As it rolls from one political crisis to another, it’s hard not to think of Britain as metaphorically crumbling. Now, it seems, significant pieces of the country are literally structurally unsound. More than 150 schools, colleges, and nurseries in England have been ordered to close parts of their buildings due to the looming threat of collapse—just days before the start of the new school year. Twenty-seven health care facilities are being urgently reviewed; seven hospitals need to be rebuilt. The cause of the panic is Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete, whose acronym “RAAC” has suddenly entered the British political vernacular.

RAAC differs from conventional concrete mainly in that it is filled with air bubbles instead of aggregates such as gravel. It’s lighter, easier to build with quickly, and cheaper than other forms of concrete. The air bubbles also provide good thermal insulation, meaning that buildings containing RAAC are easier to heat and cool. It was widely used in postwar Britain all the way up to the 1990s to cast panels for roofs, floors, and walls, and was particularly popular in the public sector, where it was used to rebuild schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure.

But anything cheap and fast comes at a price. RAAC, being less durable than standard concrete, gradually weakens, and the bubbles allow water to seep in. While the steel bars that support the RAAC panels are usually coated with waterproof layers, a lack of maintenance can cause these to corrode, further weakening the panels and causing them to break apart. The lifespan of a RAAC structure is only between 30 and 50 years. That vulnerability has been known about for years. But over the past month, it has taken on the momentum of a present crisis, as it becomes clear just how many important buildings and pieces of infrastructure are well past the end of their shelf life. In addition to schools and hospitals, RAAC issues have been found in theaters, housing blocks, council buildings, and even in London’s two biggest airports, Heathrow and Gatwick. It has created a multimillion-dollar headache for the British government, and further illustrates the cost of underinvestment in public goods and of relying on quick fixes for long-term needs.

“The problem with these panels is not so much the material itself. It’s the fact that they’ve been used well beyond their expiry date,” says Juan Sagaseta, a reader in structural robustness at the University of Surrey. “Unfortunately, spending on new buildings and opening new schools or hospitals is often viewed in our society as more glamorous than spending on maintaining the old ones.”

The issues around RAAC were first investigated in the 1990s by the Building Research Establishment (BRE), an organization initially established as a government agency that now operates as a social enterprise. At the time, the removal of roof panels from some buildings had raised concerns, although there had been no conclusive evidence of immediate safety risks. It wasn’t until 2018 that the Department of Education finally took action, after the ceiling of a primary school in Kent, in Southern England, suddenly collapsed. Fortunately, the incident happened on a Saturday and no one was injured. The school had been rebuilt in 1979 using RAAC after a fire. School authorities were sent questionnaires to try to establish whether or not they had RAAC in their buildings, but, Sagaseta says, they (understandably) often didn’t have the expertise or resources to identify the material. Finally, in the fall of 2022, the Department of Education sent out professional surveyors to classify RAAC constructions as “critical” or “noncritical.”

The sudden decision to close schools this summer was triggered by three cases of RAAC panels that were considered noncritical but later failed. The first incident involved a commercial building, the second a school in a different country, and the third an English school in late August. The 150 or so institutions now known to be at greatest risk represent a tiny fraction of the 22,000 state-owned schools, colleges, and nurseries in England.

But these instances are just the tip of the iceberg. Any building constructed cheaply and quickly in the extensive period after World War II is a cause for concern—including court buildings, prisons, supermarkets, and warehouses. As part of a routine investigation, RAAC was also discovered within the Houses of Parliament, which is already in dire need of major renovation.

Chris Goodier, a professor of construction engineering and materials who has been studying RAAC for several years, says that there are hundreds of thousands of RAAC panels spread across various public and private buildings across the UK, which require immediate assessment. “The great majority will be fine and safe. Those that are not safe should be replaced or strengthened.”

For pupils, students, and their parents, the timing of the school closures just before the new term was incredibly disruptive. Some now have to learn remotely, while others have lessons in temporary rooms. The government has said it “will spend whatever it takes to keep children safe,” but it’s not clear how much that would be. Some estimates have put the cost of fixing the problem in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

But for the Conservative Party, which is well behind in the polls, it’s not just about the crumbling concrete crisis becoming more costly as it spreads to other public sectors. How the party deals with the crisis could also be crucial as the election year draws ever closer. Experts have been clear that this crisis is in many ways the product of decisions made by the government. Since taking power in 2010, the Conservative Party has cut the budgets for public services, including for the maintenance of public buildings, first pursuing “austerity measures” to cut the national debt in the wake of the global financial crisis and then pushing a small-state approach to government.

Alice Moncaster, professor of sustainable construction at the University of the West of England Bristol, says that the root of the RAAC problem isn’t the material’s fundamental design. “It was just one of many postwar innovations to get countries up and running again as cheaply and quickly as possible,” she says. Instead, it was politics that got the UK to this point.

"It is a direct cause of lack of maintenance and replacement of public buildings, many of which are well beyond their design life,” Moncaster says. “And this comes from the ‘small state’ approach that the Conservative Party in the UK have been pushing since 2010.”

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Earth is exceeding its “safe operating space for humanity” in six of nine key measurements of its health, and two of the remaining three are headed in the wrong direction, a new study said.

Earth’s climate, biodiversity, land, freshwater, nutrient pollution and “novel” chemicals (human-made compounds like microplastics and nuclear waste) are all out of whack, a group of international scientists said in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances. Only the acidity of the oceans, the health of the air and the ozone layer are within the boundaries considered safe, and both ocean and air pollution are heading in the wrong direction, the study said.

“We are in very bad shape,” said study co-author Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “We show in this analysis that the planet is losing resilience and the patient is sick.”

In 2009, Rockstrom and other researchers created nine different broad boundary areas and used scientific measurements to judge Earth’s health as a whole. Wednesday’s paper was an update from 2015 and it added a sixth factor to the unsafe category. Water went from barely safe to the out-of-bounds category because of worsening river run-off and better measurements and understanding of the problem, Rockstrom said.

These boundaries “determine the fate of the planet,” said Rockstrom, a climate scientist. The nine factors have been “scientifically well established” by numerous outside studies, he said.

If Earth can manage these nine factors, Earth could be relatively safe. But it’s not, he said.

In most of the cases, the team uses other peer-reviewed science to create measurable thresholds for a safety boundary. For example, they use 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air, instead of the Paris climate agreement’s 1.5 degrees (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times. This year carbon in the air peaked at 424 parts per million.

The nine factors are intermingled. When the team used computer simulations, they found that making one factor worse, like the climate or biodiversity, made other Earth environmental issues degrade, while fixing one helped others. Rockstrom said this was like a simulated stress test for the planet.

The simulations showed “that one of the most powerful means that humanity has at its disposal to combat climate change” is cleaning up its land and saving forests, the study said. Returning forests to late 20th century levels would provide substantial natural sinks to store carbon dioxide instead of the air, where it traps heat, the study said.

Biodiversity – the amount and different types of species of life – is in some of the most troubling shape and it doesn’t get as much attention as other issues, like climate change, Rockstrom said.

“Biodiversity is fundamental to keeping the carbon cycle and the water cycle intact,” Rockstrom said. “The biggest headache we have today is the climate crisis and biodiversity crisis.”

University of Michigan environmental studies dean Jonathan Overpeck, who wasn’t part of the study, called the study “deeply troubling in its implications for the planet and people should be worried.”

“The analysis is balanced in that it clearly sounds a flashing red alarm, but it is not overly alarmist,” Overpeck said. “Importantly, there is hope.”

The fact that ozone layer is the sole improving factor shows that when the world and its leaders decide to recognize and act on a problem, it can be fixed and “for the most part there are things that we know how to do” to improve the remaining problems, said Carnegie Mellon chemistry and environment professor Neil Donahue.

Some biodiversity scientists, such as Duke’s Stuart Pimm, have long disputed Rockstrom’s methods and measurements, saying it makes the results not worth much.

But Carnegie Mellon environmental engineering professor Granger Morgan, who wasn’t part of the study, said, “Experts don’t agree on exactly where the limits are, or how much the planet’s different systems may interact, but we are getting dangerously close.”

“I’ve often said if we don’t quickly cut back on how we are stressing the Earth, we’re toast,” Morgan said in an email. “This paper says it’s more likely that we’re burnt toast.”

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Jayne Biggs founded the charity Heart 2 Heart Norfolk after her daughter Violet survived a cardiac arrest when she was seven, in part, thanks to CPR administered by her parents.

Paramedics shocked Violet with a defibrillator and she came back to life.

One of Jayne's defibrillators outside a children's park in Gorleston
Credit: ITV Anglia

Since then, Ms Biggs has embarked on a charity crusade to make sure people in similar situations have a chance of survival.

After funding and installing over 260 defibrillators, she has now been shortlisted for ITV Anglia's 2023 Regional Fundraiser of the Year Pride of Britain award.

"If the paramedics hadn't shocked Violet, she wouldn't have made it and that is what drove me to put defibrillators out in the community", she said.

"If you suffer a sudden cardiac arrest your chances of survival with no CPR is 5%, with CPR it's 9%, but with CPR, a defibrillator and a shockable rhythm your chances are over 50%."

"I looked around the Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft area and there wasn't one public-access defibrillator five years ago, anywhere. I thought I would see if I could raise a little bit of money to put a couple in and then it snowballed."

Richard Brown was saved by a defibrillator five years ago.
Credit: ITV Anglia

n the last ten years, Ms Biggs has placed defibrillators in public areas across Norfolk and Suffolk.

Richard Brown collapsed outside a sailing club in Gorleston in 2018.

Ms Biggs' efforts meant there was a defibrillator just metres away, which, along with swift action from friends, saved his life.

"If that defib hadn't been there, I would not be here now so I owe my life to Jayne.

"I can't put into words how grateful I am, really. I am happy to be alive."

When a person goes into cardiac arrest, there is a ten minute window in which a defibrillator could give them a chance to survive.

Ms Biggs is planning to install emergency bleed control kits in her community, as part of her next life-saving mission to help others.

She said she was "absolutely astounded" to be nominated for a Pride of Britain award.

"I couldn't believe it," she added. "I do it just because if this defibrillator can save somebody's life, giving somebody that chance, that is all that counts."

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A new study suggested that people who spend too much time seated are at a higher risk of developing dementia as researchers raised concerns as US citizens are sedentary 9.5 hours a day.

According to the research published in the journal JAMA, it took into account people who are aged 60 and older and spend much of their time — over 10 hours — sitting watching television etc. may be fueling the risk of this brain disease.

Scientists analysed data using a machine-learning algorithm from 50,000 adults of age 60. These individuals did not have dementia when the study started.

With the help of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, scientists were able to determine sedentary activities.

After a follow-up of an average of six years, scientists found that — by looking at the medical records — 414 participants had the neurological condition.

After making different adjustments, they discovered that sedentary behaviour was associated with an increased risk of dementia.

However, they also noted that certain amounts of sedentary behaviour were not linked with dementia.

The study author Gene Alexander from the University of Arizona said: "We were surprised to find that the risk of dementia begins to rapidly increase after 10 hours spent sedentary each day, regardless of how the sedentary time was accumulated."

Dr Alexander added: "This suggests that it is the total time spent sedentary that drove the relationship between sedentary behaviour and dementia risk, but importantly lower levels of sedentary behaviour, up to around 10 hours, were not associated with increased risk."

For further understanding of the link and prevention, experts have called for more research on the topic to ascertain whether physical activity would be helpful in mitigating the risk of the disease.

The findings, according to scientists, "should provide some reassurance to those of us with office jobs that involve prolonged periods of sitting, as long as we limit our total daily time spent sedentary."

