitive process. But researchers who scrutinized the fossil record to determine when and how that process evolved were stumped: The first sentences uttered left no trace behind.

Kirby designed an experiment to simulate the evolution of language inside his lab. First, he developed made-up codes to serve as proxies for the disordered collections of words widely believed to have preceded the emergence of structured language, such as random sequences of colored lights or a series of pantomimes. Then he recruited subjects to use the code under a variety of conditions and studied how the code changed. He asked subjects to use the code to solve communication tasks, for example, or to pass the code on to one another as in a game of telephone. He ran the experiment hundreds of times using different parameters on a variety of subjects, including on a colony of baboons living in a seminaturalistic enclosure equipped with a bank of computers on which they could choose to play his experimental games.

What he found was striking: Regardless of the native tongue of the subjects, or whether they were baboons, college students or robots, the results were the same. When individuals passed the code on to one another, the code became simpler but also less precise. But when they passed it on to one another and also used it to communicate, the code developed a distinct architecture. Random sequences of colored lights turned into richly patterned ones; convoluted, pantomimic gestures for words such as “church” or “police officer” became abstract, efficient signs. “We just saw, spontaneously emerging out of this experiment, the language structures we were waiting for,” Kirby says. His findings suggest that language’s mystical power — its ability to turn the noise of random signals into intelligible formulations — may have emerged from a humble trade-off: between simplicity, for ease of learning, and what Kirby called “expressiveness,” for unambiguous communication.

For Descartes, the equation of language with thought meant animals had no mental life at all: “The brutes,” he opined, “don’t have any thought.” Breaking the link between language and human biology didn’t just demystify language; it restored the possibility of mind to the animal world and repositioned linguistic capacities as theoretically accessible to any social species.

The search for the components of language in nonhuman animals now extends to the far reaches of our phylogenetic tree, encompassing creatures that may communicate in radically unfamiliar ways.

This summer, I met with Marcelo Magnasco, a biophysicist, and Diana Reiss, a psychologist at Hunter College who studies dolphin cognition, in Magnasco’s lab at Rockefeller University. Overlooking the East River, it was a warmly lit room, with rows of burbling tanks inhabited by octopuses, whose mysterious signals they hoped to decode. Magnasco became curious about the cognitive and communicative abilities of cephalopods while diving recreationally, he told me. Numerous times, he said, he encountered cephalopods and had “the overpowering impression that they were trying to communicate with me.” During the Covid-19 shutdown, when his work studying dolphin communication with Reiss was derailed, Magnasco found himself driving to a Petco in Staten Island to buy tanks for octopuses to live in his lab.

During my visit, the grayish pink tentacles of the octopus clinging to the side of the glass wall of her tank started to flash bright white. Was she angry? Was she trying to tell us something? Was she even aware of our presence? There was no way to know, Magnasco said. Earlier efforts to find linguistic capacities in other species failed, in part, he explained, because we assumed they would look like our own. But the communication systems of other species might, in fact, be “truly exotic to us,” Magnasco said. A species that can recognize objects by echolocation, as cetaceans and bats can, might communicate using acoustic pictographs, for example, which might sound to us like meaningless chirps or clicks. To disambiguate the meaning of animal signals, such as a string of dolphin clicks or whalesong, scientists needed some inkling of where meaning-encoding units began and ended, Reiss explained. “We, in fact, have no idea what the smallest unit is,” she said. If scientists analyze animal calls using the wrong segmentation, meaningful expressions turn into meaningless drivel: “ad ogra naway” instead of “a dog ran away.”

An international initiative called Project CETI, founded by David Gruber, a biologist at the City University of New York, hopes to get around this problem by feeding recordings of sperm-whale clicks, known as codas, into computer models, which might be able to discern patterns in them, in the same way that ChatGPT was able to grasp vocabulary and grammar in human language by analyzing publicly available text. Another method, Reiss says, is to provide animal subjects with artificial codes and observe how they use them.

Reiss’s research on dolphin cognition is one of a handful of projects on animal communication that dates back to the 1980s, when there were widespread funding cuts in the field, after a top researcher retracted his much-hyped claim that a chimpanzee could be trained to use sign language to converse with humans. In a study published in 1993, Reiss offered bottlenose dolphins at a facility in Northern California an underwater keypad that allowed them to choose specific toys, which it delivered while emitting computer-generated whistles, like a kind of vending machine. The dolphins spontaneously began mimicking the computer-generated whistles when they played independently with the corresponding toy, like kids tossing a ball and naming it “ball, ball, ball,” Reiss told me. “The behavior,” Reiss said, “was strikingly similar to the early stages of language acquisition in children.”  

The researchers hoped to replicate the method by outfitting an octopus tank with an interactive platform of some kind and observing how the octopus engaged with it. But it was unclear whether such a device might interest the lone cephalopod. An earlier episode of displeasure led her to discharge enough ink to turn her tank water so black that she couldn’t be seen. Unlocking her communicative abilities might require that she consider the scientists as fascinating as they did her.

While experimenting with animals trapped in cages and tanks can reveal their latent faculties, figuring out the range of what animals are communicating to one another requires spying on them in the wild. Past studies often conflated general communication, in which individuals extract meaning from signals sent by other individuals, with language’s more specific, flexible and open-ended system. In a seminal 1980 study, for example, the primatologists Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney used the “playback” technique to decode the meaning of alarm calls issued by vervet monkeys at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. When a recording of the barklike calls emitted by a vervet encountering a leopard was played back to other vervets, it sent them scampering into the trees. Recordings of the low grunts of a vervet who spotted an eagle led other vervets to look up into the sky; recordings of the high-pitched chutters emitted by a vervet upon noticing a python caused them to scan the ground.

At the time, The New York Times ran a front-page story heralding the discovery of a “rudimentary ‘language’” in vervet monkeys. But critics objected that the calls might not have any properties of language at all. Instead of being intentional messages to communicate meaning to others, the calls might be involuntary, emotion-driven sounds, like the cry of a hungry baby. Such involuntary expressions can transmit rich information to listeners, but unlike words and sentences, they don’t allow for discussion of things separated by time and space. The barks of a vervet in the throes of leopard-induced terror could alert other vervets to the presence of a leopard — but couldn’t provide any way to talk about, say, “the really smelly leopard who showed up at the ravine yesterday morning.”

Toshitaka Suzuki, an ethologist at the University of Tokyo who describes himself as an animal linguist, struck upon a method to disambiguate intentional calls from involuntary ones while soaking in a bath one day. When we spoke over Zoom, he showed me an image of a fluffy cloud. “If you hear the word ‘dog,’ you might see a dog,” he pointed out, as I gazed at the white mass. “If you hear the word ‘cat,’ you might see a cat.” That, he said, marks the difference between a word and a sound. “Words influence how we see objects,” he said. “Sounds do not.” Using playback studies, Suzuki determined that Japanese tits, songbirds that live in East Asian forests and that he has studied for more than 15 years, emit a special vocalization when they encounter snakes. When other Japanese tits heard a recording of the vocalization, which Suzuki dubbed the “jar jar” call, they searched the ground, as if looking for a snake. To determine whether “jar jar” meant “snake” in Japanese tit, he added another element to his experiments: an eight-inch stick, which he dragged along the surface of a tree using hidden strings. Usually, Suzuki found, the birds ignored the stick. It was, by his analogy, a passing cloud. But then he played a recording of the “jar jar” call. In that case, the stick seemed to take on new significance: The birds approached the stick, as if examining whether it was, in fact, a snake. Like a word, the “jar jar” call had changed their perception.

Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews who works with great apes, developed a similarly nuanced method. Because great apes appear to have a relatively limited repertoire of vocalizations, Hobaiter studies their gestures. For years, she and her collaborators have followed chimps in the Budongo forest and gorillas in Bwindi in Uganda, recording their gestures and how others respond to them. “Basically, my job is to get up in the morning to get the chimps when they’re coming down out of the tree, or the gorillas when they’re coming out of the nest, and just to spend the day with them,” she told me. So far, she says, she has recorded about 15,600 instances of gestured exchanges between apes.

To determine whether the gestures are involuntary or intentional, she uses a method adapted from research on human babies. Hobaiter looks for signals that evoke what she calls an “Apparently Satisfactory Outcome.” The method draws on the theory that involuntary signals continue even after listeners have understood their meaning, while intentional ones stop once the signaler realizes her listener has comprehended the signal. It’s the difference between the continued wailing of a hungry baby after her parents have gone to fetch a bottle, Hobaiter explains, and my entreaties to you to pour me some coffee, which cease once you start reaching for the coffeepot. To search for a pattern, she says she and her researchers have looked “across hundreds of cases and dozens of gestures and different individuals using the same gesture across different days.” So far, her team’s analysis of 15 years’ worth of video-recorded exchanges has pinpointed dozens of ape gestures that trigger “apparently satisfactory outcomes.”

These gestures may also be legible to us, albeit beneath our conscious awareness. Hobaiter applied her technique on pre-verbal 1- and 2-year-old children, following them around recording their gestures and how they affected attentive others, “like they’re tiny apes, which they basically are,” she says. She also posted short video clips of ape gestures online and asked adult visitors who’d never spent any time with great apes to guess what they thought they meant. She found that pre-verbal human children use at least 40 or 50 gestures from the ape repertoire, and adults correctly guessed the meaning of video-recorded ape gestures at a rate “significantly higher than expected by chance,” as Hobaiter and Kirsty E. Graham, a postdoctoral research fellow in Hobaiter’s lab, reported in a 2023 paper for PLOS Biology.