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"This is a gratifying result since reflux disease is a very common condition and most patients are found to have a completely normal mucus membrane on gastroscopic examination," says the study's first author Dag Holmberg, researcher at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, Karolinska Institutet and resident doctor of surgery at Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden.

In reflux disease, acidic stomach contents leak into the esophagus. This can sometimes cause inflammation in the esophageal mucus membrane (esophagitis), which is diagnosed via gastroscopy. It is common knowledge that reflux disease increases the risk of esophageal cancer, but what the cancer risk is for patients with normal mucosa has remained unknown.

The symptoms of reflux disease can come and go but generally persist, which means that many patients frequently seek medical attention and often undergo repeated gastroscopies to detect mucosal lesions or prodromal cancer.

"Our study suggests that these repeated gastroscopies are probably unnecessary for people with reflux disease who have a normal esophageal mucosa," says Dr. Holmberg. "These findings should be reassuring for this large patient group and can guide GPs who often treat them."

The present study is based on national health data registries in Sweden, Denmark and Finland, and included over 285,000 individuals with reflux disease and no gastroscopic evidence of esophagitis. The patients were followed for up to 31 years and the researchers registered all cases of esophageal cancer.

The cancer risk was then compared with that for individuals from the general population matched by age and sex and at the same period in the three countries. No increased risk of esophageal cancer was observed in patients with reflux disease and a normal mucus membrane.

By way of comparison, the researchers also analyzed the cancer risk in over 200,000 individuals with reflux disease and esophagitis. These people were at a clearly increased relative risk of developing esophageal cancer.

"We now intend to examine what factors other than esophagitis can be linked to tumor growth in people with reflux disease," says the study's last author Jesper Lagergren, professor of surgery at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, Karolinska Institutet, and consultant surgeon at Karolinska University Hospital.

The study was a collaboration between researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and the universities of Helsinki and Oulu in Finland.

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Eleven days before Christmas last year, a micrometeoroid struck a Soyuz spacecraft docked to the International Space Station. This ruptured the vehicle's cooling system, creating a dramatic spray of coolant for hours into space before there was none left.

 

Prior to this accidental strike, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio had been planning to come home by around spring break of 2023 to see his wife, Deborah, and four children. For his debut spaceflight, six months in space was enough for the former helicopter pilot and flight surgeon.

 

But eventually Russian and US engineers determined that the Soyuz spacecraft that he and two Russian crewmates—cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin—had flown to the space station may not be safe for the return journey home. The crew compartment was likely to overheat. So that damaged vehicle was flown home without anyone on board, and a replacement Soyuz flew autonomously to the station.

An unexpected challenge

That vehicle, Soyuz MS-23, was to have carried three crew members to the station. But since it was empty, it fell to Rubio and the two Russians to complete the mission that the original occupants of Soyuz MS-23 were to have fulfilled. Accordingly, Rubio was told he would have to fly not one, but two six-month increments.

 

"It was unexpected," Rubio said Wednesday, aboard the space station. "In some ways it's been an incredible challenge."

 

Because of the Soyuz leak, Rubio has now become the NASA astronaut with the longest continuous period of time in space. Last Monday, he broke the 355-day record set by Mark Vande Hei in 2021 and 2022, and when he lands later this month, Rubio will have spent 371 days in space.

 

During a video call with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, Rubio said he had missed some important moments over the summer of 2023, including a college graduation and a son heading off to West Point. However, he said he has enjoyed the extra time in space.

Rubio and his Russian colleagues have been in space for so long that they will have lived and worked alongside 28 colleagues from various nations, including Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Five different Crew Dragon missions have visited the space station during Rubio's tenure—Crew 4, Crew 5, Crew 6, and Crew 7, as well as the private Axiom 2 mission.

 

"Just having that diversity up here was such a unique feeling," Rubio said.

Keeping his body healthy

A flight surgeon who earned a doctorate of medicine from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Rubio said he worked hard to maintain his physical fitness in space. His exercise routine consists of about 75 minutes each day on a resistance machine, which mimics weightlifting activities, to maintain his bone density. Additionally, he spends 30 to 45 minutes a day on a stationary bike or treadmill for cardiovascular activity.

 

Rubio knows the toil that spending so long in microgravity can take on human bones, muscle strength, and other parts of the human body that evolved over hundreds of millions of years to live in Earth's gravity. "As a doctor, I'm really excited to see how my body does when I return," Rubio said.

 

Before the call, Nelson praised Rubio for willingly undertaking the year-long mission.

 

"Working and living on the International Space Station is the opportunity of a lifetime, but there is no doubt that it also requires sacrifice, especially time away from friends and family," Nelson told Ars. "Frank handled the unexpected delay in his return with grace and professionalism. We are grateful for the great science he has carried out on his record-breaking stay and can’t wait to welcome him home in a couple of weeks."

 

NASA says that data from missions like that flown by Rubio will assist the space agency as it plans for long-duration missions beyond low-Earth orbit. Perhaps Rubio, 47, who joined NASA in 2017, will be among the astronauts flying one of them.

 

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Turmeric, the orange-colored, natural spice is commonly used by cooks for seasoning rice or bean dishes, soups, stews, sauces and even making cakes.

It has been claimed to improve health in a variety of ways including managing metabolic syndrome, inflammatory conditions, joint pain, arthritis, high levels of bad fats in the blood, and other disorders due to its bioactive compound curcumin.

Now, researchers in Thailand say it can be as effective as omeprazole – a drug used to reduce excess stomach acid – for treating indigestion symptoms.

They have just published the first study of its kind in the journal BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine under the title “Curcumin and proton pump inhibitors for functional dyspepsia: A randomized, double-blind controlled trial.”

Dyspepsia is a common disorder, for which patients usually try behavioral and diet modifications and over-the-counter drugs before seeing a physician, who will probably prescribe omeprazole. This drug is a proton pump inhibitor (PPI) used to treat functional dyspepsia, the symptoms of which include feeling excessively full after food (postprandial fullness), feeling full after only a little food (early satiety), and pain and/or burning sensation in the stomach and/or food pipe (epigastric pain).

Close-Up Shot of Turmeric Powder (credit: PEXELS)

Turmeric as medicine 

However long-term use of PPIs has been linked to an increased risk of bone fractures, inadequate micronutrients, and a heightened risk of infections.

Seventeen Thai researchers participated, but Prof. Krit Pongpirul at the Center of Excellence in Preventive and Integrative Medicine and at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Medicine was the corresponding author.

Turmeric is derived from the root of the Curcuma longa plant. It hasn’t been clear how well it compares with conventional drugs for indigestion, largely because there have been no head-to-head studies.

The researchers randomly assigned 206 patients aged 18 to 70 with recurrent upset stomach (functional dyspepsia) of unknown cause, recruited from hospitals in Thailand between 2019 and 2021, to one of three treatment groups for a period of 28 days. These were: turmeric (two large 250 mg. capsules of curcumin four times a day) and one small placebo capsule (69 patients); omeprazole (one small, 20 mg. capsule daily, and two large placebo capsules four times a day (68 patients); and turmeric plus omeprazole (69 patients). Patients in all three groups had similar clinical characteristics and indigestion scores and were reassessed after 28 days and then again after 56 days.

Their scores indicated significant reductions in the severity of symptoms by the 28th day for pain and other symptoms for those in the combined curcumin-alone, and omeprazole-alone groups. These improvements were even stronger after 56 days for pain and other symptoms. No serious side effects were reported, although liver function tests indicated some level of deterioration among curcumin users who were overweight. Although larger, long-term studies are needed, the researchers concluded that their multicenter, randomized, controlled trial provides highly reliable evidence for the treatment of functional dyspepsia, adding that “the new findings from our study may justify considering curcumin in clinical practice.

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Currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, the BRI, which aims to better connect the world and expand common prosperity, has brought the healing powers of TCM to more countries and regions, bridging different cultures and promoting international cooperation.

In Budapest, the Qihuang Traditional Chinese Medicine Center of Hungary (Qihuang Center) provides a beacon of hope for patients seeking relief from various health issues. One such patient is Jozsef Frenyo, a 78-year-old retired teacher who suffers from hearing impairment due to an inflammation of the middle ear five years ago. Since then, he had to use a hearing aid -- until he visited the Qihuang Center two months ago when a "miracle" unfolded.

"I am very grateful to the doctors at the center," Jozsef said. "They have given me my hearing back, and I am now able to communicate with others normally."

After receiving more than 10 acupuncture treatments from TCM expert Zhang Haifang, from northwest China's Gansu Province, Jozsef's hearing improved remarkably. He no longer needs the hearing aid.

"The Hungarian doctors had told me that due to my age, they couldn't do anything to help me," Jozsef said. However, the alternative Chinese method was highly effective.

The center has also helped Jozsef's son, Csaba Frenyo, who has been struggling with obesity-related health issues. A combination of acupuncture and herbal medicine treatments helped him slash nine kilograms within a month, alleviating his back and knee pains.

The holistic approach of TCM "cured the cause, not just the symptom," said Jozsef.

Qihuang Center was jointly established in 2016 by the Hungarian Oriental Herbs Group and the Gansu Provincial Health Commission. In September 2022, the center was given "Value and Quality Award," a state prize authorized by the Hungarian Parliament and the Hungarian Prime Minister's Office.

"The center is popular in Hungary," said Zhang, who has treated several hundred Hungarian patients since she came to the center in January.

With more TCM doctors like Zhang going abroad to practice, the benefits of the ancient Chinese medical system are better known to people around the world.

Gansu Province has taken the lead in spreading TCM wisdom in the Belt and Road cooperation. Under the province's initiative, 16 overseas TMC centers have been established in 12 countries, including Hungary, Belarus and Thailand.

When the COVID-19 pandemic shook the world, TCM became an invaluable method in the fight against the virus.

Qihuang Center in Hungary adapted rapidly to the circumstances of the pandemic, moving its consultations online and providing contactless medicine delivery.

The center's president Chen Zhen said that TCM was more accepted by Hungarians after they had seen it playing an important role in fighting the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Hungarian sinologist Majer Zsuzsanna said that TCM can also play an important role in alleviating pain and combating post-COVID symptoms, which are often hard to treat with traditional Western medicines.

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The most significant tech antitrust trial of the 21st century thus far kicked off in US federal court Tuesday with the Department of Justice and 14 co-plaintiff states squaring off against the search engine giant. The DOJ accuses Google of unlawfully monopolizing the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising in the via anticompetitive and exclusionary practices.

During opening arguments, Kenneth Dintzer, deputy director in the DOJ's civil division, said, "This case is about the future of the internet, whether the Google search engine will ever face meaningful competition to protect that future." At the heart of the government's case is Google's use of contracts to maintain what Dintzer contends is a "default status" market share that tops 89% in the search engine market and 74% in the search ads business.

"Monopoly maintenance starts with default settings that we find when we open the apps and download the browsers," Dintzer said. "With these defaults, Google controls search distribution and gets more searches than its rivals. It is uncontested that Google gets sixteen times the fresh data than its nearest rival, Bing."

Insurmountable feedback loop for rivals

The DOJ says that with its massive lead in fresh data, Google can provide users with more accurate results and, in turn, attract more users and advertising revenue, creating an insurmountable feedback loop for its rivals. "With this data, Google's mobile search and ad products are better than its rivals can hope to be," giving Google more money to pay for more default contracts with device makers and apps rather than investing in products, Dintzer argued

Google's dominance not only forecloses competitors but also reduces innovation, Dintzer said, affecting the quality of results and allowing Google to neglect issues important to users, such as privacy. "Privacy is enormously important to some people. Without competition, Google refuses to offer credible protection." Dintzer said the government will provide "direct evidence that Google refuses to offer more privacy because they're not facing credible competition."