The emerging research might seem to suggest that there’s nothing very special about human language. Other species use intentional wordlike signals just as we do. Some, such as Japanese tits and pied babblers, have been known to combine different signals to make new meanings. Many species are social and practice cultural transmission, satisfying what might be prerequisite for a structured communication system like language. And yet a stubborn fact remains. The species that use features of language in their communications have few obvious geographical or phylogenetic similarities. And despite years of searching, no one has discovered a communication system with all the properties of language in any species other than our own.

For some scientists, the mounting evidence of cognitive and linguistic continuities between humans and animals outweighs evidence of any gaps. “There really isn’t such a sharp distinction,” Jarvis, now at Rockefeller University, said in a podcast. Fedorenko agrees. The idea of a chasm separating man from beast is a product of “language elitism,” she says, as well as a myopic focus on “how different language is from everything else.”

But for others, the absence of clear evidence of all the components of language in other species is, in fact, evidence of their absence. In a 2016 book on language evolution titled “Why Only Us,” written with the linguist Robert C. Berwick, Chomsky describes animal communications as “radically different” from human language. Seyfarth and Cheney, in a 2018 book, note the “striking discontinuities” between human and nonhuman loquacity. Animal calls may be modifiable; they may be voluntary and intentional. But they’re rarely combined according to rules in the way that human words are and “appear to convey only limited information,” they write. If animals had anything like the full suite of linguistic components we do, Kirby says, we would know by now. Animals with similar cognitive and social capacities to ours rarely express themselves systematically the way we do, with systemwide cues to distinguish different categories of meaning. “We just don’t see that kind of level of systematicity in the communication systems of other species,” Kirby said in a 2021 talk.

This evolutionary anomaly may seem strange if you consider language an unalloyed benefit. But what if it isn’t? Even the most wondrous abilities can have drawbacks. According to the popular “self-domestication” hypothesis of language’s origins, proposed by Kirby and James Thomas in a 2018 paper published in Biology & Philosophy, variable tones and inventive locutions might prevent members of a species from recognizing others of their kind. Or, as others have pointed out, they might draw the attention of predators. Such perils could help explain why domesticated species such as Bengalese finches have more complex and syntactically rich songs than their wild kin, the white-rumped munia, as discovered by the biopsychologist Kazuo Okanoya in 2012; why tamed foxes and domesticated canines exhibit heightened abilities to communicate, at least with humans, compared with wolves and wild foxes; and why humans, described by some experts as a domesticated species of their ape and hominin ancestors, might be the most talkative of all. A lingering gap between our abilities and those of other species, in other words, does not necessarily leave language stranded outside evolution. Perhaps, Fitch says, language is unique to Homo sapiens, but not in any unique way: special to humans in the same way the trunk is to the elephant and echolocation is to the bat.

The quest for language’s origins has yet to deliver King Solomon’s seal, a ring that magically bestows upon its wearer the power to speak to animals, or the future imagined in a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which therolinguists pore over the manuscripts of ants, the “kinetic sea writings” of penguins and the “delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen.” Perhaps it never will. But what we know so far tethers us to our animal kin regardless. No longer marooned among mindless objects, we have emerged into a remade world, abuzz with the conversations of fellow thinking beings, however inscrutable.

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The World Health Organization (WHO) is taking on the world’s worst killer, laying out its first plan to conquer hypertension—a level of high blood pressure that affects one in every three adults globally. That figure has doubled since 1990. It’s now up to 1.3 billion people.

High blood pressure might sound like a disease of rich nations, but in a report released today during the United Nations General Assembly, the WHO said that three-fourths of people living with hypertension reside in low- and middle-income nations. Nearly half of them have no idea they have the condition, which causes heart attacks, kidney disease, and stroke. Four-fifths of them, including both people with a diagnosis and those who don’t know they are affected, aren’t getting adequate treatment to control it.

If that could be improved, the agency said, 76 million lives could be saved between now and the year 2050. “There are some health issues for which we lack knowledge or effective tools,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director general—who has been open about controlling his own high blood pressure with medication—during a briefing in New York City. “Hypertension is not one of them. We have the tools. Every country can do more to use those tools.”

Technically, hypertension is an exacerbation of high blood pressure. A blood pressure monitor displays two numbers: the pressure inside arteries when the heart beats, followed by the pressure between beats. A measurement of 120/80 mmHg (indicating the movement of a column of mercury in the monitor) is considered ideal. When the first figure rises above 140 or the second nudges above 90, that’s hypertension: the point at which the force of the blood can damage arteries and reduce the amount of oxygen reaching the heart.

Blood pressure rises for a variety of reasons, which may be different around the world: eating a lot of salt, drinking alcohol, using tobacco, breathing polluted air, and not exercising. The remedies are simple, though not necessarily easy to scale: fixing diets, providing affordable medications, and building out health care and information systems so that people can be diagnosed and monitored without a lot of effort on their part.

“The bottom line here is that the world's most deadly condition is also the most neglected,” said Tom Frieden, a former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and president and CEO of the health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives (which collaborates with the WHO), in a separate briefing earlier. “For more than half a century, treatment of high blood pressure has been the standard of care in higher income countries. It's way past time for it to become the standard of care for every person in the world.”

The WHO plan calls for countries to make controlling hypertension a government priority, something that health ministries write plans for and health care systems emphasize. (The accompanying report offers Canada and South Korea as examples; those countries got hypertension under control in more than half the people diagnosed with it.) After that, the agency recommends uniform protocols for diagnosis and treatment uniform, down to the order in which to try certain drugs and the doses to use. It also outlines how to organize outreach workers and paraprofessionals to increase the number of people working on the problem while keeping costs down. Finally, it describes standards for governments buying the needed drugs—which are all inexpensive generics—and for creating data systems to track patients and treatments.

Experts not affiliated with the WHO’s project said the prevalence of hypertension around the globe is a clue that it is a disease of modernity. “I’m from Uganda, and when I was growing up in the ’80s, hypertension used to be considered a disease of the affluent. But that is no longer the case,” says Annet Kirabo, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who leads a hypertension research project in Zambia. “Africa is being Westernized. Some of the diets prevalent here that contribute to hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases are common back there in sub-Saharan Africa also.”

While salt consumption is a major factor in the rise of high blood pressure—and may be particularly dangerous in Black populations, who share genetic mutations making them more sensitive to salt—other factors influence it as well. Some may be more common in emerging-economy nations, such as a loss of access to traditional diets as people migrate to cities, an inability to exercise safely, and an exposure to fine particulates from burning fossil fuels. “This is very complex in developing countries,” says Sanjay Rajagopalan, a cardiologist and director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. “Urban migration, changes in food and culture, access to care, high levels of pollution—all of these are synergistic and result in much higher levels of hypertension.”

In its plan, the WHO makes the point that battling hypertension ought to be a priority for nations not just out of compassion, but to save money as well. More than one-third of deaths from hypertension occur in people under age 70, meaning that their income is lost both to their families and as a contribution to a country’s GDP. In one estimate cited by the agency, spending $1 on hypertension control recovers $18 down the road.

It may be a big ask, as the world comes out of Covid, to recommend that societies focus on another overwhelming health problem. But it may also be the right moment to do so. Though Covid killed almost 7 million people worldwide, diseases that are not caused by infectious organisms kill 41 million people every year. And unlike Covid, hypertension is neither a mystery nor a shock; the condition is well understood, and there are affordable drugs that treat it.

But as the new plan proposes, it has not been taken seriously enough. “In general, noninfectious diseases have been neglected in the majority of the world,” says Gene Bukhman, a cardiologist who directs the Program on Global Noncommunicable Disease and Social Change at Harvard Medical School. “They’ve been treated as emerging problems, when really they’ve been endemic problems for decades.” Controlling hypertension, in other words, shouldn’t take a program of discovery—just an effort of will.

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IT’S LATE AUGUST, and Italy is in the middle of its third record-setting heat wave of the summer, but at the bottom of the slopes in Fai della Paganella, a small ski resort in the Dolomites, a queue is forming for the chairlift. Instead of ski jackets and bobble hats, the people waiting are dressed like 21st-century gladiators—with knees, chests, and elbows covered in plastic body armor. Instead of skis, their weapons of choice are downhill mountain bikes: elaborate machines that look like off-road motorcycles and often cost as much as a small car.

Scenes like this are becoming increasingly common across Europe as ski resorts, feeling the impact of the climate crisis, look to diversify their appeal and tap into alternative sources of income. Paganella is remarkable in that it now attracts more bikers in summer than skiers in winter. “Sixty-five percent of our visitors now come outside of the ski season—between April and November,” says Luca d’Angelo, the resort’s destination manager.

“The switch,” as d’Angelo calls it, “came in 2018 or 2019.” It wasn’t originally part of some master plan, he explains. When the resort first opened a lift for mountain bikers as an experiment in 2011, “my colleagues weren’t thinking necessarily about climate change as a theme,” he says. But as snowfall becomes less and less reliable, Paganella’s decision to invest in mountain-biking infrastructure looks increasingly prescient.