On the advertising side, Dintzer said the government will prove that Google contracts have denied the distribution of potential rivals, affecting every phone and computer in the country, expressly targeting a potential entrant called Branch Metrics, and limiting Apple's ability to innovate. When asked by Judge Amit Mehta how far back Google's monopolization extends, Dintzer said that the DOJ's case addresses the company's business since 2010 when, even then, the company had a market share above 70%.

Mehta is overseeing the case in a bench trial, in which there is no jury and the judge acts as fact-finder as well as arbiter of the law.

Google's lock on the advertising market

On behalf of the state of Colorado representing all the state plaintiffs, attorney William F. Cavanaugh, Jr. of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, argued that Google exercises substantial market power in three relevant markets: general search services, general search text advertising, and general search advertising.

In their pretrial brief, the state plaintiffs argued that Google's anticompetitive actions stem from the company's default distribution agreements with Android devices, Apple, and browsers. They also pointed to Google's operation of SA360, or Search Ads 360 — a platform that makes it easier for advertisers and marketers to manage campaigns across multiple engines and markets — arguing that SA360 harms advertisers by failing to implement valuable Microsoft Ads features.

The states say Google's default distribution agreements leave rivals weaker and disadvantaged, making it harder for them to mount competition against Google. They note that SA360 excludes Microsoft's Ad features. "Through SA360, a neutral search engine supposedly, Google has put advertisers in [Microsoft-owned] Bing at a disadvantage," Cavanaugh said during opening arguments.

The disadvantage particularly, the states argue, extends to advertisers who focus on niche audiences or specialized service providers (SVPS), who are among the largest purchasers of Google Ads. SVPs stick with Google because they do not see rival search engines as meaningful alternatives.

The states raise another anticompetitive drawback to Google's advertising practices: the company's failure to incorporate auction pricing, which its main rival, Bing, does. The failure to embrace auction pricing proves that Google is a monopolist insulated from competitive pressures. "I have no doubt that during this trial, we will have an October surprise" in the form of Google auction bidding, Cavanaugh said.

Google: We win through innovation

Google, represented during opening arguments by John E. Schmidtlein of Williams & Connolly, argued that the company's opponents use a too-narrow definition of the relevant markets to calculate Google's market share. By comparing including Google in a mix that includes only generalized search engines such as Bing, Yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo, the plaintiffs ignore "specialized vertical providers (SVPs) such as Amazon, Yelp, and Expedia, as well as other popular places users go to search for information such as TikTok and Instagram."

More importantly, most PC users prefer Google because it is innovative, contrary to the plaintiffs' arguments. "Browser and carriers and Android device makers prefer Google," Schmidtlein said. "Google competed on the merits to win pre-installation and default status." To the contrary, Google's rivals have failed to innovate, he argued. "Microsoft's Bing search engine has failed to win customers because Microsoft did not prioritize innovation."

To underscore his point, Schmidtlein said, "Bing is the only search engine preinstalled on Microsoft Windows PC," yet most Microsoft users still prefer Google. "Google is no gatekeeper, and the truth is neither is Microsoft."

Regarding the anticompetitive advantages that Google holds due to its sheer scale, Google doesn't deny that its vast trove of data fuel improved search quality but says the government's argument doesn't hold water. "Google will show that there are diminishing returns to scale, that Microsoft has sufficient scale to compete, and that there are many aspects of search that can be improved without additional scale," the company said in its pretrial brief.

When asked by Mehta whether device makers, such as Apple, have any choice but to choose Google as their default search engine, Schmidtlein responded, "Why would we second-guess Apple's product decision? They are making a product that consumers want and prefer." Schmidtlein also said that Google will be calling as witnesses Eddie Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, and John Giannandrea, Apple's Senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, who will confirm they chose Google on the merits[.]

The prosecution starts its case

After opening arguments, the DOJ began prosecuting the case by calling Hal Ronald Varian, chief economist of Google. The DOJ's Dintzer probed Varian on some statements he made that seemingly bolster the government's argument that Google is all too aware of its commanding market share (including, as DOJ notes in its pretrial brief, advising Penny Chu, senior director of Google's Ads Marketing Analytics team, to "make sure that we are consistent in calling this 'query share' rather than market share.'")

Dintzer also pressed Varian on data he included in presentations based on a paper he wrote. However, Varian effectively evaded giving Dintzer complete answers to his questions and frequently paused before responding or asking for further clarifications on what the questions meant.

The trial is expected to last 10 weeks. Even if Google wins, it still faces another, potentially more serious and certainly far more complex antitrust trial next year. In January 2023, the DOJ, with the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia, filed a civil antitrust suit against Google for monopolizing multiple digital advertising technology products.

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A "slow" or "sluggish" metabolism is often the first thing we blame when we struggle to lose weight.

As a result, a US$33 billion industry offers thousands of products promising to speed up our metabolic rate for weight-loss success.

But rather than reaching for a supplement, there are things you can do to speed your metabolism up.

What is metabolism and how does it work?

Metabolism is the term describing all the chemical reactions in our bodies that keep us alive. It provides the energy needed for essential functions like breathing and digestion.

When we refer to metabolism in the context of our weight, we're actually describing our basal metabolic rate—the number of calories the body burns at rest, determined by how much muscle and fat we have.

Many factors can affect your metabolism, including gender, age, weight and lifestyle. It naturally slows down as we age and becomes dysfunctional after dieting.

Why does our metabolism slow with age?

As our bodies age, they stop working as efficiently as before. Around the age of 40, our muscle mass starts naturally declining, and the ratio of body fat to muscle increases.

Because muscle mass helps determine the body's metabolic rate, this decrease in muscle means our bodies start to burn fewer calories at rest, decreasing our metabolic rate.

Why does our metabolism become dysfunctional after dieting?

When you lose large amounts of weight, you're likely to have lowered your metabolic rate, and it doesn't recover to the level it was pre-dieting—even if you regain weight.

This is because, typically, when we diet to lose weight, we lose both fat and muscle, and the decrease in our calorie-burning muscle mass slows our metabolism.

We can account for the expected decrease in metabolic rate from the decrease in body mass, but even after we regain lost weight our metabolism doesn't recover.

Research shows that for every diet you attempt, the rate at which you burn food slows by a further 15% that can't be accounted for.

Three ways to speed up our metabolism (and one thing to avoid)

1. Pay attention to what you eat

Consider the types of food you eat because your diet will influence the amount of energy your body expends to digest, absorb and metabolize food.

This process is called diet-induced thermogenesis, or the thermic effect of food, and it equates to about 10% of our daily energy expenditure.

Research shows the thermic effect of food is highest for protein-rich foods because our bodies need to use more energy to break down and digest proteins. Eating protein-rich foods will increase your metabolic rate by about 15% (compared to the average of 10% from all foods). In contrast, carbs will increase it 10% and fats by less than 5%.

But this doesn't mean you should switch to a protein-only diet to boost your metabolism. Rather, meals should include vegetables and a source of protein, balanced with wholegrain carbs and good fats to support optimum health, disease prevention and weight loss.

2. Get moving

Regular physical activity will boost muscle mass and speed up your metabolism. Increasing your muscle mass raises your basal metabolic rate, meaning you'll burn more calories at rest.

You can achieve this by incorporating 30 minutes of physical activity into your daily routine, supplemented with two days of gym or strength work each week.

It's also important to mix things up, as following the same routine every day can quickly lead to boredom and exercise avoidance.

Neglecting exercise will just as quickly result in a decline in muscle mass, and your lost muscle will slow your metabolism and hamper your efforts to lose weight.

3. Get enough sleep

A growing body of research confirms sleep deprivation can significantly impact your metabolism.

A lack of sleep disturbs the body's energy balance. This causes our appetite hormones to increase feelings of hunger and trigger food cravings, while altering our sugar metabolism and decreasing our energy expenditure.

If you want to boost your metabolism, set yourself a goal of getting seven hours of uninterrupted sleep each night.

A simple way to achieve this is to avoid screens for at least one hour before bed. Screens are a big sleep disruptor because they suppress melatonin production in the brain, telling us it's daytime instead of nighttime.

4. Don't waste your money on diet pills and supplements

Thousands of products promise to activate your metabolism and speed up your weight loss. While some may have ingredients that will boost your metabolism immediately after you take them, such as caffeine and capsaicin (the component which gives chilies their heat), research confirms the effect is temporary—they don't support long-term weight loss.

Most products promising to help you speed up your metabolism to help you lose weight don't offer any scientific evidence to back their efficacy. Two extensive reviews published recently examined around 120 studies of weight-loss supplements and found they just don't work, despite the bold marketing claims.

So leave the pills, potions and powders on the shelf and focus on the things that work. Your metabolism—and your hip pocket—will thank you.

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More than 10,000 people are dead or missing in eastern Libya after a devastating storm and flooding destroyed dams and caused hundreds of buildings to collapse, sparking widespread anger over the lack of flood warnings in a country torn between rival governments.

More than 1,000 bodies have been recovered so far, but local officials estimated that more than 5,000 people were killed and several thousand more are missing.

A quarter of the city of Derna, with a population of about 100,000, was wiped out by a massive flood after two dams burst, they said. Buildings and coastal highways were swept away into the Mediterranean.

The flash floods were caused by Storm Daniel, a powerful, slow-moving storm system that dumped a record-breaking amount of rain on central Greece last week, killing 15 people, before moving southward to Libya, where torrential rains hit Benghazi and other towns and cities this week.

Winds climbed to 70 to 80 kilometres an hour, causing electricity towers to topple.

The daily rainfall in some Libyan cities reached an unprecedented 414 millimetres, with some experts estimating that 1,000 millimetres may have fallen in other areas.

Videos showed vast destruction in Derna, with tall buildings gutted or badly damaged, cars flipped over and streets filled with mud. Bodies covered in blankets were lined up along city streets outside hospitals.

Families and entire neighbourhoods were swept out to sea after the dams burst with an explosive roar in the pre-dawn hours of Monday morning while many were sleeping.

The damage extended along Libya’s north coast. “Entire villages have been overwhelmed by the floods and the death toll continues to rise,” Dax Bennet Roque, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s country director for Libya, said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Tens of thousands of people are displaced with no prospect of going back home,” he said. “Hospitals and shelters will be overstretched.”

General view of flood water covering the area as a powerful storm and heavy rainfall hit Al-Mukhaili, Libya September 11, 2023, in this handout picture. Libya Al-Hadath/Handout via REUTERS THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY
LIBYA AL-HADATH/REUTERS

Rescue crews work in Derna on Sept. 12. Derna appears to be the city worst affected by the floods. Planet Labs satellite photos of the city from before the disaster on Sept. 7, and after on Sept. 12, illustrate the scale of the destruction.
LIBYAN RED CRESCENT AJDABIYA VIA REUTERS; PLANET LABS PBC/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Severe flooding has struck across the world in recent weeks, causing damage in Hong Kong, Brazil, Las Vegas and elsewhere.

“The disasters continue the series of extreme events which have caused loss of livelihoods and lives in many countries around the world,” the World Meteorological Organization said in a report on Tuesday.

Libyan authorities had issued an official warning that Storm Daniel was heading toward the country, but many Libyans said they were not told of the risk of dams bursting in Derna, a coastal city with a river valley running through it.

Libya’s internationally recognized government in Tripoli has no power over eastern Libya, where a rival administration is in place, based in Benghazi and controlled by the Russian-backed militia commander Khalifa Haftar. The divided authority delayed the flood warnings and the rescue efforts, many analysts have said.