A mountain biker riding the Paganella bike park.PHOTOGRAPH: ALFIE BACON

The science around what the climate crisis means for ski resorts makes for grim reading. In a paper published in Nature Climate Change in August 2023, a team lead by Hugues François of the University of Grenoble projected the “snow supply risk” for 2,234 European ski resorts, based on global average temperature increases of 2 and 4 degrees Celsius. Under the 4-degree warming scenario, they found that 98 percent of the resorts would face “a very high risk” to their natural snow supply. Even if global temperature rises can be kept to 2 degrees (a threshold likely to be exceeded by the middle of this century), more than half of the places the team looked at would struggle for natural snow. 

Many ski resorts, of course, now rely on artificial snowmaking to make up for natural shortfalls: 90 percent of ski slopes in Italy, 70 percent in Austria, 53 percent in Switzerland, 37 percent in France, and 25 percent in Germany are now covered by snow cannons, according to data released by the the Swiss lift operators association, Seilbahnen, in 2021. But snowmaking is no silver bullet. For the purposes of the study, François’ team assumed that ski resorts could cover, on average, 50 percent of their slopes with cannons. They found that 71 percent would still face a snow supply risk under the 4-degrees warming scenario, and 27 percent under 2 degrees. Snowmaking also requires huge amounts of water and energy, ultimately contributing to the crisis it’s designed to solve. 

For Luca Albrisi, the whole idea that ski resorts could continue to operate as they currently do, plugging any gaps with artificial snow, is fundamentally flawed. An environmental activist and filmmaker from the Italian village of Pejo, Albrisi is the lead author of the Clean Outdoor Manifesto. This mission statement, cosigned by thousands of outdoor industry professionals since its launch in 2020, has subsequently coalesced into an influential activist group. To have a future, he believes mountain communities need to escape from “the current model of development,” which is dangerously dependent “on what’s essentially a tourism monoculture based on downhill skiing.” 

“Of course, we recognize that in the past, skiing allowed many valleys [across the Alps] to lift themselves out of poverty,” Albrisi says. “But it’s obvious that it’s a model that’s now obsolete.” He argues that ski resorts should preserve any untouched terrain they have left for low-impact activities like snowshoeing or ski touring (where participants climb the mountain under their own steam), instead of spending millions on new skiing infrastructure—clearing forests for new lifts and pistes and installing the artificial lakes and subterranean pipe-work for the snow cannons now needed to keep them operational.

On March 12, 2023, this led to the counterintuitive sight of over a thousand people—including ski instructors, alpine guides, and other mountain professionals—coming together to protest against proposed new ski facilities at 11 sites in Italy. Organized by Outdoor Manifesto signatories, in collaboration with other groups, the demonstration’s slogan, “Reimagine Winter: No more new lifts,” has particular resonance in the peninsula, where, according to detailed research by Legambiente, Italy’s leading environmental NGO, there are now 249 ski lifts lying abandoned and unused because of climate change. The group also identified 138 more lifts that have been “temporarily” closed for at least one winter, and a further 84 which they classified as “partly open, partly closed”—all of which are at risk of permanent closure.

The larger issue, according to Vanda Bonardo, lead author of the Legambiente report, is the misallocation of resources. “Several of those which are ‘partly open, partly closed’ are only still standing because of public money—our money,” she explains. “This spring, Italy’s tourism minister, Daniela Santanchè, allocated 210 million euros ($225 million) just to support this decaying industry, while other sectors which exist in the shadow of skiing receive just crumbs,” Bonardo says. “That’s not right, given that it’s our money, and that this model of skiing has no future.” 

As alternatives, Bonardo points to places like Panarotta 2002, a low-lying Italian ski resort that closed its lifts last winter, and the proposal to rebrand it as “Panarotta Skialp-Natur”—a destination dedicated to ski touring in winter and hiking in summer. A similar initiative has proved successful, albeit on a small scale, in the nearby ski resort of Gaver. The lifts there closed for the final time at the end of the 2013–14 season, and the skeletal pylons still strewn across the hillside have long since turned to rust. But thanks largely to the efforts of Stefano Marca, the enterprising local owner of the Blumonbreak Hotel, Gaver’s slopes now attract thousands of ski tourers on winter weekends.

Ski touring at Gaver ski resort.PHOTOGRAPH: TRISTAN KENNEDY

Gaver’s new business model still relies on there still being some snow (if not the consistent coverage needed to keep a lift operation economically viable). But there are now some “ski” resorts where skiing no longer features as part of the business plan at all. When Felix Saller met his partner, Christin Hellermann, at a mountain-bike event, the small ski hill her family owned near Dortmund, Germany, hadn’t had enough snow to open for over a decade. “They opened for two weekends in 2017, when there was really a lot of snow,” Saller says, “but they hadn’t opened at all for five years before that, and it really stopped being a business around 2000 or 2001.”

With his background in the bike industry, Saller realized the place had potential. In July 2022, three years after writing their first business plan, he and Hellermann reopened the resort as Green Hill Bike Park. Their total investment, Saller estimates, was just 2 million euros. Converting the main ski lift, he says, couldn’t have been easier. “There’s a simple hook system called EasyLoop, invented by a guy in Austria, which allows you to convert any drag lift [which tows skiers and snowboarders up the mountain] for bikes.”

While the old family-run ski resort was very much a small-scale affair, the new bike park is anything but. “We obviously haven’t had a whole summer season yet,” Felix says, “but in the last half year we had 30,000 mountain bikers, so in a whole season it will be 50 or 60,000.” In August 2023, they hosted the Swatch Nines, one of the most prestigious international contests in the world of mountain biking—a huge coup for such a new business. “I don’t have the latest ticket sales summary, but by my estimate, around 7,000 people visited on three days that weekend,” Saller says.

Unsurprisingly, this successful revival of a once-dead resort has turned heads within the industry. “We have a lot of requests from other ski resorts—in Switzerland, Austria, Poland, and also here in Germany—asking us to bring our ideas there,” Saller says. “I would say the next years will be a boom for mountain bike parks, especially for all the ski areas under 1,500 meters.” 

In Fai della Paganella, where the lifts top out at 2,100 meters, Luca d’Angelo isn’t worried about the winter season disappearing completely just yet.

“It’s still very important,” he says, pointing out that lift ticket sales are still worth 12 million euros in winter, compared to 2.5 million in summer. “But pay attention,” he says, explaining that when you factor in the expense of electricity needed for snowmaking, and the relative costs of preparing a mountain bike trail versus a ski piste, the profit margins even out—or even swing the other way. “It’s not an official calculation, but we estimate that every 1 euro a biker spends is worth six or seven times the euro spent by a skier,” he says. These days, Paganella markets itself less as a ski resort, and more as what d’Angelo calls “a year-round destination.”

For the first time this year, he explains proudly, the transition between seasons was seamless. Paganella’s top lifts closed for skiing on April 9, and “that same day, we opened lifts lower down the valley for mountain biking.” The swish of skis on snow giving way to the whir of bike cassettes made it obvious where the future lies.

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"It is changing the trajectory of evolution globally and destroying the conditions that make human life possible," ecologists warn in their new paper.

"It is an irreversible threat to the persistence of civilization and the livability of future environments for Homo sapiens."

Over the past few months the sixth mass extinction has become devastatingly visible.

We've witnessed mass seabird deaths, shores have been littered with droves of dead fish, and sea lions poisoned by heat-induced algal blooms.

Last year entire populations of penguins failed to breed and for years now researchers have been investigating an alarming reduction in insect life.

So ecologist Gerardo Ceballos from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Stanford University conservation biologist Paul Ehrlich assessed species extinctions since 1500 CE and compared those through the past 500 million years. They found we've driven 73 genera of back-boned animals to extinction during the last 500 years.

Genus is the taxonomic classification just above species, grouping together the most closely related organisms, much like siblings, in a family tree.

This rate is 35 times higher than previous genus-level extinctions.

Simple schematic representation of the mutilation of the Tree of life because of generic extinctions and extinction risks. The bottom half of the tree depicted as dead branches shows examples of the extinct genera, and the upper half shows examples of genera at risk of extinction. (Ceballosa & Ehrlich, PNAS, 2023)

Without human influence, it would have taken 18,000 years for the same number of genera to have met their end. Other studies have also found similarly high extinction rates for plant, fungi, and invertebrate life as well.

"[The sixth mass extinction] is causing rapid mutilation of the tree of life, where entire branches (collections of species, genera, families, and so on) and the functions they perform are being lost," explain the researchers.

The biosphere we live within is extremely interconnected, so loss of species groups that play particular functions within their interconnected-living web can have severe cascading consequences.

"We and all other species have evolved together thriving within a stable tree of life," Ceballos and Ehrlich say, so the loss of entire ecological functions performed by groups of species directly impacts us too.

For example, the loss of mosquito-devouring frogs has occurred alongside increasing malaria infections in Central America.

What's more, this rate of genera loss is set to increase, Ceballos and Ehrlich calculate. If we continue on our current trajectory and all current endangered genera are snuffed from existence by 2100, the equivalent 300-year-loss since 1800 would have taken 106,000 years at normal background levels of extinction.

The most vulnerable species are usually the most unique, yet overlooked on the planet. Along with them we'll lose millions of years of evolutionary history, which can never be repeated, as well as the loss of critical functions they performed that helped keep all the surrounding biological cycles chugging on like a well oiled machine.

"[It] required millions of years for evolution to generate functional replacements for the extinct organisms," Ceballos and Ehrlich note.

Climate change alone is creating a massive destabilization across these systems, scattering critical timing of ecosystem services like pollination, reducing the types of species and allowing new ones to invade more easily.

Another new study has documented these exact processes in an Arizonian dryland stream between 1985 and 2019.

"Our study provides evidence of climate change-induced modifications of mechanisms underpinning long-term community stability, resulting in an overall destabilizing effect," Junna Wang and team write.

Yet the sixth mass extinction is far bigger than the massive cluster-catastrophe of climate change alone.

From plastics, to pesticides, habitat loss and poaching, we're not allowing the life around us to catch a break.

"Immediate political, economic, and social efforts of an unprecedented scale are essential if we are to prevent these extinctions and their societal impacts," say Ceballos and Ehrlich.

Unlike the comet that eliminated non-avian dinosaurs, we're conscious of our actions and we do have the ability to change course.

"What happens in the next two decades will very likely define the future of biodiversity and H. sapiens," the team concludes.

This research was published in PNAS.

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Given the ceaseless procession of disasters this summer—from heat domes to hurricanes to the fiery destruction of Lahaina—the slow-motion disaster of plastic pollution may not be top of mind. But the United Nations recently released a “zero draft,” or the principles under consideration, of what could become one of the most consequential treaties ever written: “the international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment.” 

It gets overshadowed by climate change, but plastic pollution has grown into a full-tilt emergency that’s intimately linked with planetary warming. Humanity is now churning out a trillion pounds of these polymers a year, a carbon-intensive process because plastic is made of fossil fuels. Production is expected to triple by the year 2060. “It is well established that our global plastic pollution crisis is also contributing to our global climate crisis, and the increasing shift towards investing into plastic production over the coming decades by the petrochemical industry is a great concern,” says Nick Mallos, the Ocean Conservancy’s vice president of conservation, who focuses on ocean plastics and has been involved in the negotiations.

The recycling rate in the United States is now 5 percent—an abject failure, and an effort that the plastic industry always knew was going to be ineffective. Instead, the vast majority of plastic is landfilled, incinerated, or escapes into the environment. Microplastics shed from everyday objects like clothing and broken-down bottles and bags. Now, these tiny particles have corrupted our bodies and every corner of the planet, from the deepest oceans to the highest mountains.

The draft treaty is a menu of interventions that are on the table during the UN’s negotiations, which are expected to extend through 2024 and involve experts and representatives from about 150 countries. So this document is far from a final product. It lists two possible objectives: either “to protect human health and the environment from plastic pollution” or “to end plastic pollution” in a bid to do the same. The second is more ambitious, while the first is less definitive.

Expect such distinctions to grow contentious. “The negotiations are quite polarized right now,” says David Azoulay, director of environmental health at the Center for International Environmental Law, which is participating in the talks. “There's a larger group of countries that actually are looking for ambition. There is a smaller number of countries that are hell-bent on preventing this treaty from delivering on the promises under the mandate that was given to end plastic pollution throughout its lifecycle.” Those promises mean tackling the material’s journey from manufacture to disposal, not just how it leaks into the environment after it’s trashed.

Negotiators are concerned that this treaty could go the way of the Paris Agreement, in which countries set a planet-wide goal of keeping temperatures from rising no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, but were allowed to set their own targets for reducing emissions. Nations that haven’t met these targets may get publicly shamed, but not dragged in front of an international court. And if nations do implement strict limits, polluting industries can just move elsewhere.

Similarly, the plastics treaty could allow countries to set their own goals for reducing production. “Worst-case scenario, if consensus can't be reached, there's a risk that we get a watered-down, fully voluntary agreement that's left to member states to implement—or the negotiations can be extended for years,” says Mallos. He thinks the treaty should set specific targets that reduce production by volume or percentage. For example, the Ocean Conservancy is calling to halve the manufacture of single-use plastics by the year 2050, at a minimum.

It’s also important to keep in mind that plastic is a toxic material made of chemicals that themselves need regulation. The polymer PVC is especially nasty, as are its component chemicals. (The train that derailed in Ohio in February was carrying vinyl chloride—which is turned into polyvinyl chloride—which is associated with lymphoma, leukemia, and other cancers, according to the US National Cancer Institute.) “More than 13,000 chemicals are associated with plastics, around a quarter of which have been categorized as hazardous,” says Melanie Bergmann, a plastics researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute, who’s attending the negotiations. “This diversity in the chemical composition of plastic products is one of several reasons that prevent safe circularity, and it needs to be addressed urgently.”

Bergmann and other scientists have called for the treaty to address these component chemicals—for instance, by phasing out particularly toxic ones. The zero draft presents different techniques for eliminating individual chemicals or whole groups of them. “We are happy that the draft, in the various options, does acknowledge the importance of chemicals and the impacts of chemicals in managing plastics,” says Vito Buonsante, technical and policy adviser at the International Pollutants Elimination Network, who is attending the negotiations. “That is a recognition of a bit more maturity in the understanding of what are plastics.” 

Microplastics, too, make a number of appearances in the draft. Scientists define these as bits smaller than 5 millimeters—about the width of a pencil eraser. The document acknowledges the problems they cause, and it has options for eliminating “intentionally added microplastics,” like microbeads in face washes. But “secondary microplastics,” the kind that break down from larger bottles and bags, remain a massively complicated problem to fix. They flush into the environment in all kinds of ways, from washing machine wastewater to highway runoff. (Particulates shear off car tires and wash into rivers and kill fish.) 

“The zero draft didn't go far enough when it comes to secondary microplastics,” says Mallos. “We very much hope there'll be more specifics added about preventing these kinds of microplastics, since they do represent the vast majority of the microplastics we're finding in the ocean and the environment.”

The draft also lays out options for better managing reuse and refill schemes, while still promoting higher recycling rates. Expect that to be another sticking point as the negotiations unfold: Over the last few decades, the plastics industry has pushed recycling as an excuse to make exponentially more plastic, or hyped alternatives like bio-based plastics made from plants. (A representative from the Plastics Industry Association did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment on the zero draft treaty.)

But if recycling actually worked as intended, they wouldn’t have to make so much more virgin material—we could keep the existing stuff in circulation. That’s why for pollution experts, the ultimate goal for these negotiations will be putting a cap on plastic creation. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to right the ship and chart a course toward a future where we're not drowning in plastics,” says Mallos. “The health of our ocean and our human lives will be dependent on it.”

For now, Azoulay hails the zero draft as a step in the right direction. “The draft still includes options for having a completely voluntary and possibly useless instrument, but it also contains possibly strong measures around reducing production, around getting toxics out of the process,” he says. “I look back a few years ago, when we started discussing this issue at the international level, and this was unthinkable. This draft doesn't say much about what the final treaty will look like, but it does say a lot about how the global community has acknowledged what the problem is.”

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Poop that clings to the toilet bowl is not only unpleasant for bathroom visitors and cleaners alike, it actually wastes a significant amount of water as more flushes are required to dislodge the stuff.

It was this problem that the scientists wanted to tackle by making a non-stick toilet bowl. They used a mixture of plastic and hydrophobic sand grains for their material, fused together with laser-based 3D printing techniques, in a design that was around a tenth the size of a standard toilet bowl.

The bowl uses hydrophobic grains and a lubricant. (Li et al., Advanced Engineering Materials, 2023)

The abrasion-resistant super-slippery flush toilet, or ARSFT, was shown to repel synthetic feces, as well as multiple substances that the scientists tested. Nothing was able to get a grip on the surface, and everything slid straight down, much like the slippery pitcher plants that inspired the toilet design.

"The as-prepared ARSFT remains clean after contacting with various liquids such as milk, yogurt, highly sticky honey, and starch gel mixed congee, demonstrating excellent repellence to complex fluids," write the researchers in their published paper.

"Notably, even after being abraded to 1,000 cycles of abrasion using sandpaper, the ARSFT maintains its record-breaking super-slippery capability."

That durability is important: non-stick toilet surfaces have been developed before, but they tend to wear down with repeated flushing, so something that retains its slipperiness is a much better option for replacing conventional materials.

The 3D printing approach enabled the scientists to introduce some porousness to the surface, and add a silicon oil as a lubricant. Both of these innovations helped in the non-stick qualities of the small bowl.

What's more, the lubricant can be replenished to keep the bowl ultra slippy over time. Less water would be required for flushing and for cleaning, the scientists suggest, which would quickly add up across millions of toilets.

The flushing toilet has only been around properly for a couple of centuries, but we now use more than 141 billion liters of fresh water globally each day to flush toilets, which is nearly six times the daily water consumption of Africa.

Today, much of the world struggles to access safe, clean water, a problem that's only going to be exacerbated by climate change. Innovations such as this one promise to make a real difference – but the concept now needs to be developed and scaled up.