Years of wars and military clashes across Libya have left cities vulnerable because much of the country’s infrastructure – including some dams – was not properly maintained.

“Recovery and relief efforts will be hamstrung by competition between Libya’s two governments,” the research group Oxford Economics said in a report on Tuesday. “The Benghazi government has no money, and the one in Tripoli will try to capitalize on the disaster.”

Eastern Libya was largely unprepared for the disaster. “Although the storm was forecasted to arrive in Libya after it hit Greece, local and national authorities implemented almost no pre-storm measures or pre-evacuation plans,” Malak Altaeb, a scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, said in a commentary on Monday.

A Libyan Red Crescent team works to open roads in eastern Libya.
LIBYAN RED CRESCENT/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

“Rising sea levels, unpredictable weather patterns, and intense storms threaten lives, property, and critical infrastructure along these coastlines.

And Daniel revealed the particular lack of readiness of countries in North Africa, which have no prepared adaptation and mitigation plans to deal with extreme weather events.”

There are fears that Derna could be at risk of another flood disaster if there is any further rainfall in the near future, since the city is no longer protected by the two dams.

Many Libyans complained that rescue teams were slow to arrive in the flood-hit region in the first 24 hours after the destruction. But this was part of a broader neglect of the country.

“Humanitarian aid groups in Libya have been chronically underfunded,” the Norwegian Refugee Council said.

“Communities across Libya have endured years of conflict, poverty and displacement … Aid to Libya has shrunk over the years, with only a quarter of the needed funding for the humanitarian response met.”

By Tuesday, emergency aid was finally arriving in Libya from several countries, including Egypt, Turkey, Italy and Algeria. Other countries were preparing to send aid. Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said Canada “stands ready to support” the relief operations.

Boxes of supplies are loaded onto Egyptian military planes at an air base in Cairo on Sept. 12.
EGYPTIAN DEFENCE MINISTRY/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS

U.S. President Joe Biden said his administration is “sending emergency funds to relief organizations and co-ordinating with the Libyan authorities and the UN to provide additional support.”

Damage to roads and communications systems is likely to hamper the relief operations. United Nations agencies were distributing aid, with the World Food Program providing food baskets to people in 16 locations in eastern Libya. “The situation is heartbreaking,” Cindy McCain, executive director of the WFP, said in a social media post.

Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization, said the flooding and heavy rainfall was of “epic proportions” and had affected up to 1.8 million people in Libya. Some hospitals were destroyed, she said.

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Eat almost anything. Sleep almost anywhere. These, it seems, are the secrets to surviving in the city as a wild animal. Among the species that dominate urban spaces—pigeons, cockroaches, rats, foxes—these are the most obvious characteristics successful city dwellers have.

But they aren’t the only tactics for urban survival. A new study has uncovered four very different sets of traits that animals use to prosper in the city. “There isn’t one-size-fits-all for how different species or different taxa respond to urbanization,” says Amy Hahs of the Green Infrastructure Research Group at the University of Melbourne, who led the research. Understanding how different types of animals adapt to the city in different ways, and what drives these changes, could help us improve urban biodiversity, and with it the overall health of our urban environment.

Biodiversity studies in cities tend to focus on which species dominate, not how they manage to do so. So the study’s research team set out to change this. Specifically, their ambition was to answer two questions: Is eating anything and sleeping anywhere the only way to succeed as an animal urbanite? And how does this vary across the globe?

The researchers looked at four animal characteristics—diet, body size, mobility, and reproductive strategy—that can vary according to what a city has to offer and how flexible a species can be. By reaching out to experts who had previously published research on the traits of urban animals, and drawing together these researchers’ data sets, the team then built a bespoke mega-database to compare these four characteristics across more than 5,000 species found in nearly 400 cities around the world. The team was able to gather data for six groups of animals: amphibians, bats, bees, birds, carabid beetles, and reptiles.

Unsurprisingly, they found flexibility is useful—the ability to move throughout large areas, eating a broad diet and keeping an open mind about nesting and resting places. They labeled animals in this group “mobile generalists,” with urban bats and carabid beetles tending to profit from adopting these traits. But it wasn’t the only strategy for success they found.

In contrast, urban birds and bees often succeed by becoming “central place foragers.” These creatures have a fixed place to nest and rest, but they compensate for this site fidelity by broadening their diets. The next time you see a pigeon pecking at a scrap of food waste on a downtown street, you’ll be witnessing this in action.

Reptiles and amphibians adopt a different strategy again: Faced with scarcer food, higher vulnerability to predators, road accidents, and pollution, they respond to urbanization by specializing their diets, moving around smaller areas, and reducing the size of their clutches. It makes sense: If the shelves are stacked with fewer but constant varieties of food, eating only one of them reduces competition with other species, while having fewer offspring means enough food for them all to grow well and be fitter. Known as “site specialists,” these species run the risk of ending up trapped. Because they don’t move around, if their food or habitat disappears, so do they.

The team also hypothesized that there could be a fourth category: “mobile specialists”—animals that eat a very specific diet, and are able to easily travel to wherever they need to get it. They’d seen such animals in other locations, for instance waterbirds living on wetlands, but didn’t encounter any in their urban study.

Overall, the research looked at data from 72,086 plots in 379 cities in 48 countries, covering 5,302 species. Working at this global scale was important, for two reasons. First, studies about animals and urbanization usually only look at the evolution of one particular species, mostly plants or birds, in one specific location, and this doesn’t allow for comparisons across multiple groups of animals in multiple locations. Yet, Hahs explains, “biodiversity is diverse, and what has been observed in one context may not necessarily translate to another.” To make reliable assessments of how animals behave, the team needed to include multiple groups of animals that might adapt to metropolitan life in different ways. This required working with experts on many species.

Secondly, research on urban biodiversity has traditionally focused on cities from the global north and Australia. Yet cities in the global south are also critical biodiversity hot spots, and they are expected to expand significantly in the coming decades. As much as 90 percent of the increase in urban populations between now and 2050 will take place in Asia and Africa, amounting to billions of additional people living in urban areas in these regions. Such a large amount of urban expansion could mean key habitat and species losses; a better understanding of urban biodiversity in these places will be needed if losses like these are to be stopped. Knowledge from papers like this could help.

“Organisms live or die based on environmental conditions like habitat availability, food, lethal threats,” says Loren Byrne, a professor of biology and environmental science at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, who was not involved in the research. “This paper provides some fascinating new perspectives about how to think about this filtering process.”

If you look at the traits animals are adopting to survive in urban environments, you can see how cities could be modified to become more habitable to a wider variety of species. For example, to encourage a wider variety of birds and bees, you could increase the number of potential nesting sites. And to help reptiles and amphibians avoid ecological traps, city planners could introduce more connections between waterways to allow them to move around wider areas. But more research is needed to see what specific changes certain species would need to thrive. “This research does not provide the specific information about species that is actually needed for implementing good conservation plans,” says Byrne. “So there’s more work to be done in that regard.”

Would this work be worth it? Does having a richer, more diverse array of wildlife in cities, as opposed to fewer, more dominant species, really make a difference? The answer, according to ecologists WIRED spoke to who weren’t involved in the research, is a resounding yes. “Wildlife can help mitigate against the impact of climate change in cities,” says Nathalie Pettorelli of the Zoological Society of London. Greater biodiversity provides knock-on benefits, what are known as “ecosystem services.”

“Macroinvertebrates that live in the soil keep the soil alive and well,” says Pedro Pinho from the Centre for Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Changes at the University of Lisbon. And healthy soil is really important in cities, Pinho adds, because it can absorb a lot of water. This can help to avoid flash flooding during heavy rains and protect against drought. A more vibrant urban ecosystem also helps plant life thrive and suck more CO2 down from the air. “We can get more carbon stored in soils when the insects and their predators are present than when they’re absent,” says Oswald Schmitz, a professor of population and community ecology at the Yale School of the Environment.

Having more animal life in cities can also protect human health. One effect of climate change is that it can increase the spread of where disease-carrying insects, such as mosquitoes, can thrive, raising their populations in cities. A more diverse set of predators can keep these insects in check. “Those can be animal species, like birds or bats,” says Pinho.

“We can’t forget that a lot of organisms in the city are fun to watch, like birds and butterflies,” says Byrne. “People derive educational value, psychological and spiritual value from living alongside other organisms.” An important fact, given that more than two-thirds of the world’s population is projected to live in cities by 2050.

Falling biodiversity is a global problem, and cities are already responding to the UN’s call to “be part of the solution” by investing in green infrastructure—parks, green belts, urban forests. London has invested almost £30 million ($37 million) since 2016, and New York a huge $3.5 billion on its waterways since 2012. In 2021, 31 mayors from cities around the world pledged to cover up to 40 percent of their urban areas with green or blue infrastructure. Armed with knowledge from research like this, these sorts of investments can become better and better at improving urban biodiversity in the future—and make city wildlife about much more than pigeons, rats, and foxes.

“Fundamentally, biodiversity underpins our world, and the sustainability and resilience of our systems,” says Hahs. “If we want to have sustainable and resilient urban areas, we need biodiversity.”

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MELiSSA is born

MELiSSA stands for Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative. Unlike its BIOS and CELSS predecessors, MELiSSA relies primarily on bacteria strains, not plants. The biological component was no longer a black box. Bacteria were to be cultivated in thoroughly engineered bioreactors under tightly controlled conditions. The functioning of those bioreactors was based on elaborate mathematical models and controlled by algorithms. 

 

The entire system was also dynamic. The crew could control its operation through a digital interface and assign priorities to different functions at will. Want to stabilize the atmosphere or change its composition? Just push a button. Want to make more food? Push another button. But this automation had its price. MELiSSA didn’t need years’ worth of funding. It needed decades. 

 

The European Space Agency greenlit it anyway. The project quickly grew into a gargantuan effort backed by 14 countries and over 50 institutes, universities, and companies.

 

“Several science groups started to gather around this concept providing the required know-how in biology and engineering. We all agreed that we needed to rely on a fundamental knowledge of how our organisms function, how their metabolism work, how they uptake nutrients, how they react to different lighting conditions or changes in the atmosphere composition, etc,” said Francesc Gòdia Casablancas, head of the MELiSSA Pilot Plant, a functional demonstrator of the MELiSSA located at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. “The goal was developing what we call the Melissa Loop,” says Gòdia. 

Dealing with waste

The first compartment in the Melissa Loop is a cylindrical bioreactor kept at constant 55º C that hosts bacterial cultures very similar to the ones found in a healthy human gut. It recycles waste generated by the crew, like human feces, urine, toilet paper, inedible parts of plants, biodegradable polymers—all kinds of ugly stuff a crew of astronauts would produce every day. It is constantly monitored by sensors and controlled by software that can adjust everything from temperature to pH. 

 

Finally, there is a filtration stage where any unprocessed solids are separated from the liquid, which contains minerals, ammonium, volatile fatty acids, and carbon dioxide. Another filtration system makes sure that no bacteria escape the bioreactor. 

 

The liquid is fed to the second compartment, an illuminated photobioreactor working with cultures of Rhodospirillum rubrum, a pink-colored bacteria that can either engage in photosynthesis or feed on fatty acids. The intensity of lighting is controlled automatically and used to regulate the growth of the bacteria. The main products of the second compartment are water-containing minerals and ammonium and biomass that could potentially be used as protein source. Rats fed with it for a couple of weeks during a food acceptability study turned out fine, so there’s that. 

Turning waste into air and food

The solution of minerals and ammonium flows to the third compartment, where two cultures of bacteria—Nitrosomonas europea and Nitrobacter winogradsky—await. First, the N. europea oxidize the ammonia into nitrite. Next, N. winogradsky oxidize nitrite into nitrate, which is a crucial nutrient for all living organisms. Together, the two stages form an important step (called nitrification) in the nitrogen cycle that operates on Earth. Since it’s an aerobic processes, the oxygen required is fed back to it from the next two compartments (4a and 4b in the diagram below), which are, in turn, fed nitrate-rich outflow.

“The purpose of 4a and 4b compartments is producing oxygen and a majority of biomass that is used as food,” explained Gòdia. 4a relies on cultures of Limnospira indica, cyanobacteria known as Spirulina, which produce oxygen and food. The choice of Spirulina was no accident; used as a diet supplement, it prevents bone loss, which is one of the most serious hazards in space travel. 

 

The 4b compartment is a hydroponic plant chamber. Carbon dioxide for the plants is fed from the first compartment and from the crew compartment. “At its current capacity, Melissa Pilot Plant can produce enough atmosphere to sustain one human. Currently, we use Wistar rats to emulate human respiration,” said Gòdia. 

MELiSSA-breathing rats

The rats live in an airtight isolator. Staff members working at MELiSSA Pilot Plant feed them and clean their cages using a transfer airlock. Carbon dioxide is transported out, and oxygen is fed in to keep the optimal atmosphere composition at all times. Artificial lighting is used to simulate the day-night cycle. “To test the system, we wanted living, breathing organisms that have their daily routines and circadian rhythms. We wanted to check if the system could react to constantly changing oxygen demand and variations in carbon dioxide production,” said Gòdia. 

 

It could. The rats spent hundreds of days breathing MELiSSA air with no issues.

MELiSSA Pilot Plant is probably the most technologically advanced bioregenerative life support system ever built. Given the lighting intensity and feed rate of carbon dioxide, minerals, and nitrate, it knows exactly how much oxygen will be produced. It can regulate all those parameters to achieve a target atmosphere composition and/or food output. The system is also surprisingly responsive, allowing it to react to emergencies. “If you need increase or decrease the oxygen level, just change the lighting conditions, and cyanobacteria will react in seconds,” said Gòdia. 

 

The MELiSSA project is all about optimizing metabolic processes by controlling the environment down to the tiniest details. The only thing the people involved in MELiSSA didn’t touch was life itself. “At the very beginning, we all agreed to refrain from using genetically modified organisms. I think this decision stemmed out of concerns about public perceptions. We wanted to stay on the safe side,” Gòdia explained. 

 

Not everyone was concerned about those perceptions, though.

Elon goes to Mars

The main reason that bioregenerative life support systems didn’t go mainstream in the 1990s was their excessive weight. In 2006, Harry Jones, a life support systems engineer at NASA Ames Research Center, did a study that showed a mission would need to last over 12 years for the bioregenerative system to break even and produce enough food to offset its weight. Nobody thought about missions that long at that time, so Jones concluded that despite significant funding and development time, bioregenerative life support systems appeared “surprisingly impractical.” 

 

Thinking shifted in 2016 when Elon Musk backed the idea of a permanent colony on Mars. Before that, plans for Mars involved another Apollo-like effort: go there, plant a flag, ferry some rocks back home, and never go back. Musk’s alternative was a long-term presence, long enough that bioregenerative systems would make way more sense.

 

In 2017, NASA founded the Center for Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space (CUBES), a conglomerate of federal agencies, industry, and academia with the goal of building a demonstration biosystem for a future Mars colony.

Engineering life

The bioprocessing system proposed by CUBES goes beyond traditional life support and is geared more toward manufacturing and in situ resource utilization (ISRU). Its key functions are the production of food, materials like bioplastics, and therapeutics. Those tasks are integrated with waste recycling. Optionally, it can produce breathable air, although this will most probably be taken care of by physico-chemical systems like the ones currently working on the ISS. 

 

What’s distinct about CUBES is its approach. While MELiSSA was focused on fine-tuning the hardware and software and left biology intact, CUBES involves engineering all three to make them work seamlessly together.

 

“It is not about a specific microbe or a specific crop. You can have a nice fruit or a nice vegetable that I want to eat a lot of, but we’re not going to use it if it needs eight thousand times more water than some alternative crops or needs huge amounts of light to grow. We look at all trade spaces in the system economy and choose most efficient solutions,” said Aaron J. Berliner, a bioengineering researcher at UC Berkeley and a member of CUBES. 

 

In terms of hardware, software, and automation, the system CUBES is aiming for will look much like MELiSSA with advanced, software-controlled bioreactors. The organisms in those bioreactors, though, are a different story.

Snacks, drugs, and plastic

“With genetic engineering we can address composing diverse diets,” said Shannon N. Nangle, a post-doctoral fellow in Pam Silver’s Lab at Harvard and founder of Circe Bioscience, a biotech startup working on decarbonizing food production. “You can engineer microbes to enhance certain amino acids; you can engineer them to make other things like fats, various nutrients, and sugars. Think of that as building blocks for making food to achieve a well-balanced protein content.”

 

Nangle built a fermentation technology that can make all those sugars, fats, and nutrients using proprietary, engineered microbes. Beyond supplying nutrients, the system’s output can be used to make meals with different textures, aromas, and flavors. 

 

This is a big step forward. The spirulina in MELiSSA’s bioreactors tastes like green, stagnant water. “What astronauts eat has profound effect on their well-being and motivation,” said Nangle. “During the first stages of Mars exploration we would probably go for the most calorie-dense foods because they take the least space. Later, we could move to less calorie-dense options that provide flavors, freshness, all those psychological enhancements people on the ground need,” she added. 

 

One of the first tests of this approach was a study Nangle led at Harvard back in 2020 in which she and her team engineered a single bacterium (Cupriavidus necato) to produce sugar (sucrose), polymers for plastics (polyesters), and lipo-chitooligosaccharides, which can act as fertilizer for plants like rice. All the bacteria needed was a mix of hydrogen and carbon dioxide. 

 

“The basic way this is done is by pulling some DNA fragments or genes from other organisms and simply transplanting them into a new organism to give it new functions,” said Nils Averesch, a senior researcher at CUBES and Stanford University. Those gene donors for Cupriavidus necato engineered by Nangle’s team were bacteria like E. coli, B. japonicum, and others. 

 

At the end of the day, CUBES is about engineering lifeforms to efficiently produce useful things like food, materials, or medication with whatever will be available on Mars. Microbes can even be modified to extract minerals and metals from regolith or alter Martian soil to make it usable for growing plants. “The thing to keep in mind with biology, though, is that the more shots at the goal you have, the better, because we don’t know what is really going on exactly,” said Nangle.

 

The problem is that life, when pushed, sometimes fights back.

Fighting evolution

“We call it the cheater problem,” said Berliner. “Genetic engineering moves organisms into an uncomfortable zone. They are not natural anymore—they become cheaters. In time, cheaters tend to evolve away from doing what you told them to do and toward doing what life does best: multiplying as fast as possible,” he added. Cupriavidus necato doesn’t benefit from producing plastics, table sugar, or fertilizers; it only thrives by producing more Cupriavidus necato. 

 

Given enough time, biology has a way of returning an organism to its evolutionary factory settings. But so do we. 

 

A standard way of combating evolution in synthetic biology is engineering the growth to happen only in a short time window so that evolution can’t kick in fast enough. There are other clever ways, too. “One technique used in the industry is called bolt-on armor,” said Berliner. It works by attaching multiple copies of any genes inserted into the target organism’s DNA. “Then, when it tries to evolve away from this gene—boom—there is another copy bolted on,” he explained. 

 

According to Berliner, however, bioreactors in space won’t rely on long-term growth of the same microbe population. “More likely, when you see drops in efficiency, you would just go to a freezer, take a new strain from storage, and use it to reboot the system,” Berliner said. One portable fridge can store fresh boot-up strains for hundreds of years, even if the crew were to reboot the bioreactors every day. 

Three stages of the Martian colony

The CUBES system is designed for a permanent base, one that will only be periodically occupied during the early stages of Martian exploration. So its development road map is additive—each new capability will be built on top of the ones already deployed. The CUBES team built their plan around Martian population numbers. 

 

The first stage is designed for a Martian headcount of less than a hundred people. The crew would rely mostly on prepackaged food brought from Earth. Bioreactors with engineered microbes would supplement that with micronutrients like iron, calcium, vitamins B and D, zinc, omega-3 fatty acids, and so on. Production of bioplastics would also be modest and limited to technology demonstrations (the majority of the colony’s materials being supplied from Earth). Local drug production would be limited to small molecules produced in bacteria. Water reclamation would be done through filtration, adsorption, and distillation of urine, very much as it is done today on the ISS. The brine that is leftover in this process, however, would be processed in spirulina bioreactors to provide a source of nitrogen.

The second stage would begin when the facility transitions to a permanent settlement that has to support over a hundred people. Photobioreactors producing various engineered algae and plants would be added and powered by artificial lighting and pressurized carbon dioxide retrieved from Martian atmosphere. The materials suitable for local production identified during the earlier trials would be mass-produced and used to expand the settlement, build greenhouses, and manufacture additional tools on demand. Engineered microbes would produce much-needed drugs. Other therapeutics made on the spot would include basic antibiotic precursors, insulin, and opioids, which are already made with biomanufacturing technologies on Earth. Reclamation systems will start processing solid human waste like feces, biodegradable plastics, and uneaten food. 

 

The third stage would begin when the Mars population exceeds 10,000 people. At this point, a Martian colony should have its own bio-foundry to engineer its own microbes on demand. “This won’t happen for a long time, though. It's a possibility only when the planet is colonized. We’re probably hundreds of years away from it,” said Averesh.

 

Microbes produced in this bio-foundry could be designed and tested on Earth, and the designs, in the form of DNA sequences, could be transmitted to Mars. Crops grown on Earth, like soybeans, potatoes, or peanuts modified to survive in Martian conditions, would be cultivated in large greenhouses directly in regolith pre-processed by microbes. Manufacturing of plastics would switch away from biology-based technologies, save for specialized materials; the rest will be made in chemical manufacturing plants. Biomanufacturing, however, will be kept as a primary technology for making drugs. Most of the waste will be recycled in large-scale, multi-stage bioreactors. 

 

NASA has to make some decisions about the basics before this grandiose vision can start materializing, however. “NASA needs to provide some metrics, like what do they want specifically? How long would the first mission last? What is the energy budget we have to work with? How much water we have? How many people we need to support? Knowing that, we could focus our work on designing organisms to make all that happen. So far, NASA funded CUBES with like 15 million USD in five years,” said Berliner. 

 

In the meantime, MELiSSA is sticking firmly to its European down-to-earth strategy of progressing slowly but surely. “We have been in talks with ESA recently and secured the funds for moving to the next stage with MELiSSA Pilot Plant, which is building a human-grade facility,” said Gòdia. “My estimate is within three to four years, we are going to be ready for first test campaigns with human subjects. I guess we are going to need volunteers.”

 

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On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration approved the new shots; on Tuesday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weighed in with recommendations for who should get them. Short answer: Everyone ages six months and up.

The vaccines should be available starting this week at a pharmacy near you. So how fast should you roll up your sleeve? And why do we need another booster anyway?

We have answers from physicians, infectious disease researchers and federal officials.

1. Why do federal health officials think Americans need another round of COVID boosters?

Just as the flu vaccine is updated every year to target the viruses likely to be circulating in the fall and winter, health officials say an updated COVID shot can help bolster people's waning immunity as we head into respiratory virus season.