"The concept of the 3D-printed object with a superior abrasion-resistant slippery ability will improve the development of super-slippery materials and further save water consumption in the human society," write the researchers.

The research has been published in Advanced Engineering Materials.

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"We're pressing China to give full access, and we are asking countries to raise it during their bilateral meetings—(to urge Beijing) to co-operate," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the FT.

He said the WHO had already written to China asking "to give us information " and for the organization to send a team "if they allow us to do so".

The international community has been unable to determine with certainty the origins of the COVID pandemic.

The first cases were detected at the end of 2019 in Wuhan, China, suggesting two opposing theories: an escape from a laboratory in the city where such viruses were being studied or an intermediate animal that infected people at a local market.

A team of specialists led by the WHO and accompanied by Chinese colleagues had investigated China in early 2021.

In a joint report, they favored the hypothesis that the virus had been transmitted by intermediary animal from a bat to a human, possibly at a market.

Tedros said after that all options remained "on the table".

There has not been a team able to return to China and WHO officials have repeatedly asked for additional data.

Tedros has repeatedly said the WHO would not abandon its investigation and has called on Beijing for transparency in sharing data, carrying out investigations and sharing the results.

The WHO lifted the highest alert level that had been in place for the pandemic earlier this year.

Thanks to vaccines, post-infection immunity and better treatment, the virus is now under greater control, although with the arrival of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, new variants are emerging.

© 2023 AFP

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Ever since the US started churning out per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in the 1940s, these long-lived toxic chemicals have been accumulating everywhere humans have trodden.

Since then, these compounds have leached from industrial facilities and trash systems into our waterways, making our drinking supply one of the main ways forever chemicals are getting into our bodies. 

If you’re now eyeing your glass of water suspiciously, know that there are steps you can take to find out if there are PFAS in that H2O, and lower the risk of exposure for you and your family. 

Your water might have PFAS

Between 2016 and 2021, the US Geological Survey sampled the water from 716 different taps across the country and found that an estimated 45 percent of tested sites contained at least one kind of forever chemical. The study is the broadest of its kind in the US, making its main finding the best risk estimate we have for PFAS contamination in our drinking water. 

While efforts to regulate these chemicals are gaining traction, there is no federal mandate limiting the amount of PFAS in our drinking supply. In March, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a nationwide enforceable limit of four parts per trillion for each of the six types of PFAS in our drinking water. But while the EPA weighs public comments on the bill, millions of people might still exposed to these persistent pollutants, as not all public water systems in the country are required to monitor and remove them.

Even if the EPA’s proposal succeeds, imposing legal PFAS limits doesn’t necessarily mean our water will be safe to drink. For example, the EPA’s maximum contaminant level goal for perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), the most notorious cancer-causing PFAS, is zero. 

For these two compounds, “there’s no known safe level,” says Kelly Smalling, a USGS environmental chemist and lead author of the national tap water study. 

Researchers are still looking into how forever chemicals impact our health and how to efficiently dispose of them. This is particularly important because there are vast geographical areas in the US where PFAS levels are high enough to pose a health risk over time, but low enough to make it hard to remove them from the environment. 

By understanding the risk of PFAS exposure in your drinking water, you can find the best prevention strategy to mitigate it accordingly. 

Know thy water source 

The USGS has a comprehensive and interactive map where you can search for PFAS contamination levels by zip code. Courtesy of USGS

The easiest step in understanding your risk of PFAS exposure is knowing where you get your water from, says Jamie DeWitt, a pharmacologist at East Carolina University. If it comes from a public supply, you have it easier than those getting their H2O from private wells, as utility companies have to regularly test for contaminants and report the results to the public. 

The Environmental Working Group, an advocacy non-profit, has a nifty online tap water database that shows the servicing utility and contaminants detected where you live—just search using your zip code. You can also use this platform to gather information before you talk to your public water provider, which the EPA encourages you to do. If you find high PFAS levels in your water supply, DeWitt recommends you reach out and find out what your utility company is doing to reduce them.

There’s a caveat, though—the data included in the EWG’s database are of contaminants tested by and at the utility plant, which are a few steps removed from the actual amount that you might imbibe at home. A 2022 study published in the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research, shows that PFAS can leak into the water through the distribution infrastructure, so real PFAS levels might actually be higher than those reported by the EWG. For a more downstream estimate of PFAS contamination, the authors of the USGS study have fashioned an interactive map including data from private wells. 

If you live in or near an area where PFAS were detected, there’s a good chance these chemicals are in your tap water, as their footprint tends to spill far and wide. As a proxy for estimating contamination levels in areas where researchers didn’t test directly, the map also includes industry facilities that might be sources for PFAS. 

Although the EWG’s tap water database pertains to public utilities only, it could still help the 40 million Americans whose water comes from private wells. Smalling explains this is because neighboring water supplies, whether public or private, usually originate from a common reservoir in the same catchment area. This makes it highly likely that PFAS detected in one source might be present in others nearby. 

At-home PFAS tests

There are several PFAS testing kits for household water in the market, where you mail a sample and get results after a week or so. 

If you’re thinking about testing your water for PFAS, pick a test kit that follows the EPA’s Method 537.1 and Method 533. The easiest way to know which ones comply with these standards is to follow your state’s recommendations or refer to the EPA’s list of approved manufacturers. 

Choosing which test to go with is a delicate balancing act between cost, exposure risk, convenience, and the scope of the test. Lydia Jahl, a science and policy manager at the environmental advocacy nonprofit Green Science Policy Institute, recommends you look for the number of PFAS species a kit can detect (the more the better), and its detection threshold: the lower it is, the more sensitive.

Money can also be an important deciding factor, as these services can cost up to a few hundred dollars. However, the investment might be warranted if you own a well or live near a high-risk zone. For those on a budget, a good alternative is Cyclopure’s PFAS test, which is only $79. While the test meets a slightly older standard and is not government-certified, it does a good job at detecting a whopping 55 types of PFAS and their precursors. 

Test kits come with their own instructions, but you’ll find there are general guidelines that apply to most cases:

• Start by thoroughly washing your hands before collection, and make sure you wear a fresh pair of surgical gloves to avoid contaminating the water sample.

• Avoid touching the inside of the collection bottle and its lid. If you must set the lid down, keep the inside facing up.

• For the most accurate measurement, run your faucet on low for at least three minutes to flush the pipes before filling the collection bottle. Do not overfill the container.

• If the sampling bottle contains a preservative, thoroughly mix in the water by carefully inverting the closed container a few times.

• Make sure to have a watch or clock handy, as you’ll need to indicate the location and exact time you collected the sample. If applicable and per the test’s instructions, you can also specify which tap you collected the water from.

• Have some ice ready, as most samples have to be at 43 degrees Fahrenheit when they arrive at the lab. Some tests come with their own ice packs, but depending on the instructions, you may have to make your own with a zip-top bag and some ice cubes.

• Make sure to overnight your specimen or drop it off at a designated site within 24 hours of collection.

Currently, there is no consensus on how often drinking water supplies should be tested for PFAS. For example, the state of New Hampshire recommends testing private wells every three to five years, while Massachusetts only once a decade after an initial negative PFAS result. 

You’ve tested your water for PFAS. Now what? 

If you are particularly concerned about your risk of exposure, you can take a blood test to learn about your body’s PFAS levels. You can find such tests from manufacturers like EmpowerDX, but they don’t come cheap and they’re likely not covered by insurance, DeWitt says. 

Whether your water management company is acting against PFAS or not, an easy way to reduce your exposure to these chemicals is to filter your water supply. You can install filters that clean the water for your entire household at once (point-of-entry filtration), or just that from the specific tap you drink from (point-of-use system). 

The market is filled with a wide range of options at varying prices, so choosing a solution for you can be confusing. The EWG has a list with several point-of-use filters, which takes into consideration their ability to remove PFAS, and their associated costs. There are also offerings such as Cyclopure’s $45 filter cartridges, which have been certified by the National Sanitation Foundation. 

But any filter is better than nothing, says Jahl, and even traditional, lower-end countertop filters can remove some PFAS from drinking water. She personally opts for the ubiquitous Brita pitcher filter, which relies on activated carbon to filter a broad spectrum of contaminants, including PFAS. To keep the filtration performance in top condition, just remember to switch out your filters as instructed. 

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New Delhi: It’s a Japanese folklore called The Moon Princess. A poor couple discovers a baby girl inside a bamboo stalk and takes her in as a divine blessing. They name her Kaguya-hime and raise the child as their own. Kaguya-hime grows up in the idyllic countryside, the word of her beauty travelling far and wide. But she spurns every suitor, including the emperor of Japan, and returns to where she came from—the moon.

The story, more than 1,200 years old, is listed on an app called Neend, literally meaning sleep. Following her own struggles with sleep post-covid, 32-year-old Surbhi Jain, an IIT Bombay graduate, started Neend in mid-2021. Its USP is bedtime stories told in a languid tone, peppered with simple instructions on how to prepare oneself for sleep: not just turning off the lights but how to breathe, relax each part of the body and let go of the day gone by.

Neend takes a leaf out of internationally hit podcasts such as ‘Sleep with me’ by Drew Ackerman who tells boring stories with a generous dose of humour, lulling his listeners to sleep.