The new boosters are a much closer match to currently circulating variants than prior vaccines, say federal health officials. They're updated versions of the existing Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines and have been formulated to target a relatively recent omicron subvariant called XBB. 1.5.

2. Will they protect against the newest COVID variants?

Though new variants have emerged since the FDA developed the booster, the updated shots are still "very closely matched to all the circulating strains," says Andrew Pekosz, a virologist and immunologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

That includes BA.2.86, a new strain that authorities began tracking in August. When it first emerged, BA.2.86 set off alarms because it had so many mutations. But a spate of recent lab studies suggest it is no better at evading immunity than other circulating variants, and the new COVID boosters should still provide protection.

"I think there's every reason to expect that people will make decent antibodies against the variants that we know about right now," says Deepta Bhattacharya, a professor of immunology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

3. How long will protection last?

You'll get a boost in immunity within about two weeks after getting the shot that could reduce your risk of coming down with COVID – and that protection will likely last for a few months. It should also make you more likely to get a more mild case if you do get sick.

The boost in protection against severe disease – the kind of scary symptoms that can send you to the hospital – should last a lot longer. Exactly how long depends on a variety of factors including your immune system, your health, your age and your prior exposures to both the vaccines and infections. But for many people, the hope is the COVID shots can be annual, like flu shots.

"It will markedly increase your protection against getting very sick for about a year or so," says Dr. Robert Wachter, professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco.

4. Who should definitely get a COVID booster?

If you're at high risk of severe disease from COVID, don't think twice, say doctors and infectious disease researchers. That includes people who are over 65 or those who have weakened immune systems or certain other medical conditions, such as chronic lung disease, obesity, advanced diabetes or kidney disease.

Pregnant people should also get the shot, says Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "The goal really is to keep people out of the hospital," he says.

At Tuesday's meeting of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the CDC's Dr. Fiona Havers noted most of those who were hospitalized for COVID since January had not received last fall's booster.

The highest rates of hospitalizations are in people 75 and older, followed by kids under 6 months and then adults between the ages of 65 to 74, according to CDC data.

Johns Hopkins' Pekosz says this is why he's advised his 86-year-old mother-in-law to get the new shot right away. In fact, he told her to be "first in line," and to take all her friends with her.

CDC data shows hospitalization rates for COVID are currently highest for Black and Native Americans and Alaska Natives.

5. If I am healthy and under 65, do I really need to get it?

It's not as urgent. The risk of death or severe illness is much lower for younger, healthy people. And the vast majority already have some protection against severe disease thanks to prior infections and vaccinations.

But many experts NPR spoke with said they'd still like to see everyone who's eligible get boosted.

For one thing, "it's no fun to be sick," says Dr. Preeti Malani, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan. "It's no fun to miss school and work and being vaccinated is likely to make whatever illness you get less severe."

And a big reason to get boosted is that it may reduce the chance that you'll pass on the virus to someone vulnerable around you, including your own family.

"I will get one. I will encourage friends and family to get one," says UCSF's Wachter. "COVID is still around and as we're seeing now it's still capable of infecting a lot of people and hurting and killing some of them," he says.

And finally, as CDC epidemiologist Sharon Saydah noted at Tuesday's meeting, there's accumulating evidence that vaccination reduces the risk of long COVID among both children and adults.

6. What about kids? What's the recommendation for them?

The CDC recommends the shots for kids ages 6 months and up. While a CDC analysis found that kids ages 5 to 17 were much less likely to get very ill from COVID compared to other age groups, kids do sometimes get severely ill, even those with no underlying medical conditions.

The majority of kids ages 6 months to 11 years who were hospitalized from January to June of this year had not been vaccinated.

Along with older people, infants under 6 months – who are too young for the shots – had the highest rates of hospitalization from COVID, according to the CDC. So the best way to protect these youngest ones is to vaccinate those around them, says Dr. Tina Tan, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine. "We want to protect as many individuals as possible."

The CDC points to another good reason to get kids boosted: To reduce the risk of school absenteeism and to lower the chances of developing long COVID.

Not everyone agrees it's necessary to boost kids. Dr. Pablo Sanchez, a pediatrician at The Ohio State University and an ACIP committee member, was the sole vote against recommending updated COVID shots for everyone. Sanchez wanted to see more data specific to children and adolescents.

Offit, who is not on the committee, says he thinks most kids who have already received their primary COVID vaccines and are otherwise healthy probably wouldn't get much extra benefit from an additional shot.

7. When should I get the booster? If I'm healthy, should I wait for the holidays?

Federal health officials say if it's been at least two months since your last booster, you can go ahead and get the new one. And if you fall into a high risk category, most experts agree — don't wait.

For those at lower risk, there's a difference of opinion about how long to wait after your last shot. Many experts NPR spoke with say it might be better to wait longer – anywhere from three to six months since your last vaccination or infection.

"Getting a shot too soon, you know, it's diminishing returns," says Deepta Bhattacharaya.

You may want to consider timing your booster around events like holidays or travel plans when you'll be at higher risk.

John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine, says there's been a surge in COVID cases around Thanksgiving for the past three years, so "getting your booster a few weeks before that makes sense," he says.

On the other hand, just as timing the stock market can be a bad idea (and can cost you), timing the vaccine isn't always smart, cautions Dr. Abraar Karan, a fellow in infectious disease at Stanford University.

"It's very hard to predict when the next wave is coming," says Karan. "And there's a chance that you could get caught in that wave before you can do anything about it," he says.

8. What if I recently had COVID, do I still need a booster?

The CDC says people who've had a recent infection may wait three months to get a booster. But many people we spoke to said it's OK to wait longer.

"If you are low risk and you've been infected less than six months ago, you probably don't need the vaccine right away," says Pekosz, because "you've got some strong immunity from that infection." But he says to get it if it's been more than four to six months.

There are certain groups of people – the elderly, immunocompromised and those with underlying illnesses – who should get COVID vaccines more frequently because of their immune status, Pekosz says. So it's best to check with your doctor if you are unsure.

9. Can I get a COVID booster at the same time as a flu shot – and what about RSV?

The CDC says you can get a flu vaccine and a COVID vaccine at the same visit. "It's absolutely fine to do both at the same time," says Dr. Peter Hotez, who leads the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. Although he says he might not do that himself because the pain at the injection site or side-effects like body aches may be less if you get the shots separately.

But most experts we talked to recommended getting the vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, separately.

"I think the recommendation would be if you're going in, get your flu and COVID shot, if you're eligible for RSV, maybe space that out by a week or two," Pekosz says.

For children, the CDC recommends talking to your pediatrician about scheduling the COVID and flu vaccines and RSV preventive treatment.

10. Do I have to pay for the booster?

It depends. If you're insured, your plan should cover it, says Jennifer Kates, a policy analyst at Kaiser Family Foundation. Although if you get the shot from a provider out of your insurance network, there may be a cost, she notes.

If you're not insured, like an estimated 25-30 million American adults, the federal Bridge Access Program will provide free vaccines through the end of 2024. The CDC's vaccine.gov has information on where to get the no-cost shots. But Kates says it's not clear how many adults it will be able to cover.

Uninsured children can still get COVID vaccines and other immunizations for free under the Vaccines for Children Program.

Paying out of pocket for a vaccine would cost between $120-$129 a shot – the list price for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccine, respectively.

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NASA commissioned a study team in 2022 to investigate such hard-to-easily-classify reports, and tomorrow they're revealing the highly anticipated findings at a media briefing.

The scarcity of high-quality observations of UAPs – defined as objects in the sky that are inconsistent with known naturally occurring phenomena or aircraft – makes scientific conclusions about their nature rather impossible.

So NASA assembled an independent team of 16 scientific, aeronautic, and data analytic experts with the primary goal to advise NASA on UAPs from a logical and scientific perspective.

"We have access to a broad range of observations of Earth from space – and that is the lifeblood of scientific inquiry," NASA's Thomas Zurbuchen said last year before the commencement of the study.

"We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That's the very definition of what science is. That's what we do."

After starting in October last year, the team chaired by astrophysicist David Spergel of the Simons Foundation, has spent nine months laying the groundwork for NASA and other organizations to conduct their own research.

"The primary objective of this incredible team of experts is not to go back and look at grainy footage of UAPs but rather to give us a roadmap to guide us for future analysis," explained Daniel Evans, the NASA official in charge of the study, during an update meeting in May.

The media briefing at NASA's headquarters in Washington is scheduled for 14:00 UTC on 14 September 2023 (10:00 EDT on 14 September and 00:00 on 15 September in AEST). You can watch it live below.

A full report containing the independent team's findings will be released tomorrow too, suggesting a strategy for future analysis of UAP data by NASA.

"All of NASA's data is available to the public – we take that obligation seriously – and we make it easily accessible for anyone to see or study," Evans said last year.

The study wasn't intended to answer all the questions. The researchers focused on how civilian government data, commercial data, and other sources could be organized and analyzed in the future to shed more light on obscure sky sights, but they didn't look at classified information.

"Unclassified data make it possible for our team to communicate openly to advance our understanding of UAP not only with each other, but across the scientific community and to the public," NASA's head of science, astrophysicist Nicola Fox, explained.

One of NASA's missions is to ensure the safety of aircraft, so this study aligns with that as well as with the interests of national security in the study of UAPs.

The team investigated potential enhancements to air traffic management to acquire data on future reported UAPs and analyzed the challenges of studying UAPs and their potential risk to US national airspace.

"By understanding the nature of UAPs we can ensure that our skies remain a safe space for all," Evans said in May during the meeting.

The research will report on which scientific methods should be applied, what else NASA should collect to understand UAP, and what are the fundamental physical constraints on UAP's origins and nature.

"We recognize that public interest in UAPs is high, and that the demand for answers is strong," Evans said.

"It is now our collective responsibility to investigate these occurrences with the rigorous scientific scrutiny that they deserve."

We can't wait to find out more.

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Updated vaccines against Covid-19 are coming, just as hospitalizations and deaths due to the virus are steadily ticking up again.

Today, the US Food and Drug Administration authorized new mRNA booster shots from Moderna and Pfizer, and a panel of outside experts that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted to recommend the shots to everyone in the United States ages 6 months and older. Once Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Mandy Cohen signs off on the recommendations and the vaccines are shipped, people can start getting the boosters.

The recommendation is projected to prevent about 400,000 hospitalizations and 40,000 deaths over the next two years, according to data presented at the meeting by CDC epidemiologist Megan Wallace.

This year’s mRNA vaccines are different from the 2022 booster in a key way. Last year’s shot was a bivalent vaccine, meaning it covered two variants: the original one that emerged in China in 2019, plus the Omicron subvariant BA.5, which was circulating during much of 2022. This fall’s booster drops the original variant, which is no longer circulating and is unlikely to return. It targets just the Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5, which was dominant throughout much of 2023.

Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines work by introducing a tiny piece of genetic material called messenger RNA, or mRNA, that carries instructions for making SARS-CoV-2’s characteristic spike protein. Once it is injected, cells in the body use those instructions to temporarily make the spike protein. The immune system recognizes the protein as foreign and generates antibodies against it. Those antibodies stick around so that if they encounter that foreign invader again, they will mount a response against it.

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the virus has acquired new mutations in its spike protein and elsewhere. These mutations result in new variants and subvariants that diverge from the original virus. When enough mutations accumulate, these new versions can more easily evade the antibodies created by previous vaccine doses or infections.

The constantly evolving nature of the virus is the reason health regulators decided last year to update the original mRNA vaccines, which were designed against the version of the virus that first appeared in 2019. This year, once again, the virus has changed enough to warrant an updated booster.