“Our narrators have a calm and familiar tone which helps listeners relax. The voices are carefully curated, based on research on what frequencies are soothing to the ears," Jain said. The plots are unhurried, to ensure one does not get all excited.

Alongside app-based podcasts, which Jain claims has 30,000 daily listeners, Neend has also ventured into sleep solution products like melatonin gummies—a hormone which induces sleep in response to darkness—and herb-based relaxants. It also offers therapy and counselling services by connecting users to sleep experts. An annual subscription to the app costs ₹699.

“We think of ourselves not as a content or an e-commerce venture but a sleep and relaxation company," Jain said.

Neend, in a way, stands apart as a unique venture in an emerging market promising to deliver a restful night of sleep to customers. This market comprises new age mattress companies, makers of breathing devices and nutraceuticals, wearable sleep trackers such as smart watches and wrist bands, and medical practitioners urging their patients to get a sleep study done—to diagnose serious underlying conditions like sleep apnea.

Biological rhythms

But should one obsess over sleep? For Sagar Bishnoi, the answer is an unequivocal yes. Now 29, Bishnoi, a Delhi-based environment professional, struggled for years to get a good night’s sleep. The earliest memory, which he said is printed in his brain, dates to a morning when he was just 12. Unable to wake up on time, Bishnoi had reached school late. He was publicly admonished for frequently coming late for the school assembly. He felt humiliated.

Later, even as he graduated from college and took up a job, the distress over sleep never left him. “I would go to bed on time but not fall asleep. The deepest sleep came only towards morning. I would miss alarms and phone calls. I used to wake up tired and feel sleepy mid-day while at work," Bishnoi recalled.

The trauma of sleep deprivation led Bishnoi to box himself as a night owl. But thankfully, after a year of concerted effort, Bishnoi managed to fix his problem last year. The break came after he realized the importance of circadian rhythm—bodily functions which control temperatures, hormone secretion and the cycles of sleep and wakefulness.

These bodily rhythms are often impacted by external factors like exposure to light, ambient temperature and eating or drinking habits. Exposure to light blocks release of melatonin, a sleep-inducing hormone produced by the brain in response to darkness. Conversely, anxiety leads to elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, which interferes with normal sleep. While cortisol levels rise and fall with the sun, melatonin levels move in the opposite direction, maintaining the body’s circadian rhythm.

Why is sleep important? During sleep, memories are consolidated—transferred from short term to long term storage sites—and the metabolic waste generated in the brain due to nerves firing through the day is cleared, explained Swami Subramaniam, neuroscientist, and author of the book

Mastering Sleep.

Sleeping less can severely impair daily activities as well as affect long-term health. For instance, a 2018 study of 10,000 individuals, published in the journal Sleep, found evidence of cognitive impairment among adults sleeping less than the recommended 7-8 hours in a day. The sleep deprived found it difficult to learn new things, concentrate, make decisions, or react to a situation.

The long-term health impact is more damaging. A growing body of evidence links sleep loss to chronic conditions like obesity, hypertension, type-2 diabetes, anxiety, dementia, depression, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Data on sleep deprivation in India is sparse and mostly comes from non-official sources. According to a LocalCircles survey released in March this year, more than half (55%) of respondents said they got less than six hours of ‘uninterrupted’ sleep in a day. A little over fifth said they were not even sleeping for four hours.

Interruptions lead to poor quality sleep by disrupting different stages of a sleep cycle. The cycles usually move from three non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) stages of light to deep sleep, to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep—when dreams happen. These cycles keep repeating through the night, allowing the brain and the body to recuperate.

Another survey, by Wakefit—a mattress and sleep solutions startup—released in 2023, showed a high incidence of self-reported insomnia: one in three respondents. Almost 90% of the respondents said they woke up once or twice during the night, with 60% saying they got up in the morning not feeling well-rested. Nearly 45% of respondents said social media browsing kept them awake at night. Worries about the future, finances and work were the second most important reason which kept people awake.

Melatonin to mattress

Due to the changing nature of work and bizarre sleep routines, insomnia is now a common complaint, said Akanksha Jha, pulmonologist and sleep disorder specialist at Kailash Hospital, Greater Noida.

According to Jha, many who struggle to sleep regularly pop melatonin supplements or sleeping pills. Melatonin products are now readily available on e-commerce websites or as over-the-counter drugs.

As per Future Markets Insights, the melatonin market in India is expected to cross $10 million by 2033. The small size of the market has not deterred established and relatively unknown brands to test the waters. A check on e-retail outlets throws up numerous options for melatonin sold as tablets, syrups and gummies, often punched with vitamins and natural ingredients like chamomile, lavender and other herbs. Earlier this year, Procter and Gamble launched a melatonin sleep gummy named Vicks ZzzQuil Natura, a product which it claims is non-addictive with no next day drowsiness.

The makeover of India’s organized sector mattress market—estimated at $240 million in 2023 by Statista—is no less interesting. Most mattress manufacturers, including established ones like Sheela Foam and Kurlon are now pitching themselves as sleep solutions companies, promising that their products will help customers ‘sleep like a pro.’ The startup ecosystem is also flush with mattress makers which include the likes of Wakefit and The Sleep Company.

“While working on the design, we realized that consumers were paying a steep price for mattresses which hamper blood flow and leave a mark on the skin," said Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, co-founder of Wakefit which began operations in 2016. The startup has seen its annual revenues surge 22% year-on-year to ₹825 crore in 2022-23.

“Our mattresses are designed to ensure that the spine is aligned correctly and one wakes up without pain. The products are tested for breathability, firmness, and humidity (control)," Ramalingegowda added.

The Bengaluru-based startup, which claims to have served two million customers, has a unique policy for its employees. They are entitled to a 30-minute nap every afternoon to ‘recentre and recharge’ themselves on recliners placed in an air-cooled and dark nap room.

In addition to medical supplements and mattresses, a growing number of consumers are now using sleep monitoring devices which include wearables like smartwatches and wrist bands. Data from Statista shows that shipments of smartwatches to India jumped to 31 million units in 2022, from just 12 million units the year before.

Popular smartwatch brands like Apple and Fitbit help consumers track duration and time spent in different sleep stages—like REM and deep sleep—as well as snoring patterns, which can alert users to serious medical conditions like obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).

In OSA, breathing can stop and resume repeatedly. In obese patients, fat deposits around the upper airway obstruct breathing. This not only makes it hard to reach the deep and restful stages of sleep—leading to daytime fatigue—but also increases the risks of a stroke or a heart attack due to a sudden drop in blood oxygen levels.

Costly sleep study

To check for sleep apnea, patients need to undergo a sleep study where sensors track the activity of multiple body systems, including heart, brain and the respiratory system, over the course of a night.

According to sleep specialists, sleep apnea is common but many patients hesitate to get a sleep study done since it is expensive, costing between ₹30,000 and ₹40,000. Some are also averse to using a continuous positive airway pressure (Cpap) machine which delivers continuous pressurized air into a mask that one must wear while sleeping.

The sleep apnea devices market in India was estimated at $121 million in 2021, as per an estimate by TechSci Research, and the segment is forecast to cross $200 million by 2027. The growth, the report said, will be driven by factors like an ageing population, increasing pollution levels leading to higher incidence of respiratory disorders, and rise in lifestyle diseases like hypertension and obesity.

The boom in medical services catering to sleep disorders is already visible. Today, most major cities in India have multiple sleep clinics where patients can get a sleep study done and take medical advice.

“Four out of 10 patients who come to us suffer from sleep apnea. The remaining cases consist of insomnia and circadian rhythm disturbances," said N. Ramakrishnan, founder of the Nithra Institute of Sleep Sciences, Chennai, which was set up in 2004.

Ramakrishnan, who is also director of critical care services at Apollo Hospitals, said that the number of patients visiting the sleep clinic has multiplied manifold in recent years, with rising awareness and growing sleeplessness.

He often gets patients who appear like overworked zombies, yet complain of declining productivity at work. Many admit to popping anti-anxiety medicines and cough syrups—without visiting a doctor—just to get a few hours of sleep.

“It is ironic that medical insurance does not cover sleep treatment and breathing devices (like Cpap) since the treatment does not require hospitalization. Only when sleep deprivation leads to bigger troubles like a heart attack or stroke, insurers step in," Ramakrishnan added.

Darkness is bliss

The cost of sleep deprivation goes beyond personal health. A 2017 study published in the RAND Health Quarterly warned about the high economic costs of insufficient sleep, estimated at $680 billion a year in five OECD countries—including, $400 billion for the US and $60 billion for Germany. Lost sleep impairs productivity and performance at work, coupled with higher absenteeism. OECD is short for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

According to Charles A. Czeisler, professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, the often-glorified corporate executive who logs 100-hour workweeks or lives out of a suitcase in multiple time zones is endangering themselves, putting their companies at risk.

The more we light up our lives, the less we seem to sleep, Czeisler wrote in a Nature piece published in 2013. “Sleep is essential to our physical and mental well-being, so it is vital that we learn more about the impact of light consumption and other ways our 24/7 society affects sleep, circadian rhythms and health," he added.

Lest one is drowned by the wave of sleep hacks on the internet, the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention offers some useful tips for a good night’s sleep. Be consistent and follow a routine. Make sure, the bedroom is quiet, cool, dark. Stay away from all electronic devices including mobiles, laptops and television. Avoid large meals and caffeine before bedtime. And go, get some exercise during the day.