In June, an advisory committee to the FDA recommended that this fall’s booster be a monovalent vaccine—targeting only the then-dominant XBB.1.5 subvariant.

At that meeting, committee members reviewed evidence suggesting that the inclusion of the original variant may hamper the booster’s effectiveness against newer offshoots. “The previous bivalent vaccine contained the ancestral spike and thus skewed immune responses to the old spike,” says David Ho, a professor of microbiology at Columbia University whose research, which is not yet peer-reviewed, was among the evidence the FDA panel reviewed. “This is what we call immunological imprinting, and it results in lack of immune responses to the new spike.” He thinks taking out the old variant should optimize the immune response.

But over the past few months, even newer Omicron offshoots have arrived. Currently, EG.5.1, or Eris, is the dominant one in the United States, United Kingdom, and China. Meanwhile, a variant called BA.2.86, or Pirola, has been detected in several countries. Pirola has raised alarm bells because it has more than 30 new mutations compared to XBB.1.5.

Even though the new boosters were formulated against XBB.1.5, they’re still expected to provide protection against these new variants. “The reason is, while antibodies are important in protection against mild disease, the critical part of the immune response that’s important for protecting against severe disease is T cells,” says Paul Offit, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania and member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee.

These cells are a different part of the immune response. Unlike antibodies, which neutralize a pathogen by preventing it from infecting cells, T cells work by eliminating the cells that have already been invaded and boosting creation of more antibodies. Both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccines produce long-lasting T cells in addition to antibodies.

It’s why, Offit says, when the Omicron wave hit in late 2021 and peaked in January 2022, the US didn’t see a dramatic increase in hospitalizations and deaths even as cases rose significantly: People’s T cells kicked into gear, even when their antibodies didn’t recognize the Omicron variant.

“In some ways,” says Offit, when it comes to vaccine booster development, “it almost doesn’t matter what we pick to target” because the coronavirus has yet to evolve away from T cell recognition. “Everything works.”

Scientists think T cells are able to protect against severe Covid because they’re recognizing parts of the virus that have remained unchanged throughout the pandemic. “I suspect that as we continue to vaccinate, there are some conserved regions [of the virus],” says Jacqueline Miller, Moderna’s head of infectious diseases. “So even with the accumulation of mutations, we’re still building on previous immunity.”

People who have hybrid immunity—that is, have had a Covid infection and have also been vaccinated—seem to have the best immune responses to new variants, she says, which suggests that previous exposure shapes and improves immune responses to new variants. Preliminary studies show that antibodies generated by previous infections and vaccinations should be capable of neutralizing Pirola.

Earlier this month, Moderna issued a press release saying that clinical trial data showed that its updated booster generated a strong immune response against Pirola, as well as the more prevalent Eris variant.

In a statement to WIRED, Pfizer spokesperson Jerica Pitts said the company continues to closely monitor emerging variants and conduct tests of its updated monovalent booster against them. Data presented at Tuesday’s CDC meeting showed that Pfizer-BioNTech’s updated booster elicited a strong neutralizing antibody response against both Eris and Pirola.

The FDA expects that Covid-19 vaccines will continue to be updated on an annual basis, unless a completely new variant emerges that requires a different approach. “We will always be a little behind the virus,” says Ho. “In this instance, we won’t suffer too much, but that might not be the case going forward. Surveillance is imperative.”

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The newly approved updated COVID shot now targets Omicron variant XBB.1.5., which is closely related to the COVID variants spreading right now.

Moving forward, federal health officials want the public to think of the shots as a recommended yearly COVID vaccine, anticipating an updated shot based on what strains are prevalent.

Between the FDA's authorization and approvals, and the CDC's recommendations to patients, doctors now have to weed through many specifics, including age, immunity status and previous vaccinations.

Here's information on who should get the new shot:

For anyone 5 and older: You can get a single dose, as long as it has been at least 2 months since the last dose of any COVID-19 vaccine. 

For children 6 months - 4 years old: Previously vaccinated — one or two doses. Timing and number of doses depends on the previous COVID-19 vaccines received.

If they're unvaccinated: Three doses of the updated authorized Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine or two doses of the updated authorized Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.

For those moderately to severely immunocompromised: You may get an initial Moderna or Pfizer series of shots and boosters, one updated shot and additional doses of the updated vaccine if your doctor recommends it.

Dr. Sterling Ransone with the American Academy of Family Physicians has recently been seeing more patients with COVID. The updated COVID vaccine comes at a time when many patients should also consider flu and RSV shots ahead of winter.

"For most of my patients over 60 these days, I'm recommending that they get their flu shot, that they get their updated COVID booster and that they get an RSV vaccine. So it's a big three this year," said Ransone. 

The vaccines protect those who get it from severe consequences if they get infected. 

Nationwide, COVID hospitalizations and death rates are rising. However, the levels are far lower than past seasons. 

Wastewater, which can indicate community spread, shows increases nationally.

"The Midwest has seen the largest increases. After that, we have the Northeast and South region of the United States. And then the West is sort of still in the middle third of our measurements," said Alessandro Zulli, a wastewater scan researcher.

This is the first time COVID shots are available on the commercial market. In today's meeting, drugmakers shared list prices ranging from $120-$130 a dose. Under the Affordable Care Act, commercial and government insurance will still cover the cost.

The first shipments of the new vaccines are expected to be available by the end of the week in doctors' offices and pharmacies.

The CDC says, "Most Americans can still get a COVID-19 vaccine for free. For people with health insurance, most plans will cover COVID-19 vaccine at no cost to you. People who don’t have health insurance or with health plans that do not cover the cost can get a free vaccine from their local health centers."

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Sharona Gordon can still recall her time as a postdoctoral biophysicist 30 years ago. She was pregnant with her second child, a son, and so it was a fulfilling and exciting chapter in her life. The laboratory she was working in at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle was well funded, and her starting salary was above what was then the average, at US$18,600. Gordon’s husband was a full-time student who also tutored, and they were able to buy a house for their growing family for $130,500, with a mortgage payment of just $600 a month. “Today, my son is a postdoc in the same lab that I was [in], and the average house in Seattle is now 14 times his pay,” she says — his salary started at $53,760. “So obviously things have taken a turn.”

Gordon now runs her own lab in UW’s Department of Physiology and Biophysics. She has four postdoctoral researchers and one PhD student, and worries about how she’ll provide them with an experience to match what she had as an early-career researcher. This includes a competitive salary, given that Seattle’s cost of living is 50% above the national average. Her grant budget from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) hasn’t changed since the early 2000s. “And yet I have to pay part of my salary, as well as the other salaries, all of which have gone up” from that budget, she says. Her lab members’ combined salaries far outstrip the $250,000 annual budget of a typical modular NIH grant, leaving Gordon with less money to fund her research.

Her experience is not unique. Principal investigators (PIs) across the United States are grappling with how best to support their students and staff amid wages that haven’t kept pace with inflation, a dismal job market and stagnant federal budgets. Prompted by a general exodus of early-career researchers to lucrative industry positions, PIs are keen to correct the imbalance but are unsure about how best to do so. In response to strikes, several prominent universities have significantly raised the minimum amounts that postdocs must be paid. Short of securing more funding or successfully lobbying Congress on behalf of higher education, the future of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is likely to entail smaller labs with fewer staff, even if those who remain ultimately earn a better wage. Not everyone agrees with this outcome, which would put postdoc positions out of reach for many early-career scientists, but PIs say they don’t see another short-term solution to the funding crunch.

“It’s not that we don’t want to welcome more people, we just can’t afford it,” Gordon says, adding that listening to the financial struggles of postdocs at UW has left her feeling ashamed. Even without a ready financial solution, she says, “I can’t see myself going back to paying the low salaries that we’ve been paying.”

State of affairs

Graduate students and postdocs push the scientific enterprise forwards through their day-to-day labour. “Postdocs in particular are the backbone of biomedical research,” says Ankur Jain, a cell biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, adding that his three postdocs feed into a collaborative lab culture and bring in fresh perspectives and skills. “The subject of salary is close to my heart — I don’t think we can ever compensate them enough.”

But a series of strikes in higher education has swept across the United States and other countries, amid a reckoning over low pay and poor working conditions. The burgeoning biotech industry now offers US salaries that average $94,000, outstripping early-career academic positions by tens of thousands of dollars.

Scientists have also described challenges in recruiting postdocs in particular, citing long-vacant listings or negotiations that falter. In October, Nature is set to report the results of its second global survey of postdoctoral researchers, revealing the effects of staff shortages and cost-of-living increases since the last survey in 2020. The new survey finds that, for example, nearly two-thirds (62%) of postdocs in North and Central America were dissatisfied with their pay, compared with just 37% of Europe-based postdocs.

Ankur Jain says postdoc salaries are worth it.Credit: Gretchen Ertl/Whitehead Institute

“With postdoc compensation deservedly on the rise, universities will have to adjust to meet new financial demands,” says Thomas Kimbis, chief executive of the US National Postdoctoral Association in Rockville, Maryland.

When postdocs at UW went on strike in June, they argued that the $56,484 annual minimum salary set by the NIH, which is often used as a benchmark, is insufficient. Their new contract establishes a minimum salary of $68,456, set to go into effect in 2024. The 10-campus University of California (UC) system similarly agreed to raise salaries for academic workers by as much as 66% over the next 3 years after 48,000 people walked out in protest. Unlike MIT and Princeton University in New Jersey, both of which agreed to raise their postdoc salaries to $65,000 using temporary ‘bridge funds’ or endowments this year, neither UW nor the UC system have stated where the money will come from. Pay disputes are ongoing between early-career researchers and several UC universities.

One UC PI, who requested anonymity so as not to jeopardize his tenure prospects, says that although he supported the strike, the lack of clear guidance from administrators has left him in a bind. Many graduate students and postdocs receive NIH fellowships or training grants, including three people in his lab, but any supplementary money for the increased UC salary cannot come from the NIH or other federal funds. Instead, PIs must leverage start-up money or charitable funding to make up the difference, or secure a teaching-assistant position for their staff, funded by the university. Close to exhausting his other piecemeal sources of funding, “I’m [at] the point where I’m actively discouraging anyone in my lab from applying for NIH fellowships” so that they can instead take up teaching posts, he says. He acknowledges how incredibly awkward this is, because although winning an NIH fellowship is good for a student’s or postdoc’s career, “I literally can’t afford to have them work in my lab if they do that.”

Asked how PIs should handle this conundrum, NIH acting principal deputy director Tara Schwetz told Nature that paying for one postdoc across more than one grant mechanism is not allowed, owing to the difficulties it would introduce in tracking duplicate spending. She suggested that universities that raised salaries do more to help PIs make up the gaps.

Another solution would be for PIs to pursue extra grants to pay for more students and postdocs, but that prospect is complicated. An R01 (or equivalent) grant from the NIH, which is the usual five-year mechanism that PIs use to fund their labs, can typically support one or two personnel, according to Gordon. “But I’m struggling to keep the funding that I have,” she says, adding that “it’s not realistic or desirable to seek more” grants.

Instead, she writes letters to her senators and has advocated for a stronger federal STEM budget as a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She has also started looking for ways to cut back — by attending fewer conferences and fixing her own equipment, for example. “I’m just going to keep my science within the scale that allows me to treat people with humanity,” she says.

Similarly, the anonymous UC PI notes that there has been an obvious increase in demand for the existing pool of NIH investigator grants, forcing him and his colleagues to apply nearly every cycle. He would like to see the UC system put pressure on the California state legislature, which currently provides roughly 10% of UC’s overall budget. “The idea that we don’t ask the state for more money is horrifying to me,” he says, adding that there seems to be little political will on the part of university administrators to bring about change.