Sagar Bishnoi has been doing exactly that to fix his sleep. But when friends and family come visiting his bachelor’s pad in Delhi, they are often left wide-eyed. Dim lights or a candle placed at floor-level late evening, gentle wafts of cool breeze, a mild sandalwood fragrance hanging in the air.

“Kya mahol banake rakhha hai (what mood have you created, man)," they would say.

Bishnoi takes the jest lightly. He is not worried about his preoccupation with sleep taking a toll on his social life. “But once in a while I do break the rules when it’s worth it."

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Caffeine is a daily ritual for many, serving as the spark that ignites their day. 

For coffee lovers, sipping on a cup of espresso isn't just about kickstarting the morning; it's about nurturing a beautiful habit. 

Study: Espresso delivers far more than a caffeine buzz

A groundbreaking study conducted by researchers at the University of Verona in Italy, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, reveals that espresso delivers far more than a caffeine buzz.

The Italian scientists found that an espresso extract can inhibit the accumulation of tau protein in the brain, a protein closely linked to Alzheimer's disease.

Tau proteins play a crucial role in maintaining the structural integrity of the brain in healthy individuals. However, the build-up of these proteins is considered a hallmark of various neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease. 

To shed light on how regular espresso consumption impacts the development and behavior of these problematic protein aggregates, the researchers embarked on this groundbreaking study.

As tau protein fibers accumulate in the brain, individuals start experiencing symptoms such as memory loss, impaired judgment, wandering, and mood swings. Alzheimer's disease is one of today's most challenging health crises, mainly due to the aging global population. Some studies even suggest that it has become the third leading cause of death. Consequently, researchers are increasingly focused on preventing the build-up of tau proteins as a critical strategy to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's.

Espresso, a globally beloved beverage, is the foundation for various coffee variations.

Italian study: The details

In their latest research, the scientists meticulously analyzed the molecular composition of espresso coffee extract, pinpointing its primary components. Their selection included caffeine, trigonelline, alkaloids, and flavonoids genistein and theobromine. These components were incubated alongside a truncated form of the tau protein for up to 40 hours.

The findings are groundbreaking, revealing that all coffee extract, caffeine, and genistein possess biological properties that prevent aggregation and thickening and even inhibit the return of the tau protein, the study said.

Espresso compounds hindered the accumulation of tau protein and exhibited the capacity to bind to pre-existing tau fibrils. As the concentration of espresso extract and caffeine or genistein compounds increased, the tau fibers grew shorter. The most significant impact was observed when utilizing a complete espresso extract.

According to the study authors, consuming two or three cups of espresso each day provides substantial amounts of caffeine and genistein, capable of penetrating the blood-brain barrier and exerting their neuroprotective effects. 

Given that the typical concentration of tau proteins in the brain is about 25 times lower than the levels tested in this study, there is a compelling hypothesis that coffee consumption might play a pivotal role in averting the accumulation of these proteins and guarding against Alzheimer's disease.

Previous studies

It's worth noting that this isn't the first study to link coffee consumption to Alzheimer's. In 2018, researchers discovered that regular coffee consumption may reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's or Parkinson's later in life. 

Scientists at the Krembil Brain Institute in Canada examined various coffee blends, including lightly roasted (light), deep (dark), and dark decaffeinated coffee.

Their investigation unveiled a group of compounds known as phenylindanes, which form during the coffee bean roasting process. These phenylindanes contribute to the characteristic bitterness of coffee and thwart the interaction between amyloid-beta and tau proteins – two proteins whose deposits are commonly found in the brains of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients.

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The statistics on antibiotic use are jarring. Five prescriptions written each year for every six people in the United States. One-third of those antibiotics not needed at all.

Overuse of antibiotics has been a top concern for decades, and public health officials say the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is picking up speed. More than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the United States annually, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of those, about 35,000 people die.

Others, like Christina Fuhrman, have their lives upended. She had six hospital stays in seven months at 31, fighting for her life after a Clostridoiodes difficile (C. diff) infection left her with intense fatigue, pain, and diarrhea. The Pew Charitable Trust shared her story as an example of what can happen when a healthcare provider inappropriately prescribes antibiotics.

C. diff is the overgrowth of this bacteria that most of us have in our gastrointestinal (GI) tracts but can get thrown out of balance after taking antibiotics. The infection is particularly deadly to seniors and those with compromised immune systems.

In Fuhrman’s case, a dentist prescribed a “precautionary” round of antibiotics after her root canal. It’s an example of the 47 million unnecessary prescriptions handed out each year, according to Pew Charitable Trusts. Of those who do have an infection that could be helped by antibiotics, only half are given the correct protocol.

Exacerbating the overprescription dilemma, Pew said there was a 15 percent increase in infections and deaths related to drug-resistant bacteria in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, likely due to an uptick in unjustified antibiotic use.

Antibiotics Aren’t Risk-Free

Rachel Zetts, senior officer for Pew’s antibiotic resistance project, told The Epoch Times the nonprofit is shifting its antibiotic stewardship efforts to outpatient and community settings and encouraging patients to use their voice to protect their own health. Pew has been working to lower antibiotic overprescribing in hospitals since 2015.

“A lot of times there is a perception antibiotics are safe, and they are largely a safe and efficacious drug. There’s always a risk anytime a medication is prescribed,” Ms. Zetts said. “It’s really critical from our perspective that these antibiotics are used appropriately and when needed, both from a resistant perspective and a patient quality care perspective.”

One fairly recent finding is that adverse effects appear to be worse for those who didn’t need the antibiotic in the first place, highlighted in a study published in 2020 in JAMA Network Open. Examining 2.8 million children prescribed antibiotics, the study found that children who received a non-recommended antibiotic for bacterial infections were at three to eight times higher risk for developing C. diff infections. They also had an elevated risk of other GI-related side effects and serious allergic reactions.

The Evolution of Bacteria

Antibiotics only treat infections caused by bacteria, and many unnecessary prescriptions are written for similar symptoms that have different root causes. Antibiotics don’t cure viral infections—like the common cold, influenza, COVID-19, coughs, stomach bugs, and even some ear and sinus infections.

In spite of that, one study of 1,705 patients with COVID-19 found 56 percent were given antibiotics, even though only 3.5 percent had a confirmed bacterial infection. Hospital antibiotic use for the virus early in the pandemic varied from 27 percent to 84 percent. Results were published in 2021 Clinical Infectious Diseases.

“It’s tough because when you’re suffering, you want something to ease that suffering,” Romney Humphries, division director of the laboratory at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told The Epoch Times.

“Sometimes antibiotics make you feel a little bit better...some of them have a little anti-inflammatory response. But all you're really doing is training your own bacteria to become resistant to that antibiotic,” she said.

One of the ways bacteria learn to resist antibiotics is by building a membrane around themselves. (Shutterstock)

One way bacteria resist the antibiotic is by developing a thick outer membrane the antibiotic can't penetrate. They can also evolve to remove a component of their own makeup that is targeted by the antibiotic, among other mutations.

“Bacteria are very wily creatures, and they are able to evolve in lots of ways in response to antibiotics,” Ms. Humphries said. “Sometimes that can be very regional, so you can have one area of the world where they evolve in one way to become resistant to an antibiotic, and in another area, they can evolve in another way.”

That it continues to happen is no more a surprise than the sun rising in the morning. The year he won the Nobel prize for the discovery of penicillin, Alexander Fleming warned its misuse could result in selection for resistant bacteria.

Ms. Humphries wrote an opinion article in 2022 in Clinical Chemistry noting both the immediacy of tackling what she called “one of the most urgent threats to modern medicine.”

What Are Doctors Doing?

Antibiotic resistance is an important issue but not as pressing as obesity and opioids, according to doctors interviewed in eight focus groups for a 2020 study published in BMJ Open. They believed key drivers on antibiotic resistance were non-primary care settings, such as urgent care clinics, as well as patients who demand prescriptions.

Pew conducted a national survey of 1,550 primary care physicians who said they prescribe antibiotics more appropriately than their peers. They overwhelmingly agreed antibiotic stewardship is needed, but said they would need resources to implement it. And, 79 percent of respondents said without patient education, efforts would be futile.

Right or wrong, physicians tend to have the perception that patients want an antibiotic, Ms. Zetts said.

Targeting physicians who improperly prescribe antibiotics, Denver Health created the outpatient automated stewardship information system (OASIS) launched this year with support from Pew. It uses electronic health records to track and monitor antibiotic prescriptions. It’s been implemented in Kentucky, which uses more antibiotics per capita than any other state. Kentucky children in rural areas also receive antibiotics at three times the rate of children living in non-rural areas.

Using state Medicaid data, OASIS identified all Kentucky physicians prescribing 12 or more antibiotic prescriptions per year. They received letters with their prescribing data and an antibiotic “report card” showing how they compare to their peers.

Another novel idea is unofficial prescription pads for non-pharmaceutical interventions, Ms. Zetts said. That way, patients feel supported when they visit their doctors, leaving with over-the-counter suggestions for alleviating their symptoms.

Finally, she said there’s the “watchful waiting” concept growing among doctors who encourage patients to treat symptoms at home for a few days, returning only if they need to be re-evaluated because they aren’t improving.

‘Best Guess’ Therapy

Another reason doctors say overprescription is a problem is diagnostic uncertainties. Samples taken from patients are cultured on petri dishes in labs—a practice that is time-consuming and not foolproof, Ms. Humphries noted.

“Today we are still very reliant on the tools we used 100 years ago,” she said. “We are always beholden to the amount of time it takes the bacteria to grow in the culture.”

That could be days in some cases, and severe infections necessitate more immediate action. That’s led to empiric therapy—the “best guess” based on data as to which antibiotic will work—which is right oftentimes, Ms. Humphries said. However, premature prescribing is what leads to patients being treated too narrowly or too broadly, and both scenarios can cause antibiotic resistance.

New testing explored in a proof-of-concept study published in 2022 in Nature used machine learning to predict bacterial susceptibilities with surprising accuracy, which Ms. Humphries called “a tantalizing notion.”

However, she said it has no way to factor the myriad of pathways a bacteria can mutate. A predictive model misses how this happens—data that is needed for the machine to keep making predictions. Another risk is if the test is “trained” in one region and then marketed in another, it could miss local bacterial resistance trends—as well as globe-trotting mutations.

What Is the Government Doing?

Beyond better, faster testing, new antibiotics could help—and there’s been legislation introduced for several years aimed at funding them. That’s because most pharmaceutical companies simply are not interested in developing a product that won’t be a money-maker.

According to Pew, drug companies made more than $8 billion in profits on cancer drugs alone between 2014-2016, but incurred a net loss of $100 million on antibiotics during the same period.

“If you think of an antibiotic, you only want to take it once, and if it does its job you never have to take it again,” Ms. Humphries said. “If you compare it to an antidepressant or birth control, which you’re going to be taking for a long period of time, the return on investment is very different.”

Additionally, treatment guidelines call for older antibiotics to be used when possible to preserve effectiveness of new ones. The business of antibiotics is just bad business for drug makers, which is why many support the Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions To End Upsurging Resistance Act, better known as the PASTEUR Act, which was first introduced in 2020 but has stalled in committee and was reintroduced in 2023.

It would provide funding for antibiotic development, which doesn’t look promising according to a World Health Organization report that found only six of the 27 antibiotics in development appear capable of handling antibiotic-resistant infections.

What Can Patients Do?

Because the gut is home to at least 70 percent of the body’s immune cells, it makes sense that nurturing good gut health can be protective against infections.

It’s in our gut microbiome—home to the largest community of bacteria, viruses, and fungi in the human body—where cross talk between microbes forms the intestinal epithelial layer and mucosal immune system that protect the body from pathogenic invasions.

Chronic dysbiosis, an imbalance of microbes that can be created by antibiotics, can cause dysregulated immune responses, inflammation, oxidative stress, and insulin resistance. It puts us at risk for more than just an infection but also other diseases including cancer, according to a 2020 review article in Microorganisms. 

According to the Michigan Antibiotic Resistance Reduction Coalition, you can protect your health by:

• Not pressuring doctors to prescribe an antibiotic unless they feel your infection is caused by bacteria.

• Refusing “just in case” prescriptions and asking for testing.

• Telling your doctor you are concerned about antibiotic resistance and ask:

• Can you prescribe a “narrow spectrum” antibiotic for this infection? A “broad spectrum” antibiotic kills a wider variety of bacteria and can kill good bacteria in your body leading to side effects such as diarrhea or yeast infections.

• Can this infection be treated with fewer doses?

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In a recent study published in the Neurology journal, scientists aimed to investigate whether the use of PPIs was associated with the development of dementia. The study began in 1987–1989 and tracked these individuals over time. Importantly, they only included participants who did not have dementia at a later stage of the study, which occurred between 2011 and 2013.

To determine PPI usage, the researchers relied on visual records and participants' reports of their medication history during phone calls. They also considered the cumulative exposure to PPIs, which took into account the number of years a person had been using these medications before the later stage of the study. Incident dementia cases were identified through various means, such as in-person assessments, phone-based cognitive tests, hospital records, and death certificates.

The study involved 5,712 participants, with an average age of 75 years. After a follow-up period of six years, about 10% of them developed dementia. The analysis revealed that, overall, there was no significant difference in dementia risk between those who used PPIs and those who did not.

However, there was an interesting discovery: individuals who had been using PPIs for more than 4.4 years had a slightly higher risk of dementia (33% higher) compared to those who had not used PPIs. This suggests that long-term use of these medications might warrant closer monitoring and consideration of potential risks.

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"It's so far outside anything we've seen, it's almost mind-blowing," says Walter Meier, who monitors sea-ice with the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

An unstable Antarctica could have far-reaching consequences, polar experts warn.

Antarctica's huge ice expanse regulates the planet's temperature, as the white surface reflects the Sun's energy back into the atmosphere and also cools the water beneath and near it.

Without its ice cooling the planet, Antarctica could transform from Earth's refrigerator to a radiator, experts say.

The ice that floats on the Antarctic Ocean's surface now measures less than 17 million sq km - that is 1.5 million sq km of sea-ice less than the September average, and well below previous winter record lows.

That's an area of missing ice about five times the size of the British Isles.

Dr Meier is not optimistic that the sea-ice will recover to a significant degree.

Scientists are still trying to identify all the factors that led to this year's low sea-ice - but studying trends in Antarctica has historically been challenging.

In a year when several global heat and ocean temperature records have broken, some scientists insist the low sea-ice is the measure to pay attention to.

"We can see how much more vulnerable it is," says Dr Robbie Mallet, of the University of Manitoba, who is based on the Antarctic peninsula.

Already braving isolation, extreme cold and powerful winds, this year's thin sea-ice has made his team's work even more difficult. "There is a risk that it breaks off and drifts out to sea with us on it," Dr Mallet says.

Very thin sea-ice in the foreground - this is a type of sea-ice called "nilas" that forms in very low wind conditions

Sea-ice forms in the continent's winter (March to October) before largely melting in summer, and is part of an interconnected system that also consists of icebergs, land ice and huge ice shelves - floating extensions of land ice jutting out from the coast.

Sea-ice acts as a protective sleeve for the ice covering the land and prevents the ocean from heating up.

Dr Caroline Holmes at the British Antarctic Survey explains that the impacts of shrinking sea-ice may become evident as the season transitions to summer - when there's potential for an unstoppable feedback loop of ice melting.

As more sea-ice disappears, it exposes dark areas of ocean, which absorb sunlight instead of reflecting it, meaning that the heat energy is added into the water, which in turn melts more ice. Scientists call this the ice-albedo effect.

That could add a lot more heat to the planet, disrupting Antarctica's usual role as a regulator of global temperatures.

"Are we awakening this giant of Antarctica?" asks Prof Martin Siegert, a glaciologist at the University of Exeter. It would be "an absolute disaster for the world," he says.

There are signs that what is already happening to Antarctica's ice sheets is in the worst-case scenario range of what was predicted, says Prof Anna Hogg, an Earth scientist at the University of Leeds.

Since the 1990s, the loss of land ice from Antarctica has contributed 7.2mm to sea-level rise.

Even modest increases in sea levels can result in dangerously high storm surges that could wipe out coastal communities. If significant amounts of land ice were to start melting, the impacts would be catastrophic for millions of people around the world.

'We never thought extreme weather events could happen there'

As a self-contained continent surrounded by water, Antarctica has its own weather and climate system. Until 2016 Antarctica's winter sea-ice had actually been growing in size.

• Antarctic ocean currents heading for collapse

• Oceans break heat record, with grim implications for planet

But in March 2022 an extreme heatwave hit East Antarctica, pushing temperatures to -10C when they should have been closer to -50C.

"When I started studying the Antarctic 30 years ago, we never thought extreme weather events could happen there," says Prof Siegert.

Sea-ice has broken record minimums in summer for three of the past seven years, including February 2023.

Some scientists even believe these low ice records may indicate a fundamental change is happening to the continent - a shift in the conditions which have kept the region insulated.

Antarctica's remoteness and shortage of historical information means a lot is still unknown.

The region is still the "Wild West" in scientific terms, according to Dr Robbie Mallet.

Scientists know how far the sea-ice spreads, but not, for instance, how thick it is. Unlocking that puzzle could radically change climate models for the region.

Dr Mallet and his team go out every day to measure the ice and snow in Antarctica

At the scientific base Rothera, Dr Mallet is using radar instruments to study sea-ice thickness for an international research project called Defiant.

He and other scientists are still trying to disentangle the causes of the vanishing winter ice.

"There is a chance that it's a really freak expression of natural variability," he says, meaning that lots of natural factors could have built up and are affecting the region simultaneously.

This year's record-warm oceans are likely a contributing factor, scientists suggest - warm water will not freeze.

And there may have also been changes in ocean currents and the winds that drive temperatures in the Antarctic.

The El Niño weather phenomenon, currently developing in the Pacific, could also be subtly contributing to shrinking sea-ice, although it is still weak.

Dr Mallet says there are "very, very good reasons to be worried".

"It's potentially a really alarming sign of Antarctic climate change that hasn't been there for the last 40 years. And it's only just emerging now."

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