Liz Kellogg, a structural biologist who is currently moving her lab from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, says that even if she could secure more funding, “the purchasing power of an NIH grant today is much less” than in the past. “You end up with a mismatch between the money you have to pay people and the science you can actually do with what’s left,” she says.

Show me the money

Funding agencies have started to respond to concerns from students, staff and faculty members. In April, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a non-profit body that sponsors a series of competitive biomedical research grants, set a new minimum salary of $70,000 per year for almost all of its 300 directly funded postdocs, and urged PIs to use the figure as a benchmark for any postdoc working in their labs. Although the HHMI established a bridge fund to ease the budget burden on PIs, a spokesperson says that the organization has not yet committed to increasing its total grant award budget, although internal discussions are continuing. The US National Science Foundation sets its minimum postdoc salary at $71,099, and salaries scale by area depending on the local cost of living.

At the NIH, the salary picture is more complicated. Last month, the agency rescinded its objection to postdocs and graduate students who work in NIH laboratories unionizing to advocate for better pay and working conditions. (The NIH had previously filed paperwork with the Federal Labor Relations Authority stating that the researchers didn’t qualify as employees.) The NIH also convened a working group last November to address the challenges facing postdocs, including not just compensation, but also benefits, working conditions and protections for international postdocs.

Liz Kellogg (left) with lab members Jung-un Park (centre) and Vinh Truong (right).Credit: St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

Schwetz, the group’s co-chair, says that although the agency has attempted to keep salaries in line with inflation, it has been a challenge. The agency’s budget, when adjusted for inflation, has been relatively static for two decades, and there’s little indication from Congress that it will grow much in 2024. Although the group is considering recommending higher salaries, among many possible solutions, Schwetz says it’s too early to say just how much beyond the current figure of $56,484 a new minimum might go.

In June, the working group released an interim set of guiding principles, calling for fewer — but better-paid — postdocs and a three-year cap on the duration of contracts. It also called for better benefits, professional development opportunities and training for faculty members on how to improve mentoring of their personnel. In December, the group will present a final set of recommendations to the advisory committee to the director.

For Rebecca Bluett, a neuroscience postdoc at UW who participated in bargaining during the strike, a future with fewer postdocs would be a disappointing outcome. “I really hope that’s not what happens,” she says, noting that when resources become even scarcer, they tend not to be distributed equitably. Labs that are flush with funds will be able to hire more postdocs, produce more research and thereby earn even more funding. “I don’t have the answer, but I don’t think that having fewer postdocs is in the public interest or in the interest of scientific progress.”

But others, including Ilana Witten, a neuroscientist at Princeton whose lab includes seven postdocs, says that keeping people moving through the pipeline will not only create fresh opportunities more quickly, but will also minimize the length of time postdocs must live under financial and professional insecurity. “Putting your life on hold financially for that long feels increasingly unsustainable,” she says. “If the changes mean there will be fewer [positions] to increase the salary, then that’s perfectly fine.”

‘Look off the beaten path’

If the NIH does decide to support fewer postdocs but with increased pay, it could change the calculus for many labs across the country. Schwetz acknowledges this, and says that leading a smaller lab will hopefully help PIs to provide a better experience for their team members and to focus on a smaller number of projects. Some scientists are looking forward to that kind of future. Jain currently has 10 people in his lab at MIT, but had 12 for a short period, a situation which, he says, left him with too little time to stay on top of his research and to adequately mentor each individual. On the basis of that experience, he says, reducing the size of labs might spur, rather than dampen, scientific output. “Fewer people may be the solution so that we are intellectually engaged in all the ongoing projects,” he says.

But Kellogg says that slashing her lab’s size feels like a penalty. “I would love to grow, but now I’m looking at having to bring in a lot more grant money just to keep my lab the same size,” she says. She’s moving to St. Jude in Memphis in part because it gives group leaders extra funding to supplement the salaries of students and staff in its research labs. St. Jude recently raised its minimum postdoc salary from $55,349 to $70,013 per year. (It also provides a professional-development stipend of $2,500 per year and access to a career coach.) Freeing herself from relentless grant-chasing “will allow me to do the best science I’m capable of doing,” she adds.

The vast majority of students and postdocs in the United States applying to universities in states such California, New York and Massachusetts might do well to consider other, less expensive parts of the country, according to Mark Rebeiz, a developmental evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. “There is this idea that if you’re not doing a PhD or postdoc in a big, coastal city, your future prospects are less,” he says. But many of his PhD students have benefited from Pittsburgh’s lower cost of living, the close-knit, collaborative department and a university that provides good social support (graduate students and postdocs receive the same benefits as faculty members). Many have then moved on to a postdoc at another well-respected university. “Take a look off the beaten path, and you might be very pleasantly surprised,” Rebeiz says.

Adriana Romero-Olivares, a fungal microbiologist at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, has started recruiting new PhD students and her first postdocs, because her university is shifting in 2025 from an ‘R2’-designated university to an ‘R1’, with more-competitive research programmes.

(These classifications, managed by the American Council on Education in Washington DC, are used, among other things, to assess the research output of doctorate-granting US institutions.) As such, the university’s vice-president of research has offered a supplement to cover half of any incoming postdoc’s salary — a welcome boon for early-career researchers such as Romero-Olivares. Without the supplement, “there is no way that I could afford paying for postdocs, with their higher salary”, she says.

Regardless of the actual solution to the problem of funding higher salaries, all group leaders interviewed agreed that postdocs are invaluable members of the academic ecosystem, and that their exodus signals that something is fundamentally wrong with the system as it stands. “We’re looking at a bleak future if we can’t bring in that talented younger generation to further research,” says the PI at UC. “And it’s a shame that it’s simply down to choices about allocating funds.”

Nature 621, 431-433 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02848-3

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The key ingredient in popular decongestants such as Sudafed PE, Benadryl Allergy Plus Congestion and Allegra-D doesn't relieve nasal congestion when taken orally, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) panel concluded in a meeting Tuesday (Sept. 12).

After reviewing years' worth of data, the FDA's Nonprescription Drug Advisory Committee (NDAC) found that the effectiveness of the decongestant ingredient, phenylephrine, can help relieve a stuffy nose when delivered straight into the nose — via a nasal spray, for example — but doesn't work when taken by mouth, the 16 panelists unanimously decided. 

That's because, when taken orally, less than 1% of the drug actually ends up in the bloodstream and thus reaches the tissues of the nose that it's supposed to help, the committee reported in a memo from the meeting. (Phenylephrine is supposed to work by constricting blood vessels in the nose and sinuses.)

So, if they don't work, how did phenylephrine-based pills get approved in the first place? 

"The bottom line is that none of the original studies stand up to modern standards of study design or conduct," Dr. Peter Starke, an FDA official who led the review, told The Associated Press. Past studies of the drug had inconsistent results and too-small sample sizes, and they relied on outdated statistical methods and technology that the regulators would no longer accept, Starke and his colleagues concluded.

Phenylephrine was first evaluated as an over-the-counter oral and intranasal decongestant back in 1976, according to the NDAC memo. But the ingredient gained popularity in 2005 as a substitute for pseudoephedrine, a different decongestant that had been moved behind the counter by a law intended to rein in the sale of drugs that can be used to make meth. 

Because of this, phenylephrine soon became commonplace in over-the-counter decongestants, and now, it's the most popular decongestant in the U.S., NBC reported. Despite its popularity, though, the ingredient's effectiveness has long been debated. 

In 2007, after new formulations of popular decongestants started rolling out, University of Florida researchers petitioned the FDA to review the drug's effectiveness in adults. The researchers provided some evidence that the oral formulas were ineffective, but the FDA advisers responded by saying they still needed more data. Since 2007, three large clinical trials of oral phenylephrine have been conducted.

"These three trials represent by far the largest and most carefully constructed trials that have ever been performed to evaluate the decongestant effect of oral PE [phenylephrine]," the NDAC memo states. The trials showed that the drug had no more effect than a placebo, and additional data from the FDA's clinical pharmacology lab showed very little of it enters the bloodstream.

"We believe that these new clinical pharmacology and clinical data are consistent, substantial, and believable, and they confirm that orally administered PE is not effective at any dose that can be developed and still provide a reasonable margin of safety," the NDAC stated.

With the NDAC's evaluation done, the FDA must now decide whether to revoke phenylephrine's designation as "generally recognized as safe and effective." If it loses that designation, over-the-counter products containing the drug would likely need to be removed from shelves and reformulated by suppliers, according to NBC.

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Below are some quotations from the top lawyers for the US and Google.

KENNETH DINTZER, deputy branch director at the U.S. Justice Department:

"This case is about the future of the internet."

"If Google sets the rules, it will always be to their advantage."

"Google manipulates auctions for ads placed on the internet" to raise ad prices.

Regarding Google communications about revenue sharing deals with companies like Apple: "They knew these agreements crossed antitrust lines."

JOHN SCHMIDTLEIN, lead lawyer for Google:

Defending Google's 90% market share in search: "The large majority of Windows PC users search on Google, not (Microsoft's) Bing."

Regarding the market place for search engines: "Users today have more search options and more ways to access information online than ever before."

Discussing Apple's and Mozilla's competitions to pick best search engines: "Google won these competitions on the merits."

Describing how easy it is to replace Google with a different search engine: "A few easy clicks."

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"This case is about the future of the internet," said Kenneth Dintzer, arguing for the Justice Department that Google began in 2010 to illegally maintain its monopoly.

The U.S. Justice Department accuses Google of paying billions of dollars annually to device makers like Apple Inc (AAPL.O), wireless companies like AT&T (T.N) and browser makers like Mozilla to give Google's search engine a market share of about 90%.

Further, Dintzer said Google manipulated auctions for ads placed on the internet in order to raise prices for advertisers.

"Defaults are powerful, scale matters and Google illegally maintained a monopoly for more than a decade," said Dintzer. The consequences are that without serious competition, Google innovated less and paid less attention to other concerns like privacy, he said.

Dintzer also said the department found evidence that Google had taken steps to protect communications about the payments it made to companies like Apple. "They knew these agreements crossed antitrust lines," he said.

He showed a chat where Google CEO Sundar Pichai asked for the history of a certain chat to be turned off.

Google's defense is simple: It argues that its overwhelmingly high market share is not because it broke the law, but because it is a fast, effective search engine. It is also free.

Consumers, Google's lawyers will argue, can delete the Google app from their devices or simply type Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo into a browser to use an alternative search engine. They will argue that consumers stick with Google because they rely on it to answer questions and are not disappointed.

Opening arguments in the trial occurred before a packed federal court in Washington, DC. The trial is expected to last up to 10 weeks, with two phases. In the first, Judge Amit Mehta will decide if Google has broken antitrust law in how it manages search and search advertising.

If Google is found to have broken the law, Judge Mehta will then decide how best to resolve it. He may decide simply to order Google to stop practices he has found to be illegal or he may order Google to sell assets.

The government, in its complaint, asked for "structural relief as needed" but did not define it.

The legal fight has huge implications for Big Tech, which has been accused of buying or strangling small competitors but has insulated itself against many accusations of breaking antitrust law because the services the companies provide to users are free, as in the case of Google, or inexpensive, as in the case of Amazon.com (AMZN.O).

Previous major antitrust trials include Microsoft, filed in 1998, and AT&T, filed in 1974. The AT&T breakup in 1982 is credited with paving the way for the modern cell phone industry, while the fight with Microsoft is credited with opening space for Google and others on the internet.

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Also:  Landmark Google trial opens with sweeping DOJ accusations of illegal monopolization.